⏰ Last call for discounted Summit tickets and travel stipends
We know our members love a deadline. Well, tomorrow, June 28, is the last day to take advantage of our lowest possible ticket price for the 2024 Independent News Sustainability Summit in Chicago this September 5-7. We’ve already sold nearly half our tickets and anticipate this event will sell out.
Interested in attending the Summit but need financial support to get there? In an effort to make conference travel more affordable for our members, we’ve opened a second (and final!) call for $600 travel stipends.
Next steps:
🎟 Purchase your early bird Summit ticket by tomorrow, June 28, at midnight ET
✈️ Complete the travel stipend request form by Sunday, July 21, at midnight ET
🤝 Join our Summit Slack channel to start connecting with fellow attendees
🎉 Get excited to learn from our growing roster of knowledge experts and be in community with 500 independent news leaders, supporters, and funders
Hope to see you in Chicago!
– Hayley Milloy, LION’s marketing manager
P.S. The LION team is off next week for summer break; this newsletter will return the week of July 8.
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Thank you, Lisa Heyamoto!
Lisa Heyamoto, LION’s former associate director of membership education, is now the American Journalism Project’s new vice president of portfolio learning.
Here at LION, we’re committed to helping independent news publishers build more sustainable businesses. Our sustainability pillars and maturity model help guide members toward this goal, and Lisa’s work was instrumental in defining and executing these concepts. If you’re one of the hundreds of LION members who have received an Audit, or participated in a Startup or Sustainability Lab, or our Revenue Growth Fellowship program, Lisa has impacted your work and your news business. We’re incredibly grateful for her contributions to our team, as she generously shared her enthusiasm, good humor, and expertise to help shape our organization.
We’re excited for her next step, and we can’t wait to see her in Chicago, where she’ll take the stage for the third time as a co-host of our LION Awards Ceremony. Until then, you can find her here.
Thank you for everything, Lisa. 💖
LION welcomes 13 new members
We’d like to warmly welcome all the new LION members who joined us this month, including The Durango Telegraph, The Copper Beacon, Town Crier Productions/Charlottesville Community Engagement, Methow Valley Examiner, Wichita Life, Investigative Project on Race and Equity, The Amarillo Tribune, East End Beacon, The Yellow Springs News, Houston City Beat, Oxford Free Press, Borderzine, and Yellow Scene Magazine.
Learn how to become a LION member.
Knight Election Hub
Many of our members are looking for support to help them maximize their reporting capacity this election year. So LION is working with a group of national partners to ensure our members have access to training, tools, and resources that can help them cover the 2024 races that will have the greatest impact on their audiences.
The Knight Election Hub, which contains many free tools and resources, launched this month, and they’ll continue to add services throughout the summer.
Check out the access eligibility criteria, and sign up for the Hub here.
10 resources for independent publishers
1. Create engaging emails. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is offering a free course on designing emails that inspire action. (TODAY at 12:30 p.m. ET)
2. Prepare to cover political conventions. Join the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the National Press Photographers Association for two free virtual legal trainings; the Republican National Convention training is TODAY at 1 p.m. ET, and the Democratic National Convention training is on July 25.
3. Develop your data skills. USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism is accepting applications for its Data Fellowship, which teaches participants how to produce original, accurate data analysis and use it for data-driven health reporting. (Apply by July 10)
4. Rethink your government reporting. The Solutions Journalism Network’s Building Democracy Fellowship will provide $10,000 and nine months of support to help selected newsrooms integrate solutions journalism into their government reporting. (Q&A on July 29; apply by July 31)
5. Align profit with purpose. Join Indiegraf and Agencia Media’s Amanda Zamora for a Q&A webinar designed to help independent content creators and publishers align their mission with revenue generation. (July 26)
6. Sign up for the Medill Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub Summer Summit, a free, one-day event in Chicago featuring keynotes, hands-on workshops, lightning talks, and breakout sessions. (July 30)
7. Address and avoid burnout. LION members: This News Entrepreneur Academy course outlines what burnout looks like, why it happens, how to address it, and, even better, how to avoid it. Plus, LION member The Bentonville Bulletin’s Sam Hoisington has four tips for avoiding burnout while building a news business.
8. Secure your site. Through Cloudfare’s Project Galileo, LION members can access increased web security and performance services for free. To access this benefit, fill out this form and mention you’re a LION member.
9. Revamp your election visuals. Canva has created specific templates to support journalists’ election reporting.
10. Pack your bags. Poynter has published a list of upcoming journalism conferences and events happening worldwide, covering the who, what, when, and where (and cost!) for each opportunity.
What we’re reading
Fighting to freelance. Amid concerns about a new Department of Labor rule that specifies how employers should classify workers, some freelancers are suing, stating that the vague rule threatens their right to freelance by broadening the definition of an employee. (Nieman Lab)
Start succession planning. At INN Days, several LION members shared their experiences with succession planning and gave advice on how to start the process. One pro tip? Even if you have a succession plan, don’t “let it get moldy.” (Nieman Lab) We’ll also explore this topic at our 2024 Summit.
Show of force. The Australian government is considering using its tax system to prevent (or persuade?) Meta from pulling news content from its platforms. (The Guardian)
24-hour turnaround. When L.A. Taco ran an “emergency drive” to rehire furloughed staff members, dedicated readers stepped in to help — so much so that the outlet could rehire everyone after one day. (Poynter)
The AP Fund for Journalism. The Associated Press is launching a 501(c)(3) sister organization with plans to raise at least $100M to support state and local news. (Columbia Journalism Review and Axios)
Interim update. Press Forward has published a new report highlighting its 62 funders, 25 local chapters, and $850K in funding distribution to date. (Press Forward)
LIONs in the news
Cityside, the publisher of Berkeleyside and The Oaklandside, has launched a third news outlet, Richmondside, to serve the residents of Richland, CA — a city of 116,000 in the East Bay.
Before the launch, staff met with hundreds of community members to learn more about what they’d like the outlet to write about. They then used these insights to create a set of inspiring and practical newsroom values. The foundation for those values? “Maintain editorial independence.”
Cue the confetti and applause — congratulations, Richmondside! 🎉
In other LION member news:
⭐ Monquartier has launched a new subscription program to support the development of its newsroom.
⭐ The Tucson Sentinel has hired Natalie Robbins as its new creative community solutions reporter; she worked with the Sentinel as a summer fellow last year.
⭐ The Buckeye Flame is opening a brick and mortar newsroom.
⭐ The Haitian Times won the New York Association of Black Journalists’ Ida B. Wells Award for Excellence in Print Journalism.
⭐ Mountain State Spotlight and Outlier Media are highlighted in this Poynter article about local news outlets revolutionizing journalism.
How to reach us
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