Nonprofit local news is on the upswing, according to a new report from the Institute for Nonprofit News. An INN survey of nearly 400 digital-first nonprofit news organizations showed that the median outlet raised $532,000 in revenue in 2024, up from $477,000 the previous year. That’s an increase of 11.5%.
In addition, local news organizations now make up 51% of INN’s membership, up from 48% in 2023. The remainder of the projects are regional, statewide and national.
INN is a vitally important organization in the world of local nonprofit news. Through its NewsMatch program, news publishers are able to leverage local donations with matching funds — one-to-one in some cases. The program has raised more than $400 million since 2017. INN’s ethical guidelines have been widely adopted by the nonprofit journalism community. The organization also acts as a fiscal sponsor for fledgling nonprofits that have not yet received IRS approval for full 501(c)(3) recognition.
Click on image for the interactive version of the map.
A new grant-supported project tracks LGBTQ media projects across the country.
According to News Is Out, the LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project “offers the first in-depth look at the scope, impact and urgent needs of local LGBTQ+ media across the United States. The report shows how these vital outlets, from one-person operations to established multimedia platforms, face shrinking advertising revenue, little foundation support and growing external threats, even as their audiences surge.”
The project was created in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Media Foundation, News Is Out and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Major philanthropies are stepping up to offset some of the cuts to public television and radio, Benjamin Mullin reports in The New York Times (gift link). But will it be enough? And what possible downstream effects might there be on local news organizations that also depend heavily on foundation money?
As we all know, the Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting earlier this summer. The CPB, a semi-independent agency, had been set to spend $500 million over the next two years.
PBS and NPR receive most of their funding from grants and donations by, well, viewers and listeners like you, but their member stations — especially in less affluent and rural areas — are more dependent on government funding. Both national networks have been cutting their budgets in an attempt to help their member stations survive.
According to Mullin, foundations such as Knight, MacArthur, Ford and others have come up with an emergency $26.5 million to keep those stations afloat with a goal of reaching $50 million this year. “We believe it’s crucial to have a concerted, coordinated effort to make sure that the stations that most critically need these funds right now have a pathway to get them,” Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, the president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation, was quoted as saying.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Erica Heilman, who produces a podcast called “Rumble Strip.” Heilman’s shows air monthly on Vermont Public and other NPR stations as well as the BBC. “Rumble Strip” can also be found on all the usual podcast platforms.
Her episodes range in length from a few minutes to, well, as long as they need to be! As Chelsea Edgar wrote in a profile for Seven Days of Burlington, Vermont, “She wants to make meandering, kaleidoscopic stories about the stuff of ordinary Vermont life.”
In 2020, Heilman produced a memorable pandemic miniseries, “Our Show.” It featured listener-submitted recordings of life in lockdown, and it was The Atlantic’s No. 1 podcast of the year. In November 2021 she produced “Finn and the Bell,” the textured story of a Walden teenager who died by suicide. It won a Peabody, the highest award in broadcasting.
Ellen has an update on Suki Dardarian, the retiring editor and senior vice president of The Minnesota Star Tribune. She has been named the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year by the National Press Club.
I’ve got a Quick Take about tools for local news organizations dealing with various forms of harassment. The Institute for Nonprofit News, a leading organization for hyperlocal journalism, has put together some resources.
Following Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday night, I’ve seen calls on social media to support independent news organizations like ProPublica and The Guardian rather than traditional outlets. It’s a good idea, though I value the work done by mainstream journalism as well.
But let me suggest a different approach to funding media: using your subscription money or tax-deductible donations to support news at the local level. I’ve been writing about the local news crisis for a decade and a half, and during that time I’ve come to believe that one of the reasons we’re so polarized is that low-quality national news has moved in to fill the vacuum created by the decline of community journalism.
Civic life depends on reliable news and information. Without it, you have people showing up at school committee meetings to complain about phony, Fox News-driven issues like transgender sports and critical race theory rather than test scores and the cost of funding a new teachers’ contract.
Academic studies have shown that a lack of local news leads to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization and what my research partner, Ellen Clegg, and I like to call the “corruption tax” — that is, lenders demanding a higher rate of return when municipalities in news deserts seek to borrow money for such worthy causes as a new middle school or fire station. The lenders, it seems, want a premium if no one is going to keep an eye on how their money is being spent.
Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.
The news desert problem is serious and getting worse. According to the latest State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School, some 3,200 print newspapers have disappeared since 2005. Most of them were weekly papers that provided exactly the sort of coverage needed to build and maintain a sense of community.
