The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) has announced that NewsMatch, its year-end matching-gift campaign, raised more than $53 million for nonprofit news outlets in 2023, the highest in program history.

For the second time, nonprofit news organizations attracted more matching funds from local funders than from national and regional foundations during the program. The 340 participating newsrooms collected more than $47 million in individual donations from more than 254,000 donors—24 percent of whom gave for the first time—and 17 national funding partners awarded over $6 million in unrestricted funding during the last two months of the year. Newsrooms secured an additional $6.1 million in matching funds from nearly a thousand major donors, local foundations, and small businesses. The number of unique donors and new donors both increased over 2022.

“Thanks in large part to the funding we receive from NewsMatch, we are able to investigate and write stories on law enforcement officers with arrests on their records, or those who have been fired or forced out from previous jobs in law enforcement,” said Peter Cameron, managing editor at The Badger Project in Wisconsin, “We are also able to do aggressive work on campaign finance in rural areas of Wisconsin, showing the folks in these regions how millionaires and outside groups are trying to influence their elections.”

“NewsMatch is a conversation between newsrooms and their communities,” said INN executive director and CEO Karen Rundlet. “While the Press Forward initiative is a funder-to-funder conversation to activate investment in local news, NewsMatch is about members of the INN Network sharing the value of their work directly with their communities. News providers are explaining how they contribute to a healthier society and a healthier democracy.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/HRAUN)