and it's working.
Every state needs a digger.
VT Digger: How a layoff spawned a nonprofit site in less than a year
By Mac Slocum
Anne Galloway didn’t know anything about nonprofits or websites when she was laid off from Vermont’s Times Argus last January. She once believed the web was more distracting than resourceful. But a layoff has a funny way of upending your perspective, and now Galloway sits at the helm of her own nonprofit news site.
Galloway launched VT Digger in September 2009 with designs on filling a coverage gap in her home state of Vermont. Take a look through the offerings and you’ll see much of the content reads like the nitty-gritty stuff that used to grab column inches. That’s the point. During months of pre-launch interviews and research, Galloway concluded that the demand for enterprise reporting isn’t being met by the reduced staffs of Vermont’s newspapers.
VT Digger isn’t a hobby or a side project. Galloway is all in. She works full-time on the site, often starting at 4 a.m. and finishing up well after dinner. When I talked to her, she had just settled in at the Vermont statehouse. She’s commuting 45 minutes each way while the legislature is in session.
On the content side, Galloway tries to post 5-7 pieces a week. That’s a tough task for what’s basically a one-person operation. It’s made harder by the time-intensive nature of her content, which often requires interviews and background research. But in a savvy bit of efficiency, she’s boosting coverage by dialing back her editorial filter. That’s not to say she’s posting shaky articles. She’s just letting readers parse information for themselves.
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http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/vt-digger-how-a-layoff-spawned-a-nonprofit-site-in-less-than-a-year/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NiemanJournalismLab+%28Nieman+Journalism+Lab%29Vtdigger business model:
VTDigger.org is a project of the Vermont Journalism Trust, a nonprofit organization whose sole mission is to stimulate and commission substantive news content from established journalists.
Our money comes from donations, business sponsorships and grants.
We chose this business model for four reasons:
1. Our objective is to serve the public interest.
2. We believe financial transparency helps us build trust with our readers, viewers and listeners.
3. There is no proven for-profit model for online news.
4. The most successful nonprofit media outlet in the U.S., National Public Radio, has raised money through donations, business sponsorships and grants to support high-quality journalism for decades.
Because we are a low-overhead operation, our money is spent directly on reporting. We don’t need an office space, for example—we can run a virtual newsroom thanks to high-speed cable Internet access and the wonders of the Web. Our overhead costs consist of insurance, mileage reimbursement, web development and computer and camera equipment.
The Web and our friends at WordPress have given us an inexpensive platform for delivering written reports, videos and audio files. It takes time to produce material for the VTDigger.org, but we aren’t burdened by the legacy infrastructure costs (management compensation, manufacture and distribution of newspapers, or production and broadcast expenses) borne by traditional media outlets.
http://vtdigger.org/
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