The Online News Association is pausing its 26-year-old conference and laying off its five staffers, one of four U.S. journalism organizations that have cancelled events, cut programs or closed since September as venue costs rise and sponsor money shrinks, according to a report Nieman Lab published today. LION Publishers has left the large conference business, OpenNews has switched into what it calls "emergency mode," and the three-year-old Organization for Accessible Journalism said today that it is shutting down.

In Short

Several U.S. journalism groups have stopped running their big annual conferences, and the Online News Association is also laying off its five staffers. Hotels, food, flights and venues cost more, while the newsrooms, foundations and companies that used to pay for tickets and sponsorships are spending less. Fewer of these gatherings will take place in 2027, and the organizations that ran them are shrinking or rethinking what they do.

Four organizations, ten weeks

The announcements arrived over roughly ten weeks. Laura Hazard Owen, the editor of Nieman Lab, gathered them in a piece published at 1:09 p.m. today under the headline "With event costs up and funding down, journalism organizations cancel conferences and cut staff."

The question in 2020, when the pandemic forced conferences to go virtual, was whether people would come back in person once Covid passed. Nieman Lab had asked in March of that year whether the media events business would recover at all. For a couple of years, it did: people were excited to be together again, and U.S. journalism organizations saw revenue climb as sponsors and funders spent generously, according to Nieman Lab.

That period is over. Combine surging jet fuel prices, inflation, cost-cutting at media companies and declining sponsor and funder dollars, Owen wrote, and "the future appears grim not just for journalism conferences but, in some cases, for the organizations behind them."

Online News Association

ONA announced the change on Tuesday, November 10, 2026. According to Nieman Lab, the organization is "pausing" a conference that has run for 26 years and laying off its five staffers.

ONA's own post, titled "A strategic shift for ONA" and signed by executive director and CEO Niketa Patel, says the organization is pausing its in-person events and "will not host a conference in 2027." Its most recent conference, ONA26, took place in Chicago. The post does not give a headcount or use the word layoffs. It says the organization's long-time staff will leave this month, while Patel stays on as CEO and executive director - a detail that sits awkwardly beside the count of five departing staffers in Nieman Lab's report, and one neither source reconciles. ONA will keep its Women's Leadership Accelerator, with a call for the 2027 class early next year, along with its online resources and the ONA Weekly newsletter. The board, led by Andrew Fitzgerald, is exploring partnerships to carry the work forward, according to ONA.

Patel's explanation, as quoted by Nieman Lab, goes to the heart of the business model. "Before the pandemic, the annual conference was ONA's biggest source of revenue, and together with grants, it sustained the organization. This is no longer true," she wrote. "The costs of large convenings have climbed sharply while professional development and sponsorship budgets have shrunk."

Two lines in a budget, then, moved in opposite directions. What a conference costs to stage went up. What newsrooms pay to send staff, and what sponsors pay to be present, went down.

LION Publishers

LION Publishers, which supports independent local news businesses, went first. In a post dated September 23, 2026, executive director Chris Krewson said the organization was getting out of the big conference business "for now."

"Philanthropy is famously fickle, and funding priorities have shifted, making this kind of conference a very tough lift," Krewson added, according to Nieman Lab.

The event in question is LION's Independent News Sustainability Summit. According to LION's post, the first summit took place in 2022, planned with the News Revenue Hub and the RevLab at the Texas Tribune. LION skipped the big format in 2023 in favor of two smaller conferences, brought it back in 2024, and held it in St. Louis in 2025 and San Diego in 2026. Each edition drew more than 400 people, according to the post, and sponsorship packages started at $20,000. At the 2025 edition, 99% of attendees and every sponsor said they would recommend the event, according to LION.

Why would an organization walk away from an event that 400 people attend and sponsors recommend? Because the numbers did not add up to a margin. LION barely broke even on the conferences it held in 2025 and 2026, Krewson told Nieman Lab. The organization is not cutting staff or programming, and it is expanding its Audit program. It may still hold smaller events next year. But it "won't be taking on the responsibility for an independent event at a hotel with a food and beverage minimum and hotel room block for 400-plus people."

Those two hotel terms carry much of the risk. A food and beverage minimum commits an organizer to a set catering spend regardless of turnout, and a room block commits it to filling a set number of hotel rooms. If registrations fall short, the organizer covers the gap.

