By Emily Roseman and Michele McLellan
News outlets in the INN Network engage and grow audiences on their own platforms — primarily on their own websites, email lists and social media channels. We call them “direct audiences” because they engage directly with the outlet’s own channels instead of other news outlets or third-party platforms. “Direct audiences” here could also be understood as “owned audiences” and is different from “direct traffic,” which refers only to website visitors.
Our first chapter on the goals of nonprofit news outlets covered the bifurcation in the sector between local nonprofit outlets, which naturally pay more attention to direct audiences, and larger, national, global and regional outlets, which invest more in third-party audiences. The reasons are baked into their design: many local outlets can only reach audiences over their own platforms (their localized coverage is seldom relevant enough to get picked up by a larger distributor). And many local outlets operate in areas without any potential partner organizations, such as a local newspaper, to help amplify coverage.
On the other hand, larger national, global and regional organizations — many of which focus on investigative reporting or cover a single issue deeply — prioritize third-party audiences as a means of revealing corruption and bringing more knowledge around broad topics. Jump here to read our chapter on third-party audiences.
Over the last several years, social media’s changing policies and practices dramatically altered the distribution game for all news outlets. As Nieman Lab put it: “If you are a U.S. news publisher, you likely know that your traffic from social media has fallen — the question is just how much.” Mounting frustrations in changing platform policies seemed to push outlets toward investing in direct-audiences.
The nonprofit news field largely shifted its focus from third-party to direct audiences over six years, with one-third of outlets primarily reaching audiences directly in 2017 to double that share in 2023. In the past two years alone, a third of the sector expanded its reach to direct audiences. Many outlets that had built distribution models around third-party partners and platforms pivoted, leaning into direct audience growth through SEO optimization, email newsletters and events.
| What this all means from INN’s point of view: With the collapse of referrals from social media, there is now greater reliance on Google and search as the primary source of referral traffic for nonprofit news outlets. It will be important for nonprofit outlets, and the organizations that support them, to invest in diversifying referral traffic and news discovery opportunities for potential audiences. Initiatives like INN’s partnership with the Associated Press and our Collaborations work aim to increase opportunities for coverage across the INN network to meet more audiences. Experiments with artificial intelligence as a tool for news discovery could also help. |
In this chapter, we explore web traffic and email newsletter patterns across the nonprofit news sector. We then review the primary drivers for direct audience engagement and growth: search engine optimization (SEO), email newsletters, events, and other tactics.
In the first chapter of this report, we discussed how growing web and email audiences is a primary goal for nonprofit news outlets — and the top approaches for direct engagement. This chapter focuses on web and email as two lenses for examining audience trends and tactics.
In our Index Report published in June, we reported that web traffic was in flux. Across all surveyed outlets in 2023, the average number of unique monthly visitors declined by about one-third from 2022. This downward trend is in sync with web traffic trends across the publishing industry.
Here’s what we’re seeing in the data: Web traffic losses are not evenly distributed. Over two years (2021 and 2023), 4 in 10 outlets grew web traffic (“web gainers”), 4 in 10 lost traffic (“web decliners”), and the remainder stayed flat. We focus on this two-year timeframe for our analysis, but this trend broadly started before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Web gainers are more likely to be local, smaller, younger, and leaner revenue-wise. For example, the median age of the gainer group is 6, whereas the median age of web decliners is 12. The logic then follows, and this is clear in the data, that web decliners are often larger, older national and global organizations. National and global outlets are twice as likely to have lost traffic in the past two years than gained it.
A few factors contribute to this bifurcated web trend. Let’s start with national and global outlets: We know that many of these larger, older organizations prioritize third-party distribution over direct audience growth because of how their organization’s mission and incentives are structured (see Chapter 1 and Chapter 2). We also suspect, and hear in our reporting, that larger national and global outlets are taking the biggest hit from the overall drop in referrals from social media.
We see a dynamic group of young, local startups launching and investing in direct audience development from their inception. Compared to the web decliners, these younger outlets with growing web audiences are more likely to have increased staffing dedicated to audience development. From 2021 to 2023, 4 in 10 of web gainers increased their full-time equivalents (FTE) for audience development, while only about 2 in 10 of the web decliners did. The median FTE devoted to audience development in 2023 for web gainers and web decliners remained the same, suggesting that the web gainer outlets are investing a larger share of total resources in audience development than their more well-resourced peers.
