After a year marked by scrutiny, restructuring, and difficult lessons, the National Trust for Local News is signaling a shift in how it approaches innovation and newsroom empowerment. Under new leadership, the organization is narrowing its focus and experimenting with a different kind of growth—one that places journalists, not executives, at the center of change.
Tom Wiley, who became CEO of the National Trust for Local News in May 2025, said the organization needed to rethink how innovation actually happens inside newsrooms. “You have to be purposeful, and you have to create time and capital to innovate,” Wiley said. “If you aren’t purposeful about doing that, it won’t happen.”
That philosophy shaped the Trust’s first-ever News Innovation Sprint, a program designed to move beyond theory and activate ideas quickly. Wiley explained that urgency was intentional. “One of the ways to get that kind of engagement is to say, if you’re interested, you’ve got to go now,” he said. “There’s no judging and there’s no inspection of the initial idea.”
The sprint, supported by a Google News Initiative grant, put journalists directly in front of experienced coaches and judges, bypassing traditional top-down planning. Wiley emphasized that this approach aligned with the Trust’s broader mission. “The mission of the Trust is not to create shareholder value,” he said. “The mission of the Trust is to create philanthropic investments into impact and reach of local journalism, which I see as the glue that holds communities together.”
Innovation from the newsroom floor
For Suzie Glassman, a senior education reporter with the Colorado Trust for Local News, the Innovation Sprint offered something rare: permission to experiment. When the idea was introduced to journalists across Colorado, Georgia, and Maine, Glassman said it immediately stood out. “I was excited by the idea in a way that I hadn’t sort of felt before,” she said, explaining that she had long been thinking about how to involve readers more deeply in her reporting.
Glassman covers K–12 education, a beat where public decisions often feel opaque to the communities most affected by them. “There’s this gap in between what our officials decide and what readers or communities actually know about the decision-making process,” she said.
Her sprint proposal aimed to close that gap by giving readers a more immersive role. Glassman described envisioning “a simulation tool that says, ‘Okay, you are now on the school board and you have to cut $60 million out of your budget, and what would you do?’” The goal, she said, was to give audiences “a little bit more empathy or a little bit more knowledge behind how hard these decisions are.”
The speed of the sprint was part of its appeal. “Tom presented this idea that was going to be very fast,” Glassman said. “That’s why it’s called a sprint for a reason.” Journalists were encouraged to move quickly from concept to pitch, supported by one-on-one coaching designed to refine—not replace—their ideas.
Coaching, pitching, and shared momentum
A critical element of the sprint was the role played by Autumn Phillips, editor at large of The Post and Courier, who served as coach for the participants. Glassman credited Phillips with helping turn early ideas into clear, compelling pitches. “What Autumn did… she was amazing,” Glassman said.
Each finalist was given five minutes to present their idea during a live, virtual pitch event attended by colleagues and a panel of judges with deep journalism and technology experience. Glassman said the experience pushed her well outside her comfort zone. “To say I was a bit nervous is an understatement,” she said. “I have never done that kind of thing.”
Rather than relying on a traditional presentation, Glassman leaned into experimentation. “I tried to be innovative in my pitch,” she said. “I actually had recorded some video, put together a presentation ahead of time so that I used a mixture of video and slides and animations and even GIFs.”
For Wiley, the diversity of ideas reinforced why newsroom-led innovation matters. “The journalists did a fantastic job,” he said. “They understand the mission of the Trust is to increase reach and impact of local news.” Importantly, he noted that the pitches were not driven by revenue targets. “They are not net operating income focused,” Wiley said. “The point was really to be mission.”
The format itself created energy, Wiley added, likening it to a familiar cultural touchstone. “Your listeners will probably be familiar with Shark Tank,” he said. “This is 12 pitches, five minutes each, video, judges on—and there was energy around that.”
What newsroom leaders can learn
Watching all 12 pitches left Glassman encouraged about the future of local journalism, even amid industry fatigue. “The news is heavy,” she said. “It’s coming at you every day.” She noted that some people disengage entirely, but the sprint ideas offered a different path forward. “They were ways to either make people more informed,” she said, “but they came from the heart—from ‘we care.’”
Glassman said the projects reflected a shared desire to reconnect audiences with their communities. “We care about local news, we care about our neighborhood, we care about who’s engaging with us,” she said. “We want to find ways to make the news sort of fun again.”
For Wiley, the sprint underscored a lesson he believes newsroom leaders can’t afford to ignore. “The day-to-day operations of trying to do more with less… are consuming,” he said. Without intentional space for experimentation, he warned, organizations risk stagnation. “We’re going to keep doing the same thing, and we know what the end game of that looks like,” Wiley said.
He also emphasized the importance of retaining journalists by giving them room to innovate. “We’re not going to keep people like Suzie eager to work for us,” he said, “because they don’t get to do the stuff they want to do.” Often, he added, the barrier isn’t cost but permission. “They just need permission and a little bit of support.”
As the Trust moves forward, Wiley said the real measure of success will be learning, not perfection. “If we don’t experiment and we don’t reward innovation… we need to reward the learning and then ask again and fund the next thing,” he said. For an organization seeking to rebuild trust and momentum, the Innovation Sprint may be less about winning ideas than about changing how ideas are allowed to surface—and who gets to shape what comes next.
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