Independent News Sustainability Summit 2024

News and information habits are constantly evolving, adapting to technologies and behaviors. New research conducted by Northwestern University and FT Strategies aims to better understand what the next generations of consumers think about today’s news experience and the extent to which it meets their expectations and needs. This session will share key research findings and offer ideas about how news organizations can better serve the needs of 18 to 25-year-olds.

We kick off the 2024 Independent Local News Sustainability Summit with a conversation about what’s happening in Chicago. The city is home to many innovators in local news and the impact of that work is being felt in other places, from bringing great ideas incubated in this place that can inform all newsrooms and even the Press Forward initiative. We’ll hear how Chicago’s publishing community built a culture of supporting local news, how news leaders built a culture of supporting each other and how others can adapt these practices to create stronger news ecosystems in the places they call home.

Burnout is the scourge of the journalism world, and we can't continue to "do more with less" or self-care our way to healthy workloads. This hands-on session will help news leaders create a Stop Doing List to identify the best use of their time, money and energy - and what to let go of.

Worksheets will be provided to help you move forward with the learnings in a concrete way after the workshop.

Telling the story of your new business is critical to gaining trust, buy-in and funding from your audiences and stakeholders. This session will dig into how three news businesses articulated their news organization’s impact and the tools they’ve used to help others understand how their journalism is making a difference.

This session explains the practical differences and expectations of running a donation, membership or subscription program for reader revenue, including how much time you should expect to commit, resources required to succeed, and how much money you can expect to earn. It is for publishers looking to launch a reader revenue model or transition to a different model.

A wave of consolidation is washing over the independent news industry, leading many news leaders to question whether it's best to stay independent, form alliances, sell, buy, or merge. This session will explore how this trend is playing out across the industry, what it means, and take a look under the hood of CalMatters' acquisition of The Markup.

This session will focus on how understanding user feedback, implementing product improvements, and sizing the total addressable market will help you grow your newsletter.

Philanthropic funding has been a fairly recent and high-impact revenue stream for journalism, but a durable revenue strategy doesn't start and end with grant funding. This session will explore how to leverage philanthropic dollars to diversify your revenue streams and build a strong foundation for the future.

This session will provide insights into the art of building meaningful relationships with major donors. We will discuss best practices for engaging prospects, creating personalized approaches, and effectively communicating your organization's mission and needs.

This session will explore strategies, tactics and tips from three news businesses that exploded their bottom line in sponsorships, grants and individual giving in just one year.

Affinity Groups will facilitate specific connection opportunities and conversations for publishers and news leaders around shared identities. This group is for journalists who work in one-person newsrooms and run all aspects of their news business alone.

Affinity Groups will facilitate specific connection opportunities and conversations for publishers and news leaders around shared identities. These two groups will be available in the Grand Ballroom: 

Diaspora journalists
This group is for journalists and news entrepreneurs who serve diaspora communities. These journalists work in newsrooms that focus on serving audiences in different locations but are connected through a shared identity.
Leader: Camille Padilla Dalmau, Founder, 9 Millones

Spanish-speaking journalists
This group is for journalists and news entrepreneurs who are Spanish speakers. They may work in newsrooms that specifically serve Spanish-speaking audiences.
Leader: Claudia Yaujar-Amaro, Editor-in-Chief, Planeta Venus

Affinity Groups will facilitate specific connection opportunities and conversations for publishers and news leaders around shared identities. This group is for journalists and news entrepreneurs who identify under the umbrella term of Black, Indigenous, and/or a person of color.

Affinity Groups will facilitate specific connection opportunities and conversations for publishers and news leaders around shared identities. This group is for journalists and news entrepreneurs who identify as Black. Unlike the BIPOC group, this group will focus on the specific experiences of Black journalists.

Affinity Groups will facilitate specific connection opportunities and conversations for publishers and news leaders around shared identities. This group is for journalists and news entrepreneurs who identify as Indigenous. Unlike the BIPOC group, this group will focus on the specific experiences of Indigenous journalists.

Affinity Groups will facilitate specific connection opportunities and conversations for publishers and news leaders around shared identities. This group is for journalists and news entrepreneurs who identify as LGBTQIA+. 

This session will explore how three news organizations have built worker-led, co-operative and non-hierarchical leadership models to redefine how decisions are made, how work is accomplished and how newsrooms make a difference.

