Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
The top editor at The Indianapolis Star was named Tuesday as CEO of Indiana Local News Initiative, the not-for-profit media organization planning to create a 20-person newsroom in Indianapolis.
Bro Krift, hired in February 2022 as IndyStar’s executive editor, will be founding CEO for the Indiana Local News Initiative that outlined its mission as reporting nonpartisan information at no cost to its audience. His new duties include the founding of a network of newsrooms in multiple Indiana communities.
During Krift’s tenure at IndyStar, reporting on Indiana red flag laws following the FedEx mass shooting was recognized as a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
“Bro has just the right skills, experiences and passion to lead the Indiana Local News Initiative as CEO,” Karen Ferguson Fuson, board chair of the Indiana Local News Initiative, said in a written statement. “He deeply understands the role local journalism plays in protecting democracy and positively impacting communities.”
Krift joined IndyStar, owned by newspaper publisher Gannett Co., in February 2021 as news director. He previously led the Montgomery Advertiser as executive editor and held leadership responsibilities for newsrooms across Alabama and Louisiana.
Krift, 46, becomes the third consecutive top editor at IndyStar to spend less than two years in the role. Katrice Hardy served as executive editor from March 2020 to July 2021, when she became executive editor for The Dallas Morning News. Hardy’s predecessor was Ronnie Ramos, who served as IndyStar’s executive editor from March 2018 to December 2019.
In August, the Indiana Local News Initiative hired IndyStar’s public engagement editor, Oseye Boyd, to be editor in chief of the Indianapolis newsroom.
The startup’s staff also includes Ariana Beedie in the role of central Indiana community journalism director and Ebony Chappel in the role of market director.
Board chair Ferguson Fuson previously served as publisher of The Indianapolis Star. The organization’s board includes Penske Entertainment Corp. CEO Mark Miles and former White River State Park Development Commission leader Carolene Mays.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Good luck, and we certainly hope the new paper is really nonpartisan, but also not overly lgbtq and overly black in its coverage, of which has become too much the norm in the local media market.
How charming of you to say. Lets make sure we put those Blacks and gays back in the corner where they should be. What an idiotic comment.
“overly lgbtq and overly black”?
Guess the IBJ readership does in fact mirror the idiocy and bigotry of the state.
A very poor choice of words from the original poster, but a newspaper that indulges in heaping amounts of identity politics is going to alienate those people that get the short end of that stick, whether they’re the identitarian majority or some other minority group deemed unworthy of special coverage. And calling them “bigots” for pointing this out is doing no favors, though it’s precisely what the editorial column of the Indy Star has been doing for the last 10 years or so.
Probably explains why, like most big-city papers, the Indy Star is plunging in subscribers and online engagement. I saw numbers somewhere recently (I think it was Nieman Lab, a site that is VERY friendly to legacy media) that showed Indy Star lost about 70% of its Sunday subscription service in just the last five years. That’s catastrophic.
Will they learn? Course not. The financiers incentivize id-pol, even if it otherwise costs them money.
But there’s a problem for all these private entities that deliberately create political wedge issues: we can remain uninterested longer than they can remain solvent. Eventually the ESG money will dry up too.
As with everything in “journalism”, nothing is as it appears on the surface. Gannett product is garbage. The numbers make this indisputable. Beyond that, Gannett employees have been belligerent ogres for the past 10-15 years, while hiding behind the victim and “journalists” labels.
This new entity seems to be more of the same but now hiding as a non-profit so the Lilly Endowment et al can hold them up as they claim to be unbiased “journalists”
It speaks volumes that Bro Krift, after just 18 months on the job (about the same length of time his two predecessors worked), he’s already shifted to something else. And that something else is an agency that, as recently as the mid 2010s, would have seemed like a step down compared to Indy Star.
Don’t get me wrong: Indiana Local News Initiative is likely to be (if it isn’t already) even more corrupt and partisan than the Indy Star has become. I mean, non-profit journalism gives the opportunity for deep-pocketed investors to launder their influence in the guise of a virtuous non-profit broker. But at least ILNI doesn’t feel like a sinking ship the way Indy Star and the other Gannett newspapers do.
First comment: If you don’t want to read the new news site, then by all means do not read it. Nobody will force you.
As a former Hoosier daily newspaper journalist now living in New England, I can report that in many states a number of reputable not-for-profit journalism sites have developed during the past couple of decades — and explosively during the past few years — to begin to address the decline in quantity and quality of for-profit local news. Indeed, several are already operating in Indiana.
These sites often employ some of their home regions’ most thoughtful and long-tenured reporters, people with real institutional knowledge, a sense of history, a love of community, and a drive to report serious news and compelling stories. And the not-for-profits are often governed by directors with similar commitment to a news report that says what needs to be said, reflects the community, and — with other institutions like government, business, religion, education, neighborhoods, the arts, culture, etc. — sets an agenda for the community to consider.
I see the names of Carolene Mays and Mark Miles for the board of the Indiana Local News Initiative. If I wanted to design a partisan, ultra-liberal, MAGA-adherent, “woke,” and anti-LGBTQ news site (if such a mishmash could possibly be assembled), I’d hardly bring in the even hands of Mays and Miles for the job. If I wanted a news initiative that would speak of old-fashioned independent news from the get-go, then they’re the sort of people you should welcome.
Yes, news can be partisan. Opinion can certainly be partisan. Cable news, especially, is far too partisan. But if you believe in your heart that there is partisanship under every newsroom keyboard, then you will find it owing to your belief it is there. The best professional journalism eschews partisanship.
I appreciate your comments, Douglass, but I cannot imagine too many journalism enterprises deem themselves “disreputable”. Both InfoWars and Jacobin see themselves as clear-eyed truth tellers.
The staggering increase in public distrust in journalism didn’t occur in a vacuum. Don’t most surveys suggest, once aggregated, that about 70% of Americans feel the standard newsmedia institutions are fundamentally distrustful? As recently as 2019 I was still regularly sifting through NPR, The Economist, Christian Science Monitor, the Big Three networks, AP/Reuters…all of which have declined significantly since then, because I was watching them get subsumed by partisanship while I was trying to remain loyal to them.
A basic tenet of journalistic ethics is to separate bias from reporting–a fundamental part of training at J-schools. If they can’t do that, they’re not “reporting”–and if they want to use journalism as a smokescreen for activism, they only corrupt both journalism and activism. Let activism be overt so journalism can literally abide by its historic standards of impartiality and strip away authorial perspective, which should only be present among editorials, and if editorials assume a clearly discernible partisan bend, the managing editor should expect chips to fall where they may; they will get accused of being “partisan”.
Since non-profits don’t go out of business when their revenue starts to falter because people stop purchasing their product/service, what’s the best way for non-profit journalism to assess its own quality–its ability to report? Legacy media knows they’re losing trust because their escalating panic shows with every round of layoffs? How many people is the WaPo about to cut? 250? It’s a big outfit but that’s a sizable loss…or gain for the public, since the WaPo engages in precious little actual journalism these days.
A quick amendment on the prior comment – it is only fully endowed nonprofits that have the ability to sustain when their services don’t produce results that inspire future contributions. The vast majority of nonprofits do not fit in this category. If what they do cannot generate ongoing revenues, they indeed go out of business.