Want to build a sustainable local newsroom? These 21 steps will help you get there, a new report finds

From 2022 through 2024, 357 LION Publishers members participated in a program that aimed to help local news outlets at any stage of growth “move the needle on sustainability.”

The process included assessments, coaching, recommendations, and funding. LION has since transitioned it to a self-service assessment, but between hundreds of audits, thousands of hours of coaching, hundreds of funding requests, nearly 100 follow-up reports, and feedback from program participants over the first three years, LION had a rich set of data to mine for a sense of what interventions and metrics matter most to newsroom sustainability.

In partnership with Impact Architects, it analyzed that data and produced a report, released Wednesday, outlining a “roadmap for local news sustainability” that walks newsrooms through concrete steps to take at different stages of organizational growth.

Two revenue-specific takeaways from the report:

• “Having dedicated staff to generate revenue was transformational to an organization’s chances of sustainability.” The report’s authors found that organizations with revenue generation staff had median revenue “700% higher than those without.” In early-stage startups, “having the founder/leader dedicating a significant amount of time to revenue efforts creates the foundation for this caliber of success.”
• What separates a “developing” from a “stable” organization”? There’s a strong correlation with “the milestone of having three or greater established revenue streams.”

To measure organizational success and progress, LION applies its definition of sustainability, which requires the trifecta of operational resilience, financial health, and journalistic impact. It drills down on several individual “indicators” to evaluate and track progress toward achieving those three pillars — here are what it calls the “21 key indicators”:

LION tracks organizational progress across four stages of maturity: Preparation, building, maintaining, and growing. Applying that maturity model “enabled the program to identify the most relevant and actionable steps to help each participant reach the next stage,” per the report.

Of the 98 organizations that participated in both the sustainability audit and the follow-up progress report, 45% progressed to the next growth stage, and another 32% progressed in one of the three sustainability pillars.

When The Daily Catch completed a sustainability audit in 2022, the Hudson Valley–based local news nonprofit fell into the second stage, “building.” By 2023, it had progressed to the next stage, “maintaining,” in terms of operational resilience, financial health, and journalistic impact.

“The substantial actions the organization took between the Audit and the follow up a year later included offering medical insurance, creating an employee handbook, developing a [one or three]-year plan, purchasing media liability insurance, and — with program funding — defining, tracking, and using impact data,” according to LION. Along the way, the news org grew its revenue from $20,000 to $138,764.

Walter Mullin, publisher of The Daily Catch, shared some advice for other publishers with LION:

Stay on your skis, don’t get ahead of them. We do not want to be bigger for its own sake; we want to be bigger solely to improve our product offering in our predefined market, two towns each of roughly 38 square miles. Most transformative has been our fundraising strategy: identifying key prospects and approaching them with requests for face-to-face meetings accompanied by targeted marketing materials (and Walter’s famous cookie goody bags). We have also developed letters we have sent snail-mail, and these break through in ways we could never have anticipated.

Among organizations that completed the audit and follow-up assessment, median annual revenue grew by 62%, from $91,831 to $148,343, suggesting that organizations “made changes that increased their revenue” following the audit.

The report examined how organizations at different growth stages used up to $20,000 in funding provided to implement recommendations, and found that “across every stage of organization, assistance with planning and strategy was the most common or second most common use” for these funds.

Here’s the full breakdown of the kinds of funding requests based on organization’s growth stage:

More info about who took the sustainability audits:

• News outlets from 46 states, Puerto Rico, and five Canadian provinces participated in the program, with the highest number of participants in California.
• Most audit-takers have small budgets: 31% (116 publishers) had annual budgets under $50,000, while 47% (183) had budgets between $50,000 and $500,000.
• Slightly more for-profits than non-profits participated in the audit (56% for-profit, 44% nonprofit), reflecting LION’s membership makeup.
• More than half (53%) of news outlets took the audit in their first five years of operation.

You can read through the full report here.