Case Study

How funders can track metrics that matter for newsrooms

May 19, 2026

LION Publishers found that newsrooms with dedicated revenue staff had higher median revenues

This post is part of “Building a Thriving News Ecosystem,” a series from Knight Communities Network, a Lenfest Institute community of practice for local funders creating thriving news ecosystems.

Most traditional metrics for local newsrooms were based on popularity, reach, and followers: newspaper circulation, online pageviews, TV ratings, newsletter subscribers. But raw numbers are not as important in an age of reduced advertising, reader revenue, and mission-driven newsrooms. Instead, more newsrooms, led by nonprofit outlets, are measuring impact metrics: reporting that led to a new law, a different public sentiment, or more people taking action.

Media funders have long looked for clear, comparable ways to measure newsroom success, but finding a consistent benchmark can be complicated. Depending on the newsroom’s mission, metrics will vary, as each newsroom might have a different way of defining impact in its community. Some might want more civic education, while others could desire community engagement in person and online.

The tension for funders is how to balance the desire for standardized, scalable data with the reality that meaningful impact in local news is often highly contextual — and best judged by the people closest to it. Angilee Shah, CEO and editor-in-chief at Charlottesville Tomorrow, argues that metrics are most helpful if they are rooted in a newsroom’s mission and defined by the communities it serves, not imposed from the outside. Her publication has created its own impact tracker, which staff use.

Charlottesville Tomorrow created its own impact tracker dashboard and is seeking funding to develop it further to share with the field.

“We are scoring qualitative impact on a scale from, ‘I did something differently,’ ‘I took an action,’ ‘I took a big action,’ to ‘systems change,’” she said. “Did people take what we produce and have a conversation they wouldn’t have otherwise had, or come to a decision with their neighbors they might not have without shared information? Is our work helping strengthen the communities we serve? That’s what we’re tracking.”

For funders who are considering what metrics to track for newsrooms, it’s important to keep these broad categories in mind:

Growth metrics gauge how a newsroom is reaching more people. Examples include page views, unique visitors, newsletter subscribers, and followers.
Impact metrics track how a newsroom’s work is affecting a community. Examples include changing sentiment, audience actions, and eventually systems change.
Sustainability metrics show whether a newsroom has more financial staying power. Examples include revenue diversity, growing staff, and financial planning.

Understanding the somewhat complex playing field helps when it comes to tracking metrics that matter. Here are some important best practices and tips for funders wanting to track newsroom metrics, based on interviews with people who have been tracking them for years.

1. Work collaboratively with the communities newsrooms serve to identify key metrics.

For mission-driven newsrooms, there is a throughline from community needs to newsroom mission to tracking metrics that show impact. Funders should reward newsrooms that can make the connection from their work to what issues matter most to the communities they serve. Shah notes that there are plenty of data-tracking tools, but figuring out an organizational mission and tracking change in communities is more complicated.

“We can show you the technical part [of tracking metrics] in a 25-minute webinar,” she said. “But it might take you three years to have community governance that gives you a mission that allows you to understand what the metrics should be.”

And it’s that community governance that should be prioritized — not just how the metrics are tracked, but who is deciding what matters.

A sample dashboard from Impact Architects’ freely available IA Impact Tracker

Lindsay Green-Barber, founder and principal of Impact Architects, has been developing an impact tracker for years, first at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and later at her own firm. The tracker is freely available to newsrooms, and Impact Architects now runs a Blueprints program to give newsrooms the tools, frameworks, and guidance they need to implement an impact-tracking regimen. She says that funders should take their cues from newsrooms who have done the work.

“Impact metrics should be developed specifically for the purposes of what your journalism is trying to achieve,” Green-Barber said. “Many news organizations are recognizing that if they can go into those conversations with funders, saying ‘here’s how we think about it; here’s what you can expect to see from us,’ that funders often say, ‘great, that’s what we can put as your deliverables.’”

2. Impact tracking needs to be part of the newsroom workflow.

After a newsroom has decided on what to track, and knows how to track it with the right tools, another difficulty is making tracking an integral part of the workflow. Busy editors and reporters might consider it an “extra step” that can be overlooked or forgotten. Green-Barber notes that tracking impact needs to be a mission-critical part of the organization.

Without having a consistent workflow, impact measurement can end up diffused among many people in a newsroom. Rosemary D’Amour, senior manager of media impact strategy & engagement at Impact Architects, said that centralizing the impact information is vital to keeping it accessible and up-to-date.

“Impact lives in very disparate places and might live specifically on someone’s desktop — they might have a folder with email replies that they’ve gotten to a story but that doesn’t necessarily reach the rest of the newsroom,” she said. “So creating opportunities to share that information, centralize that information, and make sense of all of it in one place is key.”

Audacity Media Lab, an RJI fellowship project from Nicole Lewis of ProPublica and Lam Thuy Vo of Documented, aims to give journalists a framework for doing their reporting projects with impact in mind. The Lab offers free worksheets for editors and reporters so they can create impact questions at the start of a project; build actionable reporting projects such as explainers, guides, and resources; and consider the best ways to track impact after publishing.

An example of the Logic Model filled in from the editor worksheet at Audacity Media Lab

“If you can talk about your work in more concrete terms — ‘I reached this many people, I made this tool that this many people used, this many people told me how it impacted them’ — then you can tell a better story to donors, one that’s more than just pageviews or impressions,” Lewis said.

