Sarah Leach, the Gannett community group editor fired last May for talking with me about an internal company issue, has taken the route of many other editors who lost their jobs at legacy newspaper organizations. In mid-December, with the backing of local sponsors, she launched her own site, the Ottawa News Network.
Ottawa is Leach’s home county, with a population of 300,000. It includes Holland, Michigan, population: 35,000. She covered a county commission scandal there for over a year while still at Gannett and has continued tracking the story in a Substack since she left. Leach’s account of new developments, mainly election contests and lawsuits, is the core of the new nonprofit site’s content.
By intention, she is starting small, this month adding an entertainment calendar and a news freelancer. Two college interns will come aboard next month.
As in many such ventures, including the biggest like those of the American Journalism Project or The Baltimore Banner, Leach started with listening tour forums. “What I found was a desire to improve on the options for better coverage than what was there” in The Holland Sentinel or on TV, Leach said.
That was a welcome result in itself, she continued, and also addressed what she had observed in editing the Sentinel and overseeing 26 of Gannett’s smallest papers. “News deserts are real … affecting communities that end up losing more than they realize.”
Leach has formed both a board of directors and an advisory board, and in the fall put some of the logistical pieces in place and got other help from The Tiny News Collective.
Ideally, Leach said, she will have a full financial plan in place within six months and reach self-sufficiency in three years.
More from Poynter: Why more and more journalists are launching worker-owned outlets
She and her board are focused on the ambition of “putting a community in conversation with itself.” Ironically there is a wave of that sentiment at Gannett and other chains or individual papers as they deemphasize traditional editorials or abolish them altogether. Research shows, they say, that readers do not want to be told what to think in editorials but would welcome reader discussion of local issues.
Even as the shock of the firing was fresh, Leach said, she made herself a promise not to trash her former employer and has stuck to it. But you can infer her strong feelings about how Gannett has degraded community newspapers through the years by disinvesting in locally based journalists.
Leach’s falling out with her Gannett bosses came when she felt they had reneged on a promise to add 30 well-paid reporters on one-year contracts for the community group.
I asked Gannett spokesperson Lark-Marie Antón for an update on the community group issue, but she declined to comment. She did say in an email, “there was no hiring pause.” That does not square with a March 31 written memo Leach showed me from her immediate supervisor, saying that a four-month “pause” (his wording) in hiring was being extended through the second quarter.
Gannett may have added journalists to the community group outlets later in the year or in some other way, but I don’t know, given Antón’s silence. A year ago, upgrading news quality at the community papers figured prominently in chief content officer Kristin Roberts’ comments in quarterly earnings reports to investors. That priority has gotten little or no mention since.
Leach is a divorced mother of three. Because she was fired for cause, she got no severance despite more than a decade of service at the company. I asked how she had gotten by financially in the second half of 2024. “It was a roller coaster,” she said, but not as terrible as she feared. Two statewide Michigan nonprofits have picked up her work on the county commission mess.
As a freelancer, she benefited from the election year in a battleground state that also had a governor’s race. “I covered no less than three JD Vance rallies,” she said, and that’s plenty of that for now.
Comments