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.

In this conversation, Shah and Wei discuss how to reimagine the culture of newsrooms to be more supportive and sustainable for the journalists who work in them.

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 Reimagine newsroom culture and build more sustainable workplaces appeared first on LION Publishers.

At LION, we awarded $1.8 million in operational funding to news publishers last year through programs like the LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship, the LION-GNI Sustainability Audits & Funding program and the 2022 GNI Startups Labs, and we can say at least two things with confidence:

• Money is good. We’ve seen how far that money can go in the hands of small, scrappy news businesses. Our program participants used their grants to launch new products and revenue streams, hire contractors, upgrade their websites, and make other critical investments in their businesses. 

• Money is not enough. The publishers starting or leading LION member businesses are more likely to have a background in journalism than in business, yet many of the challenges they face are primarily small business challenges. For example, only 28 percent of the participants in our LION-GNI Sustainability Audits and Funding program had a strategic plan in place when they started the program, and less than half had an annual budgeting process. 

To balance these distinct needs, LION provided direct funding to 160 publishers across our programs while also delivering personalized coaching and training to help them learn the skills and implement the systems that would make their investments stick. 

Here’s what we heard from participants in our GNI Startups Lab program on Managing Money and Risk about the value of the program, beyond the dollars themselves: 

• “I’m not a numbers person, I’m a words and story person, so getting a handle on and control over the financial part of my business was really intimidating to me. That’s what this Startups Lab helped me uncover and overcome.” —Shauna Ray, Radar Media

• “When I started my news organization, a plan was the furthest thing from my mind. The Lab helped me legitimize what has become a full-fledged news business. My work with my coach and the GNI/LION team forced me to set aside time to look at the most important aspects of my news organization–time I wouldn’t have spent otherwise. Now, I have a revenue and risk management plan, and I feel confident going into next year and beyond.” —Nicci Kadilak, Burlington Buzz

• “The Managing Money and Risk Lab is a program I have been waiting for! It gave me more confidence in our numbers and reignited my passion in the running of my news/media venture. The coaches, education and LION community are supportive and top-notch.” —Michelle Olvera, BoldLatina

Another insight from our 2022 programs is that publishers often make progress toward sustainability in small, incremental steps, with plenty of false starts and missteps along the way.

As my colleague Lisa Heyamoto wrote in her Nieman Lab prediction: “It’s tempting to think that the growth path for an independent news organization is consistent and linear. But after analyzing nearly 150 organizations over the last two years through LION Publishers’ Sustainability Audit process, we’ve seen this kind of “if/then” thinking doesn’t apply to the relative Wild West that is the independent news landscape.”

The goal of our programming in 2022 was to help our members navigate this “Wild West” landscape and make strategic investments to put their businesses on more sustainable footing. 

Here are a few examples of what that journey looked like for participants in our LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship. 

A solo founder finally gets to make their first hire 

Nuestro Estado founder Fernando Soto launched his Spanish-language publication in South Carolina like many LION members – as a solo founder trying to do everything at once. 

He built the brand, reported the news, edited stories from freelancers, and posted on social, and when he could find the time, pitched to advertisers. But it was too much for one person. 

“I was overwhelmed,” he said. “I thought ‘if only I could hire somebody, things would be different.’” 

The Revenue Growth Fellowship gave Soto that opportunity. The program helped Nuestro Estado and eleven other independent publishers cover the cost of a revenue-focused hire for two years, and Soto used that funding to hire a business development manager. 

The hope was that adding a business lead would help Nuestro Estado pitch more sponsors and close more deals, while also freeing up Soto to spend more time on editorial work. 

But that plan didn’t pan out. Despite the extra staffing, business leads never took off, and prospective sponsors that did enter the pipeline often wanted to deal with Soto directly, causing him to be stretched just as thin as before the hire. 

“Telling our story just hits differently coming from me as the founder,” Soto said. “My ‘aha moment’ was realizing that maybe I should take on that business work myself, even though it’s outside my comfort zone.”

After hiring and parting ways with two business development managers in 10 months, Soto has realized that the path to a sustainable workload isn’t just adding more capacity; it’s adding the right capacity – in this case, someone to help manage the editorial product so that he can focus on revenue. 

A big investment in reader revenue pays off with a holistic approach

RANGE Media used its fellowship funding to hire an audience and membership editor in May 2022 – and when it launched its first membership drive a few months later, the early returns were modest.

