The Golden Link
Posted on 05. Aug, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis.
Thomson Reuters digital boss Chris Ahearn stands up in favor of the link economy (as opposed to someone else we know). It’s sensible talk and he suggests we have more such talk about how best to link. I agree.
As soon as I can, I’ll set a date in October to hold a symposium on the link economy and to present the work of the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY. Also I’ll set up a conversation space at CUNY’s site to discuss the link economy as Ahearn suggests; it will be up later today at wiki.newsinnovation.com. Stay tuned.
Here’s what Ahearn had to say (and I’ll bet he won’t mind my quoting a lot of it):
Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.
A better approach is to have a general agreement among community members to treat others’ content, business and ideas with the same respect you would want them to treat yours.
If you are doing something that you would object to if others did it to you – stop. If you don’t want search engines linking to you, insert code to ban them.
I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories — it adds value to all producers of content. I believe you should play fair and encourage your readers to read-around to what others are producing if you use it and find it interesting.
I don’t believe you could or should charge others for simply linking to your content. Appropriate excerpting and referencing are not only acceptable, but encouraged. If someone wants to create a business on the back of others’ original content, the parties should have a business relationship that benefits both.
Let’s stop whining and start having real conversations across party lines. Let’s get online publishers, search engines, aggregators, ad networks, and self-publishers (bloggers) in a virtual room and determine how we can all get along. I don’t believe any one of us should be the self-appointed Internet police; agreeing on a code of conduct and ethics is in everyone’s best interests.
Our news ecosystem is evolving and learning how it can be open, diverse, inclusive and effective. With all the new tools and capabilities we should be entering a new golden age of journalism – call it journalism 3.0. Let’s identify how we can birth it and agree what is “fair use” or “fair compensation” and have a conversation about how we can work together to fuel a vibrant, productive and trusted digital news industry. Let’s identify business models that are inclusive and that create a win-win relationship for all parties.
This is not code for some hidden agenda – it is an open call for collective problem solving. Let’s do it wiki-style and edit it in the public domain. Let’s define the code of conduct and ethics we would all like to operate under.
My suggestion is we start with “do unto others” as our guiding spirit – I bet it would make all of our mothers proud.
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Video Volunteers Brings Citizen Media to Disadvantaged Communities
Posted on 04. Aug, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
Imagine if citizens in low-income neighborhoods around the U.S. were given the necessary cameras, software and training to make short videos about important issues in their communities. Say, cultural, socioeconomic and political issues not covered by their local newspapers or television networks.
That is what Jessica Mayberry, co-founder of the global social media network Video Volunteers, has brought to underdeveloped and underreported communities in India. Her organization trains everyday citizens how to cover newsworthy subjects like local government inefficiencies, health and class divisions.
Most of the training is performed through workshops, where aspiring community producers are taught how to perform research, create story outlines, use the equipment and software, and then go out and shoot. The successful ones are then compensated by the organization for their work. Since 2006, Video Volunteers has trained 150 community producers in 350 villages with the help of other nonprofit organizations.
A live video screening in India
“What we’re seeking to demonstrate is look, you can produce topical videos,” says Jessica, a New York native who spawned the idea for Video Volunteers with her partner, Stalin K., in 2003. “What matters is that you’re from that local region, you know the issues there, and you have the communication skills to get the best stories out.”
The idea behind using video to tell those stories — apart from its visceral impact — is that many of the targeted communities have low literacy rates, she says, which keeps newspapers and magazines at a distance. Her organization’s work has resulted in a heightened awareness among audiences of how their communities function.
“Some of our community producers did a story a while back on the closing of a water treatment plant in their region,” says Jessica. “A lot of people got sick, and after the producers started to record what was going on, the local government came to one of the community screenings and told everyone, ‘No, no, no. We’re going to reopen the plant.’
“The purpose wasn’t to bring fresh water to India, but to empower local people with the communication and information tools to solve these problems on their own.”
One of the organization’s initial challenges was finding the money needed to buy cameras, computers and the right software. Fortunately in 2008 Video Volunteers won $275,000 in the annual Knight Foundation News Challenge, which awards several million dollars a year for innovative ideas that bring new “platforms, tools and services” “to community news, conversations, information distribution and visualization.”
Their other challenge has been keeping morale up among the community producers they train. Very often the effort put in outweighs the compensation — just like with most journalism (or advocacy) in America.
“It’s a tough job,” says Jessica. “They love it because of they attention they get, and producing videos is far more interesting than what they were doing before. But, they work really late at night and they feel they’re not getting paid enough, especially knowing that they have this very monetizable skill. If we were a bricklaying organization, they would know exactly how much they should get paid for their work and that pay would be far more concrete.”
Now as Video Volunteers extends its reach to other communities around the world, Jessica hopes to see her current model pick up enough momentum to sustain itself.
“The thing we need to figure out is how to do this in a way that’s permanent and ongoing,” she says. “What we’re trying to figure out is: what’s the lowest cost model to keep this going? How do we equip tens of thousands of marginalized people around the world with the necessary tools to tell their own stories?”
Video Volunteers co-founder Jessica Mayberry
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Revenues are Final
Posted on 03. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
Not sure if this is encouraging or something else, but we’ve finished building our page of revenue opportunities. We heard a few very good ideas, but we’d already accounted for many of them. Here are the types of revenue opportunities, beyond online advertising that we think are possible (go to the page for details on each):
New Advertising Units (Sponsor Posts, Coupons & Deals of the Day, Video)
E-commerce
Paid Content
Lists & Databases
Mobile
Premium Products
Niche Websites
Donations
Print Editions
Special Reports
Memberships
Specialized Advertising Services
Business Marketplace
Events Hosting & Promotion
Cafés
Thanks for all of the comments and suggestions. Please keep ’em coming.
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News Innovators on the Frontline: Brooklyn Based
Posted on 03. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
Founded two years ago by Nicole Davis, Brooklyn Based is a thrice-weekly events and entertainment email and blog that focuses exclusively on New York City’s largest borough. In addition to listing events, Davis and her partners, Annaliese Griffin and Chrysanthe Tenentes also write feature articles on food, music, film and anything else they think is cool. Brooklyn Based could also pass for an entertainment company in its own right, based on the events they have planned, promoted and hosted (in exchange for a cut on the admissions). We spoke with Griffin late last week (full disclosure: she and I attended graduate school together).
Explain the idea behind Brooklyn Based. You’re sort of a hybrid between email product, website and events hosting business. Which of those is the most important?
The most important thing is our email list. Our Wednesday email is the Tip Sheet; it’s all event listings and it grounds the whole thing. Even if you don’t like the other two posts, at least on Wednesday you read about 10 events you want to go to that week.
On Tuesday and Thursday we have feature posts—a neighborhood story about a restaurant or an art event or an interview. We try to stay at 500 words or less with a higher level of writing and editing than your average blog. We’re not all snappy one-liners and 15-word paragraphs. We try to have a front-of-the-book-magazine feel to our posts.
Our blog is not the majority of our content. We’re not going to be one of the tabs in your Firefox. We’re the site where people say, I need something cool to do, what’s on Brooklyn Based?
You sell ads, but how much of your revenue comes from events?
I’d estimate 60 percent of our revenues come from sponsoring events, with the rest split between advertising and events we host ourselves. Our own events are a big chunk of cash, but we don’t do them very often.
So, can you explain how that media sponsorship works?
It fits somewhere in between PR, event planning and local blogging. We’ll sometimes send a fourth email in a week that’s labeled an invitation, that’s sort of our code that it’s an advertorial for an event we sponsor.
We do this with The Bell House in the Gowanus a lot. They come up with an idea for an event, they ask us to promote and organize part of it, and they give us a cut of the door. In January, we sponsored a Lost season premiere party for them. We brought in snacks and set up a Facebook page and promoted the event to our subscribers.
We’re working right now on a garden party with Brooklyn Botanic Garden. They want it to be more interesting than just hiring caterers and event planners, so we’re stepping into that role and utilizing our email list and media contacts.
How are the sponsored events different from Brooklyn Based-hosted events?
When it’s our own, we come up with an idea and pitch it to the venue. We get a portion of the door. We hosted a documentary film series. We did the Brooklyn premiere of Food, Inc. with local food types and made it a bigger event than just a screening. We’ve done a pig roast where we had 600 people lined up in Bushwick.
With these events, we are creating content, the content is just an event rather than a blog post. Bringing all of those elements together and planning it is a skill that people are willing to pay for. Venues are willing to pay for our list and the cachet that goes with the recognition that it’s an event that we’re producing. Our readers know that we only put our name on something that’s really fun. It’s a matter of aesthetics and curating.
How do you use social media, like Twitter. It sounds like a perfect fit for your business?
We use Twitter all the time. We use it to promote events and we use it a lot like a blog. If we have a hot piece of information, like an event we’re really excited about, we’ll often tweet it first, before putting it in the email. Or, if I’m out at a bar, and a celebrity comes in, I’ll tweet that out as a silly bit of content. It’s almost an award for our most committed readers. In fact, I have a personal Twitter account that I haven’t used in months simply because I find it more interesting and satisfying to tweet as Brooklyn Based.
What has been the biggest challenge for Brooklyn Based so far?
We’ve been having a hard time keeping up with advertising. We’re doing a complete redesign, and that should help. We need more space for ads than we have and we need them to be easier to manage. That said, I think we’re going to see ad revenue make up 40 percent of the pie soon.
I also don’t think we’ve properly sold ourselves at this point. People on our list are really engaged. We have a high open rate and higher than average click-through rate. Right now we charge a flat-fee for ads. If you buy a month of advertising we’ll do five appearances for the price of four.
I think we’ve been low-balling ourselves. But, we’re beginning to understand better all the time who we are, and who we’re selling to.
After the redesign, what’s the next step for Brooklyn Based?
As part of the redesign, we are going down the road of do we want to rebrand and have a new logo. Our long-term plan is to add cities and be able to sell across that network and we need the site and brand to be scalable.
On the promotion side, we are actively trying to branch out. We have great partnerships, but we need to make sure people understand we’re not just an arm of Bell House or the Roebling Tea Room. We’re talking about ways of courting more moms and kids events, and adding a bit more Park Slope to the Williamsburg we have in our email list.
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Revenues, Again
Posted on 30. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
The first cut of our revenue opportunities list is now up here and in the side bar. We have another half dozen categories to add to this list, but please let us know if you think we’ve left anything out or missed the boat on something entirely.
From this first list, I was surprised by how many of the folks pointed to the value of a printed product. It is the most noteworthy area, of many, where my early assumptions were proven incorrect.
Jeff Mignon and Nancy Wang of Mignon-Media have been helping us with this project and were instrumental in developing this list of revenue opportunities.
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Requests for Revenues
Posted on 29. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
No, we’re not asking for donations. But, we do want to hear your ideas for new revenue opportunities for online news organizations.
As we’ve been talking to news start ups from around the country, most everyone says they want to hear about new ways to make money, whether it’s to hire more reporters or just make sure that what they’ve built so far is sustainable. Maria from Uruguay summed it up pretty well in a comment to one of our posts yesterday:
We are a 3 million people country with a really poor advertising market. People are also concentrated in the capital city (the half of the population). Moreover, as you may know, the charity donation, or non-profit, or foundations culture is not developed in Latin America as in the United States and also there are no much resources. So, what are your suggestions when I try to encourage my students to think in new proyects for investigative journalism and new business models?
Maria, we hear you. Even though we think traditional online advertising will remain the core of the US news business for the foreseeable future, the share of revenues from advertising will likely decline. So, we’re putting together a list of new revenue opportunities that will go up on the site in the next few days. (We’ll also lay out examples of new ad units–or interesting modifications to established ad units–that may be helpful).
But, while we’re putting the final touches on that list, we want to hear your ideas for new revenues open to news organizations. All ideas are welcome! Throw them into the comments section.
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News Innovators on the Frontline: The Arizona Guardian
Posted on 28. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
Often, the slimmer the news organization the more dedicated its staff.
The Arizona Guardian, a subscription-based news site in Phoenix, covers state politics as closely as any of its competitors. Except the Guardian’s five partners manage everything from the site’s political coverage to its information technology and sales. Their initial funder and co-owner, Bob Grossfeld — a political and media strategist — handles the Guardian’s marketing and web development. The other four co-owners, Patti Epler, Mary K. Reinhart, Paul Giblin and Dennis Welch — all veteran journalists — handle the editorial content with the help of one additional part-time reporter and occasional guest columnists. 
The Guardian went live in January 2009 in the wake of an East Valley Tribune layoff storm. As of now the site pulls in about 8,000 unique visitors a month and enough paid subscribers to keep it in the black. The vast majority of those subscribers are members of the Arizona State Legislature and lobbyists, which the Guardian covers “from the inside out.” With hopes of expanding its audience, the site offers three subscription plans: a 6-month “Professional subscription” for $900, a 6-month “Non-Profit subscription” for $720, and a 6-month “Individual subscription” for $180.
We spoke with Patti and Bob earlier this week about their new news organization, which recently won an award for its state government coverage.
How did The Arizona Guardian get started?
Patti: After several of us were laid off from the East Valley Tribune, we got together and talked about starting a political news site. Hooking up with Bob is what really made it happen. What was stumping the band for us as journalists was “how do you do a website?” Bob was far more web-savvy than us and he also had the business side down. So, we came up with the idea of setting up a site that could compete with the Arizona Capitol Times’ Yellow Sheet Report, a subscription-only newsletter that covers politics and political gossip.
Bob: It’s an old-school cooperative. Everybody has something to contribute and it’s not all identical. But that doesn’t mean it’s not all equal. Aside from their time and energy, their investment was effectively their severance pay. We measured the equity by a term you often hear in the construction industry called sweat equity. Everybody had and has a contribution to make and how that contribution translates in terms of currency is somewhat secondary.
What were your upfront costs?
Patti: We basically started with no capitalization, as they like to say in this world. Bob threw $10,000 into a bank account that paid for the legal fees to set up the corporation, since we’re an LLC, as well as some business cards and other minor office expenses. He’s easily recouped that money by now. But there was certainly no major funding behind us.
When we first launched in January, we started working out of the Senate pressroom, which is where all of the other state Capitol reporters were. The Senate had been leasing space to those media outlets for the past 30-40 years. However, the Senate President had already decided to kick the press corps out of the pressroom, because he said he wanted the space for legislative meetings. But who knows? We still think it’s because we were aggressively covering his affairs.
Arizona Guardian co-owner and managing editor Patti Epler
So, we took our little laptops, our Internet cards and our cell phones, and worked out of the Senate hallway for the next couple of weeks. It was actually kind of fun and we got a lot of attention. Lobbyists and legislators would stop by and commiserate.
After that we finally rented some space in the League of Arizona Cities and Towns Building, which is still on the Capitol campus. And now that the rest of the press corps has been kicked out, they’re all moving into the League of Cities building with us.
Now that you guys are situated, are you making a profit?
Bob: Yup. At this point we’re making enough to get everybody paid and keep the place operating. Which is certainly a bit more than what some early predictions were, and a lot more than what some other operations around the country are making solely on advertising. We rely on advertising a bit, but most of our revenue comes from our subscriptions.
Right now about 75% of our readers are involved in state politics and about 25% are civilians, for lack of a better term. But that latter number has grown in the last quarter and eventually we expect that 75/25 will flip. All these news web aggregators can stretch themselves thin recycling other people’s work. But at the end of the day somebody has to do the real reporting, and that’s our niche.
Our model is based on the idea that you’ve got to eat, and effectively you eat what you kill. You want to eat this week? Great, you have to get more subscribers.
Are there ever any conflicts with Bob’s involvement in the political arena?
Patti: Yes. From the beginning when we decided we’d throw in with him, we made it clear that he would have no involvement in the editorial side, whatsoever. He likes to say, “I’m the only publisher in America who can be fired by his reporters.” And to a large degree that’s true, because we could vote him off the island if we ever needed to.
We also made a big point of disclosure. Of just openly saying, “here’s who are, here’s Bob. Bob’s well known in Arizona as a political strategist and in particular as a Democratic political strategist.” So, when we write a story about something that he has had some involvement in we put a note right in the story at that point that explains his background.
Now the people who initially looked at us as a front for the Democrats when we started, no longer think that all. We’ve done a good job of alleviating that.
Have you ever considered expanding to add a full-time sales person?
Patti: One of our goals is to build our business to a point where we can hire more people to take up some of the burden. What we need right now is someone who is a dedicated sales and marketing person. We’ve never had what I would consider a serious advertising or marketing campaign. But we’re doing well for never having really reached out to advertisers.
Bob: We signed up for a few ad networks, but the level of revenue we’ve made is minuscule compared to our subscriptions. Advertising works very well if your goal is to follow the same model that made the old newspapers fail, which is just get as many eyeballs as you possibly can. When you’re doing narrow casting to a niche audience, you can’t build your revenue model based on the quantity of eyeballs, because you’re never going to get there without sacrificing the very product you’re creating.
We could have done more things with advertisers, and probably could still. And at that point we wouldn’t be what we are. We wouldn’t be producing the product that the five of us saw the need for.
Bob Grossfeld and Republican political consultant Stan Barnes on KJZZ's Here and Now. (Photo by Paul Atkinson)
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Not-for-Profit News Deep in the Heart of Texas
Posted on 27. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
The wave of not-for-profit start-ups looking to cover local and statewide news continued to grow last week with the announcement that the Texas Tribune acquired the Texas Weekly, a subscription newsletter devoted to Texas politics and government. As newspapers continue to struggle and advertising revenues fall, it seems like new news organizations are finding it easier to get off the ground without having to worry about making a profit in the bottomline (MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, and the St. Louis Beacon are three examples that leap to mind). In our research so far, we’ve come across successful for-profit news start ups less frequently.
As Neiman Lab noted, the deal gives the Tribune, which is set to launch this fall, a team of experienced reporters and an archive of content dating back to 1984.
The Tribune’s founder, venture capitalist John Thornton, told Alan Mutter last week why he thinks the not-for-profit model is the only avenue for quality, public-service journalism:
“In 2006, we looked at the challenges being faced by newspapers and how guys like us could make a profit,” he said. “The for-profit conclusion was to buy lead-generation businesses and that has worked out for us.”
But…
“I was reminded of something my pastor said when I was a kid growing up,” he explained. “If you mix politics and religion, the pastor said, you get politics. The same thing seems to be true in journalism. If you mix journalism and business, you get business. That’s when I realized serious journalism is never going to be a really good business again.”
Thornton told our own Jeff Jarvis last month that raising enough money through donations to cover state government should be a cakewalk, and might even lead to an increase in reporters on the beat.
Dance companies in Texas raise $20mm a year. . . . If journalism philanthropy, 10 years from now, were the size of dance, we’d put 150 reporters on statewide issues and could literally change the way state government operates. Think about that: an extra 20 at the capital; a couple each for all the agencies and the school board; 20 on the border. You almost can’t spend that much money responsibly. I don’t need opera. I don’t need visual arts. Don’t need symphony. Just give me dance, and I’ll change state government.
But, the starting budget will be closer to one ball than the entire dance season. Thornton tells Mutter the Tribune will run on a budget of $2 million and support a staff of 15 reporters. They won’t cover the waterfront of the state government, but they will be able to focus on the energy industry, the border with Mexico, and how demographic change is transforming the state’s politics. As Andrew Donohue, the editor of Voice of San Diego, another not-for-profit newsroom, noted in a chat with us last week, for a start up focusing on getting just a few things right in the beginning works best anyway.
Finally, here is a surely meaningless, though still interesting, indication of the Tribune’s anticipated Web 2.0-ness: even though it won’t even begin publishing for a while yet, it already claims more Facebook followers than any other newspaper in the state.
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News Innovators on the Frontline: Voice of San Diego
Posted on 24. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
As metro newspapers have faced an ugly year of decline and collapse, media observers have pointed to a number of not-for-profit efforts around the country that might fill the void. The Voice of San Diego is a notable example of a new breed of news organizations already taking up the slack, which is more than simply a theoretical discussion since the Union-Tribune was recently sold and endured a hefty round of layoffs.
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.
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Chi-Town Daily Discloses Costs for Donations
Posted on 23. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
The Chicago-based Chi-Town Daily News, a nonprofit metro news site that launched in December 2005, has set up a new kind of tip jar this month. As a way to pull in more funding, the site now tells readers the value of every article they read before requesting donations to support its ongoing coverage.
“Reader donations allow us to hire talented full-time journalists to cover key beats like housing, the environment and Chicago’s community college system, and to train volunteer neighborhood reporters,” the site denotes.
Individual stories on the site cost between $250-$1,000 to produce, depending on the word length. A typical story is worth about $350.
“It’s completely based on cost per word,” says Geoff Dougherty, the Chi-Town Daily News’ editor and CEO. “We took our expenditures for the last fiscal year and divided them by the number of words that we published over the same period.”
“In addition to boosting our donations, we’re offering people a really useful window into the cost of producing public affairs news,” he adds.
Donations from readers go to the organization’s general overhead — rent and utilities, “the occasional computer,” and paying the website’s seven-member staff, which includes a community organizer, three beat reporters, and two part-time editors.
Plenty of nonprofit news organizations like NPR have asked for donations from their audiences over the years, but Chi-Town Daily News is one of the first to breakdown its costs on a story-to-story basis. Their model resembles the one developed by Spot.Us, which asks for readers to cover the costs of investigative stories — like the origins of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — before the fact.
“If you look at NPR, they often talk about how much it costs to run a news station,” says Geoff. “But there’s never been a specific breakdown of costs. We thought this might be a good way to get readers more engaged in the funding of news.”
