Knight Foundation’s Investments in Local News Sustainability

In February 2019, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced that it would double its investment in strengthening journalism to $300 million over five years, with a focus on building the future of local news and information, which are essential for democracy to function. In early 2020, Knight Foundation and Impact Architects launched this assessment of Knight’s investments in local news sustainability with the goal to better understand the impacts of these investments and promising practices that contribute to sustainability. This report is an interim learning memo assessing these investments after each of these programs had been operating for at least one full year. Some programs have been operating for at least two years.

The main objective of this assessment is to understand the effects of grantees’ interventions in the context of Knight’s goals for sustainability of local news. Knight defines sustainability as “a newsroom where revenue outstrips expenses in a repeatable fashion, when sources of revenue are diversified, and audience size is consistent or growing year over year.” For this assessment, we leverage data to measure newsroom sustainability through a combination of financial health and audience metrics.

We know that the long-term sustainability of local news cannot be divorced from the need for local news organizations to be diverse, equitable and inclusive, with sophisticated organizational practices, and representation from the communities they aim to serve. So, we include these aspects of organizational growth and development in the qualitative elements of this assessment as well.

The assessment includes ten unique interventions being carried out by nine grantee organizations, all of which are business-to-business (B2B) organizations supporting newsrooms through grantmaking, programming, training and networking. This report is the second annual report, following the first published in 2022.