🏆 Meet the 36 winners of our 2023 LION Awards
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know that our weekly digest containing the latest LION news and industry information typically hits your inbox every Thursday morning. Well, we’ve bumped up our schedule this week because we have two exciting updates that we couldn’t wait to share! Please enjoy this special edition of the LION newsletter, and we’ll be back in your inbox at our regularly scheduled time next week. ✨
We are delighted to announce that 36 independent news businesses have been selected as winners of the 2023 LION Local Journalism Awards, which recognizes excellence in 10 award categories rooted in our pillars of sustainability — operational resilience, financial health, and journalistic impact.
More than 175 news leaders and journalism supporters attended the fifth annual LION Awards Ceremony last night in Durham, North Carolina. There, we celebrated 99 finalist entries from 74 LION member organizations, announced the 37 winning entries, and awarded $55,800 in cash prizes thanks to generous support from our sponsors.
Read our full post to learn more about these outstanding publications and their award-winning work. Congratulations to all of the winners of the 2023 LION Awards! 🎉
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Introducing LION’s five-year strategic growth plan
It’s been a *big* week here at LION Publishers. In addition to hosting the 2023 LION Local Journalism Awards Ceremony and our sold-out Southeast News Sustainability Meetup, we unveiled our five-year strategic growth plan.
This blueprint contains our vision for a healthy news ecosystem and how we plan to continue propelling our more than 475 members across the U.S. and Canada forward on the path to sustainability.
To make that vision a reality, these are three of the strategies that will be central to our work over the next five years:
- Make our sustainability model an industry standard so we can start creating and sharing benchmarks that help publishers understand how their business is doing
- Help all our members become more sustainable through education programs, community support, and cost-saving services, and provide more tailored support for our Focus Members
- Ensure any member can receive a Sustainability Audit so they can identify their stage of sustainability and recommendations on how to become sustainable
This is just a snapshot of our plan, which details where we’ve been, where we’re going, and why. We’ve set ambitious goals, and we’re beginning to operationalize these big ideas. And we’re incredibly excited for what’s ahead.
We invite you to read our highlights of the plan and view the full strategic plan on our website.
How to reach us
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