Broad and Liberty: The Little Media Outlet That Dared to Ask Different Questions
A complete guide to Philadelphia’s most talked-about nonprofit newsroom — where it came from, what it does, why it matters, and the bigger story of local news in America
Key Facts:
| Detail | Information |
| Full Name | Broad + Liberty (also written “Broad and Liberty”) |
| Type | Nonprofit 501(c)(3) media organization and public policy think tank |
| Founded | Late 2019, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Headquarters | Philadelphia, PA (Media, PA registered address) |
| Orientation | Right-of-center editorial; aims for fact-based local reporting |
| Lead Investigative Reporter | Todd Shepherd |
| CEO / Publisher | Terry Tracy |
| Parent Network (as of 2025) | Fideri News Network (formed after acquiring Access Network) |
| Monthly Web Traffic | Approximately 2.5–3 million combined visits (Fideri-wide) |
| Projected Annual Revenue (Fideri) | ~$6 million at launch, targeting $10 million |
| Major Award | 2022 National Ion Journalism Award for nonpartisan investigative reporting |
| Podcast | Voices of Reason (with PoliticsPA); Broad + Liberty Power Hour on WBCB radio |
| Coverage Area | Philadelphia, southeastern PA, South/Central New Jersey, Delaware, and statewide PA |
| Name Origin | Named for the spirit of the intersection of Broad Street and Liberty, central to Philadelphia’s identity |
A Name With Deep Roots
There’s something quietly poetic about the name Broad + Liberty.
If you’ve ever stood in downtown Philadelphia, you know Broad Street. It runs arrow-straight through the heart of the city, past old rowhouses, government buildings, and the glittering sports stadium district in the south. And Liberty — well, that word has been part of Philadelphia’s soul since before the United States even existed.
The name isn’t accidental. It places this little media outlet squarely in the middle of one of America’s most storied cities, in a place where the Liberty Bell sits just a few blocks away, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and where people have argued over what freedom really means for more than 300 years.
Philadelphia is famously called the “Cradle of Liberty.” That title didn’t come cheap. It was earned through contradiction and struggle — celebrated but also challenged, generation after generation, by those who noticed that the promise of liberty wasn’t always kept.
How Broad + Liberty Came to Be
Think back to late 2019. The media world was in a messy place.
Big national outlets were louder than ever. But local news — the kind that tells you what’s actually happening in your school district, your city council, your county jail — was quietly disappearing. Hundreds of newspapers had already shut their doors. Towns across America were losing their only reporters.
Philadelphia wasn’t immune. While the city still had the Inquirer — itself struggling through ownership changes and dwindling resources — many residents felt like the full picture of what was happening in their city wasn’t getting told. Particularly if your views sat anywhere to the right of center.
A small group of people with backgrounds in journalism, law, public policy, and business looked at that gap and decided to do something about it. They launched Broad + Liberty as a nonprofit media outlet and policy think tank in the final weeks of 2019. Their stated goal was simple but ambitious: give voice to ideas, stories, and perspectives that other outlets in the region were ignoring or undervaluing.
They wanted to challenge assumptions. They wanted to ask uncomfortable questions. And they wanted to do it with real reporting — not shouting, not trolling, but actual journalism.
What It Actually Publishes
Walk through Broad + Liberty’s website on any given day and you’ll find a mix of things.
There’s breaking local news — school board votes, county government decisions, election updates, zoning battles. There are investigative reports digging into how public money is spent and whether officials are being straight with the public. There are op-eds from a wide range of writers, some well-known, some not, who want to say something about life in the Philadelphia region.
The outlet covers Philadelphia city proper, the suburban counties surrounding it (Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Bucks), parts of South Jersey, and statewide Pennsylvania issues out of Harrisburg.
What sets it apart most, honestly, is the investigative work.
Todd Shepherd and the Stories That Moved Things
If Broad + Liberty has a signature, it’s the kind of reporting that makes officials uncomfortable.
Todd Shepherd, the outlet’s chief investigative reporter, cut his teeth at radio stations in Oklahoma City and Denver, where he won three regional Edward R. Murrow Awards — one of journalism’s more respected prizes. He spent years covering Colorado politics before coming to Philadelphia. When he joined Broad + Liberty, he brought that same instinct: find the thing someone doesn’t want you to find, verify it carefully, and publish it.
