Let me begin by saying that this newsletter is a passion project.

Like the many other past passion projects of mine — the CA//MEDIA//JOBS Newsletter, a weekly listing of journalism jobs in California; or the Missed Pitches newsletter, a weekly collection of freelance writing pitches that once got rejected — News Pain Points started the same way: I saw something that bugged me, and I couldn’t stop picking at it until I’d figure out how to say what I meant.

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The U.S. journalism industry is cannibalizing its own workforce.

In the first three months of 2026, one of the country’s most storied newsrooms lost close to half its journalists in a single round of cuts. A 240-year-old daily announced it would stop publishing altogether. A broadcast network shut down a division that had been on the air since the 1930s. And across digital and local TV, outlets from Axios to Nexstar continued trimming staff with no sign of slowing down.

The pace of destruction is outrunning any effort to rebuild — and the pipeline that’s supposed to feed new talent into the profession is collapsing right alongside it.

🩺 The Pain Point

The talent pipeline is collapsing at every stage: experienced reporters are getting pushed out, entry-level pay is driving graduates away, and the midcareer layer that holds newsrooms together is thinning fast.

At the top, experienced journalists are being pushed out by rolling layoffs that have intensified sharply since 2018. Press Gazette’s 2026 tracker has already logged cuts at The Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Politico, Nexstar, Vox Media, Axios, CNBC, CBS News, and The Wall Street Journal — all by early spring.

Full-year journalism cuts reached at least 3,434 in the U.S. and U.K. in 2025. This year’s pace could very well eclipse those figures by this summer, according to The Media Copilot.

The Washington Post alone eliminated roughly 350-375 newsroom positions in February — about half of its staff, according to the labor union that represents its journalists — shuttering its sports section, books desk, and large parts of its foreign and metro coverage.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in continuous operation since 1786, will publish its final edition on May 3, wiping out roughly 170 jobs. On March 20, CBS News killed its nearly century-old radio division and cut about 60 staffers.

A dark year for storied journalism indeed.

However, all of these layoffs track with trends those of us in the industry have been witnessing for some time now. A Columbia Journalism Review analysis found that more than 8,200 U.S. journalists have been laid off since 2022 — about 9% of the entire workforce. This year’s bloodletting may put that at a higher figure.

Pew Research found in a 2020 analysis that the decade-long decline between 2008-2018 hit midcareer workers ages 35–54 the hardest, something I’d liken to stripping out the institutional knowledge that holds newsrooms together.

At the bottom, the entry-level wage math is brutal. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the lowest 10% of reporters earned under $34,590 in May 2024.

Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that journalism graduates earn a median of just $39,700 net of student loan debt three years out — ranking 14th out of 34 major groups — and only about 15% of journalism majors end up working in the field early in their careers. The profession is asking people to take a pay cut for the privilege of entering it.

And the pool of people willing to make that bet is shrinking.

Undergraduate enrollment in journalism and mass communication programs dropped 16.3% between 2013 and 2015, and the trajectory hasn’t reversed. Bachelor’s degrees awarded in journalism have declined 25% since their early-2010s peak, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. The occasional ‘Trump bump’ in j-school interest has never been matched by an improvement in the economic logic of actually taking a journalism job.

Meanwhile, the number of U.S. high school graduates is expected to peak around 2025–2026 and then fall roughly 13% by 2041, meaning journalism programs will be fighting for students from a shrinking pool — students who can see the layoff headlines as clearly as anyone.

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This is a crisis-level structural failure.

Unlike a single round of layoffs or a single paper’s closure, the pipeline collapse threatens the industry’s ability to staff any beat, anywhere, for the foreseeable future. Every other problem I’ve covered on this newsletter — the sports gap, the paywall paradox — is downstream of this one.

📊 Why It Matters

Every outlet in the pain point section above had one thing in common: the journalists who left were replaced by nothing — no new hires, no alternative coverage plan, just gaps where reporting used to be.

What fills the gap is worse than the gap itself: press releases published as news, partisan operatives with Substacks and production budgets, AI-generated content farms optimized for engagement, and public officials who now operate in communities where no one is paid to check what they say.

The pipeline collapse is beyond just a labor market story. It is a transfer of narrative power from trained, accountable reporters to actors with no obligation to accuracy and no professional consequences for getting it wrong.

And the public can feel it.

Gallup’s annual trust survey shows confidence in mass media at just 28% as of 2025 — a record low. A separate Pew Research Center survey found that trust in national news organizations has fallen 20 percentage points since 2016, with less than half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents expressing any trust at all. These numbers track closely with the acceleration of newsroom cuts.

Fewer journalists means thinner coverage, which means less public value and fewer subscribers, and ultimately more cuts.

Meanwhile, the information vacuum left behind becomes a growth market for misinformation, political propaganda, and algorithmic content that looks like journalism but operates without any of its constraints. Every closed newsroom is a new unmonitored zone.

The democratic cost is concrete and measurable. A landmark study found that newspaper closures lead to higher municipal borrowing costs — 5 to 11 basis points per bond issue — higher government wages and deficits, costing taxpayers an estimated $650,000 per bond issue (Read the full study here).

That means that when no one is watching, officials spend more, disclose less, and face fewer consequences. The communities losing coverage the fastest are the ones that can least afford it.

To put it succinctly, the pipeline problem documented above is a structural failure in the country’s information infrastructure — and the people who will pay the highest price are the ones who never subscribed to a newspaper in the first place.

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🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders facing hiring gaps on critical beats.

» J-school administrators watching enrollment erode.

» Funders and philanthropy officers deciding where to direct local news investment.

» Developers and civic technologists looking for infrastructure gaps to fill.

» Policymakers weighing whether the government has a role in sustaining local journalism employment.

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

This is a compounding structural failure at every stage of the talent pipeline.

The midcareer hollowing-out has a specific consequence that gets less attention: the editor pipeline is breaking. A survey of 116 editors conducted by Bettina Chang during her JSK Fellowship at Stanford found that the vast majority cited a lack of formal training, barriers to advancement, and unclear success metrics.

The reporter-to-editor pathway that newsrooms have relied on for decades has almost no institutional training behind it — only a few large organizations (Dow Jones News Fund, The New York Times, NPR, ProPublica) invest in formal editor development. When experienced editors get laid off, the mentorship and quality control they provided leaves with them — and there’s no program replacing it at scale.

AI is also having an impact on the pipeline by accelerating displacement. Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston said the company was “starting to see how AI can help us automate some tasks to focus humans on our most consequential work.”

The Washington Post’s executive editor cited the collapse of organic search traffic — down nearly half in three years — and the rise of AI-generated content as key factors in the restructuring.

Meanwhile, media workers are pushing harder for guaranteed severance packages as layoffs feel inevitable amid consolidation.

