The Tiny News Collective staff is expanding to meet the needs of our growing community of news entrepreneurs, and we are excited to announce our very first operations director: Erica Beshears Perel. She will join the team on December 2 and will buttress our internal capacity and infrastructure to support the 50 (and counting!) TNC members who are starting up and leading news outlets in communities across the country. She will lead finance, human resources, general operations and oversee our popular fiscal sponsorship program.
Perel is a lifelong journalist, journalism educator and nonprofit leader. She worked for a decade as a reporter for the Charlotte Observer and was most recently the director of the University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. While there, she worked with local news organizations on audience and revenue challenges and also oversaw applied research on the local news industry. Before that, she spent 13 years supporting student journalists at The Daily Tar Heel, the independent newsroom at UNC. During her three-plus years leading that nonprofit newsroom as general manager, she ended 10 years of declining revenue by growing new revenue streams from donations, merchandise and a student creative agency.
"We need new models for media entrepreneurship, and I am very interested in the combination of independent ownership and decision-making with strong, scaled back-end support,” Perel said. “I'm eager to explore this model with the team at Tiny News alongside diverse founders who have an expansive view of news and information. It’s exciting to pioneer flexible, creative solutions to the business of news."
Perel will join Tiny News at a time of growth, building on the momentum from bringing on Andrea Faye Hart as membership director in June. Tiny News is strengthening its staff and infrastructure to help support an increased number of news founders covering underserved communities.
“We are thrilled for Erica to join our team,” said Amy L. Kovac-Ashley, executive director of Tiny News Collective. “Her experience as a journalist, in running a nonprofit newsroom, and in academia is a perfect fit for us as we strengthen our internal systems so we can support more news startups in more places that vitally need them. Erica is a consummate and empathetic professional who will bring her expertise not just to our staff but also to our members.”
Welcome to the team, Erica! 💜
TNC
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