Throughout North America, a growing number of entrepreneurs are creating new media business models and bridging gaps in local news coverage by launching local news startups. These digital startups are typically spearheaded by journalists who face a daunting challenge of simultaneously founding their organizations, building trust in their communities, and delivering impactful reporting.

But launching a journalism startup is only the first hurdle. Growing it into a successful business enterprise is an even greater challenge. Whether operating as a for-profit company, nonprofit organization, or cooperative, all startups face the same critical goals for survival. They must generate revenue, assemble effective teams, establish organizational processes, and plan for the future. Essentially, building a journalism business is no different from building any other type of business — it's tough work.

Here at the Google News Initiative, one of our key objectives in 2022 was to help more startup publishers develop their news businesses and make them sustainable. We aimed to build on the success of the inaugural GNI Startups Lab, which provided 10 local news founders with the knowledge and tools required to set their news organizations up for success.

We’re honored to have once again partnered with LION Publishers on our newest iteration of the GNI Startups Lab. This time we launched not one, but three distinct cohorts, each focusing on one critical topic: managing finances and risk, building and leading effective teams, and planning for revenue growth. Together, these Labs would provide 48 emerging publishers with essential skills and resources they need in their bid for long term sustainability.

Although this strategy represented a significant expansion of the Lab, we remained committed to several programming elements that worked well the first time out:

• Providing news founders with a diagnostic audit to evaluate their financial, journalistic, and operational health
• Delivering a targeted curriculum to assist them in making informed decisions regarding people, product, and profit
• Offering personalized coaching to support these organizations in conducting experiments, along with funding to facilitate execution.

"We are proud to support these 48 publishers on their journeys to build sustainable news organizations, and we’re excited to share their many achievements and learnings. We believe these insights will be useful to others who seek to support this critical and exciting segment of the news industry."

Conor Crowley
Programs Lead
Google News Initiative

The independent news ecosystem is a space of remarkable optimism and growth in the greater journalism industry. Consider these statistics alone: There are at least 1,000 independent news businesses across the U.S. and Canada — a 37% increase since the last tally in 2021. LION Publishers’ membership grew 13% last year, to more than 454 news publishers. And those same publishers reported a 33% increase in revenue in 2021.

These are encouraging signs for an emergent field. But perhaps even more heartening than the number and growth of these bootstrapping businesses are the meaningful ways in which they serve their communities. These publishers operate in former news deserts, providing critical information where there once was none. They are launching for and with historically marginalized and underserved communities, by leaders with diverse backgrounds and experiences. And they are engaging with their audiences more deeply and reciprocally than ever before.

“These resilient news businesses have proven time and again to be essential pillars of their local information ecosystems, and they’re doing so in some of the most challenging business environments in the country,” said Chris Krewson, Executive Director of LION. “Seeing their progress and growth over the last few years has been inspiring, while giving support organizations like ours plenty of chances to help them build stronger foundations for that impactful work.”

Much work has been done to support these news businesses, and much work remains. Publishers are still seeking diverse and stable revenue streams and building their operational resilience. They’re still working to rightsize staff capacity and increase journalistic impact. But the support available to news organizations is growing along with the ecosystem, and partnerships like the one between the GNI and LION Publishers are leading the way through iteration, innovation and collaboration.

Keep reading to learn more about the publishers in the 2022 GNI Startups Labs and how they moved their businesses forward.

There is no one-size-fits-all business model for independent news businesses. Each publisher’s audience has specific needs that require a tailored journalistic approach and corresponding funding structure to reflect differences in how they launched, the circumstances under which they’re growing and what they aim to achieve.

That said, there are a number of strategic priorities that every business shares, and the 2022 GNI Startups Labs were designed to target areas where publishers were experiencing the most urgent pain points: managing money and risk, building and managing a team and planning for revenue growth.

The program’s approach was an iteration of the 2021 North America GNI Startups Lab, which helped 10 news businesses work toward long-term sustainability through hands-on training and revenue experimentation. We learned a lot from that effort, and applied those lessons to the 2022 program by:

• Focusing on a single topic in a tight, eight-week program to set publishers up to efficiently move the needle in a targeted area
• Providing asynchronous, on-demand training through LION’s News Entrepreneur Academy to provide accessible and flexible entry points for busy leaders running the day-to-day operations of a lean organization
• Centering 1:1 coaching as the critical link to help publishers apply the training to their unique organization and incorporate it into their big-picture and day-to-day efforts
• Building toward specific deliverables to create a direct and practical application of the curriculum and coaching while creating a resource that will be relevant long after the program ends

“We designed the 2022 GNI Startups Labs to truly meet publishers where they are,” said Lisa Heyamoto, LION’s Director of Programming, Member Education. “By aligning our support directly with what they needed and how they needed it, we were able to help them make significant progress on the path to sustainability.”

Recruitment began in July to select 48 news organizations to participate in the three Startups Labs. The Labs were open to independent news business startups that met the following eligibility requirements:

• Based in the U.S. or Canada.
• Independently owned and operated.
• Produce original content primarily on digital platform(s).
• Have been operating for at least six months and no more than 5 years.
• Earn less than USD $500,000 per year in gross revenue.
• Can demonstrate some successes on the path to sustainability, i.e. increased site visits, a growing membership program or increased earned revenue.
• Focus on one or more of the following: public interest journalism, filling an information gap, serving a geographic-bound or single subject community, serving an underserved community, exploring new ways to deliver and/or monetize information

Startups were encouraged to apply for one or more Labs, and 98 news businesses submitted applications.

“Most applicants apply for more than one lab,” said Andrew Rockway, LION Publishers Program Manager. “That signals there is a broad interest in each of the areas the Labs focus on. No publisher had one single problem they needed to solve for.”

New outlets were selected to participate in a Lab based on the alignment between their organizational need and the Lab’s learning objectives as assessed by the following criteria:

• Stage of sustainability
• Annual revenue
• Staffing levels and need
• Financial reporting practices
• Challenges faced related to the Lab’s learning objectives
• Organizational goals
• Organizational progress related to the Lab’s learning objectives
• Interest and availability in participating in the Lab

Demographic factors (location, year founded, gender and race/ethnicity of leadership) were also considered to ensure the 48 participating organizations reflected the breadth of LION membership.

A view of the 48 participants

• 39 participants were from the US and 9 were from Canada, representing 28 states and provinces.
• Average age of participating news outlets: 2 years
• Average number of full time employees:
  • Managing Risk and Money: 0.75
  • Building and Managing a Team: 2.88
  • Planning for Revenue Growth: 2.81
• Self-reported race/ethnicity of news leader
  • Asian: 6%
  • Black or African American: 10%
  • Latin people / Hispanic: 10%
  • Native American or Indigenous/ First Nations: 2%
  • White: 65%
  • All other categories: 6%
• Self-reported gender of news leader

The average annual revenue of participants varied significantly by Lab. Participants in the Managing Money and Risk Lab had an average annual revenue of $47,000; participants in the Building and Managing a Team Lab had an average annual revenue of $204,762; participants in the Planning for Revenue Growth Lab had an average annual revenue of $138,312.

• Organization by business type

Managing Risk and Money

The 2022 GNI Startups Lab on Managing Money and Risk was an eight-week program helping independent news businesses shore up their operational and financial foundation in order to more confidently plan for the future and, ultimately, progress down the path to sustainability.

By the end of the program, participants were able to identify what it means to manage risk and uncertainty for a news business, understand and apply the basics of financial management and synthesize learnings with their current operational and financial position to set organizational and revenue goals.

“I came into Managing Money and Risk Lab a mathphobe, accounting phobe, and wondering why I can't just write, report and photograph. I learned that my newsletter has so much more revenue potential and the potential to reach and make an impact than I ever thought possible, and that so many organizations stand ready to help build community and revenue.”

