Did our Facebook page help you find your lost pet?
Did you learn the results of an election from our site?
Did you attend the political debates we co-sponsored in Ansonia and Seymour?
Did your shop get noticed from a ribbon-cutting story we posted?
Did we give you a heads-up on the recent traffic jams near Division Street?
If you heard sirens, did you check our Twitter page to see where the fire trucks were heading?
Do you believe that local news is a community service?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, please consider donating to the Valley Indy during The Great Give. We use the online fundraiser as our only reader drive of the year.
You can donate from 8 a.m. May 5 until 8 p.m. May 6. Donations are tax-deductible.
Click here, or on almost every hyperlink in this story, to donate.
We exist thanks to the generosity of groups such as The Valley Community Foundation, The Foundation for Greater New Haven, The Katharine Matthies Foundation, The Knight Foundation and the Online Journalism Project, our nonprofit parent.
We know we have a large local following. We know the Valley is a great “news town.”
But we do not know if we’ll have money to keep covering that news in 2016.
We’re coming to the end of a three-year grant that has supported a good chunk of our operating budget.
And the traditional funding method for local news organizations is not what it once was, to say the least.
For proof, look at the ever-shrinking hyperlocal media landscape. The Valley Gazette no longer exists in print. The Oxford Gazette is no more. The Valley Times is gone. AOL Patch, launched in Connecticut not long after the Valley Indy, endured massive layoffs.
The Connecticut Post and The New Haven Register both reduced Valley coverage — and so did we, since we’re down a reporter from 2012.
This year we’ve been trying to diversify our revenue by offering local merchants ads on our site (it’s cheap — $99 gets you a home page ad, plus two sponsored posts on Facebook and sponsorship of our newsletter).
Our sister publication, The New Haven Independent, has seen successful in this effort. Here? Not so much.
No one’s getting rich off local news. The truth is, I doubt whether a publication like this one will ever do more than break even.
That’s because this type of journalism is a community service. It’s not about page views or click bait at The Valley Indy.
Read this piece from a former AOL Patch honcho. Skip to the end.
It talks about how the entire concept of advertising has changed.
This quote: “Hyperlocal news sites — news in general — are not going to make a lot of money until they realize their job is to help people sell stuff, and that’s a hard pill for many journalists to swallow.”
I’m choking on that pill as I type.
No one at the Valley Indy is trying to sell anything, other than old-fashioned good journalism — and the philosophy that local reporting is a noble cause.
So we’re looking to you, readers, for help.
If each of our 8,000 daily readers donated $25 during The Great Give, we would be set for 2016 … and into 2017, as a matter of fact.
If our 10,000 Facebook readers each donated $50, we would be set for about the next four years.
Imagine that?
There’s no need to, because you can make it happen.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for your continued support.