“In all, we were shooting for 50 members,” RANGE founder Luke Baumgarten. “We only had nine new members after five days.”

What happened next is why LION talks so much about these three pillars of news business sustainability – and how they intersect. 

In the span of two weeks, RANGE published some of its most impactful reporting of the year, including breaking news about anti-abortion laws and election interference. 

That enterprising journalism combined with the work RANGE had already done to market its membership program and strengthen its conversion funnel led to big results. By the end of the campaign, RANGE had added 80 new members, beating its goal by more than 50 percent. 

“The stories were the seeds, the marketing was the plough,” Baumgarten said. “Without both, nothing is going to grow.”

Ultimately, figuring out the right combination of investments to produce results is as much a strategic problem as it is a resources problem, and we heard from RGF participants that the personalized coaching they received helped them navigate these big decisions. 

“It’s really good to have someone who’s done this work before and can help identify what RANGE is uniquely good at, and what we’re uniquely well positioned for,” Baumgarten said. “That support has been really, really helpful.”

A team grows faster than the operational foundation to support it

Dallas Free Press founder Keri Mitchell says she cried when she found out her newsroom had been selected for the LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship.

“I was scared shitless when we launched, I was so afraid,” she says. “It wasn’t until we got the RGF invitation that I thought, ‘OK, this is going to work out.’” 

Like other founders in the program, Mitchell hoped the new hire would help get most business work off her plate so she could focus on leading the editorial strategy.  

But like Soto, she learned that the organization’s fundraising work wasn’t something she could simply hand off, even to the most capable colleague. 

“My coach told me, ‘You are not looking for the person who’s going to sell, you’re looking for the person who’s going to provide structure and organization around the sales process – but you’re still going to have to be the person making the sale,’” Mitchell said. “That was really bad news for me.”

Despite Mitchell’s reservations, she continued to play a large role in fundraising even after hiring a development director, and this new staffing model has already shown signs of success. 

In 2022, Dallas Free Press quadrupled its fundraising haul on North Texas Giving Day – from $5,000 to $21,000 – and Mitchell now expects to be able to pay herself a salary next year for the first time. 

Of course, the challenge with this rapid growth is that Mitchell now has a much more complex organization to run, with multiple staff members and contributors to manage and a growing list of projects and deliverables to execute. 

Mitchell recognized that she needed help keeping the organization on track, and she credits her decision to hire a fourth full-time employee – an operations and programming manager – to the lessons she learned from the RGF program. 

“The cohort helped me realize that we won’t do our work well unless we have the right systems in place,” she said. “The program’s handbook and coaching gave us the guidance to know what we need to do [from an operations perspective], but we still needed a person to do it.”

What’s ahead for LION in 2023

Looking ahead, we believe LION’s role in the local news ecosystem is to help independent publishers build and run stronger small businesses. Our challenge next year is figuring out how to do this work at scale, so that more LION members can succeed in and serve even more communities. 

We’ll have more details to share about our 2023 programming soon, but in the meantime, you can get updates on our work and what we’re learning by subscribing to LION’s weekly industry newsletter. 

Want to learn how to support our members next year? Drop us a note at hello@lionpublishers.com, or email our executive director Chris Krewson to learn more about funding opportunities. 

The post Why dollars alone won’t save the local news industry 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.

The likeliest “winners” during this final fundraising sprint are the organizations that have been working toward it all year, by producing meaningful journalism, documenting impact, and raising awareness of the opportunities for readers to contribute financially. 

That said, it’s not too late for any publisher – nonprofit or for-profit – to prepare an end-of-year campaign, especially if they reject these three myths about effective fundraising: 

Myth #1: The journalism speaks for itself

We’ve written before about the “build it and they will come” approach to audience and revenue growth and how it’s, well, wrong. But the point bears repeating: News organizations can’t expect readers to fully appreciate – and be willing to fund – their work unless newsrooms make the case for it. 

Take RANGE Media, which recently grew its membership program by nearly 50 percent in just three weeks. 

RANGE was producing high-impact journalism during that time, including breaking news about anti-abortion laws and election interference, and their best fundraising days coincided with the biggest stories they broke. In other words, substance matters. 

But so does making the ask. 

RANGE set a goal of adding 50 paying members during its campaign and reminded readers of it everywhere – on Instagram, at the top and bottom of stories, in fundraising emails to their newsletter readers. 

