Report
How nonprofit new ventures seek sustainanbility
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ArticleAbove: Data from a new Knight Foundation report offers an in-depth view into the nonprofit news industry, revealing the significant progress that news organizations have made toward sustainability and the challenges they still face. RELATED REPORT "Finding a Foothold: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability" The search for sustainable news business models requires good comparative data that allows organizations to benchmark the effectiveness of their work. This kind of information is rare. It takes time to collect and structure, and requires organizations be comfortable with sharing their financial and operational data openly. A Knight Foundation report released today helps fill that gap and illuminates an emerging aspect of the news industry. “Finding a Foothold: How Nonprofit News Venture Seek Sustainability” offers a detailed look at 18 nonprofit news organizations, and their progress towards sustainability. The report, a follow-up to the 2011 Knight study “Getting Local,” examines the emerging business models of nonprofit news organizations in a transparent way. This time we expanded the number of nonprofit sites included in the research and broadened the study to state and national organizations. The report reveals significant trends over a three-year period (2010-2012), and provides a view into what has worked and what hasn’t. Importantly, the nonprofit news sector is growing but relying less on funding from foundations, as organizations find more individual donors and cultivate earned revenue from events and corporate sponsors. However, the prospects for sustainability remain fragile. Organizations have to resist the impulse to recreate the traditional newspaper online, while anticipating and adapting to changes in how individuals consume and share news.
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Photo credit: Flickr user Johan Larsson One in three Americans consumes news on Facebook. That’s a noteworthy news flash, even for those accustomed to constant declarations about how the social Web is changing people’s media habits. A new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, with support from Knight Foundation, finds that 64 percent of U.S. adults use Facebook, and about half of those users (47 percent) "ever" get news there. This translates to 30 percent of all adults in the United States. What do the results mean for every online news organization seeking to produce shareable content that’s widely distributed? Here are some of the instructive insights behind the big numbers: Connect with younger, engaged news consumers. News organizations looking to reach younger audiences need to pay attention to Facebook. The average adult news consumer on Facebook is 39 years old, nearly 20 years younger than the average profiles of people who often read print newspapers and watch cable news. Individuals ages 18-29 represent about a third of Facebook news consumers and are as engaged, if not more so, with news on the site than older Facebook news consumers. Data in other Pew research show that’s not the case on other platforms. “Even when young people do get news on other platforms, they tend to be less engaged with that news than older Americans,” the study says. Maximize incidental contact. Facebook exposes people to news who are not actively seeking it. The vast majority of Facebook news consumers (78 percent) encounter news when they are on the platform for other reasons, such as seeing what friends and family are doing and looking at photos. When asked about their main reasons for logging in, only 16 percent of all people on Facebook say it’s “to get news.” Facebook allows for some serendipity, a quality not found often on other news sites. Focus on serious (local) content. News organizations are well positioned to tap into the preferences of people who get news on Facebook. “Entertainment” is the news topic most regularly viewed by 73 percent of Facebook news consumers. But this is closely followed by news topics about “events in one’s own community” (65 percent). “National politics and government” ranks fourth, reaching 55 percent of news consumers, closely behind sports (57 percent). News organizations shouldn’t be suckered into the misconception that only pop culture and celebrities make for compelling social media content. Often the most widely shared viral articles are about serious news and events.