We’re so excited to announce our first cohort of Nonprofit News Springboard participants! 

 

Challenges abound when conceptualizing a new nonprofit news outlet or navigating the early days of a launch. INN created the Nonprofit News Springboard to boost the skills of people facing those challenges through coaching on business planning, leadership, and funding strategies as well as connection with a supportive community of nonprofit news leaders. 

 

Read more about the 13 people selected for the cohort and follow them on Twitter.

Today, INN announces eight newsrooms selected for the first-ever cohort for the IGNITE Sponsorship, a pilot program funded by Google News Initiative that will enable well-established nonprofit newsrooms to increase their earned revenue from sponsorships.

 

At the end of the program, INN expects cohort members, with the tools, training and coaching provided, to be able to increase their earned revenue by a minimum of 15% with a target of 30% growth by June 2022.

 

If you’re looking for an expert on community engagement, look no further than INN at Home’s closing speaker. Ashley Alvarado is the director of community engagement at Southern California Public Radio (KPCC + LAist). She works to develop strategies and opportunities to engage new and existing audiences across platforms. 

 

Ashley uses engagement and source development to diversify the sourcing in news coverage and on shows, enrich programming and grow audiences. Among her successes: the engagement-driven, community-centered live storytelling series Unheard LA, as well as Feeding the Conversation, an ongoing series of gatherings that bring together members of the community with KPCC journalists around specific themes or coverage areas. 

 

She is also the board president of Journalism That Matters and serves on the steering committee of Gather, as a senior fellow with the Center for Health Journalism, and as a curator for American Press Institute’s BetterNews.org. In 2019, Southern California Public Radio won the inaugural Gather Award for engaged journalism portfolio at the Online Journalism Awards.

Sept. 1: No-Code Data Visualization: The current health crisis underscores more than ever the importance of data journalism. But once you have the data, how might you convey a compelling story within these numbers to audiences? Power BI makes it possible for freelance journalists and small-to-midsized newsrooms to create embeddable, data-driven, beautiful interactives for their news websites that render on desktop and mobile. Join award-winning Albany Times Union data journalist Cathleen Crowley as well as trainer Bill Monroe and sr. mgr worldwide journalist relations Vera Chan of Microsoft News Labs for a demo on building a visualization and sharing downloads for election and county-level COVID-19 visualizations. This webinar is sponsored by Microsoft.

Sept. 10: INN Friends Present: Supercharge your fundraising with one-tap mobile payments: Nonprofit news organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of mobile fundraising. In this webinar, we will discuss how mobile apps can be used to create habit-forming news readership, display targeted messaging and utilize one-tap payment technologies to provide a convenient and immediate way for donors to contribute, through the DigestBuilder platform. DigestBuilder is cloud software that enables nonprofit news organizations to create and manage real-time mobile apps. Alongside presenters Daniel Colton and Jason Tagomori from DigestBuilder, Ben Nishimoto, VP of Operations and Philanthropy at Honolulu Civil Beat, and Landess Cole, the Audience Development Editor for Civil Beat, will share their experience with the platform. This webinar is sponsored by DigestBuilder.

Investigate West / Crosscut

The Marshall Project

Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service

Texas Tribune

New Mexico In Depth

💡 Register today for the 2020 National Freedom of Information Coalition virtual FOI Summit in late September, seven sessions in seven days with expert presentations about the latest challenges to increasing transparency and access to state and local governments and public institutions. Cost is less than $25. 

💡 More than 100 people who left journalism — 81% of whom were women of color and half of whom were Black — responded to an ethical and practical call from Open News to gather exit data. The findings showcased that most journalists of color leave the industry mid-career.

💡 The International Women’s Media Foundation is building a coalition of organizations offering journalists collective support, bolstering their digital security and empowering the news media at large to keep their employees safer online. 

💡 On Thursday, Sept. 3 at 11 a.m. ET, PolitiFact will host a basic overview of how they use CrowdTangle in their newsroom, including sharing examples of using the tool to identify story ideas, investigate trends, and understand social engagement happening on Facebook, Instagram and Reddit. See more and RSVP here.

💡 Report for America is now accepting applications from experienced journalists. Apply by August 31.

There’s more to recovery than fixing damaged property.

Center for Public Integrity and Columbia Journalism Investigations joined forces with newsrooms across the country to cover communities struck by climate disasters to learn more about the psychological impacts and what people are doing about them. The collaboration launched earlier this week; all stories so far can be found on Center for Public Integrity’s landing page. 

Partners in the collaboration include INN members California Health Report, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, City Limits, InvestigateWest, IowaWatch, The Lens and WFYI’s Side Effects Public Media as well as The Island Packet, The Mendocino Voice and The State. 

Additionally, three interns supported by the Columbia Journalism School/INN partnership contributed to the series.

Congratulations to our INN members who were named John S. Knight Community Impact Fellows in the 2020-2021 class:

 

In addition, Candice Fortman published her application to the JSK Fellowship program for transparency.

 

Khushbu Shah is the new Editor in Chief of The Fuller Project.

Next City added four new board members: Diana Lind, Andre Perry, David Porter and Lynn M. Ross.

Carolina Public Press was featured in a UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media blog post about how they're filling gaps left by traditional newsrooms.

More than 1,500 records requests to advance police transparency have been filed thanks to MuckRock’s readers.

Thanks to The Trust Project for supporting INN at Home

If you like this newsletter, forward to a friend to join our mailing list or donate to INN and its members at newsforgood.org.