The best conference of the year that you didn’t attend

The LION Sustainability Summit is coming back next year — the dates and place will be announced. Free advice: Set up a Google alert for the announcement and add the dates to your calendar.”

Tom Davidson, the Bellisario Professor of the Practice in Media Entrepreneurship at Penn State University

It’s conference season in public media. The Public Media Development and Marketing Conference (PMDMC) was held a few weeks ago. As I write this, folks are hopping on airplanes for the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA), and a few of those edgy digital folks are heading to the Online News Association (ONA).

I skipped all of them — mainly to ensure I could attend the best conference of the year — one almost nobody in public media attended.* That conference was LION Publishers annual Independent News Sustainability Summit.

These digital-first startups (both for-profit and nonprofit) have sprouted like spring wildflowers over the past decade. When LION formed in 2012, there were perhaps two dozen members. Today, there are 580, and the number is growing by 20% per year.

It’s easy to dismiss these organizations as inconsequentially small — or, worse, to view them as competitors for audience and donors. I think that’s a mistake. If anything, they’re trailblazers and potential partners using the public media model to better effect than most of us.

The conference was brimming with sessions and hallway discussions about the same challenges we face in public media:

• How do we grow our audiences?
• What forms and formats of information best serve our communities?

And, above all,

• How in the heck are we going to pay for all of this?

Unlike the fretful talk at public media conferences (especially at the bar), LION members are finding real solutions. The examples are too numerous to list, but here are some of my favorites:

• Cardinal News in southern and southwest Virginia. These are the poorest regions of that state — perennially underserved by shrinking legacy media. In less than five years, Cardinal has watered the news deserts, and local foundations approach them, checks in hand, to fund expansion into more communities.
• Spotlight Delaware, an 18-month-old site launched after years of methodical audience research, coalition building and fundraising. The prep work has helped it make an immediate, profound impact. Their pop-up newsrooms and community listening tours generate story ideas, demystify the news-reporting process and create relationships that lead to money.
• Sahan Journal, a niche site founded to serve the Somali and sub-Saharan diaspora in Minnesota. Their work has expanded to cover broader immigration and community issues. Founded by a former Minnesota Public Radio reporter, it's so focused on audience needs that its text-messaging service and TikTok presences are as robust as its website. And the community connections it forged draw support from foundations and advertisers alike.

Deep research into the success and travails of some of LION’s largest members shows that collectively, they've seen rapid growth and are “sustainable” by almost any definition. However, they’re also finding they don’t spend enough on marketing and audience research, are still figuring out how to engage their boards best, and need to get better at understanding their audiences using data. (Sound familiar?)

But the best may be LION’s Sustainability Awards, handed out at a raucous dinner on the conference’s first night. As the name implies, the awards don't celebrate storytelling (which has never been the fundamental problem in local news — we're pretty good at this journalism thing.) Instead, the awards focus on topics like operational resilience, innovative partnerships and collaborations and overall financial health.

Lest those topics seem staid or inappropriate, the awards get to the heart of the problems all local news organizations face. Or, as a 2023 award winner put it, “LION made me care about spreadsheets.” (Her actual words were hilariously more profane and spawned a t-shirt, but you get the gist.)

Those successes flow from a relentless focus on what their audiences need — informed by meeting those audiences where they are. They don’t cling to archaic notions that one particular distribution path or a certain time-honored content model is The Only Way.

Contrast that with many public broadcasters, who think the only path forward is via the Holy Shrine of the Broadcast Tower even though the audience for those linear signals is in terminal decline. If your strategic plan uses phrases like “return to …” you’re doing it wrong. 1997 isn’t coming back.

It’s no wonder that members of LION and its peer organization, the Institute of Nonprofit News (INN) are attracting trucks full of cash from Press Forward and its local affiliates.

Those independent sites are building connections, telling stories and making impacts that foundations can’t ignore — while too many of us in public media are bringing forth pitches that earnestly talk about expanding our three-person news operations to five so we can marginally increase the number of traditional stories we offer over the air to the small audiences of essentially old, predominantly white and largely suburban listeners and viewers.

The LION Sustainability Summit is coming back next year — the dates and place will be announced. Free advice: Set up a Google alert for the announcement and add the dates to your calendar.

(*By the most generous standard, I counted a half-dozen people with public media ties, nearly all of us former senior leaders at stations. If you tighten the definition to “currently working at a public broadcaster,” you get … zero. There were literally more people than that from commercial broadcasting.)

Tom Davidson is the Bellisario Professor of the Practice in Media Entrepreneurship at Penn State University. He's been a journalist and product development executive at commercial and public media organizations. Comments? Send them to tgd@tgdavidson.com.