Fiscal sponsors can help news businesses receive tax-deductible donations from foundations and other philanthropic givers even when those news businesses don’t have a 501(c)3 status. We wrote more here about what to consider when researching whether a fiscal sponsorship is right for your business, and the Pivot Fund shared some more useful tips on finding a fiscal sponsor. Today, we’re sharing a list of options we’ve confirmed fiscally sponsor news businesses. 

This is not a comprehensive list, but hopefully serves as a good starting point for researching fiscal sponsor options. You can also check out the Fiscal Sponsor Directory to consider other options that are local to your business.

Got others to recommend? Let us know at hello@lionpublishers.com.

1. Tiny News Collective

• Rate: 5% for LION members, plus an annual service fee rate, which will soon be determined (Note: other rates apply for Tiny News Collective members and clients)
• Eligibility requirement: TNC offers fiscal sponsorship to publishing and non-publishing projects that are 1) legally formed in the U.S. or a U.S. territory and 2) grounded in the charitable purpose of undertaking and supporting local journalism and public information access in a mission-oriented manner. Potential fiscal sponsees are required to submit an application via this form. Staff review applications and then make recommendations to the TNC leadership and board. Upon approval by leadership and a majority vote on the TNC Board of Directors, the applicant will be offered a fiscal sponsorship agreement.
• Types of organizations served: TNC offers fiscal sponsorship to a broad range of journalism and news media projects and programs, including those producing journalism and those supporting the journalism, news, and civic media ecosystem across the U.S. Many TNC clients are pre-launch and early-stage startups with a sole founder or small organizations with a city or county-wide coverage area.
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship: TNC offers Model C Fiscal Sponsorship and specific technical assistance for applying for grants and contributions from private foundations, public charities, and individual donors.
• Additional information: Please contact TNC’s finance manager with any inquiries. 

2. Alternative Newsweekly Foundation

• Rate: 7%–10%, plus transaction and banking fees, and other possible expenses. Sliding scale is based on project. Rates are negotiable.
• Eligibility criteria: ANF supports high-quality, independent, fact-checked journalism and media that is aligned with ANF’s mission and values.
• Types of organizations served: Local and national newsrooms and investigative journalism outlets, and the activities that support them.
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship: 
  • Bookkeeping  
  • Crowdfunding platform and support  
  • Grant research and application support  
  • Organizational development
  • Receiving stock and other noncash donations
  • Additional services as needed
• Learn more: Fiscal Sponsorship Models; contact Executive Director Ellen Meany at executivedirector@altnewsfoundation.org 
• Additional information: ANF offers Model A (Direct Project); Model C (Preapproved Grant Relationship); and Model D (Group Exemption)

3. Players Philanthropy Fund

• Rate: 6%, plus a $600 annual technology fee (additional fees are detailed here)
• Eligibility criteria: Minimum $25,000 annual budget 
• Types of organizations served: Arts and culture; children, youth, and families; disaster relief; drug treatment; and many more listed here
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship (more detail here):
  • Accounting
  • Insurance
  • Security
  • Charitable status and IRS compliance
  • Legal
  • Customer service and best practice philanthropy
  • Grant application support
  • Event support
  • Technology
  • White-label service (For example, donors can make their checks payable to your foundation name, as opposed to the fiscal sponsorship’s name)
• Learn more: Fiscal Sponsorship Overview and Fiscal Sponsorship Application
• Additional information: PPF offers Model A (Direct Project) and Model C (Preapproved Grant Relationship)

4. Journalism Funding Partners

• Rate: 7%
• Eligibility criteria: Funds must be raised for a specific newsroom need, such as an education beat, environmental coverage, an investigative desk, etc., that is additive to what already is being done by the news organization, and not for business- or operations-facing expenses. 
• Types of organizations served: Only news organizations, from small weeklies to the Associated Press
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship: JFP serves funders by making sure the funds are spent on desired journalistic areas they support, and also by making sure the news organizations provide progress updates of coverage, impact, and reach. If JFP learns that the news organization is not meeting grant specifics — such as “deciding” to furlough the funded position without pay for two weeks as part of a company-wide mandate, JFP claws back that money from the news organization so the funding can go to another newsroom to fulfill the funder’s needs. JFP serves news organizations by keeping funders far from anything that would endanger independent editorial integrity. This includes the job description, hiring, and oversight of funded positions. Funders do not talk directly to news organizations unless it is through JFP. In cases of general or targeted fundraising (with individuals or local foundations), JFP is regularly part of that conversation to bring credibility to the effort. 
• Learn more: https://www.jfp-local.org 
• Additional information: JFP says it’s grown the amount of funding by 50 percent year over year for the past three years.

5. Community Partners

• Rate: 9% of project revenues from private sources, and 15% of project revenues from public sources
• Eligibility criteria:
  • Charitable intent
  • Able and committed leadership
  • Potential for significant community impact
  • Has an advisory group
  • Strong prospects for growth and financial sustainability
  • Other: We look for a fit between the project leadership’s experience and ability to mobilize resources, the project concept, and Community Partners’ mission. We do not sponsor commercial or profit-making ventures, one-time-only events, and film or video projects unless they are integral to a larger direct-service program. See our website for criteria for religious projects.
• Types of organizations served: Arts and culture; children, youth, and families; economic development; and more
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship:
  • Community Partners offers Model A and Model C fiscal sponsorship.
    • Services offered under Model A:
      • Auditing
      • Bill paying
      • Bookkeeping/accounting
      • Human resource management
      • Insurance
      • Organizational development
      • Tax reporting
      • Other: human resources services, programmatic services, and communications services
    • Services offered under Model C:
      • Donation processing
      • Grants management
      • Bookkeeping/accounting
      • Auditing
      • IRS 990 tax filing
      • Guidance and networking
• Learn more: How to apply
• Additional information: N/A

6. Local Media Association

• Rate: 7% of funds raised
• Eligibility criteria: LMA serves as a fiscal sponsor for select journalism projects that demonstrate genuine charitable or educational intent, committed leadership, and potential for significant community impact.
• Types of organizations served: Sponsored projects often focus on enterprise or investigative reporting on critical community issues such as social justice, poverty, the unhoused, education, or health inequities.
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship:
  • The ability to solicit and receive tax-deductible donations and grants.  
  • The ability to process credit card or check donations, stock transfers, and corporate matching gifts. 
  • Use of the Givebutter platform for crowdsourced donations. 
  • Use of LMA’s registered charitable status in most states, allowing projects to accept donations from across the U.S. 
  • An annual 990 filing with the IRS for all charitable funds raised.
  • An annual financial audit, as mandated by the IRS.
  • Donor-acknowledgment letters for donations over $250.
• Learn more: LMA Fiscal sponsorship programs and Inquiry Form
• Additional information: N/A

7. The Lenfest Institute for Journalism

• Rate: For each discrete contribution, the sponsor shall retain the greater of (a) 5% of the contribution amount or (b) $500. Lenfest doesn’t have the capacity to process small retail donor campaigns and encourages sponsored companies to take those funds directly. On rare occasions, it will be flexible with charges.
• Eligibility criteria: Lenfest focuses on organizations aligned with its mission and who are generally on their way toward nonprofit status and seeking large grants from foundations.
• Types of organizations served: News organizations or companies supporting local news organizations
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship: Lenfest works with donors to process their contributions, assist with donor reporting and other donor requirements, and make grants to sponsored companies that comply with IRS requirements for Expenditure Responsibility. If the sponsored company receives its IRS letter and achieves nonprofit status, Lenfest gifts the remaining funds to the company.
• Learn more: Fiscal Sponsorships; contact Operations Manager Charles Jun at charles@lenfestinstitute.org  
• Additional information: Lenfest can sponsor a couple of companies at a time using a Model C fiscal sponsorship approach. It does not have the capacity to handle membership campaigns.

