Stacker Newswire: 2023 year in review

It’s been another exciting year at Stacker. 

In 2023, we grew our publishing network by 30%, further expanding the Stacker Newswire across the U.S. and Canada. We also launched an entirely new product line, improved the accessibility of our stories, and continued to elevate both the breadth and depth of the coverage our newswire provides. While the year wasn’t an easy one for media companies, we emerged stronger than ever. 

As we round out the year, here are a few 2023 highlights and updates you may have missed, as well as a teaser of what’s to come in 2024.

Stacker's publishing partners are seeing an impact from the newswire. 

We love hearing stories that show the impact of Stacker stories. A few of our favorites: 

• Newscenter1 in Rapid City, South Dakota, regularly scans the wire to find stories pertinent to their market. But they also seek out rankings in our national stories and then rewrite the headline to appeal to their market, which has resulted in higher page views. No one knows your market better than you do. You’re always welcome to modify headlines. 
• One of the nation's largest digital news networks of premium, trusted content taps into Stacker's newswire of national and local stories. Across their 100+ sites, Stacker content brought in over 14 million page views this year alone.
• Stacker content has become an integral part of newsletter strategy for multiple partners. One political news network has used Stacker stories to convert readers into thousands of newsletter subscribers. Another award-winning station includes Stacker stories in daily newsletters on a weekly basis, at times featuring a top-performing Stacker story to increase open and click-through rates.

Our network’s breadth has helped us reach a wider and more diverse audience. 

Stacker’s distribution network now reaches over 3,000 publications across the U.S. and Canada. We expanded across all segments including newspapers, TV and radio stations, and digital-only sites. We’re thrilled to have added new cohorts within our network including: 

• Over a dozen Black-owned media outlets through our partnership with the Local Media Consortium and BloomLab. 
• Several parenting websites, brought to us by David Arkin Consulting.
• A growing roster of alt-weeklies, hyperlocal independent newsrooms, nonprofit newsrooms, and more. 

We also added CMS support for Foundation and shortly our content will be available through Lions Light as well. 

The size of our network plus our proprietary technology puts us in a unique position to understand and predict trends in news publishing. We’ve built an in-house analytics platform that monitors each story’s performance, and we pass this invaluable information back to our newsroom, which produces stories that meet your evolving needs. 

Stacker Connect is elevating the standards of brand journalism

Earlier this year we announced Stacker Connect, a product line where we vet and distribute stories from approved brands, publishers, and nonprofit newsrooms. The response has been incredible. Our contributors are able to increase the distribution and reach of their stories, and our publishing partners can rely on Stacker to curate high-quality content and separate the wheat from the chaff. 

Each Stacker Connect contributor goes through a rigorous vetting process, and every single story is reviewed by our newsroom to ensure it meets our standards before we pass it along to the network. So far this year, we’ve distributed stories from incredible contributors like Edmunds, Way.com, Benzinga, and more. 

Today, 20% of Stacker Connect contributors are nonprofit newsrooms that receive the service at no cost. We are thrilled to have distributed stories from The Marshall Project, Grist, The Hechinger Report, The 74, and several other leading nonprofit newsrooms. We also support their impact measurement by providing detailed reports on which publishers syndicated their stories, allowing them to prove ROI to their communities and funders.

Our newsroom is setting the bar for Stacker’s newswire. 

Stacker’s in-house newsroom remains committed to rigorous editorial standards and high-quality journalism. Our reporters cover a healthy mix of topics and formats that run the gamut from hyperlocal to national stories, and we have continued to invest in and expand subject matter expertise, original reporting, and data visualizations to elevate our stories. Our coverage is designed to meet a range of publishing partner needs, from lighter fare that performs well off-platform to in-depth analyses and contextualization of today’s most pressing issues.

Some of our favorite coverage from the year includes:

• Boomers are hoarding all the houses
• Inside the book-ban machine: The rise of 'parental rights' groups and their efforts to ban books
• Early in peak tornado season, 2023 has already set records
• Has Pixar’s star truly fallen? How this once-golden studio compares to its major rivals.
• The US offers more organ-donor surgeries than ever, but more work is needed to improve organ transplants
• Extreme heat days are on the rise across the US: Where Phoenix, Arizona stands (local series spanning all metros)
• Warmest Decembers in Washington County, Rhode Island history (local series spanning all counties and county equivalents)
• Most commonly seen birds in Michigan (local series spanning all states)

We continue to invest in being a tech-forward newsroom, incorporating proven journalistic tools for things like analyzing and visualizing data. The buzz around ChatGPT and AI’s potential role in newsrooms has not gone unnoticed—nor have some of the pitfalls several media companies have fallen into by relying too much on the technology. 

We’re keeping a cautious eye on how ChatGPT and AI could eventually support our newsroom in a complementary way, such as helping with story ideation and crawling data sets to extract more advanced trends and findings—but we’re committed to human journalists continuing to do the work of producing stories. We do not employ AI in the story creation process.

We’ve also improved our corrections process and disclosures, including enhanced bylines that share more about the reporters, editors, and journalistic efforts that went into creating each story. That means more transparency for your readers and more insights into our process.

Looking ahead to 2024

One of our key strategic initiatives for next year will be around personalization. With a growing newswire, we want to ensure publishers can easily find the most relevant stories for their audience. We’ll add content recommendations to our platform and more filters to Story Hub and our API.  

We will also bring you even more high-quality content from approved contributors, providing a more robust newswire. Rather than combing through your inbox for pitches, we want to offer you a one-stop shop for stories that have met our high standards. 

We’re working to bring publishing partners more forward looks at Stacker’s planned coverage of holidays and significant tentpole events, including the 2024 election, major sporting events, and awards seasons. We’re doubling down on producing stories that shine a light on major social issues and coverage that amplifies the voices of traditionally underreported groups. 

Our newsroom will also expand our essential second-day coverage of breaking news, offering readers important context for the biggest stories to help them understand how those headlines affect them. We are committed to storytelling that resonates with our publishing partners—please reach out to your partner manager or email publishers@stacker.com if you have feedback on how we can push our coverage in 2024.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Ian Schneider / Unsplash