The result is a field that is simultaneously losing experienced professionals to layoffs, losing entry-level talent to better-paying industries, and facing a shrinking pool of students willing to enter the profession at all.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

The people working on the pipeline problem are scattered across universities, nonprofits, state legislatures, and newsrooms that are themselves under threat. What connects them is a shared read: the market alone won’t fix this, and neither will journalism schools or philanthropy acting in isolation. The efforts worth watching have moved past diagnosis and into implementation.

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Report for America is scaling the most proven pipeline intervention in the country. The national service program announced its 2026 newsroom partners in January, with plans to place more than 200 corps members in local newsrooms by July 2026. By that point, RFA will have placed more than 850 journalists in 465 newsrooms since its first placements in 2018, and the organization reports that 81% of its alumni remain in journalism after completing the program.

In 2026, RFA introduced a sports corps (five positions covering community sports) and expanded its investigative reporting program, funded by Arnold Ventures, to support 48 local investigations over three years. RFA also launched a pilot in Central Kentucky with Press Forward Blue Grass to train non-traditional community journalists — a model for stackable-credential entry.

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The Illinois Local Journalism Tax Credit is the first state-level policy designed to directly subsidize journalism jobs. In its debut year (2025), the program awarded more than $4 million in tax credits to support more than 260 journalist positions at 55 news entities across more than 120 local outlets.

Two-thirds of recipients were newsrooms of six or fewer journalists. Rebuild Local News, which helped design the legislation, reports that the program reached a cross-section of commercial and nonprofit outlets statewide, and that its formula design raised no known allegations of officials picking winners or making content-based distinctions between outlets. The 2026 application window opened February 1.

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The nonprofit news sector is absorbing some displaced talent and growing — but unevenly. The 2025 INN Index found that 83% of local nonprofit news organizations increased revenue by at least 10% over three years, outpacing state, regional, and national outlets. Traffic to nonprofit news sites surged in Q4 of 2025, especially those covering immigrant communities amid heightened ICE enforcement.

But a field-level analysis of 559 Press Forward infrastructure funding proposals warns that nonprofit outlets have clustered in major metro areas, and that the communities most in need of subsidy are often the least likely to have philanthropic access.

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🔧 The Build Opportunity

The pipeline crisis documented above has a structural quality that makes it resistant to traditional fixes. You can’t recruit your way out of a pay gap, train your way past a demographic cliff, or fundraise your way into communities that lack philanthropic infrastructure.

But each of those failures points to a specific gap where a well-designed tool, policy model, or funding mechanism could change the math. The following build opportunities offer some solutions.

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Opportunity 1: A Shared Industry Talent Platform

No centralized tool exists to match laid-off journalists, career-switchers, and j-school graduates with newsrooms that have open beats — including the part-time, freelance, and contract roles that traditional job boards miss.

The Institute for Independent Journalists tracks layoffs and surveying displaced journalists, but there’s no CRM-style platform that reconnects that talent with the outlets that need it. There’s an opportunity for a two-sided marketplace for journalism labor, built around beats and geographies, not just job titles.

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Opportunity 2: Scalable Apprenticeship Infrastructure

Report for America proves the model works at scale, but its corps will reach around 200 members by July 2026 — a fraction of the 3,400+ jobs cut in the U.S. and the U.K. in 2025 alone.

What’s needed is federated apprenticeship infrastructure: a framework that lets regional press associations, community foundations, and nonprofit newsrooms stand up their own salary-subsidy programs using a shared playbook, shared recruitment tools, and shared outcomes tracking. The Kentucky pilot with Press Forward Blue Grass points in this direction.

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Opportunity 3: State-level Payroll Policy at Scale

Illinois proved that a journalism payroll tax credit can work without government content interference. Other states need replicable legislative templates and implementation guidance.

Rebuild Local News is already pushing bills in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Hawai’i, Maryland, and Washington. But the speed of adoption matters: every year without policy intervention is another year of compounding talent loss.

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Opportunity 4: Salary Benchmarking and Transparency Tools

Small publishers can’t compete for talent if they don’t know what the market pays. The Georgetown CEW report ranks 850 journalism and communication programs by graduate earnings — similar data is needed at the employer level.

An open, anonymous salary database for journalism — broken down by market size, beat, and experience level — would give newsroom leaders the benchmarks they need to write competitive offers and give job seekers the transparency they deserve.

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💬 Closing Provocation

“All the strategies that we can throw at funding journalism are meaningless if the people are broken, if they cannot do the job.” — Meredith D. Clark, associate professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism

⚡️ tl;dr

• The U.S. journalism talent pipeline is breaking at every level. At the top, more than 8,200 journalists have been laid off since 2022. The Washington Post cut half of its newsroom in February. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is shutting down in May. CBS killed its radio division after 99 years.

• At the bottom, entry-level pay starts below $35,000, only 15% of journalism majors end up working in the field, and the number of high school graduates feeding into college programs is about to drop for the next decade.

• In the middle, the midcareer editors who hold newsrooms together are being cut fastest and replaced by nothing.

• Gallup trust in media hit 28% in 2025. A growing body of research ties newspaper closures directly to higher costs for local taxpayers.

• The nonprofit sector is growing but concentrated in metro areas with existing philanthropic networks, leaving the communities that need coverage most with the least access to funding. Illinois launched the first state-level journalism tax credit and got $4 million out the door in year one.

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The news industry spent a years convincing itself that subscriptions would save journalism. For a handful of national brands, they did. (More on that below.) For everyone else, paywalls are determining which stories get told and who gets to read them.

And more recent research confirms what local publishers have feared: the business model built to sustain newsrooms is actively hollowing out the civic coverage those newsrooms exist to provide.

(Click here to jump to the tl;dr summary of this edition.)

🩺 The Pain Point

Paywalls are working financially for large publishers but actively shrinking civic coverage in the communities least able to absorb the loss.

A University of Michigan study tracked 17 regional U.S. newspapers over the course of 17 years and found that after implementing paywalls, newspapers cut local news by 5.1% on average.

But the damage is not evenly distributed.

In smaller markets — cities under 500,000 — local coverage dropped by 12.8%. In regions experiencing an influx of younger residents (age < 40), it fell by 19.1%.

At the same time, soft news like entertainment and lifestyle content ticked up by 3.5% in those younger-skewing markets. Editorial choices are following the money, not the need, in my opinion.

The coverage losses aren’t abstract. According to the study, city council meetings and local government decisions saw the sharpest post-paywall declines, particularly in smaller markets, followed closely by local education coverage — school board meetings, classroom initiatives, the decisions that shape daily life in a community.

Lead author Paramveer Dhillon put the stakes plainly: without intervention, newspapers risk creating “information deserts in communities that most need robust local news coverage.”

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This is an accelerating structural problem with civic consequences. The gap between who pays for news and who needs local accountability journalism is widening, and no market force is correcting it.

📊 Why It Matters

The numbers tell a story of compounding exclusion.

