Bucking the media trend of shrinking news staffs, St. Louis Magazine has been hiring key journalists, expanding its news coverage and widening its digital reach. A new grant will fund two more staff hires as well as an increase in the freelance budget.
Matt Coen, owner and chief executive of the monthly magazine, moved quickly to hire Sarah Fenske as his executive editor last year, shortly after she lost her top job when the alt-weekly Riverfront Times was sold and subsequently folded.
Fenske then teamed up with former RFT reporter Ryan Krull to launch the magazine’s St. Louis Daily newsletter, a weekday summary of regional news that offers original reporting as well as links to stories in local media. In its first 14 months, the Daily amassed 20,000 subscribers.
“When Sarah and Ryan became available, it was a further opportunity to accelerate our transformation plan to expand the magazine’s news gathering, launch a daily newsletter, and grow our rapidly expanding digital audience,” Coen said in an interview.
In addition to Fenske and Krull, the company also hired former St. Louis Public Radio’s Eric Schmid as its business editor and main writer for the daily business newsletter. In all, the magazine’s website now offers 18 different newsletters, most of which are updated weekly.
With a new three-year $900,000 grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, St. Louis Magazine plans to hire two more full-time news reporters and expand its freelance budget to create an “Economic Mobility Lab,” a news initiative focused on issues that block marginalized people from improving their lives.
“This is not about adding economic development reporters,” Fenske said. “It’s about having reporters focus on what’s holding St. Louisans back (since that ultimately holds St. Louis back) and focusing on solutions to our region’s seemingly intractable problems.”
Coen and Fenske said that economic mobility is “one of the biggest challenges in the St. Louis region.” And they feel that the multi-platform journalism – published by St. Louis Magazine – can make a difference in St. Louis.
“For a long time, local journalism has been trying to do more with less,” Fenske said. “A lot of important stories are falling between the cracks” because news organizations do not have enough staff to cover them in depth.
The James S. McDonnell Foundation’s president, Jason Q. Purnell, said in a statement that “our ability to invest in solutions for St. Louis depends on the public’s access to information that explains what is at stake.” By adding resources to St. Louis Magazine, he said, “we can help ensure that more people are part of the conversation about the future of our region.”
The McDonnell Foundation focuses its grants in areas such as civic infrastructure – including tornado relief this year – as well as wealth-building and workforce development. Some of the awards have gone to local media, including about $825,000 to St. Louis Public Radio to fund a four-year program that aims – through programs on air, online, and in the community – to model how St. Louisans with differing views can better communicate with one another and foster more understanding in the region.
In September, SLPR announced that it had hired as the initiative’s lead producer Luis Antonio Perez, who has won awards for his community-first public radio projects in Colorado and Chicago. He will be working with a new “engagement producer,” Paola Rodriguez, a St. Louis native who won accolades for her work at Arizona Public Media.
In a statement, SLPR said the new producers will be able to “shape the program from the ground up, with topics that may touch on gaps in understanding across geography, class, age, and identities. In the coming months, STLPR will share their conversations on our award-winning show “St. Louis on the Air,” in regular segments on the podcast and radio episodes, in videos shared on social media platforms, and multi-media content delivered in a new curated newsletter.”
At St. Louis Magazine, Fenske said she expects the Mobility Lab staff to be in place and their initial stories to appear by early 2026. Articles will be posted on the magazine’s website with summaries in St. Louis Daily. The best stories might also appear in the magazine. As of early October, officials said the print distribution per issue of St. Louis Magazine was 31,300, with total readership per issue estimated at 148,000. The 18 niche newsletters reached a total of more than 200,000 subscribers.
Fenske said the new Economic Mobility initiative will give its journalists time to delve into such issues without the “daily grind” of tight deadlines. “There was a vacuum that St. Louis Magazine stepped in to fill” after the loss of the RFT. “I’m excited about what we are doing and what we plan to do.”
One goal of the St. Louis project will be to explain how other cities report on mobility issues. For example, the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative – which includes the Inquirer and two dozen smaller newsrooms in that region – recently embarked on a yearlong initiative to tell Philadelphia stories that highlight pathways to economic mobility. The project is partially funded by the Knight Foundation and is under the umbrella of the Center for Community-Engaged Media at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communications.
The Philly program is also part of the wider 2025-2026 Economic Opportunity Lab, a national journalism effort led by the Local Media Association and funded by Comcast Corp. That initiative includes 19 newsrooms in five markets that will examine how geography, policy and systemic factors shape individuals’ access to economic mobility and opportunity.
In the St. Louis region, Fenske saw the need for deeper reporting on mobility issues. “There are a lot of things going for St. Louis,” Fenske said. “But there is a swath of St. Louis that is not able to take advantage of the good life. What is holding those people back?”
As an example of the sort of reporting the group will tackle, Fenske referred to a 2023 St. Louis Magazine article by Nicholas Phillips about tangled property titles that freeze wealth in many Black neighborhoods. Fenske said the magazine calls it an Economic Mobility “Lab” because “it is something we will look at intensively.”
Fenske wears several hats in regional media in addition to her duties as executive editor. She hosts its “314 Podcast,” appears regularly on the weekly Donnybrook show on Channel Nine PBS, and hosts SLPR’s monthly Legal Roundtable. She is also a volunteer “journalism director” at River City Journalism Fund, which works with local media outlets to provide investigative and cultural stories.
Because “freelance funding for journalists in St. Louis has all but dried up,” Fenske said she sees the possibility of some “cross pollination” with River City journalists and the magazine’s economic mobility reporting.
With most of the region’s major media now controlled by companies based elsewhere, Coen emphasizes that St. Louis Magazine’s local ownership gives it both the freedom and responsibility to invest deeply in the community. “Local media matters, and high-quality local journalism is essential to the health of any region.”
Coen said many media companies have failed to adapt to the quickly changing digital environment. In 2007, he co-founded St. Louis-based Second Street, which helped publishers and other clients offer contests, interactive content and emails to grow their databases. That firm was sold in 2021.
“Our online audience has exploded in size over the past few years and we’re intent on continuing to grow it,” Coen says. “We are investing to build something that is not just sustainable but positioned to thrive and drive impact in St Louis over the long term.”
Robert Koenig is a former Washington correspondent for the Post-Dispatch.
