Tiny News Collective exists to support early-stage news entrepreneurs all across the United States who are raising their hands to provide community-focused news and information and places for community connection. We are who we are because of the founders we serve. And we want the journalism field, the civic information space and beyond to know about the creative, impactful work of these founders. To that end, we are thrilled to highlight their stories through an ongoing series of profiles and features.
For our latest feature, we talked with Samantha Anne Carrillo of UpLift Chronicles, a project of New Mexico Black Leadership Council (NMBLC). The mission of Uplift Chronicles is to provide essential information and perspectives, amplify Black and multicultural voices and narratives, and empower connection and engagement among BIPOC affinity groups in New Mexico, with a focus on the International District of Albuquerque. The publication started as print-only, but with the help of Tiny News Collective and support from the New Mexico Local News Fund, it launched a regularly updated website on Ghost last August. Carrillo talked about which stories have resonated with her audience, the launch of the website and their plans to start selling advertising.
The primary audience for UpLift Chronicles, which is New Mexico Black Leadership Council’s community newspaper, is Black / African American and multicultural individuals and communities as well as allied folks, organizations and businesses in our home neighborhood, Albuquerque’s International District, as well as throughout the state of New Mexico.
The International District is the most densely populated neighborhood in New Mexico. Historically and presently, it’s also one of the most culturally rich and diverse neighborhoods in the state. As with many under-resourced areas that house so many people, there are significant public safety challenges. Those issues already receive more than their fair share of mainstream media coverage, so UpLift Chronicles focuses on highlighting and amplifying the neighborhood’s deeply multicultural residents, communities and assets.
When I joined NMBLC, UpLift Chronicles was publishing PDFs of our print issues via Issuu.com and embedding them on the newspaper landing page of nmblc.org. That’s not the most intuitive or wieldy means of sharing journalism with readers, and it also doesn’t provide a viable option for offering digital advertising and sponsorship options. So we decided to create a dedicated website for UpLift Chronicles, upliftnewmexico.org, which we launched on the Ghost content management system.
Onboarding via Ghost was simple and user-friendly. There was a learning curve for me personally, having not purchased a URL or created a publication website from the ground up. But thanks to support from Ghost and Tiny News Collective, we have been able to launch and publish without any significant hiccups.
Our readers report enjoying the minimalist design of the theme we chose, and it’s great for us to be able to direct folks straight to an article as opposed to linking to a certain page of an issue’s PDF. The process for making changes to the theme has been straightforward, and we’re very pleased with the results.
Our readers responded most enthusiastically to UpLift Chronicles coverage of the 27 Black New Mexican oral histories that Ellery Washington collected for Incite Institute’s Black Elders Project. I believe that’s because humans who self-identify as Black, Indigenous and Latinx are hungry for authentic representation and American histories that genuinely reflect their communities, cultures, families and actual lived experience.
Our second-most popular article covered “Love Trumps Hate,” an original mural that NMBLC commissioned local artist Noé Barnett to create. When someone graffitied “Trump” on our offices, NMBLC founder and CEO Cathryn McGill had the idea to transform a tag that aimed to foster division into a “get out the vote” message that honored her ancestors and encouraged civic engagement in concert with NMBLC’s volunteer-led New Mexico Black Voters Collaborative.
Other articles that saw high engagement were an editorial on the latest dismal KIDS COUNT data for New Mexico and coverage of the University of New Mexico’s Center for Inclusive Health's Street Medicine team, which brings backpack-powered healthcare to the unhoused, as well as the local community garden run by Project Feed the Hood, which is SouthWest Organizing Project’s food justice arm.
From arts-based positive youth development to initiatives that empower civic engagement, cultural vibrancy, wellness and workforce development, NMBLC’s nonprofit work revolves around fostering sustainable leadership, creating inclusive opportunities, developing multicultural capacity, and cultivating progressive partnerships. Our work, which supports Black and multicultural individuals and communities, benefits all New Mexicans. UpLift Chronicles’ print and digital coverage fits well with our nonprofit areas of impact and serves as a core component of NMBLC’s overarching communications infrastructure.
For example, our latest UpLift Chronicles issue features extensive coverage of founding members of NMBLC’s International District Engagement and Support (IDEAS) Network, an entrepreneurial cohort comprised of local businesses that’s designed to connect and empower members by linking and leveraging resources, showcasing business strengths, providing support, promoting access and mobilizing the local business community during times of both joy and sorrow.
Thanks to our participation in New Mexico Local News Fund’s Accelerator program, we are just a couple steps away from finalizing our print and digital advertising and content sponsorship rates and the related processes for accepting and soliciting camera-ready advertising for our print issue and digital advertising and sponsorship options for our website.
Our plan is to finalize the UpLift Chronicles media kit and rate card before the end of the year and begin soliciting advertising and content sponsorship from businesses and organizations both within and outside of our communities in early 2025. The goal of cultivating these revenue streams is to create a source of sustainable funding that can move our newspaper beyond nonprofit funding, grants and donations. We hope that advertising and sponsorship funding will ultimately empower us to cover our monthly printing costs and invest in our staff and use of technological publishing solutions while also growing our newspaper’s original reporting capacity.
Learn more about other TNC founders by reading these stories:
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