Amy Peterson
Founder
The E’ville Good

The Curriculum

• The News Entrepreneur Academy courses
  • Navigating Risk & Uncertainty as a News Leader. Led by Graham Watson-Ringo, this course normalizes the anxiety and pressure that comes with leading a news business, underscores that risk and uncertainty are inevitable and shares strategies and tactics for moving forward with knowledge and confidence.
  • Setting Organizational Goals. Led by Lizzy Hazeltine, this training underscores why setting goals is critical to understanding the past, acting in the present and planning for the future. It gives news businesses practical strategies for setting and executing goals while articulating how to learn from success and failure.
  • Financial Management for News Entrepreneurs. Led by Harry Backlund, this course demystifies financial management by exploring why budgeting, forecasting and risk assessment are critical to understanding your financial position and informing future plans.
  • The Financial Planning Workbook. Led by Lisa Hunter, this course walks through easy-to-use templates for creating a financial forecast, budget, and cash flow projections for your news business.
  • Developing key business and financial documents. Developed by LION Publishers, this section of the LION Operational Readiness Handbook gives news leaders an overview of important legal, financial and governance documents.
  • Assessing Growth Opportunities. Led by Alison Go, this course addresses ways to evaluate revenue opportunities to ensure alignment with an organization’s financial, operational and team health. It also provides frameworks for identifying different opportunities and deciding whether an idea is worth pursuing for news businesses.
• Deliverables
  • Essential documents checklist: Participants created a list of critical documents that help news businesses reduce exposure to risk and safeguard the organization while fostering growth. The checklist allowed them to track essential documents pertaining to governance, financial, operational, and legal policies and practices.
  • Financial plan: Participants used the LION Financial Planning Workbook to create or update a budget, project cash flow and forecast and evaluate their budget assumptions for the next fiscal year.

Meet the coaches

Eric Johnston began in journalism as a part-time photojournalist for the local community newspaper. In the mid-90’s, he pivoted his career to the burgeoning online space. As a self-taught web designer and engineer, he worked for the next 15 years to build audience, revenue and adoption of the still-growing digital news environment. In 2009, Eric was named Publisher and President of McClatchy Company publications The Modesto Bee and The Merced Sun-Star in California’s Central Valley. During his tenure the publications leaned into digital audience and revenue growth. In 2014, he joined the Seattle-based Pioneer News Group as Chief Operating Officer, responsible for more than 24 publications and 500 employees across five northwest states. Dedicated to the preservation of community publishers and journalism, Eric currently works as chief executive officer at Sonoma Media Investments, LLC.

Graham Watson-Ringo is a 20-year journalism veteran and a senior director at the News Revenue Hub in charge of client success. A proud Mizzou graduate and Online News Association board member, Graham has worked for major metros, digital behemoths, and scrappy digital nonprofit startups. She is a lover of the full-funnel approach, well-crafted CTAs, making a budget and sticking to it, risky business, killer UX, and insider journalism-speak.

Ingrid Marielos Marthy is a graduate of Hawaii Pacific University, holding a BSBA with a concentration in International Business and an MBA. During the first 10 years of her career, Ingrid worked in the corporate sector, interning at a financial firm and working in operations throughout the years. In 2017, Ingrid came across an opportunity to coach small businesses in the non-profit sector to create more sustainable business models. Ingrid has served as the Women’s Business Center Director, an SBA-sponsored program, in Fayetteville, NC, and San Francisco, CA, where she designed and implemented programs specifically for women entrepreneurs that have impacted over 1,000 women annually. She has directly helped over 75 entrepreneurs start, formalize, and expand their businesses. Ingrid is bilingual in English and Spanish. In her spare time, she loves to travel, discover new food, and meet new people.

John Davidow is a journalist with over 30 years of experience leading major local digital, radio, and television newsrooms. He is a respected public radio innovator and digital strategist. John is a founder of Media Bridge Partners. Media Bridge Partners works to improve and transform the internal culture of news organizations and arm teams with the awareness and skills to support people from historically marginalized backgrounds within their ranks. John is a moderator of the Open News DEI Coalition for Anti-Racist, Equitable, and Just Newsrooms. He is currently the acting chief of staff at the National Trust for Local News.

