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Partner newsrooms will publish the editor’s independent analysis oflocal news coverage across the market
October 14, 2025
By: Jennifer Orsi and Nicole Slaughter Graham
Article origination: Poynter Institute
The nonprofit Poynter Institute, a leader for 50 years in strengthening ethical journalism and audience trust, is pleased to announce a pilot project establishing a local public editor to serve the news media market of Indianapolis.
The Indianapolis Public Editor will act as a bridge between the many newsrooms that serve the community and news consumers. This project is designed to test the effectiveness of independent accountability and public education in a local news market.
The project is led by Poynter’s senior vice president Kelly McBride, chair of Poynter’s Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, and has received grant funding from the Lumina Foundation and the Hearst Foundations. Poynter is currently accepting applications for the Indianapolis Public Editor.
“The goal of a local public editor is to help the people who live in Indianapolis understand their news ecosystem better,” McBride said, “and ultimately enable people to hold their local journalists accountable for what they need from them, and also when appropriate to elevate great journalism.”
McBride herself serves as NPR’s public editor, a position she’s held since 2020. Before that, she was public editor for ESPN from 2011-12.
The public editor, who will reside in Indianapolis and have a journalism background, will serve as a media critic focused on how Indianapolis newsrooms understand and provide coverage in line with the needs of local communities. The Indianapolis Public Editor’s work will be published on participating local news sites.
The editor will examine the entire news ecosystem that serves Indianapolis, answering questions from the audience and explaining how journalists throughout the market make decisions about coverage. Those columns will appear on the project’s partner newsrooms, which currently include WFYI public radio, Mirror Indy and Indiana Capital Chronicle.
Additional Indianapolis newsrooms are considering joining the project at a later date. The editor will examine news coverage across the market, not only from the participating newsrooms.
McBride said she got the idea for a local community-wide public editor years ago, before she became NPR’s public editor.
“I was in a city where a group of people were frustrated with the news organizations and the coverage they were doing around the city,” she said. “They asked me to come in and imagine what it would be like to have a marketwide public editor. I’ve literally been trying to find funding for it ever since.”
While a public editor works closely with journalists and newsrooms to write about coverage, their loyalty is with the news audience.
“The public editor can get your questions answered. They have the journalism process. They are often explaining how the process works and why the process isn’t meeting the needs of the public.”
McBride said sometimes journalists get criticized so much, it may be hard for them to listen to the public or understand what the public needs from them. “The public editor is a vehicle to help the people communicate to journalists what they need, and help the journalists hear the people they serve.”
Greg Petrowich, WFYI president and CEO said the Indianapolis public radio station was eager to participate in the project. “At a time when public trust in news is at a critical low, the role of a public editor offers transparency and education around how news is gathered and reported,” he said. “As a local public media station with a decades-long commitment to trusted journalism, we’re excited to bring this service to our WFYI audience. We believe this initiative will foster engagement in local news and build a more civically engaged and well-informed public.”
Mirror Indy editor in chief Oseye Boyd said her newsroom is participating to help increase community understanding of what Mirror Indy does and why.
“This not only provides an opportunity to increase media literacy in our city, but also allows community members to hold us accountable in how we cover them,” she said.
The public editor project is “another way that we can show our audience that we’re accountable to them and listening to them,” said Niki Kelly, editor in chief of the Indiana Capital Chronicle, adding, “This is also a great opportunity and an opportunity to learn more about the journalistic standards we hold ourselves to as a media outlet.”
McBride said the goal is to hire the public editor and begin the work before the end of 2025. The project also plans to hold public events with the news audience, the public editor and news organizations.
There are only a handful of public editors in the U.S., and those that exist tend to work for a single news organization, such as McBride’s role at NPR.
“That’s one of the flaws of public editors – the news organizations that have them get held up to a different level of scrutiny just because they have a public editor,” she said. Having an editor assess coverage across the entire region is a different dynamic.
“Local journalism is so different from national journalism. It is important for people who care about the community to understand the media ecosystem that serves the community and where they might be underperforming and overperforming, because then they can ask for changes.”
Stephanie Wang, who coordinates the Lumina Foundation’s Press Forward initiative grantmaking, supported the project from the initial conversation.
“For our home state to flourish, Hoosiers need to understand the role that more and better local news and information can play in strengthening communities and bridging divides,” said Wang, a former Chalkbeat chief and reporter for The Indianapolis Star and Tampa Bay Times.
At the end of the pilot period, McBride hopes improved public trust and understanding of local news organizations will make it easy for funders to continue their support.
“I also hope other communities get excited and say “We want that in our community,’ ” she said. “I hope the media organizations in Indianapolis feel validated and seen and feel like it’s made them better.”
Media Contact
Jennifer Orsi
Vice President, Publishing and Local News Initiatives
The Poynter Institute
jorsi@poynter.org
About the Poynter Institute
The Poynter Institute is a global nonprofit working to address society’s most pressing issues by teaching journalists and journalism, covering the media and the complexities facing the industry, convening and community building, improving the capacity and sustainability of news organizations and fostering trust and reliability of information. The Institute is the gold standard in journalistic excellence and dedicated to the preservation and advancement of press freedom in democracies worldwide. Through Poynter, journalists, newsrooms, businesses, big tech corporations and citizens convene to find solutions that promote trust and transparency in news and stoke meaningful public discourse. The world’s top journalists and emerging media leaders rely on the Institute to learn new skills, adopt best practices, better serve audiences, scale operations and improve the quality of the universally The Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), MediaWise and PolitiFact are all members of the Poynter organization.
Support for Poynter and our entities upholds the integrity of the free press and the U.S. First Amendment and builds public confidence in journalism and media — an essential for healthy democracies. Learn more at poynter.org.
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