About LION Summit 2020

Photo courtesy of Maëlick/Flickr

Due to COVID-19, we are postponing our Summit for at least a year. If you purchased a ticket, you will receive a full refund by the end of April. Please contact Phayvanh Luekhamhan at [email protected] with any questions. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay posted on when we’ll be rescheduling this event.
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LION Publishers is a journalism association supporting independent local online news publishers. Our mission is to help local news entrepreneurs build and grow financially sustainable small businesses. LION Summit 2020 is our ninth summit, and we’ll bring together independent local news publishers and people who care about supporting independent local news.

At last year’s conference in Nashville, we featured keynotes from what Nieman Lab called “blockbuster local news innovators” including Elizabeth Green of Chalkbeat and the American Journalism Project, Roxann Stafford of the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund, and Mandy Jenkins of the McClatchy-Google Compass Experiment.

Our survey respondents told us that the Summit sessions gave them practical action steps they can use in their daily work, and that the Summit was worth their investment of time and money. Here’s some of what we heard:

“The content of the presentations were absolutely great. I was in the conference room all the time, ready to take notes and absorbed as much information as possible. I came back to my office full of energy and full of ideas that we can implement right away in our organization to improve our website and develop products that will help us increase revenue. Excellent job.”

“Very very nice job! Really appreciate the content and connections with such good peeps is fantastic!”

“I *really* got a lot out of this experience. Of particular value to us was face time with folks from Google and Facebook. Thank you for putting on such a great conference!”

We’re also making some changes this year based on feedback you all gave us. They include:

• Shortening our conference to two days.
• Including the price of the awards ticket with your conference ticket.
• Creating a Thursday training day with two tracks: One focused on aspiring news entrepreneurs who want to start a local news site; the other focused on local news entrepreneurs who have started their business and need laser-focused help with monetization.
• More time between sessions for taking a breather and meeting other folks.

We know that especially for our members who are small independent news publishers, deciding to spend money and travel to the LION Summit is an investment. That’s why we’re working hard to make this conference affordable and valuable to you. To help make your decision a little bit easier, check out our FAQ page where we did some math on lodging, travel to and from the conference, food and other expenses you may incur while at our Summit.

We’ll have more information soon on speakers, programming and other conference events. If you have any suggestions or questions, please email programming director Anika Anand at [email protected].

We look forward to seeing you in Seattle!

REGISTER FOR OUR SUMMIT HERE