Stacker Newswire: 2024 year in review

On December 18, 2023, I mentioned in our 2023 year in review that it had been an exciting year for Stacker's Newswire. One year later to the day, and things haven't changed, at least on that front. It was, yet again, an exciting year.

Despite more struggles for the media industry in 2024, Stacker has continued to grow and adapt to publisher needs. Our partner network is approaching 4,000 publishers, and in the past year alone, we drove over 130 million readers to their sites.

A core reason for this growth was leaning further into how we can responsibly source incredible stories from a wide range of third parties. Through our Stacker Connect program, we partner with a range of third party organizations who have established their own in-house newsrooms. Stacker vets and edits stories to our editorial standards, secures full license and redistribution rights, and then distributes the stories to you. The program includes everyone from The Marshall Project to Lyft, whose editor-in-chief was previously executive editor at WIRED and manages a team of six journalists. We continue to operate our own in-house newsroom to augment the wire and ensure it meets your content needs.

3 priorities in 2024: quality, breadth and personalization

Quality remains our north star. Without your trust, the Stacker Newswire cannot be sustained. We maintain strict standards regarding use of artificial intelligence and will continue to be transparent with you should those standards evolve.

Every single contributor to the newswire is vetted (by humans) and every story that is syndicated through the newswire is vetted and edited (by humans).

Beyond quality, the breadth of our coverage expanded significantly this year. Here are just a few of the new content areas we expanded into:

• Through our partnership with Backstage, we brought weekly casting calls in your state and city to the newswire.
• There is an insatiable desire for wellness content, which we sourced from brands like Hims & Hers and Hone Health.
• Data-driven stories are a hallmark of the Stacker Newswire. Stacker’s data journalists produced stories on commuting, family-friendly travel, voting demographics, and movies, among many others. Brands like Lyft and moveBuddha provided stories based on first-party data only they can tell.
• A partnership with Money.ca ensured we published relevant stories to our Canadian partners on personal finance, travel, and real estate.
• And we’re thrilled to have expanded our pro bono nonprofit newsroom program, where we source stories from over a dozen leading nonprofit newsrooms. We brought on Ballotpedia and Votebeat to augment our politics coverage during the election, and we also added Chalkbeat and The Trace to expand coverage of education and gun violence, respectively. In fact, the Stacker Newswire was cited in a recent INN report as a key driver of republication growth for nonprofit newsrooms.

But more stories aren't necessarily better for our network of publishers, which evolved and grew significantly in 2024. What started as a few aggregators and newspaper groups in 2017, is now a diverse network of newspapers, TV groups, radio stations, nonprofit newsrooms, Black-owned publications, parenting magazines, Gen Z platforms, and LGBTQ+ publications.

Each of these publishers has their own own priorities and audience strategies, requiring us to adapt to ensure we are creating a unique experience that fulfills their individual and specific needs. In 2023, I called that personalization would be a major project for 2024, and I'm proud to say that the team delivered. This year we launched:

• Audience filters: available on Story Hub and feeds, you can filter the Stacker Newswire based on the intended audience of the story.

• You May Have Missed It: launched last month, we send out a weekly personalized newsletter that recommends stories based on your past publishing behavior.

• Headline generator: in partnership with Nota, Story Hub users can now create alternative headlines tailored to their audience needs.

What’s next?

We will continue to lean into a diverse array of high-quality evergreen content as we always have. In 2025, publishers on Stacker Newswire will see a refreshed Story Hub experience, offering new ways to slice up the newswire.

We'll be experimenting with artificial intelligence by providing optional features to optimize workflows, or by making additional content recommendations. But we will continue to ensure the human touch is applied to every single story that gets published on the newswire.

If you're interested in becoming a publisher parter and to see what the Stacker Newswire is like, feel free to reach out to the distribution team at publishers@stacker.com. We wish you a fantastic winter holiday for those who celebrate, and we wish our media industry a successful 2025.