Open Media Boston Turns Three Begins Fourth Year of Publication
It's hard to believe, but Open Media Boston is celebrating its third anniversary today. On March 20, 2008, I wrote our first editorial and kicked off a big project ... launching a new kind of online community news weekly. A publication that was open to viewer participation, but that held to professional journalistic, editorial and production standards. A publication that used a fairly traditional Associated Press style when reporting the news, but had an openly left-wing editorial stance. A publication that would be built on volunteer labor by dozens of staff and contributors, but aspired to one day find the money to pay all of our staff and contributors on a regular basis. Most importantly, a publication that would dedicate itself to covering disenfranchised communities in a major American city - and cast the light of day on the popular struggles for social justice and democracy that often have tremendous public support, but generally get ignored by traditional news media and elite opinion makers alike.
Three years on, we've accomplished a fair piece of what we set out to do. In the face of adversity. On a shoestring budget. We've put out the news week-in and week-out. We've covered Boston's working-class communities and communities of color - always striving to give voice to the aspirations of people in neighborhoods that often don't get mentioned in the mainstream press unless there's a shooting or a robbery. Vibrant, but structurally marginalized neighborhoods like Roxbury, Dorchester, East Boston and South Boston. We've covered the women's, immigrant, LGBT, environmental and many other communities besides. We've covered the labor and non-profit sectors. We've covered student activism. We've covered dozens upon dozens of rallies, pickets, occupations, marches, sit-ins and strikes. We've covered local and state government. We've covered parades, arts events, book releases, and film openings. We've covered the latest developments in popular technology. We've recorded many interesting talks by experts in dozens of fields. Hundreds of articles all told. With more in our editorial pipeline every week.
None of this would be possible without our many volunteer staff members. The people who go out and cover news stories, or help us build our co-op business wing, or work on improving our website. The collective endeavor that is Open Media Boston is only possible with a lot of people donating their labor in the service of broadening coverage of underserved communities.
We're proud of all this work we've done, and of the work yet to come. Of course, the one tough problem we haven't solved is - as ever with working-class led endeavors like this one - the money problem. We haven't yet had huge amounts of money dumped on us from any quarter. Yet we have raised more money every year than the year before it, and are moving towards having at least a couple of full-time staff people in the near-to-medium term. Since very few other news outlets, large or small, have cracked the problem of funding an online publication in an age when everyone expects their news for free, we don't feel alone in our effort to raise the funds we need to grow our operation.
Although we've gotten a lot of donations from a lot of nice people and a handful of farsighted foundations, we're going to need a lot more cash in hand before Open Media Boston becomes a going concern. And before the aforementioned labor of many people is rewarded with salaries that will allow them to spend more time working on this publication more consistently. So, as ever, we encourage people to click the big red "Donate to OMB" button on the top left hand corner of every page on our site and give whatever you all can. Every bit definitely helps.
Nevertheless, however much money we pull in, our audience is continuing to grow. And a healthy majority of that audience is in Boston and environs - no mean feat in the global environment of the World Wide Web - which tells us that we're serving our core communities to the best of our abilities. Although we can always do better. But our growth rate is slow. The only way - short of luck - to accelerate that growth rate is to hire more editorial staff to produce more content to attract more viewers. And then to hire business staff to help make more people aware that we're around, and that we're easy to access via several major social media platforms.
So you all get the idea. The degree to which our audience supports us is the degree to which we can better serve you with news and views week-to-week. It's a positive feedback loop. A symbiotic relationship. And at its best, a solidaristic one.
And with Open Media Boston you don't just get journalism. You get our community involvement. We sponsor political debates in the public interest, do media trainings, and organize conferences - on our own and with many and varied partner organizations and institutions. We don't just pronounce upon issues from some high horse. We're down in the trenches of civic life with everyone else. We don't think it's enough to ask our viewers to be engaged citizens (that term used here in the global sense), we are engaged citizens too. We care about what happens to our city, our country and our planet, and we'll always do what we can to help - as long as our journalistic integrity remains unsullied.
Anyhow, enough said. We're excited to get going on our fourth year of publication. And we look forward to getting out our weekly editions while working with our viewers to help build a more democratic and just Boston, US and world. The times we live in demand nothing less. So you all do your part. And we'll do ours. And we'll see where we are at this time next year.
Onwards.