Join us for "Product Table Talks," a dynamic series of roundtable discussions featuring experts on key topics in local news product thinking. Facilitated by Shannan Bowen from NC Local News Workshop and AX Mina, Independent Coach and Board Member of the News Product Alliance, this workshop will delve into essential skills for modern newsrooms.

Starting with an introduction to product thinking and the concept of "jobs to be done," participants will rotate through tables to learn about revenue and product strategies, user research and audience segmentation, vendor management, and securing team and leadership buy-in. The session will conclude with a wrap-up of key takeaways, which will be shared with the broader local news and news product communities.

Worksheets will be provided to help you move forward with the learnings in a concrete way after the workshop

You’re underwater running payroll, sourcing business insurance, researching CRMs and, oh yes, also publishing news. You know you need operational support, but where, how much, and when? This workshop will dive into your business model and financial position to help you identify your specific operational needs and outline a process for either choosing a vendor/contractor or hiring an in-house team member to do the critical work that moves your news business forward.

This session will explore how to leverage marketing and relationship building to create champions for your news business among the leaders and funders in your community.

Sure, you'll be covering the 2024 election — but how? If you're a place-based publisher, elections are an unmissable opportunity to serve your community.

But there are a lot of decisions to make in order to meet this moment, and the sooner you start making them, the better this election is going to go for you and your community members. The Election SOS and Knight Election Hub teams are bringing you a series of lightning talks on parts of your election strategy you might not have a plan for yet — but definitely should. Afterward, they'll facilitate small group discussions on some of those decisions and ideas to help you get election-ready.

Presentations and group discussions will tackle:
- How to build an election fundraising plan
- How to background candidates better
- How to expand your election coverage through content sharing with the AP
- How to build a feedback loop with your audience members to do more responsive election coverage

There will be free pizza for session attendees.

Three newsroom leaders share their experiments, one thing you can steal and what the future holds for AI and local news.

Strategic planning takes time, energy, and vision — attributes that are often in short supply in a lean organization. And yet, it's critical to identify where you are now, where you want to be down the road, and how to get there. This hands-on workshop will introduce strategic planning tools and exercises tailored to the needs of very small newsrooms and will provide a set of frameworks you can use to set goals and create strategies to grow revenue, increase impact, and achieve better work-life balance.

Journalism is a public good, but an increasing number of organizations are thinking more broadly about how to meet and measure impact. This session explores how news businesses are using the tools of education, community organizing, events and engagement to meet community information needs.

This session explores how news businesses are building sustainability through community engagement strategies that increase audience growth, organizational impact and financial supporters.

Learn how news organizations have invested in building more transparent, accountable, and caring work cultures. This session will identify key organizational, team, and individual needs, demonstrate how newsrooms at different stages of growth have addressed them in the workplace, and give you clear takeaways to improve your own workplace.

This registration-only, hands-on session will explore your leadership style to surface strengths and growth areas while outlining strategies for shifting your mindset from executor to visionary.

Please register here.

This session will focus on leveraging events to not only generate revenue but also to foster a deeper connection with your community. Learn innovative strategies for planning and executing events that attract both financial support and community participation.

This lightning chat will explore unique revenue streams that publishers are trying, how they launched them and the results they're seeing so far.

Table Talk discussions are facilitated peer-led discussions for independent news entrepreneurs to share ideas and build connections around shared topics of interest. This year’s groups include:

Best practices for a non-toxic newsroom culture
This session will address how to create an inclusive and healthy newsrooms, by prioritizing mental health and wellbeing, addressing "toxic" newsroom culture and undoing the myth of scarcity in journalism.
Leader: Eden Fineday, Publisher of IndigiNews

Expand your newsroom's capacity with freelancers
Using independent contractors and contributors can expand your capacity, but it means bringing different work styles, expectations and cultures into your organization. News entrepreneurs will discuss what does and doesn't work when brining in freelancers, and learn new ways to reach their goals without adding a new employee to the staff.
Leader: Katherine Lewis, Founder and CEO of The Institute for Independent Journalists

Reducing burnout: Prioritization and strategic efficiencies
A conversation for news entrepreneurs to share what has helped and what has hurt when building prioritization and decision-making frameworks and streamlining operations so that everything can get done with a little less burn-out.
Leader: Sarah Bishop Woods, Chief of Staff at News Revenue Hub

Innovative revenue experiments
Participants will share their experiments with generating revenue in innovative ways, how they did it and what they are learning from successes and failures.
Leader: Julie Drizin, Executive Director of Current: News for People in Public Media

