Guide

How to create a shared services program for newsrooms

By Mark Glaser

March 30, 2026

This post is part of “Building a Thriving News Ecosystem,” a series from Knight Communities Network, a Lenfest Institute community of practice for local funders creating thriving news ecosystems.

Any consultant or journalism support organization working with local newsrooms will eventually detect a pattern: Many newsrooms are facing similar shortages of staff or knowledge in a specific area. Often, those gaps are in HR, bookkeeping, ad sales, and grant writing. In response, many ecosystem support organizations are turning to shared services, which offer specialized training alongside fractional staff who can do the work they need.

For instance, if a state has a number of newsrooms that need help with human resources, the support organization could hire an HR consultant to help the newsrooms with a discrete set of tasks. Depending on the program’s funding levels, the newsrooms could pay all or part of the consultant’s fees for the work. Often, the issue isn’t cost for newsrooms but finding the right person to help them in a community that might not have someone with the necessary skills.

Shared services run the gamut from simple training or fractional staff to more complex accelerators, cooperatives and long-term programs. Here’s a rundown of what’s possible, with an estimated range of costs:

• Bootcamp or training program. Could serve 10 to 30 newsrooms. Cost is for a consultant’s time from $100 to $250 per hour. Can be more effective with follow-up one-on-one coaching sessions. Cost can be partially recouped with fees from newsrooms, which also can boost participation.
• Fractional staffing. Could serve 10 to 20 newsrooms. Cost is to subsidize pay for fractional staff, who might charge between $25 to $100 per hour. Cost could be partially recouped by fees for newsrooms.
• Shared services cooperative. Could serve 20 to 100 newsrooms, with a combination of training programs, fractional staff and coaching. Cost is to subsidize consultants for training and coaching, along with fractional staff and a program manager, likely $250,000 and up. Members of the co-op could pay a variable monthly according to services used.

One terrific example of fractional staffing is the Editor Corps program run by the Public Media Journalists Association. The program allows any PMJA member station to hire a temporary editor to help with special projects, breaking news, or a staffer’s leave. The station and PMJA split the cost on a sliding scale based on newsroom size. Editor Corps was started during the pandemic and has been funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which recently awarded the program an additional $750,000 grant to extend its life to 2031, right before the CPB shut down in early 2026. 

Christine Paige Diers, executive director of PMJA, said the editors do work that runs the gamut from daily editing to special projects, such as Nebraska Public Media’s 2021 “The Smell of Money” documentary about an ethanol plant polluting the environment. 

“We have provided editors on a part-time basis while a station is looking for a new news director,” she said. “Some of it is daily editing if the news director needs a break to do some strategic planning. At lots of our stations, the news director serves as the only editor, so it helps them get a break.”

That’s what really makes an effective shared services program: providing just-in-time services, on the editorial or business side, to help resource-strapped newsrooms succeed. 

Here are some tips and best practices to launch a successful shared services program, based on the experiences of five exisiting programs:

Survey and talk to newsrooms to understand their needs

Intuition and guesswork are nice, but with shared services programs, it’s vital to make sure you know the critical needs of newsrooms. One survey or series of conversations might give you a snapshot of those needs, but you’ll need to make those feedback loops a regular part of your work as needs can shift as quickly as technology or market forces. At one time, newsrooms were struggling for legal help; now there are numerous support organizations such as Lawyers for Reporters that provide pro bono legal support.

Last year, Press Forward Chicago surveyed community newsrooms and identified nine categories as “essential to the sustainable functioning of most newsrooms.” According to Tracy Baim, executive director of Press Forward Chicago, they are now providing support for five of those categories:

• Two newsletter growth cohorts for 10 news outlets.
• A grant writing bootcamp for 19 newsrooms.
• A demographic survey for about 40 media outlets.
• An advertising collaborative with more than 40 newsrooms.
• And for fundraising, a consultant is working with 15 news outlets to get a better sense of specific fundraising needs.

Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, has been running shared services for the last decade for New Jersey newsrooms through the NJ News Commons. While they often survey newsrooms, Murray considers Press Forward Chicago’s survey the “best analysis of shared service needs that I’ve seen,” and plans to replicate it.

Another important piece of research is understanding what shared services already exist, so you don’t end up replicating them. Murray notes that there are new ones being developed, including LION Publishers’ new support for HR and financial management, which received a Press Forward infrastructure grant last year. 

“We started working with a great group, Pro News Coaches, who do shared editing services, which is a huge need,” she said. “This gets back to the bigger question: which support organizations are doing what?” 

It can get very confusing fast, so there’s a nascent directory called Journalism Support Exchange, started by Press Forward and Commoner Co., that aims to be a match-maker for newsrooms and support orgs. 

Find the right consultants and vendors to meet newsrooms’ needs.

Now that you’ve identified the needs of newsrooms, it’s time to find the right way to serve those needs. That can mean hiring knowledgeable consultants to run training or accelerator programs, or finding the right people, hopefully local, who can be fractional staffers. 