8. Association of Independents in Radio

• Rate: An active AIR membership ($100) is required for the Fiscal Sponsorship program.
• Eligibility criteria: 
  • Aligned mission values
  • Minimum budget: AIR typically requires projects to have a budget of at least $10,000.
• Types of organizations served: Arts and culture: Independent audio producers, projects, podcasters
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship:
  • Auditing
  • Bookkeeping/accounting
  • Organizational development
  • Receiving property and stock donations
  • Tax reporting
  • Other: AIR fiscal sponsorship offers numerous services to a project, including administrative support, web presence, accounting, grant/donor management, and project guidance.
• Learn more: Contact AIR’s Fiscal Sponsorship Administrator at fiscalsponsorship@airmedia.org
• Additional information: Once you’ve become an AIR member, you can learn more about its fiscal sponsorship offerings on this page. AIR offers Model A (Direct Project) and Model C (Preapproved Grant Relationship) models

9. MuckRock

• Rate: 10%
• Eligibility criteria: We work with newsrooms and reporting projects that have an explicit editorial mission that aligns with MuckRock’s mission to improve transparency and access to information and insight into the workings of government.
• Types of organizations served: We typically work with new projects that are still figuring out their basic infrastructure. Current sponsored projects range from a brand-new project with two part-time staffers to an established three-year-old newsroom with a dozen staff.
• Services provided as part of fiscal sponsorship: We currently offer primarily Model A fiscal sponsorship. All of your employees must be MuckRock employees, and we provide payroll management and basic accounting services. Note that the actual cost of salaries and benefits is not included in the fiscal sponsorship fee.
• Learn more: Contact Amanda Hickman at amanda@muckrock.com with a description of your work, and we can work with you to assess whether or not you’re a fit for our fiscal sponsorship program.

Two other organizations that offer fiscal sponsorship but whom we couldn’t confirm these same details with are the Institute for Nonprofit News and City Bureau.

Got other fiscal sponsors you’d add to this list? Let us know at hello@lionpublishers.com.

The post Here are 9 organizations that will fiscally sponsor news businesses appeared first on LION Publishers.

I’ve worked on honing that superpower during my tenure at LION Publishers, in large part, because the needs of our members were greater than the resources we could offer, so we had to clearly articulate the problem and prioritize potential solutions as best we could — a scenario familiar to many independent news businesses.

It turns out that asking good questions is a useful skill, especially when starting or growing something new. Reflecting on my last few years at LION, I identified three questions that have served as the foundation for my work.

These would echo as our team grew over time, and have always been paired with a commitment to measurement and iteration based on what we learned. I offer these questions to you, our members, not because they are the only questions to ask, but because I’ve found it helpful to draw inspiration from questions that others are asking to inform my own.

1. What does success look like to us?

When I joined LION, success was hosting more than a couple hundred people at an annual conference without losing money. Then a pandemic hit and we were quickly forced to re-examine what LION was all about. Part of that reimagination was informed by our members expressing a sense of urgency to understand how to operate sustainable businesses. But the industry definition of sustainability was vague and myopic at best. And if we couldn’t define what a sustainable member business looked like, we had nothing to work backwards from to help define our own success as a membership association.

So we put forth our own hypothesis. And after spending some time testing it through programs like our Startups Labs, Revenue Growth Fellowship and Sustainability Audits, we built on what we learned and proposed a maturity model for independent news businesses. By asking ourselves, “What is success for our members?” we ultimately arrived at our own North Star success metric for LION in our first staff-led strategic plan: Helping 100 of our Focus Members reach the “growing” stage of sustainability.

What’s most important here is that we didn’t stop asking what success looks like for LION. By continuing to ask, we got closer and closer to a more meaningful metric.

I’m deeply proud of the work our team has done on making the concept of sustainability more useful and actionable for our members. And it’s just the beginning of more sophisticated conversations our industry needs to be having on whether sustainability is a true “end state” or something more fluid.

I admire news businesses who are defining their success metrics based on what success looks like for their audiences. I wonder how that might change the current strategies and approaches championed as industry success stories.

2. How do we work together to get there?

It’s impossible to do substantial and impactful work in isolation. And yet collaboration and managing teams can be hard. Really hard. So alongside fulfilling our mission for our members, it’s been imperative that we make the time to create the systems, processes and culture to work well with each other.

We call it a people-centered culture and try to ensure it consistently aligns with our values. We get some things right, and we get some things wrong. This will always be the case, no matter how well-intentioned a business is. But it’s important to try. And I’ve been heartened to see more independent news businesses setting the standard of what healthy work cultures look like.

Today LION has five times the number of staff it did when I joined. That means more people are managers with more direct reports. Both first-time and seasoned managers know just how hard the job is. That said, being a people manager can be deeply fulfilling if given the right level of support and resources. Good managers can be a force multiplier within our industry — encouraging their direct reports to think in new ways, develop new skills and pass on their knowledge and experience to their future reports in other organizations.

There have been many moments where I could have done the work myself, to check the box in the name of efficiency. But then others miss out on learning and growth moments (Spoiler: By delegating, I also learn and grow). The best managers know that if we aren’t creating space for us to teach and others to learn so they can then teach, there’s no point in working on a team at all.

Helping teams work well together falls under our sustainability pillar of operational resilience, and has even earned its own LION Award, which recognizes leaders for “establishing processes, policies, and a people-centered company culture designed to support staff, manage growth, and promote sustainability.” It’s my favorite award to watch acceptance speeches for because the winners get a moment to be recognized for how the work gets done — not just the work itself. A few years ago, it would have been unheard of for this award to be handed out in a room full of journalists.

3. How might we share what we’ve learned with others?

One of our key values is transparency because it’s the way we build trust with our members, our LION colleagues and industry partners. But it can take a lot of extra work to proactively, not reactively, write about what we’ve learned. It requires carving out space for thinking and reflection.

But this sort of “learning out loud” is critical — and it isn’t a luxury that should only be reserved for executive leadership. Literally everything I’ve linked to in this post has been a result of our team making the time to reflect and analyze the work they’re doing — and I know, based on feedback from industry peers, these reflections have made an impact on how others approach their work.

The most common refrain we hear from new members who didn’t know LION existed is how grateful they are to find others who are doing this work. This camaraderie has sometimes been the only thing helping independent news publishers — who often feel quite isolated — continue pushing forward.

