Karen Rundlet
Executive Director and CEO
May 2024
Scroll through your social media feeds, and you might see a cat meme, the uninformed rantings of an old high school classmate, a data-driven investigative news story, and then, photos of your neighbor’s vacation. It’s all very different content, but when it lives on the same feed, it’s equated and conflated.
Reporting from members of the INN Network must stand out from the noise, especially in this election year.
If we think of our democracy as consisting of three pillars — a government that develops policies, voters who elect their leaders and a free press that informs the public with facts — then news is a currency, one that has been devalued.
Since 2005, the U.S. journalism industry has lost more than 43,000 newspaper reporters. Over the last 15 years, INN members have stepped up to fill gaps in news coverage, with membership growing from 27 news outlets to 450. Our records show that 90% of INN members are still in business after five years.
To keep serving the public over the long term, INN and its members must increase the visibility of these newsrooms as sources of fact-based, deeply reported, data-driven journalism. Not everyone qualifies for INN membership, after all. We reject about half of applications because they fail to meet our standards, which prioritize financial transparency, editorial excellence and independence.
As we look ahead, INN is working to solve problems in the field. We’re coaching member staff on how to increase audiences. We’re building out collaborations for greater community impact and we’re laser-focused on cracking the code to bring long-term financial sustainability.
INN is not just fighting for our members to report stories. We are fighting for greater awareness that nonprofit newsrooms exist as a solution for healthy communities and a healthy democracy.
Newsrooms in the INN Network
as of March 31, 2024
INN newsrooms serve communities in 46 states and other parts of North America — 48% local, 26% state/regional and 26% national/global.
Direct support to the field
INN secured for members in 2023
This includes implementation grants and stipends to members and their staff, interns and fellows, and NewsMatch funding secured by INN.
Total revenue of INN member outlets
Revenue estimates are based on survey data from INN’s largely digital-first news organizations and includes its public media members.
Funding generated for the INN Network through NewsMatch
since program inception
INN members raised $47 million from individuals during the 2023 NewsMatch campaign — the highest number ever.
People working at INN Network organizations
including staff at public media stations
About 37% of INN Network staff identify as BIPOC. See our Index DEI Report for more details.
Total newsletter subscribers
aggregated across membership
INN members produce about 23,000 stories monthly, shared by 7,000+ media outlets, and attract about 100M website visitors per month.
INN’s revenue for 2023 came in at approximately $4.2 million and our cumulative reserve was $1.4 million, which is within best practice guidelines and ensures continuation of member services in case of revenue volatility. Cumulative reserves are calculated as total cash and investments valued at year end, less amounts needed for immediate short-term operations. Totals exclude fiscally sponsored projects, which are broken out separately below.
All figures are preliminary and unaudited, rounded to nearest $1000.
In 2023, expenses exceeded revenue due to timing differences between when restricted revenue was received and then spent. About 81% of INN’s 2023 expenses were directed to programming, of which nearly $750,000 (18%) comprised direct support to member organizations, stipends to INN member organization staff, fellows and interns, and service fees paid on their behalf.
In 2023, INN’s preferred partnerships, discounts and relationships with vendors enabled every INN member to access resources they otherwise couldn’t and receive discounts of up to $6,800 depending on the partnerships and discounts they choose.
About NewsMatch
Each year, INN raises funds for NewsMatch — the collaborative fundraising program that benefits member news organizations. The project is fiscally managed by The Miami Foundation. For the 2023 campaign year, INN secured a record $7 million from 17 foundations and directed $6 million (86%) in unrestricted support to INN members. Of note, the funds disbursed to news organizations through the 2023 NewsMatch campaign exceeded INN’s 2023 budget.
INN helps launch and support news organizations by providing fiscal sponsorship, a program under which INN serves as their 501(c)3 umbrella organization and handles their finances.
(Rounded to 000)
| Sponsored Project Revenue | $4,147,000 |
| Sponsored Project Expenses | $3,830,000 |
| Net all Fiscally Sponsored Projects | $318,000 |
| Funds Released to Separated FS Organizations | $659,000 |
Full financials, tax filings, annual reports and audits can be found online at: https://inn.org/about/financials/
INN would like to thank the following 2023 institutional and individual supporters of our organization and programs. Please note: Less than 1% of INN’s grants and individual donor revenue came from anonymous sources.
