You can catch a glimpse into one version of local journalism’s future on the second floor of the University of Tulsa’s downtown arts center. There, in a long, narrow glassed-in corridor, a row of about two dozen reporters and editors sits or stands behind their desks, typing away on computers, peering into screens, or talking into headsets. Some all at once.
At first, the scene may not look so different from a larger newsroom of a major metropolitan newspaper. What’s different is that the journalists in the Tulsa Flyer newsroom produce stories five days a week for a variety of local digital outlets, along with one traditional newspaper: The Oklahoma Eagle, the historically Black publication that has served Tulsans for 100 years.
Creating a network
This network concept is rooted in collaboration, where journalists may file stories for The Oklahoma Eagle; the Tulsa Flyer site; La Semana, an Oklahoma Spanish-English news outlet; or Que Buena Tulsa, a Spanish language radio station. They may exchange stories with Focus: Black Oklahoma, a monthly podcast, or appear on K-OSU, a public radio station that serves the area. Or The Frontier, a Tulsa digital site that prides itself on local investigative journalism, may supply an in-depth report for the Flyer’s site.
These organizations, along with others like the Tulsa World and Griffin Media, are part of the journalistic ecosystem the Tulsa Flyer is creating to deliver factual information to a range of audiences in northeast Oklahoma. Reporting is not just produced for one source, so this approach requires a different mindset for journalists who are used to serving one newspaper, one television station, one radio outlet.
Under this model, reporters reach multiple communities, sometimes simultaneously. The collaboration expands the distribution of reliable information across Tulsa’s 415,000 residents and the larger metropolitan area of nearly 1.1 million people.
In early April, a story examining how a U.S. Supreme Court case about birthright citizenship might impact Oklahomans appeared simultaneously on the sites of La Semana and the Tulsa Flyer. A reporter who was hired to work for both entities wrote the piece.
Similarly, The Flyer and The Eagle published a piece in April about a Tulsa group helping Black women with breast cancer deal with their struggles. And a story K-OSU reported about a possible Oklahoma constitutional convention was posted on the Flyer site.
Once a quarter, the collaboration produces a journal, Snapshot, that focuses on a community issue. The spring Snapshot, for example, concentrated on mental health care in Tulsa and across Oklahoma.
The constellation of news organizations is similar to Deep South Today, which bills itself as a network of nonprofit local newsrooms across Louisiana and Mississippi. The network was founded by Andrew Lack, a longtime journalist and former NBC News president and CEO.
Deep South Today consists of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mississippi Today, Verite News in New Orleans, and The Current in Lafayette. The goal is to collaboratively rebuild local journalism in those two states. That includes through a new video journalism studio and an investigative reporting center that is in partnership with the New York Times and Big Local News, a Stanford University project.
Like Deep South Today, the Tulsa Flyer is betting on partners to reinvigorate journalism in their community. This is one important strategy to save local journalism around the nation and in Oklahoma’s second-largest city.
The Eagle
The Oklahoma Eagle is the centerpiece of the Tulsa network. Founded in 1922, the publication has chronicled the lives of Black Tulsans since shortly after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that destroyed the city’s affluent, entrepreneurial “Black Wall Street.” The paper has been a mainstay of the city’s Black community. And it is the only Black-owned business in the Black Wall Street community that is still operating from the time of the massacre.
Gary Lee serves now as executive editor of the newspaper. A Tulsa native who read The Eagle as a child, Lee, as a teen, left his neighborhood, where many Black citizens lived, to attend prep schools in Andover, Massachusetts, and Uppingham, England. He graduated from Amherst College, where he edited the school newspaper. Lee then wrote for the Minneapolis Tribune, the Washington Post, and Time Magazine. He was a correspondent for the latter news organization in Germany and reported for the Post from Moscow and Washington, D.C.
Shortly before the Covid pandemic, Lee returned home to lead The Eagle. The staff consisted of one full time and several part-time employees. Today, the weekly paper, which publishes a daily news site, has a managing editor and three full-time reporters. Lee remains the executive editor.
The Eagle has hired locally and beyond. The managing editor is an alum of Axios, the popular digital site that covers both national and local issues. Another journalist came to The Eagle from Mississippi Today. A third who covers business for the paper came from Report for America, a nonprofit that places young journalists in news organizations and helps fund the positions.