Participating Organizations

• AfroLA - Los Angeles, CA
• BoldLatina - San Francisco, CA
• Burlington Buzz - Burlington, MA
• Clearing a New Path - Dorchester, Ontario, Canada
• Four Points Press - Crow Agency, MT
• MIWISCONSIN - Madison, WI
• Mundos Paralelos - Washington, DC
• The Border Chronicle - Tucson, AZ
• The E’ville Good - Estherville, IA
• The Flatlander - Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada
• The Hoser - Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• The Objective - Los Angeles, CA
• The Record North Shore - Wilmette, IL
• The Swellesley Report - Natick, MA
• The Yappie - Princeton, NJ
• Vallejo Sun - Vallejo, CA

The 2022 GNI Startups Lab on Building & Managing a Team was an eight-week program that helped independent news businesses strategically and effectively hire, onboard and manage team members in order to support the people whose talent and well-being are key to their long term sustainability.

By the end of the program, participants were able to identify why and when to hire for a new position, understand best practices for hiring, onboarding and managing a team member and synthesize learnings with current organizational practices to support employees both structurally and individually.

“This program demystified HR and hiring for me. It helped me make a concrete plan for building my team with my organization's values and goals at the forefront. It helped me draft policies and procedures to make sure that my staff are brought into the team culture efficiently and with minimal stress.”

Nora Hertel
Founder and Executive Director
The Optimist

The Curriculum

• The News Entrepreneur Academy courses
  • How to create a staffing plan. Developed by Lisa Heyamoto, this course outlines why and how to create a staffing plan to strategically assess organizational goals, current staffing, external considerations and organizational needs, gaps and solutions.
  • Knowing when you’re ready to hire. Led by Scott Brodbeck, this course helps news leaders understand how to align their finances, goals, culture and capacity to know when they’re truly ready to make a hire. It outlines the indicators of hiring readiness, the tradeoffs that come with different categories of hires and legal and human resources considerations associated with hiring.
  • HR Best Practices. Produced by Deb Lewis, this course explores best practices in human resources. Lessons cover the basics of HR, potential compliance issues and common pitfalls, proven methods for supporting employees and what to do if a team member isn’t working out.
  • Hiring a new team member. The goal of this module, developed by LION Publishers, is to outline best practices for how to hire someone into a new role.
  • Onboarding and Preparing Your New Hire for Success. Produced by LION Publishers, this lesson focuses on how to successfully onboard new hires and how to develop retention strategies.
  • Management Best Practices. Led by Natalie Archibald, this course outlines best practices for managing people. It helps news leaders identify and understand what influences their management style, common employee working styles and how to set expectations and communicate with your team.
  • Addressing and avoiding burnout. Led by Sushil Cheema, this course focuses on one of the most pervasive challenges in news entrepreneurship: burnout. It outlines what burnout looks like, why it happens, how to address it and, even better, how to avoid it.
• Deliverables
  • Staffing Plan: Participants created a staffing plan to align the key elements crucial to the success of a news business: strategy, goals, finances, and people. This process enabled news leaders to outline their desired destination, current position, and the resources required to achieve their objectives.
  • Employee Handbook: News leaders developed an employee handbook to articulate and communicate foundational information such as the company's mission, vision, history, internal policies, employment terms and benefits, among other subjects.

Meet the coaches

An Xiao (Ana) Mina is an executive consultant and coach with over a decade of global experience in organizational strategy and leadership, technology development, public speaking and creative media. Most recently COO at Meedan, she serves on the board of the News Product Alliance and China Residencies and is a current Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism and Communications.

Bene Cipolla offers 15 years of experience in digital and organizational strategy, audience development, and team management, and a 25-year background in multiple facets of journalism and media, from enterprise, breaking news, service journalism, and instructional content to nonprofits and community engagement. Her experiences beyond news in digital startups taught her about launching products, scaling organizations, managing operations, and driving revenue — experiences that enriched her work back in journalism. Most recently she served as editor-in-chief and then publisher of Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering public education. Bene geeks out over organizational design, project management, and design thinking as much as creative storytelling, and believes we all produce better journalism when we focus as much on our own people as on the stories we produce.

Dick Tofel was the founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until September 2021. As president, he had responsibility for all of ProPublica’s non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. During this time, ProPublica grew from an initial staff of just over 20 to more than 160, and raised more than $225 million from other than its founding funders. He serves on the board/advisory board of the American Journalism Project, CalMatters, The City, the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, Harvard Public Health magazine, Outlier Media, Retro Report, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Center for Media and Democracy in Israel.

