Public Interest News Foundation will match all support for our social enterprise community news work in June 2024
June 3rd-9th 2024 was Indie News Week, a celebration of independent publishers of public interest news across the country, organised by The Public Interest News Foundation.
Throughout the month of June, in celebration of Indie News Week, Public Interest News Foundation’s Indie News Fund is match funding all donations, patron contributions and new supporter sign ups for Social Spider Community News’ family of titles.
The margins for our work are very tight. We have never had any significant support from grant making bodies or outside investors. We started our community news operation from the ground-up with Waltham Forest Echo in 2014, followed by Tottenham Community Press in 2016. We started Enfield Dispatch in 2018, because following the closure of Enfield Gazette & Advertiser in 2017, we wanted to make sure that Enfield didn’t end up with no local journalism at all. We recently took Barnet Post, an online publication for most of its life, back into print at the end of 2023. In the summer of that year we also became the publishers of Newham Voices, an entirely volunteer led and written publication.
Every month, we distribute 15,000 copies each of Waltham Forest Echo, Enfield Dispatch and Barnet Post for free to our communities and 12,500 copies of Newham Voices. Every month, across our titles we publish upwards of 450 news stories online, again for free to anyone who wishes to read them.
A combination of ad sales, regular supporter donations from our communities and online revenue means our titles are close to breaking even on a month-by-month basis. This has been hard won, and we have accrued debts in getting here. We make an amazing amount happen with a small team, but any support makes a huge difference.
If you think you could support Social Spider Community News, this month is a perfect time as your contribution will be doubled.
If you would like to support any of our titles individually please follow the links below. If you would like to support our organisation as a whole using the paypal donation button, your support will help us to undertake greater development and outreach for our titles.
If you would like to join our patrons scheme by donating £500 or more, please send an email to [email protected]
Every month in print, and every day online, we work to bring our readers as much news as we humanly can with our small team, without any of the advantages of larger corporate publishers. We don’t publish ‘content’, we publish news. We don’t write clickbait stories that are intended to be picked up by search engines and targeted at people who have never set foot in our broughs, never mind lived and worked there.
Across our titles we try as much as we can to bring readers news about their brough that they won’t find anywhere else. If we had more resources, we would put them into more journalism.
We thank you for your time
