Nonprofit news sites are built to generate impact — but these are also generating audiences

Last week, we published the first of our new monthly rankings: the top 25 local U.S. newspapers on the web, based on their traffic. (All hail the conquering Advance Local!) Today, it’s time for the second: the top 25 nonprofit news sites in the United States.

Nonprofit news sites have an interesting relationship with web traffic. Many of them were founded specifically to do the sorts of journalism that aren’t likely to trigger Chartbeat spike alerts: investigations, policy deep-dives, niche topics, or coverage of overlooked and disadvantaged communities. Most nonprofit outlets don’t run advertising, which means they lack the primary incentive commercial news sites have to chase traffic. You’re unlikely to find ProPublica thirstily copying the latest TikTok dance craze; that’s not what they do. And many sites freely give their articles to other outlets for republishing — something that complicates even the most basic measures of “reach.”

That said…it’s good to have an audience, and hard to have much impact without one. Nonprofits shouldn’t be judged by the standards of commercial media when it comes to web traffic, but it’s still an informative window into how a lot of high-quality journalism is reaching (or not reaching) the general population. The 25 outlets we list below have each figured out their own strategies on how to do that.

Our list includes national nonprofits like The Intercept and Mother Jones, statewide outlets like The Texas Tribune and Bridge Michigan, and local news sites like The Baltimore Banner and Block Club Chicago. (Not to mention the Salt Lake Tribune, the nation’s first print newspaper to convert to nonprofit status.)

While there are outlets on this list I expect to see here every month, the numbers can vary wildly depending on the vagaries of the news cycle. (Fun fact: In May’s data, the No. 3 slot was held by the National Catholic Reporter, riding the traffic tsunami brought by the conclave that produced Pope Leo XIV. “We always get a bump when we’re covering elections,” quipped CalMatters CEO Neil Chase, “and I guess they do too.”)

For those who care, I have lots of boring details about how this list gets pulled together, but I’ll save that for the end. (Jump ahead if the spirit moves you.) Here’s the chart; keep scrolling past the end for insights into the audience work of three outlets that made the list.

No. 1: The Conversation

Let’s start at the top. It could be argued that The Conversation’s inclusion here is a bit unfair. Its U.S. site is only one of 12 different editions based in countries and regions around the world: The Conversation Australia, The Conversation France, The Conversation Indonesia, and so on. All of those sites publish at theconversation.com and thus get lumped together for traffic purposes.

Still, even if we were to magically include only the U.S. site’s traffic, it’d still be at or near the top of this list — just not 12.9 million views ahead of its nearest competitor. (Also of note: Similarweb’s data doesn’t account for the site’s stories that get republished in other outlets. Those account for more than half of all total Conversation views.)

Beth Daley, the site’s executive editor and general manager, told me the top story of June was this piece looking back at Israel’s 1981 bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor — published just after the United States’ similar strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. “It was a classic example of what we do well: bringing historical context to a major news event,” Daley said. Both that story and the site’s No. 2 performer both benefited from the Google Discover spotlight.

Daley said the site’s overall traffic has trended a bit down this year compared to 2024, something she attributed to a mix of news avoidance and changes in how people are using Google in the ChatGPT age. She sees the same pattern in data from the news sites that republish The Conversation’s stories. Their counterstrategy is to “meet audiences where they are at” on social platforms and elsewhere. Two weeks ago, it launched a Substack newsletter called The Afternoon Story. The pitch: “One great story a day from a nonprofit organization that features experts sharing their knowledge and research. It’s like having a smart friend you trust explain and analyze the news.” And alongside the usual social channels, The Conversation recently started posting on Flip, a shopping-centric social video platform.

No. 20: LA Public Press

Check out that second-to-last number in the chart for LA Public Press: ▲ 291. That means the site moved from No. 311 to No. 20 in a month’s time.

There’s no doubt what caused the traffic spike. In June, Los Angeles became the center of the debate over ICE raids and Donald Trump’s deportation policies. Protests began on June 6; soon after, Trump sent 700 Marines and thousands of National Guard troops in a show of force. From then to the June 14 No Kings protests and beyond, all eyes were on L.A.

Matt Tinoco, founder and publisher of LA Public Press, told me June was his site’s busiest traffic month “by about a factor of 3.” Its reporters produced dozens of stories from the scene, and the pageviews followed, with many stories pulling in “mid-to-upper five figures.”