A Pew Research Center survey of 9,482 U.S. adults, conducted in March 2025 and published that June, found that 83% of Americans did not pay for news in the past year. Among those who hit a paywall, just 1% chose to pay while 53% went looking for the same information somewhere else and 32% gave up entirely.

The gap falls along predictable lines.

Only 9% of adults with a high school diploma or less paid for news, compared to 27% of college graduates. Just 10% of Hispanic Americans and 11% of Black Americans paid, compared to 20% of White Americans. And only 8% of adults in the lowest income bracket paid, versus 30% in the highest.

To me, the data shows that people most likely to pay for news are older, wealthier, more educated, and whiter than the general population — meaning paywalled local coverage is least accessible to the communities that need it most.

A follow-up Pew survey confirms the pattern: 83% of respondents again reported they had not paid for any news source in the prior 12 months.

Globally, the picture is no more different, according to the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report. The report, covering 48 markets, found that only 18% of respondents across a basket of 20 wealthier countries had paid for any online news — a figure that plateaued after a decade of growth.

As the report notes, traditional news media face a troubling mix of declining engagement and growing resistance to paying for news.

🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders making editorial decisions under subscription pressure need to understand that the paywall reshapes what stories get told.

» Developers and product teams have a direct opportunity to build tools that distinguish civic content from premium content at the paywall layer.

» Independent journalists and nonprofit publishers face the sharpest version of this tradeoff: every dollar of subscription revenue carries an implicit editorial nudge away from accountability work.

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🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The subscription model rewards content that retains paying subscribers, not content that serves a civic need. That incentive structure pushes newsrooms — especially smaller ones without a financial cushion — to trade city council coverage for lifestyle content.

In the U.S. alone, paywall adoption among newspapers increased from 60% to 76% between 2017 and 2019.

But the paying-for-news ceiling has flatlined at 17–18% in the U.S. and globally, and most of those subscriptions flow to a handful of national brands. With most households only willing to pay for one or two news subscriptions, that dynamic overwhelmingly favors established national brands. That leaves local news providers fighting for scraps.

To illustrate the point, a consumer subscribing to every major local news outlet in Chicago would now pay roughly $200 a month — with individual subscription prices like the Chicago Tribune’s climbing from $8 per month in 2015 to $20 in 2026, far outpacing inflation.

The result is a two-tier information system, one in which wealthier, older, more educated audiences get the journalism. Everyone else gets whatever is free — increasingly algorithm-sorted social media content and partisan commentary that foments division and distrust.

Paywalls do not just lock out readers from stories; they reshape which stories get told in the first place. And without intervention, this can create deeper news deserts and potentially widen the information inequality gap.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

Not every publisher is standing still, however. Across the industry, a handful of experiments are testing whether there’s a way out of the paywall trap. None of these are silver bullets. But together, they suggest the paywall is a choice.

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The Salt Lake Tribune is making the most aggressive move in the U.S.

The nonprofit newspaper, which described its paywall as a "necessary evil," raised approximately $2.5 million — anchored by a $1 million pledge from Chris and Summer Gibson that the community matched at 1.5x — and said it would drop its paywall in Q1 2026, shifting to a voluntary membership model with three tiers at $5, $10, and $26 per month. See the image above.

The newspaper budgeted nearly zero subscription income for 2026, betting that donors and members would more than replace the $2.6 million in digital subscription revenue it earned in 2025. A poll of its own subscribers found that most had signed up not to bypass the paywall but to support independent news in Utah.

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Dynamic paywalls are gaining traction as a middle path. An INMA survey found that 38% of publishers are now using or planning to adopt dynamic paywalls, quadrupling from near-zero adoption in 2020 to 22% of news brands by late 2024.

These AI-driven systems decide in real time whether a visitor sees a paywall, a registration wall, or open access based on their likelihood to convert.

The Post and Courier in South Carolina used this paywall strategy and saw a 57% increase in paywall revenue and up to 54% in ad revenue after switching to a dynamic model through Piano. In this case, subscription and advertising revenue didn't cannibalize each other.

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Paywall messaging also matters, according to a study by Volha Kananovich which found that local newspapers across the U.S. are asking readers for money through subscription pitches and donation appeals — but they’re making a weak case.

More than 20% of newspaper subscription and donation appeals cited informing the public as a function of their journalism. If publishers want readers to pay, they need to articulate the civic value of what they produce beyond a subscribe button

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🔧 The Build Opportunity

The paywall problem is a product gap, not a policy debate. The tools to fix it either don’t exist yet or haven’t been assembled into something a mid-size newsroom can actually use. Here are three distinct build opportunities.

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Opportunity 1: The Civic-Access Paywall Layer

Dynamic paywalls are booming at large publishers, and a few newsrooms manually exempt emergency and civic content during hurricanes or elections. But nobody has built a turnkey product that bakes civic access rules into paywall logic by default — one that automatically keeps government, school board, public safety, and election coverage free while gating premium analysis, entertainment, and lifestyle content behind the paywall.

The product would need to integrate with existing CMS platforms (especially WordPress, where tools like Leaky Paywall already operate) and leverage the browser-side AI paywall intelligence that companies like Mather Economics are pioneering — systems that optimize paywall decisions in real time without requiring cookies.

The market timing is ripe for this. Dynamic paywall adoption has quadrupled since 2020, but is still at just 22% of news brands. The other 78% not yet using dynamic paywalls represent an enormous addressable market of publishers who know their current approach isn’t working but don’t have the engineering resources to build something better.

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Opportunity 2: Income-Sensitive Pricing and Micro-Payment Infrastructure

The data is clear: the people least likely to pay for news are younger, lower-income, and less educated. The standard $15–20/month subscription is priced for an audience that already pays.

Torstar tested this concept in 2024, launching a 75-cent-per-article micropayment option powered by the platform Axate, with a $1.50 daily cap for full access. The model was designed not to replace subscriptions but to capture incremental revenue from readers who would never commit to a recurring payment.

Pair micro-payments with income-sensitive pricing tiers — sliding-scale subscriptions, student rates, community-sponsored access — and you have a framework that protects revenue without abandoning the civic mission. The infrastructure for this exists in pieces (Axate for micropayments, Piano for dynamic pricing) but hasn’t been assembled into a single, publisher-ready product.

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Opportunity 3: Paywall Messaging That Actually Makes the Case

The study by Volha Kananovich at Appalachian State University found that local newspapers across the U.S. are asking readers for money through subscription pitches and donation appeals.

Only about 1 in 5 newspaper paywall appeals cited informing the public as a function of their journalism. Even fewer emphasized community building, investigative accountability, or democratic service.

There’s a product opportunity in building a paywall messaging toolkit — A/B-tested, research-backed templates and frameworks that help local publishers make a concrete case for why their journalism matters to the reader's daily life.