Making time to share what we learn with others is a gift, and it is key to making true progress as an industry.

Answering questions like these has been the best starting point for my work. The other critical piece? Having smart, thoughtful and dedicated colleagues who engage with these questions to design answers that I never could have dreamed up alone. I feel grateful to have had that at LION and know that this team will remain deeply committed to asking these questions in service of our members and the independent news industry at large.

And if you’re ever unsure of the exact question to ask, here’s my favorite: Why?

Anika’s last day at LION Publishers will be this Friday, May 3.

The post What I learned from (continuously) asking these three questions at LION Publishers appeared first on LION Publishers.

Assembling an awards submission lets you practice articulating how your organization’s work leads to mission-driven impact and strategic growth. And the benefits of this exercise can extend well beyond one awards application — you can repurpose this content for other types of opportunities, including applying for grants, soliciting reader support, and revamping your marketing materials.

We know it can be challenging to figure out how to promote your own work. So we’ve compiled a list of tips and resources from past LION Award winners, independent news leaders, industry experts, and fellow journalism-support organizations.

Here’s some advice from 2023 LION Award winners:

• Emphasize the significance of your organization’s work in the community. Ask yourself: Why does this work matter? Who does it impact?
  • “You can use that [LION Awards] application form to really help explain and illustrate to the judges why something like this matters in your community. The judges…are coming from the news industry and have an understanding of how news is produced and all the things that go into running a news organization, but what they are not familiar with is your community and how and why you’re creating something — that’s important to them.” – Madison Karas, 2PuntosPlatform
• Don’t underestimate the value of your achievements, even if they seem small or mundane. Ask yourself: How did this impact my journey to sustainability? What are the measurable results, impacts, and lessons?
  • “There really is a place [at the LION Awards] for all-sized outlets, and there are opportunities for huge journalistic impact, as well as community engagement. I would encourage you to apply because inevitably, at these awards, someone is stunned they won!” – Kimberly Griffin, Mississippi Free Press
• Build on your celebratory narrative. Take this opportunity to dive deep into your accomplishments and learn more about the unexpected or unheralded victories that deserve recognition. Ask yourself: What projects am I now inspired to pursue after this reflection? What can we work on this year to further our learning and growth?
  • “Write it down and take a moment to ask yourself, ‘Why was this really important, and what came of it?’ Even if it doesn’t win, it’s a really great exercise to memorialize it and write it down. It is really helpful for your own self-image, and also for marketing or grant proposals.” – Libbie Sparadeo, VTDigger

For the LION Awards, our judges love to spotlight examples of work that push the conventions and boundaries of what independent news “should” look like. So don’t be afraid to submit creative examples of how you’re running your news business and/or serving your community. We want to hear about it, and others will, too!

“We can all learn from each other,” Kimberly said. “When you put something up on the screen at the LION Awards, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea; why didn’t we think of that?’ And it allows you to replicate it in different communities.”

We heard similar takeaways during our “Making the Case” panel discussion at the 2023 Southeast News Sustainability Meetup.

The Food Section’s Hanna Raskin emphasized the importance of sharing your organization’s unique story in a way that decision makers can understand and rally behind. “Generalities won’t get you anywhere,” she said. “When you’re making the case for why someone should care about your organization, be specific and give details.” 

Generalities aren’t limited to how you present your work — but also what you apply for. Scalawag and Press On’s Alyzza May spoke about pursuing the funding opportunities or awards most aligned with an organization’s mission. “We show people where their values and money can be in alignment,” she said. 

Demonstration is key. When applying for funding, the group discussed developing and articulating a clear plan for how to use those dollars and — of course — tying it all back to growing your news business toward sustainability.

Interested in additional resources for demonstrating your organization’s impact?

We suggest starting here:

• Business Awards – How to Write a Winning Entry (LinkedIn)
  • This article delves into the significance of throwing your hat in the ring for industry awards and how to craft compelling award submissions.
• Introduction to Grant Writing for News Organizations (The Lenfest Institute)
  • This self-paced course guides you through each step of the grant writing process and includes instructional videos complemented by a Grant Writing Workbook.
• Storytelling That Moves People (Harvard Business Review)
  • This article explores the persuasive power of storytelling, drawing insights from renowned screenwriting lecturer Robert McKee.
• Basic Toolkit for Pitching a Solutions-Oriented Story (Solutions Journalism Learning Lab)
  • This article explains how to pitch solutions-oriented stories, expanding on the fundamental questions every pitch should answer: “So What?” “Why Now?” and “Why Me?”
• How to Get a Grant Webinar (Fund for Investigative Journalism)
  • In this 30-minute webinar, you’ll receive invaluable guidance on applying for (and winning) grants. Get firsthand perspectives from FIJ’s Board of Directors and hear from a grant recipient who shares her path to a winning application.
• Strategies for Tracking Impact – A Toolkit for Collaborative Journalism (Solutions Journalism Network)
  • This guide can help you track your progress more effectively and identify what is most important to your organization, like building trust with your audience or getting more people interested in local news.
• Impact Tracking Worksheet (Solutions Journalism Network)
  • This worksheet is a fantastic tool for quickly and consistently assessing what impact looks like for your organization, and your progress toward it.

We hope you find these resources inspiring and helpful. If you’re considering applying for any 2024 LION Sustainability Awards, please submit your entries by April 15, 2024, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

The post How to most effectively talk about your news business’s impact appeared first on LION Publishers.

That means that two-thirds of LION’s current member organizations can now access, at no cost, all the features of Canva Pro and Canva for Teams for up to 50 users (valued at approximately $6,000 per year) through the Canva for Nonprofits subscription. 

Canva is used to create visual assets, including social media posts, presentations, infographics, websites, reports, posters, flyers, and signage. The Canva for Nonprofits subscription includes:

• Unlimited access to a library of 75 million+ premium images and video (non-editorial in nature), plus thousands of fonts and designer-made templates.
• Collaboration features that allow team members to work together on designs in real time.
• Access to create and store your brand assets, such as logos, color palettes, and fonts, in one place via Brand Kits to ensure consistency across all your designs. 

Here’s how to access this new benefit as a Micro tier LION member or a LION member that is registered as a Nonprofit 501(c)(3) or Canadian nonprofit, or is operating with a fiscal sponsorship under the umbrella of a 501(c)(3):

1. If you haven’t already, create a free Canva account using your work email address.
2. Complete this form to have your account upgraded to access the Canva Pro/Canva for Teams features for free as long as you are an active LION member.

If you are an active LION member organization that is a for-profit Small, Medium, or Large tier organization not operating with a fiscal sponsor, you can access Canva Pro for free for three months if you are new to Canva by completing this form.

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While we continue to add publications to the database based on new members who apply for a LION membership and remove publications that have shuttered, we also recognize that many independent local news businesses are not being counted because they don’t know about us, and we don’t know about them. So last year, we recruited community ambassadors, 24 independent news leaders from 21 regions across the United States, who helped us identify publications in their geographic area that met our criteria and weren’t in our Oasis database.

