How Floodlight Grew Its Newsroom Network from 60 to 560+ in a Single Year

The Challenge: A collaboration-first mission held back by the limits of manual outreach

Republishing is built into Floodlight's DNA. Before Stacker, the team pursued a syndication strategy anchored entirely in personal relationships: Rosie Gillies, Floodlight's Director of Audience and Development, would email individual newsrooms directly, asking if they'd republish a story tied to their coverage area. That approach could land meaningful placements, but it had no way to scale and almost no visibility into the hyperlocal newsrooms that Floodlight most needed to reach: the ones covering communities without a climate reporter on staff at all.

Two problems compounded the challenge:

1. Manual outreach couldn't reach hyperlocal newsrooms at scale. Floodlight's reporting is extra valuable exactly where climate coverage is thinnest — small-town papers in places unlikely to have a climate beat reporter, if any climate coverage at all. But finding and pitching hundreds of newsrooms like that one at a time was unrealistic for a small team.
2. Floodlight's funders needed proof of reach. As a nonprofit, Floodlight has to show funders that its journalism is spreading well beyond its own site. With respect to their mission, breadth is the metric that matters most to the mission. Without a distribution network built for scale, that breadth was capped by how many relationships one team could maintain.

And the stakes go further than simply distribution mechanics considering the state of climate journalism at large.

With Floodlight's mission to fill the growing gap in the places least likely to have their own climate coverage (often communities that are more climate-skeptical to begin with) there had to be a way to scale the coverage gap, not within their organization, but rather, at scale.

When Rosie discovered Stacker through a recommendation in an Institute for Nonprofit News, it addressed both problems at once.

The Solution: A distribution lever built for breadth, ease, and genuine journalism

Stacker gave Floodlight something it had never had: a way to reach hundreds of newsrooms it didn't know existed, without adding headcount or losing the editorial integrity that's central to its mission.

A scalable substitute for hundreds of individual relationships

Where Floodlight's team could once only reach the newsrooms they already knew to contact, Stacker became a way to connect with newsrooms they had no idea existed, like those ultra-hyperlocal outlets in small towns across the country. Manually replicating that reach, Rosie said, simply wasn't realistic for a team her size.

Simple to adopt, easy to keep using

For a small team without bandwidth to spare, ease of use was a requirement for any tech solution that would have an actual impact. Rosie found the portal intuitive from day one, with little to no ramp-up period needed to get comfortable submitting stories and viewing their performance across the network. That ease extended to the people behind the platform, not just the product:

“Everyone at Stacker is so nice to work with. Everyone replies to emails so fast... you guys have made it so easy, which is great.” - Rosie Gillies, Director of Audience & Development @ Floodlight News

Breadth as the core KPI

Unlike partners who optimize for total views or the prestige of a placement, Floodlight cares most about where its work lands. Every submission goes out to a vetted network of local, regional, and national outlets, giving Floodlight a live view down to the map, the publisher, and the domain rating of exactly how far each story has traveled. This positions the Floodlight team to access the information that matters most to them and their fundraising efforts when they need it.

Reaching "beyond the choir"

Floodlight's own analysis of its 2025 pickups found that more than 80% of the newsrooms republishing its stories were located in states historically less-receptive to climate journalism. For a newsroom like Floodlight, that's central to the mission. As Rosie explained, it's evidence that Floodlight's reporting is reaching audiences that are more likely to be climate-skeptical, and less likely to have any climate coverage of their own: "It shows we're preaching beyond the choir."

The Results: A nearly tenfold jump in newsroom reach

Floodlight signed up for Stacker in June 2025 and was fully in rhythm with the platform by September. By the time Rosie reported year-end numbers to her team in December, the shift was dramatic: in 2024, Floodlight had been republished by 60 newsrooms. Over the following year on Stacker, that number reached 562 individual newsrooms — a more than ninefold increase in the breadth of Floodlight's reach.

Across that period, Floodlight's stories generated:

• 2,200+ total pickups
• 562 individual newsrooms and outlets, spanning 47 states
• 148,100+ estimated views

These results also reshaped internal buy-in at Floodlight. The broader team was initially skeptical of adding another distribution tool, hesitant that it would really move the needle. When she shared the year-end numbers in December, that skepticism flipped immediately — going, in Rosie's words, from cautious hedging to “this is great."

The Impact

Beyond the numbers, the partnership confirmed something Floodlight had believed but hadn't yet proven: that hyperlocal climate stories — about one specific place — can resonate with readers in different communities across the country. Rosie described this as the single biggest shift the partnership created, boiling it down to a phrase her team now uses internally:

“It's been confirmation of our theory that climate stories can be hyperlocal and about one tiny place, but they can be resonant with people in so many other towns and cities and states... We call it being locally relevant but nationally resonant.” - Rosie Gillies

For Floodlight, it's a story about more than distribution.

As newsroom budgets shrink and climate desks disappear, the supply of original, human-reported journalism is shrinking too — right as small and local newsrooms are asked to fill more coverage gaps with fewer resources.

Floodlight's growth from 60 to 560+ partner newsrooms is a single case study in keeping that kind of real, on-the-ground journalism flowing to the communities that need it— nonprofit newsrooms and local publishers alike. And it gives Floodlight a concrete, repeatable story to tell its own funders about impact.

Feature Image Credit: Jeffrey Basinger / Floodlight