The Daily Catch
The Daily Catch is a nonprofit, hyperlocal online newspaper serving Red Hook and Rhinebeck in New York's Hudson Valley. Founded in 2021 by veteran journalist Emily Sachar, it grew from a one-town experiment in Red Hook — a community Sachar has described as a news desert when she arrived — into an award-winning newsroom covering two neighboring towns, training young reporters, winning state press awards and, in a merger completed as 2025 began, absorbing the Hudson Valley Pilot. Free to readers who register, donor- and grant-supported, and edited by a former Newsday reporter who says she is busier covering a town of 10,000 than she was covering New York City's school system, The Daily Catch has become a frequently cited model of how small nonprofit newsrooms can survive.
Founding in a News Desert
Sachar moved to Red Hook in 2016 after many years as a reporter at New York Newsday, where her beat had included the New York City schools. Finding little consistent local coverage in her new hometown, she first wrote a blog for a citizen-generated news outlet, then decided in 2021 to start a publication she could shape and sustain herself, on her own terms. The Daily Catch — formally the Red Hook Daily Catch — launched that year as an online-only newspaper devoted to the town of Red Hook in northern Dutchess County, including its villages and the Bard College community nearby.
The founding premise was simple and increasingly common in American local news: where legacy papers had retreated, a resident journalist with professional training could rebuild coverage of town government, schools, planning and everyday life from the ground up, and readers and donors would support it if the work proved itself.
Emily Sachar: Founder and Editor
Sachar serves as founder and editor-in-chief, and her biography is inseparable from the publication's identity. A longtime Newsday reporter and an art historian as well as a journalist, she edits every corner of the operation — assigning and reading stories, giving line-by-line feedback to interns and young reporters, and writing frequently herself, often in collaboration with staff. Her oft-quoted reflection that covering a town of 10,000 keeps her busier than covering the vast New York City school system captures the paper's ethos: hyperlocal journalism, done properly, is not small work.
Sachar has also become a public voice for the model. She has discussed the paper's economics in regional forums on the future of Hudson Valley media, explaining how grants and individual donations reinforce each other — success with funders signals community reach, and visible reader support strengthens the case to funders.
Coverage: Government, Schools and Community Life
The Daily Catch covers the full civic diet of two Hudson Valley towns: town and village board meetings, planning and zoning disputes, school board elections and budgets, police and fire news, farms and land use, business openings, arts and obituaries. Its reporting is notably persistent. Long-running sagas — such as the Town of Red Hook's costly eminent-domain effort to take over the Red Hook Boat Club and turn it into a public park, with legal and planning bills passing a quarter of a million dollars and repeated court defeats for the town — have been followed filing by filing and meeting by meeting. School coverage is similarly close, from contested board races and candidate questionnaires to a defeated multi-million-dollar school bus depot proposal.
The paper also publishes reader dialogue as a genre of its own, compiling residents' reactions to major stories, and it leans into photography and community documentation, gathering images from fire departments, residents and its own reporters to chronicle events such as a nine-hour barn fire fought by a dozen local companies.
Awards and Recognition
Within its first three years, The Daily Catch won 13 awards from the New York Press Association and three from the New York News Publishers Association, according to Editor & Publisher's account of the merger — a striking haul for a newsroom of its size. Regional coverage in Chronogram similarly noted more than ten New York Press Association awards in a two-year span as evidence that the paper's sustainability rested on quality, not novelty.
National attention arrived through an unexpected door: in 2022, NPR's Rough Translation podcast featured the paper's exchange with Pavel Kuljuk, a Ukrainian journalist in Kramatorsk who had earlier corresponded with Sachar about Red Hook's town board data and then, after Russia's invasion, answered her questions about life under siege. The episode, which explored what local news means across an ocean, introduced The Daily Catch to a national audience and remains one of its signature stories.
The Nonprofit Model: Donors, Grants and Budget
The Daily Catch is a nonprofit sustained by a mix of small donations, larger gifts and foundation grants, without a paywall — the site is free to readers who register. Chronogram's survey of Hudson Valley media put its annual budget at roughly $250,000, and Sachar has said about ten percent of readers donate during fundraising drives, while noting that twenty percent donating at similar levels would be transformative. Notably, in its early years Sachar took no salary from the operation she founded, a founder subsidy she has discussed openly as part of how such startups get established, while maintaining the paper could by then sustain itself even if she did.
The grant record is substantial for so small a newsroom. Editor & Publisher reported that the paper qualified for seven major national grants in two years through the Google News Initiative and the Knight Foundation, and that it was among the Press Forward awardees, receiving $100,000 spread over two years. Publisher Walter Mullin, who joined in May 2022 and brought a marketing background to the role, leads the pursuit of grants, donations, sponsors and advertisers alongside Sachar.
Training the Next Generation
Interns are not an afterthought at The Daily Catch; they are, in Sachar's words, an anchor of its pipeline. The paper runs paid internships — including a year-long posting offered through SUNY New Paltz's journalism program at $15 an hour, structured at 35 hours a week in summer and 15 during the academic year, with a path toward a full-time reporting job or postgraduate fellowship — and recruits fall editorial interns for election coverage, requiring in-person reporting, a car and a camera.
That experience was codified for the wider industry in a handbook on hiring, training and working with interns for small newspapers, produced by The Daily Catch with a grant from the DJ McManus Family Foundation, written by Stony Brook journalism professor emerita Barbara Selvin, a member of the paper's board, and distributed free to other newsrooms. The paper also produces The Catch Up, a podcast extending its Red Hook and Rhinebeck coverage into audio.
Merger with the Hudson Valley Pilot
The defining event of the paper's recent history is its merger with the Hudson Valley Pilot, the digital outlet founded by Mark Fuerst in the fall of 2022 to serve Rhinebeck, just south of Red Hook. The two nonprofits competed for the same readers — and, more consequentially, the same donors — in a combined market of roughly 20,000 people. Officials and sources were being interviewed twice on the same topics, and readers were reading duplicate versions of the same stories.
When Fuerst decided to pursue other interests and sought a new publisher, Sachar contacted him to propose a merger instead. Under the combined operation, announced as 2025 began, Sachar continues as editor-in-chief, Mullin serves as publisher, and the Pilot's executive editor Eric Steinman became senior editor, continuing its twice-weekly newsletter and writing on arts, culture and entertainment, while a Pilot freelancer joined as production editor. Sachar reported that ninety percent of Pilot readers who lacked Daily Catch accounts registered on the site, and that officials and donors alike expressed relief at a single, stronger outlet. The merged paper serves Rhinebeck and Red Hook together, with several newsletters and an occasional print edition alongside the website.
Audience and Reach
At the time of the merger, The Daily Catch counted about 8,700 readers on its website and more than 4,000 followers on social media — penetration that, against a two-town population of about 20,000, represents an unusually deep share of its community. Its stories are discussed at the meetings it covers, its reader-comment compilations draw dozens of responses, and its reporting is cited across the Hudson Valley media ecosystem, from regional magazines to college journalism programs that route students to its internships.
Place in Hudson Valley Media
The Daily Catch belongs to a loose alliance of independent Hudson Valley outlets — including the Kingston Wire, the Hudson Valley Pilot it absorbed, the Highlands Current and others listed in the Hudson Valley News Alliance — that have rebuilt local coverage town by town as legacy dailies thinned. Within that company it stands out for the completeness of its model: nonprofit status, paid training, major national grants, state awards and a merger executed from strength. For Red Hook and Rhinebeck, it is simply the local paper — the place where the boat club fight, the school vote and the farmers market opening are all, reliably, on the record.
