At nonprofit newsrooms, is good journalism but sparse audiences a recipe for irrelevance?

With 2024 a year of acute financial distress and outright closures in the for-profit journalism world, some commentators are arguing that nonprofit startups have become the great hope for the future.

The continued growth of the sector is clearly a plus as legacy for-profit media shrinks drastically, but two experts involved in grantmaking I spoke with on background in the last month offered identical takes: There is an important hitch.

Too many startups are focused on quick success in producing investigative and accountability journalism, they said, but go light on marketing. The result can be a “Field of Dreams” strategy in which disappointingly few readers actually see the work.

Seeking on-the-record confirmation, I got a tough evaluation from Pete Doucette, a key executive in The Boston Globe’s early success in digital subscriptions, now a consultant for Mather Economics.

“Journalists are not very good marketers,” he said. “They do a story they are excited about and think most people in the addressable audience will want to read it — maybe 60%. No, that’s way high. More likely 10%.”

Jim Friedlich, executive director of the nonprofit Lenfest Institute, which owns The Philadelphia Inquirer and offers educational programs to the nonprofit sector, offered a related criticism. Startups typically do pre-launch community listening exercises, but “needs assessments are tricky,” he said.

“They may tell you, from a philanthropy’s point of view, what an underserved community needs. But that can be quite different from what the community will read.”

The big foundations that focus on journalism, like Knight and MacArthur, have been trying for years to get community foundations to expand from their traditional focuses on health and education to also come to the aid of local journalism. It’s working; more and more locally oriented foundations have responded. Another wave is coming with the five-year, $500 million Press Forward initiative MacArthur and Knight are sponsoring.

But inexperienced journalism grantmakers are especially susceptible to missing a hidden audience shortfall. If the cause is a good one and experienced journalists are delivering excellent stories, it may slide by a funder that a disappointing audience is actually reading those stories. Or that the grantees are offering selected metrics that make them look best.

Doucette and Friedlich said they do not mean to trash the sector. Both are among the many players working with nonprofit outlets on building an audience. But solutions are neither obvious nor simple.

A place to start is to look at models of success. Several I spoke with mentioned The Baltimore Banner and industry analyst Ken Doctor’s Lookout Santa Cruz. Tough-minded journalism is at the core of both, but it’s surrounded by softer community news content. The result is something like a traditional newspaper mix but in digital format; an attractive bundle for a varied set of readers.

Not coincidentally, the Banner and Lookout Santa Cruz have paywalls. The Banner’s full rate is $19.99 per four weeks, and Lookout Santa Cruz’s is $144 per year. That audience strategy can’t work unless potential subscribers see the mix of content as worth the price.

Established outlets in huge markets — The City in New York and Block Club Chicago, for instance — are also success stories in building impressive audiences after years of focus.

A second strategy has been axiomatic for years now — create a marketing/audience function parallel with strong journalism capacity. But the temptation to grab for journalism hits while going light on marketing remains.

Marketing may once have been a challenging but straightforward exercise in finding likely readers and raising their awareness of a publication and its purpose. But most nonprofit launches now must compete with other targeted publications for a share of attention. Expensive subscription entertainment services like Netflix eat up discretionary household budgets, and nonprofit income from voluntary contributions also comes under pressure.

Doucette said that Mather’s large base of for-profit clients and a smaller group of nonprofit clients are experiencing “plateauing” in paid digital subscriptions this year. It is not that they aren’t still selling them, but, come renewal time, dropouts may negate the gains. That’s a new version of churn, a top circulation issue for newspapers during the decades back when print was ascendant.

To say an outlet is underperforming is obviously subjective and depends on how its managers and funders assess progress. It will vary with the editorial scope of the publication and how long it has been in business. Then there’s the question of which metrics matter. The flawed, old-fashioned standard of unique viewers and pageviews remains a base indicator of traffic. There are now many other ways of looking at audience vitality — time spent on the site, return visits per month and others.

Using a combination of measures, my grantmaker sources and others mentioned the American Journalism Project’s Houston Landing as not seeming as far along as they would have hoped in terms of audience numbers. Houston Landing CEO Peter Bhatia and Michael Ouimette, AJP’s chief investment officer, disputed that.

Both said that the startup, a little short of a year into publishing, has exceeded internal audience targets. Bhatia also argued that Houston Landing has a nearly unique ambition to cover underserved communities scattered through a huge metro area. That mission required years of planning and will take years of execution.

However, Bhatia also told me in mid-March, “I just hired a marketing director. He didn’t have journalism experience, but he knows marketing and knows Houston.”