Jennifer Mizgata is a senior media consultant specializing in digital innovation, leadership development, and organizational change. Jennifer coaches managers, senior leaders, and entrepreneurs on their careers and business strategies. She helps teams and individuals shift mindsets, work more collaboratively, and bring new products to market. With extensive experience working at the intersection of journalism and technology, she has worked as a program director, editor, and business strategist, using human-centered design to build new products that respond to community needs and help create a more equitable world. She also teaches media, innovation and business strategy at American University and writes about improving work culture. In 2020, she launched Fortune’s advice column, Work Space. Previously, she was the Director of Programs for the Online News Association (ONA), where she founded and directed the Women’s Leadership Accelerator, invested in award-winning projects, and managed key relationships with journalism partners and tech stakeholders. At the World Food Programme (WFP), she designed outreach strategies and served as the first U.S. social media lead.

Participating organizations

• Cabin Radio - Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada
• CivicLex - Lexington, KY
• Epicenter-NYC - Queens, NY
• Excelsior Citizen - Excelsior Springs, MO
• Hothouse Solutions - New York, NY & San Francisco, CA
• La Converse - Montreal, Québec, Canada
• LebTown - Lebanon, PA
• Madison Minutes - Madison, WI
• Monquartier - Quebec, Canada
• Prison Journalism Project - Chicago, IL
• Southwest Contemporary - Santa Fe, NM
• Taproot Edmonton - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
• The Appeal - Landers, CA
• The Current - Lafayette, LA
• The NRI Nation - Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• The Optimist - St. Michael, MN

The 2022 GNI Startups Lab on Planning for Revenue Growth was an eight-week program that helped independent news businesses strategically assess revenue-generating opportunities, align finances with goals and understand what it takes to make them happen.

By the end of the program, participants were able to understand how to assess a revenue opportunity, identify how ideas align with market forces, audience needs and capacity, understand operational needs that precede revenue growth and synthesize learnings to align with current organizational resources.

“The Revenue Growth Lab has been one of the single most significant growth experiences in my first eighteen months as a news media founder. Group interactions and video trainings were helpful and supportive but still minimal to allow for a focus on one-to-one interactions with coaches and the strategic work that supports growth in those sessions. My coach helped me move from big ideas to significant action in the areas of strategizing, budgeting, revenue planning, recruiting, and hiring. After completing the Revenue Growth Lab I feel much more prepared, equipped and confident to lead my news organization forward in the years ahead.

Annelise Pierce
Founder, Editor and Community Reporter
Shasta Scout

The Curriculum

• The News Entrepreneur Academy courses
  • Setting Organizational Goals. Led by Lizzy Hazeltine, this training underscores why setting goals is critical to understanding the past, acting in the present and planning for the future. It gives news businesses practical strategies for setting and executing goals while articulating how to learn from success and failure.
  • Assessing Growth Opportunities. Led by Alison Go, this course addresses ways to evaluate revenue opportunities to ensure they align with your financial, operational and team health. It also provides frameworks for identifying different opportunities and deciding whether an idea is worth pursuing for news businesses.
  • Financial Management for News Entrepreneurs. Led by Harry Backlund, this course demystifies financial management by exploring why budgeting, forecasting and risk assessment are critical to understanding financial position and informing future plans.
  • Understanding Your Market and Audience. Led by Ana Mina, this course outlines best practices and frameworks for understanding your market and your audience to identify whether there is demand for current or potential offerings and products.
  • Assessing Your Organizational Capacity. Produced by Lisa Heyamoto, this training outlines how to measure organizational capacity and shares frameworks and best practices for right-sizing ambitions with reality.
  • Launching a New Revenue Stream. Produced by LION Publishers, this lesson addresses building an operational foundation for revenue generation. It outlines why operations are an important consideration, how to think about aligning operations and revenue growth and typical systems, processes and resources to have in place for the most common revenue streams.
• Deliverables
  • Revenue Growth Plan: Participants evaluated and prioritized revenue-generating opportunities, aligned finances with goals, and outlined the resources necessary to achieve them. They also assessed the organization's capacity and financial standing in relation to potential revenue sources.
  • Revenue Growth Checklist: News leaders worked on a comprehensive checklist of internal policies and resources needed to operationalize a revenue stream, including advertisement/sponsorship, major donor contributions and reader revenue.

