January 8, 2025

The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) enters the 10th year of the NewsMatch fundraising campaign in a strong position to support the growing field of independent journalism, with a record $8.2 million raised for the 2024 campaign and over $5 million already allocated for 2025. Funding for the new year includes a multi-year commitment from Knight Foundation to provide approximately $3 million annually through 2028. 

Held as a collaborative fund at The Miami Foundation, NewsMatch operates with a high level of efficiency, disbursing 87% of dollars raised to hundreds of independent newsrooms that are members of the INN network. 

Through NewsMatch, INN and its partner News Revenue Hub provide training and resources to help participating newsrooms generate donations from their audiences and attract grants from local foundations. Between 2017 and 2023, participants leveraged $31 million in NewsMatch funding to help generate nearly $300 million in support from their local communities. 

“The early investments of $5 million in the 2025 NewsMatch campaign give INN runway to meet our fundraising goals for the program, ” said Karen Rundlet, Executive Director & CEO. “With the public’s need for accurate information arguably more essential than at any moment in our nation’s history, INN has set an ambitious target of matching this initial funding in 2025 to support INN members covering local, state, national and global issues.” 

While Knight Foundation has supported INN newsrooms since launching NewsMatch in 2016, the five-year investment represents a new level of commitment for the foundation.

“NewsMatch drives greater investment in journalism while highlighting the critical role of community support in sustaining local news,” said Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, President and CEO of Knight Foundation. “By strengthening the fundraising infrastructure of nonprofit newsrooms across the U.S., these organizations become inherently more resilient and sustainable.”

Knight’s investment in NewsMatch is part of the Press Forward coalition’s aligned grantmaking strategy, through which coalition partners like Knight commit to funding news as a means of strengthening democracy and combating the spread of misinformation.

Over the past 10 years, NewsMatch has evolved from its initial concept as a pooled fund offering matching gifts and fundraising training for all INN newsrooms. While gifts from the pooled fund remain in place for smaller-budget newsrooms in the INN Network—who in 2024 were eligible for matching gifts of $15,000—the program has expanded to involve funders that wish to set up funds supporting particular geographic areas, communities or coverage topics. 

This flexibility in directing dollars has helped to attract new donor partners, with four funders supporting NewsMatch for the first time in 2024 – the Henry Luce Foundation, the Tow Foundation, Barr Foundation and McKnight Foundation. 

The primary source of matching gifts has also shifted in recent years, with match funding secured by nonprofit news organizations in 2023 surpassing matching support provided through the national NewsMatch program for the second consecutive year. (Results from the 2024 campaign will be published this spring.)

NewsMatch has historically operated as a year-end campaign, with grants made to match dollars raised in November and December, but this year INN began experimenting with other moments to activate donors. INN members that signed up to participate in U.S. Democracy Day were offered a $500 match from NewsMatch to spark community giving: On September 15, 2024, the 47 participating newsrooms generated more than $57,000 in individual donations from more than 800 unique donors, a third of whom gave for the first time. 

“As the traditional media industry contracts, NewsMatch must innovate and grow to serve the public’s changing information needs,” said Courtney Lewis, INN’s Chief of Growth Programs, who began overseeing the initiative in 2020. 

As part INN’s five-year strategy for NewsMatch, Lewis said, the program will lean into training and resources to help newsrooms secure matching funds from community foundations, local businesses and major donors and also seek to diversify the pool of donors by fostering a culture of giving to news and launching regional and interest-based campaigns throughout the year that align with key giving opportunities.

“If NewsMatch began as an experiment, to see if people would respond to requests to give to news, we now have the proof of concept,” said Lewis. “But not everyone can or will pay for news, and so we must continue broadening the community of individuals and institutions who are willing to support it as a public good – something accessible to all.”

About NewsMatch and the Institute for Nonprofit News

NewsMatch is a collective fundraising campaign designed to transform how communities support public service and investigative journalism. By pairing a matching gift program with learning resources and a public awareness campaign to engage new supporters, NewsMatch equips newsrooms that are members of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) Network with the tools and skills they need to effectively generate funds from their communities through individual giving, generating local matches and more.

In 2024, 20 funders supported NewsMatch: Barr Foundation, DAFGiving 360, Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, Henry-Luce Foundation, Independence Public Media Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Kaphan Foundation, Loud Hound, McKnight Foundation, Solidarity Giving, Tow Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Wyncote Foundation. In-kind support was provided by The New York Times. The collaborative fund is held by The Miami Foundation, and campaign support is provided by News Revenue Hub.

Since its founding in 2009, INN has grown to strengthen and support more than 475 independent news organizations across North America. Watch our 15th anniversary video.