Independent, nonprofit news organizations will increasingly link up in 2026 to reap the benefits of a tried and tested legacy media structure: the network.

One of the great stories in journalism over the last decade has been the remarkable rise in independent and nonprofit newsrooms. Here’s one measure: membership in the Institute for Nonprofit News has more than quadrupled in the last decade, from 120 members in 2015 to more than 500 today.

These newsrooms often begin as scrappy, indie upstarts filling a gap in coverage or serving a community that has historically not seen itself accurately reflected in the news.

But the thing about these fledgling newsrooms is that they are — by nature — independent. The upside of that independence is freedom from extractive, click-driven business pressures; freedom from editorial oversight from those seeking to control news coverage; and freedom from being stripped for parts by a hedge fund.

But there is also a downside to independence: isolation. Participants in a recent INN workshop called “Better Together” agreed that isolation is a key obstacle to newsrooms becoming more viable, less precarious entities. When it turned to the workshop portion of the day, they gravitated to solutions that knit independent newsrooms into more of a network and less of an isolated bunch of standalone outlets. They pushed to the surface ideas like network-wide story-sharing compacts, shared audience KPIs and benchmarking, and common technology.

They’re far from alone in landing on greater coordination as a key priority for nonprofit newsrooms. Across the independent and nonprofit news landscape, we’re seeing more network development initiatives emerge. To name a few: There’s the 19th News Network, a collective of publishers sharing stories touching on racial and gender equity; URL Media, which links 37 Black and brown community news outlets by pooling reach and revenue opportunities; the Climate News Task Force, funding and supporting climate reporting by 12 nonprofit outlets; Floodlight, an environmentally focused news service that reports collaboratively and shares its stories freely; and COLab, helping newsrooms start and grow in Colorado.

We’re also seeing more nonprofit regional news hubs or networks spring up, from The Colorado Sun‘s regional hubs to Deep South Today, as organizations aim to combine local reporting with shared resources, expanding coverage grounded in the communities they serve.

Each of these in their own way is responding to a clear need to pair growth in the number and reach of independent newsrooms with growth in the connective tissue needed for them to be more efficient. These initiatives also reflect a desire to create the clout and gravitas needed to lead to real-world change that individual newsrooms can’t typically develop on their own.

And this year these networks will increasingly aim their energy at the ultimate, and possibly hardest, outcome: making sure as many people as possible get access to good-quality news and information. Audience fragmentation (scattering to private channels and social media) and growing apathy with journalism (especially among younger Americans) mean that we can’t simply write stories the way we always have and hope they find the right audience. Networks can help signal what to cover and how to cover it, and even provide support in the form of money, training, and tech needed to shape the story for the right audience in the right channel.

And this is where networks will get more interesting this year. The more you share across a network, the more signal you get about what works and what doesn’t.

This could be the year independent newsrooms lean into interdependence, realizing that we are better together.