Most of the spike in web traffic came from the L.A. area — at least that’s what imperfect geoanalytic data has told them. But Tinoco also said the site benefited from prominent placements on several aggregator platforms like Apple News and NewsBreak. Biggest of all: Google Discover featuring this June 20 piece on community protests against ICE agents at the hotels where they stay.

Slowly at first, and then quickly, people started turning up. By early afternoon, hundreds of people were there. They were noisy, buoyed by the sounds of a band born out of a 1995 ICE raid, Los Jornaleros Del Norte, singing “chinga la migra,” to a familiar pop tune, “La Del Moño Colorado”…

People now frequently turn out in the evenings at hotels where ICE agents are believed to be staying, to bang on pots and pans and play sounds on bullhorns to prevent the agents from having a good night’s sleep. They also hope that the disruption will put pressure on hotel management to turn immigration officials away.

That Google Discover traffic “made me dedicate a Sunday morning to upgrading our cloud infrastructure with our web provider,” Tinoco said.

About 1 in 11 L.A. residents is undocumented, he said, and about 1 in 5 households include at least one undocumented person — so it’s not difficult to understand why deportation raids are of mass interest. “Although the times certainly are frightening, it is affirming to see that Angelenos are finding and sharing our journalism, and using what we report to guide their own conversations about our troubling collective circumstance,” he said.

No. 6: CalMatters

CalMatters benefits from being a statewide outlet in the nation’s biggest state, of course, but it also faces fiercer competition than most. CEO Neil Chase told me that while pageviews are nice, the site’s preferred metric is impact — even if that doesn’t fit in an Excel spreadsheet as well as web analytics. Impact is “not a quantifiable, chartable thing. It’s a collection of anecdotes we work very hard to record and track: Every time we hear about one of our stories making a difference, large or small. That’s why people fund us, so that’s what we track and report.”

Earlier this month, CalMatters celebrated its 10th birthday with, you guessed it, a lengthy list of ways it has fueled change in the state.

Like The Conversation and LA Public Press — and plenty of other nonprofit outlets — off-site distribution platforms are critical to CalMatters’ reach. Chase said its stories had more pageviews on Apple News in June than on its own website. Add in TV spots, radio segments, republishers online and in print, and news aggregators and you get to a sentiment you’ll hear often from nonprofit news publishers: “Our ‘readership’ is far beyond the number of ‘readers’ on our website.”

(Note: CalMatters’ visit total here does not include The Markup, the tech-accountability site it acquired in May; it remains on its own separate domain. And here’s a special shoutout to Vermont stalwart VTDigger, which managed to pull in nearly half of CalMatters’ June visits despite covering a state whose population is only 1/60th of California’s.)

Okay, here’s the nerd box.

As with the local newspapers list, our numbers here come from the web analytics company Similarweb, which estimates (among many other things) the number of visits websites get. Visits — not monthly unique users (which would be smaller) and not pageviews (which would be larger).

There exists no complete list of nonprofit news sites. The closest thing is likely the INN Index, produced annually by the Institute for Nonprofit News, the trade association for news nonprofits. In the most recent edition, it surveyed 346 INN members.

To create this dataset, I scraped INN’s entire membership roster of 500-plus members. I then did the same for LION Publishers and its 400-plus member news organizations. LION is a trade group for local independent online news outlets, and its members are a mix of nonprofit and for-profit publishers. (There’s plenty of overlap between INN and LION membership — something I even made a Venn diagram about once.)

All told, I ended up with a list of 724 news outlets, and that’s the dataset that these rankings are generated from.

Does my list include every American nonprofit news outlet? No, it does not. (If your nonprofit news outlet is not a INN or LION member but thinks it should be in this dataset, email me to make your case.) One noteworthy absence is NPR, which is not a member of either association (though some of its member stations are). With 80.8 million visits (by Similarweb’s count) in June, it’d top this list by a mile. But even if NPR were a member of INN, it wouldn’t be included here; we have a separate traffic ranking of public media outlets coming soon.

Also, because this is a list of nonprofit news outlets, I’ll be removing any for-profit LION members that make their way into the top 25. But they still deserve recognition! In the June data, there were two local for-profit outlets would have made this list if they’d been allowed to:

Photo of freeway traffic by KanyaphatStudio.