Journalism intermediaries start to coordinate

People in our industry love the word ecosystem.

We especially love to talk about healthy news ecosystems. The thinking goes that when publications champion each others’ work, collaborate on big news stories, and even fundraise together, their impact becomes greater than the sum of their parts.

Journalism support organizations herald that kind of networked systems thinking. So it’s disappointing that we have yet to build a healthy journalism support ecosystem.

The lack of coordination across funders, associations, academic institutions, consulting firms, technology platforms, and other organizations that exist to serve journalists and newsrooms ultimately undermines the ecosystems we’re trying to strengthen. It results in cohort burnout, championing different metrics depending on different definitions of success, and the dreaded “I had no idea that existed.”

Journalism support organizations exist to provide the connective tissue between funders, news businesses and industry professionals. The problem is not intermediaries receiving too much foundation money; the problem is the lack of coordination between these intermediaries to enable the most efficient and best use of existing resources. That’s because there’s no vision or infrastructure to help us better leverage what we’re all working on to more effectively serve news businesses.

Given the large cash infusion the local news industry is about to receive, I predict 2024 will be the year that journalism support organizations come to the table to share draft budgets and pitches, and coordinate to figure out that vision and the infrastructure needed to make the most of this once-in-a-generation opportunity.

And here’s what I’ll offer as a starting place of conversation: At Lion Publishers, a professional association that serves more than 500 independent news businesses across the U.S. and Canada, our vision of publishers’ success is being sustainable, and a piece of the infrastructure that supports that vision is a maturity model we designed to help independent news businesses map their path to sustainability, and to articulate where we are best positioned to help.

As we wrote in our strategic plan, Lion will prioritize more hands-on support for our Focus Members, news businesses that are in our model’s Building and Maintaining stages of growth and who are led by someone who identifies as BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+.

But there are many other members we won’t be prioritizing support for, including aspiring entrepreneurs developing and launching their business in the Preparation stage and more established publishers in the Growing stage who are nearing sustainability. We want other organizations to be excellent at supporting these folks — so we can receive them (when they move into the Building stage) or hand them off (when they’re reading to enter the Growing stage).

This is how a healthy journalism support ecosystem should work. And 2024 is the year we could build it together.