What should the future of news look like?
More specifically, what should the future of The Eudora Times look like?
We need your help to decide this.
We plan to apply for major grant funding that will open next month. Press Forward is a major philanthropic initiative recently established to help support local news. Millions and millions of dollars have been invested to help newsrooms around the country.
Today, our friends at Good Morning Indian Country – an outlet like ours that is faculty/student run out of the KU journalism school to serve a community that otherwise is lacking in news coverage – announced they received $100,000 in Press Forward money.
Likewise, our friends at The Scope at Northeastern also received funding. (If you want to know who all received funding, you can see the full list here, which includes the Lawrence Times and Iola Register.)
Therefore, we are hopeful that we can be selected in the next funding round that is more geared toward missions like ours.
Specifically, the next round focuses on infrastructure and innovation. As a university-tied outlet, we are much nimbler and more experimental than most newspapers. We’ve done cooking shows, post-game shows, community events and have more recently started Ryn’s Rundown, a short weekly newscast.
We think there’s more room to grow with “Eudora TV,” so to speak. We also think there’s room to provide more coverage in De Soto.
But we also want to hear your ideas on what the future of The Eudora Times could be and how we could expand our coverage if we had more funding to do so.
If you are interested in being part of a one-time meeting in early November to discuss this, email us at [email protected].
Meanwhile, with no guarantees of grant funding, be on the lookout for a $25,000 pledge drive that we will begin later this month.
We know many, many people love our coverage and interact with it. We also know many, many people have never once donated to us to pay our reporters to do this coverage. Like any other business, you don’t stay open long when people don’t pay.
Therefore, we hope that you will help support our pledge drive to keep our doors open and continue serving the community.
We thank you for your support for the past five years as we look to what our future can be.
