Chris Horne, founding publisher of The Devil Strip — a five-year-old, alt-weekly covering Akron, Ohio — joined the Colorado Media Project in December for the first installment in our Brown Bag Webinar series. CMP and The Devil Strip are two of the six US-based organizations participating in the Membership Puzzle Project’s 2019 global news membership cohort.

On the call, Chris swapped tips on year-end fundraising with Colorado newsrooms, discussed his organization’s pioneering transition to a member-owned co-op, and reframed the conversation around how to “save local news”. Here’s what we learned:

We don’t need to save local news. At least it’s not that simple. Chris diagnoses the failing health of community journalism as just one small symptom of the systemic disengagement people feel from their communities altogether. Isolation, loneliness, addiction. Disinformation, polarization. Inequality, injustice. That’s what we’re up against.

To save itself, journalism has to help save its community. From the moment The Devil Strip started five years ago, Chris has devoted himself to developing roots within the community, by building relationships and trust. To that end, some 95% of the publication’s stories are written and reported by regular Akronites, representing a diverse cross-section of the local community and the issues it faces.

Have you ever been given a gift that someone wanted to give instead of the one you wanted or needed? Did they blame you for not liking it? That's how a lot of local news operates these days. We keep doing things the same way we have for the last few decades but with flashier graphics and hashtags for social media.

Chris participated in the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford.

“Membership is a way to restore what’s broken in society,” says Ariel Zurulnick, Fund Director of the Membership Puzzle Project, who joined the CMP conversation with Chris. Over the last several months, as we’ve been experimenting with a joint membership pilot with five Colorado newsrooms, Chris has been transitioning The Devil Strip from a traditional, ad revenue-driven business into a member-owned news co-op, in which Chris will have an equal stake to all shareholders. Membership, which creates a whole host of ways to get involved beyond just giving money – attending events, pitching story ideas, delivering papers, to name a few – is the natural extension for The Devil Strip participatory model of journalism.

Financial support is the payoff after years of building community relationships. In addition to our five joint membership pilot organizations, we invited the 18 Colorado newsrooms participating in our 2019 #newsCOneeds year-end challenge, which matched year-end donations up to $5,000, in partnership with NewsMatch. Participating in the national NewsMatch campaign, The Devil Strip met its $20,000 fundraising goal in only six days. Chris said that while some fundraising messages resonated more than others (specifically, those focused on community impact rather than promoting journalism), Chris made clear that there was no “hack” or best practice for raising money at year’s end. Instead he credited The Devil Strip’s success to the five years of earning the community’s trust through building relationships with regular Akronites.
Local journalism is a gateway to civic engagement. Chris wants to create local journalism as a public commons — a place where people can find one another — and a way for them to fall back in love with their community. Together, through co-creating The Devil Strip, and in the process re-engaging in their community, hopefully they’ll find something worth saving.

Thanks again to Chris, Ariel, and all of our friends in the Colorado journalism community for joining the first in our ongoing Brown Bag Webinar series. Our next one — 2020 Focus with the CMP — is scheduled for Wednesday, January 22 from Noon to 1 p.m. We’ll hear from Laura Frank (Rocky Mountain PBS) about the COLab — a collaborative news hub opening mid-2020 in their new space, and Mike Rispoli (Free Press), about their recent and future plans for community engagement work in Colorado.

We’re lining up some more great guests to be featured monthly throughout 2020, so stay tuned to our website, newsletter, and social channels for scheduling announcements!