State of the Hub 2025: Navigating Change and Building the Future of Journalism

Every year, the News Revenue Hub digs into key data to uncover trends and share insights during the State of the Hub address. Missed this year’s presentation on February 13? No worries — we’ve captured the main takeaways below. It’s a long read, but packed with invaluable insights.

2024 Hub Highlights

It was a standout year for the Hub. Some key milestones include:

• Hub newsrooms and member organizations raised $29 million in 2024, bringing the total since 2016 to $129 million.
• We fully launched the RevEngine contribution management system, offering a new free tier and a redesigned contributor portal for easier payment management.
• We’re furthering our work in the public media space. A Knight-funded partnership with Greater Public is helping five public media stations grow their digital audience and membership programs.
• We secured discounts for our clients on Subtext and GlueLetter, with more on the way.
• The Hub community is growing and diversifying, with 39 local, 25 regional, 23 national/international outlets, and six journalism support organizations — plus over 600 RevEngine users.
• We improved our proprietary Hub KPI reports, no more waiting for them to be delivered each month, our signature industry benchmarks now available on-demand!
• We expanded tech integrations, connecting Salesforce with WooCommerce and are building a RevEngine-ActiveCampaign integration.
• We’ve made Slack improvements, including launching new private spaces based on career focus for more peer-to-peer connection and learnings.
• We’re strengthening collaboration with journalism support peers like Greater Public, INN, AJP, Newspack, API and the Video Consortium to identify gaps and foster partnerships.

State of the Sector

It’s important to step back and assess the industry. In 2024, we saw the rise of:

• News influencers: One in five Americans regularly gets news from social media influencers, 77% of whom have no affiliation with news organizations (Pew Research).
• Social video platforms: Audiences continue shifting to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram for news (Reuters Institute).
• Misinformation: 72% of Americans express concern about fake news, especially around politics, economics, and climate change (Reuters Institute).
• News fatigue: 43% of Americans now say they avoid the news altogether (Reuters Institute).

Although challenges abound, we know that disruption creates opportunities. This is the time to rise above the panic and be strategic.

The Two-Pronged Strategy

In 2024, Hub newsrooms as a group experienced a -9% decline in website users year over year but newsrooms on average saw a +6% revenue increase, signaling strong engagement from loyal supporters. However, relying on more money from fewer people isn’t sustainable.

In 2025, we recommend a dual strategy:

• Invest in new audiences
• Encourage loyal supporters to keep investing in you.

This concurrent audience and revenue development strategy is challenging for many organizations. Which is why we’re launching Civic Studio, a centralized multimedia production and training hub to help our clients reach and monetize new audiences. 

Civic Studio will focus on:

• Talent exchange and training: Newsrooms and independent creators can collaborate and learn from each other.
• Centralized production services: Support with editing, infographics, and multimedia content creation.
• Partnership facilitation: We’ll connect newsrooms to collaborate on projects like podcasts, YouTube series, and mini-docs to expand reach and revenue opportunities.

We’re securing funding for a pilot launch later this year. Interested in building your platform strategy? Reach out to join the waiting list.

Hub Newsroom Audience Insights

Before diving into metrics, it’s important to recognize that audience data only tells part of the story. In 2024, Hub survey data showed that audiences remain disproportionately white, over 55, and affluent. We must do better at reaching more diverse audiences.

With that in mind, here are key traffic metrics:

• Site users (via Google Analytics) across the Hub network declined by 9% year over year, with a median decline of -1.7% per newsroom. Traffic has been declining since pandemic highs, and the 2024 election didn’t produce the expected readership bump, signaling growing news avoidance.
• We broke this down by cohort:
  • Local newsrooms saw flat year-over-year traffic, which suggests stability and a positive signal that people still value local news.
  • State and regional newsrooms experienced a slight median traffic increase, likely driven by the election.
  • National newsrooms saw a median decline in traffic.
• And age:
  • Startups in the Hub network were relatively stable in traffic over the year.
  • While older newsrooms (especially 16+ years) experienced the most traffic fluctuations.

Given all the factors impacting traffic, it’s more important than ever to make it easy for audiences to engage with your work and your organization. People are engaging with news today more like balls in a pinball machine than a traditional funnel— coming from all directions and engaging unpredictably. In 2025, a one-size-fits-all audience development strategy won’t work. Embrace the chaos, and meet audiences wherever they are.

Google search remains the top traffic driver for most newsrooms, followed by direct traffic (untraceable sources like links in emails or text messages). 

A significant development in 2024 was Google’s AI Overviews feature, which summarizes multiple sources in search results. While there has been skepticism about accuracy, the big concern is fewer link opportunities in search results.

So far, Hub newsrooms haven’t seen a significant decline in search traffic, and some are even seeing growth. Google appears to be limiting AI Overviews on “news queries,” focusing more on lifestyle and entertainment searches. Still, we will continue to monitor this closely, as platform changes can happen with little warning.