Meet the Coaches

Maria Archangelo is an enthusiastic, strategic and tactical leader with more than 20 years of experience with large and small for-profit and nonprofit media organizations, including Chalkbeat, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Stowe (Vt.) Reporter and Waterbury Record and The (Barre-Montpelier, Vt.) Times Argus. Maria managed and developed local, regional, national and global teams ranging in size from 3 to 120. Strength areas include raising millions of dollars from foundations and individuals to power innovative journalism, creating new digital and print products, sales leadership, developing client relationships, earned revenue generation, editorial leadership, personnel management and strategic planning. She is a graduate of Times Mirror’s Leadership in Management Program.

Sam Gross is the co-founder of Stacker, a 60-person data journalism publisher that produces and syndicates stories to 1,500+ publishers, including major networks like Hearst, Advance Local, and Tribune along with hundreds of independent news organizations. Sam leads newsroom product and strategy, focusing on expanding access to data-driven storytelling for partners while building alignment between revenue and coverage strategies. Prior to Stacker, Sam worked on the publisher partnerships team at Graphiq to provide interactive data visualizations to journalists.

Scott Rosenfield is the chief of staff to the CEO at The Atlantic. He sits at the intersection of advertising, subscriptions, product, audience, and editorial. He works deeply with the subscription and advertising teams to define their strategies and collaborates with product and engineering teams to bring plans to reality. He helps lead the annual strategic planning and budgeting process. And he jumps in to push forward important cross-functional projects, such as the launch of subscriber-only newsletters. He was formerly the site director at WIRED. He was responsible for working with editors, product managers, designers, and audience development managers to lead WIRED’s digital publishing strategy. Prior to joining WIRED, he worked at Outside magazine where he was focused on implementing strategies to diversify revenue and reach new audiences. Rosenfield graduated from Northwestern University and is an avid cyclist and outdoor enthusiast.

Todd Stauffer is association manager and digital specialist for the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, responsible for general operations and as liaison to programs such as the GNI Ad Transformation Lab. From 2002-2022, he was co-founder and publisher of the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, overseeing sales and operations for the weekly print and daily web publication. Jackson Free Press, Inc. also generated revenue through events, seasonal glossy magazines, commercial printing and digital marketing agency services for clients. When JFP sold its journalism assets to the nonprofit Mississippi Free Press news organization, Todd renamed the company Changemaker Media Services, Inc, which offers digital marketing solutions and consulting for nonprofits and newsrooms.

Participating organizations

• 9 Millones - San Juan, Puerto Rico
• Austin Monitor - Austin, TX
• Bay City News Foundation - Berkeley, CA
• Queerency - Austin, TX
• Santa Cruz Local - Santa Cruz, CA
• Shasta Scout - Redding, CA
• Southwest Voices - Minneapolis, MN
• Springfield Daily Citizen - Springfield, MO
• The Assembly - Durham, NC
• The Breach - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• The Buckeye Flame - Cleveland, OH
• The Hingham Anchor - Hingham, MA
• JOLT - Olympia, WA
• The Kansas City Defender - Kansas, MO
• The Kerr County Lead - Kerrville, TX
• Tostada Magazine - Detroit, MI

When LION Publishers and GNI came together to launch the GNI Startups Lab, we set out to test a key hypothesis: In order for journalism startups to become sustainable, they must focus on growing in three key areas: operational resilience, journalistic impact and financial health. The 2022 iteration of the Startups Lab posed another powerful question – could rethinking the Lab structure allow us to scale up our support and serve more publishers while still providing the same level of impact?

The answer, participants tell us, is yes. This year, the Startups Lab served 48 publishers – a 380% increase from the 10 publishers who graduated from the Startups Lab in 2021. And 97% reported that completing the program made them more confident in their organization’s ability to reach sustainability.

