In the early years of this decade the educational and marketing approaches of NIE were helping the programs grow exponentially. As publishers and editors recognized the need to invest in the future readers, the NIE program became more vital to the newspaper.

There was a significant increase in youth content during this decade with both locally created content, often written by teens, and through commercially available pages and sections. More and more independent businesses saw NIE as a potential market and began producing significant numbers of curricula and in-paper content for newspapers.

The number of NIE programs grew consistently with a noticeable shift in their location from the promotions/community services department of newspapers to circulation. The end of the decade saw more than 850 NIE programs active at newspapers across the country.