If we were to measure the New Voices projects by mainstream media’s or venture capitalists’ measures of success, we’d look at how much money they raised or how many unique visitors they had.
It is no small achievement that the 46 projects leveraged the $833,000 in New Voices grant funds into at least $1.44 million in other grants, donations and advertising revenue. This does not count hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of in-kind donations: faculty time and other university support, AmeriCorps VISTA workers, office space, technology, pro bono legal advice and other services.
Still, most of that – $760,000 – was brought in by one project, TC Daily Planet and it was mostly from grants. Others are now moving more aggressively to find monetary support — although not all really want to.
At least one, New Castle NOW, located in an affluent New York City bedroom community, brought in $90,000 in ad revenue from 73 advertisers in less than three years. But ad sales are not a primary focus of the founders whose real passions are covering the school board, community development and town meetings. And the town’s retail environment, with a main street of tony boutiques, was unique among the New Voices grantees and not replicable in many places.
Investors in newly launched news sites, such as TBD.com, are figuring on at least three years to profitability. Nevertheless, the majority of the New Voices sites aspire to be sustainable, and they are doggedly moving to leverage their service to their community into dollar support.
It is too much for these sites, with only micro-funding, to build a website, populate it with content, launch it, trigger community impact and attract major support to be fully sustainable after only two years.
Many of the New Voices projects have achieved excellent traffic. One project, New Era News, a politics blog by young Coloradans, leveraged its interns’ network of friends to juice 6,000 unique visits and 44,000 page views in just its first month. But many others consider 1,000 or fewer monthly unique visitors to be just fine for their small communities. As important is the kind, not just the number, of eyeballs as town officials or candidates running for office sought out the sites as important platforms for their news. Also, many sites are getting more than 50 percent of their traffic from search engines even though they have only minimal search-engine-optimization skills.
Four of the projects – Grand Avenue News in Coconut Grove, Fla.; Rural Route 7 in Coolville and Tupper Plains, Ohio; Nuestro Tahoe on the north shore of Lake Tahoe; and Deerfield’s Forum – found they needed to offer their low-bandwidth communities print editions as well, an expensive undertaking.
Because of the diversity of projects funded, ranging from rural to metro areas, from university-led to all-volunteer projects, we see other measures of impact and success we think should be injected into any conversation about local media. They are important markers for serving community information needs. So, we pose some additional questions: