• by Ray Schultz , July 28, 2022

Two newspapers serving the South Side of Chicago—the South Side Weekly and the Hyde Park Herald—have merged under the nonprofit group South Side Weekly NFP. 

The Herald was unprofitable in 2019 and 2020, but attained profitability in 2021 after partnering with the South Side Weekly, the latter paper reports. 

Local papers like these are scrambling for resources as local news organizations face an existential crisis.   

“The business model for local news has been vaporized,” says Tim Franklin, senior associate dean at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, according to the Weekly. “The problem is also especially acute for smaller community publications, because they’ve also suffered the same loss of revenue that everybody else has.”

However, the merged papers see “an opportunity to build a scalable framework for community news, one that combines the Herald’s 140-year long commitment to neighborhood reporting with the Weekly’s community-centered approach to news-gathering on the greater South Side,” said Jason Schumer, the Weekly’s managing director, the Weekly continues.