Helping news entrepreneurs and their communities flourish everywhere
By Andrea Faye Hart
It’s been quite a journey these past six months since I started as Tiny News Collective’s first membership director. I’ve met an amazing group of founders who are on the frontlines providing news and information for communities in dire need of trusted sources and third spaces to connect in the face of polarization. And to do that job, which might not be their only job, they need focus, desire, tenacity and passion on a super-sized level, especially as “solopreneurs.”
I’m honored that Tiny News gets to work alongside them to provide the infrastructure and support to help them succeed. It’s been a privilege to hear about their challenges, triumphs and everything in between, and I wanted to share some lessons I’ve learned along the way.
Yes, traditional news gaps are widening around the country, but what’s heartening is the expanding number of people who remind us that plenty still grows in a desert. I witness this every day in the founders who keep showing an interest in joining Tiny News. Despite minimal promotion on our part — through word of mouth, social channels and this newsletter — we’ve had a steady stream of applicants and grown our membership more than three times its size since January.
One big draw for membership is business model flexibility through our fiscal sponsorship. There’s as much interest as there is creativity in reaching underserved communities, and the result is a series of experimentations that the larger industry can learn from. Of course, if you are interested in joining Tiny News and experimenting with us, you can learn more here.
It might not be listed in our service features, but one of the best parts of Tiny News is the genuine mutual aid that happens among founders. We have regular “community calls” with members, but after the election, we had a special one, with a grounding that included a reading of Grace Lee Boggs’ speech, “Reimagine Everything.” And we had people surface questions that were coming up for them after the election, from “how do I be a leader at an exhausting time?” to “how can philanthropy show up at this important moment?” Many shared about fears of being demonized by doing fundamental journalism practices, and others hoped to reconnect people to counteract polarization.
I also noticed how quickly founders are willing to help each other, even during our monthly onboarding calls with them. In one of those conversations, founders from Ottawa News Network (in Michigan) and Oxford Free Press (in Ohio) offered advice back and forth as they have similar audiences, and similar backgrounds. Mutual aid comes out in lighthearted exchanges and in bigger, more complicated moments. Even a guest trainer, Lex Roman, who hosted a workshop on growing newsletter subscribers in October, got into the spirit of mutual aid by sharing a free checklist of tips they generated after coaching conversations with our founders.
It’s true that we offer monthly training sessions for founders, but what can be even more powerful is the generative space that allows founders to share their own experiences in a brave way. To make this work, we have to allow everyone to contribute, and share their needs and values for collaboration. In some cases, the group actually sets out agreements to make generative space work. We did that with an AI community agreement so that people could feel safe while others in the group were using AI tools for notes.
At other times, it means holding space for conflicting opinions, generative conflict. Our November training for members was on AI tips for small, indie publishers. Some of our members are adapting AI tools to cut down on the many jobs they hold as solopreneurs. Others are opposed to using AI because of its environmental impact. It’s important to us that founders can share the many complicated feelings/decisions that emerge when running an outlet and that we can offer a space that’s not binary, punitive and prescriptive.
I really appreciate the geographic diversity of our members. It’s affirming to have people from Alaska, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico and so many places beyond the big cities and the coasts. That will have big implications in the long run on shifting infrastructure so that more small indie news outlets will be better supported even if they aren’t TNC members. Our partnership with Wichita Foundation, supporting The SHOUT, TMBP Media and Planeta Venus, is a good example because it’s not just funding that’s needed. It’s also a change in how community foundations as well as other civic institutions have operated. Yes, we need more investments in startup news outlets, but we also need stakeholders to be less proprietary and more collaborative as we rebuild the social contract to be more inclusive.
So far, the first six months with Tiny News has been an eye-opening, spiritually affirming experience for me. I’ve helped to build community-based news outlets in the past, but now I get to survey the whole ecosystem of smaller startups around the country. My goal is to plant seeds so we can continue to add members and make sure the ethos of Tiny News grows with it.
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 (for both members and clients).
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.
For our latest “5 Questions with…” feature, we talked with one of TNC’s earliest OG founders, Crystal Good of Black by God, the West Virginian. The BBG online and print publications showcase the diverse experiences of Black and BIPOC communities in West Virginia and the Appalachian region. Their goal is to lift the voices, perspectives and issues overlooked by the mainstream media. Crystal talked about two new newsletters on agriculture and technology, her plans to add more short-form video content and her vision for the future of Black by God.
Part of that vision includes adding staff so that Crystal can be out in the community engaging with folks in person. “I really just want to get BBG standing up really strong so that I am not just the centerpiece for this. I think a lot of people know it's my baby, and I love my baby so much that I want it to be able to function without me. I'm really trying to get things in order so BBG can stand on her own. I’m so busy sometimes that I’m not in the community the way I want to be. I really want to have folks in place that can do these roles that I do currently. That way I can spend more time being the eyes and ears of the community.”
Read the whole feature here.
Our executive director Amy L. Kovac-Ashley was recently singing the gospel of Tiny News Collective on the “It’s All Journalism” podcast, the “broccoli of media-focused podcasts.” This episode was easy to digest, with Amy talking about the history of TNC, and the importance of providing customized support for founders at different stages of their journey. She also mentioned the importance of partnerships for TNC along with the diversity of founders.
“Our mission is to help diversify the people who are entrepreneurs and owners of media but also the kinds of content and other activities and experiences people are having with news and information across the country,” Amy said. “A majority of the founders that are our members are 70 to 75 percent BIPOC, almost 90 percent women and a very large percentage of folks who are from the LGBTQ+ community. We want to work with folks who are serving communities and are really focused on their audience first. That’s a really important part of the application process with us.”
Listen to the whole thing here. 🎙️
🚀More TNC members made the splash with launches this month. Those include:
Congratulations to all our newborn newsrooms! 🍼
✍🏽TNC member Julio Ricardo Varela of The Latino Newsletter wrote a wonderful piece for Columbia Journalism Review explaining that the Latino vote in the presidential election, with a larger percentage voting for Trump and Republicans since 2004, isn’t homogeneous despite many media stories to the contrary. He talked to a lot of different sources for the story. “There should be no more talking about Latino voters as a whole. But we do have to talk about college-educated Latinos, working-class Latinos. We have to talk about Latino men and Latina women and gender divides,” Vox’s Christian Paz told Varela.
As a bonus, Julio also was a guest on the 1A show on NPR!
🔥 Founder Jai Smith announced that Lehigh Daily in Northeast Pennsylvania launched its TikTok channel 60 days ago and has already reached 1.5 million people with more than 3.6 million video views! “We’re just getting started. This is how local news evolves as tides change,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn. That is impressive!
RJI fellowships from the Reynolds Journalism Institute
Applications open December 2 and are due by February 7. Remote fellows receive a $25,000 stipend and $5,000 impact bonus, and residential fellows get $100,000 for project costs and a monthly $5,000 living stipend. Register for a Q&A about the fellowship on Dec. 4 here.
How infrastructure is foundational to local news, from Press Forward
Learn more about Press Forward’s open call for infrastructure grants (due Jan. 15) and how current Press Forward funders are supporting journalism support orgs.
Show care in helping your community navigate post-election life, from Trusting News
How can we as journalists lean into what different audiences need from us and help them navigate through? How can we extend empathy for the different mindsets people are in?
How five LION members are maximizing revenue through events, from LION Publishers
If you’re thinking about adding events to your product mix, these examples and lessons learned can help you on your way.
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 Andrea Faye Hart, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Amy L. Kovac-Ashley and Andrea Faye Hart
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