A Roadmap for Local News Sustainability: New report reveals key indicators to help newsrooms boost revenue, reach sustainability

Today, we’re publishing A Roadmap for Local News Sustainability, a report that consolidates the most actionable findings from three years of Sustainability Audit data, pulling from over 450 Audits. The topline takeaway? 

Organizations we’ve Audited earn more revenue and feel more sustainable after our interventions. 

By the numbers:

• Organizations saw a median increase in annual revenue of 62 percent,
• 45 percent progressed to the next sustainability stage on our Maturity Model, and
• An additional 32 percent made incremental progress, advancing to the next stage within at least one pillar, showing improvement across operational resilience, financial health, or journalistic impact.

We know what you’re thinking: That’s great, but how? 

The simple answer is: they took their time, and didn’t try to skip a step (or two).

Read the recipe, prep the ingredients, then start cooking.

We heard from Audit participants that taking a few hours to step back and look at the big picture was a clarifying exercise for news business leaders. We know our members’ most precious resources are time and capacity, followed closely by money. But we also know the utility of the Audit as a snapshot of their business. That’s why we made it a strategic goal to ensure that any LION member who wanted to take a Sustainability Audit could. We launched the self-serve Audit in June 2025, and since then, over 350 organizations have taken it, receiving a prioritized checklist of best practices and strategic considerations within minutes of completing the questionnaire. Those reports are our recipe for taking those organizations to the next stage.

In the report, we share our list of 21 key indicators, the policies and practices that have the most linear correlation with a news organization’s sustainability stage. We also dig into what areas of focus showed the most promise at different stages of maturity, charting a path for tackling those indicators in a way that makes sense as an organization grows, seeking to avoid overwhelming early-stage organizations or boring later-stage businesses. 

Some of these recommendations are not revelatory; after all, business best practices like having a documented one or three-year plan are fairly well established. This report is here to add a new layer to the conversation. For example, we saw a 137 percent increase in annual revenue across organizations that developed a formal business plan between assessments. With that in mind, we recommend not only that businesses prioritize the planning exercise, but also that those in the field supporting news businesses consider how they can best support organizations while they tackle these key items.

This report is the tip of the iceberg. We’ll have more insights to share in the coming months from this analysis, as well as from the Audits we’ve collected in 2025. Thank you to our partners at Impact Architects for their support with analysis and writing, and to the Google News Initiative for making this report possible.