These community ambassadors used their networks to surface organizations and combed through databases like the CUNY Center for Community Media’s Black and Latino media directories. They then contacted these newsrooms and asked them to share more in-depth information about their newsrooms.

Of the 368 news businesses that ambassadors identified, 132 shared more details with us about their publication history, content, staff size, and the tech platforms and mediums they use. This in-depth information was included in their Project Oasis profile and helps us better understand the state of independent newsrooms today. We also created profiles for the remaining 237 organizations, including their location, tax status, and publication language.

Here’s what we learned from this project:

Building relationships with news leaders who have existing connections is key.

When we set out to update the Project Oasis database, we knew we wanted to work closely with independent journalists who had strong connections in their communities. They know more about what’s happening in their local news landscapes than we do because they live and work there and have existing relationships with others in the area. 

That proved crucial to the project’s success. Ambassadors surfaced many newly launched publications and, more notably, identified many older publications that were initially overlooked by Project Oasis researchers in 2020, including 15 Spanish-language news organizations. 

In particular, we were able to add a large number of publications based in the Mid-Atlantic region of New Jersey, New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, as well as in Colorado and Missouri. Submissions from those six states made up a whopping 35 percent of all the organizations added to Project Oasis. That speaks, in part, to the hard work of the ambassadors in those regions and the deep networks they have. 

The direct outreach conducted by our community ambassadors is critical for building our field’s understanding of the needs of the independent news ecosystem. It also ensures we’re being inclusive in offering our services and support to those interested in taking advantage of and benefiting from LION and other journalism-support organizations’ offerings.

As the independent news field grows, we have to carefully consider our criteria for what independent local news is.

Throughout the project, one question arose often: Does this count as an independent local news organization? 

Our ambassadors had robust conversations about the criteria for a Project Oasis organization, and that spurred conversation among LION staff about our membership criteria and how to define local independent online news.

The criteria for inclusion in Project Oasis is: 

• The site is devoted primarily to original, local news and information (a majority of coverage is through local, originally produced news)
• The site is located in the United States or Canada
• The publisher is digital-native and/or dominant
• The site is editorially independent (privately owned and not primarily or majority-owned by a publicly traded company, newspaper chain, hedge fund or private equity firm, and/or political or religious institution. This can include public media if the public media is merged with an independent publication and the two are independently run and funded.)
• The owners are attempting to develop revenue streams from their content

In some cases, the criteria was straightforward. If an organization is owned by a large chain that publishes in multiple states, for example, it clearly doesn’t meet the definition of independently owned. But what about small chains of publications that are owned by a local individual or family? And how do we define digital — does it have to be an online-only publication, or can it be a print publication with an online component? 

We decided to accept small chains that are locally owned by someone in the state where they publish and do not own publications in multiple states because we believe they still embody the principles of independent local journalism. When it came to defining digital publications, we decided that if the website is regularly updated and is not an e-edition of the newspaper or links telling people to subscribe to the print product, it counts as digital. 

But conversations about journalism ethics and transparency could get even more tricky. Project Oasis doesn’t have an explicit guideline on how journalistic standards factor into a publication’s inclusion in the database. Some of our ambassadors found publications that published partisan or overtly biased reports. Other organizations didn’t follow best practices for transparency, like having bylines on their stories or a corrections policy. 

We decided that publications that don’t follow best practices for journalism ethics should be left out of the database and asked community ambassadors to use their judgment as journalists when considering these organizations. 

How to define local independent online news is an ongoing conversation at LION. As the independent news landscape continues to grow and diversify, we’ll continue to evaluate our criteria. 

Simply having a list of all the existing independent news businesses in the U.S. is important data to collect and keep up to date.

When Project Oasis launched in 2020, its mission was to map the growing number of locally focused digital news publications in the U.S. and Canada and to share information about the choices they have made along their pathways to sustainability. 

Researchers collected data on staff size, platforms, finances, and publication history for more than 700 local independent news organizations. Using that information, they published a report with key insights on this industry’s growth and a guide for aspiring news entrepreneurs to launch their own publications.

In our latest update, we were not able to gather as much in-depth data. While we pushed hard for all 368 publishers to share a complete data profile of their business, we only received forms from about 36 percent of them. 

This helped us clarify where our data collection efforts can be most impactful — not just for us, but for news businesses as well. That’s why we’re prioritizing our data collection efforts through our Sustainability Audit program, which asks publishers to share this data in exchange for receiving a thorough report on the state of their news business. This type of data collection — mutually beneficial and not extractive — is best aligned with our values and, going forward, is how we plan to collect and share data insights about this field.

We still believe it’s vital to the growth of this ecosystem to maintain a database of all existing independent local news publications so we can better understand the successes and challenges of local news businesses. We’ll continue to keep the database as up-to-date as possible.

If you’d like to be added to the Project Oasis database, please fill out this form to request to be included, or you can use this form to request a change to an existing entry.

If you’d like to learn about our Sustainability Audits, sign up to receive our newsletter for the next application deadline.

The post We more than doubled the number of news organizations in our Project Oasis database. Here’s what we learned. appeared first on LION Publishers.

I’m not alone in this challenge. After spending the last couple of months interviewing other Canadian independent news publishers as part of LION’s research into Canada’s local independent media ecosystem, they all echoed this sentiment.

That’s why LION asked me to build a list of financial funding and other professional development/business support opportunities that Canadian independent news publishers can take advantage of. My hope is that this database, which I’ve summarized the highlights of below, helps other existing and prospective publishers better navigate Canada’s landscape for funding and support independent news publishers. Please let us know what other opportunities you’d suggest we add to the list, so we can help other entrepreneurs take advantage of them.

Government funding: The federal government is among the key players in funding news media in Canada.  

• Introduced in 2019, programs such as the Local Journalism Initiative aim to revitalize news deserts by funding salaries for news organizations to hire journalists. 
• Another initiative is the Canadian Periodical Fund, which, since 2009, has been financially supporting print magazines, community newspapers, and digital outlets.
• There’s also a number of tax-related support programs administered by the Canada Revenue Agency, including labor tax credits for Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations  

Foundation funding: Journalism is still a new area of funding for most Canadian foundations, said Ana Sofía Hibon from Inspirit Foundation. She said it’s important to note that publications typically only receive funding from foundations when their work corresponds to the specific public interest issues prioritized by the foundations. Consequently, there aren’t any foundations in Canada that currently prioritize journalism organizations for funding. However, here is a list of foundations that have historically given funding to independent news publications.

• Inspirit Foundation supports arts and media to help advance a more inclusive and pluralist Canada. It has funded independent publishers including The Local, La Converse, The Eastern Door and Indiginews. They’ve also funded the First Nations University’s journalism program.
• McConnell Foundation’s work is dedicated to three focus areas: climate, communities and reconciliation. Independent news publications have received funding through the ‘communities’ stream. The Narwhal received $200,000 in funding from them for their Ontario bureau as well as $10,000 in core support in 2022. 
• The Trottier Family Foundation specifically supports projects that promote innovative scientific discovery, mitigate climate change and protect the environment, enhance education, improve patient and health care, and provide assistance to select community and international initiatives. In 2022, the foundation gave $75,000 to The Narwhal to support their climate investigations reporter.

