May 1, 2025
Nonprofit news has evolved into a viable model to support local journalism at scale — the problem is that while the models are there, the people are not. This is Jonathan Kealing's call to action.
December 6, 2024
One of the most urgent sustainability questions is how audiences have found INN members’ reporting as massive shifts in social media ended a decade-long distribution system for the news. INN’s annual Index survey asked members of the INN Network about their continued use of social media and what they were prioritizing as the largest source of referral […]
November 22, 2024
In Democracy without Journalism: Confronting the Misinformation Society, media scholar Victor Pickard argues that news is a public good in the neoclassical economic sense: “One person’s consumption of the good does not detract from another’s” and some people will be “free riders” who consume the good but expect others to pay for it. Pickard also argues […]
October 21, 2024
“I like to say, we don’t compete, we complete.” That’s how Ron Smith, executive director of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, describes his newsroom’s long standing relationship with the statewide outlet Wisconsin Watch, which culminated in a formal merger announced this September. After years of collaborating on innovative projects like the News414 text reporting system, which […]
October 16, 2024
We asked newsrooms for an update. In 2023, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) published its latest deep-dive study on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the nonprofit news sector, exploring research questions about staffing and leadership, operations, engagement with underserved communities and revenue patterns. But our analysis on philanthropic funding left us with even more […]
August 22, 2024
At the Institute for Nonprofit News’ first full-day topical conference at CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism last week, INN members came together for a shared exploration of the challenges facing newsrooms in an era of dramatic changes in audience behavior and social media platforms’ relationship with news. As participants wrestled with the many ways to […]
August 15, 2024
About a third of nonprofit news outlets are using artificial intelligence to benefit their organization, according to survey data from the Institute for Nonprofit News’ annual Index survey. By this time next year, this AI-using cohort will likely grow to more than half of the sector. Today, drafting fundraising emails, scraping databases, translating stories and aggregating […]
June 11, 2024
INN’s CEO Karen Rundlet prepared these remarks to open the INN Days conference in San Diego on June 11, 2024. I attended my first INN Days as a very new journalism funder back in 2016. It was shortly after I’d spent a decade at a major metro, living through layoffs and salary reductions, and becoming […]
May 9, 2024
Picture this: A group of newsrooms marshal their resources to embark on a new collaboration. The project manager has done everything right, from setting goals to establishing communication expectations and clarifying roles. The future is bright. And yet. Something goes wrong. It could be any number of issues. Maybe one of the partners stops responding […]
April 10, 2024
In the fall of 2022, Arizona Luminaria, a digital local news outlet, launched in Tucson. It aimed to inform residents about local and state issues, with a focus on immigrant communities. The previous year in Madison, Wisconsin, Isthmus, a decades-old newspaper covering local news and culture, had converted to a nonprofit. As they prepared to […]
From local news to in-depth reporting on pressing global issues, INN’s 475+ members tell stories that otherwise would go untold – connecting communities, holding the powerful accountable, and strengthening democracy.
