At the Candid Conversation above, Fort Worth billionaire John Goff closed by praising the Fort Worth Report: "Chris, I want to thank you for what you're doing. You're really making a difference in this community. When you first came to me, ... I was a skeptic, but it's amazing how much this has grown. It's a go-to news source for me every day."
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Fort Worth Report, 2021-26
Fort Worth Report, 2021-26
Building a Nonprofit Model for Local News
Confronting the decline of traditional commercial media, Cobler turned to nonprofit local news as the founding CEO, editor and publisher of the Fort Worth Report. In five years, he helped build the startup into a multi-bureau news organization with more than 30 professionals and an audience of more than 100,000 subscribers.
The model combined local foundation support with major investments from the American Journalism Project. During Cobler’s tenure, the Report expanded across Tarrant County, earned Journalism Trust Initiative certification and was named 2025 Newsroom of the Year by Texas Managing Editors.
The experience reinforced a lesson Cobler had carried since childhood, when he produced The Cobler News: People, whether they live in a big city or a small one, want to be connected by trusted local news. For him, the Fort Worth Report showed how that principle could be adapted to a digital, nonprofit model built for the future.
Cobler worked hard to overcome community suspicions that the Fort Worth Report would just be an extension of the legacy Seventh Street Gang. He did this by talking to an ever-widening circle of people after starting with the civic leaders identified by his board of directors. A big break came when those conversations led to an opportunity for the Fort Worth Report to move its growing offices to East Rosedale Street in historically underserved Southeast Fort Worth. The team knew it had made a huge impact by its third birthday party, which filled a section of Dickies Arena with their faces and company logo appearing on the big screen towering above them. Cobler tried to align the Fort Worth Report with neighbor and landlord Texas Wesleyan University's vision of a Rosedale Renaissance. The Report's vision: a renaissance in trusted local journalism. To read more about the Report's early days and Fort Worth's history, click here.
Building an Audience
When Cobler started at the Fort Worth Report on Feb. 1, 2021, his board gave him less than 90 days to hire a staff and launch a local news site ahead of important May elections. While taking this crash course, he was surprised to learn how small the newsletter lists were at many established news organizations and knew that would not be a financially sustainable path. He and a small startup staff of six pushed hard to move from the weekly newsletter cadence recommended by a consultant to five days a week in the first month, then kept growing to more than a dozen newsletters published seven days a week.
Financial support followed the audience growth as Fort Worth and Tarrant County leaders saw the impact the newsroom was having. The Fort Worth Report went from an annual budget of $600,000 in 2021 to $4 million by 2026. That startup staff grew to more than 30, including a year-round, rotating team of paid fellows who were regularly trained and encouraged to become full-time staffers as the news organization focused on developing the next generation of newsroom leaders.
The major metro market responded to both small-j journalism — readers’ personal essays about their neighborhoods and Q&As with small-business owners — and big-J Journalism, including investigations that prompted reform at the Tarrant Regional Water District and revealed a conflict of interest between the city manager and a Fort Worth billionaire. Audience research by the respected Frank N. Magid Associates in 2023 and 2026 showed that the Fort Worth Report had succeeded in connecting a sprawling community of 2.2 million people through trusted local news and information. Based on that, he and senior leadership produced a Vision 2030 that outlined the path for long-term sustainability and expanded service to the sprawling community.
The American Journalism Project highlighted the success of the Fort Worth Report's "52 Faces of Community" initiative in a major industry publication, Nieman Lab. At age 5, the Fort Worth Report had clearly established the model for sustaining community journalism in a big city. The Local Independent Online News Publishers declared in 2026 that the Fort Worth Report was one of 11 nonprofit news organizations in the country that had reached the level of sustainability. Click for more.
Vision 2030 FWR Strategic Plan.pdfClick to download "Vision 2030," created in 2025 to build on the success of the Arlington Report, which Cobler championed despite the concerns of some about expanding across Tarrant County.
Grant Moise, Dallas Morning News publisher and CEO, came to the Fort Worth Report office to propose that the respected legacy newspaper license content from the nonprofit startup to help build print circulation in Tarrant County. The DMN supported that decision with an extensive promotional print campaign and reported solid circulation increases after the deal's first year.
Cobler selected Jack Barksdale as the singer for the Fort Worth Report's 5th birthday party at Tulips FTW. He thought the young artist's song "The Wealthy Man's Debt" should be an anthem for nonprofit and nonpartisan local news. Consider these lyrics:
I guess I'm just frustrated
At the whole conversation
It's hard to build society
On faulty information
No one to trust
No one to dismiss
A state of uncertainty
That's sure to persist
And while we sit here upset
The wealthy man's jet
Is flying away
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