Help Create The Future of Journalism
We're here to tell Milwaukee's story. Here's how you can help.
Reporter Graham Kilmer working on a story for Urban Milwaukee.
“We need to accept that what local news is today is already dying,” said Elizabeth Green, co-founder of the education news organization Chalkbeat, in a column by New York Times media columnist Ben Smith.
Big media companies are not the future, Smith wrote in late March as media layoffs and furloughs began across the country. “The time is now to make a painful but necessary shift: Abandon most for-profit local newspapers, whose business model no longer works, and move as fast as possible to a national network of nimble new online newsrooms. That way, we can rescue the only thing worth saving about America’s gutted, largely mismanaged local newspaper companies — the journalists.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more nimble local online publication than Urban Milwaukee. In response to the coronavirus crisis, we pivoted overnight to covering the hell out of this life-or-death issue. We also moved quickly to increase the number of stories we release on both weekdays and weekends, adding full weekend shifts for our team. But to continue this coverage, we need support from our readers.
We need our readers to become paying members. The money doesn’t go into the pockets of shareholders as a dividend. It goes into the hands of our growing team of reporters spending more time than ever chasing stories and following up on leads.
Our membership fee of $99 a year or $9 a month works out to cost of less than 3 cents per story we publish. Hard to beat that.
Our audience is growing. It was up 26 percent last year and is up by more than 40 percent this year. We are grateful for your readership and your trust in our publication. But advertising doesn’t cover the cost of our reporting staff, especially not now.
So we ask those of you who are regular readers but haven’t become members: please join today.
