When “Nothing” Is a Strategic Asset: What Local News Teaches Us About RAOOI
December 3, 2025
Like Paul Newman says in Cool Hand Luke, “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.”
During a recent Media Transformation Challenge virtual workshop, MTC Coach Stéphane Mayoux and 2019 MTC Alumni, Interim Executive Director of the Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative, and co-author of the State of Local News Project, Mackenzie Warren, explored a surprising insight emerging from the report: sometimes a news organization’s most powerful resource is not something it has, but something it doesn’t.
Warren walked Fellows through the latest landscape where more than half of U.S. counties now have zero or only one source of trustworthy local news, and more than 200 counties have none at all. Yet alongside this stark picture, the team at Medill has identified more than 300 digital news startups launched since 2020 thriving in places once thought inhospitable to local journalism.
Warren named four familiar differentiators among them: customer intimacy, journalists as drivers of growth, deep listening, and fun and passion as competitive assets. And he also surfaced a deeper pattern, one that has implications far beyond local news.
“We might all think of resources as dollars or computers or or whatever kind of hard assets that we have,” Warren explained. “Sometimes a resource is something that you don’t have, something that could slow you down.”
A core MTC tool, RAOOI offers newsroom leaders a framework to connect their daily activities to their long-term goals. A logic model at heart, RAOOI stands for Resources, Activities, Outputs, Outcomes, and Impact. It’s often used in strategic planning and grant writing, but in the MTC context, it serves a deeper purpose: helping newsroom leaders link effort to outcomes, and intention to effect.
In many resource-oriented conversations, we talk about people, dollars, technology, and time as positive, additive resources. But Warren’s observation invites us to consider the opposite: strategic absences that function as tailwinds.
For example, many successful startups in the Medill study have no printing presses, no inherited press unions, no decades of workflow complexity, and no history of typos, scandals, or community distrust. They don’t carry the weight of maintaining multiple legacy platforms or navigating brittle structures built for an entirely different market.
“Reporters and sales professionals are resources,” Warren says. “What about having a memorable brand with no negative value. They haven’t been around for 100 years, but they also haven’t been crumbling for the last twenty. They haven’t printed my name wrong. They haven’t failed to address the systemic problems in the government. They haven’t let me down, etc. So there’s something there’s something great.”
This absence becomes a kind of organizational clarity enabling teams to channel the majority of their resources into journalism rather than into structural maintenance.
The RAOOI framework asks leaders to map the Resources, Activities, Outputs, Outcomes, and Impact necessary to implement impactful change in their orgs. Too often, leaders don’t recognize legacy systems, workflows, or histories as constraints. Warren’s insight sheds light on the hidden asset. In some contexts, the lack of legacy reduces drag, accelerates experimentation, shortens decision cycles, strengthens audience intimacy, and focuses energy on mission rather than maintenance.
“There’s a resource in being fresh and new. And I think that’s one thing that we have to think about here: having a very simple and clean product without a lot of bells and whistles hung around it, that’s a resource.”
Warren’s reframing invites a powerful set of questions for any newsroom or mission-driven organization: What would we do if we were starting today? What legacy habits do we mistake for resources? Which structural absences could we intentionally cultivate?
Sometimes the most catalytic resource is the one you never built – and the courage to let go of what no longer serves your mission.