Q&A: Brady Piñero Walkinshaw, CEO of Grist

This week, we caught up with the CEO of the nonprofit climate news site, Grist. Grist has grown significantly over the past year, seeing a 51% increase in revenue and 94% increase in membership. Walkinshaw told us to what he attributes that growth, and previewed the site’s upcoming relaunch after 20 years.

First, tell me a bit about yourself and your path to Grist.

I joined Grist in March 2017. My background was not in journalism or media at all. After college I studied food systems and environmental issues. I lived abroad in Honduras on a Fulbright after school, working on access to nutritious food in urban slums and education issues. I came back from Honduras and spent several years at the Gates Foundation, working in philanthropy on food systems and sustainability, and thinking about how farmers in developing countries can produce more food. That was the first chapter of my career.

At the end of 2012 and into 2013, I was very involved in politics in Washington State around the marriage campaign, which passed successfully in Washington State in 2012. I ended up being appointed the next year into the state legislature, where I served for a number of years and continued to work on a number of philanthropy efforts on the side, usually focused around environmental issues. I ran for Congress in 2016, and lost a very competitive Congressional race to someone terrific who is doing a great job now.

Since then, I left politics, and had to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I started thinking that one of the pathways to creating positive change in environmental issues is through media and culture, thinking about how you can shift the scope of what’s possible. Especially for addressing something like climate change, it’s fundamental that we are able to broaden our horizons for how quickly we need to move on solutions to get to how we can get to a better, more sustainable, just future.

I ended up joining Grist, and we had to replace the longtime founder of the organization. I have led the organization over the last three and half years. It’s been a really exciting professional chapter.

You’ve said you “aspire to make Grist the most culturally relevant media outlet covering environmental issues.” What does this mean in practice?

Grist was started in 1999. It started as the first digitally native environmental news site in the country. It was initially focused around raising awareness and consciousness of climate change and environmental issues at a time — particularly around 2000 — when there was still a raging debate as to whether or not climate change was real and, beyond that, whether it was rooted in human action.

Fast forward 17 years to when I started, you now have a vast majority of Americans who believe climate change is real, and it’s rooted in human action. The question is, what do we do about it?

When we think about what we do about it, the focus of Grist as a publication became three parts.

1. How do we become the source to advance and talk about solutions to a more just, sustainable future?
2. How do we root that in equity? That means a number of things to us as a media organization.
3. How do we empower and engage our audience in a direct way to act?

A close look at solutions at a significant scale is missing in environmental issues and climate coverage. You see a lot of reporting around the latest and greatest hurricane, or wildfire, or sea level rise, or a lot of negative impacts around climate change (which are all real).

There’s been less talk about what we can do about it. I believe that when we talk about what we can do about it, the world will be a better place when we address climate change. It will be healthier, people will be happier, there will be a number of positive changes that come from that.

The goal is, how can you take the environment, which is now very much an issue in the American mainstream, and make it culturally resonant. It’s not some techy blog that’s about how you decarbonize the energy sector — which by the way, is extremely important — but how we make that reach a broad audience and make it very public interest, and use a voice that’s kitchen table and accessible to a vast majority of Americans. I think we’re missing a media brand in America that focuses on moving the environment into the mainstream in a positive way.

We’re really at an exciting moment as a publication to become much better known as a media organization that’s really centering a conversation on solutions and doing it in a way that is extremely accessible to many people. That’s where we’re going. We’re in the process now of planning a relaunch of the brand, which will be happening over the next six to eight months, and we’re in a period of gestation and what will be a more visible moment for Grist.

Who do you see as Grist’s core audience?

I see our core audience as having two parts.

1. Grist should be a lifeline to people who are waking up and thinking about climate every day, and thinking about what it looks like to get to a better, more sustainable future. That audience to me is going to be an audience that thinks about climate as their top issue.

2. An area of a lot of growth for us is almost a “climate-curious” audience, an audience who certainly thinks about these things, but maybe not that often or maybe in different ways. They might think of climate from a race and justice perspective, or from an immigration perspective, or a food systems perspective. But how is it that we can weave the environment in an intersectional way into a broad set of organizing themes in the country. I think that audience is broad, I think it’s young, I think it’s diverse, and I think it’s pretty broad-based.

Before our interview, you shared some stats with me: Grist saw a 51% increase in revenue and a 94% increase in the total number of members from FY18 to FY19, 80% growth in staff over the past three years, and “significant new programs and content.” I want to ask you about each of these stats.

First, can you tell me about Grist’s revenue streams and overall financial strategy? What do you attribute last year’s revenue growth to?

We’ve had the good fortune to grow a fair amount over the last few years. It’s because of the resonance of the strategy, the caliber and quality of the talent that we’re attracting now along with the team that we’ve built and grown, and the type of content we’re producing.

In FY17, our revenue was about $3 million, going into FY20 will be somewhere over $7 million. We have four main revenue streams:

The first is earned income, which comes from partnerships with mission-aligned corporate partners, like Patagonia. That revenue stream is only 2–3% of income. It has a lot of potential to grow. Our audience is really great to a lot of brands who care about the future of sustainability.

