With the five-year anniversary of Stacker’s founding fast approaching, we are marking the occasion with the launch of a new corporate site, StackerMedia.com. In 2017, Stacker.com was built as a home for our journalism and a place for publishers to view the content they could syndicate.
But we’ve evolved greatly over the past 5 years and have become so much more than meets the eye. Today Stacker provides a range of products and services to publishers of all shapes and sizes, and Stacker Media will be a home for those interested in what we are building, where we are going, and how to get involved.
We launched Stacker with a vision: to transform data into engaging and informative stories and get them in front of the largest possible audience…without relying on traditional audience development and advertising models. New consumer media sites were abundant, and audience development strategies undifferentiated or unsustainable.
From Day 1 we looked to be a partner to newsrooms — seeking syndication partnerships to reach readers instead of competing with them for eyeballs. Digital media is at a critical juncture, and finding ways to collaborate with publishers across the globe is core to Stacker’s values and drives our commitment to developing sustainable ways to produce, distribute, and fund great storytelling.
We’re at a turning point for digital media. Many newsrooms are being asked to do more with less while still maintaining their high editorial standards, and are finding it harder and harder to support a full newsroom off traditional advertising alone. Over the past decade, newsrooms have applied more investment in a variety of models - from subscriptions and affiliate, to native advertising. Meanwhile, traditional models for how quality journalism is funded are being challenged. A growing number of non-traditional media companies are starting to invest in telling and publishing quality stories (Future/A16Z, Zillow, NerdWallet, just to name a few), finding that there are more ways than one to fund a newsroom.
As the first newswire funded through an independent Studio, Stacker is able to provide a widely accessible newswire, empowering sustainable models for journalism in thousands of newsrooms across the country.
This past year we’ve seen this model result in some incredible things, as we continue to double down on our commitment to make great journalism easily accessible. Whether making Stacker stories available under Creative Commons to ensure open access to every newsroom large or small, expanding long term investment in our newsroom, or providing entirely new tools for publishers to tell unique stories of their own, we are committed to providing free, valuable tools for publishers that empower their own sustainable business models.
Today, over 800 newsrooms publish Stacker stories every month to augment and support their original reporting. Through Stacker Studio, we’ve found a way to leverage the growing number of brands looking to fund great journalism, allowing for larger investment in our newsroom and enabling us to provide our newswire at absolutely no cost to publishers.
We are immensely proud of what we've accomplished, but there is still much more to do. Today, as we commit ourselves to a refreshed mission and vision, we are ready to step into the next chapter of Stacker’s development while adhering to our ideals.
Moving forward, we maintain one clear goal: to build the world’s most accessible and widely distributed newswire, advancing sustainable models for journalism the world over.