By
James Breiner
Launching a news publication online is
the easy part. Paying the bills and surviving for several years is the hard
part.
Three of those who have evolved and
survived for at least five years are La Silla Vacia, a political
website in Colombia, Homicide Watch, a news and data platform in three
U.S. cities, and Texas Tribune, a news site focused on Texas civic
life.
It often takes at least four iterations
for a digital initiative to gain traction, according to Michael Maness, vice president of the Knight
Foundation’s Journalism and Media Innovation program.
Maness moderated a panel in which the
editors told their stories at the International Symposium on Online Journalism
April 5 at the Knight Center for Digital Journalism in the Americas in Austin,
Texas.
Power in Colombia
Juanita Leon, founder and publisher of
La Silla Vacia (“the Empty Chair”), said that her team of four journalists aims
to cover how political and business power make themselves felt in Colombia.
It would be quite easy to go bankrupt
doing investigative journalism in Colombia, she said, because it offends so
many of the people and organizations who have the resources to be sponsors or
advertisers. So she considers it a success that in the five years of the site,
she has had two babies and has not had to sell her car to keep the operation
going.
La Silla, as it is called for short,
averages about 500,000 unique users a month. The staff writes five original
stories a day, hosts a debate platform and publishes 15 blogs. Leon sees La
Silla as a laboratory to test innovations in the production and distribution of
news.
They have experimented with new story
forms and databases, such as one that traces connections among powerful
families and political figures. They have had many scoops, won international
awards, and had impact far beyond the newsroom. A national survey of opinion
leaders showed it is the third-most read website in the country.
Monthly revenues and expenses total
about US$40,000, mostly for salaries. For 2013, their revenues came from:
- 23 percent advertising
- 52 percent grants, mainly the Open Society Foundation
- 12 percent workshops and consulting for independent media
- 7 percent contributions from readers, called “super amigos”
- 6 percent from university events such as high-profile debates
Among her recommendations to aspiring
digital entrepreneurs:
- hire artists and engineers as well as journalists to promote creativity
- how you see yourself matters — are you a community service or a business?
- have a unique personality
- build upon existing networks
- be transparent; let people know how and why you made a mistake
- each user is important
Colombia has lived through decades of
armed conflict between left-wing and right-wing groups, so managing the
comments section of La Silla has been tricky. Commenters have to register with
their real names and agree to rules of civility.
“We answer every comment,” Leon said.
“That gives you a different relationship with your audience.”
A different kind of crime reporting
Laura Amico, CEO and founder of
Homicide Watch D.C., has a similar story of living close to the edge
financially to keep her entrepreneurial venture going. “We have been
bootstrapped from Day One. We have never had investors. We are paying our bills
and making it,” she told me in an interview.
“Five years in, it is every day a
question of can it be viable. We are always looking for a partner.”
Her original idea was to understand her
neighborhood better by investigating how it is affected by violence and how the
criminal justice system functions. She decided to track every homicide case
through the D.C. justice system, from the perspective of the victims, the
suspects, the investigators, the prosecutors, and the convicted.
The site's slogan describes it well:
“Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.”
She told how she and her husband,
Chris, a data journalist and computer programmer, cut back drastically on
dining out and socializing so that they could fund their project.
A year ago she and her husband moved to
Boston so she could study at Harvard on a Nieman-Berkman Fellowship.
With Laura gone, who would run Homicide Watch? They ran a Kickstarter campaign
that raised US$47,000 to pay a staff of student interns to keep the operation
going. She now is using the site as a platform to train young journalists to
cover the criminal justice system.
Most of the revenue for the operation
comes from licensing the data-tracking software to the Chicago Sun-Times and
the Trentonian, which also have Homicide Watch operations.
From crime to education
She and her husband are now expanding
their concept of structured journalism coverage to education, with the help of
WBUR in Boston, the Knight Foundation and the Boston Foundation, as described here in NiemanLab.
“Working with Homicide Watch is what I
am most proud of having done in my career,” she told me. “The challenges that
we face every day are exceedingly hard. I didn’t imagine five years ago that I
would have to have the conversations that I do have about partnerships and
advertising and what we need to do legally, paying taxes. They’re really hard
things to learn.”
What keeps her going, she said, are the
comments on the website, such as when a family member of a homicide victim
offers thanks for showing their loved one as a person, not just a crime
statistic.
In Texas, US$4 million in seed funding
The Texas Tribune story is not one of
bootstrapping but rather of developing a business model for watchdog
journalism.
Editor Emily Ramshaw told the attendees
at ISOJ that the journalism model and the business model have evolved since the
Trib launched in 2009 with seed funding of US$4 million.
At that time, it had a staff of 29; today it has a staff of 40.
“From the beginning we have focused on
data that would be searchable,” she said.
They started with a database of
public employee salaries, which was tremendously popular. They have since expanded the data offerings to include
information on public schools, water usage, lobbyists and campaign finance. The
data drives much of the traffic to the website.
Texas Tribune had 570,000 unique
visitors and 3.1 million page views in February. The audience is 91 percent
college graduates; 51 percent have an advanced degree and 52 percent have
income of US$100,000 or more.
The Trib, which is a not-for-profit
organization, gives away its content free to other news organizations,
including television packages for local stations. They have created widgets
that other media can use on their websites to track election results, for
example, in their local coverage areas.
The Trib tries to generate about 20
percent of its revenue from each of five sources. Last year the US$5.4 million
in revenue broke down like this:
- 23 percent corporate sponsors
- 16 percent individual donors
- 22 percent events
- 18 percent foundations
- 13 percent memberships
Expenses totaled US$4.7 million last
year, so the operation generated a healthy surplus.
Events have become a huge part of their
budget, generating about US$1 million in 2013. The annual Texas Tribune
Festival lasts several days and has 2,500 paying attendees.
The publication also runs free
breakfasts around the state in which public officials are interviewed by the
Trib’s reporters and editors. “We believe events are news and are journalism,”
Ramshaw said. "We believe our readers and users should be in the same room
with the people who represent them."
The next innovations include
newsletters focused on particular topics such as water usage, public education,
and possibly transportation. The key is to keep evolving.
This post originally appeared on the
blog News Entrepreneurs. It is
published on IJNet with the author's permission.
James Breiner is a consultant in online
journalism and leadership. He is a former co-director of the Global Business Journalism Program at
Tsinghua University and a former Knight International Journalism Fellow
who launched and directed the Center for Digital Journalism at the University of
Guadalajara. He is bilingual in Spanish and English. You can follow
him on Twitter here.
Image of Emily Ramshaw, editor of Texas
Tribune, courtesy of James Breiner.
Source: Ijnet.org
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