By Ha Ta
INN member outlets are adapting their publishing and distribution strategies to reach audiences across a fragmented and shifting media environment. While web traffic faces headwinds, outlets are expanding their reach through content sharing via republication partnerships and direct-to-audience strategies like newsletters. Together, these trends highlight both the challenges and the growing opportunities for nonprofit outlets to connect with the public in new and sustainable ways.
A roundup of important statistics in this chapter:
INN members continue to evolve their publishing and distribution strategies to meet audiences where they are despite an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
Today, INN member outlets are primarily digital, with 70% publishing their coverage through a website — a shift from traditional print journalism. Smaller segments use email newsletters (15%), print newspapers (10%) and podcasts (2%) as their primary platform.
An outlet’s geographic scope of coverage often influences how it reaches its audiences, whether directly or through third-party partnerships.
Local outlets continue to prioritize direct publishing. Most local outlets (89% in 2024) focus on reaching audiences through their own direct platforms, mostly online. Meanwhile, state, regional, national and global outlets are expanding their reach by forming third-party republication partnerships with other news sites, print publications and public radio to reach audiences beyond their own platforms.
INN members expand audience reach through strategic republication partnerships.
As reported in the 2024 INN Index, the majority of INN members allow republishing of their reporting for free or with few restrictions.
In 2024, INN members reported approximately 25,000 republication partners. This figure represents all reported partnerships, not unique partners, because outlets may share some of the same partners, INN cannot fully deduplicate these counts. The median partners per outlet is seven.
National and global outlets make up 24% of the INN’ Network but account for 62% of members’ republication partners. In contrast, local outlets comprise half of the membership and account for just 12% of republication partners.
Only 19 percent of INN members are outlets with over $2 million in revenue, but they account for 63% of republication partners. Nearly half (49%) of those outlets are national/global outlets.
As we described more in-depth in the 2024 Audience Index Report, larger, more prominent national outlets have greater visibility and capacity to build distribution networks, while local newsrooms face more barriers to expanding the reach of their reporting. The fact that a few of larger outlets have been the main drivers in the network’s growth in republication partners since 2023 points to a meaningful trend: syndication and republication seem to have become a growing core audience strategy for the biggest INN members, especially as they face the steepest contractions in direct distribution channels such as web traffic, a topic we’ll discuss further later in this chapter.
Last year, INN launched On the Ground, a republication portal and newsletter, to tap into this growth in republication. Initially, the service was a way to help 90 members share politics and elections content. INN has since broadened the scope to include stories about the effects of federal policy changes on communities.
INN also partnered with Public News Service and the Associated Press to make member content available to more than 3,000 news organizations via On the Ground. Member newsrooms have shared more than 1,600 stories across more than 1,000 news outlets.
In addition to sharing content with one another, nonprofit news outlets are forging robust partnerships with their for-profit peers. Virginia Arrigucci, deputy director of local journalism products at the Associated Press, described this as a symbiotic relationship.
“Republication partners are either seeking ‘more content for my audience’ or ‘more audience for my content,’” Arrigucci said.
She added that for-profit outlets want more quality news content, while nonprofits are seeking broader audience reach. This mutual need is driving partnerships that help nonprofits extend their impact and for-profits to enrich their coverage.
While third-party republication is helping many outlets expand their reach, direct audience trends tell a more nuanced story.
INN members’ web traffic patterns reflect broader industry challenges, though local outlets show signs of growth
In 2024, INN members drew a median of 30,000 unique monthly web visitors, a slight increase from about 27,000 visitors in 2023. Median newsletter subscriber numbers rose to 6,000 from 5,800 during the same period.
Web traffic patterns among nonprofit news outlets are consistent with those of the broader media landscape. SimilarWeb, a data firm that tracks web traffic, found that only 30% of the top 50 U.S. news websites saw year-over-year traffic growth in May, while most of the top 10 sites experienced significant declines in web traffic during that period, Press Gazette reported.
