(Annette Moser-Wellman)

Many believe the disruption in the newspaper business model will lead to innovation. But what will that innovation look like? To be sure, one of the creative concepts to emerge is that of the small, local, online newspapers sprouting up all over the country. What makes these not-for-profit news organizations unique is not just the way they generate revenue, but their editorial perspective. In this interview, Andrew Donohue, editor of voiceofsandiego.org, shares how the publication started and his vision for the future of news.

What was the impetus for creating voiceofsandiego?

There was a general atrophy in the San Diego media world. The Union and the Tribune merged in the early '90s. Then the LA Times, which had a full San Diego Bureau and San Diego edition, left town. So we went from having three daily newspapers competing for stories to one newspaper very quickly.

Our main founder, Buzz Woolley, was the son of a reporter. He saw the atrophy of media as a weakness in a civil society. As a retired venture capitalist and philanthropist, he partnered with Neil Morgan, a grandfather in San Diego journalism. Together they decided to create a new business model for news. This would be an online newspaper supporting a vision of public service with investigative reporting at the core of the institution.

So I'm going to ask the question most media professionals wonder, "How do you make money?"

Buzz Woolley provided the initial funding of $350,000. We had a staff of four in our first year. That was 2005. We have grown to a staff of twelve and while our budget has grown, Woolley's annual contribution is $200,000, roughly one-fifth of our operating budget. We source the lion's share of our funding now from grants and foundations, other large donors, small donors, corporate sponsorship and advertising. We consider ourselves stable and sustainable right now. We are a live experiment on how large a news organization this new business model can support.

So we run on a million-dollar budget. It's an incredibly efficient operation. I think the local public radio station has fewer reporters than we do and a budget of $18 million dollars. If you gave us $5 million dollars, we would have a 40 person operation and be putting out about five times as much content as we have now. The possibilities of what you could do with that much money are incredible, and I don't think that kind of a budget is out of reach.

What makes you different in the marketplace for news?

As other media organizations continue to shrink, we see ourselves fulfilling a complementary and vital role. We don't try to be a general interest publication. Our mission is to provide investigative and in-depth reporting on key quality-of-life issues in San Diego. Education, local politics, the environment, crime, the local economy and housing are our key areas, and we cover them as enterprise beats. We do in-depth and contextual stores, and are looking to move into more cutting-edge blogging communities in areas like the arts and sports. For example, rather than locker room quotes, we create communities of fans offering statistical analysis and stories from the data.

How big is your readership?

We are experiencing a tremendous amount of growth in our readership. In the last six months it has exploded and we're really excited about it. We measure our audience at about 80,000 unique visitors a month. And we are really proud of how long people stay on our site. They stay nine or ten minutes compared to most on-line news publications at two or three minutes. We are also proving that it's a myth that people won't read longer stories on the Web. And when we write our longer stories with 3,000 to 4,000 words, if we make it engrossing and interesting, people will stay in front of their screens for a while.

What's your vision of news in the future?

My idea of what would happen six months ago was so different from what actually happened, that I'll probably look back at myself and laugh six months into the future. I do think, however, that we will have a much healthier ecosystem. I am very optimistic about where news is going. I see a mix of a lot more small organizations that focus in their own way on different areas. News will all be delivered over the Internet whether that is via television, phone, computer or whatever other cool things are invented between now and then.


Annette Moser-Wellman is President of Firemark, Inc., an innovation consultancy, and author of Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization and Running While The Earth Shakes: Creating An Innovation Strategy To Win In The Digital Age, both published by the Media Management Center.

This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.

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