Helping news entrepreneurs and their communities flourish
By Amy Kovac-Ashley
Being a founder of a news startup can be a lonely and isolating pursuit. One of the most important services that Tiny New Collective provides is the community of founders we’ve co-created. Leaning into the “collective” part of our name, TNC is a place for founders to ask for tips and guidance, share their knowledge and be connected to one another, regardless of physical space. We believe it’s also imperative to offer a “brave space” for them to talk honestly about what’s happening, including both their wins and struggles. We even provide founder-only gatherings that don't include TNC staff, so they can speak founder to founder.
The work is so intense, and often founders don’t have a lot of people to talk to about it, who understand their challenges. They need a space for the “real talk” to process their experiences. I’ve been told by members that these spaces often take on the feel of group therapy. We strive to foster a nurturing space where people can open up about their professional and personal lives. If someone is going through a tough time, others are quick to offer encouragement; announcements about success are met with celebration and congratulations just as quickly.
Our goal is to make sure that our facilitation of these spaces keeps up with the needs of the community. That’s why we recently created a “Community Care Agreement for AI Tools” in response to some members’ use of AI tools to take notes and summarize our meetings. We understood why people used the tools, but we wanted to think more deeply about how those tools would affect the openness of the discussions.
After consulting with our community and others, we landed on allowing the use of the AI tools, but with limitations on sharing them with others outside of the Tiny News Collective or keeping them archived indefinitely. You can read more about our thinking behind the agreement in this blog post by TNC’s Pilar de Haro, as well as a public excerpt from the agreement.
The concept of community care is incredibly important and necessary for this entrepreneurial part of the news industry. Most people in startups are accustomed to the idea of work, work, work till you drop, without breaks or vacations. That’s just not sustainable.
“To defend against burnout, I guard my family time and hobby time, workouts and hangouts,” wrote TNC member Nora Hertel of Project Optimist in a post on RJI. “I’ve gone skiing twice this winter, and it took me a good hour each time to stop thinking about work. But standing at the top of a black diamond in the freezing cold finally snapped me into the present moment.”
In August, our monthly member workshop will focus on mental health and burnout prevention skills, led by AX Mina, program director of The Self-Investigation, a nonprofit foundation focused on mental health and well-being in the news industry. We are here to support founders’ businesses, of course, but perhaps more importantly we are also here to support founders on their personal journeys as entrepreneurs. As the news business slowly catches onto the importance of community care, TNC will continue to make sure it’s a vital part of what we offer founders.
After the public radio-backed local news site DCist closed in the nation’s capital, six former staffers decided to launch a new worker-led nonprofit newsroom, The 51st, to cover local news in Washington, D.C. They are one of the newest members of Tiny News, and they just launched a crowdfunding campaign with the goal of bringing in $250,000 in 30 days. Do you think the community would step up? Hell yeah! With a nudge from a Washington Post story (which featured a nice mention of Tiny News), the campaign brought in more than $104,000 in its first day, with another $50,000+ on the second day.
“We are floored by this flood of support,” the founders wrote on the crowdfunding page. “Thank you for your donations, your shares on social media, and your encouraging messages. We can’t wait to make this happen with all of you.” Neither can we. ❤️
By Madison Karas and Pilar de Haro
Traditional newsrooms have focused a lot of time and energy on becoming more data-focused in all of their operations, from the journalism they produce to their revenue streams. Extensive dashboards and detailed reports are now the norm. But for small publishers, all of that data can just be too much overwhelming noise. More importantly, these publishers need to know what these metrics add up to and how these relate to the impact that they want to make in their communities.
Thanks to funding and support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, our ambition to start building a data and metrics program began this spring. We pursued our research with the goal of identifying a set of metrics, sourced from community, audience, revenue and product data, that could be used as indicators and boosters for just-launched and very-tiny organizations.
Many of the conversations we had in our research brought us back to the same point: We’ll never be able to prescribe one definitive set of metrics to all tiny news organizations, as news organizations need to tie their metrics to their mission and audience. That underscores the need for thorough pre-launch audience research.
Read the whole blog post to learn more about our early research results.
Are you interested in joining the Collective or know someone who is? Want to make a difference in your community (geographical or topical) by providing news and information? Our membership director Andrea Faye Hart will answer any questions you have about TNC in her monthly AMA session on Zoom on July 30 at 3 pm ET. Register here or share with your friends who want to learn more.