Pair it with the dynamic paywall layer from Opportunity 1, and the messaging can be personalized to the visitor: a first-time reader sees a civic appeal, a returning reader sees a value proposition, a high-propensity subscriber sees a direct conversion offer.

💬 Closing Provocation

“The Tribune cannot afford to continue to limit who has access to independent and trusted news. Making the news is only the first step — we must also ensure people can find it.” — Lauren Gustus, CEO and Executive Editor, The Salt Lake Tribune

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⚡️ tl;dr

• The pain point: Paywalls are gutting the civic coverage they were supposed to protect — local news dropped nearly 13% in smaller markets after paywalls went up, replaced by lifestyle fluff that keeps subscribers happy.

• The twist: 83% of Americans don’t pay for news, and the people locked out skew younger, lower-income, and non-white — exactly the communities that need local accountability journalism the most.

• The takeaway: The subscription model isn’t broken by accident; it’s structurally misaligned with journalism’s civic mission — but fixable through tools like dynamic paywalls, micropayments, and smarter messaging that no one has assembled into a turnkey product yet.

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Across America, more kids are playing organized sports than ever before. Almost no one is covering them.

Local newsrooms have hollowed out their sports desks, leaving millions of families, athletes, and communities with no one telling their stories. It’s not a small gap — it’s enormous. And it represents the biggest unclaimed business opportunity in American media.

A new report analyzing 559 funding proposals for local journalism confirms the underlying cause: the threats to local news aren’t individual newsroom failures; they’re ecosystem-level infrastructure breakdowns.

But while funders and policymakers debate the diagnosis, some of the sharpest business minds in media are already placing their bets — not on city hall coverage or investigative units, but on Friday night football.

(Click to skip to the tl;dr summary of this newsletter.)

🩺 The Pain Point

The U.S. just recorded its highest-ever high school sports participation, and yet the journalism ecosystem that once covered those games has all but collapsed.

The NFHS 2024–25 High School Athletics Participation Survey confirms that participation has surged by more than 645,000 athletes in just three years, with breakout growth in girls’ flag football (up 60%), and girls’ wrestling (up 15%).

More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005. News desert counties have hit a record 213, and roughly 50 million Americans now live with limited or no access to local news.

The reporters who once filed Friday night game recaps, profiled breakout athletes, and held athletic departments accountable are largely gone. What remains is a structural mismatch: demand for school sports content is surging while the professional supply has cratered.

High school sports coverage once served as community connective tissue that bound neighborhoods through shared stories the way obituaries and school board reports did. When that coverage disappears, something civic disappears with it.

🟡 Pain Point Score: RISING

The collapse of local school sports coverage is a structural market failure with proven revenue implications. In the meantime, competitors (social creators, school-produced content) are filling the vacuum with no editorial standards.

The social media replacements are not communal in the same way. They are siloed experiences — you learn about your friends’ feeds, not a stranger’s story.

There is a difference between a highlight clip going viral and a beat reporter writing about the sophomore who broke the school’s 800-meter record in front of 200 people on a Tuesday afternoon. The first entertains. The second witnesses.

The coverage gap is a market failure with civic consequences, one that is deepening as participation rises and newsrooms continue to shrink.

📊 Why It Matters

The numbers make the business case impossible to ignore.

In August 2025, the Minnesota Star Tribune launched Strib Varsity, a dedicated high school sports product. Within months, it accounted for 10% of new subscriptions, with its paywall converting readers at roughly 3x the rate of the paper’s main site.

MassLive, a digital outlet under Advance Local, reported that about a third of its new subscriptions came through high school sports content. And the Boston Globe launched in 2025 a dedicated high school sports team and initiative citing growing interest from families and athletes.

These aren’t anomalies — they’re proof points. The Local News Initiative’s profile of these efforts documented how high school sports is emerging as one of the most reliable subscription engines in local media.

While web traffic to the 100 largest newspaper sites has plummeted more than 45% in four years, local school sports coverage is making the search for differentiated, high-engagement content existential.

MassLive’s VP of Content Ronnie Ramos called it content readers can’t get anywhere else and noted that people will pay for it.

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🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders and publishers: You’re leaving the most proven subscription driver on the table. The Star Tribune and MassLive have demonstrated the model. The question is: why haven’t you replicated it?

» Developers and product builders: The tooling for local sports coverage — stats engines, live-streaming infrastructure, community engagement platforms — is woefully underdeveloped. This is greenfield territory.

» Independent journalists and creators: Social-native creators are already filling this vacuum with mic’d-up footage and highlight reels. But they lack the editorial standards and investigative capacity that professional journalism brings. There’s a hybrid model waiting to be built.

» Philanthropic funders and investors: A new report by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, analyzing 559 Press Forward infrastructure proposals, argues that the era of individual newsroom experimentation is over. The field needs system-level investments that lower the cost of producing local journalism. Sports-driven local models are exactly the kind of scalable infrastructure play the report calls for.

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The diagnosis here runs deeper than “newspapers are closing.” I can identify at least three compounding forces have created this gap:

First, the economic collapse of local news hit sports desks early and hard. Sports coverage was often the first casualty of shrinking newsrooms because it was seen as discretionary, the proverbial “toy department,” despite growing evidence it’s among the most effective content for driving subscriptions.

Let’s not forget that The Washington Post eliminated its entire sports section in February this year. This move alone signaled the latest and most dramatic blow to sports journalism, which has seen reporters cut or reassigned across the industry.

Second, national platforms cannot fill the local gap. When The New York Times purchased The Athletic for $550 million, it put the Times in “direct competition with every local news site” for subscribers.

But The Athletic covers roughly 270 professional and major college teams. It does not, and structurally cannot, cover 20,000 high schools producing 8.2 million athletes. No national platform has the incentive or capacity to do this.

Third, the funding ecosystem rewards experimentation over scale. Hansen Shapiro’s new report is blunt on this point: philanthropy tends to be time-bound and project-based, which produces fragmented, newsroom-by-newsroom solutions that never reach the scale needed to address a systemic problem.

As she told ProPublica founding general manager Richard Tofel in a Nieman Lab interview: the era of innovation is over. What’s needed now are scaling solutions, and funders willing to pick winners and let failing experiments die.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

From the Star Tribune’s paywall-busting prep sports product to Chuck Todd’s proposed $2 billion franchise network, a growing number of publishers are treating high school sports not as a soft feature, but rather as a business model.

The through line: content readers can’t get anywhere else, serving communities willing to pay for it. Here are four compelling models worth watching.

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Star Tribune / Strib Varsity (Minneapolis). The most ambitious model currently operating. Strib Varsity combines dedicated sports journalism with a stats-and-scores engine and live-streaming for hundreds of Minnesota high schools.

The product has its own paywall tier and is converting readers to paid subscribers at three times the rate of the main site. This is a high-investment play, but it’s proving the model at scale.

