As we start our third year of publication, we’ve decided our news outlet needs BINJ in its name
Last week, I wrote a column about how the “enshittification” of social media and the rise of so-called “AI” is really hurting the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and our news publication HorizonMass. Basically, such “creative destruction” (read “just plain destruction of once-useful services”) by Silicon Valley tech giants is making it harder and harder for independent news outlets like ours to build audiences.
This week, I’m writing an editorial announcing that my BINJ colleagues Chris Faraone, John Loftus, Linda Pinkow, and I have decided that at least one of the problems causing the slow growth of HorizonMass is self-inflicted. Meaning that it’s a problem we can actually solve: We think that having two websites, binj.news for our organization and horizonmass.news for our news brand, is hurting us by confusing potential readers.
We therefore believe that we need to change over from two websites to one website for both our organization and our news brand. And we think that our organization’s acronym “BINJ” needs to be in the name of our news brand, too.
Quite simply because BINJ just turned 10 years old in June and it’s a far better known brand than HorizonMass.
When we launched HorizonMass as BINJ’s news publication in 2023, we did so for what seemed like good reasons at the time. But we have seen signs, portents, and hard numbers that tell us that much of our audience still doesn’t understand the connection between HorizonMass and BINJ. And we’re fairly sure that the resulting confusion is slowing the growth of both BINJ’s member base and HorizonMass’ subscriber base.
So, we’re building a new website over the next few weeks to serve both our organization and this publication–and we’ll let you all know what HorizonMass’ new name will be when we launch it.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that today marks the start of HorizonMass’ third year of publication and that we are officially going weekly as of this edition. We quietly transitioned from a biweekly to a weekly a couple of months ago and it’s working well; so we’re going to stick with it!
If readers have any input on these upcoming changes, please let us know at info [at] binj.news. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this matter.
This editorial was produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven, news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
