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RSSLION Publishers helps strengthen the local news industry by helping local media companies build more sustainable businesses through sustainability audits, coaching, and other resources.
This week on the Small Press, Big Ideas podcast I was joined by LION Publishers Executive Director Chris Krewson to discuss the organization’s history, the work they’re doing, and where they’re headed.
Like most of the guests on this podcast, Chris’ roots in local journalism go back a long way. Chris worked at a variety of local news outlets near his home town of Philly including stints at The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Allentown Morning Call, and starting as the first editor for Billy Penn.
In 2019, the project Chris was working on ran out of funding right around the time that LION was looking for a new Executive Director, leading to the work that he’s doing now.
LION Publishers is a nonprofit founded in 2012 “by a group of digital news entrepreneurs who were among the first to be affected by the newspaper industry’s consolidation, closures, layoffs, and buyouts”. LION is an acronym for Local Independent Online News.
When I asked about the origins of the organization Chris told me the story of Michele McLellan. Michele is a journalist and consultant who in 2010 started Michele’s List, a database of local media sites that were beginning to pop up at the time.
Realizing that the phenomenon was gaining traction across a small but dedicated group of people, Michele went on to found Block by Block, a network of small entrepreneurial local news sites that met up for several annual conferences starting in 2010.
At a Block by Block Conference, The Patterson Foundation funded a one day workshop focused on sustainability and paired the publishers in attendance with coaches for a super camp to help them build stronger businesses. This was the real origin of LION Publishers, which started a year later to continue this work.
When Chris joined LION Publishers in 2019 he was the only full time employee, armed with a $1 million dollar grant from the Knight Foundation and a mission to support local media sites who had been struggling with the question of sustainability for a decade.
LION Publishers’ members run the gamut: some are largest publishers in their state, some are as small as a wife/ husband team, some cover only a segment of the economy, some just business news.
According to Chris, founders of these local news sites typically emerge from existing newsrooms and need to rapidly need to ground themselves in the skills of a business owner.
Things like strategy, budgeting, financial planning, etc. isn’t normally something the founders are experienced with, which is why LION is rapidly training journalists to become business people.
LION offers a free Entrepreneur Academy with a resource library and lessons on specific topics like financial management, legal issues, audience development, and many more. LION Publishers also has a list of similar organizations that local media entrepreneurs can join listed on their site.
But the biggest benefit to members that Chris talked with me about is LION’s sustainability audits. The audits offer “a comprehensive process for LION members to identify and respond constructively to roadblocks to sustainability within their organizations”.
The process consists of a questionnaire to determine the current state of an organization’s metrics, an interview with an expert analyst to dive deeper, and an audit report that provides strengths and recommendations to strengthen the organization’s sustainability.
LION is also looking to offer something similar to an audit to all members on demand. This would bring together the two most popular elements of the audits: qualitative data that the publisher reports and the coaching to help guide their business.
Under the new iteration, the audit will become a survey tool that gives back instantaneous feedback weighted by the existing 500 audits that LION has performed. Local media publishers would then be connected with LION Publishers vetted coaches and consultants that maty be applicable.
In addition to the existing audits, LION is also launching a new program that Chris spoke with me about a new program called Sustainability 360.
This initiative is “designed to make the independent news industry more accessible for LION members by connecting them with the most impactful support we can arrange and whatever resources we can find to help their businesses move toward sustainability”.
In addition to these programs, Chris and I also spoke about a range of other topics in the local media space such as newsletters, AI (of course), what winning models look like now and moving forward, and more.
One of the top takeaways from my conversation with Chris is his thoughts on successful local media companies’ characteristics now and moving forward, which I totally agree with.
Chris says that the attributes of the most sustainable organizations he sees are that they’re diversified in revenue and unafraid of experimentation and change. He hammered home this point, saying that local media publishers need to get used to change going forward and that he doesn’t believe that the future will look like the past.