By Michele McLellan, Vignesh Ramachandran, Ha Ta
Nonprofit news outlets have significantly grown their reach in the past decade. But they struggle to measure the full size of a growing audience for their high-quality journalism. A more comprehensive picture of the wide reach of nonprofit journalism is vital for the field’s economic sustainability. Better methods to capture the scale of nonprofit newsrooms’ reach and impact could catalyze fundraising and membership growth.
Data from the INN Index suggests that nonprofit journalism’s reach is significant. Together, the websites of 346 outlets in our survey drew at least 61 million visitors monthly in 2023, a number that corresponds to roughly one-fourth of the adult population of the US. We also count 8 million email subscribers, 5 million podcast downloads on average per month and the readership of 7 million print editions plus readership in up to 15,500 outlets that re-publish the work of nonprofit organizations.
In this chapter, we focus on how publishers track and measure the scale of their audiences as well as key challenges they face in documenting their reach in an increasingly complex distribution ecosystem. Previous chapters covered outlets’ audience goals, reach on their own channels and reach via republication by others.
We know that significant work is underway to develop new ways to measure audience reach and impact. However, the data and our observations in the field indicate that the ability to understand audience behavior is significantly underdeveloped compared to the challenging task at hand.
For example, according to our survey:
While the field in recent years has been heavily focused on increasing direct traffic, publication by third-party channels is a major driver of the reach of nonprofit news and it continues to grow.
Because nonprofit publishers and their funders place a high value on giving the public broad access to high-quality news, the majority of INN members – 84% of outlets surveyed – make their reporting available to republish at no cost and with very few restrictions. This means a significant audience for INN member content is not on INN member websites, newsletters or other products.
Conversations with INN members indicate that audience metrics from republication partners are notoriously difficult and time consuming to collect and track. In addition, as reach grows through an expansion of republication partners, measuring audience overlap becomes a more urgent and technically challenging problem. As a result, the scale and size of third-party audiences is growing rapidly but remains broadly outside of members’ or INN’s ability to measure, presenting unique challenges for members trying to understand their actual audiences.
As we detail in Chapter 2: Third-party audiences and republication strategy, publishers are experimenting with a variety of tools and combinations of tactics for tracking this readership, including using tools like Google Alerts, Parse.ly, media monitoring platform Truescope, adding WordPress’ Republication Tracking Pixel to their website, as well as manually tracking through staff awareness.
For example, The Conversation U.S. has found success with capturing the scope of its audience by combining direct audience numbers with third-party republication data to get a more accurate understanding of story reach. Joel Abrams, director of digital strategy and outreach for The Conversation U.S., said they are able to obtain those off-platform metrics in three primary ways:
“It does pay off,” Abrams said. Being able to demonstrate reach to funders “is really important and a key element in our success in getting and retaining them.”
But while Abrams said the numbers are helpful, his colleagues have found some funders are more interested in the quality of audience reached, like if a big-brand news website or newspaper republished a piece. To build on that qualitative data, The Conversation U.S. also tries to keep track of the buzz around a story: if an author was interviewed by a media outlet and quoted, if a podcast mentioned a story, what engagement the organization’s Instagram and TikTok videos have had. “The more stuff we do, the more data we have to deal with,” Abrams added.
Most nonprofit newsrooms are regularly using some form of analytics to measure direct audiences. We define regularly as track at least monthly. However, a significant number of outlets (33%) do not regularly track basic measures of their web audience via Google Analytics even though publishers identified growing this audience as a top goal.
Regular use of analytics drops off steadily with the size of the organization as measured by revenue. Outlets that raise $2 million or more in annual revenue are nearly twice as likely to use analytics regularly. Through the lens of geographic scope, national outlets are the most likely to track regularly and global outlets are the least likely.
| Tracking frequency | Percentage of outlets |
| Regularly (monthly) track | 67% |
| Don’t regularly track | 33% |
Percentage of outlets using Google Analytics or similar providers to track direct audience metrics
Indeed, 95% of outlets with revenues of $2 million or more rely on analytics, nearly twice the rate of those operating on less than $250,000. This disparity largely reflects differences in resources. While free analytics tools exist, they can be challenging to navigate. For instance, some smaller newsrooms have expressed frustration with Google’s transition to Google Analytics 4, the latest version of its popular free analytics tool, noting that setting up basic reports and dashboards is less intuitive than in the previous version.
Direct traffic metrics can provide valuable insights for news outlets to make editorial decisions. Evanston Roundtable, a nonprofit news outlet covering local issues in Evanston, IL, outside Chicago, often uses audience analytics on Parse.ly for editorial insights.
“The editors like to see what stories are the top performers, and not just stories, but categories,” said Mark Miller, vice president and treasurer of the board. “For example, a couple years ago, we launched food coverage on the site. We didn’t really do much with that, we found a writer to do both coverage of restaurants and other food related topics, and we can see in the traffic that that has really taken off as a category. So [audience analytics], at a high level, are of interest to either confirm or or knock down theories we have about what we want to be doing.”
