Bruce Putterman, the publisher / CEO of CT Mirror—which together with ProPublica won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting—has advice for growing a small, regionally-focused newsroom: invest in business operations, stay in your lane and show the real impact of your journalism, beyond clicks and pageviews.
What about high quality journalism? That’s where you start, Putterman suggests, but it’s only part of how you grow.
CT Mirror was founded in 2010 partially in response to the mass newsroom layoffs that cut statehouse reporting across the U.S. What started as a relatively niche publication with three journalists covering state policy and politics has evolved into a more mainstream publication with a robust team that includes not only investigative reporters, two city-based community engagement reporters and a podcast host, but also a chief growth officer, a membership manager and a lead for events and marketing.
“CT Mirror did a lot of things right in the early years,” Putterman says. “One mistake we made was overinvesting in journalism and underinvesting in business operations such as revenue, audience, and innovation. My advice, therefore, is to strike the right balance between newsroom and sustainable growth from the very beginning.”
In practice, Putterman says, that looks like: expanding a newsroom’s scope only incrementally; scaling processes, systems and policies as you grow; experimenting and being intentional about learning from your mistakes; cultivating a strong partnership between editorial and business; and “never, ever compromising even the slightest smidgen of your editorial independence for anyone or any offer.”
The Pulitzer win marked the second time the two members of the INN Network had collaborated, said CT Mirror’s executive editor, Beth Hamilton. ProPublica – the investigative powerhouse that since its founding in 2008 has received eight Pulitzer Prizes, six Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 18 George Polk Awards – runs the Local Reporting Network that pairs talented local journalists with the larger newsroom’s resources in order to help communities drive positive change.
“We pitched the towing story and that led to us being in the Local Reporting Network for a second time,” said Hamilton. “There were several benefits to working together on the towing project. First, this was an immensely complex data story that required both technical skill and problem solving as we struggled to first obtain and then clean and analyze the data. Combining our local reporters’ knowledge of the system and ProPublica’s next-level data expertise was instrumental in allowing us to find the story in the data.”
The series exposed how the state’s unique towing laws favored unscrupulous companies that overcharged residents. It prompted an overhaul of laws that had allowed towing companies to sell cars as soon as 15 days after they were towed. In other words, Hamilton said, “real impact for Connecticut residents.”
