Image: Newspapers, Letters and Writing Implements on a Wooden Board, painting ca. 1699, Wikimedia
As traditional media’s subscriber base continues to shrink, nonprofit newsrooms are seeing steady growth. In the past fifteen years, nonprofit media has grown from just a few dozen to several hundred outlets.
These outlets rely on a different financial model—a mix of memberships, subscriptions, and foundational contributions—but they still understand the value of market differentiation.
Take ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom started in 2008. It is now one of the leading sources of online investigative journalism and has more than five hundred thousand subscribers. Its success is no secret. Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor, told the Washington Post last year, “You get subscriptions by consistently providing material you can’t get elsewhere.”
You also get Pulitzers—eight of them so far. Most recently, the site was awarded a Public Service Pulitzer for its look at the consequences of state abortion bans.
ProPublica is not the only nonprofit doing top-notch journalism. This past year, the Baltimore Banner won a Pulitzer Prize for its series of more than two dozen stories about the opioid crisis in the city. The Banner, founded in 2022, has quickly grown to become the largest newsroom in Maryland. Last year, the outlet grew its subscriptions by 57 percent.
Nonprofit newsrooms are also producing some of the most innovative journalism in the field. At The Outlier, a media organization in Detroit that was founded by Sarah Alvarez, a former Michigan Public Radio producer, the power to produce news is put in the hands of citizens. The newsroom trains and pays locals to report on local public meetings and events.
It borrowed the model from another successful nonprofit newsroom, Chicago’s City Bureau, whose stated goal is to increase civic engagement by reporting on—and with—local residents. As City Bureau founder Darryl Holliday wrote in 2021, “Journalism is a public good. Let the public make it.”
Perhaps Holliday’s participatory model offers a new way of making news sustainable, by harnessing community members to hold local power to account. One major issue breeding mistrust among media consumers is the dearth of local representation, so it makes sense that participatory journalism might offer a strength-building possibility.
Nonprofit news organizations also have to contend with the challenge of finding ethical and sustainable funding. Nonprofit newsrooms have a responsibility to find sustainable financial models, or risk losing their investment. Earlier this year, the Houston Landing, one of the country’s largest and most promising nonprofit newsrooms, unexpectedly shuttered after less than two years.
Despite twenty million dollars in seed funding, the organization struggled to create a cohesive editorial vision and a financially sustainable business. It was dogged by the decision to open in an area that already had a local paper, the Houston Chronicle. Finally, staffers complained of ethical issues. The Landing’s six-member board of directors included several of its major funders, giving them outsize power within the organization.
“The worry is that you make decisions out of fear that [funders] are not going to renew their initial grants,” a person involved with the Landing told Nieman Lab.
Nonprofit newsrooms are a hopeful alternative to the struggles of traditional media organizations, but in order to survive, they must contend with their own set of ethical responsibilities.
