Founded in 2009 by 27 nonpartisan, nonprofit news organizations, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) provides education and business support services to its member organizations and promotes the value of public-service and investigative journalism.
In 2015, Sue Cross became the INN’s executive director and president after spending 15 years at the Associated Press and doing consulting work. “[INN’s] startups were interesting and innovative, but they were also struggling,” she told me, noting that their primary source of revenue came from foundations in the form of “seed funding for what were essentially experiments.” Yet member newsrooms were overwhelmingly started by journalists, many of whom didn’t have experience running a nonprofit. “It was a completely new way of thinking for virtually everybody coming into it,” Cross said.
On Cross’ watch, the INN leaned into a strategy of providing members with capacity-building programs to generate durable community support. The efforts have paid impressive dividends — more than 90% of the INN’s nearly 450 member newsrooms survived their startup phase by relying on a mix of earned and unearned revenues, including an influx in funding from place-based donors and community foundations looking to bring news deserts back to life.
“We’re seeing a pathway to restoring local news,” Cross said. “I don’t think anybody foresaw the speed and extent that would grow.”
In May, Cross announced she would be stepping down from the INN at the end of 2023. She’ll leave behind a network that’s larger, more diverse and better resourced than when she arrived eight years ago. And yet, some things haven’t fundamentally changed. “The field is still experimental and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach,” she said. “The closest thing to a Rosetta Stone is where news is rooted in what the community wants and needs.”
“We had to help people learn as they go”
The INN is open to nonprofit outlets that produce high-quality and original journalism, maintain editorial and operational independence, are transparent about their funding sources and comply with membership standards for ethics and best practices in nonprofit journalism. Members don’t take more than 15% of their funding from anonymous sources, reflecting the institute’s commitment to funding transparency.
Looking back, Cross recognized how her her time at the Associated Press shaped her early tenure at INN. “I came from traditional media, so I had that mindset of, ‘They [outlets] have to merge,’ or ‘They need to have 30,000 average monthly user views to survive,’” she said. “I was applying everything I knew in the past to what would succeed in the future.”
Realizing that the traditional playbook didn’t apply to most nonprofit outlets, Cross shifted the INN’s focus toward providing capacity-building programs. “Some of the larger organizations were able to go out and hire,” she said. “But when you have startups all around the country of all different sizes, we had to help people learn as they go.”
One INN program, NewsMatch, is a collaborative fundraising initiative that has helped raise over $270 million for emerging newsrooms since its launch in 2016. The Miami Foundation oversees the program’s fiscal administration and the San Diego-based News Revenue Hub provides resources to help participating outlets run successful campaigns. “The strategy,” Cross said, “is to take national support and use it to inspire broader, more diverse and more local giving.” (Stay tuned for a closer look at NewsMatch in a follow-up post based on my conversation with program manager Meta Stange.)
Other INN member programs and deliverables include the Rural News Network, which addresses the most pressing issues confronting America’s rural communities; the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Hub, a resource to help members advance racial equity; and the INN Index, a comprehensive study of the state of the nonprofit news media.
Published in May, the INN Index 2023 provided, among other useful findings, a look into members’ revenue sources. Local outlets derived most of their support from foundations (45%), followed by individuals (28%), earned revenue (26%) and other sources (1%). Among other interesting findings: Startups that launched in 2020 and 2021 received the highest percentage of foundation support, at 63%; state and regional outlets received the highest percentage of individual giving, at 33%.
Drivers of support
Cross cited a handful of reasons why outlets are enjoying an influx of support from new funders, the first of which involves a conscious shift in editorial strategy. In the formative years of nonprofit news, many outlets “went into a community and tried to cover everything,” she said. This approach mirrored that of their peers in the for-profit space, who operated under the premise that expansive coverage would attract more eyeballs and with it, more ad dollars. It was a well-intentioned strategy that wasn’t all that financially sustainable.
Now, Cross said, “startups ask members of the community, ‘What is the top civic issue you can’t get information on?’ They start there and then broaden to other topics.” This strategy generates community buy-in, while also engaging individual donors inclined to bankroll coverage on specific issues like K-12 education, food security or climate change. The INN also encourages donors to contribute to NewsMatch’s special interest funds supporting multiple organizations that cover a particular issue or place.
Another big reason for the field’s growth stems from donors’ sense of civic duty. “It’s this idea of journalism as the fourth estate and keeping watch on what the government is doing on behalf of the people,” Cross said. This impulse isn’t new, of course. For example, after the 2016 election, the ecosystem enjoyed a “Trump bump,” courtesy of funders concerned about rampant digital misinformation. What’s changed is that funders increasingly recognize how journalism — and local news in particular — can complement and even galvanize grassroots community building.
Cross recalled chatting recently with a leader at an East Coast community foundation seeking to rebuild local news in a region where extreme wealth stratification has eroded social cohesion. “Her hopes encapsulate what we hear across this country, that local news is a way to build a sense of community,” Cross said. “That may mean creating a website, but it also might be having a meet-up at a coffee shop. This community-building aspect is a big reason a lot of philanthropists, particularly place-based philanthropists, are coming into news.”
Lastly, fledgling newsrooms are tailoring their pitches toward individual donors’ psychographic profiles. While it’s always risky to paint this segment with a broad brush, many individuals view themselves as venture philanthropists providing seed capital to promising start-ups. Successful outlets have convinced these donors that their support — and especially general operating support — will “build something new and fund innovation,” Cross said.
Cultural headwinds
With her departure from the INN looming, Cross is clear-eyed about the field’s prospects moving forward. On one hand, she’s obviously thrilled by its maturation over the last eight years.
Whereas journalists from “legacy media” started most of the nonprofit newsrooms in the mid-2010s, she’s now fielding calls from bookstore owners and League of Women Voters members curious about getting an outlet off the ground. The INN’s ever-growing network — it added 60 members in 2022 and will have 600 newsrooms by 2026 — means members can engage in extensive peer-to-peer capacity-building. Cross is also encouraged by an increase in younger and more ethnically diverse individuals coming into the ecosystem. (The INN will release “INN Index 2023: Report on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Nonprofit News Sector” on October 24.)
But many challenges remain. For instance, while individual donors are often motivated by civic duty, they also value their privacy and may prefer to give anonymously. For Cross, this “requires leaders to explain to donors that when you are building trust in news, that putting your name behind the news is important culturally and for transparency.”
The more fomidable challenges are less tactical and more cultural in nature. “We’ve been through five or six generations where the news has pretty much been free,” Cross said. “But that’s not the case when it comes to something like state government, which is the government that affects us the most, and we have to continue to find ways to support it.”
The same calculus applies to local journalism’s ability to advance grassroots community-building. We assume the field can sustain its momentum because funders will maintain an unflagging desire to inform citizens, foster pluralism and build social cohesion. But this support doesn’t occur in a vacuum. There are innumerable bad actors whose livelihoods depend on sowing distrust of democratic norms and heightening polarization. For Cross, these “headwinds” can stymie funders’ efforts to heal the body politic and alienate segments of the population who lack representation in the public sphere. “I would say that keeps me awake at night — the scale of what’s at stake in making sure people can have a voice,” she said.
On the whole, however, Cross will step away from the INN feeling optimistic about the state of the field due to a pervasive desire among journalists, civic leaders and donors to strengthen their communities. “People are asking, ‘What happened to our local news?’” Cross said, “and we are telling them, ‘You can restore local news, and here’s how you can do it.’”
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