Over the past year, a Liberian journalism treasure, The Bush Chicken, has been mostly inactive. Regular news articles have not been published on our website for some time. Before we explain why, permit us to recap what we’ve accomplished so far.
Since The Bush Chicken launched on January 31, 2015, we’ve been providing a quality of writing and selection of stories unrivaled by any other Liberian news outlet. This level of excellence is evident in the fact that no other news outlet won more Press Union of Liberia excellence awards between 2017 and 2020.
Our reporters have also been recognized externally, including being selected for:
- Training at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York,
- The U.S. Department of State-sponsored Edward R. Murrow Program for Research and Investigative Journalists, and
- Merck Foundation’s More Than A Mother ‘Media Recognition Awards’.
We’ve also been cited in U.S. State Department Human Rights reports and featured in the Global Health NOW newsletter published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
We hold ourselves to the highest international standards. Unlike many Liberian media outlets, we do not accept plagiarism and regularly screen all articles to ensure originality.
We refuse pieces that are not balanced or well-documented, and we ensure we have permission to use images we publish.
No other news outlet in Liberia has an explicit rule forbidding its reporters from accepting payments from newsmakers. And when we have financial or other interests with subjects of stories our reporters write, we make a disclosure to allow our readers to understand the connections.
Although this is unremarkable for those who read international newspapers, in Liberia, this is unique.
To accomplish all this, our work hinged on ensuring that our reporters could earn a living wage doing honest and ethical work. We knew we would need to build an organization that can create revenue to ensure sustainability.
However, after operating for almost 6 years, we failed to achieve sustainability. Although we have been sustained by grants, reader donations, consultancies, and over $90,000 of cash from our owners’ group, we failed to find a formula that provided us with regular monthly income. Our online advertising was just not enough to compete with giants like Facebook and Google.
Moreover, our website faced major hacks that affected crucial elements such as our RSS feed, social media sharing, and our daily newsletter.
Our thorough research showed us we could be profitable if we started a print edition, but we have never managed to raise enough money to go to print.
Instead of hobbling along, we decided to stop publishing to avoid continuing to pile on over US$6,500 in salary arrears to our employees.
Now, at the cusp of completely shutting down our operations, we’ve decided to reach out to the reading public to vote with their wallets.
We’re looking to raise US$23,000 to completely rebuild The Bush Chicken. Here’s what we plan to do with the money:
- We will pay the over US$6,500 we owe in salary arrears to our employees to ensure a fresh start. (~30% of the funds)
- We will design an entirely new website with significantly increased security features, improved social media shareability, and better SEO. Our current website has suffered significant hacks that have made many functions inoperable. This rebuild is needed to regain all key functions of the website. (~25% of the funds)
- We will fund a print edition that will allow us to become financially sustainable. Although print media is disappearing in much of the developed world, a significant amount of advertising dollars in the Liberian media still goes to print. High browsing costs and other disincentives keep the population from using platforms other than social media. (~55% of the funds)
The US$23,000 will allow us to implement a business plan that’ll lead us to sustainability.
If you value having an independent, thought-provoking media outlet in Liberia, we urge you to contribute to this project. Training and equipping journalists to do unbiased and high-quality reporting require significant capital.
Help us reimagine what is possible with the media in Liberia in terms of quality and independence.
If we meet our Kickstarter goal, we’ll follow this schedule:
- February 2022 – Complete repaying reporters’ salary arrears
- March 2022 – Website redesigned and relaunched
- April 2022 – Print edition layout design finalized
- May 2022 – Digital only print edition published
- June 2022 – First print edition published
Feedback
If you’ve been a regular reader, please also take the following survey to give us your thoughts that will help us improve our operations (https://sprw.io/stt-8b57cc). We’ll also be contacting 10 of our strongest supporters to get more in-depth insights.
Risks and challenges
The biggest risk we face is not being able to raise all the funds. However, for backers of this Kickstarter project, you’ll simply get your money back.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.