Canadian media-specific support: These are some other organizations that offer resources to specifically support independent news entrepreneurs.

• Canadian Association of Journalists is a professional organization committed to championing the rights of journalists and offering professional development opportunities. They have local chapters in Toronto and Ottawa that actively support their respective regional journalism communities. In 2024, CAJ will host its annual conference in Toronto. 
• News Media Canada represents the voice of print and digital news media in Canada. They provide resources, research, and support for Canadian publishers.
• Canadian Journalism Foundation promotes the excellence of Canadian journalism. They provide fellowships, awards, and professional development opportunities.
• Indiegraf is a network that supports independent digital publishers with tools, services, and knowledge to grow their business.

Entrepreneur and/or small business funding and support: There are also non-journalism specific opportunities that all entrepreneurs can benefit from.

• Toronto Metropolitan University Zones has incubation zones at the university that foster innovation in multiple fields, including media, for Toronto-based publications.
• Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab offers a year-round program called the Fifth Wave initiative, which is Canada’s first feminist business accelerator for women founders in Southern Ontario.
• Venture for Canada provides hiring subsidies and serves as a facilitator, connecting new entrepreneurs with enterprising college students and recent graduates. 
• Organizations such as Futurpreneur Canada and the Laidlaw Foundation provide grants and financial backing to youth-driven organizations. 
• The League of Innovators supports young entrepreneurs through an accelerator program, which provides financial assistance and business training opportunities

U.S.-based support for Canadians: Multiple U.S.-based organizations also extend their support northward, benefiting Canadian news entrepreneurs. 

• The International Center for Journalists offers programs that Canadian journalists can access. 
• The Reynolds Journalism Institute, a journalism initiative housed at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri, provides resources and opportunities open to Canadians. 
• The International Women’s Media Foundation also offers avenues tailored to Canadian women in journalism. 
• Northwestern University’s Medill School, in partnership with the Google News Initiative, provides funding to Canadian newsrooms through their Data-Driven Reporting Project program.
• LION Publishers is a U.S.-based membership association that supports independent news publishers with its Sustainability Audit and Funding program, which helps publishers better understand how to reach sustainability, and other professional development and training opportunities, including these courses for Canadian publishers. 

To explore all of the more than 50 opportunities in greater detail please refer to the Comprehensive Guide to Funding and Support Opportunities for News Entrepreneurs in Canada Airtable. Each opportunity caters to a specific need within the journalism sector: mentorship, project funding, organizational support, legal aid, and capacity building.

If you have suggestions of other opportunities to add that Canadian news entrepreneurs should be aware of, please reach out to hello@lionpublishers.com. 

A special thanks to The Green Line’s Anita Li (a LION board member) and Inspirit Foundation’s Ana Sofía Hibon for their suggested contributions to this list of resources.

Thanks to the Google News Initiative for funding our research into Canada. Learn more about our partnership.

The post A primer on funding and support for Canadian independent news publishers appeared first on LION Publishers.

Ready to get together again for more conversations like this one? Our next in-person event is only a few months away! 

The Southeast News Sustainability Meetup in Durham, North Carolina this October will bring together publishers from across the Southeast United States, and it will also host the 2023 LION Local Journalism Awards Ceremony. 

LION’s 2023 News Sustainability Meetups and the 2023 LION Awards are sponsored by The Walton Family Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The Google News Initiative. If your organization is interested in sponsoring LION’s News Sustainability Meetups or the LION Awards, please contact Chris Krewson, LION’s executive director, at chriskrewson@lionpublishers.com.

The post The future of local watchdog journalism ft. Dean Baquet and Evan Smith appeared first on LION Publishers.

But for organizations that have chosen to be for-profit (like two-thirds of LION members), new nonprofit organizations waiting on their 501(c)(3) status, or nonprofit organizations other than 501(c)(3)s, a fiscal sponsor can receive those donations on their behalf.

That’s why LION is thrilled to announce a new membership benefit: discounted fiscal sponsorship through Tiny News Collective, which provides tools, resources and expertise to help communities build sustainable news organizations.  

LION members can apply here for fiscal sponsorship through Tiny News Collective. If you are not yet a LION member, you can learn about LION’s membership criteria and apply to join here.

The discounted fiscal sponsorship fee for LION members is 5% of all program grants and donations received. LION members that become fiscally sponsored by Tiny News Collective will also have access to their resources and efficiency, field experience, network of funders and changemakers, and other technical assistance. Tiny News Collective is fully committed to supporting the editorial independence of its fiscally sponsored projects.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of this membership benefit or learning more about how fiscal sponsorship can benefit your organization, feel free to reach out to Tiny News Collective’s Finance Manager, Jason Tompkins at  jason@tinynewsco.org.

Find answers to some frequently-asked questions about fiscal sponsorship below. If you have additional questions about LION Publishers membership, please email membership@lionpublishers.com.

FAQ

What is fiscal sponsorship?

Fiscal sponsorship is a practice that has evolved as an effective and efficient means of funding new charitable initiatives, delivering public services, and seeding social movements. In a typical fiscal sponsorship relationship, a nonprofit organization confers its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status to groups that are engaged in activities that serve the host’s mission, typically for a fee. 

Donations to the projects are directed to the fiscal sponsor and are restricted by the fiscal sponsor to support activities of the project, and fiscal sponsor organizations are responsible for assuring the activities of the project fulfill their charitable purpose.

How does Tiny News Collective provide fiscal sponsorship?

Tiny News Collective provides a legal framework for their “Model C” fiscally sponsored projects, enables the movement of resources from funders and donors to projects, and facilitates a community of practice made of news organizations across the country that are also growing and scaling in real time.

What will fiscal sponsorship from Tiny News Collective cost my organization?

(Updated June 28, 2024) The discounted fiscal sponsorship fee for LION members is 5% of all program grants and donations received. For example, if your business receives a $25,000 grant, $1,250 (5%) of that grant would go to Tiny News Collective as the fiscal sponsor.

This fiscal sponsorship service is available to both for-profit LION members and members that are seeking, but have not yet received, a nonprofit designation from the IRS. Upon signing a fiscal sponsorship contract with TNC, you would also pay an initial administrative fee of $300 and then a recurring annual administrative fee of $300.

Why is fiscal sponsorship beneficial?

Fiscal sponsorship can provide: 

• Access to tax-deductible donations and grants that might not otherwise be available. Setting up a new nonprofit organization can be a time-intensive and expensive process, involving legal fees, paperwork, and other expenses. By working with a fiscal sponsor, organizations can avoid many of these costs and administrative burdens.  
• Administrative support and financial oversight
• Credibility for a new project or organization by associating with an established nonprofit organization.
• Access to established relationships with foundations, donors, and other organizations. This can facilitate securing additional funding and other resources.
• A streamlined nIt can provide a quick and easy way approach to starting a new project or testing a new program without having to go through the lengthy and expensive process of forming a separate nonprofit organization.  

Is fiscal sponsorship right for my organization?

Fiscal sponsorship is not a one-size-fits-all solution. You’re encouraged to reach out to Tiny News Collective’s Finance Manager, Jason Tompkins at jason@tinynewsco.org to discuss what option might be best for you. 

