November 13, 2024
Nonprofit news has a superpower: beyond engaging and growing audiences directly on their own platforms — websites, newsletters and social accounts — most nonprofit news outlets build ways for their coverage to be republished and spread by third-party outlets, too. The majority of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) members (84%) offer their work for free to other media outlets, including both nonprofit and for-profit publications, radio, television, and podcasts.
Nonprofit news commitments to developing third-party distribution are paying off. The latest chapter of INN Index data shows that in 2023, INN members’ stories were republished by up to 15,500 media outlets across the country, more than double the 7,100 figure reported the previous year. This dual approach to story distribution — combining direct and third-party distribution — is helping outlets expand their reach and maximize the impact of their reporting.
This strategy for a broader reach makes sense: Many nonprofit outlets have a mission to inform the public on critical issues, from government accountability to environmental crises, and sharing content with other platforms expands the reach and impact of their work. Third-party distribution via established partnerships or syndication platforms allows nonprofit outlets to transcend their own readership and reach audiences who might not otherwise engage with their content.
Some types of nonprofit outlets prioritize third-party distribution more than others. Investigative and single-topic outlets, for example, whose longer-form styles of journalism don’t lend themselves to the high publishing frequency required to draw consistent direct traffic, take advantage of third-party distribution to reach a wider audience.
Larger state, national, and global outlets, often with missions to inform the public on broad issues, have also embraced third-party distribution. These outlets frequently use syndication platforms like the Associated Press, Public News Service, Stacker Media, which can distribute their stories to media outlets across the country. Local outlets, whose focus is often more geographically specific, tend to prioritize direct audience growth over third-party partnerships.
National and global outlets garnered the highest total number of third-party distribution partners, about 9,600, accounting for 62% of all partners, despite representing just 26% of the field. Local outlets, which make up nearly half of INN’s membership, reported a total of 1,100 distribution partners.
What’s driving the growth of re-distribution partners? INN’s annual Index data and interviews with members point to three primary drivers: a broader distribution capability provided by syndication platforms like the Associated Press, Public News Service, Stacker Media, more one-to-one partnerships outreach, and expanded tracking efforts.
Nonprofit outlets that have seen a steep year over year growth in the number of outlets that republished their content said syndication platforms like the Associated Press, Public News Service and Stacker played a major role in driving that acceleration. These organizations tend to be those covering state, regional, national or global issues. Although these platforms may charge fees for content distribution, according to some nonprofit outlets who have utilized their services, they have seen the benefit of getting their work introduced to a wider audience.
Syndication platforms provide nonprofit outlets with a one-to-many distribution method, helping them reach a diverse and often far-reaching audience.
For example, The Hechinger Report, a national nonprofit news outlet that covers inequality and innovation in education, reported about 500 third-party outlets republishing their content in 2023, a substantial jump from a few dozen outlets reported in the previous year’s survey. Nichole Dobo, Hechinger’s director of audience engagement, said the increase is a direct result of a partnership with Stacker Media. The partnership, which began in 2023, has provided Hechinger a new avenue to reach local audiences. “Stacker allows us to gain additional partners after the first-round partners that we typically have for the majority of our stories,” Dobo said in an email. “This new distribution channel increases the opportunity for us to reach key priority audiences including local TV stations, rural communities and middle America.”
The Daily Yonder, a nonprofit outlet focused on rural issues, also uses syndication platforms to distribute stories to radio stations nationwide. With the syndication platform Public News Service, the outlet has been able to distribute newscasts and stories to radio stations nationwide. Their work could be picked up by hundreds of stations, or in rare instances, thousands, said Adam Giorgi, The Daily Yonder’s director of planning and program development. The radio stations, which are often small, locally operated stations with fewer resources, do not have to pay to air content redistributed to them, Giorgi said.
“Definitely part of what animates our thinking is we don’t want to reach just the same old affluent news consumers, people who are already pretty prone to high news consumption,” Giorgi said. “We’re wanting to get stuff out to folks who maybe aren’t in the nonprofit news bubble. We feel like our radio strategy definitely helps with that.”