Publishers indicate through post-Lab surveys and testimonials that the structural redesign of the GNI Startups Lab offered them greater flexibility and a more focused path to growth. One key component was the asynchronous learning benefit offered through the News Entrepreneur Academy, allowing publishers to curate the video curriculum to complement their own schedule and business needs.

“Publishers can do a single course in one sitting, or they can do five courses in one sitting. They can casually view a video or they can really intently undertake a course because they need to directly apply that learning to their business,” Heyamoto said.

They also appreciated the menu and range of courses offered.

“The training was so specific to our media/news organization,” said Michelle Olvera of BoldLatina. “It felt like I hit gold with this education vs. a startup accelerator program out there that wasn't specific to me.”

Publishers raved about the quality of their coaching pairings (which strove to create relationships that supported accessibility and language needs) and the in-depth consultations they received through weekly meetings. Beyond the frequent coach-publisher meetings, LION Publishers’ Senior Manager of Coaching Elaine Diaz organized check-in meetings for Lab coaches to exchange insights and swap advice beyond providing updates.

“Coaches would explore the common threads that they were seeing and the coaches would work together to find solutions or uncover resources to help them,” Diaz said. “Publishers had access to one coach directly, but their coaches were drawing on the collective minds of all four coaches, plus the LION team.” Indeed, the 1:1 coaching proved so helpful that some publishers chose to hire their coaches and continue the relationship after the Lab ended.

While this year’s iteration of the Startups Lab pivoted to asynchronous learning, publishers still relished the opportunities to come together as a cohort to share experiences. Rockway said that the true impact of the cohort meetings is as much about emotional support as it is knowledge-sharing.

“Publishers so often seem to feel that they're the only person or organization in the world going through these challenges. And so, in that sense, challenges can feel unsolvable,” he said. I think these moments … give folks a sense of realizing their challenges are industry- wide, that there are solutions, and they shouldn’t give up hope.”

Post-lab surveys demonstrate that Startups Lab ignited transformative change for the publishers involved and led to increased self-confidence in their efforts to achieve sustainability.

Publishers’ Confidence Scores, Post-Lab

The LION team imagines future program iterations could offer publishers the tools to conduct deeper audience research, level up strategic planning or enhance revenue generation efforts. Heyamoto is excited to further grow the News Entrepreneur Academy and curate modular learning paths, allowing for more curriculum customization.

“Rather than a set list of trainings that come in a particular order, we can have more of a menu, so folks can customize their courseload and do the training that is most meaningful to them, in the order that makes the most sense,” she explained.

Diaz agrees, adding that LION’s bespoke and holistic learning methodology can be applied to future coaching practices, as well.

“We will try to work with the coaches to create more of a “One size fits one” kind of curriculum,” she described. “So we have more time to go back and forth on the curriculum after participants are selected and ensure that the curriculum, deliverables and coaching can truly meet the participants' needs.”

The future of independent startup journalism publishers in North America is uncertain and challenging, but the results of the 2022 GNI Startups Lab offer evidence for optimism. The targeted education provided will make a direct impact on these entrepreneurs’ ability to manage their businesses – and will inspire them to approach future business challenges with more faith in their abilities.

“I think it's a huge success to consider their growing confidence in understanding their news publication as a business,” Rockway said.

Perhaps most remarkably, the iterative program design tested and proved an exciting new method for reaching more publishers at scale while still achieving transformational results. Replicating the Startups Lab approach with other focus areas offers the opportunity to support even more trailblazing news entrepreneurs and accelerate the overall sustainability of the local startup news ecosystem.

“When I started my news organization, a plan was the furthest thing from my mind. The Lab helped me legitimize what has become a full-fledged news business. My work with my coach and the GNI/LION team forced me to set aside time to look at the most important aspects of my news organization — time I wouldn't have spent otherwise.”

Nicci Kadilak
Founder
Burlington Buzz

“We are incredibly grateful to LION and highly recommend the Revenue Growth Lab to any fellow news entrepreneurs who have the opportunity to participate. The entire LION team and coaching staff are incredibly kind and are the experts in the industry changing the face of local news as we know it!”

Hillary Jenison
Co-founder
Anchor Media LLC