5 lessons from 3 years and 450 Audits: What we’ve learned and what’s next

Since its inception in 2022, the Sustainability Audit and Funding program has been LION Publishers’ widest-reaching initiative, serving 354 unique LION members. To this point, the Audit has offered a comprehensive assessment, individualized coaching and analysis, a customized action report, and up to $20,000 in funding for participants between 2022 and 2024. December 2024 marked the end of the LION Sustainability Audit program as a hands-on, intensive program of support for LION members. As we work to launch the next iteration of a streamlined, on-demand Sustainability Audit program in June (more on that below), I wanted to take the time to reflect on what we’ve learned over the last few years.

The LION Sustainability Audit and Funding Program was first supported by the Google News Initiative in 2022. The 2023-2024 program was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Google News Initiative.

Audit Alumni

To start, let’s take a look at those 354 LIONs who participated in the program. One hundred members received an Audit in 2022, 75 in 2023, and 179 in 2024, with 96 of the 2022 participants also going through the Audit Booster in 2023. Some 98 percent of participants received funding through the program, totaling more than $7.5M in direct support to LION members. 

Participants represented 46 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and seven Canadian provinces. Of those, 42 percent of participants were organizations founded in the past five years. On the tax status side of things, 56 percent of participants were for-profit businesses, and 44 percent were nonprofits or solely fiscally sponsored, a split in line with LION’s overall membership.

The median participant had previous year annual revenue of $140,000 at the time of their Audit. Thirty-two percent of participants earned less than $50,000 annually. The vast majority of participants made less than $500,000, similar to LION members overall.

The median participant had one full-time employee. Forty-eight percent of participants had two or more full-time employees. A significant contingent, 31 percent of participants, had no full-time employees.

Across size, age, tax status, and much else, we are heartened that 93 percent of Audit participants agreed that the process has had or will have a positive impact on their overall sustainability.

Highlights and Insights

While we have highlighted insights throughout the program (for example, here, here, and here) and will continue to more deeply explore lessons from the Audit’s first three years, as we make this transition, I wanted to share five quick lessons applicable to most LION newsrooms.

1. Take time to reflect on your news business.

“We are constantly doing and rarely assessing. The interview and the Audit provided time to think and assess what we are doing.” – Denise Rolark Barnes, The Washington Informer

The management of any small business is time-intensive and stressful. With the ever-changing news cycle and ongoing threats to journalists’ safety, the management of a small news business is even more so. Unsurprisingly, 79 percent of LION founders say they always or often have more work than they can reasonably accomplish in a given week and only 24 percent of organizations say they have adequate staffing capacity to do the work they’re committed to doing. The constant pressure of daily tasks obscures the importance of assessing the broader strategy that informs the things news leaders do on a day-to-day and month-to-month basis. In addition to burning out, leaders also risk losing sight of the reasons motivating their journalism and entrepreneurship. 

Our recommendation: Set aside an hour each week to think about your business broadly. Ignore the execution of recurrent tasks, instead focusing on the broader strategic drivers of your business, like what sets you apart from your competitors, the things your audiences love about you, ways to grow your revenue, and how you spend your time and money in support of your business.

• How to Regain the Lost Art of Reflection, Harvard Business Review
• A simple framework for deciding what to stop doing, American Press Institute

2. Clarify your priorities.

“Right now, we are a tiny organization, each of us wearing many hats, and it’s very hard to get the 30,000 ft. view as well as identify the details for each of the next steps we can and should take toward improvement, growth, and sustainability. The Audit helps nail down priorities and tasks so that we can focus on what we need to do to grow and sustain our organization…” – Erica Walz, The Insider Utah

As stated above, most LIONs have more work than they can reasonably accomplish. Often, this is because everything is, or at least feels, mission-critical. A fairly common refrain I’ve heard from LIONs going through the Audit is, “I know what I need to do, but…” But what should I do first? What should I give up? How do I get started? And with what resources? 

Most news leaders have a strong understanding of the business they’re in but are often drawn in dozens of directions. An emphasis of the Audit has been to help news leaders set priorities, with the individualized Audit report often functioning as a “roadmap” for the next year. Audit participants were given $20,000 to implement two to three actions from their report. Significantly, the most popular category of actions to spend funding on was “Planning/Strategy,” with almost 20 percent investing in proactive planning or other strategic activities. That number increases to a full quarter of participants when financial planning and budgeting are included.

Of course, other spending was popular, including staffing and revenue generation (see the chart below), but it’s affirming to see participants recognize the importance of revisiting their strategies and priorities before diving back into the day-to-day.

Our recommendation: Spend some time annually to develop or refine a strategic or business plan, and build a budget.

• Get started with strategic planning and goal-setting: this resource shares guidance on aligning strategic planning with mission and values, News Product Alliance
• Create a Lean Canvas model (here’s a downloadable template) to help frame your thinking about your business, Lean Foundry
• Write your business plan: tips and templates on business planning, U.S. Small Business Administration
• The LION Financial Planning Workbook: check out these templates and guidance for creating a budget and other key financial documents, LION Publishers
• Setting Organizational Goals, LION Publishers
• Six LION members share the secrets to a great staff retreat, LION Publishers

If you need support in planning, financial management, or other areas, we’d also recommend checking out LION’s new Expert Network, with dozens of experts available to help support you and your team in building a strategic or business plan, crafting a budget, setting and revising goals, and much else.