His work on election grants became genuinely nationally significant. He was the first reporter to dig deeply into how COVID-era election funding — particularly money tied to a nonprofit connected to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — was distributed across Pennsylvania counties. His reporting raised pointed questions about whether those funds were distributed evenly across red and blue areas, or whether the pattern told a different story. The work was detailed, documented, and data-driven.
He testified in front of Pennsylvania’s state legislature about it. The reporting won Broad + Liberty the 2022 National Ion Journalism Award for nonpartisan investigative reporting.
Shepherd has also reported extensively on the Delaware County prison, documenting what he described as rising violence and management failures after the county took over the facility. He found a prison employee under investigation for smuggling contraband who had also been convicted on felony drug charges in the 1990s. He found that assault numbers at the facility were among the highest of any comparable county in the state.
He’s reported on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s administration stonewalling records requests related to a sexual harassment scandal involving a top aide. He’s filed Right-to-Know law challenges and won transparency rulings in court.
This is not opinion writing. This is shoe-leather reporting in the old-fashioned sense — file the request, get turned down, file again, go to court if you have to, write what you find.
Not everyone agrees with the outlet’s editorial slant. But even critics tend to acknowledge that the investigative reporting is real.
The Right-of-Center Question
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, because it’s worth being honest about.
Broad + Liberty describes itself as a “right-of-center” media outlet. It advocates for political and economic freedom, federalism, school choice, and localism. Its opinion pages regularly push back against progressive policies in Philadelphia — on crime, education, taxation, and public spending.
In a city that votes overwhelmingly Democratic — and in a media market dominated by outlets that lean the other direction — that’s a notable position to hold.
The outlet’s founders believed that conservative and center-right perspectives were being squeezed out of Philadelphia’s public conversation. They thought that wasn’t healthy. Cities need disagreement. They need people asking hard questions from different angles.
Media Bias/Fact Check, which rates news outlets for political slant and factual accuracy, reviewed Broad + Liberty and rated it right-center in bias — but found its news reporting to be fact-based and relying on credible sources. The opinion pages, naturally, reflect the outlet’s editorial orientation.
That’s a distinction worth holding onto. There’s a difference between a news outlet having a political viewpoint and a news outlet making things up or distorting facts. Broad + Liberty appears to do the former, not the latter.
That said, readers should always know what they’re reading and who is writing it. The outlet is transparent about its orientation, which is more than can be said for some.
The City Behind the Name
You can’t fully understand Broad + Liberty without understanding Philadelphia, and you can’t understand Philadelphia without understanding its complicated relationship with the idea of liberty itself.
Philadelphia in 1681 was founded by William Penn, a Quaker who genuinely believed in religious tolerance. He signed a peace treaty with the Lenape people. He built a city meant to be different.
But only three years later, a ship called the Isabella arrived carrying hundreds of enslaved Africans. And the contradiction at the heart of Philadelphia — freedom promised, freedom denied — has been playing out ever since.
The Liberty Bell was originally just the State House bell, ordered in 1751 with an inscription about proclaiming liberty throughout the land. Abolitionists latched onto it in the 1800s as a symbol, not of achievement, but of unfinished business. They pointed to the bell and said: the pealing feels hollow when one in six Americans is enslaved.
That complicated history didn’t go away. It shows up in the work that sites like Broad + Liberty cover today — debates about policing, about who gets what resources, about whose voice carries weight in a city that has often promised more than it delivered.
Philadelphia’s Broad Street itself has been the site of some of that history. Massive parades to celebrate American independence have rolled down it. A replica of the Statue of Liberty once stood at its intersection with Penn Square during World War I, drawing 100,000 people for its unveiling. The street has carried celebrations and protests and everything in between.
For a media outlet to name itself after that history is to claim a piece of it. Whether Broad + Liberty lives up to that claim is, fairly, an ongoing question.
The Bigger Picture: Why Local News Matters So Much
Here’s a fact that should bother all of us, regardless of political leaning.
Over the past 20 years, America has lost more than 3,200 newspapers. Two more close every week. Research from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism found that roughly 70 million Americans now live in areas with either no local news outlet at all, or just one barely-surviving one.
Pennsylvania is not an exception. Two of its 67 counties have no local news source whatsoever. In many rural areas, a single reporter covers everything. Even in Philadelphia, pockets of the city go largely uncovered.
