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More than a hundred years ago, Theodore and R.C. Baughman, a husband-and-wife team, used printing equipment salvaged from the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to launch the Oklahoma Eagle. The Eagle would be a voice for the local Black community, as it recovered from the deadly attack, in which a white mob burned more than 1,200 homes and left some 300 people dead, just fifteen months earlier. For the next fourteen years, the paper was run as a family operation, until Edward L. Goodwin Sr., a local businessman, took a controlling stake, passing it down through his family over the years.
Now, for the first time in more than eighty years, the Eagle is transitioning again. A coalition of nonprofits have joined together to create the Tulsa Local News Initiative, a new program from the American Journalism Project that will invest fourteen million dollars into Oklahoma City’s local news landscape, including the Eagle. Among the donors are the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the Mary Lou Lemon Foundation. Jim Goodwin, the current owner of the Eagle, will be joining the local initiative’s board, and the paper will restructure as a nonprofit overseen by the board.
“The potential impact cannot be underrated,” said Gary Lee, the Eagle’s current editor, of the cash influx. The paper has struggled with revenue in recent years. Its full-time staff only includes Lee, with the rest of the paper put together by a network of freelance contributors. The new structure, Lee said, “will allow us to survive.” Lee will become the executive editor of the Tulsa Local News Initiative and a new editor will be hired to oversee the Eagle’s production. “This gives us the potential for long-term economic sustenance, which I think that the past model of ownership, while honorable, was struggling to do,” he said.
The Tulsa Local News Initiative is the product of more than a year of research studies into the local media landscape conducted by AJP and Old Town Media. AJP conducted a “community listening program” that included interviews, focus groups, and surveys, seeking to learn what people felt was missing from their local news offerings. They also ran a community ambassador program to enlist people with extensive networks in their communities to help with outreach.
The studies found that participants wanted news to be more proactive and accountability-based when it comes to covering people in power, according to Sarabeth Berman, the American Journalism Project CEO. Respondents also felt that news coverage too often focused on crime, and they expressed a desire to see their communities portrayed through a wider lens, including updates on business developments, neighborhood culture, and local politics. And many expressed a sense that national news organizations seemed to be too politically biased. “Tulsa residents are feeling the impact of less journalism focused on Tulsa rather than on ideological differences at the national level. They want journalism that tells the full story of their communities.”
The initiative will be supporting a handful of other local outlets, including The Frontier, a statewide nonprofit, and La Semana del Sur, a Spanish-language newspaper. For the Eagle, the additional funds will go toward hiring more full-time staff members and will allow the paper to take more risks with its news coverage and content, to reach a broader audience. “We are aware that to reach younger readers, we need to become more happening, so to speak,” Lee said.
Correction: An early version of this story inaccurately described a community listening program. It was conducted by AJP, not Old Town Media.
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