By the end of the campaign, RANGE had added 80 new members, beating its original goal by more than 50 percent. The recipe for success? RANGE founder Luke Baumgarten says the newsroom’s journalistic impact and marketing campaign worked hand in hand. 

“The campaign emails created a baseline of awareness of our model, the need for sustainability, our mission and how we’re trying to do journalism differently,” he says. “It was ultimately the stories that got [more] people to finally hit subscribe.”

Myth #2: Annual reports are only for nonprofits

One of the best tools for attracting and retaining members, subscribers or donors is an annual report that tells the story of your impact and why people should support it. 

Annual reports are common in the nonprofit world, but many for-profit news organizations don’t take advantage of this marketing tool, and it’s a missed opportunity. 

One exception: LION member Richland Source, a for-profit local news site in Ohio that spends several weeks each fall building a hard-copy annual report to help attract members, advertisers and corporate sponsors. 

Publisher Jay Allred says Richland Source’s annual report is a key factor in its fundraising success. 

“It’s a springboard for end-of-year fundraising,” Allred shared on Slack last year. “The report helps us raise more than $150,000 in local support. It’s worth the effort.”

Myth #3: Readers will revolt if you ask for money too often

The fear of annoying or losing readers with an over-aggressive fundraising campaign seems to be a universal concern among journalism leaders, with every disgruntled email response or uptick in newsletter churn taken as evidence proving the point. 

This concern is admirable, especially when it comes from a place of wanting to create the best experience for your readers. That said, it’s more likely that you’re not asking for support enough.

To take a timely (and somewhat extreme) example, consider political campaigns. Like news publishers, they have an incentive not to tick off their audience – because they want that audience to give them their votes. 

But when it comes to asking for money, goodness gracious they are not shy! They send text messages, they send emails, they buy social ads, and they do all these things a million times more aggressively than even the most assertive local news publishers.

Oh, and they make a whole bunch of money doing it. 

There are limits to this analogy, of course, and there are good reasons not to emulate the shadier side of political marketing. But the bigger takeaway: News publishers have a long way to go before they become seriously annoying on the level of those political campaigns.

And as other organizations gear up their own end-of-year fundraising campaigns, the much bigger risk is that news publishers will let their message get drowned out by all the noise. 

How LION Publishers can help 

Here are a few resources from LION Publishers that can help you plan and execute a fundraising campaign to end the year:

Borrow these 7 campaign ideas to ask readers for support in new ways.

Learn how LION member Richland Source raises more than $250K/year in community support, and join our News Entrepreneur Community on Slack to read this thread about how their annual report contributes to the fundraising effort. 

Review this slide deck from our Independent News Sustainability Summit session on measuring impact.

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.

Bonus Reading

• How a local paper built a tool to measure impact by Karen K. Ho
• Stop chasing clicks and instead track impact by Bene Cipolla 
• 7 tips for tracking your impact by Anjanette Delgado
• Creative end-of-year fundraising for news by Christine Schmidt and Teresa Gorman

The post 3 fundraising myths that could be holding your news business back appeared first on LION Publishers.

But launching at the start of a global pandemic? Even as experienced news leaders with a detailed business plan, they couldn’t have imagined just how challenging their first months would be.

The silver lining: The growing pains of remote work helped them focus more on their team culture—and prioritize it just as much as reporting the news and raising money.

“We had to put so many extra effort into cultivating relationships, and it has paid off,” Zamora said. “Our team has so much love for each other, and that is not by accident.”

The conversation focused on how The 19th has built “operational resilience” in their newsroom by making it a priority to support and listen to their people.

“In some ways we have to slow down,” Ramshaw said. “We’ve been in startup mode nonstop for three years, and that is exhausting. It’s a treadmill of fundraising. It’s a treadmill of hiring. And [now] we need to think more about how we take care of our team, how we prioritize our culture, how we love on each other, how we set up systems and processes.”

You can read more highlights from the conversation on Twitter (in English and Spanish).

The post Amanda Zamora and Emily Ramshaw deliver keynote at LION Local Journalism Awards appeared first on LION Publishers.

The Independent News Sustainability Summit brought 500 independent news leaders and supporters together in Austin, Texas, for three days of conversations and connections focused on building more sustainable independent news businesses. The group of attendees represented:

• Nearly 200 LION members from nearly a third of our membership 
• Dozens of funders, people who work for journalism-support organizations, and vendors who sell products/services to independent news businesses
• Attendees from 48 states and four Canadian provinces 
• More than 100 people who received a total of $56,000 in travel scholarships to help them attend 

The event was hosted by LION Publishers, News Revenue Hub and RevLab at The Texas Tribune, with support from presenting sponsor Knight Foundation, and from The Lenfest Institute and Google News Initiative. 