Asheville Watchdog is one of those younger, local outlets that has been steadily growing their web and email audiences since the outlet’s launch in 2020, from 166k pageviews in 2020 to more than 2.75M for 2024 to date. They plan on continuing to focus on growing audiences in 2024 and beyond. For The Watchdog, they have their mission to produce investigative and accountability journalism established, and now they’re focused on growing the tent of readers and increasing engagement among their existing audiences.
Keith Campbell, the outlet’s managing editor, points to increasing the volume of stories and covering local issues of the highest concern to Asheville’s communities as the driving forces behind web audience growth. One series of stories that brought in a lot of new audiences was around the main hospital. After Asheville’s beloved hospital was sold and converted to a for-profit operation five years ago, trouble started to arise, including a spike in staff cuts and staff departures. The Watchdog’s investigative reporting covered these changes closely, leading to the state attorney general filing a lawsuit against the hospital and its corporate owner and the federal government placing the hospital in immediate jeopardy, the toughest sanction a healthcare facility can face.
Since September, The Watchdog's focus has been covering the devastation wrought by Tropical Storm Helene, the worst disaster in western North Carolina's history. Asheville lacked potable drinking water for more than seven weeks, and The Watchdog relentlessly covered the damage to the water system and the city's restoration efforts.
Heading into 2025, Campbell is laser focused on continuing to provide new, relevant coverage to their readers every weekday. The Watchdog will exceed that goal this year, with the outlet increasing its coverage during Helene. And the Watchdog is expanding, recruiting for an additional investigative reporter.
“People are constantly telling us how much they appreciate what we’re doing and hope we can continue to grow. But we think we can do much better. There are a lot of people who aren’t reading us, and we continue to try to build that awareness, and hopefully, as we develop a marketing plan and get smarter about the audience, we’ll get there.”
In addition to producing relevant, fact-based reporting, how are nonprofit outlets engaging and growing direct audiences?
Index data show that organic search drives the most referral traffic to nonprofit news outlets. Organic search is website traffic that comes from unpaid results on search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. For the typical nonprofit news outlet, organic search drove 38% of traffic in one year, followed by social media (16%). The “other referrals” category drove 14% of traffic, and respondents most frequently cited NewsBreak, SmartNews, Flipboard, Apple News and Google News as sources of traffic.
Our data show that larger, national and global organizations gain most from organic search referrals. A small cohort of 29 nonprofit outlets said organic search accounted for 50% or more of their total traffic and, as a group, these outlets reported more average monthly visitors than the field as a whole. They were most likely to be national/global or state/regional outlets that prioritize explanatory or investigative reporting. Conversely, local outlets covering daily news and events were underrepresented in this group of organic search powerhouses.
INN Index data doesn’t explain this, but INN’s work in the field suggests that explanatory and investigative outlets often produce more "evergreen" content — articles that might remain more relevant over time because they provide deep analysis or context on broader issues. Larger, national and global outlets often have more resources to invest in search engine optimization (SEO) and improved website speed. And older websites likely have more search authority, visibility, and established trust via external linking and other factors.
For example, organic search accounts for more than 50% of website traffic for Bay Nature, a San Francisco Bay Area environmental media nonprofit. Each new story the organization publishes builds on 24 years of deeply researched, expertly sourced evergreen journalism that attracts curious local residents seeking to learn about nature and the environment where they live. Website visitors who become paying members receive a year of access to live nature talks and guided hikes.
Email newsletters remain one of the most reliable tools for audience growth, and they are incredibly widespread across the sector: only a handful of outlets in our survey — about 10 of 346 — don’t have a newsletter. Local Independent Online News Publishers reported similar findings in their 2024 report on local news outlets: 95% of their reporting outlets have a newsletter, up from 81% in 2022.
Newsletters are even the primary distribution platform for a smaller cohort of nonprofit outlets. In 2023, 13% of outlets primarily distributed coverage over newsletters, up slightly from 10% of outlets in 2021. And about one-quarter of the sector (27%) sends out a daily newsletter, reflecting a commitment of time and labor to the platform. Many small, local outlets are launching newsletters as a quick and nimble way to show proof of product and start building a core following (see the work of the Tiny News Collective).
Two-thirds of outlets reported gains in email subscribers from 2021 to 2023 (we’ll call them “email gainers”), with only 1 in 10 reporting declines (“email decliners”). The remaining outlets stayed flat. Of course, many email subscribers could be inactive or the list owner might have recently cleaned their list to improve deliverability, so we shouldn’t take this as a platform-growth victory. But writ large, we see email success span across the industry more so than other platforms.
