The Last Mile: Why Journalism Support is Failing its Own Standards
We spend years teaching newsrooms to build audience infrastructure and measure impact. It’s time we turned the mirror around and asked why we aren’t doing the same.
A Quick Disclaimer: The following thoughts are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs my perspective on the industry’s challenges, Backstory & Strategy remains my space for “thinking out loud” and poking at the frameworks we all navigate.
Are We Practicing What We Preach?
If you’ve spent any time in the Journalism Support Organization world lately, you’ve almost certainly told a newsroom to stop living in their own heads. You’ve told them they have to meet their audience where they actually live, not where it’s convenient for the newsroom to find them. You’ve warned them that hitting “publish” doesn’t mean a single soul actually saw the work.
We tell them that if the community doesn’t know they exist, the quality of the journalism is irrelevant. It’s the right advice. It’s expertise delivered with real care.
But now, turn that lens back on us.
We’d never let a newsroom get away with a vague answer to the most basic question in the business: Who, exactly, are you trying to serve?
When we say “local newsrooms” or “independent publishers,” we’re talking in abstractions. I want to know the specifics. How many organizations actually fall under your mission? Where are they? What do you actually know about what they need today? What is your actual, repeatable system for finding the ones who aren’t already in your Rolodex?
If that question is harder to answer than it should be, you’re not alone. Most journalism support organizations have a strong sense of the newsrooms they already know. They know the ones that show up at conferences, apply for grants, and respond to newsletters.
But that isn’t a constituency. That’s a self-selecting sample. And it almost certainly skews toward the newsrooms that need help the least.
When did your organization last ask what percentage of the newsrooms you exist to serve actually know your resources exist? When did you last treat the gap between “we built it” and “they’re using it” as your problem to solve rather than theirs? If the answers are uncomfortable, they should be.
We have a last-mile problem. And we’re not practicing what we preach.
What the Last Mile Actually Means
In logistics, the last mile is the final leg of delivery. It is the stretch between a resource existing and the person who needs it actually receiving it. It is the most expensive, most difficult, and most consistently underfunded part of any system. You can build the highway perfectly and still leave communities stranded if you don’t build the road that connects to their door.
Understanding why the last mile is so hard requires looking honestly at our incentives. Grant cycles reward creation. A new tool or a new fellowship generates a report and a press release. Sustained adoption work—the onboarding and the follow-through—generates none of those things. It’s expensive, slow, and hard to make legible to the people holding the checkbooks.
Then there’s the reality of visibility. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but even the best-designed resource in the world won’t just “find its way” to the people who need it. That requires a distribution infrastructure we haven’t built yet.
Right now, the newsrooms finding our guides and our grants are the ones already plugged into the circuit. They’re the ones on the right email lists and in the right Slack channels. That means the people who need the help most are, by the very nature of the system, the ones least likely to ever see it.
And before anyone reads this as a uniquely journalism problem, consider what’s been happening in your podcast feed.
At some point in the last year, you almost certainly got served an ad for BetterHelp. Or Talkspace. Or Cerebral. The mental health industry has poured billions into making sure you can’t scroll, stream, or search without being reminded that help is available. They have behavioral targeting. They have apps that will follow you around the internet for a week after a single relevant search.
Roughly half the people who need mental health treatment still never receive it.
Not because the resources aren’t there. Not because the marketing isn’t working. Because building the thing and promoting the thing is not the same as actually getting it to the person who needs it. The last mile swallowed all of that investment whole.
If an industry with that kind of money and urgency still can’t close the gap, what exactly are we expecting from a press release and a conference session?
Good Work Facing a Hard Problem
The journalism support field has built genuinely valuable things. The Journalism Support Exchange is a masterful aggregation of more than 300 JSOs in a single searchable tool. The News Media Help Desk connects newsrooms to vetted fractional experts at pre-negotiated rates.
These aren’t halfhearted efforts. They represent serious investment and serious thinking. But they are running directly into a last mile problem that our current incentive structures make almost inevitable.
Consider LION Publishers. They represent the gold standard of what journalism support looks like when it’s done well. They don’t just drop resources into the void and walk away. They cultivate.
And LION knows the last mile problem intimately. In their 2025 Impact Report, Chris Krewson noted that their goal is to continue meeting members where they are with the right help at the right time. They’ve done the work to scale. They reached 785 unique organizations last year—a 30 percent increase over 2024.
But LION has 457 members. There are somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 newsrooms out there.
That means the best version of what journalism support can look like is reaching about 5 or 6 percent of the potential universe. This isn’t because LION is failing. It’s because even committed, intentional last-mile work is extraordinarily hard to scale. The last mile problem isn’t solved by doing what LION does better or faster. It requires something structurally different to reach the other 94 percent.
The Mirror We’ve Been Avoiding
We need to be honest with ourselves for a minute.
We spend an incredible amount of energy coaching newsrooms on how to build feedback loops and move beyond simple reach. But as an ecosystem, we’re still mostly measuring our own success by the press release and the grant report.
The problem isn’t just with the tools. It’s baked into our most personal work: the coaching, the convenings, and the research. If you look at a standard JSO impact report, you’ll see high satisfaction scores. You’ll see quotes from leaders who felt more confident after a summit.
But you rarely see evidence that these newsrooms are actually performing differently six months later. We don’t often ask if they reached more people or grew their revenue because of us. Our measurement usually stops at the door of the interaction, which is exactly where the actual impact is supposed to begin. When our best-resourced organizations are only touching a few hundred leaders in an industry of 10,000, we haven’t built a constituency. We’ve reached a plateau.
The “No” Pile
This structural failure is loudest in the places where we say “no.” Every year, hundreds of newsrooms apply for grants or fellowships and get turned away because they aren’t the right fit or the cohort is at capacity.
In a functioning ecosystem, those 76 people LION couldn’t accept would not just get a polite decline. They would be treated as the ultimate warm leads for a dispatch system. If we really practiced what we preached, a rejection wouldn’t be a dead end. It would be a pivot to a resource those newsrooms didn’t know existed.
A New Metric
If we want to close this last mile, we have to stop asking if people liked our help and start asking if they used it.
I’d love to see us trade the satisfaction survey for an Implementation Rate. Instead of a form sent ten minutes after a webinar ends, imagine a check-in six months later that asks one question:
“What specific workflow or revenue stream is still in place today because of that intervention?”
Until we decide that the distance between a resource existing and a newsroom actually using it is our problem to solve, we’re just adding to the noise.
What We Can Do Before the Big Solutions Arrive
I’ve written before about what structural solutions look like at scale. We need a dispatch layer that actively routes newsrooms to the right help and a tiered infrastructure that reaches the 95 percent of newsrooms current models never touch.
But they require coordination, capital, and time that don’t yet exist at the scale needed. In the meantime, the last mile doesn’t have to wait.
Every JSO can start applying its own standards to its own work right now:
Ask not just “did we publish this?” but “who found it, and who didn’t?”
Treat every newsroom that wasn’t funded as a referral rather than a rejection.
Add one honest utilization question to every program evaluation.
None of this is glamorous. None of it fits neatly into a grant report. It is, however, exactly what we’ve been asking newsrooms to do all along.
If we’re serious about keeping local journalism alive, we have to be willing to do the unglamorous work ourselves. There are communities out there waiting at the end of a road that simply doesn’t exist yet. They are waiting on those newsrooms, and those newsrooms are waiting on us.
It’s time we finished the road.
Does your organization measure “Implementation” or just “Satisfaction”? I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about the gap between building a resource and seeing it actually used. Drop a comment or hit reply.
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