Your Board Isn’t Underperforming. It Was Built Wrong.
A new report names the governance gap in nonprofit news. Here’s what it gets right—and what the sector still needs to hear.
A Quick Disclaimer: Backstory & Strategy is a personal, independent publication. The views, analysis, and commentary expressed here are strictly my own and do not represent the official position, strategy, or endorsement of the American Press Institute, its leadership, or its board. This is my personal space for analyzing the media landscape, testing new frameworks, and thinking out loud.
Let’s start with the number that should stop you cold.
Only 10 percent of nonprofit news leaders believe their board is very effective at long-term strategy. And yet two-thirds of those same leaders say long-term strategy is one of the board’s most critical responsibilities.
That’s not a gap. That’s a chasm. And it has been sitting, mostly unnamed, at the center of nonprofit news governance for years.
Last week, the ASU Knight Center for the Future of News released “The Governance Gap: Strengthening Boards for the Next Era of Nonprofit News,” authored by Julia Wallace, the Knight Center's launch director and a former editor-in-chief of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Emily Hedegard. It is serious, careful work—and the sector should read it.
But research this honest deserves a response equally honest. And there is one place where I think the report pulls its punch: the framing that what we are seeing is, quote, “predictable growing pains.”
I want to push on that. Because growing pains imply you’ll eventually grow out of them. What nonprofit news is dealing with is something different. It isn’t a developmental stage. It’s a founding flaw.
The Three Boards Nonprofit News Actually Built
Most nonprofit news organizations were not built with governance in mind. They were built with survival in mind. And in that context, boards got recruited for one of three purposes:
The first was compliance. You need a board to be a 501(c)(3). So you find five people who believe in the mission, put their names on the paperwork, and get back to reporting.
The second was credibility. You stack the board with recognizable civic names—a retired judge, a university dean, a former city council member—because funders want to see that the community has bought in.
The third was camaraderie. You recruit the people who showed up at the launch party. The true believers. The ones who will never vote against the founder.
None of those are governance. And here’s the trap: once you build a board for one of those purposes, you have implicitly made a promise to every member about what their role is. Retrofitting real governance expectations onto that foundation is not a growing pain. It is a renegotiation—and most organizations never attempt it. Some founders avoid it because they fear conflict with the very people who believed in them when no one else did. Others avoid it because, if they’re being honest, they mistake formal governance for a loss of control. Either way, the architecture stays broken.
The ASU report documents the symptoms of this problem beautifully. Boards that are unclear on their roles. Boards that lack expertise from outside journalism. Boards that are not meeting fundraising goals. These are accurate findings. But the diagnosis underneath them is that the sector optimized for the wrong things at founding, and nobody has gone back to fix the architecture
The Fundraising Number Is the Tell
Of all the findings in the report, the one I keep returning to is this: only a quarter of nonprofit news leaders say their boards are very or extremely effective at meeting fundraising goals.
In the broader nonprofit world, the board is the fundraising engine. Not the only one, but a primary one. Major gift introductions, donor cultivation, peer-to-peer asks—these live on the board. The executive director is the closer, but board members open the doors.
In nonprofit news, the executive director is usually doing all of it. Opening doors, making the ask, closing the gift, and then filing the acknowledgment letter. The board may attend the gala. They may write a personal check. But the architecture of development is almost entirely staff-dependent.
This is not a complaint about individual board members. It is an observation about what the sector normalized. We built boards that were not expected to fundraise. And now we are surprised that they don’t.
Fixing this is not a training problem. It is an expectations-setting problem—and it has to happen before someone joins the board, not two years in. I explored the financial accountability side of this in “The Endowment vs. The Piggy Bank”—boards that can’t distinguish between a reserve fund and operating capital can’t govern their way out of a budget crisis, no matter how well-intentioned they are.
Where Organizations Actually Are
In a previous issue, I introduced the Sustainability Maturity Curve—a four-stage framework for understanding where mission-driven media organizations actually sit on the path from survival to scale. Think of it as a diagnostic tool: each stage describes not just what an organization looks like, but what its board is—and isn’t—capable of doing. The governance gap looks very different depending on where you are.
At Survival Stage, the board is almost irrelevant to operations. The founder is making every call. The board meets quarterly, approves the budget, and otherwise stays out of the way. This is not malicious—it is how startups survive. But it creates habits that calcify.
At Stabilization Stage, the board starts asking financial questions. Can we make payroll? What does our runway look like? This is progress, but it is reactive governance. Strategy is still happening in the founder’s head.
