Newsroom Profile: Mirror Indy
May 13, 2026
Mirror Indy is the darling of the local news scene. With 22 staffers, the startup nonprofit newsroom seeks to solidify its place as a primary source of news for residents of Indianapolis.
At its founding, it was pitched as a movement to include the often overlooked voices of the community. With an altruistic mission, good salaries, and attractive benefits, Mirror Indy wooed talented journalists from other local news outlets and a significant audience. Now in its third year of publication, Mirror Indy continues to grow in both reach and impact.
But the stakes are high. If the news outlet fails to establish a sustainable financial future, the gamble could prove costly. The community stands to be worse off, should we lose that concentration of talent and community impact.
As the first of many newsroom profiles I hope to feature monthly, I spoke with Mirror Indy leadership to understand how the organization is ensuring its future in the city. My goal is to describe the role each newsroom plays in our community, as well as how they pay for their journalism.
Nonprofit newsrooms: different business model, same obstacles to success
Although nonprofit digital newsrooms are on the rise throughout the United States, it’s been widely documented that they can’t make up for the decades of losses suffered by the for-profit news industry. That’s because charity alone is not a business model. Even the most generous foundations and donors do not promise to fund nonprofit newsrooms in perpetuity. Like most startup nonprofit newsrooms, Mirror Indy must develop several sustainable lines of revenue.
“As with any business, the most successful business model tends to be one that can withstand change,” said Sharene Azimi, communications director for the Institute for Nonprofit News, which supports nonprofit newsrooms around the country. “INN recommends that news organizations prioritize revenue diversification, meaning both a mix of philanthropy and earned revenue but also diversity within philanthropic contributions — institutional funding, major gifts, subscribers and small-dollar donations.”
Nonprofit newsrooms support their journalism by asking the audience to make small donations or become members (like public radio), or by keeping some or all of their information behind a paywall and asking people to subscribe to see it (like newspapers).
In the competitive Indianapolis news market, Mirror Indy has taken a collaborative approach, which Azimi says is typical of INN’s 500 member newsrooms. Instead of competing with other news outlets, Mirror Indy shares its content freely with any news organization that wants to publish it.
“It’s more about serving the community with valuable information than about chasing views, so we see many INN members pursuing editorial collaborations with both nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms in the same region – and making content freely available to others,” she said.
Mirror Indy has a four-legged revenue model to fund its $5.4 million annual budget, said Bro Krift, CEO of Mirror Indy’s support organization, Free Press Indiana. Grants cover 65% of the annual costs. Fourteen foundations support Mirror Indy. Individual giving makes up 28% of the funding. That means around 1,400 people have donated under $1,000, which Krift called “fantastic.” Mirror Indy’s development team has worked hard to cultivate relationships with those individual donors, he said.
Right now, low-dollar sustaining donors (people who commit an average of $18 per month) support 3% of the budget. The fourth revenue line, corporate sponsorships and advertising, is likely to grow to 4% this year.
“We continue to have foundation support at a pretty high level, but the goal long term is that you balance out that stool on all those legs because that gives you stability as you grow and as you age,” Krift said. “So there’s plenty of models out there of other organizations that are just doing a tremendous job from a membership standpoint. And we think about that and study that often.”
Free Press Indiana’s board of directors represents organizations that have funded or are currently funding Mirror Indy, Krift said. However, as a governing board, it does not oversee editorial decision making.
Right now, Mirror Indy is heavily dependent on those large gifts from foundations. For it to be more financially solid, it will have to continue to increase the amount of money from other sources, like individual donors and corporate sponsors.
Central to Mirror Indy’s strategy is to make the news outlet a place where employees look like and come from the communities of Indianapolis.
Free Press Indiana was originally called the Indiana Local News Initiative and operated as such for the first several months. Its first three hires were African American women, a move that set the tone for the rest of staff, said Oseye Boyd, who was hired third as editor-in-chief of Mirror Indy. Nine of 22 staff members are people of color and 17 are women.
Historically, Black residents and other minority communities have been overlooked and underrepresented by news coverage. Making the newsroom a desirable place for a diverse workforce is part of the business strategy.
In addition to good salaries, the parent company assembled a benefits package designed to care for the “mind, body, and soul,” he said. In addition to paid time off, Krift said, the entire newsroom takes off a week in July and December.
“We want people feeling great when they are walking into that eight hours of their day and feeling even better when that time each day ends,” Krift said. “So, our goal is to create a place where our staff are treated like the skilled craftspeople and artists they are, earning a good living so they don’t have to change professions to live a good life outside of work.”
Reaching readers in different locations
Going into its third year of publication, Mirror Indy counts success in the steady growth of its audience. Its weekday newsletter has 42,000 subscribers and the Mirror Indy website gets 78,000 unique visitors every month on average. That number is up 20% year-over-year for the same time period, which is remarkable given that most news websites are trending down. Single month unique visitors are up 40% year over year, April 2025 to April 2026. Subscribers to its text-only message service went from 1,000 in year one to 4,300 this year.