At the same time, though, hundreds of independent news projects have launched in recent years. Most but not all are digital-only; many are nonprofit, some are for-profit.
As it happens, this is the time of year when it makes the most sense to support local news, especially nonprofits. Every year, the Institute for Nonprofit News, through its NewsMatch program, provides funds to nonprofits to match some of what they are able to raise within their communities. This year’s campaign began Nov. 1. As INN explains:
Eighteen national and regional funders have pledged $7.5 million to NewsMatch, the largest grassroots fundraising campaign to support nonprofit news in the U.S. Since 2017, participating news organizations in the INN Network have leveraged $31 million in NewsMatch funding to help generate nearly $300 million in support from their communities. All of these newsrooms have met INN’s membership standards for financial transparency, editorial independence, and original public service reporting. Not every nonprofit news outlet meets those standards and is able to become an INN member.
Ellen and I wrote our book, “What Works in Community News,” to profile independent local and regional news organizations that are finding ways to serve the public despite the ongoing financial challenge of paying for journalism. We also talk with news entrepreneurs and thought leaders on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our hope is that the people and projects we highlight will inspire others to fill the information gap in their own communities.
Philanthropy will remain an important source of funding for some time to come. We should assume that long-stalled federal efforts to provide tax credits for local news aren’t suddenly going to start moving forward during the Age of Trump II. Efforts in states that include New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California are worthwhile but limited.
Ultimately the news desert problem will be solved, or not, without government assistance. If your community has an independent news outlet, please support it. And if it doesn’t, I suggest you look into what it would take to get involved in starting one.
On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sophie Culpepper, a staff writer at Nieman Lab who focuses on covering local news. She co-founded The Lexington Observer, a digital local news site covering Lexington, a town of 35,000 outside Boston. For two years, she was the nonprofit news outlet’s only full-time journalist. She covered public schools, local government, economic development and public safety, among other subjects.
I discusss the recent Nonprofit News Awards bestowed by the Institute for Nonprofit News. Three of the awards went to projects that have been featured on the “What Works” podcast. The Service to Nonprofit News Award went to Andy and Dee Hall, the retired founders of Wisconsin Watch, who were guests on this podcast last December. VTDigger won a community champion award. And Mississippi Today won an explanatory journalism award.
In addition, an INNovator Award for a sold-out event featuring live stories from the stage went to Brookline.News, a digital nonprofit founded by Ellen.
The Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City, part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The city is served by The Salt Lake Tribune, the first nonprofit legacy newspaper in the U.S. Photo (cc) 2006 by Ken Lund.
Should nonprofit news organizations place their journalism behind a paywall?
There is considerable precedent that suggests they should not. Public television and radio are free, though they depend on grant money and donations from, you know, viewers (and listeners) like you. There’s also an educational mission and significant tax advantages that come with nonprofit status, and you could argue that they should make their journalism free in return for those benefits.
The Institute for Nonprofit News, for instance, begins its mission statement this way:
Nonprofit news is created for, supported by, and committed to the communities it serves. Through reporters who have deep community ties and topical expertise, nonprofit news elevates untold stories, exposes wrongdoing, and provides the facts we need to make informed decisions. And because most of this content is available without paywalls or subscription fees, nonprofit news makes essential information available to everyone — not just those who can afford it.
That falls short of an explicit statement of disapproval when it comes to nonprofits and paywalls, but it comes kind of close.
Yet Ellen Clegg and I found in our reporting for “What Works in Community News” that a few nonprofit news outlets do charge for their journalism, though most do not. Among those with paywalls are two digital-only sites: the Daily Memphian, which is part of our book, and The Baltimore Banner.
Both of these employ large staffs and aim to serve as complete replacements for the shrunken legacy papers they compete against. Such projects are expensive, and their leaders can hardly be faulted for concluding they need to charge for their journalism just as most for-profits do. Both find ways to make their journalism affordable for folks who may not be as well-heeled as their regular subscribers.
Another nonprofit with a paywall is The Salt Lake Tribune, the first legacy daily newspaper to embrace that model. Writing at Nieman Lab, Sarah Scire reports that the Tribune would like to end its dependence on a paywall at some point and is even now making much of its journalism free. She quotes from the Tribune’s annual report:
We’ve raised $340,000 and counting to fully remove the paywall on all of our election coverage ahead of the critical 2024 races. We’re not there yet from an income point of view to make our website free, but we hope to grow our donor base and income to the point that we’ll be able to open everything up to everyone.