In our email data we see trends similar to what we reported earlier for web audience trends: Email gainers tend to be younger, with a median age of 6 years since launch, and they tend to be local or state/regional in focus. Email decliners tend to be older and have a national/global focus. The distinction between gainers and decliners blurs a bit more for email, though, with many larger and older, national and global outlets also well-represented among gainers.
But unlike with our web data, with our email data we see a stronger connection between platform effort and platform success. A good majority of the email gainers (7 in 10) reported email as a top two audience distribution platform, compared to only about half of the decliners. More than half (54%) of the email gainers reported having some FTE devoted to audience development, whereas 43% of the email decliners had audience development staff.
Index data doesn’t explain why we see more of a connection between effort and success for email vs. web, but INN’s work in the field shows email audiences are more controllable compared to web or social media, with email service providers yielding a dataset that can be used for direct messages and product testing. And, it has long been established that email newsletters can establish regularity and loyalty with audiences.
Email newsletters are touted as a silver bullet platform for nonprofit media, and many wonder when email will fall from grace. We can and should be critical of the email hype — it doesn’t work for every outlet and audience, of course — but it’s worth noting where we see continued success. We asked survey respondents an open-ended question: What strategies has your organization found to be most effective in building its audience? Newsletters prevailed as the top cited strategy in about 1 in 4 responses. (There were 180 total responses to this question.)
Success with web audience growth and email audience growth go hand in hand. The web gainers were more likely to have increased their newsletter subscribers from 2021 to 2023, with 77% of them reporting email subscriber growth compared to 52% of the decliners. Virtually none of the web gainers, 3%, lost newsletter subscriptions.
Based on reporting with several nonprofit outlets, we’re hearing about a powerful web-to-email audience exchange: Outlets are investing in converting web audiences into newsletter subscribers through experimentation with on-page acquisition, and link-heavy newsletters are driving web traffic back to the outlet’s story pages. KPCW, a public radio station serving the greater Park City region in Utah, saw a 175% increase in website traffic following the introduction of its free weekday newsletter, “The Local," and 18 months later more than 10% of daily visitors to KPCW.org come from the newsletter.
Based on insights from a reader survey this year, Wisconsin Watch began experimenting with developing an audience for a new newsletter focused on state politics. The team uses audience segmentation tools to show non-subscribers an embedded newsletter signup form when they visit a politics article. SEO-optimization helps expand the reach of those articles and widens the pool of potential subscribers for the politics newsletter.
Respondents frequently cited paid lead generation ads on Facebookas a cornerstone newsletter growth tactic. We’ll cover marketing and paid growth in our last report chapter, which is coming soon.
Web and email audiences are the most common platforms today, but we’re also tracking the growth in the use of social media and the consistent use of events as audience engagement and growth strategies.
A majority of outlets (60%) use social media daily to distribute their content, while a third (33%) do so weekly. Facebook is used most often (more than 80% of outlets post there at least once a week) followed by X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. Many outlets leverage social media platforms to funnel audiences to the web or email. MinnPost, for example, uses paid ads on Facebook and LinkedIn to drive newsletter sign-ups and has a dedicated onboarding email series for readers who sign up via social media ads.
In our reporting, we also noticed a shift in how outlets describe using social media. Many outlets describe social platforms as a way to engage with users and audiences where they are, and less as a step in a funnel toward other platforms or small-dollar donors. In particular, outlets are leveraging Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to engage younger, more diverse audiences. The Lens, for example, hired a social media and marketing manager and a photojournalist to create visually engaging content for younger audiences. They have seen an increase in their social audience and continue to explore strategies to convert social followers into loyal readers.
Many outlets mentioned events and community gatherings as their primary way of reaching new or harder-to-engage audiences. Events are used broadly across the sector but not quite as deeply as other platforms, figuring in the activities of more than 70% of publications but rarely ranking as a top three platform for reaching audiences.
Event frequency has held steady over time. In 2018, 78% of publishers reported staging at least one event, with a median of four events annually per outlet. In the latest survey, 8 in 10 said they conducted one or more events in 2023, with a similar median.
Massachusetts-based Lexington Observer hosts events and sets up booths at local gatherings to build awareness and attract newsletter subscribers in a small, tightly-knit community. For Dallas Free Press, in-person interactions often lead directly to text message subscriptions, particularly in neighborhoods historically neglected by news media. Dallas Free Press’ pop-up newsroom, akin to an old-fashioned lemonade stand, makes the rounds at community events in Black and Latino neighborhoods, where team members' one-on-one conversations break down the trust barriers that stymie digital subscriptions. 100 Days in Appalachia holds forums and roundtable discussions to connect with audiences around specific regional issues, as well as sponsoring documentary screenings and festival events, concerts featuring regional musicians and artist pop-ups.
