As we look to 2025, local journalism is at another inflection point, with fresh political, financial, and technological challenges looming.

Press freedom is under assault. Audience attention is fragmenting. Trust in the media continues to erode. And the emergence of AI looms as a threat to even the most capable and forward looking organizations.

Yet there is also reason for optimism. The net number of new digital startups in the US is up, according to data gathered by Medill’s State of Local News Project. Philanthropic contributions are on the rise. Many existing digital news publications are seeing year-over-year gains in revenue. And small organizations are banding together to strengthen their operations.

All of this informs how we think about the role that Newspack plays in the journalism ecosystem: How we evolve to meet the challenges ahead. And how we leverage the remarkable community that has grown around Newspack. 

Five years after launching our first sites, we’ve become a preferred platform for an emerging class of independent publishers who are driving the future of news. By the end of this month, we’ll have close to 300 sites on Newspack delivering 100 million pageviews a month. 

We have grown well beyond our origins as a simple, cost-effective CMS, providing both the tools and the industry expertise to drive audience and revenue growth.

But we can’t stop there. Our ambition is to provide the common services all news organizations need to function. And at the same time provide an environment where innovation can thrive. 

In 2024 we marked several key foundational steps toward that goal:

• We took in nearly $1.5m in grant support, courtesy of the Knight and Lenfest foundations, allowing us to hold prices flat for another year.
• We successfully launched the Revenue Development Program, moving dozens of participants through strategic growth sprints that have already added more than $500,000 in revenue for participating publishers in half a year.
• We launched the Newspack Data Dashboard, which gives publishers easy access to key metrics and allows them to benchmark their performance against their peers.
• We migrated a growing number of customers to our Audience Management System (formerly RAS), which provides segmentation, targeting, messaging, donor management, membership and subscription tools. 
• On the back end, we made continued improvements in our federated site solution and the overall reliability of our systems, which contributed to our getting through election night without a single technical issue.
• We made steady improvements in our support processes and technology so that we can respond quickly and efficiently to the thousands of help channel requests that we receive every year.
• And we launched a small advisory board, composed of publishers who have real product/dev capacity, to advise us on the future direction of the platform.

As Newspack has matured, we’ve begun to attract larger publishers who in the past relied on proprietary or custom-built platforms. They include a well-established print publisher with nine different local titles and a digital pure-play that has been at the forefront of the industry. (Formal announcements to come later this month).

Their arrival is a vote of confidence in the entire community. They came to Newspack understanding that we’re not a custom development house. But they bring insight and ambition that will inform our future development roadmap and allow us to extend those features to everyone.

They also have hopes of using their own resources to develop capabilities that can benefit others – in effect creating the beginning of an open-source flywheel that allows the community to draw directly on the efforts and insights of other digital publishers.

We expect to hire additional engineers and support staff and bring on several contractors in 2025 as we continue to optimize the core platform and position ourselves to embrace new innovations.

As part of that, we’ve engaged a colleague who works for the open-source side of WordPress, to help craft a series of developer guidelines that will clear the way for such efforts. And Scott Klein, who was an entrepreneur-in-residence with Newspack while spearheading the Knight Election Hub, will move into a role as a customer advocate. He’ll work with our Support and Product teams to ensure that we stay current with your needs.

We’re shortening our development release cycles to get new features into your hands more quickly. 

And we’re in discussion with several publishers about how we might help them scale projects that they hope to get funded through Press Forward’s latest call for infrastructure proposals – and thus create a pathway for those innovations to quickly reach a wide audience.

As someone who has devoted his career to transforming the practice of journalism, it is an inspiration to work alongside you as you seek new ways to serve the information needs of your communities and meet the challenges of our profession.

As always, we’re grateful for your continued support of Newspack and welcome your regular feedback as we look ahead to 2025. 

Happy New Year all,

Kinsey