IndyWeek sees wins in membership push

As readers chip in, paper's leaders look longer-term

"Counting scheduled recurring contributions, we’ve reached nearly 40 percent of our $100,000 annual goal in just over a month," Billman wrote. "You are helping us to fulfill and further our mission in an increasingly perilous time for local media."

A free paper going back to its founding in the early 1980s as the North Carolina Independent, IndyWeek joins a growing list of for-profit publications trying voluntary membership (versus paywalls) to tap readers for direct support. IndyWeek took ideas and inspiration from a membership drive by alternative weekly the Chicago Reader and others in the industry.

"The messaging that's really worked for us... and that really fits our mission is that we operate for free and we see ourselves as being very community-oriented, being independent and a grassroots organization," Billman said. "To make that viable, we have to have people help out."

Both Billman, IndyWeek's editor for the past four years, and owner Richard Meeker had been thinking about seeking reader support for years; trying "the public media model," as Meeker put it.

"I have been fearful that people would somehow see asking for money from a free alt weekly publication as a very un-alternative thing to do and an admission of some kind of failure," Meeker told me by phone the other day, but added that "the businesses have always been on the edge financially."

IndyWeek, with a print distribution of about 25,000 as well as an online audience, has seen the same declines of print advertising and challenges with digital revenue as other newspapers and magazines.

"The idea is, what are the ways we can find resources" to support journalism, Meeker said. "Any legitimate way we can find money, we should find it, as long as we're not compromising our journalism.

Here are a few takeaways from IndyWeek's member drive:

• They learned from others: Billman and Meeker drew on the Chicago Reader's member drive lessons for some of the basic elements of the Press Club push: Six emails, delivered once a week, that also were IndyWeek columns from publisher Susan Harper, former N&O columnist Barry Saunders, Billman and others, making the case for IndyWeek's importance and promoting the link to join the Press Club.
• They kept it simple: from messaging to mechanics: The headline, "Keep it Indy" captured IndyWeek's basic message, which was articulated in different ways by each columnist. They hired companies close to home to process the money (contributions aren't tax-deductible, so the accounting was simple) and help with a branding campaign. "We didn't really have much to lose: we could do it with relatively low startup costs," Billman said.
• They see the PressClub as a launch pad, not an end point: With several hundred members signed up, IndyWeek is working on ways to provide member benefits. Billman also wants to communicate back to members on how their contributions are supporting the journalism; they'll find new voices in the paper, he said, and other visible results of a significant boost to the editorial budget.
• They're still learning: IndyWeek's membership campaign has no dedicated staff and no extra support resources, and Billman says there's much more to learn so that reader contributions evolve from one campaign to a base of support. He picked up key ideas on how to run the campaign at an alternative newsweeklies conference, and expects to learn more at another gathering this summer.

"The fundraising has done remarkably well," Meeker said. "The next step is, all right, what do you do for the members of the Press Club to make it so that, a) you get something, and we’re making T-shirts and doing other kinds of things, and b) so that the initial impulse to give the money... is in some sense rewarded with being part of a community."

Here are a few links to learn more about membership programs, successes and challenges:

• The Membership Puzzle Project has focused on membership in news for more than two years, posting a database of membership programs among news organizations and multiple research papers and articles documenting successes and lessons. 
• Among those reports was a "member manifesto," drilling down into why members said they supported news outlets (versus why news organizations want members).
• Shan Wang from the News Revenue Hub shared lessons on launching "serious, sustainable membership programs for journalism" in a 2018 piece for Nieman Lab, urging organizations to "ask for more, more often, and aim higher."
• The London-based Guardian newspaper has won international attention for its success in building voluntary membership as core revenue (its goal is 1 million members); the paper's editor in chief wrote about its success recently, and the Lenfest Institute published a reader revenue case study including The Guardian and Slate for their success with membership. 

Bulletin board

Sander's new role; NewsMatch 2019; more on McClatchy-Google

• Pam Sander has been promoted to Southeast Editor for GateHouse Media, overseeing newspapers in eight Southeastern states, including North Carolina, the StarNews in Wilmington reported. Sander, who has been regional editor for GateHouse's Coastal Carolina group, will keep her base in Wilmington. The StarNews story outlines other new roles related to Sander's move.

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• Nonprofit news organizations may apply through Aug. 1 for the NewsMatch 2019 program, which supports fundraising for journalism through matching money, tools and guidance. Applicants must be members of the Institute for Nonprofit News. Apply for INN membership here (deadline is July 1) and for NewsMatch here.

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• The PBS investigative program FRONTLINE is taking applications for partners in its new Local Journalism Project. The program is open to newsrooms on any platform (not just video); it will support a reporter's salad, training and related expenses for an investigative project produced in partnership with FRONTLINE. Partners also will receive support from FRONTLINE's editorial and audience development teams. Learn more and apply here. Deadline is July 15.

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  Mandy Jenkins, who brings experience from both established and startup newsrooms, is the new general manager of a McClatchy-Google News Initiative project called the Compass Experiment, through which Google will fund three new local news sites over three years. McClatchy, which owns The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer, will oversee the sites, according to announcements so far. Read more from Jenkins via Medium (and follow the experiment there) and from Nieman Lab.

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• Condolences to friends and family of Frank Barrows, former managing editor and writer at The Charlotte Observer, who died last Wednesday. He was 72. The Charlotte Observer's obituary and a tribute from former Observer columnist Tommy Tomlinson, now at WFAE, were among the remembrances.

Storylines

Apple incentives, opioids solutions, Juneteenth

• WRAL investigative reporter Tyler Dukes followed up on North Carolina's unsuccessful bid for an Apple campus with a story last week showing that, six months later, North Carolinians are still in the dark about what kind of taxpayer-funded incentives were offered. Read Dukes' story and Twitter thread noting the refusal of Gov. Roy Cooper's administration, the Department of Commerce and Wake County to release public records.
• NC Health News reporter Taylor Knopf, who did reporting trips in Europe last year to report on how some other countries have tackled the opioids crisis with public health initiatives, returned to some of those ideas in a recent piece on North Carolina's rising drug overdose deaths and whether solutions from elsewhere are being embraced on a state or national basis.
• To mark today's Juneteenth commemoration of the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States, the Asheville Citizen-Times' Elizabeth Anne Brown taped into historical interviews with three former enslaved people for "Juneteenth: Remembering Asheville's slaves."  Buncombe County has been a leader in finding slave records and making them available online, as the Citizen-Times explored in a 2016 piece.

Use This

Tools from ProPublica and The New York Times

• ProPublica has updated its highly useful Nonprofit Explorer research tool to provide full-text searches of IRS 990 forms and other filings from federally tax-exempt organizations. Read more about the update here.  The Explorer is a great example of a news outlet turning a reporting resource into a public asset: It's useful for journalists or anyone else wanting to research the funding and spending of nonprofit organizations, including vetting groups you are considering for donations.
• The New York Times Insider blog posted a piece on "How 5 Data Dynamos Do Their Jobs"  and shared a Google Drive folder with data journalism training materials it's providing for its staff reporters and editors. Together, these are great pointers for reporters considering how to use simple tools like spreadsheets to simplify tasks and expand what they can do in reporting.

The Local View: Wilmington

NCPA trains press and public at WHQR