We emerge from this stage of our grant experiences with some recommendations - both for startup community new sites and those who wish to support them.
For those who seek to launch their own community news sites, be they professional or amateur journalists, we urge you to:
- Start simply with free or open-source software.
- Be sure project leaders stay involved; delegating key tasks to grad assistants or volunteers doesn’t work.
- Build in a community editor or partnership coordinator on the front end to engage in the high-touch work of teasing out content contributors.
- Hook interest from entities with established infrastructures - agricultural extension agencies, public libraries, community technology centers.
- Try everything. Keep what works and redo what doesn’t. Be willing to do so quickly.
- Remember that the community doesn’t only want news; it wants connections as well.
- Think of your task as not just covering community, but building it as well.
For those in a position to support new developments in the community news ecosystem, consider interventions that:
- Build up social media skills for community news sites.
- Convene existing site operators with wannabe site founders.
- Provide training in grant writing and management.
- Establish a New Ideas Fund for ideas that surface after the project really understands what it needs.
- Build a second-tier Tech Fund for sites ready for more complex web development.
- Ramp up donor education so that interested high-wealth individuals understand opportunities for supporting new media infrastructures.
- Develop ad software that can help small sites monetize their value to their communities.
Conclusion
Moving forward, the landscape keeps changing in exciting, but challenging, ways. Commercial competition is moving full bore onto the community news scene. Professional journalists, gone from their newsrooms, are ferreting out new ways to practice journalism in the community news space. Social media is ramping up the speed of site launches. And, new technologies continue to introduce new opportunities and efficiencies.
We have seen how the opportunities for empowering citizens to be citizens are activated when they have the news and information they need to do their jobs as citizens. Matching that civic demand with civic sustainability continues to be the challenge for the future.
What is not changing is the acute demand for news coverage - and for connections - in communities large and small, from metro suburbs to college towns to rural areas. We have seen how the opportunities for empowering citizens to be citizens are activated when they have the news and information they need to do their jobs as citizens.
Matching that civic demand with civic sustainability continues to be the challenge for the future.