Giorgi said he has also been encouraged that several stations have consistently carried The Daily Yonder’s weekly radio newscast, which has been in production for many years — a signal that the outlet’s product is valued and serving a real need.
The Daily Yonder also recently partnered with Stacker Media to distribute their stories and get republished by a mix of mainstay newspapers and smaller metro publications, such as those in college towns, and midsize metro areas, further expanding their reach.
In 2023, The Daily Yonder reported more than 3,700 redistribution partners, of which 3,200 were radio partners.
“If we had to try to manually reach out to all the organizations that show up in our databases via Public News Service and Stacker, it just wouldn’t be possible. So those partners are pretty vital,” Giorgi said. “If we had infinite resources, we would be reaching out to people all the time and saying, ‘Use our stuff.’ But it’ll eat away at your capacity really quickly. So it’s a matter of finding ways to get our work out there without totally exhausting ourselves. We’re trying to cover rural America at large, so it’s a matter of how do we get our arms around that?”
While syndication platforms help nonprofit outlets reach a wide audience, many nonprofit outlets are building relationships with other newsrooms to broaden their story distribution, often reaching out directly to potential republication partners to pitch stories.
For example, Andrea Lopez-Villafana, managing editor of Daily News for Voice of San Diego, a local nonprofit investigative outlet, said she sometimes personally reaches out to outlets in the area that might be interested in republishing certain stories.
“I have done that in the past, just sort of reaching out to outlets saying, ‘Here’s our content sharing policy. We dropped this investigation. If you’d like to republish, here it is. You can use it. You don’t have to pay for it.’ And then, out of that, getting some sort of analytics on how many people read the story,” Lopez-Villafana said.
Several nonprofit outlets we interviewed attributed some of the growth in their republication numbers to a more concerted and systematic tracking effort. Outlets who have found value in monitoring their third-party republication metrics are investing more time and utilizing emerging tools for this purpose. Some of the methods used by these outlets include the WordPress Republication Tracking Pixel, Google Alert, Parse.ly, Truescope, a media monitoring platform, republication buttons, manual tracking through staff awareness, among others.
One reason tracking efforts are so important: Many nonprofit outlets we talked to agree that a broader audience reach can be an effective pitch to funders and donors. By showing that their content is being disseminated widely across various channels or reaching extensive geographical areas and audiences, outlets said they can strengthen their case for support and funding.
Overall, we anticipate seeing higher rates of republication again in 2024 as the focus on building third-party partnerships gained momentum amid a presidential election year.
INN has been investing in republication opportunities for its members, too. Earlier this month, INN launched a collaboration with The Associated Press to help member newsrooms expand their reach, bringing crucial, local election stories to wider audiences across the U.S. INN members’ politics and elections coverage is available via AP’s third-party distribution service called APT, allowing thousands of AP member news organizations in the U.S. to freely republish nonprofit stories. This collaboration extends the reach and impact of On the Ground, INN’s politics and elections republication service.
A major dilemma many nonprofit outlets have is how to accurately track third-party audience reach and donor conversion, and the impact of investing in third-party distribution.
“That’s like the million dollar question, right? Is there any way to connect the dots between these third-party distribution arrangements that we’re doing and the traffic and the audience on our first party platforms?” Giorgi of The Daily Yonder asked. “There are some hypothetical or anecdotal reasons to believe that those two are correlated in some fashion, that getting out there into the world more is going to improve your traffic. But at this stage, unfortunately, it’s really hard to be able to actually say with any certainty whether that’s happening.”
It can’t hurt to have more name recognition and reach, Giorgi said.
…
This blog post is brief summary of Chapter 2: Third-Party Audiences And Republication Strategy of the INN’s Audience Index Report. Read the full chapter here.
Know what’s new in nonprofit news.
Receive our weekly INNovation newsletter with top stories from newsrooms across North America, resources from media innovators and timely job opportunities, plus invitations to events.
"*" indicates required fields