Five trends in 2022: A year in review from Impact Architects’ projects
At Impact Architects, we help to build and measure high-impact strategies that contribute to social change. Our projects vary greatly depending on the needs of our partners in journalism, media, and philanthropy — from program evaluation and inclusive content analyses, to creating custom impact frameworks, to supporting newsrooms to deploy IA’s Impact Tracker. And in 2022, we saw a year of tremendous change as organizations dealt with an ongoing pandemic, and political, economic, and social change around the world.
Here are five things we’ve seen and learned from our work with social change organizations this year:
Equitable Journalism is becoming more defined, and it is rising to the top of strategic priorities for funders.
Philanthropic organizations have large dollar amounts that they spend on programs to advance social, economic, and political equity in the world. Understanding their approaches to the work, and evaluating that work’s success, therefore makes not just ideological sense but economic sense as well. Equitable journalism has been a popular phrase to refer to shifts in strategy focused on supporting organizations and approaches that center equity, with community building, engagement, reporting, and content distribution, often developed in specific contexts to serve specific communities who have been historically marginalized, excluded, and misrepresented by journalism institutions, including Black communities, Indigenous communities, people of color, and women. We’ve seen two big examples of how philanthropic organizations are approaching equitable journalism this year with projects we worked on with Democracy Fund and Ford Foundation.
In 2022 Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program underwent a strategy refresh with implications for all program areas. Our evaluation of Democracy Fund’s support for local news ecosystems from 2016–2021 — increased collaboration relationships among newsrooms and audiences, adaptive capacity, and sustainability — were most evident in nonprofit and independent newsrooms that hold at their core the values and approaches of equitable journalism.
In Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression Journalism Program, they made critical assumptions about the role that women, people of color, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, and people from underserved rural communities play in developing new models of journalism that will be trusted by people in their communities and people in the U.S. more broadly. In our program evaluation, we found that their assumptions largely paid off.
Inclusive content analyses go beyond source audits and needed for news organizations to understand their progress.
News organizations across the country are striving for inclusive language in their reporting and processes in an effort to make their reporting more reflective of and beneficial to the communities they serve. A content analysis helps them assess if they’re reaching their goals. For example, in summer 2022, we worked with KPCC/LAist (part of Southern California Public Radio) to develop an inclusive content analysis to measure the degree to which the organization was adhering to its own Dialogue Style Guide, which emphasizes story framing and inclusive language. In a random, representative sample of audio, digital, and newsletter content produced from July through December 2021, less than three percent of stories include content contrary to KPCC/LAist’s standards for inclusivity, a finding which will help them meet their long term goals. By going beyond a source audit, KPCC/LAist’s inclusive content analysis helped them truly understand their coverage and opportunity areas.
If your newsroom would like help to conduct an assessment, contact Impact Architects.
Philanthropic institutions are increasingly funding commercial media.
We explored philanthropic support for commercial newsrooms from 2016–2021 with The Guardian and found that while the total percentage of all philanthropic dollars to journalism going to commercial media remains small (about 3%, or $65.8 million), that funding tends to be restricted grants to support specific projects or innovation efforts, whereas funding to nonprofit newsrooms is more likely to be unrestricted and/or focused on organizational sustainability. With this understanding, commercial newsrooms seeking philanthropic support can address the administrative and operational requirements that come with that territory and review the guide The Guardian developed for those entering into this space.
There is a strong growth in community-driven local news.
Rating the health of local news largely depends on who you ask, but we’re seeing indicators that signal the increasing appetite for community-based journalism. For instance, the Institute for Nonprofit News’ 2022 survey revealed nonprofit news organizations have seen extensive growth throughout the U.S., with a significant portion of that driven by local news outlets serving smaller markets. Indeed, that growth is reflected among member-driven organizations: INN reports its membership has doubled to more than 400 organizations in the past four years, and Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers reports a 71 percent growth in membership year over year, accompanied by a 33 percent median increase in annual revenue for those members.
As more local news outlets emerge to represent smaller markets around the country, a continuing question will be on their financial sustainability, especially as the long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on local news and the industry more broadly is still to be determined. New models like that of National Trust for Local News, which invested in its first projects in 2021 and is focused on developing new business models and ownership structures, are providing innovative approaches to the question. We’re exploring this trend as well through projects like our evaluation of local news sustainability with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which analyzes the effects of grantees’ interventions particularly with respect to audience and revenue growth.
The future of news is impact-driven.
At Impact Architects, impact is central to our work and inspired the development of the IA Impact Tracker tool. At a time when newsrooms around the world are facing challenges of trust, sustainability, and engagement, documenting their real-world change as a result of their reporting can help news organizations demonstrate their value to their audiences and their funders.
As newsrooms develop new tools and techniques to track their work, we’re excited about our team’s IA Impact Tracker, acquired from the Center for Investigative Reporting by our founder (and the Impact Tracker’s creator, Lindsay Green-Barber). As a tool, it helps news organizations move beyond pageviews to assess their role and impact in their communities anywhere from the individual to structural levels–but it also helps inform an approach to the work and center impact as a core tenet in newsrooms. The IA Impact Tracker is available for free for newsrooms and social change organizations to adopt, or you can partner with us to develop your organization’s impact framework and customize your tracker tool.
Have thoughts on what to expect in 2023? Get in touch with us or sign up to receive our monthly newsletter about trends, projects, and lessons learned in media development.
