For the last nine months, I have worked with newsrooms of all shapes and sizes across the country as the Institute for Nonprofit News’ (INN) Audience Fellow. From Alaska’s Mat Su Sentinel to the national ProPublica, the challenges to producing nonprofit news are vast. Newsrooms face shrinking funding, rising attacks on the press, and cratering trust in journalism. We exist in an oversaturated media landscape with new content competitors and a younger generation unsure of our relevance.
In my time at INN, I have come to believe the most fundamental challenge is upstream of all of these issues. Increasingly, nonprofit newsrooms rely on distribution platforms designed for monetizable content. The systems that mediate outlets’ relationship to audience depend on values, metrics and workflows that are misaligned with not just the mission, but the operating frameworks of nonprofit journalism.
I have seen how ignoring this tension means fighting with one hand tied behind our back. Reckoning with it leaves newsrooms better equipped to deal with all other audience challenges. Investing in distribution strategy purposefully built for nonprofit journalism is vital to establish trust, relevance and sustainability.
At INN, I worked with the newsrooms that are lighting the way forward.
- In the short-term, newsrooms are developing platform strategies to mitigate the tension between algorithms and nonprofit goals.
- Medium-term, newsrooms are building direct channels to the audience, sidestepping the middlemen that muddle the relationship with news consumers.
- Farseeing operators are imagining owned distribution platforms designed around the mission and norms of our sector.
The growth of nonprofit news was built around burgeoning platforms, particularly social media and search, which theoretically made distribution free and democratic — easing the burden of dissemination so outlets could focus on the real work of reporting. Today, newsrooms’ overreliance on these platforms is their greatest vulnerability. Distribution is no longer the work of journalism that we can outsource, it is the make-or-break factor of nonprofit news.
The Platform Problem
I started my career, not in journalism, but in local Alaska politics. The organization I worked for recruited candidates for local office and ran their campaigns. These races were small, occasionally decided by single-digit votes. but our team punched above our weight because we applied the now ubiquitous tools of digital marketing to campaign communications.
When I learned how to run Facebook Ad campaigns, I found it remarkably intuitive. I could identify the audience I wanted to target and set clear conversion goals. I had simple metrics for return on investment and easy ways to demonstrate the value of our content, and therefore my work, to my boss.
When I started working in a newsroom, this digital marketing mindset helped engage new audiences. But it was only a fraction of the value-add it had been in politics. There was some unseen friction. It was not as easy to get reporters to buy into the key performance indicators. On campaigns, all content had the same goal: more votes. In a nonprofit newsroom, the content we published aimed to inform the public. What is the conversion strategy for that mission? It felt like social media was designed for the campaign work, not the journalism work.
The difference is marketing campaigns are selling something. Nonprofit news, by definition, is not. As platforms optimize for content which is monetizable, it makes it harder for nontransactional content to thrive. Letting others gate-keep our relationship to our audience will always make engagement work an uphill battle.
1. To succeed on the platforms, play by the platforms’ rules
The platforms that mediate relationships with audiences are too dominant to ignore. At INN, I’ve seen how newsrooms can take advantage of the cheap reach these platforms offer as part of a broader owned distribution strategy.
This often starts with a deeper command over data. Since September, I have facilitated the Total Reach Group of INN’s Audience Studio, gathering editors from 15 member newsrooms to discuss the best ways to capture, understand, and communicate audience data. This group aims to build original metrics that are tied to nonprofit goals: reach, impact, fiscal sustainability.
Coming up with new metrics means scrutinizing the nonprofit news user journey. What makes someone take out their phone or open their laptop to consume nonprofit journalism? Our group has taken on challenging questions about the value of different types of engagement ( a video view vs. a newsletter open). They have rethought the relationship between editorial process and engagement analytics and discussed how to align the whole newsroom behind long-term audience goals.
Audience data often leads newsrooms to similar tactics. It takes them away from pageviews on 5,000-word articles as the thing to optimize for. It might lead to deeper investments in audio and video, like Mississippi Today, or reporting practices native to particular platforms, like the 19th’s social first reporting. Alongside intentional platform strategy, the data leads newsrooms to prioritize direct, unmediated channels to their audience.
2. Sidestepping the middleman
Newsrooms cannot survive on platforms and republication alone. Investing in direct audience channels is vital for any outlet.
Bridge Michigan saw site traffic and Facebook referrals crater in 2024. However, Bridge had already been systematically pivoting toward its most promising direct audience channel: newsletters. Because of this, Bridge was able to thrive in a year of extreme volatility for other newsrooms, growing reader revenue and expanding newsroom staff.
I worked with Bridge Michigan to design training around their strategy for other newsrooms. Over 80 editors showed up to the first webinar. Across INN, there is tremendous interest in direct audience growth and editors are already innovating here. SMS and live events have shown promise, but newsrooms are also building brand-new news products, like Documented’s Whatsapp communities and Hechinger Report’s tuition tracker which reaches more high school students’ than any traditional article
In working with these newsroom leaders, I’ve seen firsthand that direct channels provide stability, where growth depends on the value provided to the audience, not algorithmic performance. They are more reliable paths to habitual, returning engagement—the name of the game for any small publication. And they lead to supporter revenue more consistently—for Bridge Michigan, 95% of reader revenue comes from their newsletters. Direct channels create the audience interactions that sustain a newsroom.
3. The future of owned distribution
If platform strategy is the mitigation step, and direct audience channels are the middle step, the endgame is owned distribution systems shared by nonprofit news.
For scrappy nonprofits, the focus is on the present. It is hard to think about the distant future, when survival tomorrow is not guaranteed. However, at INN’s audience conference in October, we created space to imagine that better future and our role in shaping it to the field’s interests. After interviewing audience editors across the INN network, INN’s Andrew Haeg and I led a half-day workshop designed for INN newsrooms to generate ideas for how they could collaborate to take a greater ownership stake in their distribution pipelines.
The solutions generated by the 80-plus attendees were invigorating. Ideas included collectively bargained agreements for republication, as well as a shared aggregator platform for nonprofit news. It was empowering to put aside scarcity and to imagine the solutions that would make newsroom work less harried, more fun, and more impactful.
While we are a long way from establishing viable alternatives to the dominant platforms, the nonprofit field would do well to position themselves for that day. In the meantime, working on owned distribution will increase collaboration between newsrooms, strengthening the power of the nonprofit network. It will help the field understand our audience better and enhance our negotiating position with the existing platforms. And the work will keep our focus on owned distribution as the ultimate path to thriving nonprofit news and to stronger information ecosystems across the board.
Meeting unmet audience needs
I believe true pessimism about journalism’s future only comes if you conflate the needs and interests of audiences with the systems that mediate our connection to them. I think there is growing dissatisfaction with the content that thrives on the internet. Even as they participate in it, people desire alternatives to a content landscape so optimized for monetization.
If this is true, why are the platforms growing, not shrinking, in their share of our collective attention? Why do most people under 30 get their news from social media?
There is a gap between the consumption trends of digital platforms and the values of digital audiences. Increasingly, scholarship supports this and audience editors feel it. The personal experience of this under-30 news consumer confirms it. I am fed and regularly consume content I do not want to be consuming.
On the existing platforms, nonprofit content may be a vulnerability. On channels that newsrooms own and control, that are not mediated by third party algorithms, AI, or aggregators, it is a strength. Nonprofit news is positioned to fill the emerging need for content that is not transactional or monetizable. Owned, direct distribution is the path to that future.
Peter Heckendorn’s term as INN’s Audience Fellow ends this month. He leaves INN extremely grateful to all of the members he got to work with, to his boss Sam Cholke, and the rest of the INN team.
