Today is Local News Day, a new holiday of sorts being celebrated for the first time this year. Its aim is to help make the general public more aware of all the mostly small news outlets that are trying to keep local and regional journalism in the public interest going in the United States.
And while it’s kind of being established from on high by some of the biggest players in nonprofit journalism—notably Press Forward (a major coalition of national funders led by the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Ford Foundation) and the American Journalism Project (a heavily-funded national organization that establishes similarly well-funded news operations in select states around the nation)—a good idea is a good idea. So my colleagues and I at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism are gamely participating.
The focus of that participation? Like many of our sibling news organizations, we’re using Local News Day to ask the thousands of Massachusetts residents who already subscribe to our weekly BINJ.News newsletter to tell their friends and family to go to our newsletter subscription page and sign up for our free weekly updates.
Adding to that appeal, I’m now publishing this one to ask “people out there in Peopleland” (as I like to say) to do the same thing. If folks reading this are not subscribed to our BINJ.News newsletter, please sign up today! And if you’re already subscribed to our newsletter, but needed another nudge to tell your friends and family to do the same, consider yourself nudged!
Why the stress on subscribing to our newsletter? Simple. BINJ is producing in-depth independent reporting on issues of the day in Massachusetts that you won’t find anywhere else in the public interest every week of every year. If you get our newsletter, then we can make sure you see our latest articles on the regular—immediately expanding our growing audience.
The bigger our audience, the more our hard-hitting reporting can help improve the real world in real time. The more we can do that, the more it will make sense for you all to support our news operation when we ask for donations. The more donations we get, the more likely it will be that we’ll be able to keep providing news in the service of democracy for the long term.
Thanks for hearing me out. Happy Local News Day! And subscribe to the BINJ.News newsletter today!
Note: It’s totally fine to subscribe to the BINJ.News newsletter any day!
This editor’s note was produced for BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service
