Founding General Manager

Founding General Manager / Publisher-in-Training — The Yonkers Ledger (Nonprofit Newsroom Startup)

Organization: The Yonkers Ledger — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit newsroom
Location: Yonkers, NY (hybrid)
Type: Founding role · stipend/honorarium to start, with a clear path as we fundraise

The short version

We're rebuilding local news for Yonkers — New York's third-largest city, 210,000 people — and we're looking for one ambitious recent grad (journalism, business, public policy, nonprofit management, or just relentlessly capable) to help run it from the ground floor.

You'd be helping build an actual institution: setting up the business model, supporting fundraising and our November matching-grant campaign, helping seat a board, tightening operations, and getting a real newsroom to run on time. If you want a job where you can point to something you built, this is it.

Why Yonkers, why now

A city of 210,000 has the news needs of a small metro and, right now, thin independent coverage of city hall, schools, housing, development, and public safety. That's a gap — and a rare chance to build the thing that fills it rather than joining something already finished.

And Yonkers isn't isolated. It borders New York City — 30 minutes from Times Square — and sits inside the country's largest media market. You'd be building something new while plugged into the New York journalism and nonprofit world, not working in the middle of nowhere. We have the mission, the community, an editorial calendar in motion, and nonprofit status. What we're adding is operational muscle.

The model works elsewhere — we've studied it

Founder-built local nonprofit newsrooms have become real institutions in comparable cities: Santa Cruz Local, El Paso Matters, the Kansas City Beacon, San José Spotlight. Yonkers is bigger than several of those markets and less served. The playbook exists; we're running it here.

What you'd actually do

• Help design and run the business model — revenue streams, membership, events, sponsorships
• Support fundraising, including our INN NewsMatch campaign (Nov–Dec) and local donor outreach
• Help stand up the board and basic governance
• Keep operations moving: workflows, deadlines, systems, the newsletter, recruiting contributors
• Work directly with an experienced editor/journalist and a working board — real mentorship, not a hierarchy you disappear into

Who you are

• Recent grad or early-career, hungry, organized, and comfortable with ambiguity
• Interested in journalism, civic life, nonprofits, or entrepreneurship (you don't need all four)
• Can juggle planning, people, and execution without waiting to be told what to do
• Bonus: any exposure to fundraising, WordPress, social media, spreadsheets, or Yonkers itself

What you get

• A founding role with your fingerprints on how the organization runs
• Direct, senior mentorship in nonprofit management, fundraising, and media operations
• A genuine resume line — "helped launch and run a nonprofit newsroom" — that opens doors
• A stipend/honorarium now, structured to grow as we fund the role

To apply: Send a short note about why this interests you, plus a resume or anything you've built or run — a paper, a club, a project, a business. We care more about drive and judgment than a perfect background.