We hope you’ve noticed plenty of changes for the better here on Berkeleyside. There’s our redesign, of course, but we’re also constantly trying to improve the quality of our reporting, the depth of our coverage, and the range of issues we examine. We’re also branching into live events with the first Berkeleyside Local Business Forum next month.
Berkeleyside is more than a labor of love for the three founders — myself, Lance Knobel, Frances Dinkelspiel and Tracey Taylor. We want to build a sustainable local business. To date, however, we’ve purely invested our time and money and taken nothing out of the site.
To do all this relies on the support of our readers and advertisers. If you enjoy Berkeleyside and want us to continue developing the site, please keep reading and recommend it to friends, neighbors and colleagues. When you feel the urge, participate in the comments on our posts, which is where, all of us at Berkeleyside believe, so much of the value of the site emerges.
If you want to do more, still, we’ve created a way for you to help fund Berkeleyside. Why on earth would you do that? We think that there’s a great market of local and regional advertisers for Berkeleyside, but the truth is that no-one yet knows quite what will be the formula for continued funding of local journalism. Advertising will be a part of it, certainly, but other revenue sources will be important. We have no plans whatsoever to start charging for our content, but we’re interested in you becoming a subscriber or premium subscriber to Berkeleyside. We have a modest set of benefits beyond the site for subscribers, and we plan to extend those benefits over time.
The money Berkeleyside makes enables us to pay our contributors when they report stories. It enables us to embark on more ambitious, enterprise stories on some of the big, gnarly topics in Berkeley. It enables us to expand our capabilities with more multimedia journalism.
As always, we’re eager to hear what you think. And if you want to contribute something more than your attention and comments, have a look at our support page.