Growing established newsrooms
There's a sizable cohort of LIONs who have been publishing for years, and haven't experienced the sort of explosive success that comes from a major influx of funding. But neither are they fresh startups anymore. So how do you keep growing responsibly and steadily?
Leader: Dylan Smith Editor and Co-Publisher from Tucson Sentinel

How to lead, inspire and get the best out of your early career journalists in order to sustain and grow your newsroom
Participants will discuss how to lead and manage early career journalists so that managers will get the best out of them, and create better chances of a newsroom that can both sustain and grow.
Leader: Kristen Hare, Local News Faculty from The Poynter Institute

Seeing Community: Collaborative approaches to visual journalism for local news organizations
This session will focus on local visual journalism as a tool for engagement, community building, and more impactful and contextualized reporting.
Leader: Jennifer Stratton, Executive Editor of CatchLight

Creating membership models
This session will focus on building and sustaining effective membership models for LIONS, where we'll explore approaches to structuring offerings and crafting compelling value propositions. This session welcomes everyone, from those new to membership models to experienced managers looking to refine their membership engagement strategies.
Leader: Meghan Rutigliano, Outlier Media Contributor, Strategic Consultant, Detroit Documenter

Regional collaboration with other newsrooms
Covering the Sunshine State can be a tough job, from hurdles to public records to managing such a large geographic area. Join the Florida Newsrooms Table Talk to share ideas and tips on how to get records that are meaningful to your audience and how connecting with other publishers can help you navigate the workload of large-state coverage. This session is open to anyone who feels that they share these challenges.
Leader: Megan Stokes, Editor-in-chief, Oviedo Community News

Answering your legal questions 
Complying with privacy requirements, enforcing your right to access public records and meetings, publishing newsworthy stories while minimizing legal exposure and avoiding copyright infringement claims are essential to your news organization's sustainability. Lawyers for Reporters will discuss with LION members who have been clients of the program common legal issues facing independent online news organizations and best practices and resources to address them.
Leader: Kay Murray, Managing Attorney at Lawyers for Reporters

You've been growing your reader revenue in fits and starts over time, but you know you could be taking a more efficient and effective approach. How do you find time to launch a planned campaign? How do you get started? In this session, two organizations that recently celebrated their first successful campaigns will walk participants through the process step by step.

Before the session begins, you’ll hear a five-minute presentation from Indiegraf, a Bronze Sponsor of the 2024 Independent News Sustainability Summit. This session has not been sponsored by Indiegraf, and its contents are considered wholly separate from Indiegraf’s presentation.

Advertising sales can be a major source of revenue, but it can feel daunting. It doesn't have to be. This hands-on session will cover a simple system for handling inbound sales requests, "hunting" down sales, and a perspective that will make you want to sell more. Takeaways will include a media kit template, a sales conversation agenda, a simple agreement template, and recordings of Kenny's real-life sales calls with local businesses. A true, "no ghosting" system.

LION and Blue Engine discuss insights from their partnership assessing large independent news outlets.

Conveying why your news business is valuable to the community can be challenging - especially when you're trying to change the expectations of what a news outlet does, and for whom. This session will explore how to find and communicate your niche and your audience when you're not the only (or biggest) game in town.

Ads and sponsorships remain significant revenue streams for LION members, and they can be an even bigger part of your revenue mix. This session will provide concrete examples of projects you can steal and ideas you can implement as you put ads and sponsorships at the center of your revenue strategy.

To effectively reach Spanish-speaking communities, publishers need to understand the complexity of this growing demographic. In this session, you’ll gain insights from publishers with real-world experience serving the diverse Hispanic, Latino, and LatinX audiences in the U.S. Panelists will explore migration patterns, political and economic disparities, passions around sports, food and family, and the myriad ways publishers connect with them.

This lightning talk will explore how to reach new audiences in different places through various ways

Organization leadership transitions are inevitable, but they don't have to be painful. As the independent news industry matures, we're seeing a greater emphasis on and examples of thoughtful succession planning at all levels of leadership. This session will explore how three high profile founders managed this change by approaching it from a position of intention, trust and strength.

In 2023, the Canadian government passed a bill called the Online News Act, which called for qualifying Internet platforms to compensate publishers. In response, Meta shut news down across Instagram and Facebook to avoid payments. But Google struck a deal with the government to distribute $100MM Canadian, and chose as the vehicle an organization comprised primarily of independent publishers. Hear first-hand about the impact of this legislation -- versions of which have been proposed at the federal and state level in the U.S.