This past June, I had the pleasure of attending the INN Days 2024 conference, a gathering of members of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). INN is a nonprofit organization representing more than 400 nonprofit newsroom members across the United States, including NPQ.
In recent years, the conference has grown substantially in size and scope as the nonprofit news ecosystem has evolved from a series of isolated experiments to potentially the budding future of vibrant and quality news—or, to put it another way, the latest and perhaps last hope for rebuilding the rapidly deteriorating American news industry.
The ongoing disintegration of local news is clear. A recent study by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism found that the loss of local newspapers accelerated to 2.5 per week in 2023 and that more than half of US counties lack any local news source.
And the consequences of losing quality local news are wide-reaching. As Press Forward, an initiative to fund local journalism, observes: “The steady and significant decline in the availability of reliable, fact-based local news across the country is connected to growing threats to democracy, increasing polarization, and the spread of disinformation.”
Within this dire context, it was both the great achievement and the promise for the future that the growth of nonprofit news represents that most struck me during the conference.
The ongoing disintegration of local news is clear.
Even as for-profit local newsrooms are dying off, the number of nonprofit news organizations has ballooned in recent years. INN now boasts over 400 members, up from just a couple of dozen members at its founding in 2009.
Meanwhile, thanks in part to new philanthropic initiatives (more on that in a moment)—but also to the hard work of individual nonprofit news organizations making the case for funding—more philanthropic funding is finding its way to the nonprofit news industry than ever before.
INN members, many of them scrappy, independent startups created by passionate journalists to fill voids in local or topical news, have found themselves at the forefront of a movement that may, in fact, come to represent the very future of journalism.
Funders Stepping Up
The idea that philanthropy should support the news industry is a relatively new one.
After all, until fairly recently, most news companies—from local newspapers, radio, and television to bigger national news outlets—were for-profit enterprises, ineligible for tax-exempt grants and dedicated, at least in theory, to generating profit.
Just a decade ago, the concept of nonprofit news was still relatively untested, with notable exceptions like public media and NPR affiliates, which pioneered their longstanding—though recently ailing—funding model in the 1970s.
Today, the landscape is starting to look very different. Nonprofit news powerhouses like ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and NPR have built serious national newsrooms that produce competitive, high-quality investigative and public service journalism. Meanwhile, nonprofit local news organizations have likewise proven themselves more than capable of providing the kind of quality local journalism otherwise dissipating before our eyes as for-profit news organizations crumble.
But this nonprofit news landscape needs funding to thrive and grow—especially if it is going to try to fill the gaping and growing void in local news.
As the nonprofit news ecosystem has grown, there has been increasing (if still insufficient, many INN conference attendees would argue) interest on the part of philanthropy in supporting nonprofit news.
More recently, we saw the emergence and first round of funding applications by Press Forward, a coalition of funders coordinated by the MacArthur Foundation and housed in the Miami Foundation, which has pledged to raise $500 million to support new and existing news organizations, especially those providing local news.
Other organizations have stepped into leadership roles within the local and nonprofit news space as well, like Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit coalition that advocates for nonpartisan public policies to support local news.
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Speaking at the INN conference’s closing plenary, Press Forward director Dale R. Anglin acknowledged that, until recently, philanthropy had largely stayed away from the news industry.
“Philanthropy’s role in many places is to seed, fill gaps, to grow to experiment. We hadn’t been doing that a lot in journalism because you didn’t need us; you [the news industry] had your own revenue streams,” Anglin said.
But Press Forward is hoping, in addition to raising money directly for local news, to change how philanthropy at large views the role of news in building and supporting local communities.
“If you care about your community, you need to care about the local news ecosystem,” said Anglin, adding that such initiatives should aim “not just to build it back, but build it back better.”
“We need to redistribute power and democratize journalism at a systemic level.”
A New Kind of Newsroom
The recent INN Days conference was an exciting reminder of how far the nonprofit news industry has come in a short time.
And if that success was striking, so was the way in which INN and its members, I think, represent something truly new for the American news industry. These news organizations, from the largest to the smallest and scrappiest, are more than merely nonprofit look-alikes of faltering for-profit newsrooms.
Most of INN’s member nonprofit newsrooms are being led and powered by editors and reporters who are committed to the highest standards and goals of journalism, focusing their investigative and public service reporting on substance over flash and service over profit—a welcome change, in this author’s opinion, from the “if it bleeds, it leads” kind of journalism that too often has replaced investigative reporting in many shrinking newsrooms.
The rise of this nonprofit news ecosystem, meanwhile, offers an opportunity to rethink what newsrooms should look like, not just in terms of the news they produce but also in terms of organizational culture and values.
Among the many intriguing presentations at INN Days was one by Kate Harloe, an independent journalist who advocates for a radical reimagining of the American media system.
Arguing that the core cause of the ongoing breakdown of American local news is the result, in part at least, of the “extractive economic system that we’re operating in,” Harloe called for embracing systemic change within the industry and embracing a “just transition” for journalism as more and more of it moves into the nonprofit space.
“We need to redistribute power and democratize journalism at a systemic level,” Harloe said.
It was a point that seemed to resonate with many attendees at INN. For all the incalculable value for-profit news has provided to the American public, there are many aspects of the traditional local newspaper model that could stand a serious reexamination—from a notorious lack of diversity in many local newsrooms to poor wages and worker rights for working journalists to impenetrable hierarchies owned and/or led by “old boy” networks of highly compensated elites whose own interests were often reflected in decisions around news coverage.
The rise of nonprofit news organizations offers hope not just in the reinvigoration of local and public service news but also in a transformation of what the news industry looks like and the values by which it operates.
If it is a time of handwringing for local news—and it is—there are also hopeful signs in the growth and growing collective power of groups like INN, as well as a growing wealth of experiments in nonprofit news that just might signal a brighter future for news.