Recently, Mirror Indy launched a TikTok account, which garnered 1,400 followers in 12 days.
But numbers aren’t the only barometer staff use to measure their success. The leadership of the company tells me they want to make a difference in the lives of the people they serve.
“It’s very important for us to impact our community with the news and information that we provide,” Boyd said. “It is important for people to become civically engaged so that they can not just survive, but thrive in Indianapolis. When we say we want democratized storytelling that empowers Indianapolis residents to better their city, that’s what we mean.”
That’s hard to measure. Krift said Mirror Indy has had 200 “instances of impact” in 2026 to date, which he defined as anecdotal signs of trust and community engagement with readers. “Last year we tracked about 750 instances, nearly 1,000 documented examples of impact since we began tracking this work,” he said.
He and Boyd point to the example of Hoosiers attending the Juneteenth festival for the first time after they heard about it from Mirror Indy. When a community member shares a story that no other outlet would cover, that’s also impact. That was the case for Rebecca Robinson, when she turned to the news organization to share the story of her grandparents’ unsolved murders at Riley Towers more than 50 years ago.
“Everybody deserves that. It’s really hard to do it right in the media industry because you get lots of people contacting you, saying ‘oh, my story; it’s important,” Krift said. “But just taking that time in that moment, there’s just levels of grace to it that I really liked about that moment.”
Mirror Indy staff are instructed to focus on the needs of the community in order to be of service. The outlet is about equipping the public with useful, relevant information so that they can navigate systems and challenges. From how to face an eviction notice, to getting the city to honor pothole requests, to participating in causes like fighting homelessness, and learning how to get educational accommodations for your child, I see Mirror Indy fulfilling a need not met by other news outlets.
The nonprofit’s efforts to touch the community in intentional and service-oriented coverage resonates with the public. Here are some notes I received from Mirror Indy readers:
Ronak Shah writes:
Mirror Indy has an independence that is difficult to find in journalism. It doesn’t run traditional ads and isn’t owned by a large corporation. The independence reminds me of NUVO (the local, independent, alt-weekly newspaper that shuttered in 2020), when it was in its heyday…The Documenters initiative is especially valuable and I honestly believe it’s played a significant role in boosting civic engagement in our city.
Josh Riddick writes:
I am a big fan of The Mirror. They offer quality reporting and analysis that is thoughtful and grounded in real conversation. With shifts in local media, we have several outlets running stories without meaningful reporting. They also do not have difficult paywalls, allowing for community access.
Ashley Hooley writes:
Mirror Indy created user-friendly voting guides and support leading up to the primaries! I think the consistent coverage on upcoming public meetings is positive for the community.
Here to stay?
Because of its hyperlocal focus on neighborhoods and voices overlooked by mainstream news media, Mirror Indy has carved out an indispensable role in the city’s news market.
Yet, Mirror Indy is only as good as its permanence in the community.
The Houston Landing is a nonprofit startup that recently folded. Its story offers us a cautionary lesson in how good intentions can be harmful to a community.
When the Landing was launched in 2023 with funding from several big foundations in Houston, it was regarded as a promising news organization. Two years later, funders dropped their financial support, forcing the outlet to fire all of its journalists and abruptly close its doors.
In that time, Houston Landing spent much of its $21 million in seed funding and had not made much headway in generating revenue from readers or leveraging technology to attract new readers.
Ask Mirror Indy staff what they have in common with the Houston Landing and they will tell you there is no comparison and that the only distinction they share is being nonprofits. That, and both organizations set out to keep their content free to readers.
I agree that Mirror Indy looks very different from the Houston Landing. By sharing its content with other newsrooms, Mirror Indy is attracting a larger audience. It helps the news organization expand its reach, when it is exposed to new and larger audiences. By listening closely to audience needs and concerns, it has a news strategy designed to provide useful and actionable information.
But is it moving fast enough? Eventually, one of those big funders will move on. When that happens, will Mirror Indy have convinced enough people to donate to allow it to absorb the blow?
Mirror Indy has proven itself worthy of support through its commitment to inform, entertain, and include audiences often overlooked by mainstream news media. It provides a service to the community and a lens to hold those in power to account. Those characteristics alone make it deserving of a shot at permanence.
I’d love to hear from you. Please send your questions about Indy’s media ecosystem to indypubliceditor@poynter.org, or reach out to let me know if you’d like me to come speak to your community group. Your input helps strengthen Indianapolis’ local journalism.
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The Indy Public Editor is a grant-funded pilot project run by the Poynter Institute. This column is edited by Kelly McBride and copy edited by Lauren Klinger. The project is managed by Nicole Slaughter Graham with support from Amaris Castillo.