Along with these major NewsMatch supporters, INN would like to acknowledge and thank the estimated 255,000+ individuals, as well as the 945 local companies and other funders who together contributed more than $47 million to 340 INN member news organizations in the 2023 NewsMatch campaign.
Starting in 2023, Google News Initiative made up to $7,440,000 available to INN newsrooms that participate in the GNI Fundamentals Lab for INN Members.
Photo by Key Peninsula News
funds per newsroom for audience development
The GNI Fundamentals Lab [for INN Members] gave us direct, actionable and easy-to-understand suggestions to improve our site for better audience, membership and advertising outcomes. It was also nice to be in a cohort and see that we weren’t alone in needing some improvements and also to gain inspiration from peer organizations.
— Laura Lindsay
Advancement Director, MinnPost
Our continued partnership with INN reflects our deep commitment to the sustainability of local news. Nonprofit newsrooms are on the front lines, providing communities with the in-depth reporting people need to navigate complex issues and make informed choices, particularly during critical times like elections. We’re proud to collaborate with organizations like INN that are dedicated to strengthening journalism, especially at the local level.
— Chrissy Towle
Director of News Partnerships, North America for Google
Nearly 350 news organizations completed INN’s second in-depth survey of diversity, equity and inclusion in nonprofit news, published in 2023, exploring demographic changes of staff and leadership, newsroom practices and funding.
Photo by India Currents Foundation
of INN Network outlets reporting detailed DEI data
The INN Index is an invaluable resource for journalism funders, and its DEI study last year provided an additional layer of nuanced data and information illuminating areas of progress and continuing challenges for the field.
— Kathy Im
Director, Journalism and Media, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
newsrooms in INN’s Rural News Network
In 2023, RNN produced three collaborative series centered on rural America’s nursing home shortages, workforce development and what some racially diverse communities are doing to change their fates.
Photo by Tucson Sentinel
These collaborations are win-wins for everyone involved. For us, they generate more reach, offer some extra funding and connect us to valuable networking and resources.
— Sophia Paffenroth
Community Health Reporter, Mississippi Today
We’re very likely to participate in future [INN] collaborations because they challenge us to be our best. They shake us awake out of the daily haze of running a newsroom. They reenergize us. They remind us that we’re part of a vital and thriving nonprofit news ecosystem that’s producing great work across the country.
— Chao Xiong
Director of Editorial, Sahan Journal
attendees at INN Days 2023
News leaders, funders, and civic innovators from 250 organizations gathered in person for INN’s annual conference, and almost all (9 out of 10) attendees agreed that the sessions provided them with actionable guidance and advice. Overall, more than 2,200 people participated in INN virtual trainings and events in 2023.
Photo by INN from INN Days 2023
INN Days are a wonderful opportunity to share, to learn and to feel great about the incredibly important work we’re doing as nonprofit news leaders. A mixture of cheerleading and serious and intentional listening, INN Days left me ready to return to the important work at hand with optimism and excitement.
— Emily Sachar
Founder/Editor-in-Chief and CEO, The Daily Catch
largest-ever pooled fund for NewsMatch
More than 250,000 people supported NewsMatch in 2023. New donors increased by nearly 20% in 2023 compared to 2022 and local match funding exceeded the national match for the second year in a row — suggesting that communities are stepping up to support the news they need.
Photo by Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
A well-informed public is crucial for democracy to thrive, and journalism is an essential service — a public good — needed to make that happen. NewsMatch allows us to get double and triple mileage on our investments supporting newsrooms and encouraging other donors to do the same.
— Brian Eule
Journalism Director, Heising Simons Foundation
My partners and I started The Frisc as a bootstrapped idea seven years ago — no big funders, no foundations, just friends and family donations, free tools, a deep knowledge of San Francisco, and a vision for great journalism that fights for a more affordable, inclusive and accountable San Francisco. NewsMatch funding has been critical to our survival, giving us a fighting chance to prove our idea to a wider readership and funding base and — most important — to make an impact in our city.
— Alex Lash
Editor-in-Chief, The Frisc
INN performed over 70 free or subsidized wealth screenings for our members last year. These evaluate a donor’s financial capability to give to an organization and are a critical part of the journey to cultivating major donors.
Photo by The Maine Monitor
donor names screened for giving potential on behalf of INN members
Building our organization’s Donor Engagement Tool was a great exercise for figuring out how to fundraise for the newsroom. We have a much better understanding of how to articulate the opportunities for support to our donors.
