Post Platform: A new era for nonprofit news discovery

Nonprofit news grew out of the drive to serve communities underserved by commercial media and to fill gaps in coverage that other outlets would not. The infrastructure that made this approach possible and fueled the growth of the sector — social media, search, syndication — have changed dramatically, revealing structural vulnerabilities across the field.

Building on quantitative research from our Audience & Distribution Index Report 2024, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) has gone deep into understanding the challenges ahead. We expect to continue expanding support for members and rolling out new programming in the area of audience development while leaning into the shared values that bind the INN Network.

All communities deserve access to news, but are they finding it?

Social media had an extraordinary effect on shaping the nonprofit news sector. The revolution in social media prompted a broad reshaping in the audiences news organizations could serve by radically reducing the costs to build and serve an audience. From 2007 to recently, tech giants took on nearly all the infrastructure costs of the news distribution system. 

[Social media] deeply informed the type and scale of organizations built over the last two decades, but that system has collapsed for news and with it many of the structural advantages that allowed nonprofit news to thrive.

More than 80% of INN members were founded during this period of social media dominance and their missions reflect that. Many members identify their primary audience as constituencies considered un-viable in an era where news organizations bore the cost of operating TV and radio towers or delivering newspapers — more than half of members say they primarily serve a community where there is a broad inability to pay for news, few cultural norms around paying for news and/or donations to nonprofits are largely limited to religious organizations. 

Social media also dramatically reduced the costs of building a news brand from scratch when social media primarily connected people to others they knew, creating a visible word-of-mouth network and a feed that could place a startup on equal footing with a legacy player.

This system deeply informed the type and scale of organizations built over the last two decades, but that system has collapsed for news and with it many of the structural advantages that allowed nonprofit news to thrive. During the prime of the social media era, Facebook alone was more than 40% of referral traffic. All social media combined now accounts for less than 15% of referral traffic on average for INN members, according to INN’s Index survey.

Audiences have stayed on social media for news even as news organizations continue to be pushed off the platforms, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania. The audience for news is increasingly locked into social media platforms and challenging for news outlets to move to their owned products. Three-quarters of INN members now have at least a small marketing budget (3.5% of average yearly expenses) and they are spending most of it on Meta. Nearly half are using their marketing budget to maintain access to audiences on social media through boosting posts. The growing segment that are paying for Facebook ads to lure social media audiences to newsletters are also seeing the most consistent newsletter list growth, according to the Index survey.

The growing segment that are paying for Facebook ads to lure social media audiences to newsletters are also seeing the most consistent newsletter list growth.

The social media space is fragmenting and INN has moved aggressively into capturing the opportunities that are available to members. It has negotiated early access and preferred status for members on rising platforms that offer opportunities for forging meaningful connections with audiences. In March, INN negotiated an arrangement whereby member newsrooms would be among the first to appear as the default local news source in the updated feeds for Nextdoor’s 45 million monthly users.

INN has also launched a new member peer group for staff working on audience, to help them navigate the growing costs and complexity of distribution. It’s a space specifically designed to quickly identify opportunities to build an audience and replicate winning strategies across the network.

Trustworthy information must rise to the top, but tech favors quantity over quality

INN members are deeply committed to serving the information needs of communities — providing reliable, trustworthy information for those seeking it. 

Search now dominates referral traffic, rising to the same 40% mark that social media once was, according to the INN Index survey. For INN members, it presents a clear opportunity as a distribution channel that still prioritizes text and drives traffic to members’ products.

With INN’s help, members are increasingly savvy about not only the questions people have, but how search engines shape the answers audiences find. Unlike social media, members have long faced structural disadvantages on search. It is a system that heavily favors large, established news organizations that can rely on speed, volume and popularity to consistently dominate the zero-sum world of search where only one story can claim the top spot that gets most of the clicks. 

Startups uniquely struggle to gain momentum on search because of their lower story output and slim archive, but the number of startups has accelerated as social media has declined as a distribution channel. Nearly half of INN members were founded since the sharp decline in Facebook traffic started in 2017. 

Among the strongest positioned on search are INN members that either converted to nonprofit, like the Salt Lake Tribune, or acquired an SEO-optimized archive, such as Block Club Chicago, whose archive includes 138,000 stories from its for-profit predecessor. The growth in mergers among nonprofits presents new opportunities for audience, and INN is supporting members pursuing mergers about how it could impact positioning on search.

For most members to retain search referral traffic into the future, they need to understand the specific questions they are best equipped to answer. INN has dramatically expanded the trainings and resources on Google Search Console, evergreen stories and keyword research for members. INN is helping members with the critical work of building on the niches in search where they do have unique strengths and helping them shore up areas where they may be particularly exposed to competition or AI overviews. INN is developing new tools to help members identify where there is high demand among audiences for information, but few reliable news sources in search results.

We must meet people where they are, even if it’s not our space

One of the most deeply held values of INN members is that the duty to inform the public runs deeper than the drive to compete with other news outlets. To that end, nearly 85% of INN members allow other news outlets to republish their stories for free.

This aspect of INN members’ reach has grown exponentially recently — the number of syndication partners doubled in a year across the INN Network to more than 15,500 outlets. This growth in reach though also comes with a growing set of tradeoffs.

The majority of the audience for nonprofit news is now “invisible,” unable to be accurately counted and outside of systems that move people towards becoming donors.

INN now estimates that the vast majority of people consuming stories from nonprofit news organizations are now doing so on a product owned by a for-profit news organization. A review of republication policies by INN found that few members were able to accurately count the number of people viewing stories on syndicator’s sites. The majority of the audience for nonprofit news is now “invisible,” unable to be accurately counted and outside of systems that move people towards becoming donors.

Syndication also increasingly undercuts traffic from search. In the last year, Google changed its algorithm so it is much harder for the originating publisher to get credit in search rankings compared to much larger syndicators publishing the same story.

INN has moved aggressively into this space, negotiating with the largest syndicators for terms that would protect members on search and other distribution channels. INN has successfully negotiated terms for members with the Associated Press, Microsoft and Apple News that appropriately value their work and provide ongoing access and protections only possible by leveraging the full INN Network. INN’s On the Ground program is going farther to give members a clearer view into how their stories perform on syndicators’ sites and leverages the full scale of the network’s editorial work to negotiate the best possible terms with syndicators.

What we do now

The INN Network has expanded dramatically, growing to more than 475 members, with nearly all founded since social media and search first promised that the costs for a news organization to build an audience and distribute its stories would be negligible.

The era of free distribution from social media is coming to a close and the remaining options come with tradeoffs or require savvy and leverage to avoid exploitative partnerships.

Those organizations that are growing despite these challenges are the members who have invested in audience staff and resources, collaborate with their peers as strategy becomes more complex and are leaning into the leverage that comes from being part of a large network.

INN is investing heavily to expand the resources for members to meet these challenges and carry the critical values that bind nonprofit news organizations to their communities and each other into a new paradigm where reinventing news distribution will be just as important as reinventing news production was in a previous era.