Become an Open Media Boston Cooperator and Support Community News Media!

Greetings, Open Media Boston viewers. Just thought I'd take advantage of a slow news week to talk shop with you all. As some of you may recall, several months ago I announced that we were working on starting up a cooperative to help encourage social investment in this community news publication. So I thought I'd give you all an update, and ask more folks to get involved on the ground floor in advance of our coop launch. By way of background, a coop is basically a democratic form of business that a progressive enterprise like this one can organize without getting all weird and sell-outty. A coop signs people up for an annual membership fee (and often an additional annual investment). Members of the coop join to help provide themselves with a needed service - like food from a food coop, or bicycle repair from a bicycle repair coop - or become worker-owners in the case of various kinds of worker coops. Like a worker-owned bakery, for instance.

Each cooperator gets one voting share - or its equivalent - and helps democratically run the business. Cooperators get to attend scheduled coop meetings, vote on issues of the day, and elect the coop board from their own ranks. And of course, they provide themselves with an important product - fair and accurate community news.

We're interested to start an Open Media Boston Coop because we think it may be the only way to survive and thrive over the long term - and keep on providing the kind of quality metro news coverage and progressive editorial stances that we know our audience has come to expect. All while paying our staff and contributors - which is probably the main marker of the success of an online news operation in this day and age in my estimation.

At the moment, we run Open Media Boston as a non-profit project of the good folks at Media Working Group - a well-established and well-known national media-makers collaborative. We plan to keep our non-profit wing going no matter what; so starting a coop won't affect it at all. But we are keenly aware that being a non-profit limits the kind of money we can raise to foundation grants and donations. Which in this recessionary period is a very difficult way to monetize a news operation.

When we launch our coop, we will then have a new and different way for individuals and institutions to help support us. Individuals will become part-owners of Open Media Boston, and become organically connected to what we do. Which we think is a great and healthy thing. Institutions - like non-profits, unions, other coops, and believe it or not, foundations - will be able to invest in our coop. Institutional investors won't get votes, but they'll have a way to support what we do without compromising our independence.

This is all very experimental, of course. Very few media outlets run coops of any kind. But at the outset, we think the model holds much promise for news publications.

And that's where you all come in. We're looking for more people to get involved with our coop - even before we launch. We need a brain trust to help us figure out how we should do things out of the gate.

So we'd like you all to seriously consider joining up now - at what will probably be somewhat lower than the annual membership fee we'll ultimately agree upon.

Just $35 (or more, of course) will make you an OMB cooperator for this year. If you join now, you'll get invited to our preliminary cooperators meeting and get to work with us on answering the questions we need to answer to create a strong coop.

To sign up, just click the big red "Donate to OMB" button on every page of our Open Media Boston website, and donate at least $35. We'll contact you shortly after you've done that with more information.

If you have any additional questions about the coop, please feel free to drop me an email atinfo@openmediaboston.org.

Otherwise, it continues to be a pleasure and privilege serving Boston with news and views every week. With your support, we'll be able to keep it coming for many years to come.

Cheers to all, and I hope you are enjoying the summer weather (global warming induced heat waves excepted).

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston