The Strongest Organization in Nonprofit News Just Proved Why That's Not Enough
INN's 2025 Impact Report is a case study in what happens when the system asks one organization to do everything.
A Quick Disclaimer: These thoughts are mine alone. They don’t necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or the leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs how I see the industry, Backstory & Strategy is my space for thinking out loud and poking at the frameworks we all have to navigate.
Karen Rundlet’s letter at the front of INN’s 2025 Impact Report contains a line worth sitting with.
“We no longer need to validate the nonprofit model. We need to pull the levers that strengthen it. More nonprofit newsrooms is no longer the goal; more resilient nonprofit newsrooms with staying power is. From growth to strength.”
That is the right instinct. It is also, I think, the most important strategic statement any major journalism support organization (JSO) leader has made publicly in the last year. Rundlet is acknowledging that the field’s defining challenge has changed. The era of “more is better” is over. What comes next is harder, less photogenic, and far more consequential.
But there is a question buried inside the phrase “from growth to strength” that the report never asks: whose strength?
Rundlet’s formulation treats strength as a property of the individual newsroom. Give each outlet better fundraising tools, more coaching sessions, access to legal resources, and they become stronger. The logic is intuitive. It is also incomplete. Because strength, in a system this fragmented, is not a property of the node—it is a property of the network.
There are two ways to think about making a newsroom strong. The first is the individual logic: if we give this newsroom ten more tools, they will be strong. The second is the coordination logic: if we build a system where this newsroom only needs two tools because the other eight are handled by the infrastructure, the field is strong.
The INN Impact Report is a detailed, data-rich articulation of the individual logic. It describes what INN does for its members, tool by tool, program by program, session by session. And on those terms, the evidence is real. INN retained 94.5% of its members. NewsMatch generated nearly $70 million for 407 participating outlets in its tenth year, with more than 100,000 first-time donors.
When the LA wildfires and Appalachian floods hit, INN disbursed $600,000 in emergency grants, a program designed to disburse within 72 hours. When journalists faced safety threats, they issued 479 discounted DeleteMe licenses—an 800% increase. These are not symbolic gestures. They are operationally meaningful acts by an organization that takes its role seriously.
But the report also reveals something its authors did not intend. Read through the lens of the structural arguments I’ve been making in this newsletter since January, INN’s own data is the strongest case yet for why the individual logic, no matter how well-executed, hits a ceiling that only the coordination logic can break through.
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The Last Mile, Inside the Building
In January, I wrote about what I called the Fog of Good Intentions: the problem isn’t too many JSOs. It’s uncoordinated duplication.
Think of disaster relief. In a humanitarian crisis, you don’t eliminate redundancy—you coordinate it. The system works not because every organization does something different, but because a dispatch layer routes resources to the right place at the right time.
INN’s Impact Report illustrates the other half of that equation: what happens when resources reach the right organization but can’t complete the journey to the newsroom that needs them.
Consider the numbers. In 2025, INN staff and experts delivered more than 500 office hour sessions. They performed wealth screenings on 100,000 member donors. They launched Audience Studio and convened working groups on newsletter disruption. That is an enormous amount of activity from a team of roughly 22 people serving 524 organizations.
Now consider who is on the receiving end. The report tells us the median INN member organization has 5.5 full-time equivalent staff. Let that number settle for a moment. Five and a half people. That typically means no dedicated development director, no audience strategist, no HR department, and often no one who has done their specific job before.
A one-hour fundraising consultation is valuable to a newsroom that has someone on staff who can take the advice and execute on it. For a newsroom where the editor is also the fundraiser, the tech lead, and the board liaison, that office hour is a contact, not a transformation. The advice is sound. The capacity to act on it doesn’t exist.
This is the Last Mile problem manifesting inside the best-resourced, most trusted membership organization in the field. INN can build the tools, design the training, and deliver the consultation. What it cannot do, at 22 staff serving nearly 500 organizations, is ensure that the resource it provides converts into durable operational change. The math doesn’t allow it.
I suspect they see this. The “from growth to strength” framing only makes sense if you’ve felt the limits of growth. But naming the ceiling would require asking a follow-up question the report avoids: if INN can’t deliver deep support to nearly 500 newsrooms, who can? If the answer is “no single organization,” then the field doesn’t need a stronger node—it needs a different network.
The Concentration Question NewsMatch Doesn’t Answer
In February, I wrote about the 160x Efficiency Play: the pattern where high-capacity organizations keep surfacing in national programs because they’ve mastered the art of being found.
NewsMatch is the closest thing the nonprofit news field has to a genuine public good. Over ten years, it has helped generate more than $475 million. The INN Impact Report presents the headline: 407 outlets participated and generated nearly $70 million.
But the locally-generated revenue is where the concentration question becomes real.
A newsroom with a development director and an existing donor file will leverage that $15,000 national match into a campaign that generates multiples of it. A newsroom where the editor is running the appeal gets the same match but lacks the internal capacity to multiply it. The match is equitable. The ability to capitalize on it is not.
