As I reflect on the year that was for El Tímpano, the civic media outlet I founded to serve the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrants, I couldn’t be prouder. In the past twelve months, our staff doubled from six to 12. Our newsroom grew from two to five. Our revenue increased from one million to nearly two. And none of it was a miracle. We’re not the lucky recipients of one huge investment. (But if you’re out there, hello!) Our success has been slow and steady—the result of several revenue streams, a growing list of supporters, and six years of work developing strategies in collaboration with the communities we cover and serve.
But my pride is tempered by fear for an industry that at times feels like it’s collapsing around us. 2023 was particularly brutal. Not only did digital darlings like Vice, Jezebel, and Buzzfeed News bite the dust. Nonprofit leaders like Texas Tribune, Futuro Media, and The City laid off staff or cut salaries, as did public media powerhouses including LAist, Capital Public Radio, and WNYC.
More unsettling for me are the outlets whose end attracted little notice outside their own communities, where they left a gaping hole for audiences that have few other sources for trustworthy local news: La Estrella de Tucson, which said farewell to its readers in April; Al Día of Dallas, which ceased printing in August. And the dozens of publishers of community and ethnic media who told researchers earlier this year that, barring a miracle, they don’t see their own outlets surviving for five more years.
So yes, I’m proud of El Tímpano’s growth. But my god, I’m also relieved, concerned, and curious: What is it about our model that allowed us to defy the odds? How can we maintain this success next year, and the year after that? And for news outlets like ours that focus on serving marginalized communities, what lessons might be found in our success that can help others sustain their vital work? These are questions I am exploring this year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford.
The wealth bias of news revenue models
If I could point to one lesson from our journey to sustainability—and it has been a long and arduous journey indeed—it’s that we found our solution by looking outside of traditional revenue models and funding sources for local news. That’s because business models for local news, I learned, simply don’t work for outlets serving low-income communities.
When I started El Tímpano in 2017, the field of nonprofit news, it seemed, had collectively determined that reader revenue was the key to sustainability. There were playbooks, fellowships, grants, trainings, and entire organizations devoted to growing revenue through building an engaged audience and asking for their financial support. The strategy offers a pathway for outlets to develop financial sustainability while holding themselves accountable to their audience. What went unsaid, however, was the underlying assumption that the audience has money to give, and the resulting incentive to grow and prioritize audiences that do.
El Tímpano was designed with and for communities that have few options for local news, and little individual wealth to support it. Our extremely engaged audience is made up of day laborers, house cleaners, caretakers, and fast food workers. In the costliest region of the country, our subscribers find themselves at the bottom end of the Bay Area’s gaping inequality. Among the most common questions they send to us are, “where can I get help to pay my rent?” or “I’m out of work, can you help me find a job?”
Resources on reader revenue, events, and sponsorships have been designed by and for news outlets serving very different audiences than ours. I’ve reviewed nonprofit outlets’ sponsorship pages that boast of the median income, education levels, and other metrics connoting the “influential” status of their audiences. El Tímpano’s subscribers fall on the opposite end of every spectrum.
In seeking sustainability for our work, I was finding that the very thing that motivated me to found El Tímpano—to fill gaps in news serving marginalized communities—was our main weakness.
How, I asked myself four years ago, is an outlet serving a low-income audience expected to survive?
It turns out, we aren’t, and for that reason, we’re rarely given the chance.
That’s what I learned trying to seek funding in our early years. “It’s really interesting,” I was told by more than one funder who expressed their admiration for our innovative model of creating journalism with and for Latino immigrants. “But we don’t see how it’s sustainable.” Or “scalable,” or “profitable”.
Sustainability has become a core focus for many journalism funders, who want to see that a news outlet will not rely on philanthropy for the long term. But in a context in which the one common denominator of sustainable digital news outlets is that they serve affluent audiences, this metric becomes a bias in favor of news that serves the well-to-do, and in the end a self-fulfilling prophecy: There are few models of sustainable outlets that serve low-income audiences, so funders don’t take a chance investing in such outlets. (One could argue that addressing this market gap is in fact the point of philanthropy, but this is not a common stance in the journalism funding space.)
A Civic Partnerships Model: Leveraging our strength
The key to El Tímpano’s revenue growth emerged once we stopped trying to fit into traditional revenue models or seek funding from traditional journalism funders. Instead, we leaned into what made El Tímpano unique: our success in genuinely reaching, informing, and engaging communities that other institutions struggle to reach. That is how our Civic Partnerships strategy came about.
This strategy earns revenue from government agencies and nonprofit service providers who value El Tímpano’s trusted relationship with thousands of “hard-to-reach” community members. Among our services, we provide sponsored messaging, surveys, Mam Mayan-language videos, and outreach consultation for organizations and agencies with information or resources that are relevant to our audience and in the public interest. Revenue ranges from six-figure grants from entities like the Alameda County Public Health Department that support timely and verified public health messaging to a $500 sponsored message about free tax prep services or a city agency’s town hall on economic development. The strategy both boosts our revenue and aligns with our mission of connecting community members to relevant resources, vital information, and opportunities to have their voices heard. And yes, we build in safeguards to ensure that paid partners don’t influence our editorial independence.
Revenue from Civic Partnerships allowed us to hire our second employee in 2022. Since then, it has generated $600,000. We have money in the bank and plans for sustainable growth. As we invested this revenue in expanding the reach and impact of our service journalism, we found funders aligned with our mission, such as foundations focused on health equity or civic engagement. Today Civic Partnerships is one of El Tímpano’s fastest-growing revenue streams, though to be clear, it is one of several—including foundations and individual donors—that together provide resilience against economic fluctuations beyond our control.
El Tímpano’s laser focus on equity in news, and on reaching and engaging with low-income immigrants is no longer a barrier, but now part of the solution for our long-term sustainability and growth.
In search of equitable revenue models
While I share this journey in the hopes that it may be helpful for other news outlets, I certainly don’t consider our search for sustainability complete, nor do I think El Tímpano’s Civic Partnerships strategy will work for all news outlets that serve marginalized communities. But that, in fact, is another of the lessons I learned: There is no one model of sustainability for news outlets.
If we want a thriving news ecosystem that supports a vibrant and equitable democracy, it will take not only diverse models of journalism, but diverse models of revenue, and it takes time to figure those out. Were it not for a small handful of funders who took a risk on El Tímpano in 2020, we would not have had the runway to develop the revenue strategies that have allowed us to sustain our work and grow.
As a 2024 JSK Journalism Fellow, I’m spending this year at Stanford exploring what other ways news outlets serving marginalized communities can leverage their strengths to expand their revenue. If news outlets of yesterday sustained their journalism by being in the business of advertising, might news outlets of tomorrow be in the business of community engagement, research, education, or public opinion polling? I plan to meet with individuals and organizations that might be interested in partnering with an outlet like El Tímpano as well as with publications that have developed outside-the-box programs and revenue streams that align with their own unique mission, strategy, and audience. While El Tímpano identified one path forward to sustain our model of civic media, I know there are many more out there if we only look, and take risks to explore the possibilities.