The Eagle once largely served North Tulsa, where most Black residents previously lived. Today, says Lee, the paper follows the movement of Black residents into other neighborhoods. “We distribute it free citywide,” Lee reports. “And we have a cross-over readership.”
The veteran journalist wants a paper that is not just reaching one racial group. Instead, the paper seeks to serve a broader reach across Tulsa, whose population the latest U.S. Census data reports is 14% Black, 54% white, 19% Hispanic, and 4% Native American. Three Native American tribes are based in Tulsa – the Creek, Osage, and Cherokee.
As of late February, The Eagle was distributed weekly to 85 stores, libraries, and retail outlets across the city. The circulation manager is trying to double that number.
The February 27th edition featured staff-written stories about Mayor Monroe Nichols’ State of Black Tulsa address, Senator James Lankford’s Tulsa Regional Chamber speech, and a local pastor’s journey away from a troubled past. The collection of pieces in the 12-page broadsheet included a letter from Lee and five stories from the Tulsa Flyer.
A few weeks earlier, the February 6th edition similarly provided hyper-local reporting. The front-page featured a deep look at the challenges the city’s Booker T. Washington High School faced in securing its 18th state basketball title. Readers were presented a feature about the city’s Black rodeo culture and a report about data centers’ impact on Oklahoma. The weekly letter from the editor detailed the observation of Black History Month in Tulsa.
Destination journalism
Lee advocates for local journalism being its own destination. That may sound out of context from a person who made his mark through international and national reporting. But even when working on those beats, he always was interested in the sociology of a place.
Of course, that’s the essence of local journalism: reporting about the people, culture, and organization of a community. “I am fascinated with local stories,” the soft-spoken editor explains. “Local can be political, too, or about the arts, or even how long a streetlight stays green.”
Lee and a core of experienced editors work with The Flyer’s new, younger hires in developing their journalistic skills. “Part of our job is to train them,” he says. “We pull up a chair and edit their stories with them.”
The job also entails helping The Flyer’s mostly young reporters envision a career in local journalism. He acknowledges finding graduates interested in local reporting can be a challenge. But he believes that if you like telling stories about people, doing hard news, and reporting the culture of a community, you can do all of that in one place.
“I want people to feel they can make a career here. I want them to feel like this is not a steppingstone,” Lee emphasized during an interview.
The Flyer’s CEO, Ziva Branstetter, developed her career through local journalism. Before spending several years at The Washington Post and ProPublica, where she led a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team, the Oklahoma State University graduate spent more than 20 years at the Tulsa World as an editor and reporter.
Covering the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was among her assignments. In 2015, she used her background in investigative reporting to become a co-founder of The Frontier, the Tulsa-based investigative newsroom that supplies stories to The Flyer and trains young Flyer journalists in investigative reporting.
The Flyer’s Origin Story
The Flyer debuted in October 2025, with Lee as executive editor of the online newsroom as well as of The Eagle. The foundation for The Flyer, which originally was known as the Tulsa Local News Initiative, was cemented long before then.
The organization arose in part through local leaders expressing concern over the state of journalism in their community. The concerned included philanthropists like Tulsa’s Emily Kaiser, a journalist herself.
The American Journalism Project (AJP), a leading catalyst for nonprofit, nonpartisan journalism across the country, became involved with Kaiser and civic leaders to understand the gaps in Tulsa’s news environment and the investments needed to close those gaps. AJP then organized listening sessions across Tulsa.
What came next is the Tulsa Flyer and the transformation of The Eagle. Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project, puts the mission this way: “The Tulsa Flyer is transforming The Eagle, a legacy publication, while building something entirely new. The Flyer is the primary source of original reporting in the community. We see this as an opportunity to preserve a critical institution while building for the future.”
Two things matter in this model – revenue mix and clearly understanding the audience.
In folding The Eagle into the Tulsa Flyer, the AJP took the unusual step of turning an existing for-profit news organization into part of its nonprofit portfolio. As it did so, AJP decided to invest $2.5 million in the work of The Flyer over three years. The funding supports several members of the business staff. AJP operates from the premise that investing in the business side gives nonprofit news organizations the talent and time to develop a sustainable financial model.
AJP and the MacArthur Foundation are among the national funders, but the rest of the support comes from the community, which helps The Flyer meet its $4.5 million annual budget. Large donors include such local philanthropists as Emily Kaiser, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.
