Tom Stites, a 2010-11 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, is the founder and president of the Banyan Project.
Banyan is pioneering a wholly new Web journalism business model based on the consumer cooperative form, piloting community-level sites that are owned by their readers the way depositors own credit unions and shoppers own food co-ops. The sites aim to strengthen democracy through original and reliable Web-based journalism that serves less-than-affluent everyday citizens and engages the civic energy of this huge public, which is ill served by mainstream journalism. Tom’s fellowship project was detailed business planning in preparation for launching pilot sites, drawing on the expertise of Berkman colleagues as well as Harvard law and business professors.
Tom brings to his project, and to his continuing commitment to Berkman projects, unusually broad experience as an editor and entrepreneurial publisher. As an editor he has supervised reporting that has won an array of major journalism awards including the Pulitzer Prize; as an entrepreneur he has been the founding publisher of two print magazines and three on-line publications.
Positions he has held include national correspondent, national editor, and associate managing editor for project reporting at The Chicago Tribune; night national editor of The New York Times, and managing editor of The Kansas City Times. Most recently he served for a decade as the editor and publisher of UU World, the national magazine of the Unitarian Universalist religious denomination, and as a consulting editor for the Center for Public Integrity, a pioneering investigative reporting nonprofit based in Washington.
Tom has taught in the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and conducted seminars at several journalism schools. In 2006 he was a Resident Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, where he did research on power and the conscience. With co-author Doug Muder, he is working on a book that analyzes the past, present and future of U.S. journalism in the context of democracy's needs.