• Fellowships
  • Reports
  • Lab
  • Storyboard
    • Nieman Foundation at Harvard
    HOME
    About
    Subscribe
    Archives
              
    Foundation
    Reports
    Storyboard
    LATEST STORY
    Lessons learned in The Building of Lost Causes
    Business Models Mobile & Apps Audience & Social Aggregation & Discovery Reporting & Production
    ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
    May 24, 2023, 2:53 p.m.
    The number of nonprofit digital newsrooms grew again in 2022
    LINK: inn.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Sarah Scire   |   May 24, 2023

    The Institute for Nonprofit News reported a 17% growth in the number of new nonprofit newsrooms in 2022, in an annual report released this week.

    INN’s Index Report Snapshot is based on self-reported data from 315 nonprofit news outlets — about 90% of INN’s members — for 2022. (INN says it will release a “deeper and more complete Index Report focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion” this summer.)

    Overall, roughly half of nonprofit news outlets are focused on local issues (184 newsrooms), with the rest split between state and regional coverage (104 outlets) and those focused on national or global issues (106 outlets).

    A few other tidbits from the report:

    • Revenue across the nonprofit news sector kept up with the growth of new newsrooms, increasing by 19% between 2021 and 2022 to nearly $500 million. “This indicates that growth in the field is not stretching or competing for a static or shrinking pool of resources, but that news organizations are developing new resources as they grow and as new ones launch and build support in additional communities,” the report reads. “More than 80% of the outlets surveyed either grew total revenue or maintained revenue from 2021 to 2022.”
    • Large and established state and regional outlets are driving the nonprofit news industry’s gain in median revenue. “Our data don’t explain why foundation support to state and regional newsrooms is growing,” the report notes, “but our reporting indicates a shift in philanthropic attention to statehouse coverage.”
    • The majority of outlets surveyed distribute their journalism through a website (74%), with other subsets primarily delivering via email newsletter (11%) or print (9%).
    • A little over a third of outlets grew their web audience in 2022, but a similar portion saw their average monthly unique visitors decline. Local outlets were more likely to see their web traffic increase, according to INN, while outlets focused on national and global coverage were the least likely.
    • INN estimated its digital-first members employ nearly 4,000 people. Roughly two-thirds of those employees are reporters, editors, and other kinds of journalists.

    You can read the full INN Index Report here. INN also published its own financial information in an impact statement.

    Note: This article previously referred to incomplete data and included an incorrectly labeled chart. Both have been updated.

    Show tags
     
    What’s the best way to follow how the news is changing?
    Our daily email, with all the freshest future-of-journalism news.
    Prefer a once-a-week email? »
    The latest from Nieman Lab
    Lessons learned in The Building of Lost Causes
    Linda Solomon Wood
    Publishers find the AI era not all that lucrative
    Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
    Embrace the barbell
    Millie Tran
    Prediction markets go mainstream
    Taylor Lorenz
    The rise of informal news networks
    Heather Chaplin
    Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
    Lessons learned in The Building of Lost Causes
    “The skills we developed while facing down the fossil fuel industry — persistence through trolling campaigns, converting readers one by one, turning an upstart publication into essential reading — these aren’t just about journalism. They’re about how to keep building when everything around you feels like it’s crumbling.”
    Publishers find the AI era not all that lucrative
    “Welcome, surely. Lucrative, in a sense. Game changer? Hardly.”
    Embrace the barbell
    “It’s time to abandon middling stories and go very short or very long.”
    Help advance the Nieman Foundation’s mission “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism” by making a donation.

    To promote and elevate the standards of journalism

    Covering thought leadership in journalism

    Pushing to the future of journalism

    Exploring the art and craft of story
    © 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College  /  Some rights reserved
    Harvard Trademark Privacy Digital Accessibility
    Walter Lippmann House    One Francis Ave.    Cambridge, MA 02138    617 495 2237