Checking in with the Tiny News Collective Founders
Winter 2021 Update
Early this year we had the great privilege of welcoming our first group of founders to the Tiny News Collective. These seven news entrepreneurs are building local news organizations in communities that desperately need quality news.
In the months since then, we’ve been deeply impressed, humbled and thrilled to see their hard work come together as they each seek to serve their local communities with dedicated, responsive and representative news and information.
We’re excited to share an update with you from each organization about where they are in their journeys and welcome you to follow along as they begin to launch their publications.
Ang Diaryo
Ang Diaryo is a monthly bilingual news magazine, website and SMS news engagement network. It was born out of community organizing in the Los Angeles Filipino working class. This community is severely underserved by mainstream and Filipino/Fil-Am media. It is a difficult community to reach but these outlets also are not producing relevant and timely news and information.
We are currently partnering with grassroots organizers, nonprofits and churches to directly reach out to and interact with the community.
— Minerva Benedicto Vier
Follow their work at angdiaryo.tinynewsco.org.
Austin Vida
Austin Vida, a digital Latinx news and culture site, aims to amplify and celebrate the resilience of bi-cultural Austinites through culture and community coverage. For the past several months, Austin Vida has been publishing a monthly Cultura Guide, which curates the best of the city’s Latinx cultural arts events, as well as a monthly newsletter focused on community news. It’s a resource offered free when folks sign up.
During Hispanic Heritage Month, Austin Vida Editor/Publisher Nancy Flores was named one of six Latina entrepreneurs in Austin to watch by the online publication Austonia and Austin Vida’s Cultura Guides were featured in the University of Texas at Austin’s student newspaper The Daily Texan.
Through media partnerships with local events such as the Latinos Unidos Mixer and Latino Art Weekend, Austin Vida was able to conduct interactive listening sessions engaging the community on what folks want to see in Austin Vida as it gets ready to launch its site.
Austin Vida is looking forward to boosting its sign ups in order to serve more residents and launching its site with stories based on community feedback so far. It’s important that the local Latinx community doesn’t feel like their stories are an afterthought because they are a big part of what makes Austin special.
— Nancy Flores
Follow their work on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and at austinvida.com.
Black by God | The West Virginian
Black By God is an emerging news and storytelling organization centering on Black voices in the Mountain state and central Appalachia. We fill news and information gaps through a community news and storytelling process. We call it community news-making. We digitally publish weekly to more than 1,000 subscribers and our print reaches more than 5,000 people in communities across West Virginia.
One of the recent wins for us was media coverage by Yes Magazine talking about Black By God and the work we have been doing in their article “Filling In a News Gap for Black West Virginians”. We also celebrated one of our featured articles, “The House of Campbell”, by Samantha Stephens in prompting the Charleston West Virginia’s City Council to honor Mr. James Cubert Campbell, the city’s first Black city councilman.
— Crystal Good
Follow their work on Instagram and Twitter and at blackbygod.org.
Five Wards Media
Five Wards Media creates equitable and informed media that centers Newark residents’ concerns, voices, and information needs. Our mission is to produce unique coverage of issues impacting diverse communities in Newark that lack traditional media coverage.
We are committed to finding different ways to engage the community in this journey with us. Newark residents are trained and supported in storytelling, mediamaking, and other creative art forms through our community media incubator. Our reporting fellows will create multimedia projects rooted in the information gaps that exist here in Newark, New Jersey.
We are launching a bi-weekly newsletter named “The Hood Report.” The newsletter will include original content, community information, and features from residents and local organizations around the city.
— Brit Harley
Sign up for the newsletter here.
Follow their work on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Spotlight Schools
Spotlight Schools is redefining how education is covered in Orange County, Calif. and more specifically in the Los Alamitos Unified School District. Our goal is to help readers better navigate, understand and participate in the public school experience. Launched in August, the Spotlight Schools weekly newsletter has grown to nearly 175 subscribers. We’ve broken news on a recall effort against the Board of Education, extensively covered California’s Covid-19 safety protocols for schools, as well as shared the stories of remarkable students including one who is helping Navajo Nation families hit hard by the pandemic and another who started a mentorship club to foster connections across campuses.
As school board meetings become ground zero for political conflict, we hope to serve our community by rising above the polarization to focus on solutions-oriented journalism. We want to elevate public discourse and serve the public interest. To do that, Spotlight Schools intends to continue listening to community members to promote understanding.
What is most important to us is keeping stakeholders informed with reliable and accurate information so they can better make decisions about what’s best for their families. We could not have done any of this without the support of Tiny News Collective and our fellow entrepreneurs in the cohort. It’s been a life-changing experience and our hope is the best is yet to come!
— Jeannette Andruss
Sign up for our newsletter at spotlightschools.tinynewsco.org.
Follow their work on Instagram.
The Harvey World Herald
The Harvey World Herald is a digital news media outlet serving the Harvey, Illinois community that will be a one stop shop independent source for news in the city. We are working on a bi-weekly email newsletter called The Renaissance Letter, which is a testament to the revival of local news that Harvey has been deprived of in about 40 years. So far we have got about 100 subscribers that we wish to grow as we progress. In addition to Harvey residents, our readership includes past residents in other cities and reporters in Chicago newsrooms.
The Chicago media market has truly embraced the Harvey World Herald, and we’ve been able to learn from staff at renowned local organizations like Block Club Chicago, WTTW, and Injustice Watch on a number of issues like ethical photojournalism and social media and audience engagement.
Because the city lacks a health department, we are planning to use social media to launch a regular COVID-19 dispatch for our readers. We’re slated to launch a series of social media newscasts about young creatives in the city, largely Black and Brown, to showcase the community’s long overlooked but vibrant arts, culture, and entertainment community.
As a small newsroom, we’ve thought critically about using social media to reach non-traditional news consumers and direct traffic toward our newsletter as we prepare to launch our website with long-form reporting. Our social media reporting about a recent water crisis in the south suburban area has been well received and appreciated and readers find our news outlet as a reliable and consistent source of information. Consistency and transparency are the most important things for our newsroom because this is a community rife with distrust.
— Amethyst Davis
Follow their work on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and harveyworld.org.
The Tiny News Collective believes a world where everyone can participate in creating relevant, accurate and culturally conscious local news and information is one where everyone can more fully engage in civic life, make more informed decisions, and better understand the world around them.
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Interested in founding a news organization and not sure where to start? Sign up as an interested news founder for resources and information about the Tiny News Collective.