Yet she also observes that even though the Tribune is growing, it remains dependent on paid subscriptions. Last year, for instance, subscribers were responsible for $5 million of the Tribune’s $15 million in revenues. Much of the rest comes from donors and advertising.
The bottom line is that even nonprofit news outlets need to bring in enough money to fulfill their mission. In the end, readers don’t really care whether their local news is owned by a nonprofit for a for-profit; Scire reports that only about a third of residents even know that the paper is nonprofit. What they want is a news source that’s comprehensive and reliable.
I’ll be taking part in a webinar on “Saving Local News” on Wednesday, Feb. 14, from 3 to 4 p.m., sponsored by the Boston University Alumni Association. (That’s not why I got invited, but I actually did earn my master’s in American history from BU way back in 1983.)
In the course of our reporting for “What Works in Community News,” Ellen Clegg and I were confronted with a reality that cuts against our usual optimism: that though news startups across the country are helping to fill the gap created by the decline of legacy newspapers, the new media landscape is unevenly distributed.
Large regional and statewide nonprofits like The Texas Tribune and NJ Spotlight News are doing reasonably well, though the Tribune has recently hit a few bumps and Spotlight has never been a fundraising behemoth. Smaller projects serving affluent suburbs, like a number of startups in Eastern Massachusetts, are doing well. But there are few independent news outlets serving low-population rural areas and urban communities of color, and those that do exist are often overlooked by the larger philanthropic organizations.
Corinne Colbert writes about that reality for a newsletter called Local News Blues, which I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of until my friend and teacher Howard Owens of The Batavian pointed me to it a few days ago. Colbert is cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Athens County Independent, a nonprofit digital startup that in southeastern Ohio. Late last week she wrote a commentary headlined “Does big philanthropy really care about our smaller news markets?” Now, you know the rule about question headlines: the answer is almost always “no.” She observes:
Nearly 60% of foundation grants go to national and global nonprofit outlets, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News. Local outlets — which INN defines as those serving audiences at the county, city or town level or having a specific focus — represent almost one-fourth of nonprofit news jobs, but we get less than 20% of foundation funding. That gap represents millions and millions of dollars.
Recently the Houston Landing, a well-funded nonprofit with strong backing from the American Journalism Project, imploded when the publisher fired the highly regarded editor and the top investigative reporter without offering any logical explanation. The Landing may recover, but there’s been a serious lack of transparency. Meanwhile, projects that Ellen and I have written about such as MLK50 in Memphis and the New Haven Independent have never been able to attract much in the way of national funding, even though both are performing vitally important work.
Nonprofits are bringing news and information to communities in ways that for-profits often no longer can. But it’s time for major foundations — including Press Forward, a $500 million effort comprising 22 philanthropies — to bring renewed efforts to helping not just large, sexy projects but more quotidian efforts as well. Fortunately there are signs that Press Forward gets it.
“Small markets … present business challenges that corporations are often unwilling to face,” writes Colbert, “and those challenges make launching or growing a local news operation especially difficult. National funders could ease those burdens, but first they have to acknowledge our existence — and our importance.”
The Institute for Nonprofit News, or INN, has a new CEO. Karen Rundlet will succeed Sue Cross, who announced earlier this year that she was leaving the post. Rundlet, who is currently senior director of the Journalism Program at the Knight Foundation, has worked with grant recipients such as City Bureau/ Documenters in Chicago, INN’s NewsMatch program, Sahan Journal (based in Minneapolis and one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I report on in our book “What Works in Community News”), Solutions Journalism Network and Military Veterans in Journalism.
Rundlet has also worked as a journalist and manager at the Miami Herald as well as the public radio program “Marketplace.”
INN is an important player in the world of local news startups. NewsMatch, which allows community journalism organizations to leverage local donations with matching national money, has been transformative. The organization also acts as a fiscal sponsor for nonprofits that have not yet obtained 501(c)(3) federal tax status — donors can make a tax-deductible gift that is administered by INN and is then passed along to the local media outlet. Its model code of ethics is used by local news organizations across the country; see, for instance, the “Ethics & Practices Policies” at The New Bedford Light.
According to the announcement of Rundlet’s appointment, more than 425 news organizations now make up the INN Network, supporting more than 5,000 people who work in nonprofit news in North America.
“Karen is uniquely positioned as a visionary, passionate and experienced journalist and philanthropist to propel the nonprofit news movement,” Marcia Parker, the chair of INN’s board of directors, said in a statement. “As a leader of our field, she already is driving the national advances to redesign news media that is inclusive for communities of color and can bring trusted information to everyone.”