In recent years, publishers have expressed concerns about declining referral traffic from Google and Facebook, as well as lower click-through rates – typically coming through Google’s search engine – following the rise of Google’s AI summaries in search results.
A closer look at the trend set2 reveals that overall, 52% of INN member news outlets experienced more than 10% growth in web traffic between 2021 and 2024, while 41% experienced declines. For 8% of outlets, traffic remained relatively flat, fluctuating by 10% or less.
When examining web traffic trends by geographic scope of coverage, local outlets were the only subgroup to show overall growth. In contrast, national/global and state/regional outlets experienced net declines in web traffic during the same period.
Between 2021 and 2024, national global outlets recorded the largest total decline in web traffic — a combined drop of approximately 6.4 million users. State/regional outlets also declined, though to a lesser extent, with a total drop of about 1.6 million users. By contrast, local outlets showed modest overall growth, gaining about 290,000 users.
Between 2021 and 2024, 34% of local outlets experienced a decline in web traffic, while nearly 60% saw growth. Among national/global outlets, half reported declining traffic, and about one-third achieved growth.
When analyzing web traffic trends by coverage priorities, we found that outlets focused on investigative journalism and news and event reporting were less likely to experience traffic declines — 32% and 39% of these outlets saw declines, respectively — compared to 50% of outlets producing primarily explanatory journalism. Notably, 58% of investigative outlets reported an increase in web traffic during the same period.
Outlets specializing in covering a single topic were more likely to see web traffic decrease, with 60% of single-topic outlets experiencing declines compared to 41% for those covering multiple related topics and 34% for general news outlets. Fifty-nine percent of general news outlets saw web visitor growth in the same period.
Newsletters are a key area of audience growth for INN members
While growing and maintaining website audiences remains a challenge for nonprofit news outlets, they are finding success in growing a newsletter subscriber base. Between 2021 and 2024, 72% of nonprofit news outlets surveyed grew their newsletter list size, defined as an increase of more than 10%. Only 10% experienced a decline of more than 10%.
Local outlets showed the strongest newsletter audience growth
The majority of INN members (52%) across all geographic scopes reported growth between 2021 and 2024 in their newsletter subscriber lists, with local outlets leading the way.
Local outlets showed the strongest growth in this area, with 78% reporting increases in newsletter subscribers. Those outlets represent 50% of all respondents that reported newsletter subscriber growth. This likely reflects their strong emphasis on cultivating direct relationships with audiences, particularly through email, as a primary method of distribution and engagement. State and regional outlets also demonstrated solid progress: 72% grew their newsletter subscribers base while 66% of national and global outlets reported newsletter subscriber growth. National and global outlets had the largest average newsletter subscribers gain, at about 22,800 each. That number is about 5,000 for locals and 500 for state and regional outlets.
Growth is consistent across editorial approaches, with investigative outlets leading slightly
Between 2021 and 2024, investigative outlets were the most likely to report newsletter subscriber growth, with 80% seeing increases compared to 70% of outlets focused on news and events or explanatory reporting. On average, investigative outlets gained about 9,100 subscribers over four years, while news and events outlets added roughly 4,300, and explanatory news organizations saw the highest average increase at 10,500 subscribers.
These patterns reinforce the strategic importance of email newsletters as a direct-to-audience channel, especially in a shifting distribution landscape where social media reach has become more uncertain. The broad-based growth across geographic scope of coverage and primary mission signals that newsletters is becoming a core audience strategy across INN membership and, by extension, the broader nonprofit news field.
1 This report draws on data from 376 of the 407 news organizations that completed the Index survey. We excluded data from 27 public media members because of systematic differences in how they report revenue and expenses, as well as four outlets that are not primarily publishers. See more in Methodology.
2 The 2021-2024 trend set is a dataset that includes data from all outlets that reported complete audience data — either web visitors or newsletter subscribers — for calendar years 2021 and 2024. Sample sizes vary slightly by metric, depending on data availability in each year: 229 outlets provided complete web visitor data for both years and 226 outlets provided complete newsletter subscriber data for both years.
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