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MassLive (Massachusetts) offers a leaner approach under Advance Local. MassLive currently covers 95 teams statewide and is expanding into the Boston and Worcester areas. VP of Content Ronnie Ramos said he has plans for live-streaming and a high school version of NFL RedZone — weekly video highlights across games.

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Chuck Todd’s proposed micro-outlet network. The former Meet the Press moderator has made local youth sports the centerpiece of a proposed $2 billion media venture. His model: a franchise-style network of up to 1,000 community-owned sites where sports-driven advertising revenue subsidizes broader local journalism.

Todd told LNI that the first three hires at any new local news organization should be a lead high school sports reporter, a micro weather forecaster, and a consumer/food reporter. He frames sports as the most sustainable revenue stream for local news — not a soft feature.

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Report for America launches its first sports corps. The national service program launched in 2017 by The GroundTruth Project places emerging journalists in local newsrooms to cover under-reported communities and beats. To date, RFA has partnered with more than 400 newsrooms across all 50 states, and by mid-2026 will have more than 200 active corps members in the field.

For its first eight years, the program focused almost entirely on civic accountability beats like government, criminal justice, health, immigration, education. It wasn’t until this year that RFA launched its first-ever sports corps — with just five positions nationwide, including one dedicated to high school and youth sports in Arizona.

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🔧 The Build Opportunity

The tooling layer for local school sports coverage barely exists. This is where developers and product builders should be paying attention. What’s needed isn’t another one-off experiment. It’s shared infrastructure that any newsroom can plug into and go live in weeks, not years.

The Strib Varsity model proves there’s demand. The Hansen Shapiro report proves the field needs a platform layer, not more pilots. Think of it as Substack meets ESPN+ meets a local stats engine, purpose-built for high school markets.

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Opportunity 1: A sports-local-news operating system

No single product currently combines real-time stats ingestion, low-cost live-streaming, community engagement tools, subscription infrastructure, and AI-assisted content generation for high school sports at scale.

Most stats are still tracked on paper or in disconnected coaching apps. Most live-streaming still assumes a broadcast truck. The opportunity is an integrated platform layer that legacy papers, digital startups, and micro-outlets alike can deploy without building from scratch.

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Opportunity 2: AI-augmented coverage that scales without replacing journalists

Patch’s AI-driven newsletter system has already demonstrated that AI can extend hyperlocal reach to 14,000 communities and nearly a million subscribers.

Imagine that same scaling logic applied specifically to school sports — automated game recaps, statistical analysis, and event scheduling that augment human reporting rather than replace it, with editorial standards and community trust baked in from the start.

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Opportunity 3: Community engagement infrastructure for hyperlocal audiences

The missing piece isn’t just content — it’s connection. Parents, coaches, and athletes currently have no unified way to interact around local sports coverage.

The build opportunity includes subscription and paywall tooling optimized for hyperlocal audiences, notification systems tied to specific teams and athletes, and feedback loops that make the audience part of the coverage.

This is what turns a reader into a subscriber and a subscriber into a recurring revenue source.

💬 Closing Provocation

“The first three hires I would make starting a local news organization would be a lead high school sports reporter, a micro weather forecaster, and a consumer/food reporter. Too many local news startups start with trying to get the news junkies to pay for subscriptions. I think you’re a closed audience there. Start with the widest possible pool.” — Chuck Todd, in conversation with Medill’s Local News Initiative

⚡️ tl;dr

• High school sports participation just hit a record high, but the local journalists who used to cover those games are mostly gone. More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005, and sports desks were often cut first. The result: a massive gap between surging demand and vanishing coverage.

• But a few players are proving this gap is also a business opportunity. The Star Tribune’s prep sports product converts subscribers at 3x its normal rate. MassLive is seeing a third of new subscriptions come through high school sports. Chuck Todd wants to build a $2 billion franchise network with sports as the revenue engine. And Report for America just launched its first-ever sports corps after eight years of ignoring the beat.

• The newsletter argues this isn’t just a content play — it’s an infrastructure problem. What’s missing is shared tooling (stats engines, live-streaming, community engagement platforms) that any newsroom could plug into, rather than each outlet building from scratch. The closing message: stop treating school sports as a soft feature — it may be the most sustainable path to local news revenue.

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The number that newsrooms have worshipped for two decades — web traffic — is now lying to them.

The industry spent years optimizing for a metric controlled entirely by Google and Facebook, and now that those platforms have changed the rules, publishers are discovering they never actually knew their audiences at all.

The collapse isn’t coming. It already happened. But here’s what most coverage of this crisis misses: the publishers who stopped worshipping traffic years ago aren’t just surviving. They’re growing.

(Click to skip to the tl;dr summary of this newsletter.)

🩺 The Pain Point

For years, web traffic was the universal metric of digital news. It’s what publishers showed advertisers, what funders used to justify grants, and what boards cited to measure impact. The entire business infrastructure of online journalism was built on the assumption that Google and Facebook would keep sending people to news websites.

That assumption has been shattered. A March 2026 analysis by Growtika found that 10 major tech publications — CNET, Wired, The Verge, TechRadar, and others — lost a combined 65 million monthly organic visits from Google since their 2024 peaks. That’s a 58% decline!

Some individual sites fared far worse: Digital Trends fell 97%, ZDNet dropped 90%, and The Verge lost 85% of its search traffic. Meanwhile, the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Trends report found that Facebook referrals to news sites have dropped 43% in the last two and a half years, with X (formerly Twitter) referrals falling 46%.

But the pain has not been evenly distributed. Chartbeat data drawn from over 2,500 publisher websites, cited in the Reuters Institute report, shows that publishers specializing in lifestyle or utility content — weather, TV guides, horoscopes — were more likely to have been affected by the decline.

The traffic isn’t shifting to another platform that publishers can chase. It’s disappearing into AI-generated answers, walled-garden social feeds, and direct conversations with chatbots. The scoreboard that newsrooms have been reading is broken, and most still don’t have a replacement.

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This is a high urgency problem, but not for the reason most people assume. The crisis is not that traffic decline automatically means revenue decline, but the publishers proving that are a specific kind of publisher.

Digiday’s analysis of subscription trends, drawing on its 2025 Subscription Index and other public earnings data, found that The New York Times accelerated digital subscription growth by 6.5 percentage points between 2023 and 2025, with average revenue per user rising year-over-year to $9.72. The Guardian posted an 8.2-point jump in subscription growth acceleration. Bloomberg raised its annual subscription price 33% year-over-year.

But these are elite, well-resourced publishers with strong brands and large audiences. The majority of newsrooms have not made the same transition, and many lack the capital or reach to try.

A Local Media Consortium survey of executives across 170 local media companies found a dramatic increase in the number of publishers identifying subscriber retention as a top challenge. Most of the closures aren’t happening at outlets that failed to diversify — they’re happening at small, independent publishers that never had the resources to begin.

