Community news sites are not a business yet

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There is a mismatch between instilling sustainable civic demand for local news information and developing sustainable economic models.

While most of the New Voices sites are exploring hybrid models of support, none is raising enough money to pay full salaries and benefits. Instead, they are eking out income via such sources as memberships, donations, sponsorships, advertising, coupon deals, events, fee-based training, crowd-funded stories, consulting and grants.

No one in this space yet seems to be receiving money for licensing their content, as a few larger nonprofits have done.

Two have launched with partners that had an advertising infrastructure. However, Hartsville Today was “never really integrated into the operations” of its partner, the semi-weekly Messenger, or the newspaper’s ad sales staff, Fisher said.

Grosse Pointe Today launched with a plan to have the 45-year-old Blue Book directory sell ads on its behalf, but revenues were disappointing and the relationship has ended. Nevertheless, said founder Burns, “We got into this for the long haul.”

A handful of sites have been awarded their own nonprofit status, including Grosse Pointe Today, The Austin Bulldog, and The Forum. While this makes it easier to get grants, it also means they must ensure in the future that a third of their income comes from public sources, as required by the IRS.

Many of the sites would benefit from putting a greater emphasis on search engine optimization. Simple steps, like specifically identifying their geographic reach in their site structure (headers, sections, footers) or within individual stories, could help readers and advertisers find them more easily and clarify the site’s mission for prospective supporters.

Now, some sites are facing competition from commercial operations, such as AOL’s Patch.com, which offers a templated website, pays a salaried editor, and networks regional and national advertising.

Whether these top-down, cookie-cutter enterprises can connect well with hundreds of communities remains to be seen. We suspect that much will depend on the site editors’ attachments to their communities. At best, they will provide more needed community information. At worst, they will siphon off display advertising much like craigslist siphoned off classifieds from newspapers.

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