It has been a remarkable, exciting week for those of us at Growing Community Media. Over the past four years, dating to our remaking as a nonprofit newsroom, we’ve been reinventing the model for authentic, local news.
We don’t want to repeat for you the travails which have put local news across America at risk.
Instead, we’re focusing on the future.
We started with the simple truth that people still want to know and understand what goes on in the town they choose for home. They want an independent newsroom with local roots doing the reporting.
We’re building the plane as we’re flying it, and with our trusty craft in midair, we’ve been pitching parts out the door, adding people and products, listening better to readers about what they want to know, building new streams of revenue to pay for it all and crafting a pretty unique hybrid. Advertising. Reader memberships. Philanthropy. Print. Digital. Social. Email. And with COVID ending, mixing in a few events.
This week, two key strands of the new revenue model are happily overlapping.
GCM and its Austin Weekly News have just earned a two-year grant from Press Forward, a new national philanthropy, which we’ll use to hire a managing editor for our West Side paper. We’ve proudly published the Austin Weekly for 38 years. But our reporting has always been constrained by a limited pool of ad dollars. Now as a nonprofit, we are finding new revenue streams to pay for more news coverage, more pages, more community connection.
A couple of sidenotes: For the first time we will form a community-inclusive hiring committee to be central to choosing the managing editor. And as soon as we are able to find funding, we will open a West Side Public Newsroom. This will be a storefront in Austin where our staff can work from, interviews can take place, small groups of neighbors can convene to talk about issues and our coverage. We’ll also welcome reporters from other news outlets reporting on the West Side to share the space.
We are grateful to Press Forward that GCM and 12 other independent Chicago newsrooms were in the first cohort of grants from this ambitious local news effort.
At the same time, we’re midway through our annual Spring Fund Drive. I am certain, with your help, that we will raise the last $75,000 of our goal. This is the money that goes into the newsroom to pay reporters, editors, designers, and a digital manager to tell stories across our four publications.
If you are a member of GCM, then please renew. If you are reading our news for free, then snap out of it. Our costs are real. Our reporters provide value. This is our invitation to really join this enterprise, to be part of this powerful community.
Last thing, on Saturday, GCM made the donuts at the Oak Park Farmers Market for the first time. Thanks for coming. Hope you liked them. Thanks to our staff and the volunteers who made this work. It is another way to support local news.