Here are a few takeaways from an inspiring, rewarding three days in Austin:

1. LION members are making an impression at the highest ranks of the journalism industry.

As a career journalist who spent more than four decades in newsrooms, including eight years as executive editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet has seen a lot of trends come and go in our industry. 

So when he talks about his excitement for the future of local news and name drops a LION member, New York Focus, it’s more than high praise. 

It’s a sign that our little corner of the news industry is moving toward the limelight, alongside a growing recognition that the future of local news will be built by civic-minded founders, not cost-cutting corporate brass. 

As Baquet put it: “I’m actually bullish [about the future of news]. I’m a realist, I understand the economics of the news business, and I get all the forces that are pushing against us. But I also see people getting into the news business in ways they couldn’t have before.” 

He added, “I had coffee with three editors at New York Focus… they do great stuff, and you could not have had a small group of people start a news operation with that kind of focus when I started in journalism. So I’m bullish.” 

2. The independent news movement is growing, with more representation of those who have been historically underrepresented.

If anyone needed a reminder about how much growth we’ve seen in independent local news, the LION Local Journalism Awards delivered in spades. 

As Joshua Benton wrote for Nieman Lab, the list of winners wasn’t dominated by a small group of unicorn organizations that felt like exceptions to the rule.  

Instead, they came from all corners of North America, from small towns and big cities, from for-profit and nonprofit newsrooms – and all of them with success stories that feel replicable, even if deeply challenging.  

The award honorees also reflected the growing racial diversity within independent news, and at events like this one.

In a post about winning a LION Award, Mississippi Free Press publisher Kimberly Griffin wrote, “We don’t represent every community in Mississippi, but we darn well try daily and will continue to get better at it. That’s frightening for people in power because our existence challenges the media and leadership status quo, how news is done and what communities are served.”

Magnolia Reporter publisher Mike McNeill also wrote about his observations from the conference. “I think of all the newspaper conferences I went to, and as much as I liked all those people, they all looked like me,” he said at the Summit’s closing session. “But this group looks like America.” 

3. The human side of running a small business is getting more focus.

A year ago, we shared a framework for news business sustainability that centered around financial health, journalistic impact, and what we call “operational resilience” – in other words, the health of the people doing the work and the likelihood they’ll be able to keep it up. 

That third pillar often gets overlooked in our industry, but we saw at the Summit how important and urgent it feels for many of our members. 

“We are not managing products and tasks,” Outlier Media executive director Candice Fortman said in a session on combating burnout. “We are managing human beings having human experiences.” 

In a keynote conversation, The Markup editor-in-chief Sisi Wei and Charlottesville Tomorrow editor-in-chief Angilee Shah discussed what they are unlearning or shedding from their legacy newsroom experiences, including the idea “that you can’t rest when you need it.” 

In another session, Montana Free Press executive director John Adams said hiring is one of the most important roles of a CEO, and he shared a personal measure of success – the fact that his employees are able to do things like buy a home and not rely on side gigs to financially survive.

We’ll have more to share from the Summit next week, including session slide decks and keynote videos. 

In the meantime, we’d love your feedback. Please complete this short survey if you attended the Summit, or reply to this email if you weren’t able to attend but have thoughts or ideas to share for our next in-person event. 

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Philomath News is a rural news startup with a single employee. CalMatters is a statewide nonprofit with a staff of more than 50 and a seven-figure budget. So what do they have in common? 

Like nearly 200 other independent publishers, they both rely on Newspack to grow audience and revenue. 

“When I started Newspack three years ago, my goal was to help independent digital news organizations publish great journalism and find a path to sustainability,” said Kinsey Wilson, the founder and head of Newspack. “One way to do that is to ensure that local independent publishers have access to the same technology as larger organizations – at a fraction of the cost.”

To learn more about what Newspack can do for your news business, schedule a demo here, or read on for a Q&A with Newspack founder Kinsey Wilson that covers publishers’ most common questions about Newspack. 

You say you provide great technology to small independent publishers at a fraction of what it would typically cost. How is that possible?