Rethinking Audience Development

With traffic declines and audiences scattered across numerous platforms, it’s critical to develop thoughtful strategies for different online spaces. Here are a few suggestions:

• Review referral data from 2023 and 2024. Wherever you see growth or stability, invest more time. Platforms with less engagement can shift to automated posting to save resources. 
• The Marshall Project invested in Reddit by hosting AMAs, which boosted traffic and built trust. 
• LAist demonstrated audience engagement by highlighting stories sourced directly from readers’ questions, creating a meaningful feedback loop. 
• The Salt Lake Tribune had a TikTok win by resurfacing archived content, attracting 3 million views to a historic story.
• Think of articles as new homepages. Since many users land on articles directly, make it easy for them to subscribe, donate, or explore more. Consider each article’s potential to drive deeper relationships. 
• Continue to invest in newsletters— a top driver of loyalty and revenue. Newsrooms saw list growth of 14% in 2024, with 8.5% more total subscribers and a median engagement rate of 66%. Promotions via website CTAs, events, and partnerships remain effective. 
• Rewire News Group launched The Uplift to offer solutions-focused content, a direct response to audience feedback, which quickly became a high-performing product. 
• Coda Story’s Oligarchy newsletter saw a surge in signups thanks to timely Instagram promotions and news cycle alignment.
• Experiment. Tools like Nota and Glueletter can save time on content creation and audience retention tasks. Glueletter, for example, helped Hub orgs test email prompts for “cart abandoners,” an e-commerce-inspired strategy with promising results.

Revenue Highlights 

While audience growth is crucial, increasing year-over-year revenue is just as important. 

• Average household total giving—the annual average amount each household contributes to an org—rose by $14 in 2024, underscoring the importance of growing revenue from your most engaged supporters.
  • This growth can come from strategies like encouraging current supporters to give again during matching campaigns or converting one-time donors to monthly. For Hub-administered Salesforce accounts, the report ‘Average Household Total Gifts Last 365’ helps track this KPI. Many organizations saw revenue grow despite flat or shrinking supporter bases by focusing on this metric.
• Recurring giving remained steady at an average of $12/month, while retention rates and the share of recurring contributors increased year-over-year. These improvements reflect strategic stewardship, the use of scalable technology, and consistent, thoughtful asks.
• Experimental fundraising tactics paid off. The Texas Tribune tested moving graphics to boost engagement, and The Forward, inspired by our work with The Guardian, added an “end epic” ask at the bottom of articles. Both of these data-driven wins highlight the value of ongoing experimentation.
• There’s significant potential in mid-level contributors giving $1,000-$10,000. We’ve already helped many Hub organizations with wealth screening through Salesforce, and later this year, we’ll pilot automated moves management to enhance major donor strategies.

Looking Ahead

Our 2025 priorities focus on diversifying your audiences and revenue streams:

• News Revenue Ad Network: In 2024, we piloted a full-scale ads & sponsorships revenue system, and expanded ad operations support with Google Ad Manager. Consulting services — which includes lead generation, Salesforce management, and a branded content studio — formally launch this summer, but Hub newsrooms can start leveraging the network now. Sign up to join the News Revenue Ad Network to be included in national sales presentation and high-value, low-lift programmatic. 
• AI Lab: Through a partnership with the American Journalism Project, we recently launched a lab where we’ll experiment with Hub newsrooms to leverage AI to find efficiencies in time-consuming tasks like data analysis. The cohort is kicking off now, and we will provide regular updates throughout the year, in addition to scaling our learning in real-time to other Hub newsrooms. 
• Expanded Insights Survey: The Hub’s proprietary survey can now be distributed both to existing audiences and new target audiences to help you better understand the needs of the people you want to serve, compared to those you are already reaching. We’ll advise on how to distribute a wider net of insights and, as always, help organizations analyze the results. 
  • One adopter and collaborator of this process is Nashville Banner, who we’re working with to develop zip code strategies based on survey data, Census data, voter turnout data, and more. 
• Media Landscape Analyses: We’re proud to be growing the research arm of the Hub, specifically producing more media landscape analyses to inform strategic investments in both start-ups and existing newsrooms. Our landscape studies are structured as a community information needs gap analysis that shows what people want from local news in comparison to what’s being offered in their region. As a result of this work, we’ve seen new newsrooms launched in Fort Worth, Amarillo, and New York City. And now, thanks to a growing number of Press Forward chapters, we’re seeing these studies inspire strategic investments across entire ecosystems of newsrooms.
• SMS Cohort: In 2024, we launched an SMS cohort to build stronger distribution channels. The cohort examined whether SMS could better connect trial participants with underserved communities — especially those disengaged from traditional news sources or living in rural areas with limited broadband access. The cohort shared election resources and breaking news updates to readers via SMS — in some cases, seeing open rates soar beyond industry averages — or used SMS to engage in two-way conversations with audience members. We’ll be publishing a case study soon sharing more of what we learned.

We hope you found some inspiration and are ready to set and surpass ambitious goals this year. Our challenges are big, but the opportunities are bigger.If you’d like to be sent a recording of the State of the Hub presentation or to learn more about any of the initiatives in this post, please email [email protected].