News organizations with staff focused on revenue generation had a median revenue 700% higher than news outlets without it, according to a report released by Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers on Wednesday.
The exhaustive LION report of its members’ activities outlines a framework for thinking about the future of sustainability for local independent online news organizations.
“One of the first things that I was excited about that we did at LION — and this really took hold in the industry — was when we started putting definitional terms around the idea of sustainability,” said Chris Krewson, LION’s executive director. “About a year or so later, we talked about these steps in the maturity model, these stages that our organizations go through on their way from when they’re created up until they’re on somewhat firm footing. And I think what I’m most excited about, after two years of these deep dives into these emerging businesses, we finally got enough data to start talking publicly about that journey in more concrete terms.”
Among the key takeaways: that the local news problem is a small business problem and that organizations are never too small to think big. The report notes that the biggest weaknesses of organizations LION analyzed was a lack of focus on business operations, and one of the biggest keys for outlets making the leap from “developing” to “stable” is securing at least three clear revenue streams.
Krewson said the findings shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“But the bigger point: There is no skipping of steps,” he added. “In other words, if a business doesn’t do something along the way, that thing still has to get done, whether they do it early or late. And in the process of putting something off, it’ll cost them time, it’ll cost them revenue in the doing of that thing, whether that’s the right kind of incorporation, securing the right kind of insurance, planning for growth, better tracking audience, growing their newsletter list.
“All these correlations that sort of are disparate things, I think we’re finally able to start putting on a chart and giving people discrete goals to shoot for so that they know what the track of their progress is. That’s what I’m most encouraged by, that our theory of this is proving to be true, and we have now thousands of individual pieces of data from hundreds of organizations over a long enough time period.”
For so long, Krewson noted, journalists had been discouraged from thinking about the business side of running a publication. But for those who decide to start their own ventures from the ground up, that lack of experience can pose challenges.
Simply trying to rebuild what a prior newspaper did while only focusing on producing high-quality journalism isn’t sufficient on its own. And with so many solopreneurs or small teams working with very limited resources, learning how to maximize what you have is all the more important.
“Figuring out how to deploy and not waste [resources] is a hugely under-appreciated part of the news founder’s journey,” Krewson said. “That’s been one of the very common recommendations in a sustainability audit for somebody, especially in the earlier stages, is to create a ‘stop doing list.’ And the only way that you can do that is by having a real firm grasp on what you are doing that is resonating, so you can stop doing and worrying about the things that aren’t. That is just a mantra that we find ourselves continuing to repeat.”
LION currently has more than 575 members across the United States and Canada, but Krewson said he hopes this report reaches the hundreds of other independent publishers across the U.S. and beyond to other countries encountering similar news-industry headwinds.
Perhaps in this work, there’s also room to consider independent content creators, who are becoming more commonly used sources for audiences to consume news and information. While local independent newspapers continue to decline and online independent publications stagger to fill some of the gap, creators are emerging as another part of the equation.
“I don’t yet know how to factor in the huge explosion of growth in independent creators, which have a lot in common with LION members, but may be a little more savvy on the platform adoption side, a little more savvy on the hunting for revenue side,” Krewson said. “[They] do many of the same things but deliberately don’t want to be news brands in the same way that independent publishers do.”