We’ve done it in part by raising nearly $10m in grant funding to subsidize our startup costs, and by standardizing our technology solutions using industry best practices. We build common tools – rather than custom, one-off solutions – that can be used by many while still giving publishers the flexibility to express their brand as they see fit. That encourages smart business practices while keeping costs down.

Newspack charges a flat monthly rate for its publishing platform, whereas some other CMS platforms charge a percentage of revenue. What’s your pitch to publishers for why the upfront investment is worth it?

Our goal is to earn fair value for the tools and services we’re delivering, without penalizing the most successful publishers simply because they’re making more money. That would only encourage those high-earning publishers to find other solutions. Instead, we’d rather keep them on the platform and hope they contribute their expertise to the community we’re building.

Revenue is a top concern for many LION members and independent publishers. How does Newspack help?

We deliver great publishing tools. But that’s only the start. We’ve also built an end-to-end advertising solution that’s easy to implement. And a full suite of what we call “reader activation” tools that help you manage everything from initial registration to newsletter signup to donation to membership or subscription, depending on your model.

Newspack’s publishing platform is built on WordPress, but it’s a very different experience than many WordPress veterans will be used to. Can you explain how? 

As an open source technology, the beauty of WordPress is that it invites contributions from developers all over the globe. That means there are more than 50,000 plugins in the WordPress ecosystem, which support an almost infinite variety of functions. Of course, the curse of WordPress is that there are more than 50,000 plugins, which creates a paradox of choice and a huge maintenance headache. We shoulder that burden for you by making smart selections based on our knowledge of the business, and by making sure they’re secure and play well together.

Our membership at LION includes established publishers who have already launched news sites and aspiring founders who are just getting started. Is Newspack an option for both those groups?

Publishers large and small generally need access to a similar suite of tools. For established publishers, we provide free migration to the platform. But whether you’ve been around for years or are just starting out, your needs are similar: a publishing system that is easy to use, optimized for speed and looks great on mobile; tools to attract and engage audience; and advertising and reader revenue systems to build revenue.

How can publishers learn more about starting or migrating a news site on Newspack?

Sit in on one of our weekly demos. Or simply contact us so we can discuss your needs.

LION offers sponsorships to software and service providers, educational institutions and other businesses that aim to serve independent news publishers like LION’s members. Learn more about our sponsorships policy and sponsorship opportunities at lionpublishers.com/sponsorship.

The post Why so many independent publishers choose Newspack as their CMS appeared first on LION Publishers.

In this News Guest episode, you’ll hear from two people who have been on both sides of newsroom management about how independent news publishers can be better managers.

• Samantha Ragland is vice president of journalism programs at the American Press Institute and has coached newsroom leaders across the country. 

• Wendi C. Thomas is the founder and publisher of MLK50, a LION member newsroom in Memphis that focuses on the intersection of poverty, power and policy.

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 Wendi and Samantha, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:

On deciding if managing people is the right role for you:

Wendi C. Thomas: Many people think, ‘Oh, I want to have power, I want to have money and be the leader.’ But management is like being a servant – you are going to work so hard for so little recognition. The question to ask is: Do you want to serve, and do you want to set up other people to shine?

Samantha Ragland: Sisi Wei [editor-in-chief of The Markup] gave me some great advice – she challenged me to decide if I wanted to grow cool people or wanted to grow cool projects. I love that idea, and because of that challenge, I really enjoyed my first experience as a people manager. I thought that I was there and promoted into a position of power to help the team.

On what makes a good (or bad) manager:

Wendi: The really good editors and managers I had over the years were truly invested in my success as a person. They saw me as a person first, and my identity as a worker was second, third, fourth down the line. 

Candice Fortman: The best managers, if you wrote down what makes them good at their jobs, they often sound like the best volunteers at an organization. The same spirit that draws someone to work for free to serve a mission is often what you see in the best managers.

Samantha: There is no one-size-fits-all approach to leadership, and that is what makes it a hard, hard job. But if you are only focused right now on the journalism in your newsroom, then you are not doing the job of being a leader and a manager.

On taking care of yourself while leading an organization:

Wendi: I have been in regular therapy for the last eight years, and I also have people outside the newsroom – other Black women in newsroom leadership roles who I go to for support and counsel. You need to have that kind of outlet. I don’t know if it was Oprah or Beyonce or some other important person who said ‘You can’t pour from an empty cup.’ And that’s very true when you’re working with people. You want to be able to give them what they need, but first you have to be able to get what you need for yourself.

