A familiar face is leading The Leader to a fast launch
Macie May joins The Longmont Leader, which will begin publishing May 27
A month ago, the Compass Experiment shared our plans to launch a new local news source in Longmont, Colorado. Those early outlines are now very close to becoming a reality.
Next week, on Wednesday, May 27, we plan to start publishing as The Longmont Leader. On that day, the Longmont Observer will redirect to longmontleader.com
It was important to us that we get started in Longmont as soon as possible, as local news is so needed as Colorado transitions into reopening and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Moving this quickly means some parts of our operation will be debuting as a work-in-progress, which we will improve and build on over time.
Lucky for us (and for Longmont), we have hired an editor that knows the city well and can hit the ground running. Macie May, formerly the editor of the Longmont Observer, is joining us as editor of The Longmont Leader.
Macie was the driving force behind the Observer’s editorial operations for three years — writing and reporting on local happenings, corralling a network of contributors, and serving as a key connection between the community and its leaders. Macie knows exactly what it takes to cover daily news in Longmont, so we knew she’d be the perfect candidate for the job.
As Macie has been readying for this transition, our Compass team has been getting to know the Longmont community. We’ve been eager to learn more about what people love about living in Longmont, and what they wish they could change to make it better. We want to know what they expect from a local news provider and what we can do to make their lives easier.
Usually, we’d do this sort of thing in person, talking about these issues over cookies and coffee. Since we’re all being responsibly physically distant, we have instead taken these events virtual.
We started by asking interested local residents to take a survey about their city and their news habits. From there, they opt in to join a local focus group on Zoom. We held our first such focus group last Friday, with more planned in the days and weeks to come.
So far, we have been (pleasantly) overwhelmed by the amount of feedback we’ve gotten from Longmontians who are eager to influence their local news. We’ll be sure to publish a future post to share what we’ve learned from these sessions.
In the short term, these folks are helping us to figure out where to focus our efforts as we get started. We are going to be running a very lean operation during the first couple of weeks, as we are still hiring on the rest of our full-time staff*. In the meantime, Macie will be working with a team of freelancers and community contributors to get The Leader’s first stories onto our website and into our readers’ inboxes.
We’ll be keeping our readers posted as we hire new staff members and launch new features on the website. As we get into the summer and Colorado continues to recover from COVID-19, we will continue the feedback loop with our readers through emails, social media, and virtual events.
You can follow along with our upcoming launch and ongoing progress by following The Longmont Leader on Facebook and joining our email list.
If you interested in joining us as a partner, contributor or sponsor, please reach out to us via email at info@longmontleader.com.
*We are still accepting applications for business development and bilingual reporter positions. If interested, please apply at the link.
The Longmont Leader is part of The Compass Experiment, a local news laboratory founded by McClatchy and Google News Initiative’s Local Experiments Project. This Medium site is set up to share news and learnings from The Compass Experiment’s local news websites.