— Amanda Santana
Director of Marketing, Voice of OC
participants in Emerging Leaders Council since 2017
Designed to support and foster connections among diverse news leaders who will innovate and grow the nonprofit news field, the 2023 ELC welcomed 16 professionals from INN Network news organizations ranging from a local digital media startup to a long-established national magazine.
Photo by India Currents Foundation
The ELC has been an amazing catalyst for me already, and I’m so grateful. The opportunity to connect, compare notes and dream with leaders in the industry is priceless. The attention paid to helping participants develop as leaders and work on issues they care about is such a gift! I’m looking forward to using what I’ve learned to uplift others and help nonprofit newsrooms thrive, and I can’t wait to see the positive impacts of my ELC colleagues’ work.
— Alyia Paulding
Membership & Development Manager, Public Source
INN newsrooms must increase their audiences to drive impact and contribute to their overall sustainability. There are certainly challenges ahead. Profound distrust in media persists: 39% of U.S. adults say they don’t trust the media, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, a growing number of people are avoiding news altogether. And we know members often under-invest in audience acquisition and development.
INN chips away at these challenges through critical resources and services for nonprofit news outlets to help them grow strong, original and direct audiences. These include major media distribution partnerships, new platforms developed and owned by our field, and audience development training.
And while audiences from social media platforms are declining across the board, the good news is that INN members are expanding their direct, owned audiences from newsletters and search. Combined, INN Network news organizations have 8.1 million email news subscribers. On average, they attract over 100 million pageviews per month. Their stories are picked up by over 7,000 outlets, including commercial and nonprofit outlets.
INN’s continued focus on audience strategy — helping members better measure and analyze the audience metrics that matter most to their nonprofit organizations and helping funders better understand how investing in news audience development drives the field’s sustainability — puts us closer to the goal of sustainability and impact.
One thing that INN did is, they set up a dedicated channel to help us reach editors at Apple News to pitch our stories, which is really helpful because I had been doing that somewhat on my own, but the channel that INN set up was so much more efficient. It ended up making me more effective at it and saving me some time, which when you’re a small team, it’s everything. I’m able to talk to some of my peers, at these other audience jobs, through channels INN set up, which is enormously helpful.
— Nichole Dobo
Director of Audience Engagement, The Hechinger Report
We’ve seen social media take dramatic turns away from news content, signaling the end of a decade of easy distribution for news organizations. INN is rising to meet this challenge by significantly expanding content distribution options for member organizations. Through new partnerships with Apple News and other platforms, INN members are meeting audiences where they are searching for news. More than half of members engage with INN’s audience development programming.
INN’s major strategic focus around audience will be on building member news organizations’ direct, owned audiences. But a big audience is not the same as the “right” audience, and many INN members have a mission to serve those most in need. In the last year, INN has released a raft of new audience research tools for news organizations to better understand the constituencies they are reaching. More than 300 news organizations have accessed these tools, and more than 50 news organizations are working directly with INN to get the most out of them to understand the impacts from their coverage and activate their relationship with audiences into sustainable support.
This year, INN is leaning into elections and making sure that some of the most important reporting our members do is more accessible to more communities. We’ve seen scores of members engage with this work already, and it will continue through the election, through initiatives like On the Ground, a major content sharing network for INN members to expand the distribution of their election reporting. Not only do we expect this effort to bring in new audiences, but it will reinforce members’ agenda-setting ability and move important reporting into larger conversations about our communities and our country.
Sam and all the featured speakers [for the Attracting Audience webinar series] were just top-notch. It was all just very well run and executed. It was encouraging and heartwarming to know these folks are helping INN members fulfill their public-service mission.
— Nick Budnick
Editor-in-Chief, The Lund Report
Sustainability for nonprofit newsrooms comes when we collectively recognize and invest in news as a public good and not merely a transaction for a desired product.
This aspiration is a tall order for news organizations with no development staff and small outlets, where everyone juggles multiple responsibilities and where investors aren’t knocking on their doors. Plenty of nonprofit news leaders have a passion for journalism that drives the editorial work, but many don’t have the tools and skills to cultivate donor relationships.
And this is what INN provides.