Krewson put the trade-off in plain terms. "Every dollar I spend on rubber chicken dinners and microphones/WiFi for three days is money I can't spend on programs that make publishers' businesses stronger," he said.

LION has said it will publish a new strategic plan and give another update by the first quarter of 2027, according to its post.

OpenNews

OpenNews, the organization behind the SRCCON conference, said in October that it was switching into "emergency mode." The phrase plays on Emergency Mode for News, its initiative to support journalists working during disasters, according to Nieman Lab. In practice, it means cutting back on "work that distills journalism craft: no more community calls or Source articles for at least the rest of 2026 and maybe longer."

SRCCON's future is uncertain. "We usually make our decision about SRCCON at about this time every year, but this year is different as we consider the news from both LION and ONA and the funding pressures that we know all too well," Jessica Morrison, co-executive director of OpenNews, told Nieman Lab in an email. "We are opening a community conversation today - emails going out very soon - to gather input about SRCCON, our other programs, and where we go next with OpenNews."

That sentence is telling. One organization's decision is now shaping another's: OpenNews is weighing its conference partly in light of what LION and ONA have already done.

Organization for Accessible Journalism

The smallest of the four is closing entirely. The Organization for Accessible Journalism, founded three years ago, said today that it is shutting down.

"Financial support never reached a level that allowed us to build beyond an all volunteer effort - including my full-time effort," founder Stacy Kess wrote, according to Nieman Lab.

In a post on the organization's website, Kess says she will file to dissolve the organization this month and has asked the board and chief operating officer to resign as she winds it down. The group filed its articles of incorporation in November 2023, according to the post. Kess points to its work on an alt-text standard and an accessibility playbook, and to its style guide, without saying what will happen to those resources. Its fiscal sponsor, the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, will handle outstanding commitments.

OAJ's closure is not about a cancelled event. It belongs in the same story because it shows the funding squeeze from the other end: an organization that, by its founder's account, never raised enough to move beyond volunteers.

What the tax filings show

Nieman Lab published a chart of three organizations' revenue from 2019 to 2025, using the total revenue line from each organization's IRS Form 990, the annual return U.S. nonprofits file. The filings come from ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. ONA's 2025 return was not available as of today, according to Nieman Lab.

PPC Land checked the same database for the parsed figures behind the chart. All three organizations report on a calendar year.

Year Online News Association LION Publishers Institute for Nonprofit News
2019 $3.30 million $0.69 million $8.65 million
2020 $2.62 million $3.14 million $7.74 million
2021 $1.99 million $2.27 million $6.97 million
2022 $4.08 million $3.95 million $8.20 million
2023 $4.47 million $6.88 million $8.50 million
2024 about $3.75 million nearly $12 million about $15.6 million
2025 not available about $4.61 million just under $10 million

The 2019 to 2023 figures are the parsed Form 990 totals in ProPublica's data. For 2024 and 2025, ProPublica lists summary amounts for ONA's 2024, INN's 2024 and LION's 2025 filings; the LION 2024 and INN 2025 values are PPC Land's reading of Nieman Lab's chart and should be treated as approximate.

Three patterns stand out. ONA's revenue roughly doubled between 2021 and 2023, from $1.99 million to $4.47 million, in line with the post-pandemic return to in-person events, and then slipped by about 16% in 2024, according to PPC Land's calculation. LION's revenue rose almost every year from $685,224 in 2019 to a peak of nearly $12 million in 2024, then fell to about $4.6 million in 2025, a drop of roughly 60% by PPC Land's calculation. The Institute for Nonprofit News followed a similar arc, from about $8.5 million in 2023 to about $15.6 million in 2024 and back to just under $10 million in 2025.

Total revenue on a Form 990 combines grants and contributions with program income such as conference registrations, so the chart does not isolate what any single event earned or lost. What it does show is the size of the swings these organizations are budgeting around. When annual revenue can fall by half or more in a single year, a 400-person hotel commitment that only breaks even is hard to justify.

Who is still meeting

Journalism conferences in the United States are not gone, Nieman Lab noted. IRE and NICAR will hold their annual data journalism conference in Denver in March 2027. The Institute for Nonprofit News is "talking about what INN Days will look like in 2027" and will know more by early next year.

The International Symposium on Journalism is on for 2027, its 28th year, according to its founder Rosental Alves, who also sits on the Nieman Foundation's board. He did not describe the climate as easy.

