NowKalamazoo
NowKalamazoo is a nonprofit community news service based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, publishing original reporting for the whole of Kalamazoo County. Founded in 2023 and operated as a program of the Local Journalism Foundation, an independent nonprofit organization, it produces watchdog investigations, government and policy coverage, arts and culture reporting and small-business news, delivered principally through its website and a free daily email newsletter published each weekday morning. The organization describes its work as civic media rather than simply news: its stated purpose is to give residents the information they need to make informed decisions, hold people in power accountable and create positive change, with particular attention to communities that have been historically marginalized or kept from telling their own stories.
Founding and organizational structure
NowKalamazoo was established in 2023, with its website and branding appearing that year, as part of a deliberate effort to rebuild local journalism capacity in a county whose traditional news institutions had contracted. It is published by the Local Journalism Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit whose legal identity underlies the newsroom's operations, fundraising and grant relationships. Ben Lando is the organization's publisher and founder, and he has served as its public face in fundraising and in the national local-news philanthropy community. The Foundation presents NowKalamazoo as a journalism laboratory for reimagining what local news does, and the same organization also supports broader goals of diversifying who works in local media and increasing civic engagement in Kalamazoo County. The newsroom has operated with a small core team supplemented by part-time and freelance journalists; a Michigan media ecosystem report described it as working with three full-time independent contractors, three half-time staff and a handful of freelancers, while actively seeking support to hire more.
Mission and editorial philosophy
The organization's own mission statement frames NowKalamazoo as a public resource for everyone who lives, works or spends time in Kalamazoo County. Its journalism is organized around systems, solutions and accountability rather than incidents alone, and it states that it was founded to meet community information needs and revitalize a stagnant local information ecosystem. Transparency is treated as an editorial value in its own right: the newsroom publishes explanatory notes about how it makes decisions, including a publicly posted policy describing how it reports on sexual assault and other forms of abuse and the care it takes with respect to victims. That practice of explaining its reasoning to readers is intended to distinguish its reporting from both traditional outlets and the unaccountable information flows of social media.
Coverage areas
NowKalamazoo organizes its reporting into several defined areas. Its Policies and Power coverage examines municipalities, public policy and how government decisions affect residents across Kalamazoo County. Beyond Bullets is an ongoing project examining the widespread problem of gun violence in Kalamazoo, including the role that philanthropy and nonprofit organizations can play in reducing it. Explore and Connect covers fine arts, culture, the humanities and creativity in the community, while its business coverage focuses on small businesses and entrepreneurs. Across all of these areas, the newsroom mixes watchdog investigations with neighborhood celebrations, reflecting an editorial position that a community news service should document problems rigorously while also recording the ordinary life of the place it serves.
The daily newsletter and events calendar
The most consistent point of contact between NowKalamazoo and its readers is its daily email newsletter, sent each weekday morning. The newsletter combines the newsroom's original reporting with a round-up of local news from other sources and a sampling of local events. Alongside it, NowKalamazoo maintains a countywide guide to activities and events, consolidating calendars from across Kalamazoo County into a single listing of what is going on. These service features are central to the organization's theory of civic media: a resident who may not seek out an investigation will still open a morning email that tells them what happened, what matters and what is happening nearby, and the calendar gives organizations across the county a shared public noticeboard.
Community engagement and public forums
Engagement is built into the newsroom's reporting model. NowKalamazoo has convened public forums on issues arising from its coverage, including a voters' forum and a public forum at which community members shared their experiences with a category of criminal charges in the Kalamazoo area. Its listening work is designed to bring people directly affected by an issue into the reporting process before conclusions are drawn. The organization also participates in the Southwest Michigan Journalism Collaborative, a regional grouping of newsrooms, educational institutions and community media organizations that has worked together since 2019 to share ideas and editorial content and to raise awareness of the importance of local news. Through that collaborative, NowKalamazoo journalists have taken part in public media-literacy work, including workshops helping residents identify trustworthy news and spot misinformation.
Investigative and data projects
Some of the newsroom's most ambitious work has taken the form of funded, data-driven projects carried out with community partners. With Catalyst grant support administered through the Urban Institute, NowKalamazoo partnered with the Campaign for Criminal Justice and Transparency and Kalamazoo Defender to examine how resisting and obstructing charges are used in the Kalamazoo area. The project combined listening sessions with people directly affected by such charges with analysis of public-record incident logs, arrest records and datasets from local law enforcement and judicial agencies, looking for patterns in the demographics of those charged, the neighborhoods where charges originate, the additional charges commonly paired with them and whether particular officers issue them disproportionately. The planned outputs extended beyond articles to data visualizations, a photo essay, a podcast, social media material, a community guide and live events, illustrating the newsroom's multimedia and community-facing approach to accountability journalism.
Funding and philanthropic support
As a nonprofit, NowKalamazoo is sustained by reader donations, grants and philanthropic support rather than by a paywall; its journalism is published for the public good and its daily newsletter and reporting are offered as a community service. It was one of four Michigan news organizations to receive a Press Forward grant of $100,000 over two years, support its publisher described as providing breathing room on fundraising and confidence to hire. It was also selected for a yearlong fellowship program run through the Chronicle of Philanthropy, receiving $30,000 and training from Chronicle editors and national experts to strengthen its coverage of nonprofit accountability and solutions, applying that training to the Beyond Bullets project. Reader fundraising is organized as an annual campaign; its 2025 NewsMatch campaign, backed by matching support from local champions, NewsMatch and the Joyce Foundation, raised more than $124,000 from over six hundred supporters, exceeding its $110,000 goal. Individual team members run personal fundraising pages as part of the campaign, a structure that makes the newsroom's dependence on, and accountability to, its community explicit.
Place in Michigan's local news landscape
NowKalamazoo emerged during a period in which Michigan's local news ecosystem has been closely studied and deliberately rebuilt. A statewide media ecosystem report by The Pivot Fund counted it among a small group of independent Michigan newsrooms receiving significant national investment, and it is regularly listed alongside other nonprofit startups attempting to replace coverage lost to newspaper contraction. Its model combines elements that have become characteristic of the nonprofit local news movement nationally: free access, a daily newsletter as the primary habit-forming product, a consolidated community calendar, defined accountability projects, collaborative membership with neighboring newsrooms, and funding that mixes small reader donations matched by local and national philanthropy. Within Kalamazoo County, that combination makes NowKalamazoo one of the principal sources of original reporting on policies, power and culture, published online at nowkalamazoo.org.
