“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 sends vital information to Milwaukee residents and allows them to text back questions, the two outlets decided to consolidate their core operations and fundraising while allowing each newsroom to function with editorial independence.
As Wisconsin Watch put it in their statement, “Given the loss of reporters covering local government and community life, we must nurture collaborative efforts, where newsrooms work together to gather the resources necessary to tell the stories that matter most.”
This concept of consolidating operations while allowing for unique identities is also at the heart of the Metro Nonprofit News Network (MNNN), a new initiative launched this month in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota. With seed funding from the McKnight Foundation, MNNN will provide shared services, mentorship, and financial guidance to three hyperlocal nonprofit newsrooms in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region and, over the next two years, identify and support the launch of three additional community newsrooms.
“Our perspective is that each newsroom in the network needs to have its own editor and advisory board,” Steve Schewe, publisher of founding participant Eden Prairie Local News, told INN. “The nonprofit registration would reside in the community itself, because that is what drives the local identity of a newsroom. We don’t want to give that up at Eden Prairie Local News, and we wouldn’t expect anyone else to give that up.”
For many years since the Institute for Nonprofit News was founded by 27 nonprofit investigative outlets in 2009, growth of the field was the name of the game. Today, INN membership exceeds 450 independent newsrooms.
But, as INN CEO Karen Rundlet observed in her opening remarks at the annual INN Days conference in June 2024, more news outlets does not always mean new entrants are stronger.
“As more news entrepreneurs enter the sector, we’re starting to see some organizations merge, or enter joint operating agreements or formal partnerships,” Rundlet told the gathering. “We’re seeing consolidation and networks because newsrooms see it as a way to become more financially stable and editorially powerful.”
At the start of this year, the merger of INN members Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting took effect, creating a multimedia nonprofit news outlet that provides in-depth reporting across every platform from online and social media to video, radio, podcast, and the Mother Jones print magazine — reaching a combined audience of 10 million people monthly.
In April 2024, CalMatters announced that it acquired The Markup, which specializes in covering technology and its impact on our lives, citing “a time when the entire world is watching AI developments and tech regulation coming out of California.”
On October 15, 2024, the Daily Catch and the Hudson Valley Pilot became one news organization serving the towns of Rhinebeck and Red Hook, NY, aiming to “eliminate unproductive competition and create one cohesive newsroom to cover both towns with expanded resources to report on local government, politics, businesses, schools, arts and culture, health, transportation, the environment, local farming, and more.”
The 19th took a different approach to expanding its reach: it created The 19th News Network, four years after its founding in 2020, to republish, curate and co-report stories with both nonprofit and for-profit news organizations that share its mission of advancing racial and gender equity in journalism.
“We don’t simply need more nonprofit news outlets, we need more strong nonprofit news outlets,” Rundlet says.
While more than 90% of startups that become members of the INN Network are operating five years after launch, there is only so much that fundraising and capacity-building support from an organization like INN can do to strengthen individual outlets. Ultimately, market forces will play out in the primarily digital nonprofit news sector just as they have done across the newspaper industry.
Mergers and acquisitions among nonprofit news organizations are not a new phenomenon: more than five years ago, WNET, the PBS affiliate for the New York metro region, acquired INN member NJ Spotlight and merged it with NJTV to create NJ Spotlight News, a multimedia newsroom that delivers nightly television news programs and a robust website addressing issues critical to New Jersey residents.
“The model is a complicated one that combines two very different cultures and forms of journalism, but it has been fascinating to see it evolve as the whole world of journalism evolves,” NJ Spotlight’s founding editor John Mooney said recently. “We certainly believe the readers and viewers of New Jersey benefit, with multiple platforms telling their stories, each in their distinct ways.”
If a trend toward collaboration over competition seems counterintuitive in the get-the-scoop world of the media industry, it was at the heart of INN’s creation. INN’s founding document, the Pocantico Declaration, recognized that news outlets have many forms of potential collaboration: editorial, administrative and financial. The news leaders who signed that declaration anticipated that “as this new, dynamic nonprofit investigative journalism continues to evolve in unprecedented ways, so, too, will its collective sensibilities become more clear.”