Start.coop and Defector Media received a Press Forward infrastructure grant to launch shared services for worker-friendly newsrooms, which include cooperatives and worker-owned outlets. Greg Brodsky is executive director of Start.coop, and his goal is to help worker-friendly newsrooms get off the ground quickly with the knowledge and support they need. They plan to offer three tiers of services: self-serve with templates and guides; a purchasing cooperative with preferred vendors; and “true shared services” with fractional staff.

Start.coop’s service is still being developed, but Brodsky believes it might be best to have more preferred vendors in different categories (see slide, above).

“There are some categories where we might say, ‘we highly recommend a vendor,’” Brodsky said. “But there’s probably going to be two or three because people have different needs. It will really vary by category and what the needs are.”

One shining example of meeting needs with services is the Texas Newsroom, a collaboration of the largest public radio newsrooms in Texas, working alongside the smallest newsrooms to expand access to content, including investigative reports. The entire staff of Texas Newsroom is actually on staff at newsrooms in the collaborative, including its executive director Corrie MacLaggan who’s on staff at KUT in Austin. 

The special sauce of this collaboration is that it’s more than just content sharing. MacLaggan runs weekly meetings with news directors about editing, and a weekly meeting with top executives at the larger stations to discuss the business side. 

“Collaboration is great, and it’s all about relationships,” MacLaggan said. “The key for us is that we have a regular cadence of meetings and get to know each other. So if news breaks, we are used to working together, we know each other.” That helped a lot when there was flooding in Central Texas last summer and reporters and editors from different stations rotated in and out of the area. “Working together made us more powerful as a group than we could alone,” she said.

Be sure to evolve the program as newsroom needs shift

Consider surveys and discussions with newsrooms about their needs an ongoing process so that shared services remain relevant and up-to-date. That means that programs and offerings will need to evolve over time to make sure they are staying current with new technology and best practices. 

Feedback surveys after programs wrap up are helpful in improving them for future cohorts. Many training programs and accelerators aren’t effective because publishers often don’t follow the training with action. Finding issues early can help pivot programs effectively.

Baim at Press Forward Chicago said that their first big survey has been followed up with focus groups and smaller surveys to help fine tune match-making between news outlets and services. 

“You have to make sure to follow up and check in with outlets,” Baim said. “And sometimes it is not just about teaching someone to fish. Sometimes you have to fish alongside them for a while, and provide a fishing pole, bait, the boat and even the body of water.”

In 2024, PMJA did a needs assessment survey related to its Editor Corps program, learning that younger reporters wanted training to become better editors. With the new CPB funding, PMJA will create a specialized editor training curriculum. “Our plan is to have a six-part series of virtual workshops that are based on different editorial needs,” said PMJA’s Diers. That will give PMJA a two-pronged approach to shared services: fractional staff and specialized trainings for editing.

Final takeaways and next steps

• Make a plan for long-term sustainability beyond seed funding. Seed funding is great to get started, but programs need to find diversified funding sources, including national and local foundations, major donors and fees from newsrooms. In some cases, the programs could become their own cooperatives or nonprofits, with their own infrastructure — and funding sources. For instance, Editor Corps splits the fee for fractional editors, Texas Newsroom staff are paid by the larger stations, and Start.coop expects worker-led newsrooms to pay for vendor services and fractional staff. Funding can vary, so aligning programs with funding opportunities can help. The nexus of shared services often is where publisher needs fit with funding opportunities. If funding dries up, programs need to strategize ways to fill the gap.

• Make sure to market your services to newsrooms. To get the most impact, you often want to serve more newsrooms, especially smaller ones that need the most help. But they can be overwhelmed with work, and it can be tough to convince them to sign up. Murray at the Center for Cooperative Media said they had a program for legal support, but didn’t get enough news organizations using it, so they cancelled the initiative. Diers said it’s a challenge to convince more newsrooms to use Editor Corps, though PMJA does have a nice intro video. “It’s great to have people who’ve used the program to tell others about it as ambassadors,” she said.

• Start out with one easy area to build confidence. Rather than starting with the most complex area of interest, such as advertising, try something simpler, like content sharing or HR support. “Identify newsroom needs, and pick the easiest one to test out,” Murray said. “A shared HR person is pretty easy.” Diers agrees and advised not to get too caught up in the details. “If it doesn’t work, you should still try it,” she said. “Have a ‘just try it’ mindset, and you can iterate from there.”

• Gauge the success of your program through time and money saved. The whole point of shared services is to give newsrooms the skills, staffing, and buying power they need to succeed. Could a cooperative help reduce software costs? Could a fractional grant-writing person give back time to a harried executive? Those are the metrics for success. “We see people doing work that’s not the highest value for the limited time they have,” said Brodsky of Start.coop. “So if we can take some of those operational stresses out of their day, and allow them to focus on making great local news for their community, then I think we’re successful.”

Resources

If you’re interested in learning more about various shared services programs, check out these resources and other existing programs:

• New Jersey News Commons: About page with video recap of its first 10 years.
• RJI and Local Media Consortium: News Media Help Desk including a learning center and Digital On-Demand fractional services.
• NEWSWELL: a new service at Arizona State University that offers “wraparound” services to newsrooms in its network, including student interns.
• Press Forward infrastructure grants: These include a number of new shared services initiatives.
• Knight x LMA BloomLab: Early Observations from the First Year of Shared Revenue Services