In October, I had the rare opportunity as a journalism student to engage directly with leaders from nonprofit newsrooms across the country during the Institute for Nonprofit News’ “Better Together” event, hosted in partnership with CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. For a full day, I and other students joined audience experts and news leaders to participate in panel discussions and workshops dedicated to unpacking the questions: In today’s fractured media landscape, how can we better reach and serve our audiences? And how can nonprofit newsrooms work together more intentionally to amplify our impact?
For years, the journalism community has grappled with the persistent challenge of a declining audience base. This relentless chase stretched our limited staff to the breaking point and left many of us frustrated, as despite countless adjustments, growing our audiences and revenue often felt like an uphill battle.
This pervasive challenge was a big part of why I pursued the Masters in Engagement Journalism Program at the Newmark School. I’m part of a cohort that includes journalists alongside professionals from diverse backgrounds, all sharing a commitment to reaching communities more effectively to serve them better.
A key conference theme was thinking more broadly about collaboration: a pivot from seeing fragmentation as a threat to seeing it as an opportunity for building and growing communities.
Noble Ingram from Bolts spoke about how collaborating on Spanish-language stories with culturally aligned partners not only improved promotion but shaped the editorial process itself. These collaborations weren’t just about logistics — they reflected an intentional, mutual mentoring and the sharing of specialized skills that are too often scattered across institutions. Attendees stressed that this type of intentional, cross-organizational collaboration is becoming essential, not just for better journalism but for sustainable operations in a fractured ecosystem.
One discussion resonated deeply: As fragmented as the media landscape has become, it actually invites us to find and serve our niche audiences more intentionally.
“Fragmentation is wonderful — an opportunity to find niche audiences, to share content and resources, and to give them fantastic content,” Open Democracy’s Editor-in-Chief Aman Sethi emphasized. Instead of worrying about audiences “leaking out,” we can now build bridges between silos, amplifying our collective impact.
Conference conversations emphasized audience listening, community building, collaboration, and long-term sustainability as essential to contemporary journalism practice. Yet many journalism schools have yet to fully integrate these principles into their curricula. As students of the Engagement Journalism program, we felt seen and validated.
We heard directly from news organizations that they increasingly need the skills we are honing: building and growing communities through deep listening, producing stories that truly reflect their needs and aspirations, developing news and adjacent products that serve them, measuring engagement and impact, and making journalism more sustainable.
Of course, this work comes with trepidation. At moments, the weight of expectations can feel overwhelming. As my classmate Jacob Martin, formerly of NPR Kentucky, expressed: Can we even beat this?
Another classmate Carlin McCarthy, who has worked with NBC and is involved in union efforts with New York City writers, responded with a rallying cry from the union: “If we fight, we win.” She reminded us that despite fear and nerves, “We are still trying to find a way forward for journalism and still care about the future of the industry and that it’s not dead and dying.”
We find reassurance in knowing we are part of a broader community committed to sustaining journalism not just as an industry, but as a vital public service that keeps people informed, engaged, and mobilized around shared goals for empowered communities. In these challenging times, this mission is more essential than ever.
In many ways, the conference brought us full circle. The pressures of constantly chasing attention, the feeling of being stretched thin, and the expectation to be everywhere at once, surfaced again and again throughout the day.
But at the end of the day, there was almost a collective exhale from the realization that we don’t have to do everything, and we don’t have to do it alone. Through deeper engagement with communities and intentional collaboration across the network, the work becomes more focused, more sustainable, and ultimately more impactful.
