How NJ21st’s Audience Grew From 2022 Through 2025  

Earlier today, we published our Annual Financial report, this article is intended to provide transparency around reach and distribution – it’s meant to sit alongside our annual financials.

This is a record of how our reporting reached readers with a look at how it’s changed over the years.

It might be helpful to view the website as the public archive for investigations, explainers and ongoing reporting. From 2022 through 2025, website views increased steadily with a clear shift starting in 2023 and consistent growth in 2024 and 2025. The increase wasn’t a single spike but rather – a multi year trend that evidenced sustained public interest in our reporting.

Unique visitors followed a similar pattern with data showing was driven by new readers as well as returning ones.  Our website functioned as the entry point and year to year record for our work.

Our Substack played a bit of a different role-  launched in late 2022- it developed into more of a distribution channel than an entry point – starting 2023. From 2023 through 2025 email engagement grew each year. Across all three years, email accounted for the majority of Substack readership as we relied less on social media and search.

Across the two platforms, readership patterns aligned closely with our work on school governance, referendums, budgets, flooding and other public interest coverage.

Audience growth tracked reporting NOT promotion or automated distribution.

This becomes even more impressive when one considers we are banned from two political machine-controlled Community Facebook forums in Berkeley Heights and New Providence (with the latter having been administered by actual candidates running for office in 2025 and is now, in part, being administered by a page that does not appear to disclose its Administrators).  

In any case, readers and community members should be able to see not only how our resources are used but how our work reaches them.