Ouimette said that AJP has similar startups to Houston Landing in Ohio and Indiana, with others in the works. “We realize that the process begins but doesn’t end with publication. That’s a topic we’re really working on.” AJP also hired a new vice president focused on audience acceleration earlier this year, he said.

The marketing toolbox is evolving. Newsletters have come to the fore in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. They are highly efficient tools for building out lists of potential subscribers. Newsletters cater to subject interest and may direct readers to individual “premium” stories that can be unlocked only with the acceptance of an introductory subscription offer. The aggregate number of newsletter subscriptions is in itself a relevant metric for measuring audience.

Older tactics still apply — for instance, co-publishing with other local outlets to get over the startup bump of getting local news readers aware of who you are and what kind of work you are doing. That may be less of a fit, though, for outlets that want to be dominant in their community and compete with a legacy site to be a primary destination.

There is an exception to putting audience numbers first and foremost in evaluating a startup, my sources said: When the ultimate goal is journalism with enough impact to bring social justice or other necessary change. Success in that dimension is measurable — by Chalkbeat’s open-source MORI (Measures of Our Reporting’s Influence), for instance. A new outlet with a series of high-impact successes may be given a little more slack on marketing and the pace of audience growth.

I didn’t find anyone in the industry disputing the importance of audience-building and how often it could be better. I checked for an opinion with Local Independent Online News Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News, each with more than 400 member organizations.

Chris Krewson, LION’s executive director, recalled that when he worked on the nonprofit Billy Penn site in Philadelphia, audience focus was all about social media referrals, pushing for content that would go viral.

“Facebook had already cut their number of referrals by a third or a half,” Krewson said. “Now, it’s mostly gone as they withdraw from news. … So what I hear on the circuit is that the way we talk (about the audience issue) has changed radically over the last three years. … The discoverability part is what really worries me.”

Sam Cholke, INN’s manager of distribution and audience growth, told me, “This is not a new problem. It’s hard to get people to eat their vegetables,” So the heavier content should sit alongside other kinds of material. That story diet “needs to be mixed and needs to be sweetened.”

He and Krewson both mentioned that these audience issues are now feeding dubious vendors of “paid acquisition” — mostly collections of email lists. One member organization going a different direction, he said, is rolling the dice by using part of its marketing budget to put up billboards.

Besides LION, INN, Lenfest and many other leading organizations offer coaching on audience growth — the Local Media Association, American Press Institute, Northwestern’s Medill Local Journalism Initiative, among others. Poynter, especially through its association with the Table Stakes program, teaches audience development and reliance on specific metrics to chart progress.

There is a superabundance of constructive ideas for solutions kicking around — too many to catalog in this piece. But there is another glitch there; many of these programs have been underwritten by the charitable arms of Google and Facebook. Google is reconfiguring where its grant money goes, generating less traffic and direct help. Facebook has been winding down its program entirely, along with its news feed. Other tech companies, like TikTok, can help but not fully cover what has gone missing.

I wonder whether finding the right mix of content may be harder than it sounds. Ouimette reminded me of The Alhambra Project, an early experiment in listening to a community and then creating a tailored news site together with them for a 2010 launch. Sponsored by the University of Southern California in an ethnically mixed city of 80,000, the experiment found that residents were interested in government but at the very practical level of parking and garbage collection.

Executing that kind of story was a stretch for editors and student reporters, accustomed to more conventional reporting on politics, disputes on issues and wrongdoing that needed to be exposed. Plus how could such small-bore coverage scale beyond the hyperlocal?

The project’s publication, Alhambra Source, ceased publication in 2020 when it became apparent that breakeven was out of reach.

Picking the right mix of metrics among many available options, as noted above, is complex. And, as the collapse of referral traffic from the big social players illustrates, success is sure to be a moving target. Just last week, The 19th, a gender-oriented nonprofit site, proposed a new mix of metrics that would capture “total journalism reach.”

I’m persuaded that cultivating and measuring the audience, always worth attention, has become the paramount issue in 2024 and will remain so for years. It certainly will play a big role in helping new funders determine where to distribute the Press Forward money.

Lenfest’s Friedlich left me with an optimistic take on where the sector’s audience efforts are headed:

“It’s no secret that nonprofit news startups often struggle, at least initially, to attract a broad audience of news consumers. It takes time to build both trust and a new brand and, admittedly, journalists are not always the best marketers.

“At the same time, it’s important to recognize that public service journalism, especially investigative news sites, often ‘punch above their weight class,’ creating impact far in excess of the size of their audiences.

“It takes patience, editorial acumen, business expertise, and capital to build an audience for any lasting media brand, and public service journalism is certainly no exception.”