Open Media Boston Holiday Appeal: Help Us Launch the New OMB Cooperative!

Open Media Boston needs your help to keep putting out professionally-produced news coverage of Boston and environs - with a consistently progressive editorial stance - week after week. OMB is a non-profit news publication that relies on our viewers to chip in to keep the useful information we produce flowing. Although we started off as an all-volunteer operation in March 2008, we can only keep going for the long haul if we can pay our staff a living wage. So it's been vital that folks who like what we do have helped us out by donating to OMB.



Still, we don't think donations alone - even when combined with whatever foundation grants and advertising revenue we can scare up - are going to be enough to pay our staff in these difficult times. Let alone pay all our contributors (which we've aspired to do since our inception). But we've got a plan that we think might do the trick.

In the last 20 months, Open Media Boston has reported on many issues of great importance to many Boston area communities. Including the progressive community-at-large, working class communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, the labor community, the feminist and women's communities, the non-profit community, the LGBT community, the tech community, the arts community, and communities of interest around a host of issues like health care, the environment, the economy, transportation, housing, education, agriculture, prisons, peace, and many others. Now we're offering members of those communities an opportunity to own a piece of OMB and help us expand into the full-time progressive news operation that Boston needs and deserves.

We are excited to announce our plans to turn OMB into a consumer cooperative - much like a food coop. Instead of simply seeking donations, we'll become a community enterprise. Doing Community Supported Journalism. A few progressive media activists have discussed the concept here and there around the country over the last several months, but we hope the coop approach will help us make it work. We figure if Community Supported Agriculture can be a success, then Community Supported Journalism can too.

People need news just like they need food. News helps democracy work. But news media - community, corporate and every kind in between - is in trouble worldwide. No one wants to pay for it anymore. It's more expensive to produce than most entertainment media even though the rise of the web and other digital media have dropped the cost of information distribution down close to zero. And solid news production can't be done by volunteers over the long term, in our considered opinion. So if communities don't rise up and fund our own news media, we're going to find ourselves without sufficient information to participate in our political system. Let alone change it for the better. And grassroots perspectives will become harder and harder to find. Especially progressive perspectives.

So here's our proposal. We plan to launch a coop and encourage folks to become shareholders in Open Media Boston. People will make an annual contribution for 1 share in our cooperative. In exchange for their investment, they will receive 1 vote for shareholder seats on our cooperative board of directors. If we make any profits, each shareholder will receive an equal return on their investment.

There's a lot more to say about this model, but we'd prefer to wait until we decide on how we're going to operationalize our idea. And it's an unusual idea to be sure. There have been very few media cooperatives historically - with one major exception that may surprise some people ... the Associated Press. That's right, the famed AP international wire service is a coop. And it seems to work pretty darned well for them; so we're thinking it will work well for us.

To help us get things moving, we've decided to give our potential supporters some options.

Either you can become an OMB Member for a modest annual donation, or you can become an OMB Cooperator for a somewhat higher sum. Or you can do us a real solid and make a larger contribution - monthly if you like - of as much as you can spare ... in exchange for which you'll be put down as a future cooperator, too.

All contributions will be treated as donations to our non-profit, but OMB Cooperators (and higher contributors) will get something extra. When we launch our planned cooperative, everyone that signed up as a cooperator will receive 1 voting share in the new enterprise. The share will be good for the 1 year from the launch date of our coop, and will need to be renewed annually after that.

So please take a look at our new membership table below, and if you can contribute at any level from $25 a year on up, we strongly encourage you to do so. [To become a member, just click the big red Donate button on the top left corner of every page on Open Media Boston, or any of the links in the table. And don't forget, everyone who makes a contribution of at least the lowest amount listed on the table will also receive a reasonably exciting gift from OMB as a token of our esteem.]

After all, good news media doesn't make itself ... but with your help Open Media Boston can keep bringing you progressive news about the communities you care most about every week for many years to come.

*coop shares will be issued upon the launch of the Open Media Boston Cooperative

p.s. - just a quick note to say that Open Media Boston doesn't just do journalism, we're also active in the communities we cover - in the last few months we've done two significant public events: a Boston At-Large City Council Candidates Forum in September and the Digital Media Conference (together with the National Writers Union) in October ... the more we can grow our operation, the more events we'll be able to organize in the public interest ...

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston