The Economist, in a story on the future of the news business, called Voice of San Diego a “small, scrappy news website,” praising them for covering “nitty-gritty issues such as water, crime and health care—the sort of stories that local newspapers used to cover extensively.” That coverage has included an award-winning series on local redevelopment projects gone wrong. Founded in 2004, the Voice now employs 11 reporters, supported by a combination of foundation support (including the Knight Foundation, which is also funding this project), individual donations, and advertising. Their readership has grown too, peaking this spring at just over 60,000 unique visitors per month, according to Quantcast. We spoke to Voice editor Andrew Donohue earlier this week.

Voice of San Diego Editor Andrew Donohue

What is the key to the success you guys have enjoyed that others coming behind should know?
I think a really important thing is to have people from outside of journalism on your board. There’s a natural tendency to try to put a bunch of journalists on your board, in actuality that’s what you know as a journalist. We have people who’ve run start ups, who’ve done venture capital, people who’ve had to know how to run smart agile and small companies and learned to adapt to changing technologies really quickly. That’s a huge plus for us. They challenge you to think in ways you probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

Another one is to be incredibly focused on what you’re covering and to know you’re personality from the start. So many people, if they’ve come from a big newspaper, want to try to be everything to everybody. They want to be that general interest, department store kind of publication. Inevitably, if you start something like this you’re going to have a small staff and you need to be incredibly focused and just be the best at something rather than being okay at a lot of things.

When you know your personality you can make news decisions a lot easier. Everyday you have to balance what you cover and decide if you’re going to chase that story or ignore it, put your head down and keep going on a longer-term project that you know you have and that you know no one else has. Or are you going to be one of eight reporters at a press conference?

I’m glad you mentioned the importance of being focused. You’ve written about the luxury your reporters enjoy in not worrying about being a general-interest paper of record, that they “learn how to let the small stuff slide in order to go after the more ambitious stories.” But, what happens if the San Diego Union-Tribune folds? That would take away your ability to lean on that paper of record and go after the high-impact stories, right?
You’ve asked a question that we’ve thought through a hundred times. First, my hope would be that even if the UT did cease to exist, there still would be other publications to do that day-to-day coverage.

Second, I think a lot of that information is being distributed directly by a lot of these organizations now. You have the fire department and police department with their own Twitter feeds and websites. For a long time reporters have served as the police blotter and simply transcribed that back to the public. A lot of the time people don’t need a reporter translating that stuff. So I’m hoping that the barriers to distribution being lower some of this stuff can be communicated to people without a middleman. The idea is that we would be there to fact check and go after the more interesting and necessary stories in-depth.

There will be an ecosystem to replace a lot of that, but what you’re going to see are a lot more but smaller publications.

But, do you envision an expansion of the Voice of San Diego to take up some of that slack? Which gaps would you fill?
We’re envisioning that anyways. We think there is some really interesting and intelligent ways of doing arts and sports coverage that haven’t been done by traditional media through blogs and building communities around readers.

We would certainly like to have a dedicated investigative team. We wouldn’t mind doubling back on some of the things we already cover. We have one full-time political reporter and a region certainly needs more than just one of those. So we’d certainly double back on things like politics, education, housing, and the economy. There are a lot of things we still don’t cover like health care. We have a lot of business stories here that aren’t always told.

So, how do you plan to pay for that expansion and build something that is sustainable without relying on foundation support?
Knight has always been clear that they are not a long-term solution. But, if you look at public broadcasting they still do get funding from foundations. So, we believe we are sustainable. But we don’t ever want to have to rely on only one or two revenue streams.

We’re starting to dream up a lot of different ways to monetize different things. We’re laying the foundation for a syndication service. Another is an obituary section with different levels of service that you would pay different amounts for. We’re also looking at producing reports or content for people very specifically.

None of those are in play right now, as far as getting money, or have any of the rules built around them, but that’s what we’re incubating.

Can you tell me more about the syndication idea?
With the contraction of the last six months, not only in print but also in radio and television, we’ve seen a drastic increase in the desire to partner with us. At the start we were overjoyed to have a partnership with say the NBC affiliate because we had access to a whole new audience that we wanted to get to our site and to magnify the impact of our stories.