And even for publishers who have built subscription models, the traffic collapse isn’t neutral. Digiday reports that audiences arriving through search convert to paid subscriptions at roughly 3x the rate of those arriving through Google Discover. Losing search traffic doesn’t just hurt ad revenue; it also shrinks the subscription funnel.

The gap between publishers who built direct audience relationships and those still renting them from platforms is widening fast. Traffic’s collapse is making the divide impossible to ignore, and for the publishers on the wrong side of it, every month spent measuring success by a collapsing metric is a month closer to joining the growing list of closures.

📊 Why It Matters

The numbers tell two stories at once: one of collapse, and one of adaptation.

On the collapse side, the data is stark. The Growtika analysis found that 4 of the 10 publications studied now generate less combined traffic (2.1 million visits) than the r/ChatGPT subreddit alone (4.68 million). TechRadar’s traffic loss of 11.5 million visits exceeds the current total traffic of Wired, The Verge, ZDNet, HowToGeek, and Digital Trends combined. And it’s not just tech media. Healthline lost 55 million monthly visits. NerdWallet, a publicly traded company, saw a 73% decline.

However, Piano.io’s 2026 publisher data shows that even as median traffic fell 2%, revenue climbed 10% — and 70% of publishers who saw traffic decline still grew revenue. Highly engaged users generate 110 times more revenue than one-off visitors — $25.52 versus $0.23 per thousand visitors. One could reach the conclusion that traffic volume has decoupled from both audience value and revenue potential.

The publishers who recognized this early are now pulling ahead.

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Trends report found that 76% of publishers now rank subscriptions and memberships as their top revenue focus for 2026, ahead of display advertising (68%) and native advertising (64%).

On Substack, more than 5 million paid subscriptions are now active across 35 million total subscriptions. The top 10 publications collectively earn more than $40 million per year, and 52 individual publications earn at least $500,000 each.

Beehiiv’s 2026 State of Newsletters report found that paid subscriptions on its platform generated $19 million in 2025 versus $8 million in 2024 — a 138% jump! New newsletter creators reached their first dollar in a median of just 66 days.

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🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders and editors-in-chief who still use traffic dashboards to evaluate editorial success and make staffing decisions. If your strategy meeting starts with a pageview report, you’re optimizing for a broken scoreboard.

» Revenue and advertising teams who pitch traffic numbers to advertisers and are watching CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) erode alongside visits. The pitch needs to shift from volume to attention and engagement — and the data to support that shift now exists.

» Audience development and growth teams who need new KPIs to justify their strategies and budgets. The most useful growth metrics in 2026 are registration rates, return frequency, newsletter subscriber depth, and cross-platform engagement; not unique visitors.

» News technology developers and product teams building the next generation of analytics and distribution tools. The infrastructure opportunity here is enormous.

» Funders, donors, and board members who have used traffic as a proxy for impact without questioning what it actually measured. The Knight Foundation and the American Journalism Project are already investing in audience development and revenue diversification as the new markers of newsroom health. Other funders should follow.

» Independent journalists and creator-journalists who are building media businesses on platforms like Substack, YouTube, and Patreon. The traffic collapse is your competitive advantage — your direct audience relationship is the asset legacy newsrooms are scrambling to build.

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The diagnosis here is dependency masquerading as strategy, and it runs deeper than measurement.

For two decades, news publishers treated Google and Facebook as permanent infrastructure. They optimized headlines for search algorithms, designed stories around trending queries, and structured entire beats around what would perform in the feed. Newsrooms didn’t build audience relationships. They rented them from platforms.

When those platforms pulled back from news, Facebook pageview referrals in the U.S. dropped 35% while those from X fell 46% from 2023 to 2025, and thus the dependency was exposed.

This created a dangerous blind spot. Publishers could tell you how many people clicked on a story, but not why those people came, whether they valued what they read, or whether they’d come back. Traffic measured distribution efficiency, not audience connection.

Piano.io’s publisher data illustrates the cost of that blind spot: one-off visitors make up 60% of traffic but generate almost no revenue, while highly engaged users convert at 44 times the rate. And yet most publishers optimized for the former, not the latter.

When Google introduced AI Overviews that answer queries directly in search results, the publications most dependent on “how-to” and “best of” queries — exactly the kind of commodity content that platforms can now generate themselves — saw the steepest declines, Growtika’s analysis found.

But the structural failure goes beyond choosing the wrong metric. Publishers also outsourced their entire distribution infrastructure to search engines and social media platforms. The measurement problem and the distribution problem are entangled but distinct. Fixing how you measure success won’t help if you still have no independent way to reach your audience.

As if things weren’t unstable enough, an even deeper structural shift is emerging. According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, automated traffic surpassed human-generated web traffic for the first time in a decade, accounting for 51% of all web activity in 2024. The surge is largely driven by AI and large language models, which have made it easier than ever to create and scale bots that crawl, summarize, and transact on behalf of humans.

And the trend is accelerating. AI bot visits to publisher sites grew by roughly 400% over the course of 2025 alone, according to TollBit’s quarterly tracking data. The web is quickly becoming a place built for machines first and people second. And now publishers must contend not just with fewer human visitors but with a fundamental change in what a “visit” even means.

As the Newzdash 2026 News SEO report put it: winning in 2026 is about owning topics, not just ranking URLs. The report’s panel of 20 global experts highlighted the need to move beyond pageviews toward engagement, return rate, and value-based metrics.

That shift is underway at some publishers. But for most newsrooms, the tools, frameworks, and internal culture to measure what “owning a topic” actually looks like remain a work in progress — to say nothing of the distribution channels needed to reach people directly when they do.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

The response to the traffic collapse is emerging on mainly two fronts: direct-to-audience distribution and measurement innovation. No single solution has become the new standard, but the pieces of a post-traffic ecosystem are taking shape.

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Direct-to-Audience Distribution

Newsletters can be thought of as owned infrastructure. Email has emerged as one of the most resilient distribution channels in journalism. Unlike social feeds or search results, newsletters are permission-based, algorithm-resistant, and owned by the publisher.

Substack now hosts more than 50,000 publications earning money, with open rates that often exceed 40% — dwarfing typical web engagement metrics. On beehiiv, paid subscriptions grew 138% year-over-year and the platform powered 28 billion emails in 2025. Paved’s network now reaches 253 million newsletter subscribers across 3,000+ publishers, demonstrating that newsletter advertising has matured into a standalone revenue channel.

Another example of owned distribution is YouTube — the new front page. YouTube became the highest-priority platform for news publishers in 2026, scoring +74 net in the Reuters survey, up from +52 last year.

In his 2026 priorities letter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan noted in January that the platform has paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies over the past four years.

Adweek reported that journalist-creators like Tara Palmeri, Taylor Lorenz, and Dave Jorgenson are now treating YouTube as their primary distribution point, using its discovery engine to attract viewers and funneling their most engaged fans toward Substack and Patreon for conversion.

