Q&A: Anika Anand on how collaboration facilitates support networks for journalists

Anika Anand is the deputy director for Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, a network of more than 450 journalism organizations across the US and Canada.

We caught up with Anand to hear about what LION is up to in 2023 and why collaboration can lead to both sustainable news organizations and happier, healthier journalists.

WF: How did you get started in journalism?

AA: I got my undergraduate degree at UNC-Chapel Hill in general journalism and reporting, but when I graduated, I felt like I was a bit unfocused in terms of what I wanted to cover. I decided to explore business journalism and economic reporting at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. I didn’t necessarily come out of the program wanting to be a business reporter, but I became more interested in the business of journalism and the industry—revenue streams, different business structures, and how miserable some people were working in newsrooms, that cultural aspect of it.

My first job out of grad school was with Chalkbeat, which was then Gotham Schools, a New York digital news site covering K-12 education. I was hired as an education reporter, but I kept asking questions about our audience and impact—how did we know people were actually reading our stories? I credit Elizabeth Green, who’s now the CEO of Chalkbeat, with nurturing that line of questioning rather than being defensive or old school. She gave me the opportunity to be engagement director, and at the time, engagement was very poorly defined. I basically cold-called and emailed as many people as I could who had engagement or community or social somewhere in their title and asked them about it.

WF: How did reaching out to that network of engagement journalists help you early on?

AA: It was crucial. We all wanted to make sure that the audiences we were producing journalism for knew that the journalism existed, it was actually addressing their concerns and questions and challenges, and they were doing something with that information — it was having impact. Having that network was incredibly valuable because everyone was approaching those streams of work in very different ways.

I remember being so blown away by the work Ashley Alvarado was doing early on at the Center for Investigative Reporting, like getting people out in person to test their jewelry and telling them about an investigation they were doing on lead in jewelry. There were all these creative entry points that traditionally people would not label as “journalism.”

WF: As deputy director for LION, how do you collaborate with such a large member network of publishers?

AA: The way that I’m engaging in this collaborative work is as a director of an organization that is trying to hear from its members on a regular basis about what their biggest challenges are in making a news business sustainable. For some of our members, that’s just having enough revenue and funding to pay their staff. For others, it’s not knowing where to start in terms of setting up a strong operational foundation to run their business every day. I’m taking those inputs and feedback to work with our team and design the kind of supports that are going to best help these businesses become sustainable long-term.

In trying to serve our members at LION, we’ve had a lot of members say, I just need more money, if I had more money it would solve all my problems. We took that feedback to heart and designed some programs and opportunities for direct funding — and we learned that it’s not the only problem, there are lots of other problems that need to be addressed that don’t have to do with money.

WF: What are some of those other problems that LION members face and how are you working to support them?

AA: The biggest category of challenges that we see is around operational resilience. That’s everything it takes to have a strong foundation to run your business day to day: payroll, benefits, workflows, processes, systems, managing burnout, putting in growth paths for people. A lot of newsrooms are struggling with this, even larger newsrooms.

There are three buckets of sustainability we talk about: journalistic impact, operational resilience, and financial health. In addition to revenue in financial health, there’s also managing costs, managing risk, making sure you have a budget, staying on track — a lot of this unsexy work that gets overlooked because it isn’t directly in service of the journalism every day. I’m not necessarily advocating that every single person in the newsroom knows how operations works, but there needs to be an appreciation for that work, and leadership needs to create space for it to be just as important as the journalistic impact and revenue generation.

We’ve had a lot of successful experiments in helping our members through programs and benefits, and now our big question is, how do we scale that? How can we spread the wealth more across our membership and make sure it’s the help that everybody needs? Some folks are further along than others, and we have to right-size for that.

In some ways, the best way that this work can scale is all our members sharing the knowledge they’ve gained with each other. That collaborative and community aspect of LION has always been a strength. It’s something that we’re a huge advocate for and we really encourage our more experienced members to take some time to share back best practices and insights with members who are just coming up. They’re the ones doing this work every day, and while we play a role, nothing can replace that advice-giving from someone who’s in it.

WF: How exactly do LION members collaborate with each other?

AA: For example, when COVID hit, there were a couple of members who put together a support group. Ryan Belmore with What’sUpNewp and Doug Hardy with CT News Junkie started a weekly call on Monday to check in with the New England publishers, and eventually more LION members across the country.

It was as much about the business, advice, and learnings as it was just having a friend and being able to connect with others in a similar position running a small news business in the pandemic — wanting that camaraderie and just saying, ‘how are you feeling?’ That stood out to me because it’s not just about the day-to-day work, it’s also about having that support network.

We actually had two different sessions on this at our independent news sustainability summit this year — one was about preventing burnout and one was about building support networks. How do you make sure you don’t feel so alone in this? That’s at the heart of what we do try to do at LION and build that community for folks.

WF: What are some of the biggest lessons or learnings in your journalism career?

AA: Nobody has it figured out. There’s so much value in acknowledging this, so you can keep asking questions and frame everything as a learning moment. Using that language helps create a culture of learning rather than right answers versus wrong answers. Every journalist has the opportunity to ask a lot more questions and demonstrate the same sort of skepticism, curiosity, and humility that they do when they report. Keep finding those opportunities to learn.

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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.

About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.