February 15, 2023

Five members of the INN Network are the first nonprofit news organizations to participate in the Subscriber Engagement Index, a project of Northwestern University’s Medill Spiegel Research Center and Mather Economics that uses data science to study how news audiences build long-term relationships with news organizations. 

Understanding how news consumers build and maintain habits enables news publishers to make better business and technology decisions. The Subscriber Engagement Index goes beyond showing news organizations what works to offer unique benchmarks about how relationships are forming with their reporting compared to their peers.

The first nonprofit news organizations to participate will be Block Club Chicago, the Salt Lake Tribune, Civil Eats, 100 Days in Appalachia and the Red Hook Daily Catch. After the initial cohort, INN will work with Northwestern to open the initiative to more members and release new findings on how news audiences’ relationships with nonprofit news organizations may differ from their for-profit peers.

“Building direct audience has never been more important for news organizations, so we’re enthused to be working with Northwestern University and Mather Economics to bring more of the cutting-edge tools available to for-profit news organizations to INN members,” said Sam Cholke, manager of distribution and audience growth at INN. “We look forward to having the mission and approach of our newsrooms included in research about what meaningful relationships look like for news consumers now.”

The subscriber engagement tool is provided for free to selected participants thanks to support from the Google Innovation Challenge, the Myrta J. Pulliam Charitable Trust, individual donors to the Medill Local News Initiative and the Spiegel Center’s endowment funds. 

For more information about INN’s involvement in this project, contact sam@inn.org.