I’ve spent nearly two decades in and around newsrooms, and one thing has continued to become more challenging year over year: resource constraints. The landscape is brutal. Nearly 136 U.S. newsrooms have closed or merged in 2025 alone. Following the closure of USAID, roughly $150 million in annual support for journalism vanished overnight. If our problems weren’t grave enough, the White House has now published a “Media Offenders” tracker, targeting reporters and stories it claims misled the public.

In this critical moment where resources are scarce and journalists are desperate to offer deeper, more impactful content, 2026 must be the defining year for strategic mergers and radical resource sharing. This is not merely an option; it is the only viable strategy to better serve audiences and ensure organizational survival. We must operate with the conviction that the sum is greater than the parts, or else risk diluting our impact into irrelevance.

To be clear, I am not advocating for the type of consolidation that strips communities of their voice. We have all seen the damage done when conglomerates like Sinclair buy up local stations, homogenize the output, and cut local coverage in favor of national talking points. That is consolidation for profit, not for public service.

The strategy for 2026 must be different. It is about mission-driven mergers that cut administrative bloat to raise the quality of coverage. It is about acknowledging that skin-deep, promotional, and short-lived partnerships won’t cut it anymore. It’s about finding partners that share common values or audiences and together delivering big, ambitious coverage.

I’ve spent years working on media partnerships, and I know the barriers well. Most news organizations are driven by ego; they guard their data and resources jealously, viewing a merger as a loss of identity rather than a gain in capacity. But when managed innovatively, the potential is transformative.

Take, for example, the Ocean Media Group. In 2024, Torey Malatia, the former CEO of Rhode Island Public Media, and his board led the charge to strategically merge with the local PBS station.

“We could do things incrementally each year, we assembled a great staff, but giving them the opportunity to flex their muscles was really hard,” Malatia told me. “We started to think about whether there is a way to start with the basic mission of public service media and consolidate that to get more ambitious resources behind it and get more things done.”

Malatia noted that the intention wasn’t driven by fear, but by a “creative opportunity when you start thinking about how the audience is consuming this and what is most valuable for them.” By creating an operational plan that redirected back-office resources toward content, they built a platform capable of audacity.

We are seeing this logic take hold elsewhere. Examples of mergers driven by mission rather than marketing include Chicago Public Radio and the Chicago Sun-Times, which created one of the largest non-profit news organizations in the U.S. In 2013, the first online and nonprofit news organization in the U.S. to combine resources with a public radio station was St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR) and the St. Louis Beacon. In 2024, CalMatters announced the acquisition of The Markup leading to major investigations such as states sharing personal healthcare data with Big Tech.

Sometimes, this strategic thinking means knowing when to close the doors to ensure the mission is not compromised and the work lives on. Global Press, where I served as COO, made the difficult but prescient decision to gracefully conclude operations after 20 years of covering communities around the world. Rather than letting the mission evaporate with the pressures of the current funding landscape, Global Press proactively ensured its incredible assets lived on through deep strategic partnerships. Its massive photo archive will find a permanent home with the Wikimedia Foundation in order to offer open source access; its training materials will be acquired by the International Center for Journalists to ensure thousands of journalists continue to have access to these trainings; and its industry-leading Duty of Care training and resources now will have a home at A Culture of Safety (ACOS) Alliance. This is the ultimate form of putting the mission above the masthead.

Reimagining how resources, staff, and assets are deployed is challenging work. It requires designing thoughtful operational plans that prioritize creativity and new products over legacy structures. But the beauty in what leaders like Malatia share is that their choices weren’t reactionary moves against an ominous future — they were offensive moves for innovation.

So, take my advice for the year ahead: It’s time to put your ego and fears aside. Begin meaningfully collaborating, partnering, and merging. Do it not just to survive, but to serve your audience with the power they deserve.