In early 2020, News Catalyst was just getting started with programming and training to assist organizations achieve sustainability through the incorporation of product development practices, innovative use of technology and digital strategy. At the same time, news organizations were beginning to struggle with the disruption of the pandemic and the need to prioritize using their resources to respond to the news needs created by it. So News Catalyst turned to looking how we could best make use of our specialties to help in an area we saw few resources being deployed—support for very local, one or small team news startups trying to create new news organizations to serve communities and audiences who were not being served by existing media or where there was no existing media at all.
We spent the spring and early summer of that year speaking with founders who’d gone down the road of being a local news founder and uncovered a few key trends that were mirrored across place and time: the need for affordable and comprehensive technology stacks that are right-sized for local news organizations, guidance with the logistics and practicalities of creating a new organization and the support of a community of peers to work through the unique challenges of news entrepreneurship.
On the technology side, we challenged ourselves whether we could build a comprehensive, performative tech stack for local news that could cost less than $100 a month and we figured out we could.
On the operations side, we challenged ourselves to identify services that would help local founders with a clear list of objectives to get their organizations up and running and we have.
On the community and training aspect, we partnered with LION to bring in expertise and experience to begin building and testing key training and resources that would help founders develop and implement their strategy and we continue to build and refine on this work on an ongoing basis.
We officially announced the Tiny News Collective in December of 2020 and we brought on our first cohort in the early summer of 2021. We are encouraged by the support and feedback we have received and are committed to an ongoing process of learning, accountability and responsiveness as we continue to work on building the best version of the Tiny News Collective.