Welcome to the Local Fix. Each week we look at key debates in journalism sustainability and community engagement through the lens of local news.  But first, we always begin with one good idea…

One Good Idea: Think Inside the Box
A review of nerdy subscription boxes on Buzzfeed got us thinking about the opportunity for local publishers to develop their own subscription box of goods made and sold by local businesses, as well as the adjacent advertising possibilities. If you created a subscription box for your community, what kinds of things would you put in it? (Hit reply and tell us!) For further inspiration, check out how My Little Paris is using subscription boxes and how the folks at Richland Source are exploring similar ideas: from t-shirts to popcorn bags.

When to Listen to Data and When to Listen to Your Heart

This Fast Company piece on BuzzFeed’s data strategy was spreading like wildfire last week, and for good reason. Any size newsroom can learn from how BuzzFeed’s publisher Dao Nguyen thinks about the opportunities and the limits of data. “The data never tells you why anything happens. Data will tell you, if you’re very lucky, what happened. It won’t ever tell you why,” says Nguyen in the interview, “If you want to understand why, that requires a different set of skills, largely in your brain and in your heart.” Nguyen followed up on the Fast Company piece with her own post, including a number of useful charts. More on data in the newsroom: 

• What Does the Journal News’ Audience Analyst Do? – Reynolds Journalism Institute 
• How Upworthy is Using Data to Move Beyond Clickbait and Curation – Nieman Lab 
• For Measuring Impact of Journalism and Advocacy, Data is Not Just Data – Tech President 
• How ​GateHouse Media Delights ​its Audience with Data-Driven ​​Decisions – Parse.ly 
• Facebook’s New Reaction Buttons Are All About Data – Slate

How to Improve News Websites

Sometimes even minor tweaks to your website can improve user experience, engagement and donations/subscriptions. There have been a few recent articles with some good, concrete advice for managing and improving your site.  

• In October Jack Brighton reviewed 100+ nonprofit news websites and suggested three key priorities for the year ahead.  
• Social Movement Technologies has a three part series focused on engaging members in activism but many of the lessons are very applicable to newsrooms too. 
• The Engaging News Project examined 155 newspaper and TV news websites “to understand how they were using social media buttons, comment sections, online polls, lists of hyperlinks, and mobile versions.”
• The Society for News Design just highlighted the five news sites that they believe epitomize the definition of how news design is changing.

Creating a Culture of Paying for News Through Crowdfunding

In January the Pews Research Center released a new report on crowdfunding journalism. Pew found that crowdfunding is still a “drop in the bucket” in terms of journalism revenue but that more and more newsrooms were trying their hand at crowd-powered fundraising. One of the most interesting findings in the report was not the number of projects or the amount raised but the increasing number of people who are willing to participate and fund news this way. “Equally striking is the upward trend in the number of people contributing financially to these journalism projects – rising from 792 in 2009 to 25,651 in 2015,” write the researchers. We’ve seen in our own research on crowdfunding that it can be a powerful on-ramp to encourage people to support local journalism.

However, the Pew report only focused on Kickstarter, which means it didn’t cover other platforms like Beacon and Patreon where journalists are raising money from their community. In fact, over the last year Beacon has been helping to expand immigration reporting across the U.S. through a matching grants program for newsrooms that crowdfund on their platforms. Here are three Beacon immigration projects that are raising money right now:

• Jose Antonio Vargas just launched one of the biggest journalism crowdfunding campaigns in history – hoping to raise 1 million dollars for his #EmergingUS project.
• In New Jersey a nonprofit newsroom plans to partner with longstanding ethnic media outlets across the state to report on immigration. 
• New Brunswick Today is a bi-lingual hyperlocal watchdog site that wants to do more translations and expand its immigration reporting. 

(Disclosure – The two NJ projects above involve our partners in the Local News Lab and Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation)

Have a good weekend,
Molly and Josh 

The Local Fix is a project of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s Local News Lab, a website where we are exploring creative experiments in journalism sustainability.