The 160x Efficiency Play: Why Distribution is the Real Product
We spend $600k for deep support. For $3,750, we could connect everyone else. Here is the blueprint for a tiered "Trauma Center" infrastructure for journalism.
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.
In January, I explored how the journalism support sector suffers from a massive discoverability problem. We’ve created an entire ecosystem of tools and resources, yet most newsrooms will never know they exist. At the time, I floated the idea of a “journalism 211” system: a single point of entry to help publishers navigate the overwhelming array of available support.
I’ve been thinking a lot about distribution since then.
If you build great aggregation tools and market them well, how come you can’t reach more than a tiny fraction of newsrooms? More than a discoverability problem, we have a distribution infrastructure problem. It’s a bigger gap than I initially realized.
The Journalism Support Exchange (JSX) is a masterful matchmaking tool created by Press Forward in partnership with Commoner, the consultancy founded by Darryl Holliday and Anika Anand. Now in beta at jsx.news, it’s a searchable database of more than 300 journalism support organizations (JSOs). It’s exactly the sort of tool our sector needs.
But here’s the rub, jsx will primarily be discovered by newsrooms that don’t need it most. The newsrooms most likely to find it already know about Press Forward. They follow LION Publishers. They’ve already connected with JSOs.
The newsrooms JSX was designed to reach - they don’t know it exists. They won’t come across it in searches. They won’t find it in newsletters. It’s impossible for them to discover the tool because they don’t know any of the professional networks where newsrooms learn about things like this.
The News Media Help Desk is another fantastic example of a high-value tool searching for a distribution system. Launched by the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) in partnership with the Local Media Consortium (LMC), it’s designed as a centralized hub for sustainability. It doesn’t just offer guides; it connects newsrooms to Digital On-Demand Services (DODS)—vetted experts who provide fractional help with tech and revenue projects at pre-negotiated rates.
It is exactly the kind of “fractional capacity” the industry cries out for. But again, we are building specialized high-speed lanes for a highway system that hasn’t been mapped. If the mom-and-pop weekly isn’t already “in the life” with RJI or LMC, the Help Desk is just another brilliant resource they’ll never think to call.
I’m not criticizing these products. There’s nothing wrong with building tools. It’s what we all do. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t notice the pattern.
The Concentration Pattern
Take a look at funding numbers for the past 36 months across major journalism support organizations.
Press Forward’s October 2024 cohort provided capacity support to 204 newsrooms out of 931 applicants. Celebrate with the winners. But what about the other 726 newsrooms that applied and were turned away?
In our current system, those newsrooms are rejects. In a robust infrastructure, they would be referrals. Also, 85 of the current 205 recipients (41%) were already LION Publishers members. In other words, they were already plugged into at least one major JSO when they applied to Press Forward.
What about the recent grantees at the Institute for Nonprofit News, LION, or the Lenfest Institute? Compare their reach to the thousands of publishers who look to the Iowa Newspaper Association for their advertising revenue support, the Arizona Press Club for professional standards, or IRE for specialized training.
These are the organizations that newsrooms actually ‘live’ in every day. Yet, they are the same regional players that the national coordination layer often bypasses. We fund the high-capacity ‘winners’ of national grants, while the regional infrastructure that supports everyone else is left to fend for itself.
Pull up your data and take a look for yourself. You’ll notice that the same high-capacity organizations keep popping up again and again across multiple national programs because they’ve mastered the art of being found. Meanwhile, the newsrooms deeply embedded in those regional associations—the ones without a dedicated grant writer or a “head of growth”—remain invisible to the national funders.
This isn’t a failure of intelligence or a lack of “innovation” on the part of local publishers. It’s an infrastructure failure. We have built a world-class penthouse of support services, but we forgot to build the elevator that reaches the ground floor.
Enter The Trauma Center
We don’t have to guess what a journalism support infrastructure might look like. Emergency medicine dealt with this same challenge several decades ago.
If you suffer a heart attack in rural Montana, you don’t get transported 2,000 miles to receive care at Johns Hopkins. You visit the local trauma center. If that hospital doesn’t have the resources to treat you, they stabilize you and refer you to a regional trauma center. If that hospital doesn’t have a neurosurgeon on staff, they’ll airlift you to the closest one.
