If there is one thing I’ve learned in recent days it’s that our Potomac Local News is slightly above average.
A proud member of LION Publishers (It stands for Local, Independent, Online, News), I attended our 1st annual conference last weekend in Chicago. The organization formed after the Block-By-Block conferences ended its three-year pioneering mission to help local indie news publishers find financial sustainability.
While at LION I was once again was able to network with my fellow publishers, swap ideas, see how journalists are finding better ways to report on under-served communities, and plan for the long term financial sustainability of Potomac Local News, which, at least for now, is solely supported by local ad dollars.
More than three years into this project andwe are considered by some as veterans in the indie local news scene. However, I tend not to think of myself as being ready for retirement.
But as we indies compared notes on the number of viewers we have on our sites, how long they stay on our site to read and interact with the news, and which publishers are making a profit and which ones are making just enough to get by, Potomac Local News ranks in about the middle.
In my book, starting from nothing, in a community as challenging as this one is (lets face it, life’s tough around here if your financial livelihood is not directly tied in some way to the federal government, and mine is not), then building it into something, then scoring above average is more than a passing grade.
We reached nearly 70,000 unique visits last month — our highest yet — an impressive number for website with such a local focus as ours. The only way to go from here is up.