Here are some additional resources from LION:

• 5 Tips for Choosing a Fiscal Sponsor for Your Newsroom
• Non-Profit vs. For Profit: Which One is Right for You?

The post Tiny News Collective offers discounted fiscal sponsorship to LION members appeared first on LION Publishers.

My mother, an immigrant, talked about missing family members in our home country and not being able to travel to see them. My husband explained that he needed to hire for three positions at his job, but he didn’t have enough funding for all of them. 

Asking questions for 15 minutes required a constant fight against my desire to offer solutions to both problems. But unsurprisingly, by the end of both conversations, my mother and husband had come up with their own solutions — and none of them looked like what I had imagined. (Side note: I tried to replicate this with my toddlers, and it didn’t go so well, but that is a story for another day.)

This kind of conversation is at the core of our coaching philosophy at LION: We firmly believe that the people closest to the problem are the closest to the solution, and we have designed all our programs in the last year with that philosophy in mind. 

Most recently, we brought in experts from across the industry for our GNI Startups Lab program to support LION members on their path to sustainability in three specific areas: managing risk and money, building and managing a team and planning for revenue growth.

The feedback from participants on the coaching they received has been overwhelmingly positive:

• “The training through the News Entrepreneur Academy paired with the expertise of my coach set me up for success for the year to come and beyond.” -Travers Johnson, Queerency

• “The coaches, education, and LION community are supportive and top-notch.” -Michelle Olvera, BoldLatina

• “Bringing in leaders from the field who both know what they’re talking about and can break down their process step-by-step is exactly what we wanted out of this program and it’s exactly what we got.” – Gabe Schneider, The Objective

We heard feedback like this across all our programs that offered personalized coaching, including the LION-GNI Sustainability Audits and Funding program and the LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship. Here are a few takeaways about why this type of coaching is so important and how other organizations can build it into their own programming. 

1. Coaching and training meet different needs for news publishers — and should be paired together.

Last year, we soft launched the News Entrepreneur Academy to offer LION members self-guided courses on small business topics such as accounting and planning for revenue growth. We built these courses into our GNI Startups Lab curriculum so news leaders could learn new skills and build a shared foundation of knowledge. 

However, we know that no two news businesses are exactly alike, and context matters when it comes to translating a best practice into an actual practice. That’s why we paired these self-guided training courses with personalized, one-to-one coaching. 

“Coaching is the critical link that helps publishers incorporate their newfound knowledge into their big-picture and day-to-day efforts,” said Lisa Heyamoto, LION’s director of programming, member education. “Our program design makes that relationship even more explicit.” 

Pairing coaching with training meant that our coaches could spend their time with participants discussing how to effectively apply the training. From our coaches in the Managing Money and Risk program, we learned that the trainings:

• Became an ongoing coaching tool. Coaches felt they could refer participants back to the videos to gain more clarity around key concepts and frameworks, instead of spending precious coaching time revisiting them on a call. 
  
• Made coaching conversations more productive. When participants were grounded in the concepts before meeting with their coaches, it was easier to make progress on problem-solving than when participants had not seen the courses.
  
• Were especially relevant to early stage organizations. For many of these organizations, the content in the NEA courses was entirely new to them, and it helped them catch up with organizations that had more small business administration experience.

“Coaching can be awesomely specific and useful so long as there’s a foundation of knowledge to build on,” said Anika Anand, LION’s deputy director, “and that came from our NEA courses in this case.”

2. Attracting highly qualified coaches with relevant experience starts with an intentional recruitment process.

We received 56 amazing applications for 12 GNI Startups Lab coaching positions this year, and the strength of our coaching pool started with the design of our recruitment process. 

Here are the steps we followed to make sure our process was fair, competitive and equitable:

• Accept applications: We didn’t just want to invite big names in the industry to be coaches, because we know there are many professionals with relevant experience we’d miss out on. By opening up applications, we gave these professionals the same chance to prove themselves as other candidates.
  
• Be transparent about pay: We believe no candidate should enter a contracting process without knowing compensation information beforehand, and this transparency also helps inform standard industry rates that other y peer organizations, funders, and news leaders can benefit from.
  
• When in doubt, err on the side of advancing a candidate: This helps guarantee that people from disadvantaged backgrounds or outside journalism support organization networks get a chance to show who they are, which sometimes takes more than one interview. 
  
• Think hard about your application criteria: We started by deciding what skills are must-haves and what are nice-to-haves. We also articulated the program’s target population and personas so we can ask candidates if they have relevant experience serving that group. (Sidenote: Highly qualified candidates sometimes don’t have relevant experience in newsrooms, but their experience mentoring local businesses makes them uniquely qualified to be coaches and foster out-of-the-box thinking).
  
• Make yourself available during the hiring process: Taking the time to talk with potential candidates allowed us to clarify expectations for good candidates who felt they may not have relevant newsroom experience. This is even more important if you’re trying to provide coaching in areas such as financial planning and human resources because they aren’t specific to the news business. We recommend stealing Outlier’s hiring hotline idea and making sure you set aside time for 1:1s. The questions you receive from the first candidates that reach out to you can inform a Frequently Asked Questions document.
  
• Make a plan for reaching beyond your own networks: If we’re only reaching out directly to people we know or posting on Slack channels full of people in our network, it is easy to reproduce the same privilege and inequality that permeates our industry. That’s why we use these questions to guide our outreach strategy:
  • To the best of my knowledge, is this pool of candidates varied in terms of race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, geography, experience, education, etc.? 
  • Do we have people with diverse backgrounds?
  • Do we have people from different organizations?
  • To the best of my knowledge, do people from historically marginalized communities have access to this place or are members of this organization, Slack channel, etc.? If not, how am I addressing this through direct outreach and word-of-mouth?
    
• Evaluate and iterate: As with every process, there will always be imperfections and room for improvement. Take the time to answer emails from candidates who were not selected. Make sure to create a space to evaluate and for your team to provide feedback on these processes. Reach out to candidates and ask them about their experience.

3. Coaches need to understand the goals of their coaching sessions.

Our programs have repeatedly taught us that a single person doesn’t have all the answers – no matter their level of expertise. That said, a single person who knows how to ask the right questions can help news leaders solve almost any challenge, which connects back to our core coaching philosophy: The people closest to the problem are the ones closest to the solution.

Building on that philosophy, the main goals of our coaching program are to:

1. Build organizational capacity: Coaches focus on developing the participant’s skills and helping them shore up the structures, workflows and strategies that support their work.
   
2. Foster independent thinking and problem solving: We want participants to not only solve specific business problems in our programs, but to develop the skills and confidence to tackle future challenges independently.
   
3. Generate momentum toward measurable goals: As a process gains momentum, it begins to happen more quickly and becomes less likely to stop. Our coaches help news businesses set realistic and achievable goals that can create momentum and discourage “planning to plan.” 
   
4. Model applying the same framework to new, similar problems: A framework is a structure intended to support or guide future designs and decisions. By helping leaders develop a framework instead of prescribing a one-time solution, participants can build long-lasting skills that are transferable to new, similar challenges.