3. Find trails blazed by peers.

“Drawing from the experience and best practices of our community of organizations has helped us focus and prioritize achievable tasks that I’m confident will guide us toward sustainability.” – Rob Arias, The E’ville Eye

The path to founding, leading, or working at a digital news outlet is winding, and no two journeys are alike. And yet, the approaches refined over time by this community of independent news businesses, those that inform the Audit, offer direction to building sustainable news businesses. This is especially true with the infrastructure of running a news business, like operations, financial management, and a foundational understanding of your audience.

Below, we’ve highlighted the prevalence of critical indicators for each of LION’s sustainability stages.

Our recommendation: This one is a bit self-serving, but…take the Audit! The specific foundational items your news business might need will vary, and the customized Audit approach will help identify the things your business needs in its current stage. The Audit will open again in June (details below). And if you haven’t already, be sure to join our News Entrepreneur Community Slack channel to discuss ideas, challenges, and tips with hundreds of others in the independent news industry.

4. Diversify your revenue.

“This Audit identified key areas for us to leverage and diversify our revenue streams, highlighting opportunities that we have not yet implemented.” – Garry Pierre-Pierre, The Haitian Times

We don’t ask in the Audit questionnaire what keeps publishers up at night, but if we did, my hunch is that “money” would be the top answer. There are few challenges more significant than earning and sustaining enough revenue to keep your business running and, ideally, growing. Long-time Audit analyst Todd Stauffer refers to revenue streams as “legs of the stool” – if you want stability, and you’re not a French furniture designer, you probably want to aim for at least three legs. Still, only 40 percent of Audit participants had at least three distinct revenue streams making up 10 percent or more of their total revenue. That number shrinks to 14 percent if we up the share of total revenue to at least 20 percent. Of course, there’s no revenue strategy that’s perfect, but diversifying your revenue mix helps make your business more resilient against downturns in a specific segment. 

Our recommendation: To the extent possible, work to make your most effective revenue stream more efficient, so you have time and resources to focus on experimenting with other revenue streams. That doesn’t mean to try to earn money from five or six new things if you’re currently only earning from one or two (only a handful of LIONs earn more than 10 percent of their total from five or more revenue streams, and those that do are new organizations with low annual revenue), but to focus on a few that can be sustainable for your market and your business. Reading through Todd’s Digital Revenue Playbook is a great starting point for strengthening your existing revenue streams and assessing ways to experiment with new ones. 

5. Embrace confidence.

“As a business owner, it is great to have a tool like this to validate what you are doing and show areas that need improvement. I learned that I am not as “lost” as I thought I was, but just need the guidance to give me the direction and resources to move forward.” – Don Fish Jr., Tri-Community NewsPlus

At LION, we emphasize data over anecdotes, but for this lesson, we’re leaning fully into vibes. Over the past three years, I’ve read survey responses and reports from 354 LIONs and exchanged emails and phone calls with many of you. My biggest takeaway is that this group of journalists and entrepreneurs is the single greatest asset to the independent news ecosystem. In your dedication to your communities, your drive to grow and improve, and your commitment to one another, I’m consistently blown away. 

Our recommendation: Believe in yourself, and invest in yourself!

What’s next?

One of the limitations of the Sustainability Audit in its current format is the need to limit who can participate at a given time. Because Audits take full-time and contract help to produce, we could only support a maximum of 50 organizations in a given three-month period. Because of restrictions on the funding attached to Audits, organizations that participated in 2022 or 2023 weren’t eligible in subsequent years, and some organizations weren’t eligible at all. In short, as broad as this help had become, the Audit program was still a time- and resource-intensive initiative that limited access. 

So in June 2025, we’re launching a new version of the Sustainability Audit that will be available to all LION members on-demand. Want to take the Audit once a year or once every few months? You can! 

LION members will be able to access a streamlined questionnaire whenever they’d like and get a report with tailored recommendations based on insights from the past three years, benchmark comparisons to peer LION organizations, and resources and guidance from across the industry.

While we’ll offer free coaching through the LION Expert Network to testers and early adopters of the new Audit, moving forward, the Sustainability Audit won’t come with a dedicated Audit analyst or direct funding. If you’re interested in testing an early version of the new Audit, send me a note at andrewrockway@lionpublishers.com.

And finally…

We’re tremendously grateful for all of the people who’ve made the Sustainability Audit possible, including current and former LION staff (especially Anika Anand and Lisa Heyamoto, who led the development of the Sustainability Audit in their time at LION), the more than forty experts from across the industry who served as Audit analysts (who we really can’t say enough good things about), many others who helped us craft and refine the Audit questionnaire and make sense of the data, the Google News Initiative and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for their funding and support, and the hundreds of LIONs who have engaged earnestly and energetically in the program.