At Sustainability Stage, real governance can begin—if someone initiates it. This is where board composition reviews, skills matrices, and explicit fundraising expectations can take hold. Most of the organizations the ASU report surveyed are probably somewhere between Stabilization and Sustainability. They can’t cross into true sustainability because the founder has hit a personal bandwidth ceiling on fundraising, and the board isn’t built to catch the handoff.
At Scale Stage, the board functions as a genuine strategic asset. It brings relationships, expertise, and capital that the staff cannot generate alone. This is where maybe 10 to 15 percent of the sector actually operates.
The report is describing the aggregate. The maturity curve explains why the aggregate looks the way it does—and more importantly, what the next move is for any specific organization.
📬 If this framework is useful, you’ll want to be here for the next one. Backstory & Strategy is free, independent, and published for people who are serious about the business of journalism. No fluff. No vendor pitches. Just frameworks and honest analysis.
What Fixing It Actually Requires
The ASU report is generous in its recommendations. It covers governance literacy, role clarity, board composition, financial oversight, and risk management. All of it is correct. But I want to be specific about what is actually hard.
The hardest thing is not training existing board members. The hardest thing is cycling off the people who predate the organization’s current needs. The true believers from the launch. The compliance names who never expected to fundraise. The camaraderie picks who are confused about why things have gotten so formal.
These are often the people who took real risk on the organization when it had nothing. They deserve gratitude. But they may not be the board the organization needs for the next decade. Creating a culture where that conversation can happen—with dignity, with gratitude, and with intention—is leadership work that no report can do for you. If you want a framework for how to think about organizational identity during transitions like this, “The Difference Between Surviving and Building Something Real” is worth revisiting.
The second hard thing is being explicit about the “give/get”—the explicit expectation that a board member will either personally donate a specific amount or raise it from their network—before recruitment. Not after. Before. The number does not have to be large. But it has to be real, and it has to be stated out loud. “We expect board members to give personally and to open doors to others” is a sentence that changes who says yes.
And the third hard thing, which the report wisely flags, is bringing in expertise from outside journalism. The sector has a tendency to build boards that reflect its own values rather than its own gaps. You do not need seven board members who love local news. You need two who love local news, two who understand finance, one who understands law, one who understands major gifts. And one person whose entire job is to ask the uncomfortable question nobody else will.
This is also, not coincidentally, an accountability problem. As I argued in “Your Resume, Not Your Tax Return,” nonprofit news organizations struggle to hold themselves accountable to external standards partly because their boards were never built to demand them. A board recruited for compliance won’t push for a performance framework. It will approve the budget and go home
What the Sector Could Become
Here is what I actually believe: the organizations that figure this out are going to look structurally different from the ones that don’t—and the gap between them will widen.
A nonprofit news organization with a genuinely functional board does not just have better governance. It has a different fundraising ceiling, relationships the staff could never cultivate alone, risk management that protects the editorial mission rather than threatening it, and the capacity to think in five-year cycles instead of five-month ones. The organization built wrong is always one leadership transition away from a crisis. The organization built right has a board that can catch the handoff.
The organizations that get there will not be the ones that waited to grow into better governance. They will be the ones that decided—explicitly, often uncomfortably—to build it.
The ASU report is a rigorous, well-timed contribution to that conversation. It names what most people inside the sector have only whispered. The 10 percent number alone is worth the read.
What comes next is the harder work. Not a study. Not framing. Actual decisions, made by actual leaders, about who is on their board and what is expected of them.
That part does not require a report. It requires will.
💬 Let’s talk about it.
Where does your board sit on the Sustainability Maturity Curve right now? Are you stuck at Stabilization—reactive, founder-dependent, running on good intentions? Or have you made the intentional shift toward something that can actually catch the handoff?
Drop a comment below. I read every one, and this is exactly the kind of conversation this newsletter exists to have.
If this piece resonated, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to an ED, a board chair, or a funder who needs to read it. The governance conversation in nonprofit news is overdue—and it spreads one share at a time.
Related Reading from Backstory & Strategy
These pieces extend the argument—pick the one that fits where you are:
→ The Sustainability Maturity Curve for Mission-Driven Media — The four-stage diagnostic behind this piece. Find out which stage your organization is actually in.
→ The Endowment vs. The Piggy Bank — What happens when boards confuse “forever money” with operating funds—and what leaders and donors must do to protect the future.
→ Your Resume, Not Your Tax Return — On accountability, transparency, and why nonprofit news organizations need to stop hiding behind their 990s.
→ The Difference Between Surviving and Building Something Real — On mission, identity, and why asking people to “keep us alive” is a losing strategy.
→ Why the Journalism Ecosystem is Flying Blind — On the sector’s failure to define what “sustainable” actually means—and why that vagueness starts at the board level.
The Governance Gap report is available at the ASU Knight Center for the Future of News. It is worth your time.