As part of our support for TNC founders, we recently launched a new series of profiles to learn more about their work, their impact and plans for the future. Our first feature spotlighted Nora Hertel from Project Optimist, a news outlet that takes its name seriously in doing solutions journalism to give people more agency in the news they read. Nora talks about the big win of receiving a $100,000 grant from McKnight Foundation to help support her operations. Last year, McKnight funding helped her launch a community conversation series, “Shades of Purple.”
As for her vision for the future? “Our vision is very optimistic, but the path will not be easy. Project Optimist is working to engage more community members in civic life in order to mend divisions and help problem-solvers take on the huge issues of our day,” she said. “Some of the problems we want to help our community chip away at include climate change, inequity, political polarization and social isolation. I think stories, art and conversations are the best tools to do this work.”
Read more in the 5 Questions profile and check out Nora’s latest piece for RJI, a call for help to support local news entrepreneurs.
Every month, the Big Blast will highlight the wonderful work (and media appearances) of TNC founders. Here’s a selection of recent news from our founders.
🙌 Nancy Flores from Austin Vida spoke on a panel at the National Association for Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) 2024 conference, “How Product Leaders Are Shaping the Future of News.” She talked about her experience building community-based news products. As TNC’s Pilar de Haro told Nancy afterward: “Adding your cultural lens to unpack failure was super valuable and reassuring to hear.” Follow Nancy on LinkedIn and you can see this lovely video she made about her time at the NAHJ conference and hear about why she created Austin Vida.
🎤 Delonte Harrod (smiling, middle right) of Intersection Magazine did a great job on the panel with the Maryland Humanities Council entitled, “Pulling Back the Curtain: Media’s Power in Crafting Our Shared Experiences.” Delonte talked about how important it is for journalists to be good listeners and to center stories on community knowledge and experience. “Black people have always found ways to have an information ecosystem," Delonte said, when discussing news deserts. “We need to center Black people's knowledge and their community solutions.”
🤑 The folks at Rascal News are running a one-month pledge drive to raise money and are leading with data and transparency about their goals and how they will spend the money. Plus, they are using avenues like Twitch to reach people. They will end the pledge drive in August at Gen Con on a panel called “Meet the Rascals.”
"We have two big goals for this pledge drive,” they wrote. “The first is that [co-founders] Lin, Rowan, and Chase want to be able to write for Rascal full time, for a decent living wage, without the need for survival jobs. The second is that we want to raise enough money to be able to commission freelance writers regularly." Go Rascals!
🎙️ Crystal Good of Black By God The West Virginian was featured in a recent interview on KBLA 1580’s show “The Black Pack with Adrianne Shropshire” about her experience as an Affrilachian from West Virginia. People have been reaching out to Crystal nonstop since the announcement of the Republican vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, the author of the 2016 book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“The sad part is nobody’s going to meet the Appalachia that I live in, the West Virginia that I love and adore, in the shadow of all of this rhetoric,” she said. In 2019, Crystal contributed to a book called “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to ‘Hillbilly Elegy’” with a poem entitled, “HE Said/SHE Said.” Crystal is a sixth-generation West Virginian.
Here’s a roundup of resources to support small newsrooms:
Social is down, newsletters are up: How audiences are finding LIONs in 2024 from LION Publishers
With changes in social media algorithms, publishers are focused on direct engagement with audiences.
The heat is killing us: Data for journalists covering climate change and gun violence from Maynard Institute
A free webinar on July 30 at 3 p.m. ET with Helina Selemon from New York Amsterdam News and Aaron Glantz of Maynard Institute.
Building democracy fellowship from Solutions Journalism Network
Selected newsrooms will receive a grant of $10,000 and nine months of training, resources and coaching to integrate solutions journalism into their existing government reporting. Apply by July 31.
Create a donor stewardship plan from the Pivot Fund
Read this post and watch the full webinar, which looks at the art of donor engagement, focusing on the unique challenges faced by both hyperlocal newsrooms and fundraisers of color and sharing solutions from experienced practitioners.
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Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Big Blast from Tiny News. Be sure to follow us on social media to keep up with the latest from TNC and our amazing group of founders!
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tiny-news-collective/
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The Big Blast Credits
Written by Amy L. Kovac-Ashley, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Amy L. Kovac-Ashley and Andrea Faye Hart
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