When local news disappears, things get worse for communities in ways that are surprisingly measurable. Municipal bond costs go up — because less oversight means more financial risk. Voter turnout drops. Corruption is harder to catch. School problems fester. Local officials do things they’d never dare do if someone was watching and writing about it.
Broad + Liberty stepping into that gap matters — not because everyone will agree with its editorial choices, but because the gap itself is real and dangerous.
The nonprofit model it uses is one that journalism scholars and philanthropists have been pushing as a possible lifeline. The Philadelphia Inquirer went nonprofit. Block Club Chicago went nonprofit. The Salt Lake Tribune. They’re all trying to find a way to keep local reporting alive when advertising dollars have mostly fled to Facebook and Google.
It doesn’t solve everything. As one journalism professor put it, philanthropy alone isn’t a business model. Someone still has to pay salaries, servers, and legal fees. But it removes the pressure of quarterly profit targets, which gives reporters more room to chase long storieinstead of chasing clicks.
Growing Into Something Bigger: The Fideri Story
By 2025, Broad + Liberty wasn’t just an outlet anymore. It was the seed of something larger.
In September 2025, Broad + Liberty acquired another Philadelphia-area media company called Access Network and formed a combined entity called Fideri News Network. The name Fideri comes from a Latin root meaning “to trust” or “to be faithful” — a pointed choice in an era when trust in media is near historic lows.
The combined company launched with 19 websites, a radio station (WBCB 107.3FM/1490AM in Bucks County, the official broadcast partner of both the Eagles and the Phillies), and projected revenue of about $6 million annually. The goal was to reach $10 million and expand to around 29 sites, aiming to become one of Pennsylvania’s largest native digital media audiences.
The vision is notable. It’s not trying to be a national outlet. It’s specifically focused on hyper-local news — the kind that tells you what happened at the Horsham Township zoning board, or who is running for school board in North Penn. That used to be the job of local newspapers. Now, in many places, nobody does it.
Fideri also expanded into podcasts, sports broadcasting, and civic programming. Its Voices of Reason podcast — produced with PoliticsPA, another outlet it partnered with — brings together guests from across the political spectrum to talk through policy issues. The goal, the founders say, is to model a kind of conversation that doesn’t just deepen existing divisions.
The Ethical Questions Worth Sitting With
All of this comes with questions that deserve honest consideration.
Is a right-of-center outlet truly the right model for filling the local news gap in a city as diverse and predominantly progressive as Philadelphia? That’s genuinely debatable. Some researchers worry about partisan outlets exploiting the local news vacuum to advance political agendas rather than serve communities. It’s a real risk.
On the other hand, Philadelphia’s mainstream media landscape does lean decisively in the other direction. Having a credible, fact-checking voice from a different perspective isn’t inherently bad for democracy. It might even be healthy, as long as that voice is honest about what it is.
The transparency question matters a lot here. Broad + Liberty is open about its orientation. It doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t. That’s meaningfully different from outlets that are partisan but pretend to be neutral.
There’s also the question of funding. As a nonprofit, Broad + Liberty relies on donors. Who donates? What do they expect in return? The outlet doesn’t give detailed donor disclosures in its public-facing materials, which is a fair thing for readers to wonder about. This is a challenge for nonprofit news generally — not unique to Broad + Liberty.
What Makes It Worth Reading
Here’s my honest take, having spent real time with the site.
The investigative work is genuinely useful. The reporting on Delaware County’s prison, on election grant distribution, on state government stonewalling — these are stories that matter to real people, and they were told carefully. Other major outlets picked up and ran with some of Broad + Liberty’s findings.
The op-ed section is more variable. Some pieces are sharp and thoughtful. Others feel more like political cheerleading. But that’s true of op-ed sections everywhere.
The site is clearly expanding its capacity. More reporters, more coverage areas, more formats. That’s encouraging, even if the early days were necessarily limited by a small team and slim resources.
If you live in the Philadelphia region and you care about what’s happening locally — in your county government, your schools, your prison system, your elections — you should probably be reading a range of local outlets. Broad + Liberty is one worth having in that mix, not as your only source, but as one of several.
Final Words
The question of what Broad + Liberty becomes over the next few years is genuinely interesting.
If Fideri’s expansion plans work out, it could become one of the largest sources of local news for millions of people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. That’s a significant amount of influence over how communities understand themselves.
The name they chose — Fideri, Latin for trust — is a high bar to set. Trust gets earned slowly and lost fast. Every story that gets a fact wrong, every piece that seems more interested in scoring political points than reporting what’s true, chips away at it.
