News Nonprofit in Chicago to Suspend Operations The Chicago News Cooperative, a nonprofit news organization that provided news to The New York Times and tried to compete online with The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times, will suspend operations the week of Feb. 26, its editor, James O'Shea, said. The decision came after the main supporter of the cooperative, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, changed the types of grants that it could quality for, effectively reducing its potential financing. The news organization's second-biggest source of funds, The Times, was then asked to contribute more, but both parties concluded that "did not make economic sense," Mr. O'Shea said in a telephone interview Sunday. The Times, which twice a week has been including two pages of the cooperative's content in its Chicago edition, will stop doing so at the end of the month. Mr. O'Shea said he was grateful to The Times for supporting the cooperative since its conception. "We would have never gotten off the ground without them," he said. The Times expressed pride in its relationship with the Chicago News Cooperative. "The C.N.C. was a worthy experiment, created to find a viable model to support enterprising public affairs journalism," said Eileen M. Murphy, a spokeswoman for the newspaper. While this model was not sustainable in the end, The Times remains committed to looking for solutions in support of an extremely worthwhile goal. Nonprofit news start-ups have tried - some successfully and some not - to put down roots in several cities. One such organization in California, The Bay Citizen, which contributes material to San Francisco Bay Area editions of The Times, is said to be considering a merger with an older, similar news organization in Berkeley. In Chicago, Mr. O'Shea and several other former journalists from The Tribune set up the cooperative in 2009 to produce what he called "public service journalism." The start-up employed 15 to 20 people, seven of them full-time employees. Mr. O'Shea informed the staff of the suspension on Friday. He said he was trying to find financing to continue education coverage. The start-up, he said, was put at a disadvantage by the Internal Revenue Service, which has not yet determined whether the cooperative and news start-ups like it will qualify for tax-exempt 501 (c) (3) status. The primary lesson, Mr. O'Shea said, is that news start-ups should "try to get at least two to three years of financing" before starting. In recent months, he said, he had spent a substantial amount of time raising money, and "being a journalist, to be honest, that wasn't my favorite part of this."