Spotlight on New Media Tools For Nonprofits and Community News Groups

We're seeing a lot of exciting developments on the community news front this week. 

J-Lab posts an interesting story on a model of stewardship that bumped traffic to a nonprofit statewide news site while demonstrating a viable sustainability model. J-Lab editorial director Andrew Pergam’s profile of a “merger of equals” between VTDigger and the Vermont Journalism Trust has created a promising funding model for supporting support statewide and regional news coverage. 

Also, San Francisco State University’s Renaissance Journalism Center has created a New Media Toolkit to help journalists sort through the multitude of available story-telling technologies. “The site was designed specifically for those working at small to medium-sized nonprofits and community and ethnic news organizations, as a way to help jump-start efforts in social media, video, audio, blogging and monitoring and metrics,” it says.