Several months ago, Voice of San Diego launched the News Revenue Hub, a project to help news organizations outsource the management of their membership programs – an expertise Voice of San Diego developed over the past 12 years.
We wanted to share the technology and strategies we developed.
It worked.
Since launching in November, the Hub has helped organizations raise more than $1 million from their readers.
The interest from news organizations around the country has been incredible, and today we announce that the Hub will become its own organization, led by Voice of San Diego Publisher/COO Mary Walter-Brown and Digital Manager Tristan Loper.
The Institute for Nonprofit News, or INN, which incubates many public service news organizations, is helping get the News Revenue Hub set up as its own nonprofit project.
Voice of San Diego now has 2,700 active members, and I am extremely proud of what Walter-Brown has accomplished. The success of her project, however, means we must recruit a new COO and digital manager.
The Hub and Voice of San Diego will maintain a strong partnership, and the Hub will provide its now refined services to Voice of San Diego. The new structure, though, will allow it to serve dozens more organizations. We expect the transition to happen by July 1.
Voice of San Diego has been entrepreneurial since the beginning and has regularly contributed to the effort to address the crisis in local journalism everywhere. We helped launch INN in 2009.
Everywhere, news organizations are watching their advertising dollars flock to new platforms like Facebook and Google. They are increasingly realizing that to support the journalism they do, they’ll need to raise money from the people who value the work they do.
This is the central insight Voice of San Diego has operated with for many years and our work on it is now helping many other communities.
If all newsrooms do their part to address the crisis creatively, we can share lessons learned and build a new system that is more sustainable in the long term and more accessible and accountable to the people it’s meant to serve.