The Trust

OpenPress is owned by the OpenPress Trust, not by shareholders, a parent company, or any individual. There is no outside investor to answer to and no acquisition to be groomed for — the Trust exists to hold the newsroom and studio in trust for their readers and users, indefinitely.

Most of what erodes trust in a newsroom traces back to who can pressure it — an advertiser threatening to pull spend, an owner with a business interest in a story going away, a shareholder who wants growth numbers a slower, more careful newsroom won't produce. A trust structure removes that pressure point by design: nobody with a stake in the outcome of our coverage owns a stake in the company.

The same logic extends to the studio side. Client and product work is taken on because it's work we'd stand behind, not because a parent company needs the revenue line to grow this quarter.

• The Trust holds 100% of OpenPress. It cannot sell the company, take on outside investors, or distribute profits to individuals.
• Editorial and business operations are kept separate day to day — see our Editorial Standards for how that separation works in practice.
• Trustees oversee that the Trust's terms are followed; they do not assign stories, approve studio projects, or otherwise direct day-to-day editorial or business decisions.

In practical terms, the Trust structure means a few things stay true no matter how the business grows: no advertiser, sponsor, or client can buy influence over coverage; no story is spiked or delayed for commercial reasons; and the company can't quietly be sold to an owner with different priorities.

OpenPress is funded by studio and client work, not by advertising influence over the newsroom. Any revenue beyond what it costs to run the company is reinvested — into reporting, into the studio, and into free tools like the CV Builder and File Converter — rather than extracted as profit for owners, because there aren't any to extract it for.

A structure is only as good as how it's checked. If you ever see coverage that looks like it was shaped by a business relationship, or a piece of sponsored content that isn't clearly labelled as such, we want to hear about it — that's exactly what this structure exists to catch. Reach the team via our Contact page, or read our Our Mission page for the fuller picture of what all of this is in service of.