LNA Cohort Program

What We Do

During the six-month Accelerator program, participating local news organizations design and conquer a project core to their mission- and bottom line. In previous cohorts, projects have ranged from launching new digital products, reassessing distribution maps and building new revenue-generating programs.

In addition to organization selected projects, news organizations work to improve five key pillars: research insights, business strategy, product development, content strategy and leadership. LNA individually tracks each member’s progression through the Medill Enterprise Sustainability Assessment (MESA). This in-house tool is designed to measure each organization’s mastery of the five key pillars of the Local News Accelerator. Program participants will take this survey three times: once at the beginning of the program, once in the middle and once at the end.

In our 2023 and 2024 cohorts, representatives of each organization gathered as a group every six weeks to endure a day of collaborative workshops, peer feedback and presentations from Northwestern experts.

All LNA programs remain cost-free to participating organizations thanks to a generous investment from the McCormick Foundation.

Apply Here!

Does your news organization want to be a part of our next LNA Program Cohort? We accept applications on a rolling basis.

Apply Here

Our Clients

Whether a traditional media organization or entrepreneurial media venture, the LNA works to serve a variety of journalism entities across the City of Chicago on projects ranging from reevaluating magazine distribution to creating innovative community sponsorship programs, all in hopes of spurring a more sustainable future for Chicago’s local news ecosystem.

Each of our clients gains valuable insights into their audience and organization through participating in the Accelerator.

Learn more about their research and initiatives

Community Outcomes

Each organization’s success maximizes Chicagoland’s access to essential information for civic engagement and leads to an improved, more informed Chicago.

Improved local news coverage means…

…quality education.

…affordable, nutritious foods.

…a healthy environment.

…accessible healthcare.

….empowering employment.

…safe communities.

…thriving arts.

…togetherness.

Proven Process

Medill provides the structure, framework and financial resources proven to help news organizations to achieve transformative performance results.

Our system blends concepts from:

The Lean Startup: a principled approach to new product development that creates order by providing tools that continuously test a business's vision.
Continuous Discovery Habits: a guide to help product managers and entrepreneurs cultivate endless learning and consistent interactions with customers.
Measure What Matters explores Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as a guiding principle for management systems.
Human Centered Design: places real people at the core of design to ensure products and services resonate with the intended audience.
The Wisdom of Teams: outlines the development of high-performance teams.

My advice to other newsrooms is to be open to radical changes, even if they’re radical experiments.
Lisa Miner, Daily Herald Managing Editor / Team Leader for the LNA

Powered by the quantitative and qualitative research capabilities of Northwestern University, partner news organizations receive robust, bespoke research to inform their projects. Workshops and guidance from subject-matter experts on Northwestern faculty and staff allow news organizations to tap into the wealth of knowledge across the University—including our engineering and business schools.

At the start of the program, organizations in the Accelerator are paired with a professional coach, who guides the team through every stage of the process, ensuring goals are met and helping push through obstacles.

It felt like a lot of time in a good way. It gave us an opportunity to step back and assess the whole problem, and work through every part of it. Usually, we’re working at the speed of news. The program gave us time and space to think deeply about what we’re doing here.
Elizabeth Couch, Crain’s Chicago Business Director of Audience Engagement

Our Methods

S-curve

The Accelerator program utilizes the S-curve as a project management framework to ensure gradual, timely goal completion. Typically, news organizations experience easy early wins before entering a more complex phase as they explore more precise challenges. As new skills and resources are acquired, the team’s progress becomes more rapid in the final stages of the program.

MOST framework

The MOST framework consists of four key components- mission, objectives, strategies and tactics- that work together to allow organizations to accomplish concise goals through purposeful plans of action.

MESA (Medill Enterprise Sustainability Assessment)

Developed by Medill, MESA is a simple but powerful diagnostic tool that asks individual team members to assess their organization, using a 1-5 scale, on 60 competencies modern news businesses must master. This tool enables coaches to size up qualitative characteristics in quantitative ways. Coaches can spot trends, anomalies, patterns and gaps. News organizations complete the MESA survey several times throughout the Accelerator program. The progression of these scores offers sharp insights into team improvements.