Rhode Island-based ecoRI News routinely uses audience metrics as a point of information for the volunteer board of directors as well as to track the newsroom’s impact and monitor general audience growth trends.
“We track how many web visitors, how many email subscribers we have so we can [measure] broad trends in growth. And for editorial, we track whether people are clicking on opinion versus the straight up news stories,” said Joanna Detz, publisher and co-founder.
Digital audience analytics alone don’t drive ecoRI News’s editorial decisions, Detz added, instead, the newsroom takes a hybrid approach, combining audience metrics with insights from the comment section on their website and from real world conversations with their readers.
As a statewide newsroom covering a geographically large and dispersed state, Montana Free Press relies heavily on audience data to understand its reach, particularly in smaller communities. The organization tracks how its reporting is consumed, how readers discover their content, and how they engage with it across various platforms. This includes analyzing behavior flow — how people navigate to and interact with their stories — as well as monitoring content pickup and republication.
“Using as much analytical data as possible to understand who we’re reaching, especially in small communities, is important because Montana is a very large state and so geographically dispersed,” said Nate Schoenfelder, the outlet’s audience engagement director.
Direct traffic can also become a valuable source of revenue, although not typically in the way of traditional commercial mass media, which sells eyeballs and clicks to advertisers. Instead, direct reach is a primary gateway for readers to become small, recurring donors or members. However, only 25% of outlets track conversion rates (the number of readers becoming donors). Among those who do track conversion rates, publishers most often monitor newsletter metrics (75%).
There is an impact on the organization’s confidence in strategic decisions. Among outlets who do track conversion rates, 38% of newsletter readers became donors and 28% of web users became donors.
THE CITY, which covers New York, recently started tracking conversion rates to its newsletter and donations in late 2024. Diana Riojas, the newsroom’s audience manager for distribution and engagement, said the metrics have been a “game changer.” The numbers revealed THE CITY’s service journalism — like its explainers about recycling or archive of Mayor Eric Adams coverage — have converted many readers.
“Before we didn’t really know how valuable the service journalism was,” Rojas said. “We would hear from people, sure, but knowing that people are donating to THE CITY or even subscribing to our newsletter and want to hear more from us, that was like: OK, we’re doing something right. We should just keep doing the right thing, and keep answering people’s questions.”
We often get this question: How many people are consuming coverage from INN member outlets?
As we noted earlier, nonprofit news content is reaching tens of millions of readers on a range of platforms. But current metrics often don’t capture a comprehensive picture of nonprofit journalism’s audience. In an effort to go beyond traditional measures, some are focusing on developing their own metrics that measure their reach.
The 19th created a metric they call “total journalism reach” to more comprehensively capture how its journalism is consumed. Depending on the newsroom’s focus during a given month, it could combine a mix of website views, views from republications, views on aggregation apps like Apple News, views of newsletters based on open rates, event attendees, video views, podcast listens and Instagram post views.
“In our current reality, journalism exists in various formats splintered across platforms and products,” Alexandra Smith, The 19th’s chief strategy officer, wrote in Columbia Journalism Review last year. “People are just as likely to get their news on Instagram as from a news website. It no longer makes sense to rely primarily on measuring readership by traditional website metrics.”
Since The 19th launched its new approach, Smith told INN the biggest impact has gone beyond numbers. “It’s a culture shift more than it’s a metrics tool in a lot of ways, because the culture shift is that our goal is to reach people wherever they are with our journalism and [total journalism reach] measures that.”
Now that there is measurable value placed across platforms, Smith said the newsroom feels more engaged and rewarded experimenting with different formats beyond traditional articles.
For news organizations reconsidering metrics, Smith advises a customized approach: “No one should copy and paste the metrics that we’re tracking. The real power is in having those conversations in your own organization, to talk about: What is your mission for your journalism and products? What are you trying to do with and for your audiences? And then from there: Which places and spaces does it make sense to measure?”
Next City has developed its own version of a “total journalism” number, incorporating reach across all platforms, including newsletter opens, Apple News and podcast plays. “We want to think about what real reach looks like,” said Lucas Grindley, Next City executive director. Grindley said the goal has been to align who the organization is with how they measure. For example, Next City had many stories republished on partner newsroom sites and the metrics had to catch up to capture those.
