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The local news industry isn’t dying, it’s evolving. The future lies not with the legacy regional publishers, but with nimble, lean, highly focused hyperlocal news operations.
Whether you’re a young reporter or an established news hound, you may well be looking for a way out, a route to control your destiny. Today News gives you that opportunity.
Creating a good website can set you back thousands. Aside from the cost of a developer or agency, there are myriad other expenses: hosting, newsletter provider, maintenance and upgrade fees, domain renewals, plugin costs, and various other set-up and ongoing costs.
Having operated successfully in the hyperlocal news sector for six years, we know what a modern local news website needs to look like. We’ve ploughed all that experience into creating a platform, using the most up-to-date technology, to enable you to focus on what you do best: reporting on news and becoming the leading news source on your patch.
If you make your site an indispensable news hub for your patch, you will make it attractive for advertisers. Each Today News site comes with an array of revenue-generating tools, including paid jobs and events listings, e-commerce functionality, Google Ad Manager technology, as well as the means to create sponsored content opportunities.
On top of that, we provide our own expertise and experience to help you reach advertisers in your community, not to mention resources such as media packs and accounting software.
We’re looking for journalists to take on patches across the United Kingdom.
We currently have journalists editing Today News websites in Altrincham, West Kirby, Heswall, Sale, Glasgow, Oxford and Cherwell Valley.
But we’re expanding rapidly and are looking for journalists to take on patches in their home town.
If you’d like to know more, drop us a line on david@todaynews.co.uk
Cutting-edge, clean and eye-catching design on mobile, ensuring high reader UX on any device
The platform has ready-to-go newsletter functionality, letting you start building loyal readers from the off
The TodayNews platform comes with e-commerce, paid jobs and events listings, and Google Ad Manager technology built in
The growing network of editors is there to support each other and help each other create successful sites
Whether you migrate your site over or take out a site on a new patch with us, you join the Today News network. This will give you all the tools you need to run a local news business: a cutting-edge website with multiple potential revenue streams, and use of the Today branding on your patch.
Here’s a breakdown of everything that’s included within your subscription:
You can, but building a site with the technology that’s suited to a modern-day local news site – as you’ll get with a Today News site – would cost a five-figure sum. This is an incredibly cost-effective and quick way to get off the ground, put your journalism skills to good use, build a community on your patch, and begin to make a living out of it.
How long is a piece of string? We can’t guarantee the amount you can make from your site, but we can say that if you can quickly become the most trusted and dominant news title in your town or village, you will become appealing to advertisers. The advantage that hyperlocal journalism has over other forms of local journalism is that you can offer advertisers a very clear proposition: your content will relate unerringly to a particular georgraphic patch and the people that live within it. By building such a qualified audience and readership, you will become attractive to advertisers, and our years of experience can help you to choose strategies that will monetise your site.
You will earn a 50% cut of all advertising generated by the site, to be paid on a monthly basis. Our experience has shown that this amount can vary between a useful second income to a profitable main income.
Like most publishers, you won’t actually own your site as it will be part of the Today News network. It’s similar to a license agreement, whereby you are able to take advantage of all the benefits of membership of the Today News network for as long as you are paying the subscription.
We don’t tie you in to any contract, so you can leave as and when you want to. As your site will by then be live and established, we will seek to find a replacement to take on the editing duties of your site.
Site editors should be prepared to jump on to a story when it happens – that way, you can quickly develop a reputation as the ‘first port of call’ for news on your patch. As you’ll be living on your patch, it’s much easier to produce content that if you were based in a distant newsroom. From experience, a couple of hours’ work a day will usually be enough to get your site off the ground, but this will increase as your site starts to attract revenue.
Ideally, we’d like editors with NCTJ training and/or experience in a newsroom. The ability to write clearly, succintly and accurately is a pre-requisite, as is the determination to make your site a success.
If you’d like a chat about how you can join the Today News network and start a local news business on your patch, drop us a line on the email below or fill out the form to the right. Look forward to hearing from you.
Email: david@todaynews.co.uk
