A Roadmap for Local News Sustainability
Hundreds of surveys, hundreds of hours, hundreds of datapoints. One comprehensive look into the state of local news businesses.
Authors:
Eric Garcia McKinley, Ph.D. and Abigail Chang of Impact Architects
Chloe Kizer and Andrew Rockway of LION Publishers
Data visualizations: Eric Garcia McKinley, Ph.D.
Data analysis support: Dylan Sanchez
Editor: Michele McLellan
Designer: Ben Cunningham
2025 Sustainability Audit Report
Publish date
Nov. 12, 2025
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Introduction
How best can we support the independent news organizations that are a fundamental part of healthy civic life? We certainly don’t have all the answers, but after three years of hands-on work with hundreds of newsrooms across the United States and Canada, we learned a lot.
The LION Sustainability Audit and Funding program was LION Publishers’ widest-reaching program, serving 357 LION members from 2022 through 2024. Supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Google News Initiative, the program offered a path to sustainability that included a comprehensive initial assessment, individualized coaching and analysis, a customized action report, and up to $20,000 in funding to help participants implement recommendations from the action report.
The goal of the program was to help independent news organizations move the needle on sustainability. Ninety-three percent of Audit participants agreed that the process has had or will have a positive impact on their overall sustainability. Below we’ll dig into how.
This report is an overview of insights gathered from intensive programming, including 357 Sustainability Audits, nearly 4,000 hours of expert coaching, 450 funding requests, 98 follow up reports, and feedback from program participants.
The analysis produced the following insights:
- The combination of assessment, coaching, action report and funding was effective. Seventy-seven percent of 98 organizations that provided follow up data showed significant, measurable progress in developing their infrastructure, adopting best financial processes and/or improving and documenting the impact of their journalism.
- Median revenue for these organizations grew by 60 percent year over year during their participation in the program.
- Having dedicated staff to generate revenue was transformational to an organization’s chances of sustainability. Organizations with revenue generation staff had median revenue 700 percent higher than those without. In early-stage organizations, having the founder/leader dedicating a significant amount of time to revenue efforts creates the foundation for this caliber of success.
- The greatest weakness among organizations was a lack of systems and practices designed to manage business operations that support staff and leadership through legal, human resources and management processes.
- The shift that we see from developing to stable organizations correlates with the milestone of having three or greater established revenue streams. This supports established discourse concerning the importance of revenue diversification.
- A sounding board is a powerful resource. Participants shared that funding for outside consultants to plot high level organization strategy and planning was the most beneficial.
December 2024 marked the program’s transition from a hands-on program for LION members to a self-serve assessment. The self-serve assessment is available on demand to all LION members and for a fee to non-members.
Key Takeaways
LION’s on-demand self-serve assessment is rooted in the trends we’ve learned from our programming.
The local news problem is a small business problem.
Local news organizations are businesses grounded in their community impact, a reality that doesn’t make their business operations or financial processes any less important than their journalism. We’d argue it makes having a strong business infrastructure more fundamental.
Chart a path, even if it’s only the next couple of steps.
Having a plan for where an organization is going allows for efficient resource management, strategic alignment and sets the stage for growth. That can be a business model canvas as an organization is launching and then a more structured one- or three-year plan as an organization develops.
An organization is never too small to think big.
Early-stage or small organizations still have plenty they can do to lay a foundation for even modest growth. Seventy-three percent of organizations that entered the program early in their development had achieved measurable progress a year later. Defining your market, your impact, and your financial goals and then developing processes for tracking all three creates an environment for informed decision-making.
Read the recipe, prep the ingredients, then start cooking.
The shift from an organization run primarily by its founding team to one with wider staff is a key pivot point in an organization’s development. The more infrastructure an organization has prior to making this shift, the more success they see. The way to get started? A prioritized strategic checklist.
Row in the same direction.
Open lines of collaboration between editorial, product and revenue teams with shared definitions of success make an organization agile enough to weather a storm or latch onto new opportunities.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this work. We couldn’t have done it without the coaches, newsrooms, staff and partners who collaborated to bring this program to life.
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Contact
If you’re interested in learning more about the data in this report, please email LION’s Director of Data and Evaluation, Chloe Kizer at chloekizer@lionpublishers.com.
If you’re interested in learning how the LION Sustainability Audit can help the news businesses you work with, please reach out to Andrew Rockway at andrewrockway@lionpublishers.com.