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Helping Community News Startups

Oakland Local: Sustaining Momentum

Oakland Local is a case study in a New Era for Community News Sites – namely how future sites will use social media to ramp up, spark buzz, and build an instant brand.

Key to its going live in October 2009 was an orchestrated time line of outreach. At 3 a.m. the day before launch, founder Susan Mernit and her partners wrote emails to 800 people, urging them to look at the site and tweet or blog about it the next day.

That compressed timeline, she said, was essential: It resulted in more than 1,800 visitors on launch day, and the Twitter activity prompted stories in three trade publications.

On Facebook, the site began attracting 100 new members a day. As of September 2010, it had 4,150 Facebook fans and more than 2,450 Twitter followers and 309,500 unique visitors. “Facebook is a profound referral source for us and a huge brand builder,” Mernit said. “In terms of momentum I think Twitter is fantastic, but Facebook has become a dominant tool.”

“Facebook is a profound referral source for us and a huge brand builder.” - Susan Mernit

“Facebook is a profound referral source for us and a huge brand builder.”
- Susan Mernit

Mernit said a lot of the initial effort involved coaxing. “Every single person who registered on the site got a personal note,” she said. “I was really trying to coax a little fire into a flame before it went out.”

The site has partnered with 35 community organizations and worked hard to see that their content was included. It also partners with Bay Area media outlets.

Mernit set aside $3,000 of her original New Voices grant to build the site and reserved the rest for writers.  She and two co-founders work for free, for now, drawing their livelihoods from consulting and other work.

Mernit knew she couldn’t pay her writers $400 or $600 for a story, but she could pay $200 or $250 for some.  And she raised more by pitching stories on the crowdfunding site Spot.Us to cover an important trial in Los Angeles. Other news outlets picked up the site’s coverage.

But she doesn’t aspire to be an all-volunteer site. “I was very aggressive about fundraising. I knew we couldn’t wait till the money ran out before we raised money,” she said. She enlisted friends to research grant possibilities at the FoundationCenter.org’s site.

“We got turned down a lot,” she said. However, as of June 2010, nine months after launch, she had raised $102,500 from four grants, including funding to help the site be viewed not just on smart phones, but basic cell phones as well.

In addition, Oakland Local is going out of its way to provide training to build media skills in the overall community – not just training citizen journalists to write for the site.

For Oakland Local, key issues are food access, the environment, social justice and development. Mernit said it’s important to tell funders what your issues are and “not that I just need money to keep going.”

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