On mistakes and lessons learned as managers:

Samantha: One mistake I still think about often is how I managed across generations as my team at the Palm Beach Post grew. I inherited some folks who I don’t think I led well – I was way too hands-off. And that wasn’t about giving them autonomy, it was about fear, right? These are people who were very senior to me, legacy people, and I wish I would have found a way to communicate their value as I saw it earlier in my process of managing them, because we would have had a better working relationship.

Wendi: My biggest mistake has probably been not trusting myself enough to have the tough conversations with employees that needed to be had. And again, that’s coming out of fear. It’s not out of kindness or care for the team member, it’s out of me being fearful and not wanting to have that tough conversation, when the adult thing to do would be to go ahead and tell somebody, ‘We’re having a challenge. How can we fix this?’

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

The post How to become a better manager ft. Wendi C. Thomas and Samantha Ragland appeared first on LION Publishers.

Whether the person is full-time or part-time, it means you’ve gained enough traction, earned enough revenue, and built a strong enough operational foundation that your business is ready to grow. 

That’s the exciting part. 

The scary part? It also means you’re about to become a manager – and for some independent publishers (emphasis on independent), the transition to delegating work, rather than doing it all yourself, doesn’t come naturally. 

“There is a difference between being a manager and being a good manager,” Outlier Media executive director Candice Fortman said on our latest episode of News Guest. 

Management can be a particularly tough skill to learn for journalism leaders, especially those with backgrounds as star reporters. 

As media critic Ryan Chittum put it nearly a decade ago: “The personal traits that tend to foster reportorial excellence—independence, skepticism, aggressiveness, etc.—can be, shall we say, counterproductive in a boss.”

At LION, we’re working to help our members become more well-rounded leaders by providing training, coaching and other resources in areas of need.

Here are a few upcoming opportunities for publishers to strengthen their management and leadership skills:

= LION members only

Listen to our News Guest episode with MLK50 founder Wendi C. Thomas and American Press Institute vice president of journalism programs Samantha Ragland. It’s a fascinating conversation about what it means to be a good manager – and about the lessons they’ve learned and mistakes they’ve made along the way. 

Join us for the Independent News Sustainability Summit in Austin this month. The full schedule is now available, and the sessions on management and leadership include:

• From journalist to CEO: What we wish we’d known before running a startup featuring Erin Millar from Indiegraf, John Adams from Montana Free Press and Kara Meyberg Guzman from Santa Cruz Local.
   
• Leading a turnaround: How reimagining can lead to sustainability featuring Cierra Hinton from Scalawag, Lisa Snowden-McCray from Baltimore Beat, and Tim Griggs from Blue Engine Collaborative.
   
• Achieving ambitious goals: How newsroom leaders established and achieved big aims featuring John Bebow from The Center for Michigan / Bridge, S. Mitra Kalita from Epicenter-NYC / URL Media and Mary Walter-Brown from News Revenue Hub.

• Building a support network: How leaders can combat isolation featuring Christian Monterrosa from LION Publishers, Ben Nishimoto from Honolulu Civil Beat, Flavian DeLima from Spinning Forward, Lela Savic from La Converse and Megan Raposa from Sioux Falls Simplified. 

Dive into LION’s Operational Readiness Handbook. This resource in the News Entrepreneur Academy includes an excellent lesson on onboarding and preparing a new hire for success, as well as sample documents and templates for:

• Building an onboarding checklist for new hires and creating a plan for their first 90 days
• Using a RACI chart to articulate job responsibilities 
• Leading a “user manual” exercise to better understand your colleagues and how they like to work

Take a self-guided course: We’re adding new video courses to the NEA all the time, and three of our latest ones focus on management and leadership:

• HR Best Practices with experienced HR consultant Deb Lewis

• Management Best Practices with executive coach and marketing consultant Natalie Archibald

• Addressing and Avoiding Burnout with executive coach and former New York Times reporter Sushil Cheema

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

Bonus Reading

• To become managers, journalists must let go of independent mindset by Annie Russell

• Management isn’t journalism’s strong suit by Ryan Chittum

• How would you like leadership in journalism to be different by Erika Owens

• Journalism managers are burned out – is it time for a work redesign? by Jane Elizabeth

• They built their careers on change. Now, they’re middle managers by Alex Sujong Laughlin

• Journalists embrace management opportunities – and train for them by Cristina Tardáguila 

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