The second is membership. We have around 6,000 paying subscribers, even though all of our content is free. That makes up about 4–5% of revenue. We see a lot of potential to grow that as well.

The remaining 90% comes from foundations and major donors who invest in us at a more significant level. The most significant growth has come thanks to the generous support of foundations and individual donors.

Can you tell me about Grist’s membership program? Why did you pick that model, and what is included in a Grist membership?

I’m really excited about the membership program. There’s someone terrific on our team named Jess Alvarado-Lepine who runs our membership program. She’s done an extraordinary job in building it. There are a set of membership benefits: we do facilitated conversations with members, where writers on the Grist team talk to different experts in different areas. You get some great shirts that say, “I cared about the climate before it was hot.”

You also get a lot of member email updates about the different things going on at Grist, different themes that are on our minds. That’s been a lot of the structure of the membership program.

Prior to COVID, we would do some member meetups in major cities. An events strategy was also part of membership. However, events in and of themselves have not been a part of our revenue structure.

What areas of the company did you invest in with this massive staff increase? What are some of the new programs and content? Can you share the total number of staff?

We’ve really grown across the board, with a couple of really exciting new developments. One is within our editorial program: we have just added more higher caliber reporters. A year and a half ago we launched an environmental justice desk, and we attracted a number of people to report specifically on environmental justice issues, like Yvette Cabrera, who came to us from HuffPost, and Naveena Sadasivam, a Pulitzer finalist who came to us from previously from ProPublica and the Texas Observer. John Thomason came to join us from The Intercept, and he’s one of our editors on that desk. We saw a lot of growth in our coverage around justice and equity.

The second area is a new effort on data journalism to bring more accessible visuals to our storytelling. That’s been led by Clayton Aldern, who joined us from Oxford. Our data journalism initiative was initially launched in partnership with the data visualization company Tableau, which is helping to underwrite that.

We have also grown our fellowship program, so we have a lot of early-career writers, particularly writers of color, who come through Grist for six- to 12-month fellowships.

Another growth area is a new program that we launched about two years ago called The Fix. We describe it as our solutions lab. It’s related to the Grist 50, an annual list we produce of the 50 emerging leaders of the forefront of environment justice and sustainability. We get about 1,200–1,500 nominations, cull through that, create a list, and with those leaders — now there are 250 of them because we’ve just finished our fifth list. The Fix builds a network out of those leaders.

The community now convenes virtually — it used to be in-person. Then we create a lot of content that’s based on the solutions that those leaders are advancing, and then we publish it on the site.

The program is led by Lisa Garcia, who used to lead Environmental Justice in the Obama administration. The program as a whole has brought in a lot of resources.

We are also growing our innovation and growth team, which includes audience development, product, and creative. We recently brought in a new leader for that, Christian Skotte, who was a longtime director of Science Friday.

Can you tell me about the decision to acquire Pacific Standard?

We’ve respected Pacific Standard for a very long time. They did a lot of incredible work and are well known to journalists and an audience that really cared about their work. They won a couple National Magazine awards, and they’re a finalist this year for a James Beard on some really amazing work they did on farm workers and immigrants in the food system.

When they decided to shutter last August, we — along with many people in journalism — were sad and thought, maybe there’s a way to keep the content alive. It would be an opportunity given the intersection of our work and theirs.

Pacific Standard worked a lot on issues of economic, social, educational and environmental justice. We saw a lot of intersectionality with the environmental justice work that we do. There was a lot of desire to make sure that at least the content archives were kept on the public domain.

Shortly after they closed, we were in touch with the parent of Pacific Standard, which had been Sage Publishing. They needed to transfer the assets to another nonprofit for a variety of reasons. Over several months of conversation, it turned out to be a really good fit. Right now, we’ve agreed to take on both the brand and the archives, which we’re keeping public and maintaining on the Pacific Standard domain. We don’t know what else we’ll do. We’re having those conversations right now.

A lot of the Pacific Standard site is evergreen because it’s so resonant. They did a lot of interesting work on race and racial justice, a lot of that content is still getting a lot of traffic. In the short term we’ve been thinking, how do we keep getting that content in front people when it’s evergreen? But over the long term, here at Grist we’ll be thinking about other strategies or tactics there to look at some of these issues of social and economic justice in a broader way, always with the environment as our core.

And finally, the last question we ask all of our interviewees: What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media from an organization other than your own?

I’m really excited about the role that some of our fellow travelers play in nonprofit journalism, like Chalkbeat and The Marshall Project. I’m excited about what The 19th is doing around women and gender in politics, how they’re creating a model that integrates both the local and the national.

There’s a really important role for these sorts of sites who are thinking deeply about and moving the needle on the issues they’re working on. That’s a trend I’m excited about. If you look at the media right now, we’re seeing furloughs and layoffs. Where we’re seeing a lot of challenges, often it hasn’t been with those organizations. There’s a lot of confidence in the model you see being advanced by some of these other fellow travelers in nonprofit media.