September 18, 2024

The work of 2024 Nonprofit News Awards (INNYs) winners highlights people and places often missing, or underrepresented, in typical reporting: the 7th Avenue Tunnel in Olympia, Washington, where one unhoused man saved another’s life; alleys of a Chicago neighborhood where family members and neighbors searched for a missing Black woman; and a New Hampshire town where forever chemicals from a plastics manufacturer poisoned the water. 

From engaging community members at a swap meet in Oakland, California to raising millions of dollars to fund a local news outlet in Chicago, a common thread distinguishes the winning work: service.

“Service, whether it’s publishing a years-long investigation or texting neighbors in the languages they speak about registering to vote, sets nonprofit news organizations apart. For independent news outlets to survive, they need strong community ties,” said Karen Rundlet, CEO and executive director of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), which presents the awards to members of its 450-newsroom network and their collaborators. “Providing information that reflects people’s lives and is relevant to them helps news organizations stand out from pink slime sites, press releases, memes, and all the other noise that distorts or distracts from the journalism that’s essential to our communities and democracy.”

INN presented the fourth annual INNYs in Atlanta on September 18. Of the 11 categories, six are broken into divisions based on the size of the news outlets, while five categories have an overall winner across all sizes. The overall honorees included Nebraska-based Flatwater Free Press, which has grown rapidly since its founding in 2021, as Startup of the Year, and Maple Walker Lloyd of Block Club Chicago as Emerging Leader of the Year.

Walker Lloyd, Block Club Chicago’s director of development and community engagement, works with subscribers, foundations and corporations to expand the organization’s support base.

“Fundraising is no easy feat but it’s incredibly rewarding,” she said. “It’s not everyone that someone gets to say they fundraise for nonprofit news, but I do. I’m thankful for the opportunity to serve Block Club and raise awareness of the importance of local news.” 

This year, the Service to Nonprofit News Award recognizes two nonprofit news pioneers: Andy and Dee Hall, who are co-founders of Wisconsin Watch and have deep ties to INN. Andy Hall is an INN founder and longtime advisor. Dee Hall has edited various collaborative series and projects led by INN’s collaborations team.

INN is “kind of a mutual aid society for mostly small nonprofit news organizations.”

Dee Hall, Winner of The INN Service to Nonprofit News Award

The Halls, who are married, were investigative reporters and worked together at the Arizona Republic in the 1980s. In 2009, the couple started the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism — now Wisconsin Watch — in the basement of their home. Andy Hall retired as executive editor of Wisconsin Watch in December. Dee Hall is now editor-in-chief of Floodlight, another INN member. The long list of their achievements across the span of their careers includes leadership roles that set a solid financial footing for Wisconsin Watch, training and supporting the next generations of investigative reporters, and key roles in newsroom collaborations.

“The award is meaningful to me because I really believe in the mission of nonprofit news,” Dee Hall said. INN has been crucial to the growth of nonprofit news, she said. 

“We are humbled and surprised and honored to be named recipients of this award,” Andy Hall said. Previous service award winners Chuck Lewis, Mark Trahant and Karen Lincoln-Michel “all have played important roles in our own careers,” he said.

INN, he said, has grown its membership and fostered support among independent news outlets despite intensified pressures on news organizations.

A similar kind of resilience – producing relevant and impactful journalism despite industry pressures – is also evident among the INNYs winners. 

Some winning projects involved scouring through thousands of public documents and interviewing hundreds of sources, doggedly following every possible angle of a story. Journalists from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 68 media partners analyzed more than 3.6 million documents from the Cyprus Confidential leak to reveal the secretive financial networks fueling Russia’s war on Ukraine, winning Journalism Collaboration of the Year.

For City Bureau and the Invisible Institute, Sarah Conway and Trina Reynolds-Tyler combed through more than 1 million police records and interviewed more than 40 sources over two years to expose how Chicago police delayed and mishandled missing person cases that disproportionately affected Black women and girls. They won a Breaking Barriers Award from INN for that work – as well as a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. 

El Tímpano, which won the Breaking Barriers Award – Medium Division, examined why a disproportionate number of Latinos were kicked off Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program and to help further, shared relevant resources on its website and social media. Claudia Boyd-Barrett and Hannah Hough of California Health Report exposed the “minefield” that families of children with complex medical needs and disabilities face to access and use state programs meant to support them. They won the Insight Award for Explanatory Journalism – Micro division. 

The INNYs celebrate excellence in journalism as well as characteristics such as collaboration, innovation and impact, championing achievements from across new organizations, whether in editorial or development.

INN members’ service also extends to each other. 

“We’re kind of a mutual aid society for mostly small nonprofit news organizations,” Dee Hall said. INN members support each other daily, and the benefits of that collaboration and generosity has an impact beyond news outlets, she said.

“There are communities that INN members serve that simply didn’t have a local news source anymore,” Dee Hall said. “And so the work that we do together, often unpaid as volunteers, as part of the organization, does ripple out into the community in providing credible news to some places that have very little, very few sources of credible news. So it has a lot of impact all the way around.”

The award “acknowledges that the spirit behind the formation of INN is that we are stronger together than apart,” Andy Hall said, referencing the 2009 Pocantico Declaration. “That collaboration, that freely sharing information about what’s working — or, sometimes just as importantly, what we’re trying that’s not working — are essential elements of improving the nonprofit news sector in a way that supports democracy and improves the quality of life for people in our communities.”

See the full list of award winners and finalists.

The 2024 INNYs were sponsored by Google News Initiative and Canva.