The experimentation is also going beyond digital measures. Some organizations are holding focus groups or gathering survey data. The Maine Monitor pays close attention to how government officials and institutions are taking action in response to their reporting. The Pulitzer Center tailors how it defines impact depending on the project, measuring indicators like the quality of engagement, factors about story placements and the representation journalists bring to the work. While Resolve Philly has an impact tracker for projects, the organization has said the best way to understand impact is to ask the people impacted. They have done this by reaching back out to readers who have consumed their service journalism via text. City Bureau measures its success with how civically engaged its communities become, using a collaborative tracker database. “Several Chicago Documenters* have run for their local police district councils, demonstrating expanded civic capacities and leadership and exerting civic power — and we tag these activities accordingly in our impact database,” said Kristen Fallica, City Bureau’s director of communications. “For us, success means creating conditions where information, generative relationships and practical skills combine to restore civic health and drive the structural solutions democracy requires.”
* Documenters are citizens recruited, trained, and compensated to attend and document public governance meetings and civic events, as part of the Documenters Network. The Network, powered by City Bureau, is a collective of newsrooms and community organizations committed to participatory civic media, aiming to build a new public record by covering under-reported public meetings.
Only about one in ten publishers say they are fully confident of their ability to use audience data to make strategic decisions about editorial, distribution, marketing, staffing and budgets. Larger organizations also express more confidence in their use of analytics to inform editorial and distribution strategy (and they are more likely than their counterparts to regularly use analytic tools).
Some publishers say they prefer direct, in-person audience engagement over digital analytics. They believe qualitative, analog measurements — such as conversations with readers, community feedback and real-world interactions — provide valuable insights for their newsrooms.
“Web analytics come with so many caveats of whether something went viral in search or the stories that get the most traffic are not always the accountability stories that you spend the most time on, or the stories that are the most civically important. It may have had a great headline.” said Joanna Detz of ecoRI News. “I don’t make editorial decisions based solely on what technology is telling me, I often find I need more context. And now, when less traffic is coming from search, it almost seems like the analytics that matter are the ones coming from our direct-to-consumer channels, like the newsletters, which aren’t being filtered by an algorithm or by AI yet.”
ecoRI News covers environmental and social justice issues across the smallest state in the U.S. that only takes about 45 minutes to drive across. “We’re so local and Rhode Island is so small,” Detz said. “We also meet a lot of people in real life and sometimes that’s just more valuable to have conversations and understand how people are consuming our news.”
Detz said ecoRI News’ newsletter subscribers are likely more loyal readers because of the intentionality of signing up and consuming their stories, versus readers who stumble upon stories via search.
The Evanston RoundTable has been working with BlueLena, a digital marketing and revenue management platform, to analyze audience data and set up more targeted calls-to-action on its website, but Miller said the outlet’s core editorial priorities are pretty intuitive and clear. “We’re a hyperlocal news outlet, so a lot of this is kind of obvious to cover what’s going on in the schools, city government, the local economy, the arts and culture scene and food. Editorial instinct works pretty well.”
Smaller newsrooms have also expressed that viral stories can sometimes skew their data. “We will occasionally get some story, like an outrage story, that catches the attention of the national press,” Miller explained. “People get angry and start clicking through to read the story. It’s like a one and done thing for a couple days, there’s a ton of traffic … I don’t want to take the lesson from that, that we should be doing more of that. We don’t want to chase traffic. We’re not in the clicks business.”
Montana Free Press is a unique exception among small, statewide newsrooms with its strong emphasis on data-driven audience measurement. Schoenfelder said he holds a monthly all-staff meeting to help stakeholders all around the newsroom understand the latest audience metrics. He shares core KPIs during that meeting, including unique visitors, loyalty metrics and story-specific performance. “I always tell our staff if you want to get in the weeds, just ask, and we can set aside some time to do it. But otherwise, these are the things that we’re focused on.”
Schoenfelder said the Montana Free Press has found having a data-driven mindset has helped them detect topics that their readers are interested in that they would not have expected. After seeing chatter on social media about Montanans receiving high property tax assessments, the newsroom’s data reporter put together an explainer about tax policy and the changes. “The audience for that explainer was huge,” Schoenfelder said. “We did not expect something on tax policy to get such across the board traffic. It was one of the most read stories that we had published.”
Schoenfelder is the only full-time staffer focused on audience tracking, and a marketing contractor helps with social analytics. “Everyone is just motivated and making sure that their quality reporting is reaching as many people as possible or reaching the right people — and being able to have the impact that they desire,” Schoenfelder said.
Capturing nonprofit journalism’s full reach and impact is crucial to driving fundraising and membership growth. While funders often rely on traditional audience metrics, data on non-traditional reach can also make a strong case. Additional data about non-traditional reach will be persuasive to many donors, grantors and government agencies who currently rely on traditional metrics to measure a news organization’s reach and success.
INN’s work in the field suggests that in many cases, publication on a third-party platform does not result in more direct traffic to the nonprofit outlet’s website. Given current challenges to capture a holistic picture, it is worth assessing a combination of direct audience and third-party audience metrics across platforms to understand readership.
This presents nonprofit publishers with the dual task of ensuring they are making full use of available tools to track and grow their direct audience while also finding ways to measure the wide reach and influence of their work in other publications.
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