But the founding instinct — that local news matters, that missing voices deserve platforms, that someone should be watching what local officials do with public power — that instinct is sound.
Philadelphia has been fighting about what liberty means for over three hundred years. Broad + Liberty stepped into that conversation in 2019 with a particular point of view, a small team, and some real ambition. The conversation continues.
FAQs
1.What is Broad + Liberty?
It’s a nonprofit media outlet and public policy think tank based in Philadelphia. It publishes local news, investigative reports, and opinion pieces focused on the Greater Philadelphia region, southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and the state of Pennsylvania broadly.
2.Is Broad + Liberty biased?
Yes — it identifies itself as right-of-center in its editorial orientation. That means its opinion pages lean conservative and libertarian-leaning in policy matters. Its news reporting, according to independent fact-checkers at Media Bias/Fact Check, is fact-based and relies on credible sources.
3.Who founded Broad + Liberty and when?
It was founded in late 2019 by a group of people with backgrounds in journalism, law, public policy, and business who believed that alternative perspectives were underrepresented in Philadelphia’s media landscape.
4.Who is Todd Shepherd?
Todd Shepherd is Broad + Liberty’s chief investigative reporter. He started in radio journalism, won three regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, and came to Philadelphia after years covering politics in Colorado. He broke major stories on election grant distribution and Delaware County’s prison system.
5.What does Broad + Liberty stand for philosophically?
The outlet advocates for political, cultural, and economic freedom. It supports principles like federalism (distributing power to local governments), school choice, and broad access to opportunity. It critiques policies it sees as limiting individual freedom or expanding government inefficiently.
6.What is Fideri News Network?
Fideri News Network is a larger media company formed in 2025 when Broad + Liberty acquired Access Network. It includes Broad + Liberty, PoliticsPA, WBCB radio, and several other regional digital outlets. The name comes from a Latin root meaning “to trust.”
7.How does Broad + Liberty make money?
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it relies on donations from supporters and advertising revenue. Its parent network Fideri also generates revenue through event ticketing, e-commerce services for local businesses, and radio advertising.
8.Why does Philadelphia need another media outlet?
Local news across America has been collapsing for two decades. Even in a city as large as Philadelphia, many neighborhoods and policy areas go underreported. New outlets filling specific gaps — even imperfect ones — are generally better than silence.
9.Has Broad + Liberty ever broken a nationally significant story?
Yes. Its early reporting on how COVID-era election grants were distributed across Pennsylvania counties attracted national attention and prompted legislative hearings. Its reporter Todd Shepherd testified before state lawmakers about his findings.
10.What is the “Voices of Reason” podcast?
It’s a podcast produced jointly by Broad + Liberty and PoliticsPA that brings together people from across the political spectrum to discuss policy issues. The goal is constructive, solution-focused conversation rather than conflict for its own sake.
11.How does the Broad + Liberty name connect to Philadelphia’s history?
Broad Street is Philadelphia’s main north-south artery, and liberty has been central to the city’s identity since the founding era — the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution were all rooted here. The name signals an intent to engage with that history and those debates.
12.Can I trust everything I read on Broad + Liberty?
You should bring the same critical reading skills you bring to any outlet. Its news reporting has been rated as fact-based by independent assessors. Its opinion content reflects a particular political viewpoint. Reading it as one source among several is a smarter approach than treating any single outlet as the whole truth.
13.Is Broad + Liberty anti-progressive or anti-Democrat?
Its editorial pages often critique progressive policies and Democratic officials, particularly in Philadelphia. But it has also covered stories that make Republican officials look bad, and its investigative reporters have not exclusively targeted one party. Being right-of-center doesn’t mean ignoring Republican wrongdoing.
14.What happened to the Octavius Catto Leadership Initiative mentioned in some coverage?
Broad + Liberty launched this initiative to support the next generation of liberty-minded leaders in Pennsylvania, inspired by Octavius Catto — a Black civil rights activist and educator killed in Philadelphia in 1871 while fighting for the right of Black men to vote. The choice of that name is interesting given the outlet’s political orientation, and is itself a subject of genuine discussion.
15.Where can I find Broad + Liberty online?
The main website is broadandliberty.com. The outlet also has a presence on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) under the handle @broadandliberty. You can sign up for daily or weekly email newsletters on their site.
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