For 16 years, Civil Eats, a nonprofit news site dedicated to critical thinking about the American food system, has helped to mainstream the nation’s food policy conversation. At a time when political divisions and the climate crisis fan fears and threaten our collaborative spirit, we offer fair, accurate, and accessible journalism that reveals how our food system works—and where it breaks down.
In the last year, Civil Eats elevated its user interface and interactive innovations in several ways. After nine years, Civil Eats removed its paywall in September 2024 with support from funders and the Google News Initiative, making our reporting free and accessible to everyone. Removing the paywall has brought thousands of new readers to the site and allowed us to launch our Food Policy Tracker, a new reporting tool documenting the myriad federal food policy moves made by the Trump administration. The tracker, one of our top-performing pages, has been widely lauded—it was featured by the Institute for Nonprofit News—and reaches new audiences, allowing us to receive tips for future story ideas. We have also partnered with audio outlets and platforms to provide audio versions of our reporting, reaching audiences in new demographics who prefer to listen to their news.
We’ve used our online technology creatively, too. First, we integrated our content management system with a newsletter plugin and our email service provider to send instant emails every time we publish a story on the tracker, and/or to receive a weekly digest of all our tracker reporting. Second, we launched a new paid product, the Crash Course, an email-based educational curriculum to inform new readers about critical issues in the food system. Third, we increased the interactivity of our thematic member newsletter, The Deep Dish, by pairing it with online salons and activating our community Slack channel to keep the conversations going.
As a digital news publication, our weekly newsletter and social media tools are essential to connect with our readers and crowdsource policy impacts affecting them in real time. Our free weekly newsletter has 40,515 subscribers, and allows us to feature both the Food Policy Tracker and our recent reporting. With a strong average open rate of 49.2 percent, it is higher than the media and publishing industry average of 34.23. We have also upped our video content and harness platform algorithms that push video content to non-followers. A recent video highlighting the effects of federal cuts on farmers overperformed with over 349,000 views.
This year, Chemical Capture, our investigative series examining the consolidated power of the pesticide industry, was named a semifinalist for the 2025 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and received an honorable mention in the investigative category of the 2024 Best in Business Awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW).
Our member newsletter, The Deep Dish, is a finalist this year in the James Beard Foundation Media Awards and has previously received awards from the Online News Association and International Association of Culinary Professionals.