The NewsMatch report says newsrooms increased unique donors by 24%—a meaningful trend. But it’s a cohort-level average. Are the newsrooms at the bottom of the capacity spectrum seeing the same growth, or are the well-resourced outlets driving the average while the smallest ones tread water?
For some newsrooms, the match is the only reason fundraising happens at all. That’s a powerful argument for the program—but it’s also a powerful argument that those newsrooms need something deeper than a campaign toolkit.
None of this diminishes what NewsMatch accomplishes. It is a genuine public good. But it is also, by design, a mechanism that works best for newsrooms that already have the infrastructure to use it.
Eleven Functions and the General Hospital Problem
The INN Impact Report describes a remarkable breadth of programming: fundraising, audience development, peer learning, editorial standards, field research, press freedom, disaster response, startup consulting, rural coordination, wealth screening, and coaching.
That is eleven distinct program areas for a 22-person organization. Now map those functions against the rest of the JSO landscape.
Fundraising support? Lenfest does this. News Revenue Hub does this. LION does this. Peer learning? ONA, SPJ, IRE. Field research? Shorenstein, Tow, API.
I wrote about the General Hospital problem: when every hospital tries to become a Level 1 Trauma Center, we waste billions duplicating expensive equipment. A healthy system has specialized clinics and a referral system that knows when to move a patient from one to the other.
INN’s eleven-function portfolio is the General Hospital problem in practice. When there’s no coordination layer routing newsrooms to the right JSO for each need, every major JSO feels pressure to become a one-stop shop.
It’s worth naming the force that drives this: funding architecture. Foundations fund new programs, not integration. A grant for “our new audience initiative” is fundable. A grant for “we will stop doing audience development and build referral protocols to route our members to the organization that does it best” is not.
To be clear about what I am and am not saying here: INN's eleven-function portfolio is not a strategic error. It is a rational response to a system that hasn't built the alternative. When your members call with a problem and no other organization is reliably there to handle it, you handle it. That's not mission creep. That's institutional responsibility under conditions of scarcity. The critique belongs to the system, not to the people working inside it. But recognizing that the response is rational doesn't mean the system that requires it is sustainable. A 22-person team covering eleven functions for 524 organizations is not a model that scales. It is a model that holds until it can't.
The result? INN provides fundraising consultations. Lenfest provides fundraising consultations. LION provides fundraising consultations. A newsroom with 5.5 staff is supposed to figure out which one to call. Usually, they just call the one they’ve heard of, never knowing a different organization might have been a better fit.
What Isn’t in the Report
Given INN’s position, the absences in the report are notable:
The Funding Tension: 65% of INN’s revenue ($5 million) comes from restricted grants. While they warn newsrooms not to become overly reliant on institutional philanthropy, they are living the same model.
The AI Void: There is no articulated position on AI, content licensing, or the operational implications for small newsrooms. For the largest network in the country, this is a massive gap.
The 76% Flare: More than three-quarters of INN member newsrooms reported facing “major challenges” in the current political environment. This finding is buried. It is a field-level crisis indicator. What does it translate to? Staff cuts? Closures? We don’t know.
The Geographic Gap: Large swaths of the country where news deserts are most severe have minimal representation. Montana has five members. Indiana has four.
If you found this analysis valuable, please share it with someone who should be in this conversation. The structural problems in the JSO ecosystem won’t get solved by the people already talking about them. We need newsroom leaders, board members, program officers, and state press association directors thinking about this together.
Strength Belongs to the Network
The INN Impact Report measures INN. It measures what INN did and how many members they retained. By those metrics, they are performing well.
But “from growth to strength” demands a harder question: Is the nonprofit news field getting stronger?
A field where 76% of newsrooms report major challenges is not getting stronger. A field where the median newsroom has 5.5 staff is not getting stronger just because the median held steady.
And that median is precarious. The $1.1 billion rescission of CPB funding means the “anchor tenants” of local news are weakening. When the anchors drift, the civic load shifts to the 5.5-person digital startups that are even less equipped to carry it.
Think about what coordination logic would change. Right now, a newsroom is expected to solve ten different discovery problems while trying to report the news. The individual logic says: “Give them a directory.” The coordination logic says: “Build a system where they make one call and the system handles the routing.”
INN wouldn’t need eleven program areas. It could focus on NewsMatch and emergency response, trusting a referral infrastructure to route newsrooms to the right specialized JSO.
Strength isn’t what happens when you give each newsroom ten more tools. Strength is what happens when you build a system where they only need two because the infrastructure handles the rest.
INN’s Impact Report says the nonprofit model no longer needs validation. Good. Now let’s build the infrastructure that actually lets it scale.
Let’s Talk About This
I have strong views, loosely held. I’d rather be corrected than comfortable.
If you work at INN: I’d welcome your perspective. You know the operational reality in ways I don’t.
If you lead a newsroom: Has this matched your experience? When you needed help, did you know who to call?
If you work at a foundation: Does the funder-driven duplication pattern ring true? What would it take for coordination to become fundable?
Hit reply or leave a comment. I’m especially interested in hearing from people who think I’m wrong.
Something wrong? Click here to let me know — I take corrections seriously.