Here’s how that system works:
There are tiers of care with clearly defined capabilities and formal referral protocols between each level.
It’s geographic-based, so everyone lives within distance of care.
There’s training so first responders know which tier can handle which emergencies.
Journalism support already has Tier 1. We have a handful of national JSOs staffed with incredible experts trained to solve almost any challenge a newsroom faces. What’s missing is everything else.
Tier 1: National Journalism Support Organizations, such as API, AJP, LION, and Press Forward. They have the funding, staffing, and expertise to provide outstanding assistance. They’re also great at distributing funds.
Tier 2: Regional Journalism Support Providers Press associations, state newsletter societies, the 41 current Press Forward chapters, etc. Coverage is currently hit or miss.
Tier 3: Local First Points of Contact This is the tier we need everyone to know about. Community foundations, libraries and city councils. These groups touch newsrooms in every community but don’t know they matter to our industry.
Tier 4: Trusted Advisors This is the most important tier of all. Newsrooms already talk to accountants, lawyers, insurance brokers, and vendors about their struggles. They just don’t know these providers can help—and neither do the providers.
The folks at The Latino Media Consortium are building something that almost perfectly resembles this Tier 4 vision. Their Assessment & Capacity Building (ACB) Program & Dashboard is a journalism capacity-building tool built for and by Tier 4 partners.
Instead of just publishing another directory, LMC is providing customized assessments that are culturally and linguistically competent, along with matched coaching. They’re building distribution infrastructure by meeting newsrooms where they already are within trusted networks.
The Missing Service Layer
Here’s what doesn’t exist yet because we stop at the product launch instead of focusing on onboarding.
First, we need a Playbook. Regardless of which tier you fall into, we need to teach organizations how to use tools like JSX effectively. This isn’t “go check out this website.” This is “when a newsroom walks into your office, concerned about revenue, grab this playbook and follow the warm handoff protocol.”
Second, we need Referral Scripts. How do you tell a newsroom you can’t help them? We need standard language that Tier 4 advisors like CPAs and lawyers can use when they want to help but don’t know what to say.
Third, we need Feedback Loops. There has to be a way for intermediaries to tell us when available resources don’t meet their clients’ needs.
Finally, we need Metrics That Actually Measure Coverage. We obsess over program quality control. We don’t measure how many newsrooms statewide press associations put in touch with other resources.
Return on Investment: Who’s Pouring the Concrete?
If we accept that distribution is the product, we have to fund it like one. Right now, we spend millions subsidizing Level 1 programs. We allocate pennies for how those funds are actually distributed to the other 95%.
Here are the numbers:
As of right now, journalism support spends roughly $600,000 per year to hyper-scale about 500 newsrooms with major grants.
For $30 million, we could support 8,000 newsrooms at $3,750 per year.
That’s 160x more efficient than what we’re currently doing. With a $1M investment, we could plug 266 additional newsrooms into the journalism support ecosystem for an entire year.
Now for the hard part. We have a decision to make. Do we take this current flood of philanthropic funding and turn it into as many direct newsroom grants as possible? Or do we take a slice of it and build infrastructure that could survive after the surge subsides?
I’m proposing we buy the network.
I’m not asking you to permanently fund this system. What we need is somewhere around $50M over two to three years to build out the coordination layer. Maintenance costs would come way down after the initial investments are made, to roughly $10M to $15M a year.
That starting capital would allow us to hire Onboarding Officers at every state press association. We could build out that service layer so products like JSX work for intermediaries instead of just end users. We could fill in gaps for states that don’t yet have functional regional support infrastructures.
We can continue pouring money into subsidizing direct grants to reach 5% of newsrooms. Or we can start funding the infrastructure required to reach the other 95%.
It’s not a question of whether we should build coordination infrastructure. The real question is whether we have time to build it before the current philanthropic window closes.
Are you in Miami this week for the Knight Media Forum? While I split my time between the home office and our headquarters in Arlington, I’m curious to hear what’s actually happening in the hallways. Are we talking about the 5% we’re funding, or are we talking about the 95% we aren’t reaching?
Drop a comment below or find me on LinkedIn. Let’s talk about how we actually build the roads.
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