Local Independent Online News Publishers Inc

Membership Services & LION Awards: The operations of having a membership, including processing applications/renewals, securing member benefits (e.g. discounts), organizing the national Independent News Sustainability Summit (INSS), and running our Community Ambassadors program. We clarified our membership criteria and accepted 103 new members. 29% of our memberships leadership identifies as BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+. We sold out the 500-person INSS event and supported nearly 100 attendees with a $600 travel stipend. We recognized 40 finalists of at Sustainability Awards ceremony and awarded nearly $60K in cash prizes to the 21 winners; all finalists received valuable feedback from judges. INSS hosted seven affinity groups and ten table talks, all led by LION members. 100 members participated in peer learning groups led by six Community Ambassadors. Our News Entrepreneur Community Slack group grew to nearly 1K total contributors.

Membership Education: We provided supplementary coaching hours to members who had gone through a Sustainability Audit, with 93% reporting that the sessions were valuable. We launched the Expert Network, a new product that allows all members to book discounted coaching and consulting hours on an as-needed basis. We launched our Sustainability 360 pilot program with six participants. This program is dedicated to helping 100 LION members reach the Growing stage of our independent news maturity model within the next five years, a significant cornerstone of our strategic plan.

Data & Evaluation:Armed with our definition of sustainability and newly minted maturity model, we published six data insights in 2024 based on information from our membership and Sustainability Audit program. We also partnered with Impact Architects to analyze all the data collected through the Sustainability Audit program from 2022 to 2024. More in-depth insights, including benchmarks by maturity stage and areas of catalytic intervention, will follow in 2025. We continued to support Project Oasis, a public database that tracks every known local, independent news publication in the U.S. and Canada. As of December 2024, approximately 1,600 publications are represented in this database.