Sustainability: Cracking the black box at the heart of local news

This guest post was written by David Grant, Blue Engine Collaborative’s director of partnerships.

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What does it mean to be “sustainable?”

There’s no idea more core to discussions about the future of local news organizations than their sustainability. Yet there’s no working definition for when a news organization reaches this hallowed ground. 

We — Blue Engine Collaborative and LION Publishers — have an initial definition. 

In 2021, LION developed a theory that sustainability for local news publishers exists at the intersection of three pillars — operational resilience, financial health, and journalistic impact. And in partnership with LION, we’ve built on this work to better understand and communicate what happens when publishers actually reach this stage.

Blue Engine coaches conducted 10 Sustainability Audits for larger LION publishers in the “growing” stage from a variety of backgrounds and compared their performance with global research about the progress of small businesses across the country. 

Here is an initial definition of sustainability for local news publishers:

• We can withstand a major challenge to two of the three sustainability pillars at one time.

While no organization can withstand a cataclysm — and defending against all three could make one so risk-averse it would be static — the organizations in our review could handle a challenge to two pillars and keep on chugging. They can do this because they have most (or all) of the four major characteristics listed below that our coaches would evaluate to determine if and how they would weather an intense storm.

We define those four areas as follows:

• Talent: The right people in key roles. (Corresponding pillar: Operational resilience)

Do you have a team that’s up for the task?

Organizations with a founder selling sponsorships, wooing philanthropy, and managing a newsroom simultaneously are many things, but foundationally, they still need key talent to help them become sustainable enterprises. Organizations that have built a strong team across crucial senior and middle management roles are set up well to sustain their excellence.

• Financial health: 6+ months of organizational expenses in cash reserve. (Corresponding pillar: Financial health)

To withstand a financial shock, there’s a simple test for sustainability: cash in the bank.

While recommendations for cash reserves vary across organizations of different sizes, most we spoke with maintained something near this level of reserve. Those who did not have this at the moment did not feel this was an onerous level to maintain going forward and had maintained such a level in the past.

• Product-market fit: Continued, even if modest, growth in support by local stakeholders (audience, philanthropists, and/or sponsors). (Corresponding pillar: Journalistic impact)

Nothing grows forever. 

At this point in most local news organizations’ life cycles, however, stagnating audiences likely means disconnection from the communities we serve, a key way to fall out of sustainability. All of the organizations surveyed show growth across key audience and financial metrics, even though those metrics vary.

• Structure: A repeatable way of producing our results. (Corresponding pillar: All three)

Does your excellence have a structure? 

In a crisis where a key team member or supporter stepped away, would the rest of the team be able to function and keep the organization running at a high level of excellence? Hallmarks include clear budgets, specific medium- and long-term goals, and operational indicators of progress (KPIs, e.g.) toward those goals that are regularly communicated to the team and the board. This is NOT a call to write extensive documentation about team workflows. It is a call to understanding and documenting broad organizational rituals that can be carried on even in the absence of key individuals. 

Even with solid answers to these four aspects, reaching sustainability is not the “end” of the publisher’s road. 

In fact, some organizations in our review left “sustainable” to return to the “growing” stage by choice (and some are contemplating doing so in the future).

Organizations may decide to expand into new products or new markets, temporarily returning to “growth” for a stronger long-term base of sustainability. 

Moving between categories on purpose is a sign of organizational ambition, not “going backward,” and can lead to greater impact and greater staying power. 

(This is quite different, of course, than backsliding into a stage like “maintaining” because your products, your people, and your structure are not connecting with your audience.) 

You can learn about each specific stage here, as outlined by LION.

So where does this leave us? 

For publishers, identifying your opportunities to shore up your talent, build financial wherewithal, continue to develop product-market fit, and formalize organizational structure will give you ample ideas for reaching an even stronger organizational posture. 

For journalistic funders, we hope the four signposts of sustainability can simplify how you understand the progress of a larger, more complex organization. From there, organizations that demonstrate their excellence in this way are great candidates for additional support to reach more people via new products and services or expansion into new markets. 

We welcome your thoughts and suggestions about how to develop this work further. In our next installment, we’ll discuss the four major opportunities facing “growing” and “sustainable” publishers identified in this research.

Thank you to LION for bringing Blue Engine coaches into this adventure and to the Google News Initiative for supporting the Sustainability Audits and, by extension, this research.

We are grateful for the help from the participating publishers: 

• ARLNow
• Block Club Chicago
• Daily Memphian
• Honolulu Civil Beat
• Lookout Local
• MinnPost
• New York Amsterdam News
• Richland Source
• Sacramento Observer
• Spotlight PA