The Flyer also has more than 20 $5,000 donors. And 400 supporters are paying members, 64 of which pay monthly.
In terms of developing an audience, the listening sessions across Tulsa revealed that people desired less crime in news reports, more journalism that helps the community solve problems, and reporting that holds elected leaders accountable to voters. Participants also wanted to see more of themselves and their neighbors in news stories. And they preferred to learn more deeply about issues like housing costs, schools, and the city’s arts and culture.
Data plays a key role in helping The Flyer understand its audience reach and impact. Lee describes how The Flyer uses data to determine what stories interest readers. Accountability journalism stories do well, he says, so The Flyer knows they should be central in its work.
Another data-related aim is tripling the number of visitors to the site by year’s end. The Flyer has an audience director to help with that task.
As The Flyer prepared to launch last fall, Branstetter, Lee, and their team came up with six “personas” to define the audiences they hope to reach. The personas spanned across racial, political, and gender lines. Stories should appeal to one or more of these personas.
This could look like simply playing to an audience. But it is more complex and important.
Before The Flyer could help its readers see more of themselves and their communities in stories, the organization first had to understand its audiences. The personas are an attempt to provide that understanding. Branstetter says that The Flyer “practices audience-first journalism.”
That does not mean soft-pedaling issues. Focus groups wanted deeper stories that tackled tough subjects. A feeling existed, Branstetter said, that journalism in Tulsa had been too soft.
Being in the community
Central to the project’s community engagement is The Flyer’s documenter’s program. A concept at play in other AJP-supported sites, such as the Fort Worth Report, documenters are local citizens The Flyer trains to take notes about what transpires in a public meeting.
The Flyer has about 100 documenters, who range in age from 16 and up. Some are retirees, but not all. The documenters get paid $15-to-$17 an hour to detail what goes on in meetings of the City Council, school boards, and the Tulsa-based tribes. The information gets published in The Flyer and throughout its network.
The program has grown so popular, Lee says, The Flyer has added advanced training for those interested in this form of citizen journalism. That includes from two former Washington Post photographers Lee asked to come develop photographic skills for interested documenters.
The Flyer also employs a community journalist director who attends events across the city to establish relationships, better understand the city, and demonstrate the news outlet is part of the community. Simply showing up is an old-fashioned but tested way of developing trust in any organization’s work.
Branstetter puts it this way: “You have to go talk to people.” Within The Flyer’s first two months, the director had attended 33 events. Attendees received handouts that showed how to connect with The Flyer.
Reporters each are assigned three neighborhoods. They are expected to do reporting from there, not from their desks. And Branstetter emphasizes the goal is to get readers information they need to solve problems. That includes handing out resource guides that tell residents how they can get access to mental healthcare, food supplies, and social services.
Being imaginative is another way to “be in the community.” Earlier this year, The Flyer started a monthly book club that dives into works about Tulsa or that Tulsa authors wrote. The first session drew about 20 people in February to discuss “Black Moses” by Caleb Gayle, a University of Oklahoma graduate. In late April, Lee and Tim Landes, The Flyer’s cultural reporter, led a discussion about “Blood Sisters” by Oklahoma and Cherokee author Vanessa Lillie. At year’s end, the organization will throw a pizza party for those who attend six of the monthly meetings.
The future
The Flyer is only in year one of its efforts to provide Tulsa residents reliable information about their community, train young reporters in local journalism, and work with news outlets that serve overlooked audiences. The future will require sustainable funding, audience growth, and, most of all, quality reporting from a network of organizations that tell the story of Tulsa. And, at some point, The Flyer may face the decision whether to expand beyond Tulsa given the news deserts that extend across Oklahoma.
If The Flyer succeeds with its local network, much like Deep South Today has done regionally in Mississippi and Louisiana, the collaboration will provide lessons for strengthening local journalism in other communities. There’s much to lament about the decline in news outlets nationwide, but the model emerging in Tulsa is showing one way to reinvent local journalism.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE TULSA FLYER
Create a journalistic network
Reach overlooked audiences
Tap into community support
Engage with readers
Know your audiences’ interests
Hire for experience at the top
Report on more than crime
Hold leaders accountable
Provide problem-solving journalism
Tell stories where people see themselves
Develop audience personas
Promote local journalism as a destination
Train young journalists in local journalism
Use citizens to document public meetings
