Citizen publisher named 2026 Kiplinger Fellow
Henrico Citizen owner and publisher Tom Lappas has been named as one of 32 Kiplinger Fellows for 2026 by the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio University. The group includes representation from 17 states and four nations.
Each year, the Kiplinger Fellowship (created in 1973) has welcomed 20 to 35 journalists from hundreds of applicants globally into its ranks. The weeklong program focuses on a different topic related to journalism each year.
This year's program will be held in May at the Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and will center around the theme "Saving Local News: A Practical Guide."
Since 2015, more than 3,000 community news outlets have disappeared from the U.S. media landscape, creating sprawling news deserts. A study by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University projects further loss of local news, creating a crisis of information in the coming years.
Participants will hear speakers from a number of leading journalism organizations, including The Knight Foundation, Rebuild Local News, The American Press Institute, the Institute for Rural Journalism, the Local News Initiative, Press Forward and the Institute for Non-Profit News.
“While this fellowship has a decidedly U.S. contingent, the loss of local news is a global issue,” Kiplinger Executive Director Kevin Z. Smith said. “With each passing year, the struggles to maintain local news presence in many regions is overwhelming. Where we’ve seen local news outlets collapse, we’ve also seen a rise in people being disenfranchised from their local government, voting diminishes, political crimes rise, accountability is lost and these news vacuums lead to widespread misinformation.”
During the fellowship participants will discuss issues such as picking the best news model, making news decisions, fundraising, staffing, advertising, marketing and branding, subscriptions, using artificial intelligence and profit versus nonprofit models.
“It's a shame what is happening to local news right now, so I'm so happy to see an organization as credible as the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism take up the cause,” OU Scripps School of Journalism Director Hans Meyers said. “I worked in local news for nearly a decade before going to graduate school, and I saw firsthand how important what local news organizations cover is. I'm confident these fellows at the instructors Kiplinger have found will present real, actionable solutions to the crisis and underscore the indispensable need for journalist to cover the communities in which they live.”
Lappas founded the Citizen in 2001, and the publication has earned more than 270 awards for journalistic excellence in the years since. Under his leadership, the Citizen quickly pivoted at the onset of COVID-19 from a twice-monthly, print-first publication to a daily weekday online-only format; its reach has nearly quadrupled since, to more than 100,000 monthly readers and nearly 29,000 daily email newsletter subscribers.
Since 2020, the Citizen has earned funding from Facebook, Google, the Local Media Association and LION Publishers, and in 2024 it was one of five Virginia publications to earn an inaugural $100,000 Press Forward grant. Last year, it became the first Virginia outlet twice selected as a Report for America host newsroom. In October, the Local News Initiative named the Citizen one of 12 “Local News Bright Spots” nationally.
Lappas also serves as treasurer of the Virginia Press Association Board of Directors. In 2024, he helped craft legislation making Virginia the first state in the nation to permit qualified online-only publications to publish legal notices.