Central to this approach is tailoring the coaching to the organizations’ particular goals and progress. We don’t want organizations to meet program goals for the sake of meeting program goals. Instead, our aim is for each newsroom to move the needle in whatever way is relevant and feasible.

For the Startups Labs, coaches worked with participants to adapt the program deliverables to their specific needs. That was especially true during our Building and Managing a Team program where it was more relevant for some participants to work on building a budget (to set a strong foundation for making the next hire) or produce a performance review document or leadership readme than to pursue our suggested deliverable of a staffing plan and employee handbook.

4. Coaching works best when it’s a team effort.

It takes a village to boost and support news businesses, and we work hard in our programs to make sure participants are benefitting from the collective expertise and experience of the whole coaching team. 

How do we do that?

• We think about building a team of coaches, not just hiring individuals: We intentionally hire coaches with different and complementary skill sets, and we prioritize hiring people who are good team players.
  
• Host weekly meetings to workshop challenges: We don’t want these weekly meetings to be another space to repeat the information we gather from written coaches’ reports. Instead, we designed a Rose/Bud/Thorn system to make sure we have time and space to address and workshop specific challenges and share resources.
  
• Provide a Coach’s Handbook to help set expectations: We created this living document to provide an easy reference point for our growing group of coaches across programs. The handbook familiarizes coaches with the principles, values, and theory of change that guide LION Publishers so we remain consistent across programs. It also explains responsibilities and sets clear expectations so coaches are better equipped for success in their role. 

5. Setting coaches up for success requires a lot of hard work behind the scenes. 

We want our coaches to coach, not to spend their time drowning in administrative work, so we do a lot of heavy lifting in the background to make that possible, including:

• Sending a welcome letter to help acclimate our coaches to the program and our coaching processes at LION. 
  
• Writing one-page background briefs on all our program participants and sharing those with the coaching team. We heard from our coaches this year that they want even more of this kind of information to better understand where organizations have been and where they want to go.
  
• Setting up a light-lift coaching report template that coaches can complete and submit in Slack. The coaching reports are designed to take less than 15 minutes to complete, and they help us collaborate as a program team by providing visibility on the common challenges that participants are facing and the questions they’re asking.

How we’ll incorporate coaching into LION’s work in 2023

We are still working on the retrospective for the 2022 GNI Startups Labs, but we know for sure that we will keep building coaching into our education programs. We are interested in talking with even more coaches from diverse experiences and backgrounds, so (per learning #2!) don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at elaine@lionpublishers.com if you’re interested in working with us. 

Meet the coaches from our 2022 GNI Startups Lab

Managing Risk and Money

Eric Johnston, chief executive officer at Sonoma Media Investments, LLC

Graham Watson-Ringo, senior director of client success at News Revenue Hub 

Ingrid Marielos Marthy, former director of the Women’s Business Center, an SBA-sponsored program, in Fayetteville, NC, and San Francisco, CA

John Davidow, founder of Media Bridge Partners and acting chief of staff at the National Trust for Local News

Building and Managing a Team

An Xiao (Ana) Mina, executive consultant and coach with over a decade of global experience 

Mary Benedicta Cipolla, former editor-in-chief and publisher at Chalkbeat

Richard Tofel, founding general manager and first employee of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until September 2021

Jennifer Mizgata, senior media consultant specializing in digital innovation, leadership development, and organizational change

Planning for Revenue Growth

Maria Archangelo, chief revenue officer at Open Campus

Sam Gross, co-founder of Stacker

Scott Rosenfield, chief of staff to the CEO at The Atlantic

Todd Stauffer, association manager and digital specialist for the Association of Alternative Newsmedia

Elaine Díaz is LION’s senior manager of coaching.

The post What does it take to support news publishers with personalized coaching? appeared first on LION Publishers.

Our guests in this episode have ideas on how to keep you focused on getting dollars in the door in 2023 and beyond:

• Kyle Constable is the director of membership and digital innovation at The Connecticut Mirror.
• Lizzy Hazeltine is a business growth consultant who has worked with LION members across North America.

You can listen and subscribe to News Guest on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Here are a few excerpts from the conversation with Kyle and Lizzy, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:

On why publishers often struggle to prioritize revenue over editorial work

Lizzy Hazeltine: Our brains work against us. As a species, when we’re nervous, we tend to avoid [uncertainty] and to prioritize things that make us feel comfortable and that shut up the amygdala in the center of our brains. So making time for revenue often requires confronting some of our internal programming, and it requires being really courageous in the face of what is an unknowable outcome.

On applying your skills to new challenges in a revenue-focused role 

Lizzy: Nobody was born a membership manager. I mean, thank goodness, that would be strange. So the good news is, folks can get into this work with who they are. For example, if you’re a reporter who moves into a revenue role, what are you really good at? Finding things out about people? Verifying that information? That’s all essential for a major gifts program. Storytelling? That transfers directly to building a case for support.

On getting your whole team to adopt a revenue focus

Kyle Constable: I started on the newsroom side at The Mirror, so I understand the hesitancy to even dabble in the revenue space. But the reality is, we’re not asking our team to bow to the influence of anyone who’s offering money. We’re just asking them to remind people that the work they’re doing is important. That’s really what it comes back to. Even some of our reporters who have been doing this for 40 years, they’ve come to understand that they play a fundraising role.

On making fundraising appeals more efficient and replicable

Kyle: As you’re writing appeals for an annual fundraising campaign like NewsMatch, know that nobody remembers what you wrote and sent out in NewsMatch last year or the year before. I try to strike a balance each year between recycling old language and writing new language that I can add to the library of language that’s available to me in future years. That’s how you’re going to see the biggest return on investment for your time. 

On setting revenue goals for the new year

Lizzy: I encourage people to take the time and space that we get in the cold early days of January to figure out where you need to be in December 2023 – and then work backwards from there to make a plan for how much you need to raise on a monthly basis. That way it’s not a heroic end-of-year effort to pull off what is a 12-month goal. 

Kyle: You can set your New Year’s resolutions in January if you want, you can do it in February, you can do it whenever – but put a plan together and stick to it. And part of my plan is to have one damn good fundraising appeal every single month of 2023… because you never know who has capacity at any given moment, and that’s why you should always be asking.  

Want more advice on how to prioritize revenue in the new year? Sign up for the LION newsletter to get updates on this series and other resources and opportunities for independent publishers.

The post Make time for revenue work in 2023 appeared first on LION Publishers.

Sound familiar? We hear stories like this all the time from LION members struggling to find a work-life balance that feels sane, let alone sustainable.

In this episode, you’ll hear advice about how to identify burnout in yourself and your team — and what to do about it – from two experienced news leaders:

• Ryan Belmore is the owner and publisher of What’sUpNewp, a LION member publication in Newport, Connecticut.
  
• Naseem S. Miller is a reporter at The Journalist’s Resource, where she writes about health and medicine.

