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Outlet profile

Stateline

U.S. center-left

Owned byStates Newsroom, a nonprofit news network; previously an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts (1998–2023)
FundingFoundation grants and individual donations; does not accept corporate donations or underwriting. Pew provided a $3 million transition grant when Stateline moved to States Newsroom in 2023. States Newsroom's donor base skews toward left-leaning philanthropies, though it also receives some nonpartisan journalism grants.
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

Stateline was launched in 1998 by The Pew Charitable Trusts as a daily online news service dedicated to covering state government and policy. Its original mission was to bring national attention to state-level trends in areas such as health, budget, and education. For roughly 25 years it operated directly under the Pew umbrella, which gave it an unusual degree of institutional stability and funding security rare in journalism. In May 2023, Pew announced it was transferring Stateline to States Newsroom, providing a $3 million grant to ease the transition; Pew cited a broader shift away from direct journalism production. States Newsroom, founded in 2017, operates newsrooms in all 50 state capitals and had previously been fiscally sponsored by the Hopewell Fund, an Arabella Advisors-managed left-of-center philanthropy vehicle, before incorporating as its own 501(c)(3) in 2019. Media Bias/Fact Check rates Stateline as left-leaning, citing story selection and opinion content that favors a progressive perspective, while also awarding it a high factual-reporting score. Since January 2025, Stateline's coverage has focused heavily on friction between the Trump administration and state governments, including pieces on federal funding being withheld from Democratic-led states, immigration enforcement conflicts, and federal preemption of state AI laws — framing that has generally been critical of administration policy.

Sources

  1. Pew's Stateline to Join States Newsroom — States Newsroom press release
  2. Pew's Stateline finds a new home with nonprofit States Newsroom — Nieman Journalism Lab
  3. Stateline archived project page — The Pew Charitable Trusts
  4. About — Stateline
  5. Stateline — Bias and Credibility, Media Bias/Fact Check
  6. States Newsroom — Wikipedia
  7. States Newsroom (Newsroom Network) — Influence Watch
  8. How Trump's expansion of federal power threatens states' authority — Stateline

Profile compiled 2026-07-11; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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