Data, Evaluation, and Sustainability Audit
402 Audits
were completed in the first six months after launch, compared to 450 Audits completed over the program’s three-year history.
As interest in the Sustainability Audit, a cornerstone of LION’s programming since 2022, only continued to grow, we knew we needed to scale it. So we shifted from a cohort-style program, which required significant time from both LION staff and participants, to a self-serve product that most publishers can now complete in under 90 minutes.
This shift opened new opportunities for us to collaborate with external partners. We partnered with Press Forward on a new program that offers Audits and strategic business coaching to the 205 news outlets awarded Closing Local Coverage Gaps grants in 2024.* And our first regional, Audit-powered partnership supports 40 New England publishers, thanks to the Barr Foundation.
* Press Forward adopted our definition of sustainability in its Open Call, another nod to a 2023 strategic plan goal — making LION’s Sustainability Audit and Maturity Model an industry standard.
We’re creating custom dashboards that enable our partners to see which interventions had the greatest impact, helping them better understand their grantees. So not only does the Audit give individual publishers a bird’s-eye view of their business, but it also allows us to glean valuable, data-driven insights into the independent news industry.
And we’re using these insights to improve support for publishers at different stages and share information with the industry at large. We published ‘A Roadmap to Local News Sustainability,’ a report that consolidates the most actionable findings from three years of Sustainability Audit data, pulling from over 450 Audits.
Picked up by Nieman Lab, the Medill Local News Initiative, A Media Operator, and Journalism UK, this report reveals 21 key indicators most strongly correlated to a news organization’s sustainability stage, along with standout statistics, like the fact that organizations that completed the Audit saw a median increase in annual revenue of 62 percent.
Our Impact
“We did the Audit before and were able to implement some of the recommendations. This [new] Audit was actually very consistent with the human one and reminded me of some of the things that slipped on my list. So useful. Already trying to move forward on them.”
— Amos Gelb, American Witness
“This Audit has provided me with ideas and standards, as well as milestones and goals to stabilize our program to eventually expand.”
— Rasheed Shabazz, Oakland Voices
“The Audit was easy to do and confirmed a lot of things I suspected the organization needs to address. It's helpful to have that extra set of eyes evaluating our current state, so I know where to focus. Thanks very much.”
— Carson Walker, South Dakota News Watch
“The questionnaire makes me pull together data so that I am thinking about our organization with all the information at once. It also lets me know what things I am not focused on that maybe I should be.”
— Tara Hughes, Winchester News
We were invited to present our product and findings at Stanford University’s Story Discovery at Scale conference and at the 10 Points Unconference in Catania, Italy.