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Measurement Innovation

Piano.io provides a publisher engagement platform that moves newsrooms away from raw traffic metrics toward what they call the “engagement ladder.” Its system tracks how readers progress from anonymous visitors to registered users to paying subscribers.

Among the publishers using Piano.io include Rolling Stone, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times. The platform’s 2026 data showing the 110x revenue difference between engaged and casual users is becoming a rallying point for the industry’s shift.

The American Press Institute’s Metrics for News (MFN) tool helps newsrooms measure engagement depth across beats and content types. Newsrooms like the Winnipeg Free Press and Crain’s City Brands use MFN to identify what content their audiences genuinely value — and, critically, what they can stop producing.

🛠️ The Build Opportunities

The gap in the market is wide open — and it’s bigger than a single product. In my opinion, there are at least three distinct build opportunities emerging from the traffic collapse.

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Opportunity 1: The Post-Traffic Analytics Platform

What publishers need — and what doesn’t yet exist as a single, integrated product — is a post-traffic analytics platform built specifically for news organizations.

This tool could unify several data streams that are currently siloed: on-site engagement depth (time spent, scroll depth, return frequency), off-platform presence (citations in AI answers, social sharing, newsletter opens), audience identity and loyalty signals (registration, habit formation, community participation), and downstream impact metrics (did coverage drive civic action, policy change, or informed decision-making).

Think of it as Chartbeat meets CRM meets attention scoring. It’s designed for the reality that most of a publisher’s audience may never visit their website directly. The platform could help newsrooms answer the question that traffic never could: Are we actually reaching and serving the people we exist to inform?

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Opportunity 2: AI Citation and Distribution Tracking

ChatGPT referrals to publisher websites have risen rapidly since mid-2024. But according to Chartbeat data cited in the Reuters Institute’s 2026 report, ChatGPT still represent just 0.02% of total referral traffic.

As AI platforms grow, publishers need tools that track when and how their content appears in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Comet, and others. ProRata.ai’s attribution technology is an early example — identifying when publisher content is used, attributing it to its source, and compensating publishers accordingly through a 50/50 revenue share.

To help on that front, IAB Europe released a technical framework in September 2025, titled “Crawling for Compensation,” establishing content access controls, discovery protocols, and monetization APIs. Additionally, IAB Tech Lab’s Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) working group has developed the standardized APIs to implement these mechanisms at scale.

There’s a clear build opportunity for an independent monitoring layer that gives publishers visibility into their AI footprint — a kind of “Chartbeat for chatbots.”

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Opportunity 3: Creator-Newsroom Partnership Infrastructure

The Reuters survey found that 76% of publishers plan to encourage journalists to behave more like creators, 50% plan to partner with external creators for content distribution, and 39% fear losing top editorial talent to the creator ecosystem.

The Washington Post’s Ripple project, CNN Creators, and Vox Media’s creator deals are early experiments. But there’s a gap for tools that help newsrooms manage creator partnerships: revenue-share tracking, brand-safety frameworks, cross-platform analytics for journalist-creators, and talent retention structures that let journalists build personal brands without leaving the organization.

Think of it as a creator management platform built for newsrooms. (See my previous newsletter edition.) As Morning Brew CEO Robert Dippell told Adweek: “Human connection becomes a premium channel” in an AI-saturated environment. The publishers and entrepreneurs who build the infrastructure for that connection will define the next era of news.

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For developers and entrepreneurs in the news technology space, this is a rare moment where an entire industry’s measurement and distribution infrastructure needs to be rebuilt simultaneously. The publishers who adopt new metrics and own their distribution first will have the clearest picture of their actual audience — and the strongest pitch to advertisers, funders, and subscribers.

💬 Closing Provocation

The question for every newsroom isn’t how do we get our traffic back? It’s what were we actually measuring — and what should we measure now?

“No discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact: in the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place.” — Danny Crichton, Partner at Lux Capital and former Managing Editor of TechCrunch

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⚡️ tl;dr

• Web traffic — the metric news publishers have relied on for 20 years — has collapsed, with some major sites losing 85–97% of their search traffic as Google and Facebook pulled back from sending visitors to news sites. That traffic is now being absorbed by AI answers and walled-garden feeds.

• The twist: traffic volume was never a great measure of success anyway. Publishers who shifted early to direct audience relationships (newsletters, subscriptions, YouTube) are actually growing. Data shows highly engaged users generate 110x more revenue than one-off visitors.

• The big takeaways: stop measuring pageviews, start measuring engagement and loyalty, and build distribution channels you actually own (like email newsletters) instead of renting audiences from platforms. There are also major opportunities to build new analytics tools, AI citation tracking, and creator-newsroom partnership infrastructure to replace the old, broken system.

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The news industry spent the last year deciding it needs creators. Good. But it picked the wrong ones.

While newsrooms scramble to partner with people who “look like journalists” on TikTok and Instagram, they’re walking right past the scientists, professors, doctors, and researchers who already hold the trust that legacy mastheads have been hemorrhaging for a decade.

The creator strategy isn’t broken because it’s new — it’s broken because it’s narrow.

🩺 The Pain Point

Most publishers treat their creator strategy as a distribution hack: find someone with followers, hand them a link, hope for clicks. But that approach mirrors the same transactional thinking that eroded audience trust in the first place.

According to the Reuters Institute’s 2026 trends survey of 280 senior news executives across 51 countries, roughly 76% of publishers plan to encourage journalists to develop creator-like personas, and half intend to partner with influencers for distribution.

The problem? Nearly all of that energy flows toward “news influencers” — people who already operate in the media orbit. Meanwhile, high-trust subject-matter experts (the climate scientist with 200K YouTube subscribers, the economist with a loyal Substack following, the public-health researcher whose threads go viral) sit outside the newsroom’s field of vision entirely.

These aren’t just potential amplifiers. They’re trust brokers. And newsrooms are ignoring them because they don’t fit the legacy definition of a “media partner.”

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This is a compounding problem. Every month newsrooms spend partnering exclusively with personality-driven news influencers, they reinforce the perception that news is entertainment, not expertise.

The trust gap widens, and the subject-matter creators build direct audience relationships that make future partnerships harder to negotiate.

📊 Why It Matters

The trust numbers are brutal and it’s getting worse. Gallup’s latest survey found that just 28% of Americans express confidence in mass media to report news fully, accurately, and fairly. Yikes! That’s a record low, and the first time the measure has fallen below 30%. Five years ago, that figure was 40%.

Pew Research Center data from a September 2025 survey shows trust in national news organizations fell 11 percentage points from a brief uptick earlier that year, landing at 56% — and down 20 points since Pew first asked the question in 2016. The decline cuts across both parties and all age groups.

