Ryan welcomes folks to SRCCON 2025. (Photo by Andrew Losowsky)

As Ryan Pitts joins the team at Big Local News, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how he shaped the work of OpenNews.

Ryan’s been a part of OpenNews since it became OpenNews. He built the Django CMS for Source as a side project while still working at his local paper in Spokane, WA. He soon became an integral part of the team, as he connected members of his network to the OpenNews community. In 2014, he joined OpenNews full time after spending a year developing The Census Reporter, where he remains a board member. He’s continued providing coding and development support to OpenNews (including a redesign of Source where sprint lead Ethan Marcotte commented “I don’t think I’ve ever seen another human being work as quickly as Ryan did.”) while wearing innumerable other hats.

A throughline in Ryan’s work is his deep care for everyone around him, wellspring of encouragement and enthusiasm, and facility for connecting people and projects. Ryan’s created so many ways to foster and sustain network connections in his work at OpenNews, largely through finding ways for people to support and learn from one another. If you’ve enjoyed a SRCCON session, you’ve benefitted from his curatorial touch and mentoring of hundreds of facilitators. Ryan excels at helping people identify and celebrate their strengths and, when necessary, clarify their challenges, which he’s then expertly positioned to help them make a plan to solve. He’s organized code convenings, contributed to open source projects and guides, given technical guidance in the early planning of The Coral Project, and spearheaded peer learning efforts like Peer Data Review. Ryan’s background in local news gives him deep insights into the challenges facing technologists in newsrooms and a drive to make their lives easier while also advocating for newsrooms to evolve and operate in more inclusive, worker-centered ways.

As the ultimate team player, Ryan has jumped in and done whatever is necessary to get a project across the finish line or sustain the work of OpenNews and its service to this community—whether that be wrangling with Heroku, picking out the good sandwiches, or updating another batch of outreach tweets. This willingness to adapt and evolve has been critical to our ability to function as a small team. Ryan’s care shows up by keeping track of all the details so that the needs of people are always not only centered, but served, in everything he does. This has become core to the way that OpenNews works.

And now, the news nerd community will get to benefit from Ryan’s support in his new role as Managing Director with Big Local News. Congrats to Ryan and to Big Local!

If you’re as excited as I am to support Ryan in this next chapter, please consider donating to OpenNews or to RANGE Media, where Ryan is a board member. Your donation will join Ryan’s 10+ years of contributions in strengthening and sustaining this network.

Thanks, Ryan!!