The New Haven Independent, a not-for-profit online news site, celebrates its fifth birthday today with an open house. (You better hurry – it’s this evening.) The site covers New Haven with a small staff — just a handful of employees — and is subsidized by a grant from the Online Journalism Project. (There are several community sponsors as well.) Still, there is the question of sustainability. What happens if the grants dry up? Editor Paul Bass is upfront about the issue:
“Most of our financial support has come from charitable foundations. They’ve stuck with us longer than they originally promised. They’ve continued to stick with us. But their intent was to seed our project, to develop a model for the new journalism. They’ve made it clear we can’t count on their support indefinitely to cover the majority of our budget.”
To that end, the site is launching its first fund drive. (Contributions are tax-deductible.) The site is asking for $10 – $18 a month, certainly a hefty amount in the era of searchable free news. That’s a lot to ask. Writes MediaNation’s Dan Kennedy:
“The New Haven Independent is an important experiment to see whether a non-profit news site can cover a poor, mostly minority urban community ways that for-profit news organizations either can’t or won’t.”
The New Haven Independent has a good social component, with robust Facebook and Twitter pages. The site will certainly need to lean heavily on its fans and followers to help spread the word if it is to get donations.