Innovation
Funding Models
INRG believes that publications should never depend on one funding model. INRG has a list of ten non-profit models, several co-op structures and fundraising strategies; each publication will be matched with these strategies based on their individual needs.
Distribution models
Although some news organizations want to move to full-digital publication, large portions of the rural United States lack internet access, and sometimes even lack electricity. For these reasons, INRG believes each community has unique distribution needs that should be approached as unique problems. Hybrid distribution models like using QR code stickers to distribute content, social media use and other strategies have proven more effective in engaging readers and audience expansion.
Building Trust
Most struggling publications lack a strong community connection. INRG plans to build community connections by first bringing in a reporting team to cover the hard-hitting issues local journalists need help with, to inspire reader’s interest in the local publication. From that point INRG will organize– in the name of the publication– town halls with local politicians, meet-and-greets with community members and a variety of other community-centered events. These are common strategies for non-profit publications, but rare for local ones.
Community Journalism
Although many journalists go through years of school to perfect their craft, good journalism can come from anyone. Students now account for 1 in 10 statehouse reports in the nation and the San Quentin Prison News Project has proven that, even if a person enters journalism barely able to read, they can produce Pulitzer-Prize worthy content with relatively little training. There are not enough journalists to cover every community, but there are enough community members in every community to cover it themselves.
Reporting partnerships
Even in areas with well-populated news landscapes newspapers are rarely well staffed enough to complete complex projects and have to either abandon them or depend on partnerships. Partnerships between small, medium and large publications creates a larger capacity for reporting and reduces unnecessary workloads.
Rural & Inner City Wire Service
Wire services are, for the most part, a thing of the past when it comes to local, state and national news.Establishing a wire service that allows medium-and-large circulation news publications to re-print local news content legally will bring in a consistent stream of income for the publication in need, while creating a legal avenue for larger publications to republish their work.
Accessibility
Many news publications serve communities with unique barriers to news access, like those deaf, blind, low-reading-level, illiterate and/or multilingual audiences. INRG seeks to find solutions to overcome these barriers. Examples of potential solutions include partnerships between print and radio publishers to make sure deaf audiences are able to access the news, creating accompaniment pieces for blind audience members to get descriptions of the visuals used in broadcasts, eliminating academic language from print news, and hiring reporters who speak and write the language of the audience.
Diversity
INRG believes that journalism is losing out by not training students, stay-at-home-parents, disabled people and incarcerated residents to be reporters. Training community members as journalists will ideally create newsrooms with demographics that reflect the communities they serve.
Alternative buyer
Many small newspapers sell themselves off to large corporations due to a lack of interest from other sellers. Some of these newspapers actively pay new owners to take over for fear of their communities losing their only media outlet. INRG will give those newspapers the opportunity to become part of the organization, avoiding layoffs.
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