You can listen and subscribe to News Guest on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Here are a few excerpts from the conversation with Ryan and Naseem and our host Candice Fortman, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:

On the challenge of recognizing your own burnout

Ryan Belmore: In the spring of 2017, I was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and I was going through all of the treatment and the tests and chemo and radiation and driving back and forth, and I still couldn’t bring myself to step away and take time off. It took the community’s help to get there. Our readers put a fundraiser together for me, and one of our paying members said, ‘You know, it’s okay to take a day off and take care of yourself.’

That’s where a lot of the pressure had come from – subscribers giving me money, so I felt like I had to perform for them every day. But hearing that feedback, it got me thinking, ‘This business will be OK if I take time off to take care of myself.’”

Naseem S. Miller: I’ve been aware of the connection between trauma and journalism and how our jobs can affect our mental health ever since I covered the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, but it didn’t really affect me physically until the pandemic. I was reporting on one of the projections about how we were going to run out of hospital beds, and I got freaked out thinking, ‘What if I didn’t get these numbers right, what if it’s not correct?’ 

Next thing I know, my heart rate is so high, and I can’t bring it down. It was all weekend. Every time I passed by my computer in our dining room, I would feel nauseous. So on Monday, I messaged my doctor’s office, and I’m like, ‘I need help, I can’t bring my heart rate down, and no amount of deep breathing and Netflix is helping me.’

A certain amount of stress is good for us, it keeps us on our toes, it’s a survival method. But there is a level that – if you don’t complete the so-called stress cycle – it keeps building in your body. And that’s when it becomes dangerous, and it can turn into burnout. 

On why journalists are especially susceptible to burnout

Naseem: I think it’s the nature of our jobs. There’s a lot of online harassment, especially for women and people of color. There are extreme political issues going on now that we have to cover. Our jobs are unstable – we are dealing with potential layoffs and cutbacks. Newsrooms are shrinking, and we have to cover more and more and more. 

And of course, part of us is dedicated to this profession. We know it’s a public service and it’s so important. We want to keep doing it. But at the same time, if we really don’t look out for ourselves, we could burn out because we are human, and there’s only so much we can do. 

On learning to set healthy boundaries

Ryan: As a whole, journalists do a terrible job at setting expectations. We over-promise, and we’re the worst kind of caregivers for our communities – we put everybody before ourselves. 

Since my cancer diagnosis, I’ve made my emails very personal. I’ll say, ‘Hey, it’s been a long week, I’m taking the weekend off.’ And people will respond ‘Oh, you deserve it. Here’s a $5 donation, here’s whatever.’ 

The one thing we can beat all the corporate conglomerates at is being people. We’re not machines, we are people – and we need time off. It helps us.

Candice Fortman: I always think about it the other way, too – if we are tired and burnt out from an election, so is our audience. There’s a degree of care that we show them when we give them a break as well, because information overload is a very real thing. 

On looking for signs of burnout on your team

Naseem: Burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis per se, but in general it’s emotional exhaustion. You often have a low level of motivation to work. You might have a hard time sleeping. You’re agitated. You turn to drugs and alcohol more as a soothing thing. 

As managers, we’re not therapists, right? But the simplest thing you can do is check in with your people. You might hear back from somebody or you might notice some sort of change in their behavior. 

On strategies for managing stress and avoiding burnout

Ryan: In 2020, I was planning to meet up with other New England publishers in person, and then the pandemic hit. Suddenly we were all locked in our houses dealing with a pandemic that none of us had ever dealt with before. So we started talking every single Monday. The call still goes on. 

It started with just a few of us in New England, then eventually we’d have publishers from the other side of the Earth joining for these calls. It’s just important to talk to people who are going through the same thing. You need to make some friends to check in with once a week or once a month and have conversations, whether it’s about your dog or about publishing.

[Learn more about how to create support networks to combat isolation.]

Naseem: It’s so important to have that connection. Don’t isolate yourself, reach out to someone. And take breaks throughout the day. Get up from your desk every hour or every 15 minutes, and take a break. Walk around your house. If you have a yard, walk around the yard. Just get up and then come sit back down. Maybe do a couple of squats. You’ll be amazed what a big difference it makes.

Candice: We used to do a daily dance break in the office. Maybe I’ll bring it back after this conversation. So every day, somebody picked a different song, and for three minutes we’d do a silent disco – everyone would put in their earbuds and start the song at the same time. 

It was a reminder that we are human and that we are not just here to produce. But it also was a really useful way for us to connect as a team. I now know everyone’s musical tastes – some of them I deeply agree with, and some of them have me deeply concerned. 

Want to learn more about preventing burnout? Sign up for the LION newsletter to get updates on this series and other resources and opportunities for independent publishers.

The post Prevent burnout as a news business leader appeared first on LION Publishers.

In this episode of News Guest, you’ll learn why and how you can make time for this important work with insights and advice from: 

• Angie Cirone, former director of journalism sustainability at Richland Source, a LION member in northern Ohio
  
• Anjanette Delgado, executive editor of the Detroit Free Press and contributor to the Media Impact Project at the University of Southern California

You can listen and subscribe to News Guest on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Here are a few excerpts from the conversation with Angie and Anjanette, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:

On how to define ‘impact’ for your team:

Anjanette Delgado: It might be something that only affects one or two people, it might be a policy change that affects the entire state, or it might mean that someone else picked up your story and ran with it. Whatever it is, people on your team should understand what ‘impact’ means to your organization. 

On how to create systems that support regular impact tracking:

Anjanette: You can use something as simple as a Google Form that dumps the information back into a spreadsheet, or Julie Christie from Resolve Philly has this wonderful Airtable solution. I think the really important thing is to figure out how to tie this to your metrics, because if you’re not looking at these impacts alongside pageviews or subscription conversions or whatever it is that matters to your newsroom, then it’s going to be siloed off to the side, and your staff is going to know it’s not the thing that really matters.

Angie Cirone: The friendly reminders to track impact are important – using weekly meetings and one-on-one conversations to remind people of why we do what we do and how they play a crucial role. 

On how impact tracking can contribute to fundraising:

Angie: We put together an impact report annually and we send it to our corporate partners and prospects. We then set appointments to review the report with them and talk about the highlights, and that is really our case for support. We’re able to list out our corporate sponsorship levels and invite people to partner with us, and we also take parts of our impact report and break it into email campaigns.

On how reporters can contribute to a fundraising campaign:

Angie: We asked reporters last year to write an email in their own voice that could be sent to their personal networks and our full contact list. Those emails performed better than the ones coming from the brand. One reporter said he would eat a raccoon at the Raccoon Festival if we reached our member goal. Another said he would jump in the freezing lake for the Polar Bear Dip if we reached it. That made the campaign fun and engaging for the readers, and they appreciated that the reporters were putting something on the line.

On tracking impact in a small newsroom:

Anjanette: Track impact using the tools you already use, and just make it simple. Maybe you don’t publish a 45-item report, but you do a column or a story about your impact. It’s a chance to talk to your readers about the importance of your work. 

Want to learn more about measuring and marketing impact? Sign up for the LION newsletter to get updates on this series and other resources and opportunities for independent publishers.

The post How to measure and market your impact ft. Angie Cirone and Anjanette Delgado appeared first on LION Publishers.