For a decade, the implicit metric for audience strategy was reach. Platforms and philanthropy rewarded it. Advertisers paid against it. Editorial decisions bent around it.
LION Publishers data shows the shift is real: median revenue among independent local news organizations grew 15.2% in 2024, driven largely by subscriptions and direct reader support, not traffic. Revenue tied to relationships grew. Revenue tied to eyeballs didn’t.
If your organization disappeared tomorrow, who would notice? The answer tells you how deep your community relationships actually are.
“I would take a small, deeply engaged audience over millions of readers with six seconds on page.”
— Seth Lind, Director of Operations, This American LifeEveryone says community. Almost no one means the same thing.
“Community” is one of the most invoked, least defined words in the field. Almost every news leader in this research named it as a priority. Almost none meant the same thing by it.
Community can mean:
A beat. Covering a specific group as the subject of your journalism. The community is who you write about, not who you write for.
An infrastructure. Becoming a functional part of how a place operates: the directory, the text line, the voting guide, the thing people turn to when they need to know something.
A relationship. Building an emotional bond around a shared identity. People don’t just read you; they belong to something you’ve created.
A pathway. Getting journalism to the people who need it most, through whatever channel actually reaches them, not the channel that’s easiest for you.
All four require completely different approaches. Using the same word for all of them while building for one is how community strategy fails.
Bethany Lane, Revenue Strategist at QCity Metro, a digital news outlet focused on Charlotte’s Black community, conducted an audience survey and found readers wanted a sense of connection. Stories about people consistently outperformed policy and civic coverage. The finding was concrete enough to change the organization. QCity Metro rewrote its mission statement, from “reports and informs on the black community in Charlotte” to something deeper: to inform and connect.
Manuel Torres, Senior Editor at The Marshall Project, says the editorial ethos is what makes impact pathways actually work: before a story is assigned, the team asks “Who do we want to see this?” and “Who has the power to change this?” The audience question is upstream, not downstream. What gets made is shaped in part by who needs to see it, not the other way around.
Why creators are winning, and what to do about it
The creator economy is not winning because creators are better at TikTok. It is winning because creators have an intimate relationship with their followers that legacy institutions lack. When a creator loses trust, they lose everything. Reuters Institute research maps this shift: more than a third of under-30s now regularly get news from creators or influencers.
El Vocero in Puerto Rico built partnerships with influencers in a variety of spaces: a veterinarian, a comedian and a mentalist. Lupa, a fact-checking news outlet in Brazil, worked with influencers with 1M+ followers to fight misinformation in election coverage.
Adriana Lacy, the founder of Influencer Journalism, an agency that helps newsrooms build their social strategies including partnerships with creators, identifies the most common failure: “They want to rent the influencer’s audience. They don’t try to understand why that audience trusts the influencer and how to tap into that. They want creator audiences without offering anything in return.”
MPR’s morning newsletter ends with daily engagement prompts: “How is ICE impacting you? What are you celebrating today?” Subscribers who engage are more likely to convert to paying members than passive readers.
The partners are unlikely: a veterinarian, a comedian, a mentalist. But the logic is straightforward. They bring audiences El Vocero can’t reach; El Vocero brings the journalism they can’t produce. Each owns their platform. Neither compromises the other.
Seventy people showed up to an open house. Not a fundraiser, not a ticketed event. Just proof that the audience relationship is real enough to exist outside of the digital page.