Meet the first cohort of the Tiny News Collective
These six organizations are working to bring needed local news and information to their communities.
Today, the Tiny News Collective is proud to introduce the news organizations joining the first cohort of the collective.
The founders behind these organizations all share a vision of serving local audiences through producing news for and with their community, a vision the Collective will foster in hundreds more places across the U.S. over the next several years.
“I’m excited for this first cohort of founders as they begin their journey,” said André Natta, the Tiny News Collective board chair. “I’m also excited for the Collective as an organization as we start to put everything we’ve worked on and talked about over the last year into practice.”
The Tiny News Collective will be working closely with these founders to build their news organizations, launch their products and begin to generate revenue.
Thanks to a partnership with the Google News Initiative, each organization in the first cohort will receive a $15,000 stipend to help create the capacity for the founders to get started. In addition, the GNI has funded their first year of membership dues in the Collective and LION Publishers.
LION Publishers, an association serving aspiring and existing independent news entrepreneurs, is developing the training, onboarding and community elements of the project. News Catalyst, based at Temple University and supported by the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund, is leading product and technology.
The Founders
Jeannette Andruss
Seal Beach, California
The yet-unnamed tiny newsroom will cover essential education news in the Los Alamitos Unified School District of nearly 10,000 students located in the northern part of Orange County, California in a rapidly diversifying and politically “purple” area.
Minerva Benedicto Vier, co-founder — Ang Diaryo
Los Angeles, California
Ang Diaryo is creating innovative analog and digital products to provide timely news and information for the underserved working-class Filipino community of Los Angeles.
Amethyst Davis — The Harvey World Herald
Harvey, Illinois
The Harvey World Herald is a response to a global pandemic that ushered in an economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression. In a city where uncertainty is an everyday experience, the community is in need of information that shapes their daily lives now more than ever.
Nancy Flores — Austin Vida
Austin, Texas
Austin Vida is an independent digital Latinx news and culture site. It aims to empower the local Latinx community by amplifying its stories, events and cultura.
Crystal Good — Black by God
Princeton, West Virginia
Black by God is an emerging new media property seeking to share perspectives that cultivate, curate, and elevate Black voices from West Virginia.
Brit Harley — Five Wards Media
Newark, New Jersey
Five Wards Media creates equitable and informed multimedia that centers city residents’ concerns, voices, and information needs.
The Tiny News Collective
Part classroom, part accelerator, part platform, the Tiny News Collective is a comprehensive approach to building a local news ecosystem from the ground up. We provide our founders with everything they need to build a sustainable local news organization — training, technology, community and capital — so that they can focus on the most important parts of building and running their organizations.
Our founders can focus on understanding their communities, developing products and creating effective revenue strategies instead of needlessly spending months on the logistics of setting up a company. All of that is done for them.
When these organizations outgrow needing our support, the Collective will help them depart with full ownership of everything they’ve created.
The resources and services of the Tiny News Collective exist to create capacity for the real innovation of local news: local founders stepping up to do the work of building the news organizations that their communities need.
Our mission is to find founders who care about their community’s news and information needs and who want to build news organizations that reflect and truly represent their communities. To help us in that process, we’re fortunate to work with an extremely talented selection team.
Our work is grounded in the expertise of the two organizations that came together to create the Tiny News Collective. Through TNC, LION’s years of experience teaching and supporting news entrepreneurs are combined with News Catalyst’s expertise in product thinking, technology and strategy. We’ve built upon these strengths with a talented and experienced board and group of advisors and we seek to support hundreds of Tiny Newsrooms across the country over the next few years.
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.
