Revenue diversity is the path forward

For 2026, I keep coming back to one truth: The future of journalism depends on our ability to diversify revenue far more intentionally.

For years, I believed one of my former employers was among the strongest examples of this model. During my tenure there, they had newsletter sponsorships, events, digital and print advertising, and a clear playbook for how each line supported the others. Today’s landscape requires an even deeper level of diversification. It’s not enough to have multiple revenue lines. We need to build experiences where every single project or product has revenue potential. We need to treat that as a strategic requirement rather than a nice-to-have, meaning we consider a revenue spot for everything.

Sound obvious? Maybe, but it will require a major mind shift for some organizations, even in 2026.

Audience habits have changed, and the pathways that once reliably brought people to our sites continue to decline. The audience’s journey now begins in dozens of places: platforms, AI apps and devices where the publisher has limited control. Apple News, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels, podcasts, newsletters: Each one is now an ecosystem unto itself. That means every time our journalism shows up somewhere, we need to ask: What are at least two revenue sources this product or platform could yield? If the answer is zero, or even just one, we should pause long enough to ask whether it makes sense in an environment where the survival of news is severely threatened.

Diversification isn’t only about protecting ourselves from volatility. It’s about building resilience into the model itself. How do we limit risks if a platform changes its policies or if a foundation shifts its giving priorities? One effort I admired in the last year was The 19th fundraising for an endowment. We must build in redundancy by design with new approaches. A news experience shouldn’t be limited to pageviews or newsletter metrics. It should earn revenue, sponsorship, live-event extensions, membership conversion, brand awareness, and intellectual property value. In an unstable economy and challenged news industry, ad and sponsorship revenue will not be easy to raise. That’s one reason I have my eye on URL Media’s new effort, backed by the Knight Foundation, to grow sustainability for community media. All highly mission-driven work needs pathways to sustainability.

This mindset isn’t just for one type of journalism model. For-profit news, nonprofits, and public benefit corporations face the same pressures, the same platform dependency, the same need to build buffers against economic and philanthropic uncertainty. We can honor missions and pursue revenue at the same time; in fact, we have to. Journalism and information can’t serve communities if the organizations producing it cannot sustain themselves. Every new idea, every new product, every new distribution channel should come with a simple question attached: Where does the money come from, and does it come from more than one place?

We shouldn’t be afraid to think this way. It’s necessary. Diversified revenue is not the back-end part of a strategy; it is the strategy. And in 2026, the organizations that will thrive are the ones that build business models as creative and dynamic as the journalism itself.