The Voice of San Diego, one of the oldest of the new guard of non-profit news orgs that have been popping up, has teamed up with some academics from San Diego State University to launch The Hub, a handy database of information about non-profit community news organizations. If you’re looking to start your own non-profit news org or want to learn more about what’s already out there, this is the place to start.
I’m a big fan of things that solve problems, and The Hub clearly does that. Voice of San Diego CEO Scott Lewis told Garber the site was created in response to “many, many occasions in which VOSD execs and editors found themselves fielding requests for consulting and advice from people hoping to start their own non-profit news sites.”
I spent some time cruising around and think it shows a lot of promise. I’ve also got five ideas for how it could be made even better and more useful.
Inside The Hub
The piece that I’m most interested in is the simple directory of existing non-profit news orgs that The Hub has put into motion. This is a great idea. Structured directories are almost always awesome. The Hub’s directory is pretty simple, currently listing just 13 organizations that qualify as non-profit, community-based news organizations. All the big players you usually read about in stories are there: New Haven Independent, Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen, etc. Each profile page includes a quick rundown on the org’s background and then a short Q and A with someone from the organization answering basic questions about its goals and origins.
It might not sound like much, but this is really useful stuff for people looking to learn more about this area.
That said, there are a few ways these profiles could be improved on to make the site as a whole much more useful:
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More structured data — I’d love to see The Hub focus more on structured data over narrative. The interviews I read were fairly interesting, but the ability to take in all the important details about an organization at a glance is more valuable than the ability to read a Q & A that may or may not contain the same information. What I’d love to see would be for The Hub to borrow a page from CrunchBase in how all the data is structured and links to clickable search results. An emphasis on getting more structured data
would be a bigger win than getting more narrative info on these profile pages. - Funding information — The biggest piece of structured data missing is the funding for each organization. As a reader, I want to know how much funding each news org has received so far and what the source of it is. From my own reading, I know that there’s a vast disparity in funding levels between some of these organizations. Visitors need to be able to see this at a glance so they can put the rest of the information into the proper context.
- Rundown on key personnel — Similarly, the structured data for each news org should include the names of the top editors and the publisher of each organization. These pages could link to “people” pages on The Hub, or they could just link out to LinkedIn profiles or Twitter accounts. Either way, people will want to know who’s in charge at these news orgs so they can get a better sense of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.
- Subscriber/follower counts for social media accounts — The Hub’s profile pages helpfully link out to the social media accounts for each news organization. What they don’t tell you, however, is how many followers that news organization has right now. This might seem like a small thing, but it could actually be very useful information if acquired automatically. It would be great to be able to rank non-profit news orgs based on how many followers they have on Twitter, or by number of fans on Facebook, for example.
- Info on how freelancers can pitch them and how interested parties can support them — My final suggestion would be for The Hub’s profile pages to prominently include information aimed at freelancers looking to learn more about how to pitch non-profit news organizations and for fans and avid readers looking for how to support these new enterprises and their work. These are two use cases I think will be pretty common among visitors to The Hub and they don’t appear to be addressed specifically on the profile pages.
The Hub is a useful project off to a great start. People working on the edges of journalism
need more projects like these that give shape and voice to what’s happening in the field. I look forward to seeing how this develops.
