If you’re trying to understand how the journalism industry has changed in the last 10 years, then you could probably do a lot worse than look back on the long and winding path blazed by Tulsa nonprofit news outlet The Frontier.
Emerging in spring 2015 as a rude upstart blog with spicy headlines, provocative questions, and rugged coverage of local crime and policing, The Frontier steadily matured into the stately, respected outlet for accountability and enterprise journalism it is now, which its founders describe as “ProPublica for Oklahoma.”
The total number of working journalists in America is projected to decline 3% from 2023 to 2033.1 Even with that less-than-rosy outlook, the state of the news industry in 2015 was possibly even more dire then than it is now. To look back on this period is to see a media in chaos, as social media platforms continued gobbling up advertising revenues that once were easy money for legacy media businesses. Corporate raiders consolidated the industry by buying and swapping media businesses like TV stations and newspapers2 that were often cash-strapped and confused about how to move forward.
And yet, 10 years later, flowers are growing up through the cracks. The Frontier’s 10th anniversary is this month and over that time their staff has doubled from four journalists to eight. They’ve won awards for their reporting and cultivated a strong base of individual donors, as well as donations from corporations. Publisher Bobby Lorton and executive editor Dylan Goforth have stuck with The Frontier all 10 of those years, as veteran journalists and cub reporters alike have cycled through the nonprofit as it published investigations, put real people’s faces on state policy and collaborated with national news orgs to haul in major stories.
How did they do it? I gathered three of the team’s four founding journalists and Lorton to share the story of The Frontier’s chaotic early days and to reflect on the last decade in this racket, ahead of their anniversary party at Central Library later this month. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Section introductions written in italics are mine.
“We Kind Of Got Told To ‘Dial It Down, Girls’”
Ziva Branstetter: [Bobby and I] met at Shades of Brown.
Bobby Lorton: I had friends of mine who kept on kicking me, [saying] “Hey, Tulsa's news market is going down the tube. Can we do anything to fix this?” And I obviously was a little bit burnt out on anything to do with news after we sold the paper.3