For one and for all: It’s a noble idea. And a great business strategy for saving news
Here at the Institute for Nonprofit News, we’re often asked what makes nonprofit news different. Two events this month reminded us how different nonprofit news organizations actually are from other kinds of media — and why they’re growing fast, even as commercial news continues to decline.
On Feb. 2, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune announced it will start running stories from the Sahan Journal, a 4-year-old nonprofit news startup that is a member of the INN network.
“We’re excited to announce a new partnership with @sahanjournal, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color.” the newspaper tweeted. “Launched in 2019 by former Star Tribune reporter @mukhtaryare, it’s become a trusted source of news for Minnesotans.”
What’s exciting isn’t that this partnership is exceptional. It’s that it’s not.
The average nonprofit newsroom now shares its reporting with more than 14 other news outlets and platforms.
That means in Minneapolis and everywhere, nonprofit newsrooms are feeding the whole ecosystem of journalism, from newspapers and NPR to SmartNews, Patch and other commercial media. This is journalism that isn’t paywalled, isn’t proprietary, isn’t funneled to affluent neighborhoods just to drive advertising revenue.
Shared reporting means that philanthropic funding of nonprofit news comes with a huge multiplier effect built right in. And access to news becomes more equitable. This shared reporting is now part of the sustainability equation for all kinds of news media. It’s one big difference in nonprofit news and one big reason it’s growing
Another recent event: INN member news nonprofits set a record this month in sharing not only reporting but their deepest business data.
Each year through the INN Index study, hundreds of nonprofit news organizations do the business version of baring it all. They share data about their revenue, how they spend it, what kind of news they cover and the impact it had. This year, more than 95% of the eligible newsrooms participated in the INN Index — the highest sample ever.
Sharing this level of data takes a significant amount of effort and amounts to an amazing act of mutual aid. INN dissects their pooled data, analyzes the trends, and enables individual news organizations to pull lessons and new ideas from the collected intelligence. Many of these outlets are highly experimental enterprises. They are nimble and open. They ‘fess up to their failures as readily as they trumpet their successes. They learn from both and share what they learn.
All of this sharing isn’t about being nice. It’s part of a global business trend: the shift from business development of isolated institutions to building ecosystems, from stand-alone businesses to networked enterprises.
“Open networks can help ensure that no idea is left behind,” Harvard Business Administration Professor Rosabeth Kanter wrote in a Harvard Business Review study of how networks improve business economics.
A big reason news nonprofits are growing so fast has little to do with the usual catchphrases — a response to the decline of ad revenue, market disruption, digital transformation. In many ways they’re already on the other side of those challenges. It’s because they are networked and committed to collective growth. The network doesn’t just support many business models, it’s part of the model.
In our forests, big trees grow bigger by blocking light and water and shading out everything around them, much as legacy news companies engaged in unceasing competition. Now the big timber is dying. What’s replacing it are newsrooms that grow like bamboo — each incredibly strong and resilient shoot linked by a common root system, drawing nutrients and growth from the collaborative effort and shared resources nurtured by INN and similar alliances around the globe. They compete to be sure, for stories and funding, but it isn’t unbridled competition. They compete and they cooperate, the model business researchers now are citing as more successful in growing industries and economies.
Collective growth allows innovation to spread faster. It enables copy-cat successes. It speeds growth and helps colleagues sidestep mistakes, as new models for news take shape. It’s why most nonprofit newsrooms have three, four or more streams of revenue — why more than 90 percent of INN members survive well past their startup years.
There’s a myth in American business of the solo hero entrepreneur, the smart maverick who can move faster on her own. As Kanter writes, “American institutions have tended to operate in silos, looking inward to maximize their own performance rather than outward to find benefits in collaborations that could lift all.”
An enterprise is more likely to grow and contribute to shared prosperity, she notes, “when it is networked … when there are smooth pathways between institutions for the flow of intellectual, financial and human capital.”
In nonprofit news, INN builds pathways, and innovative news leaders do the heroic work of experimenting, finding and building new models and reporting platforms and then sharing that knowledge. Nonprofit news is entrepreneurial — and communal. And that doesn’t slow innovation, it speeds it up. This is what gives nonprofit newsrooms the resilience to restore and reinvent our news media. This is what sustainability looks like. This is the nonprofit news difference: no idea left behind.
