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  "description": "Newsrooms like to spend their time on the journalistic process and assume that the value of their work will speak for itself. They need to start selling themselves.",
  "path": "/newsrooms-need-to-get-comfortable-expressing-their-business-value-and-raising-money-on-it/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-03T13:13:06.000Z",
  "site": "https://werd.io",
  "tags": [
    "Journalism Has the Receipts. It Won’t Use Them., by Yoni Greenbaum in Backstory & Strategy",
    "We know that news deserts cost communities at least $1.1B a year"
  ],
  "textContent": "Link: Journalism Has the Receipts. It Won’t Use Them., by Yoni Greenbaum in Backstory & Strategy\n\nArts organizations learned long ago to prove their economic value with hard numbers: attendance, tourism revenue, multiplier effects. News, as Yoni Greenbaum argues here, likes to cling to civic virtue and assume that the work should speak for itself.\n\n> “Journalism operated on a commercial advertising revenue model for over 150 years. Publishers sold readers to advertisers, while editors fretted about maintaining a church-and-state divide between the newsroom and business desk. Journalists saw themselves as watchdogs, not wealth generators. Pitching our value based on our own economic impact felt gauche, too close to an advertorial.”\n\nYoni points out that this is starting to change. We know that news deserts cost communities at least $1.1B a year, for example, because of a report by Rebuild Local News and the University of Illinois Chicago. But newsrooms themselves tend to shy away from reporting their own economic impact — even though they already have the tools to do so.\n\nIt’s not obvious to me that this accounting would work as an argument across the board for newsrooms, and particularly for those with a national focus. Does ProPublica (my employer until the end of the month) save anyone money? It certainly does prevent corruption, and there are instances with real dollar amounts attached to them: Intuit, for example, paid back $141 million to its customers over deceptive marketing. But I’m not sure that its impact can be quantified easily overall, despite the newsroom’s obvious public benefit. On the other hand, for _local_ newsrooms, this makes a lot of sense to me: at their best, they act as connective tissue for their communities. That $1.1B a year was _just_ increased interest costs from lenders who felt they could charge more to unmonitored governments.\n\nThey just need to get more comfortable at telling the economic side of their stories. And there’s a wider point here, which is that almost all nonprofit newsrooms need to be able to get more concrete and detailed about their business models. If you’re running an organization that wants to be sustainable, it’s not enough to care about the journalistic process, and your business accounting cannot be limited to activities like events and merchandise. You actually have to care about building a business holistically, and everything that entails.",
  "title": "Newsrooms need to get comfortable expressing their business value - and raising money on it.",
  "updatedAt": "2026-07-03T13:13:06.867Z"
}