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BEACON MEDIA

EIN 93-3138185 HILLSBOROUGH, NC

Revenue 2025
$428,012
Expenses 2025
$313,641

Program services were 79.9% of total expenses calculated — Part IX's program-services column over total expenses, both as filed.

As filed

Subsection
03
NTEE code
A01
Classification
1000
Street
PO BOX 162

These codes are the IRS's own and are shown exactly as filed. What each one means is in the Business Master File documentation (opens in a new tab).

Mission and programs · 2025

Mission

To promote public education, we will partner with existing media outlets across platforms to share the ideas and voices of those advocating for a more equitable democracy throughout North Carolina. Beacon Media aims to make these ideas and supporting information more available and accessible in communities where the media predominantly represents other viewpoints or limits information that citizens should be able to access. We will also syndicate other forms of stories and content related to our mission to inform rural and exurban area communities through local media outlets. In addition, Beacon Media will conduct an educational program for grassroots and other community leaders whose important voices are underrepresented in mainstream media and other public fora. Beacon Media will provide such persons training and workshops to help them develop better written and oral communication skills so that they become better public advocates for their ideas and communities.

  • Beacon Media's Radio + Digital initiative (social media and digital channels coupled with radio syndication) goes beyond the typical digital-only approach to ensure that our content and voices reach underserved audiences at the community level. This strategy across North Carolina offers a significant opportunity to reach underserved and under-communicated audiences, including rural, Latino, Black, and working-class communities, and present a vision for a more inclusive democracy. In 2025, Beacon began brainstorming for a new Radio + Digital show partnership with two young mayors from Western North Carolina, Preston Blakely and Dalton George. Both are excellent examples of the kinds of leaders and trusted messengers who Beacon Media is building around to ensure those who have the most at stake in our democracy have the platform and support to tell their stories directly and persuade new and often disengaged audiences that they, too, have a stake in our collective future. We began pre-production work and developed a partnership for a podcast called Do You Even Live Here? to deliver vital storytelling to rural audiences in Western North Carolina and grow and develop these key voices. We also continued progress on our El Faro Radio + Digital initiative, serving North Carolina's diverse, widespread Latino community in English and Spanish across the state. Beacon Media's Spanish and English-language Latino community media initiative, El Faro, has gained considerable momentum and began to develop key relationships and shift narratives beginning in the fourth quarter of 2025. The project, which is primarily social media-first across channels and is working to build into a regular podcast and grow its audience through a more robust social media presence, is designed to meet the urgent information needs of Latino communities across North Carolina.

    Expenses $146,098 · Revenue $146,098

  • Beacon Media continued to work with our Beacon Voices cohort throughout 2025, talented grassroots leaders whose vision and voice will lead to a better North Carolina. Beacon produces regular weekly columns and syndicates them to more than 100 newspapers across the state, reaching marginalized audiences in rural areas, along with Black and Latino communities. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we also began a push to increase our Voices presence and narrative on social media, including in Spanish and to North Carolina's Spanish-language newspapers and outlets. Beacon Media's Executive Director met frequently with those Voices to develop pro-democracy messaging and content to diagnose a difficult moment in American democracy and provide a vision for the future. Those Voices included but were not limited to the Rev. C.J. Brinson, Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Stevie Brooks, Kimberly Jones, Sam Grote, Melissa Castillo and others. In late 2025, Beacon Media expanded its model to include planning for a new hyperlocal site alongside partner We Are Down Home in Franklin and Granville Counties, North Carolina. Aside from its El Faro Latino community media initiative, which delivers key reporting alongside values-based commentary in English and Spanish, the hyperlocal media model called County Beacon will allow for Beacon Media to contribute reporting of key civic information where it matters most: at the community level.

    Expenses $42,918 · Revenue $42,918

  • Beacon Media continued to make substantial progress toward its fundraising goals in 2025 and was able to onboard its first additional full-time employees, an El Faro Associate Producer and our Community Media Liaison to expand Beacon Media's programming and reach. Key investments from Way to Rise, Rural Democracy Initiative and the Marguerite Casey Foundation and individual donors across North Carolina allowed Beacon Media to continue and expand its mission to reach marginalized communities with the information and vision of a brighter future that NC's communities need to thrive.

    Expenses $61,712 · Revenue $61,712

As filed on the 2025 return.

Officers and directors · 2025

As listed in Part VII of the 2025 return, in the order the filer printed them. Each return names its own; this is not a roster the organization keeps with us.

  • Justin Clayton

    Director

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    1

  • Akilah Ensley

    Director

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    1

  • Mike Figueras

    Director

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    1

  • Pope McCorkle

    Director

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    1

  • Brandy Bynum Dawson

    Chair

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    1

  • Kimberly Meyer

    Secretary

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    1

  • Brooks Fuller

    Treasurer

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    1

Compensation is as filed in Part VII: reportable pay from this organization and from related organizations, other compensation, and hours per week. The total, marked calculated, is our sum of the three dollar columns, with a blank column counted as $0; the form itself has no total. On a Form 990-EZ the columns are Part IV's instead, and on a Form 990-PF Part VIII's — compensation, contributions to benefit plans, and expense account — and the total sums those. Earlier years are each on their own filing page.

Filings

  • 2025
    Revenue
    $428,012
    Expenses
    $313,641
    Contributions
    $428,012
    Grants paid
    $0
  • 2024
    Revenue
    $218,253
    Expenses
    $144,452
    Contributions
    $218,253
    Grants paid
    $0
  • 2023
    Revenue
    $59,035
    Expenses
    $7,787
    Contributions
    $59,035
    Grants paid
    $0

The four totals the IRS asks for on Part I of the Form 990, as filed. A dash means the figure was not present on the return — not that it was zero.

Grants made

No itemized grants to organizations. Schedule I is filed only by organizations that granted more than $5,000 to a recipient, so most filers have none.

Grants received

Other IRS files

Auto-Revocation List

Not listed. The IRS publishes this list for organizations whose exemption was automatically revoked for failing to file for three consecutive years.

Publication 78

Listed as of 13 October 2026, under deductibility PC.

These are two separate IRS files on two separate schedules, shown as published and not reconciled with each other. Neither is a statement about whether a contribution is deductible today: 19,245 organizations appear in Publication 78 while the IRS's own revocation file lists them as currently revoked, more than half of those revoked before 2019. Absence from Publication 78 is evidence of nothing, and presence is not evidence either. Verify current status with the IRS before relying on it.

What this page reflects

The registration facts above come from the IRS Business Master File published 13 October 2026 and read 26 October 2026, for every organization at once. Returns through tax year 2025, the newest we have parsed for this organization.