With NewsMatch — a matching gift program that has generated more than $330 million to the field since its inception — INN secures philanthropic investments from national and regional funding partners and provides members with training to help them secure donations from their communities. INN builds fundraising and organizational talent through our Network Philanthropy Center and Emerging Leaders Council. And INN provides wealth screening and turnkey fundraising templates and tools, saving newsroom staff precious time.
As INN strategizes opportunities for increasingly scaled impact, a top priority is spurring collaborative action to more fully realize the Network’s transformative power. Beyond helping members expand donor bases, INN helps facilitate collaborations across its 450+ members to help them not only operate with maximum efficiency, but to catalyze transformational and sustainable investments in democracy and community.
A healthy, diverse mix of philanthropic and earned revenue sources is essential for nonprofit newsrooms to have a stable financial footing. Because nonprofit news is such a young field, its fiscal health requires broader appreciation and support that motivates people to take responsibility for its existence, much like commitments made to sustain the arts, higher education, and other civic institutions in their communities.
That’s why it is promising to see INN members garner more donations and other financial support from within their communities and networks.
The support signals community interest and value. Local funders and those focused on specific topics have the greatest opportunity to scale and grow over time. And national funders are crucial catalysts, driving this effort by challenging communities to support nonprofit news outlets.
Recent data shows this approach works. Since 2017, news outlets that participated in NewsMatch have leveraged $31 million in pooled national funds to help them generate more than $299 million from their communities. The program is an unparalleled donor acquisition program for nonprofit news outlets, with 415,000 donors making a gift for the very first time during the year-end campaign.
We’re streamlining INN training to help news outlets implement year-round strategies to cultivate large contributions from major donors and local funders. This includes focusing on fundraising fundamentals like building a strong board, developing effective cases for support and securing the right talent.
It’s also promising that more members are pursuing earned revenue streams like advertising and sponsorship. As a whole, our members now generate about 17% of their funding from earned revenue sources, and for our local newsrooms that figure is 26%. INN is focusing on how to effectively scale sponsorship opportunities across the field through partnerships and collaborative news products.
INN is building on what works to help better position nonprofit news organizations to own their future success.
When people think of NewsMatch, they probably are inclined to think about the small-dollar donors first because that’s where all the attention and all of the focus is on: getting readers to give and driving those donations. But I’ve really appreciated how much NewsMatch has helped connect our newsroom with partner matches. Those might be large donors, donor-advised funds or foundations who decide to give money to our newsroom via NewsMatch. So then we’re talking about not just the main national match, but the partner matches. That’s been, particularly in the last few years in our recent campaigns, a huge benefit to us.
— Adam B. Giorgi
Director of digital strategy, Daily Yonder and Center for Rural Strategies
We fund INN because their research and trainings touch so many different facets of nonprofit news. For us, it’s an investment in the overall capacity and health of this fast-growing field.
— Neha Singh Gohil
Communications Officer, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The work starts with urgent issues: artificial intelligence; local, state and federal elections; and how the two perpetuate anxiety in the industry.
Election coverage is a quintessential public service news outlets provide at a time when experts already are warning of generative A.I. content as a viral tool of election misinformation.
INN continuously responds to and anticipates what news outlets need to serve communities and establish trust. For the 2024 elections, INN is offering its eligible members access to real-time election results through the Associated Press, editorial support for covering elections and practices to foster audience engagement from Google News Initiative, and an efficient platform to share and republish election coverage.
Election-focused partnerships represent a portion of how INN members collaborate and innovate to find solutions to some of the industry’s biggest problems. INN also facilitates collaborations among newsrooms, including rural outlets that may lack staff and resources to manage extensive in depth reporting through our Rural News Network. Crucially, INN partners with news outlets to pilot innovative programs and news strategies. Embracing the possibilities of change is one way for news organizations to devise new models of news, which would include strategies for leveraging A.I., answering ethical questions about its use, and preventing equity gaps that disadvantage small, under-resourced newsrooms.
As we look ahead, INN will empower newsrooms to face the future with an innovative spirit and to replace fear with informed optimism about the possibilities to come.
From local news to in-depth reporting on pressing global issues, INN’s 450 members tell stories that otherwise would go untold — connecting communities, holding the powerful accountable, and strengthening democracy.
The staff of the Institute for Nonprofit News works to support the field in business education, audience development, leadership training and more.
INN’s Board of Directors is comprised of individuals elected to represent our member organizations and those from outside our network who are known for their strong commitment to investigative journalism and/or who bring broader expertise to help INN achieve its mission.
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