At the same time, audiences are gravitating toward individual voices they perceive as credible. Pew data shows that 38% of adults under 30 regularly get news from influencers on social media; and the behavior is bipartisan, with virtually no difference between Republicans and Democrats.

But here’s the catch: Reuters Institute research across 24 countries found that much creator content skews toward opinion and partisan commentary rather than reported news, and that most popular news influencers have no obligation to report fairly or accurately, even if many try.

That means newsrooms partnering only with opinion-forward creators risk reinforcing the very dynamic that’s eroding their authority. Subject-matter experts offer a different proposition — credibility rooted in domain knowledge, not personality.

Ryan Kellett, a Nieman-Berkman fellow at Harvard and formerly the audience lead at Axios, raised this point at the World News Media Congress in Krakow. He acknowledged that newsrooms have legitimate brand-safety concerns about partnering with non-journalists.

Kellett suggested that those uncomfortable with such partnerships should consider working with academic and expert creators who have real, verified expertise.

🤔 Who Should Care

Newsroom leaders and audience strategists — you’re the ones setting partnership criteria that may be too narrow.

Independent and local publishers — you have the most to gain from expert-creator partnerships because your audiences crave local authority.

News product developers and app builders — there’s a discovery and matchmaking gap here that technology can solve.

Journalism funders — your grants support creator programs, but are they broad enough to include non-journalist experts?

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The diagnosis: newsrooms are applying influencer-marketing playbooks to a trust-building problem, which requires a completely different logic.

Journalism innovator Liz Kelly Nelson has warned that the real risk isn’t just how newsrooms partner with creators — it’s who builds the infrastructure that governs creator journalism.

Writing in Nieman Lab, Nelson described two divergent paths: one where platforms build creator programs optimized for their own needs, using engagement metrics and ad inventory rather than journalistic integrity, causing the most sensational voices to rise while careful, community-embedded reporters remain invisible.

The other path involves creator-governed systems for discovery, standards, and partnerships where journalists and creators can be found based on beat expertise, geographic coverage, and demonstrated trust-building, not just follower counts. Nelson, along with Justin Bank and Ryan Kellett, is launching an infrastructure project to help close that gap before platforms define the terms alone. (More on that later.)

The root issue is that newsrooms still define “authority” through a legacy lens. A credible partner looks like a journalist, talks like a journalist, or used to be a journalist. But audiences have already moved on from that framework.

Audiences trust the epidemiologist who explained COVID variants better than the evening news did. They trust the local urban planner whose YouTube videos make zoning laws digestible. These people command deep loyalty in niche communities — exactly the audiences newsrooms can’t reach through traditional channels.

The American Press Institute, which has been running newsroom-creator collaboration experiments, references a taxonomy from consultant Adriana Lacy that categorizes potential partners into four types: niche content creators, community leaders, micro-influencers, and macro-influencers.

For local news organizations, API argues, what matters most is that a trusted messenger’s community overlaps with your market area and has a need for your journalism. That category of “trusted messenger” includes activists, nonprofit leaders, and small business owners whose influence comes from community embeddedness, not audience size — and it’s the one most newsrooms underinvest in.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

Influencer Journalism, founded by Adriana Lacy — an award-winning journalist, educator, consultant, and entrepreneur whose background spans the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Axios — is one of the most direct attempts to bridge this gap.

The platform helps newsrooms and media organizations combine journalistic excellence with influencer partnerships and modern storytelling techniques. Through strategic partnerships, video production training, and engagement workshops, Influencer Journalism empowers media organizations to reach today’s audiences on social platforms without compromising editorial standards.

In addition to partnership facilitation, the company provides short-form video consulting and training programs that help journalists adopt proven creator engagement practices. The approach treats creator partnerships as a strategic function — not a one-off campaign.

The American Press Institute has been running structured experiments across two cohorts of newsrooms, providing grants and hands-on support for creator collaborations.

A 2024 pilot through the Knight Election Hub supported six newsrooms experimenting with influencer partnerships around nonpartisan election coverage. In 2025, API expanded the program to 16 local and community news organizations, each receiving $3,000 grants to test creator collaborations that went beyond content marketing.

These weren’t transactional distribution deals but true collaborations built around listening, sharing control, and reaching audiences in ways newsrooms can’t do alone. The Houston Chronicle worked with food influencers to bring new energy to dining coverage. CivicLex in Kentucky tapped local creators to inspire small but meaningful acts of civic engagement, from litter cleanup to shadowing public officials.

Across both cohorts, API described its role as not just a funder but a guide and partner, helping newsrooms step outside their comfort zones and reflect on what real impact looks like.

Project C, led by Liz Kelly Nelson — who developed the concept during a 2024 Sulzberger Fellowship at Columbia — has built a Slack community of 60-plus 200-plus independent journalists who connect daily to support each other, share strategies, and collaborate.

The initiative also runs “Going Solo,” an accelerator co-created with Ryan Kellett, Blair Hickman, and Caitlin Dewey that provides practical training for journalists transitioning into the creator space.

The News Creators project from FT Strategies has proposed Information Credibility Guidelines for creators who feel a strong personal responsibility for accuracy but lack the formal frameworks of a traditional newsroom.

🛠️ The Build Opportunities

Opportunity 1: A creator-expert discovery platform purpose-built for newsrooms, not a recycled influencer-marketing tool. Think of it as a matchmaking engine that surfaces subject-matter creators (scientists, academics, policy experts, community leaders) by beat, geography, audience trust signals, and editorial alignment.

Current tools like CrowdTangle are gone, and nothing has adequately replaced them for this specific use case. A product that indexes expert creators across YouTube, Substack, LinkedIn, and podcasts — scored by domain credibility rather than follower count — would fill a painful gap.

Opportunity 2: Beyond discovery, there’s an opportunity to build partnership infrastructure: standardized contract templates for expert-newsroom collaborations, shared editorial guidelines that protect both brand safety and creator independence, and measurement dashboards that go beyond clicks to track trust indicators like audience retention, community sentiment, and subscriber conversion from creator-sourced traffic.

💬 Closing Provocation

“Publishers will finally learn the value of news creators” isn’t the real prediction for 2026. The real question is whether they’ll learn the value of the right creators — the ones who don’t look like journalists but hold more trust than most mastheads.

The newsroom that figures this out first won’t just grow its audience. It’ll deserve that audience.

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⚡️ tl;dr

• Newsrooms are rushing to partner with social media creators, but they’re picking the wrong ones. Instead of teaming up with “news influencers” who mostly offer opinion and commentary, they should be partnering with trusted subject-matter experts — scientists, doctors, professors, local community leaders — who already have the credibility that traditional media keeps losing.

• Public trust in news is at record lows, and these expert creators offer something personality-driven influencers can’t: authority rooted in real knowledge.

• A few organizations (like the American Press Institute and Influencer Journalism) are starting to figure this out, but most newsrooms are still stuck thinking a credible partner has to look and sound like a journalist.

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