Nieman Lab: INN Index 2026 — AI use in nonprofit news now reaches 81%

The Institute for Nonprofit News released its ninth annual INN Index on June 10, 2026, drawing on survey responses from 412 member organizations — 93% of INN’s membership. Nieman Lab’s coverage focuses on the AI adoption figures, which show a sharper year-over-year jump than most industry surveys have captured.

In 2025, 81% of INN members reported using AI-based tools. The year before, that figure was 63%; in 2023, it was 34%. The three-year arc suggests adoption has moved past early experimentation into something closer to operational baseline for most nonprofit newsrooms.

The more useful finding, for anyone thinking about what AI actually does inside these organizations, is where the usage is concentrated. The report finds that AI is being applied primarily to business operations — fundraising support, administrative workflows, grant writing — and to production tasks like transcription and data analysis. Editorial content production remains largely outside the scope of reported AI use. That gap between operational adoption and editorial adoption appears to be a deliberate choice in most cases, not a lag.

The broader picture the INN Index describes is a field that is still growing in terms of the number of organizations and their reach, but at a slower pace than in earlier years. Funding pressures have become more prominent in the current cycle, which may explain why AI adoption in operational areas has accelerated — organizations under financial pressure have more reason to find efficiency through tools than organizations with slack capacity.

The volunteer figure is a footnote in the Nieman Lab coverage but worth noting for anyone working in local journalism: volunteers play an ongoing role at nearly 40% of nonprofit newsrooms, up from 36% in 2023. That number signals something about the staffing economics of the sector that AI tools alone are not resolving.

For journalists, editors, and newsroom leaders trying to benchmark their own organizations, the INN Index provides one of the more reliable snapshots of where the nonprofit news sector actually sits. The AI adoption figures in particular are useful context for internal conversations about whether to adopt specific tools, since they show that adoption is now widespread without showing what measurable impact it has had on coverage quality or organizational sustainability.