The more that that’s happened, the more people have asked us to partner, we’ve realized that the quid pro quo, the trade off, isn’t as great for us now that we’ve done a pretty good job of getting into those markets.

The trade-off for our content no longer is just publicity and we can’t continue providing free content to a bunch of for-profit companies without exploring a way to get some of that money back. Also, if there is going to be a void in the media world we also have an obligation as a non-profit to fill it with public service reporting and high quality news.

Also, part of our metamorphosis is understanding that we’re not a website. A website is the main way that we distribute our information right now, but that’s not in our mission and that’s not our identity. As soon as we’re okay with that, then we’re okay with syndicating our content and then we understand there’s a lot of ways to engage people. For some people that may be the website, for others that’s us putting on on a forum about housing or the economy or post-election analysis.

Those other outlets cut both ways. Yes, they’re great exposure and allow us to fundraise, but they also allow us to get our stories out.

What happens if the daily newspapers start going out of business, what does that mean for Gothamist?
Newspapers like The New York Times have really been financed by wasting an enormous amount of other people’s money and it’s hard to feel good about what they’re doing.

If the Times goes out of business because they’ve made poor business decisions, then so be it. They haven’t been that innovative, they tend to copy other people’s ideas, and they’ve made some poor decisions by investing in declining assets. And that same argument applies to pretty much every paper.

It’s businesses like Gothamist that will replace the Times or other dailies. It might not be Gothamist per se, because this business is very competitive, but it will be somebody like us.

Things are going to get much smaller, but that’s what happens when a monopoly dies. That doesn’t sound like a horrible thing to me. In fact it sounds like a pretty exciting thing. I don’t know why we should root for the 500-lb gorilla.

Gothamist relies on the reporting in those papers for a certain percentage of its coverage, will Gothamist increase its editorial staffing to fill the void?
We only aggregate 30 percent of our content from the Times, the Post or the News. Some of that news will come from independent media. There are something like 500 or 600 independent news sources in New York, and they will not disappear. Some of the rest we will report ourselves. So, we’d still have sources for the news, we might have to work a bit harder at it. If the Times went out of business, we’d get a bit of that advertising and be able to pay for more writers.

I’m sick of this idea that we’re just parasites. We break 5 or 10 stories a week. We broke the pug story last week- where the lady with a sick dog was arrested after an altercation with a Hasidic cop on the subway. That story ended up in the Post and The Daily News the next day. We broke the story about the Vox Pop Statue of Liberty being tortured. That made it into the Post.

We definitely aggregate more stuff from the dailies than they take from us, but given their budget is 300 times as large that’s not surprising.

Most of your advertisers are national, are they generally buying into the entire Gothamist network? Do you use sales reps?
Most of our advertisers are national, but they generally prefer specific cities. They’re national brand advertisers who have a preference to buy cities per campaign.

We’ll still do most of the sales ourselves. I’ve hired a couple of people over the years to help in reaching out to specific brands. But, mostly it’s a lot of people coming to us. Hopefully we please them and hopefully they come back—maybe they tell their friends or other media partners about us.

Do you have a local sales operation?
Only to the extent that we have a list of targeted local advertisers—30 or 40 in each of our big cities—that we talk to. They’re advertisers like museums, show venues, large stores, people who organize events in those cities. They are the same kinds of advertisers that you’d see in an alt-weekly.

What needs to happen on the business side of the online news space, in your view?
The one thing I’d like to see that would be helpful to smaller guys is some kind of real self-service model that works and is targeted at smaller local advertisers.

All of the alt weeklies collaborate in a clearinghouse to sell national accounts. Each of them owns a portion of the company, and gets a share of the profits. We need something like that, but it first requires a tech solution for local self-service and I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe it’s that they’ve tried and it hasn’t worked.

Without it, if you’re trying to run a neighborhood blog it’s going to be hard to do if you’re not doing direct sales. I believe in sales, but hearing it isn’t going to make you do it.