"It's not only the difficulty of finding sponsors, but also the rising costs of venues, hotels, airfares, etc., compounded by shrinking travel budgets in newsrooms and even the problems international attendees face in coming to the U.S.," Alves told Nieman Lab in an email. ISOJ cut costs, in part by moving to a different venue, and it benefits from being relatively small, according to Nieman Lab.

"It's very sad that foundations and corporations that funded journalism conferences in the past have pulled back their support," Alves added. "The need for these gatherings is as great as ever."

Why this matters beyond journalism

The cost side of the problem is easy to see in a hotel contract. The revenue side leads back to the economics of news publishing that PPC Land has tracked through 2026.

Patel points to shrunken professional development budgets, and Alves to shrinking travel budgets in newsrooms. Those newsrooms have been losing audience from the channels that once filled them. Search engines delivered 12% of North American publisher pageviews in the third quarter of 2026, down from 21% a year earlier in Chartbeat's data. Digital Content Next, which represents premium publishers, told a federal judge on October 29 that its members' unique visitors fell 26% between 2023 and 2025. Across more than 400 news publishers tracked by NewzDash, Google Web Search's share of their Google mobile traffic fell from 51.10% in 2023 to 27.42% in the fourth quarter of 2025. Over the same stretch Google rolled out AI Overviews, one of several forms of zero-click search that answer a query on the results page itself. Media executives surveyed by the Reuters Institute in January expected a further 43% decline in search traffic over three years.

Lost traffic becomes lost advertising, and lost advertising becomes cost cuts. USA TODAY Co. put a $100 million annualized cost reduction program in place at the end of September, including workforce reductions, after its indirect digital advertising fell 32% year over year. In Germany, Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland was set to close on September 30, 2026, eliminating 160 jobs. An economists' panel that included Joseph Stiglitz and Daron Acemoğlu reported last year that 9% of the U.S. journalistic workforce was eliminated in 2023.

Each of those numbers is a reason a newsroom might not send three people to a three-day conference in another city. Nieman Lab's report does not try to measure how much of the conference decline comes from newsroom budgets and how much from the retreat of sponsors and foundations, and the Form 990 totals cannot answer that either.

For the advertising and marketing technology business, the change has a practical edge. Events such as LION's summit put publishers' revenue and audience staff in one room with funders and sponsors, and sponsorship is how companies pay to be in that room. When a 400-person summit becomes a set of smaller, still-undefined gatherings, and when ONA has no 2027 conference at all, those meetings either move elsewhere or stop happening. The pattern also fits a broader shift in how small publishers are trying to fund themselves: The American Prospect, for instance, removed all programmatic advertising from its website in April and asked readers for monthly donations instead.

What happens next depends on decisions due in the coming months: OpenNews on SRCCON, INN on INN Days, LION on its strategic plan by the first quarter of 2027, and ONA's board on whatever partnerships it can find. Of the four, only OAJ has announced a definite end. For the rest, 2027 is a question still open.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Online News Association, LION Publishers, OpenNews and the Organization for Accessible Journalism, as reported by Laura Hazard Owen of Nieman Lab. Niketa Patel (ONA), Chris Krewson (LION), Jessica Morrison (OpenNews), Stacy Kess (OAJ) and Rosental Alves (ISOJ) are quoted. IRE and NICAR and the International Symposium on Journalism are going ahead in 2027, while the Institute for Nonprofit News is still deciding on INN Days.

What: ONA is pausing its 26-year-old conference, will not host one in 2027, and is laying off its five staffers. LION has ended its 400-plus-person Independent News Sustainability Summit after barely breaking even in 2025 and 2026. OpenNews has cut community calls and Source articles and has not decided on SRCCON. The Organization for Accessible Journalism is dissolving.

When: LION announced its decision on September 23, 2026; OpenNews in October 2026; ONA on November 10, 2026; the Organization for Accessible Journalism today, the same day Nieman Lab published its report.

Where: United States. LION's last two summits were held in St. Louis and San Diego, ONA26 took place in Chicago, and NICAR's 2027 conference is set for Denver.

Why: The cost of staging large events - hotels, food and beverage minimums, venues, airfares - has risen while newsroom travel and professional development budgets, corporate sponsorships and foundation grants have fallen. For ONA, a conference that was once its largest source of revenue no longer sustains the organization.