3. Leading indicators play a big role in metrics and impact over time.

When LION Publishers looks at the hundreds of sustainability audits they have run with newsrooms, they start to see patterns in the leading indicators of sustainability. That’s important because metrics can take time, sometimes years, to become meaningful for small or startup newsrooms. Andrew Rockway, associate director of data and evaluation at LION, says that funders should not expect big outcomes from small newsrooms, but instead look at leading indicators such as:

Did the newsroom create and use a budget?
Are they setting revenue goals?
Do they have a business plan?
Are they implementing audience tracking systems?

“If at the start they didn’t have a budget and by the end they do — and they’re using it for decision-making — that’s an early indicator they’re building toward sustainability,” Rockway said. “It’s about seeing progress on those process indicators over time.” He believes that newsrooms who make investments in infrastructure such as revenue staff and financial reporting tend to become sustainable in the long run.

Bloom Labs can create heat maps to show coverage areas for news outlets

Stephen Jefferson runs Bloom Labs, which works with publishers to geotag stories by streets and neighborhoods to see where they might have coverage gaps (see the heat map above). These metrics can be leading indicators for behavioral and coverage patterns, showing which parts of the community are being missed and how that changes over time.

Like Rockway, Jefferson believes that single data snapshots are misleading and that more meaningful evaluation comes from trends over time and narrative change (filling coverage gaps, increasing engagement in target areas). Visual tools such as maps are especially powerful because they make impact clear, especially for funders.

“A snapshot is helpful, but it doesn’t really tell the narrative of the news cycle or ecosystem,” he said. “You have to look at patterns over time — what’s changing, what’s improving, what’s fluctuating — to understand the real impact.”

Last summer, Bloom Labs published a three-year research study in collaboration with newsrooms that defined a new framework for measuring “geographic consistency” (i.e., how local coverage fluctuates across places over time). Bloom Labs is now actively working with newsrooms to integrate the metric, helping them understand the consistency of their geographic representation.

4. Smaller newsrooms have different ways of measuring impact.

Unlike larger newsrooms, the smaller ones — especially startups — will take a long time to start showing growth and impact. Tiny News Collective, which supports news startups around the country, created a “Tiny Vitals” program to help these smaller newsrooms figure out the best way to track metrics that matter. (You can read more about their program here and here.)

Sample dashboard from Tiny Vitals

So far, the program has had these key takeaways:

TNC reframes metrics as being a set of “vitals” split between internal (revenue, supporters, audience size) and external (community change, real-world outcomes).
It created a central dashboard in partnership with DataSketch (see sample above) that focuses on “north star” metrics integrating web, newsletter, revenue, and impact data.
Metrics only matter if publishers build data literacy, context and consistent habits.

One example TNC cites as tracking qualitative impact is from the Mat-Su Sentinel in Alaska, with a reader telling the newsroom that they had “given up reading the news before finding the Sentinel.” It’s just one anecdote, but it becomes trackable impact data when combined with other signals such as audience growth and support. Plus, TNC believes it’s important to treat growth and impact metrics differently.

“Scaling your reach in a community and creating material change in it are not the same thing,” wrote Madison Karas, contract product manager and project manager for R&D at Tiny News. “These metrics are complements, not substitutes; in other words, they can be used well together but not in place of one another. Think of it this way: the journalism industry has been treating growth and impact like margarine and butter, but they are more like peanut butter and jelly.”

Final takeaways & next steps

Combine the best metrics that closely align with mission and audience. Start with finding the newsroom’s mission and purpose, and understanding how the newsroom is governed. Then ask the newsroom which metrics fit their mission the best. That means going beyond growth metrics in Google Analytics and looking at events, revenues, staff, impact and more. “Newsrooms are not satisfied with one way of measuring impact; they’re getting more contextual, more localized,” said Bloom Labs’ Jefferson. “Purpose is guiding all of those decisions, and that’s exciting to see.”

Try to work with the metrics that newsrooms have already identified. Funders should be aware of what metrics newsrooms already track, and try not to dictate more complex metrics that would require education and investment, sometimes distracting them from their mission. “Try to be aware of what newsrooms already have access to versus what’s going to require a lot of new effort for them to gather,” said D’Amour of Impact Architects. “It can be really helpful to make this something that’s not burdensome to grantees.”

Keep impact-tracking tools simple and easy for newsroom staff to use. Because tracking impact is a team sport, newsrooms should design systems that everyone can use easily. Lightweight tools include audience surveys, intake forms and simple spreadsheets to track impact. “The [Audacity Media Lab] tool is there to give you this sort of scaffolding that you’re going to layer and build on top of,” Lewis said. “You need to listen to your audience, collect feedback, and then define what types of impact matter for your reporting.”

Temper expectations depending on the growth stage of the newsroom. Metrics aren’t one-size-fits-all as many local newsrooms range from startup to small to medium and beyond. Quantitative measurements are important but will vary widely depending on the newsroom’s maturity and mission. Qualitative indicators are important, especially for earlier-stage and small market newsrooms. “We tend to think about peer benchmarking for some of the other quantitative metrics like cash on hand, gross revenue, and full-time employees,” LION’s Rockway said. “More developed, more sustainable organizations will have larger metrics in those indicators on average, while less developed organizations, correspondingly less.”