Why the Journalism Ecosystem is Flying Blind
The journalism support ecosystem is optimizing for a standard it has never actually defined.
I asked my son to clean his room last week. He did. The floor was clear, the bed was made, and from the hallway, it looked like a win.
Then I stepped inside. The desk was buried. The closet was a crime scene. His definition of “clean” wasn’t mine, and neither of ours matched my wife Tracy’s. Three people. One instruction. Three entirely different versions of reality.
Nobody lost anything over it. The room got re-cleaned. Life continued.
But imagine that same imprecision is the operating framework for an entire multi-billion dollar field. Imagine the word at the center of every funder pitch, every cohort curriculum, and every “capacity-building” program is a word nobody has ever actually defined.
When a funder says “we invest in sustainable newsrooms” and a publisher says “we’re building toward sustainability,” they think they’re talking about the same thing. They’re usually not. And almost nobody asks them to compare notes.
That isn’t a hypothetical. That’s just Tuesday in the journalism support world.
The ecosystem runs on two words: Sustainable and Resilient. We treat them as synonyms, as goals, as proof of “seriousness.” But ask five people in this field to define them with precision, and you’ll get five different answers.
This isn’t an academic gripe. This lack of clarity has teeth. It dictates who gets the check, who gets passed over, and what we are actually building toward.
The Distinction We’re Missing
Let’s start with the line most people miss.
Sustainability is a financial condition. It means the math works. Revenue covers costs, and the organization keeps existing.
Resilience is a capacity. It’s the ability to absorb a punch and stay standing.
A newsroom can be financially “sustainable” while producing zero civic value. A newsroom can do irreplaceable work for its community while being financially fragile. Those are different problems. They need different logic and different fixes.
Right now, the field mostly means “sustainability” when it says “resilience.” And it mostly means “revenue diversification” when it says “sustainability.” That is a lot of heavy lifting for two words that are essentially vibes.
The Hollow Foundation
You can be sustainable without being resilient.
Picture a regional nonprofit. Healthy budget, diversified revenue, great development team. On paper, it’s exactly what funders want. But the editorial vision is trapped in the head of one person. The audience is aging out. The biggest funder is bored and looking at a “strategy shift.” There is no succession plan.
The lights are on, but the foundation is hollow. One bad year, one departure, and the whole thing unravels faster than the balance sheet suggests. Sustainability measures the present; resilience is about absorbing a future that hasn’t happened yet.
The One-Heartbeat Institution
Conversely, you can be resilient without being sustainable.
Think about the solo operator running a weekly in a rural county. No development staff, no foundation ties, no path to “growth.” By every metric the ecosystem uses to find “investment-ready” orgs, he doesn’t exist.
But he’s been publishing for twenty years. He knows how to cut costs to the bone. He has no organizational complexity to manage, so he can flex in ways a 50-person newsroom can’t.
His threat profile isn’t a revenue cliff. It’s illness. It’s burnout. It’s a car that won’t start. The institution is one heartbeat. His resilience is personal, not organizational. The moment he stops, the coverage stops.
That isn’t a failure of his model. It’s the defining feature of it. And the field is using the wrong tools to measure him—if it sees him at all.
What the Research Actually Says
This is not just a journalism problem. It is a general organizational problem that journalism has inherited without knowing it.
A 2025 systematic review of resilience in the nonprofit sector found there is still no holistic framework bringing together structures, people, and relationships in the discussion of what resilience actually means. Researchers established that “bounce back,” the most common working definition, is inadequate, particularly for smaller organizations that cannot simply return to a prior equilibrium after major disruption.
Smaller organizations in vulnerable financial positions demonstrate resilience through entirely different mechanisms than well-resourced ones. They adapt. They evolve. They find a different footing. They do not bounce back.
That finding should land hard in a field that has been building programming almost exclusively around the “bounce-back” model.
The Four Layers of the Mess
When we say “journalism support ecosystem,” we usually just mean the “service layer”—groups like American Press Institute, LION, or Institute for Nonprofit News. That’s too narrow.
The ecosystem has four distinct layers:
The Service Organizations: The trainers and consultants providing direct support to newsrooms.
The Funders: Institutional foundations and individual major donors who shape what gets built and what gets abandoned.
The Journalism Schools: The ones training the practitioners, conducting the research, and—in many cases—running their own newsrooms.
The Convening Layer: The conferences, trade publications, and peer-reviewed work where the field talks to itself and decides what it believes.
Funders are not external to the system they are financing. They are among its most powerful actors. The priorities they set and the frameworks they promote are ecosystem behaviors with ecosystem consequences. Treating funders as separate from the field they are actively structuring is one of our most convenient fictions.
All four layers are flying blind. Funders award grants against undefined standards. J-schools graduate students without a framework for organizational health. Service orgs run programs built on untested assumptions. This isn’t a coordination failure. It’s a definitional one.
The Cost of Inattention
The damage shows up as selection bias. When you don’t define what you’re optimizing for, you default to what’s easy to measure: revenue, staff size, and audience growth.
That filter always favors the urban, digital-first nonprofit with a donor base. It ignores the “load-bearing walls”—the solo publishers in information deserts who don’t fit the template. We are quietly deprioritizing the very infrastructure we cannot afford to lose.
What Happens Next
Before the next round of major funding or the next big cohort, we need a working taxonomy. Not a universal dictionary, but a set of distinctions that make the questions answerable in context.
Resilience against what? For what type of organization? Toward what civic function? Treating a 20-person metro newsroom and a one-person rural operation as the same thing isn’t equity. It’s inattention dressed up as a framework.
This taxonomy needs to be built with input from all four layers and tested against real newsrooms. The American Press Institute has the standing and the capacity to lead this. I’m not being subtle about that. If we don’t do it, I’d like to know who will.
The Wednesday Ask
My ask for Wednesday is simple:
If you run a newsroom, write down your own definition of “sustainable” and “resilient” before you read anyone else’s. If you’re a funder or a J-school dean, do the same. Then compare notes with someone in a different layer of the system.
The gap between your definitions is the problem. Closing it is the work.
My son’s room is clean again. This time, we defined “clean” before he picked up the first shirt. The journalism support ecosystem has skipped that step for a decade. It’s past time we took it.
Share this post with a colleague in the ecosystem.
What does “sustainable” mean in your shop? Is it a bank balance, or is it something deeper? Let’s hammer this out in the comments.
I strive for accuracy and clarity. If you spot an error or think I’ve misrepresented a data point, please let me know. I’ll update the post and acknowledge the change here.