Our Story
NASHVILLE, Tennessee – The State News Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to providing high-quality journalism that informs and engages the public. Our mission is to deliver reliable reporting on state and local news, ensuring that communities are well-informed about the issues that impact their daily lives. We uphold the traditions of American journalism by prioritizing transparency, accountability, and integrity in all our work.
Founded on the principles of journalistic excellence, the State News Foundation strives to bridge the gap between the public and the information they need. Our team of dedicated journalists works tirelessly to cover stories that matter, bringing to light information in the public interest about state and local governance, policy, and community affairs.
Michael Patrick Leahy is the founder and chairman of State News Foundation. He is also the CEO and Editor-in-chief of Star News Digital Media, which owns and operates a family of state focused news sites known as The Star News Network, including the flagship founded in 2017, The Tennessee Star.
He is also the host of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, broadcast weekdays 9 am to 12 am on AM760 WENO in Nashville.
Leahy was a Breitbart News contributor from 2012 to 2022, and is the author of Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, published by Harper Collins’ Broadside Books imprint in 2012, and co-author of The Star News Digital Media Guide to the Constitution and Bill of Rights for Secondary School Students, published in 2019.
An early innovator in social media, Leahy founded Top Conservatives on Twitter in 2008 and organized and hosted the February 20, 2009 conference call of a handful of activists, including Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots, Dana Loesch, and Star News Digital Media co-founder Christina Botteri that launched the Tea Party Movement one week later.
A native of upstate New York, he is a graduate of Harvard College, has an MBA from Stanford University, and has lived in the Nashville area since 1991.
Christina Botteri is the CTO and Executive Editor of Star News Digital Media, and The Star News Network; and is the co-founder and secretary the State News Foundation. She is the designer and developer of the Star News brands, websites, and books; and has more than three decades of experience working in communications, media and public relations, and social media for technology startups. She was active as an early organizer of the Tea Party movement in 2009 and 2010.