The Beacon is a non-profit online news outlet in the Kansas City metropolitan area focusing on public-interest journalism.

[1] It is Kansas City’s first regional nonprofit news outlet that is not a public television or radio station.

[2] It was founded in 2020 by Kelsey Ryan, a former Investigative journalist for the Kansas City Star[3] and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

[6][2] The news organization received initial funding from a Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge in 2019 and has received additional funding from the Solutions Journalism Network in order to write about broadband infrastructure in Kansas and Missouri.

[13] The expansion into a regional news network from a single newsroom was spurred with a commitment of $1.1 million from the Wichita Community Foundation [14] and funding from the American Journalism Project.