The 19th’s first-ever strategic plan is an attempt to 'play it safe' in a precarious media age

When The 19th launched — with $8.5 million to start — in August 2020, they kicked off with a budget that most news outlets can only dream of. Five years and $100 million raised later, The 19th’s next chapter is focused on substantially growing its audience and making sure money is never a problem. Emily Ramshaw, The 19th’s CEO, thinks establishing an endowment can help with that.

The 19th’s first-ever strategic plan, published last week, outlines seven major goals to advance the nonprofit’s mission of serving American women and LGBTQ+ people with journalism about politics and public policy through an intersectional lens. Chief among those goals is the creation of a $30 million “quasi-endowment,” which The 19th can tap into in the case of a financial crisis. Since the three-year endowment campaign launched this past January, The 19th has already raised $25 million, Ramshaw said.

After bearing witness to the news industry’s (many) economic challenges and now the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people, press freedom, reproductive health, and more, Ramshaw and her team wanted to secure The 19th’s future.

An endowment is a pool of donated funds that is invested to generate additional income for a nonprofit organization. While traditional endowments typically prohibit the spending of the principal amount, quasi-endowments are more flexible and can be used in emergencies. Endowments are common in higher education but are relatively rare in the nonprofit news industry. The Scott Trust Endowment, for example, generates income for The Guardian’s news operations. News outlets affiliated with universities (including us at Nieman Lab) can also benefit from endowments.

In the case of The 19th, Ramshaw said the idea for quasi-endowment came from a question she constantly fields from philanthropic funders: Where are your new revenue streams?

Funders want to see that publications aren’t solely relying on philanthropy, and often look for subscription or advertising revenue as a sign of a diverse revenue portfolio. But that doesn’t work for The 19th, whose journalism is free to consume. And while The 19th does offer event sponsorship and advertising on its website and in its newsletters, those haven’t turned out to be major revenue streams, Ramshaw said.

“There are too many newsrooms chasing the same set of dollars right now,” Ramshaw said. “My vision for the 19th is to stop chasing the same foundations that everybody else is chasing and bring new people into the media funding ecosystem. I believe that The 19th, given what we cover, has a unique opportunity to do that. With the endowment, my vision is to continue bringing new media donors into that space, teaching more people the value of supporting a free press and supporting nonprofit media. And hopefully those people end up supporting other news organizations as well.”

When Melinda Gates made a multimillion-dollar grant to The 19th last year, Ramshaw decided that money could be used to start the quasi-endowment that’s housed in a high-yield savings account rather than invested in stocks. That interest income will then be put toward The 19th’s annual operating budget, which is currently about $12 million. As The 19th’s endowment grows with more donations, its interest income is expected to increase, too. The money will offset The 19th’s annual fundraising goals and help “take the pressure off of philanthropy,” Ramshaw said.

“I’ve been heartened to see how excited and consistent our supporters and major donors have been in saying, ‘I’ll continue to support your general operating budget, but I’m also going to make a one-time gift to the endowment,’” Ramshaw said. “We’re not there yet, but I’m very confident that this is going to be a tool in our toolbox that allows us to create a new revenue stream and the ultimate safety net for the worst-case scenario. [Given] the risks facing our industry right now and [the heightened need for] legal support, liability insurance, and all those kinds of things….God forbid we need to tap into some of these dollars to protect The 19th, but we are going to be in a position because of this endowment to do it.”

The other major — and perhaps more difficult — goals of the strategic plan include doubling the 19th’s “total journalism reach” (a metric it created in 2024 defined by adding up all of a story’s views on its own and third-party platforms) and increasing subscribers to its products (like newsletters, SMS, and others) by 2.5 times by 2028.

Ramshaw declined to share The 19th’s current number of newsletter subscribers, but said its total journalism reach in 2024 was 57 million. Dick Tofel, the former president of ProPublica and author of the journalism newsletter Second Rough Draft, said the goals laid out in The 19th’s strategic plan were ambitious given today’s media landscape.

“The thing that I suspect will be most challenging to execute are the very clear audience goals because it’s a challenge for news generally,” Tofel told me. “You have the very significant weakening of Google search. You have the uncertain consequences of the rise and increasing ubiquity of AI. You have the move to multimedia when The 19th — like many nonprofit news organizations — was largely born in text. All of these things in terms of growing audience are just sort of atmospheric challenges.”

To grow and retain those new audiences, The 19th will experiment with new pop-up newsletters around topics that are of interest to readers but may not have dedicated beat reporters, chief strategy officer Alexandra Smith said. The first pop-up will launch later this fall and will focus on “how politics, policy, and power can influence our audiences’ experiences.”

“What our audience is looking for from us for right now [is explaining how] they’re personally impacted by policy changes,” Smith said. “We’re helping people navigate the current landscape. There’s also a strong [interest from] allies who are looking to understand how they can advocate for the causes that they care about, so we’re doing more stories that are showing the joy, the wins, the successes, and the community leaders that are making a difference on various issues or in their communities to help show our audiences what’s possible right now.”

The 19th will also explore working with independent creators, Smith said, as a way to expand The 19th News Network, its republishing partnership with more than 120 like-minded news outlets. The 19th was short on details on the creator project and Smith described the idea as in its early stages. She envisions different options for collaboration: some creators might want to talk to their audiences about why they like The 19th as a news source, while others may opt for citing The 19th’s journalism in their videos. The 19th, which has about 85,000 Instagram followers, will first prioritize working with LGBTQ+ creators as a way to both support those creators impacted by anti-queer public policy, and as a way for The 19th to reach queer audiences, Smith said.

“More and more of our audiences tend to trust individuals who have life experiences that are similar to their own, and we know that platforms are working to uplift the work of these independent creators who are doing journalism and finding ways to get it in front of the people who need it the most,” Smith said. “We have independent creators who want reliable information sources and they want to work with newsrooms who they trust that will report the story accurately, fairly, equitably. That’s something that we clearly are set up well to provide.”

This article was updated to correct the number of publishing partners in The 19th News Network.