MLK50: Justice Through Journalism cites public outreach as a major tool for attracting and engaging new audiences, including people who had never heard of the Memphis, Tennessee-based publication before. MLK50 focuses on hosting spaces that center practical problems like housing, often distributing guides tailored to specific community concerns. At two 2024 Juneteenth events that drew more than 135,000 people — the South Memphis Black Farmers Market and Cooper-Young Festival in four unique Memphis neighborhoods — journalists from the outlet discussed their journalism and answered questions about community issues. MLK50 handed out branded Juneteenth t-shirts, story cards with enhanced visual design and QR codes, and one-page guides to navigate landlord issues and to locate lead remediation resources. "When we get out from behind these screens and in front of the people that we’re writing about, they become less of a subject and become more of a speaker," Audience Engagement Manager Melonee Gaines said. “I want to make experiences fun and informative — and they walk away with something that has our brand awareness on it.”
INN’s reporting and work in the field points to a common audience challenge that ranges across national and local outlets alike: At a certain point, audience sizes start to level off and plateau once the outlet has maximized their “easy,” core audiences.
For a local outlet, this could mean tapping into the folks who are already avid news consumers in a given community or, for a single-topic national outlet, quickly gaining the professionals working directly in the covered industry. Nonprofit outlets tend to have missions (see Chapter 1 on Goals) that compel them to reach the disengaged, serve communities otherwise not served, or bring new audiences into the fold. This means once an outlet grows a core audience, but not all of the audiences attached to its mission, its audience work is far from over.
Our reporting shows that many nonprofit outlets are in this stage of audience growth – reaching the early milestone of building a core audience, starting to convert this early and loyal audience into small-dollar donors, and then starting to focus on untapped or disengaged audiences. Usually, this looks like reassessing audience strategy and adapting new or more sophisticated, multi-platform audience strategies.
Six years into its journey, Block Club Chicago is undergoing an overhaul to better define the stages of its audience funnel. Lizzie Schiffman Tufano, who joined the organization in late 2022, notes that the outlet is starting to focus on lead generation and building its pipeline better. “Up until this year, I’d say we’ve done very little lead-gen and external pipeline building. My theory is we are nearing the ceiling of how much new traffic will flow in without us making any effort on that front,” she said.
Block Club is now focused on understanding its audience beyond its core base. By the end of 2024, it aims to map out geographic and demographic gaps across Chicago and develop strategies to reach those underserved areas.
“We feel pretty confident that if you live in Chicago, we have something of value to offer you,” Schiffman Tufano said. The goal is to identify blind spots in coverage and engagement, such as areas where people haven’t encountered Block Club's content or felt its relevance.
This shift has prompted Block Club to test new methods of engagement. The organization has dipped its toes into editorial partnerships with other local outlets, offered giveaways with Chicago-based event organizations, and hosted in-person events.
Shelterforce, a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit covering affordable housing and community development, recently launched a strategic plan for audience growth and diversity. "We want to ensure that we are reaching a diverse pool of audiences," said Schlonn Hawkins, who joined in 2020 and is CEO and publisher.
Shelterforce focuses on a multiplatform approach, leveraging webinars, social media, newsletters, and even pop culture discussions to engage new readers. A recent webinar Shelterforce hosted tied to the movie “In the Heights” used its themes of gentrification to spark broader conversations, attract new audiences, and drive newsletter sign-ups. Shelterforce is also considering partnering with influencers to make content more accessible and engaging for marginalized communities.
Shelterforce is rethinking its reliance on platforms like Facebook and experimenting with Instagram and video content to stay relevant in an evolving digital landscape. “We have to stay in this digital landscape game of information consumption,” Hawkins noted, warning against becoming obsolete like Blockbuster video stores.
Shelterforce plans to grow its webinar series and host its first in-person event, which Hawkins believes will attract a fresh wave of readers.
Nonprofit news outlets are demonstrating progress in engaging and growing their direct audiences across websites, newsletters, social media, and events. However, audience growth is only part of the story. The next chapter of this report will dig into how these organizations are measuring and tracking audience activity, with a particular focus on assessing the impact and effectiveness of their marketing and engagement efforts — underscoring that growth alone does not equate to success. The last chapter will explore strategies around paid efforts to expand reach, including the use of lead generation ads.
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