Knight's new study, Finding a Foothold: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability, provides a detailed look at 18 nonprofit news organizations, ranging from the two large nationals, ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to the much smaller Wyofile and Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

The study explores their reach and engagement strategies as well as how they make money and how they spend it. It builds on Getting Local, a similar Knight study two years ago of eight nonprofit news organizations. (Note: I helped research and write both studies.)

Two years ago, the big headline was that the news organizations needed to devote more resources to marketing and revenue development in order to lessen their reliance on foundation funding, which in many cases will not be a long-term source or at least not a primary one. Many of the organizations were devoting most of their resources to editorial content - at levels that were unlikely to be sustainable without additional revenue growth.

Happily, the new Knight study shows that most of the sites are making significant progress in growing revenue and diversifying their revenue streams from sources such as memberships, sponsorships or advertising, event sponsorships, and syndication - selling their content to other news organizations.

Three organizations stood out as making the most progress with revenue diversification - MinnPost, Texas Tribune, and Voice of San Diego. As I looked for commonalities across those sites, two things jumped out at me:

• Each organization uses research to understand its audience and uses that understanding to support its revenue strategies
• Each organziation is actively engaging citizens both onlne and off.