He led NBC News. Now he’s pouring millions into nonprofit news in the South.

There is no greater time to be in the nonprofit journalism business.

That’s what Andy Lack, the former chairman of NBC News and creator and cofounder of nonprofit local newsroom network Deep South Today, believes. There are challenges, but innovation supersedes many of them.

Newsrooms in many states have scaled back on their statehouse reporting over the years, leaving a gap in local news coverage. Yet there has never been a greater need for covering lawmakers’ decisions that could impact communities. Increasingly sophisticated technology is now making it easier than ever to produce this reporting.

“It’s so important to the health of our democracy,” Lack said. “It’s so important having that ability to go deep locally as well as nationally. For me, in underserved communities, it’s really a public service.”

This month, Lack announced he was investing $7 million to support nonprofit journalism in the South, one of the largest contributions made to the sector by a single individual in recent years.

The funding will go toward building newsrooms across new markets. It also will strengthen Deep South Today’s video-first operation, which produces original journalism and visual storytelling for each of its newsrooms. Additional funds from Lack will go toward launching a collaborative investigative reporting initiative in partnership with The New York Times that will include full-time investigative and data reporters, a dedicated editor and Times Fellows embedded in Deep South Today newsrooms.

Lack has yet to allocate about $4 million of the gift. He is still evaluating different nonprofit journalism initiatives aligned with his interests.

The donation comes as both local and national news organizations face significant financial pressures from declines in subscriber and advertising revenue, as well as diverted web traffic from artificial intelligence chatbots. Some consumers are also seeking news in other places, such as social media. Newsrooms, many of them smaller, independent operations, are closing or scaling back their staffs and areas of coverage.

But many local nonprofit newsrooms have reported revenue growth over the past five years. As part of its annual index, the Institute for Nonprofit News asks its members to share financial data. Out of the members that have shared complete financial data for 2021 through 2024, about 83% of local outlets reported revenue growth of at least 10%.

That revenue benchmark was reached by 71% of state and regional publications and 76% of national and global outlets.

Media executive Andy Lack cofounded Deep South Today and its newsroom Mississippi Today.

Returning to his roots

Lack cofounded the first nonprofit newsroom under the Deep South umbrella, Mississippi Today, nearly 10 years ago. The mission: bolster local news coverage around the capital city of Jackson, which had diminished over the years.

Deep South today has added three newsrooms to its network in the past four years: Verite News, which focuses on covering inequities facing communities of color in New Orleans; The Current, which covers Lafayette and southern Louisiana; and The Garrison Project, an investigative reporting initiative that works with national and local newsrooms to cover criminal justice issues.

Lack’s interest in expanding news coverage in the South is personal. He grew up in New York City and spent much of his career there, serving as the chairman and CEO of Bloomberg Media Group and Sony Music Entertainment, among other roles. But he has family roots in the Mississippi Delta.

His great grandfather arrived to the state in the late 1800s from what was then Prussia. He went on to build a successful career in Greenville, Mississippi, which included an eight-year stint as mayor.

He sent Lack’s grandfather and his brothers to New York to start a business and then come back home to Mississippi. They never did.

“My cousins and uncles said to me, you need to go back,” Lack said in recent interview. “We didn’t, but will you?”

‘What the industry needs’

Mississippi Today initially began as a state watchdog, but its coverage evolved and expanded over time. In 2022, the newsroom, led by reporter Anna Wolfe, broke the largest welfare fraud scandal in Mississippi’s history. The following year, Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize Winner in local reporting.

Lack felt the nonprofit pathway was logical for covering smaller communities and state capitals. He believed the newsrooms could raise more money in the community to do the work they wanted to do, rather than relying mostly on advertising.

Deep South Today and its newsrooms are funded by charitable contributions and grants from individuals and institutions, as well as through advertising, underwriting and sponsorship revenue. These include Pro Publica, Archie and Olivia Manning, W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the American Journalism Project, among dozens of others.

Fundraising has become a little easier over time, Lack said, because the network has demonstrated that it can do the work.

Lack doesn’t see nonprofit newsrooms as the ideal model for long‑term financial sustainability in the industry. But he said it plays an important role in it.

“The nonprofit crowd is still small in this universe, but I think necessary,” Lack said. “Public media proves that. PBS has proven that over and over. There’s a role for public media and nonprofit media.”

Andrew Morse, the president and publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, worked alongside Lack when Morse led Bloomberg Television. The two share parallels in their career pathways: Both spent the majority of their careers in New York and are now leading newsrooms in the South.

“Right now, the news business needs great leaders who are willing to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work,” Morse said. “At this stage in his career, the fact that Andy is devoting his time to furthering great local journalism is exactly what the industry needs.”

The two have had conversations about striking a partnership between the AJC and Deep South Today.

In September, Deep South Today will expand into Arkansas to cover the Black Belt region. It borders the other states in Deep South Today’s purview and shares a lot of the same issues, Lack said, from challenges in education, health care and government services to complex racial dynamics. There are other states he’s identified as areas to expand, including Louisiana and Alabama.