Starting an online community news publication like Open Media Boston has been, in many ways, a leap into the unknown. Since our first weekly edition in March 2008, we've been building the road as we travel. Figuring out how to produce regular original content on a growing, but still shoestring, budget. Building a staff and an audience. Raising money. Learning the technical side of social media. And always looking around the country (and world) at what other startups like us were doing.
After all, we're part of a wave of similar online community news publications that have launched over the last five years. We started up in an era when the traditional news industry saw its fortunes fall - a development which was partially self-inflicted (at least for outlets owned by multinational corporations that slashed their news budgets but still expected double-digit profits to go on forever) and partially due to technological changes driven by the rise of the internet.
Early on, we looked around and saw that no one in the news industry - from the most established operations to newcomers like us - knows precisely how to build a sustainable business model. Public, private, non-profit and hybrid news outlets are all trying solve a seemingly intractable problem: How can we get paid to produce the news needed to keep a democratic society going when everyone increasingly expects to get their news for free via the internet?
So, we were excited last January when Michele McLellan, a consultant for the Knight Foundation as well as the Knight Digital Media Center and then a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, added Open Media Boston to her list of promising local news sites. In the months that followed, Michele and her team interviewed us, surveyed our audience, and ultimately invited us to to last week's "Block by Block" Community News Summit 2010 in Chicago.
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