It’s been a great week as the news staff of The Eudora Times has gotten back to work.
Reporters Lucie Krisman and Riley Wilson are working on some great stories that will come out in the coming week. In the meantime, I’ve been working on rounding out the extras of our newsroom.
Most importantly, that includes working to set up a crowdfunding website to help support the financial needs of our operation. We are not positioned yet to accept subscribers or set up a paywall like a regular newspaper since we are continuing to work on our business model research.
Therefore, it will be important for our readers to indicate their support by making a donation to this crowdfunding site to illustrate their “subscription” that way. We need money to create a more useful website to better serve our readers, to pay our reporters for their work, and to buy equipment and software to support our reporting, for example.
We hope to be able to launch the crowdfunding site by the end of this week. It’s a special projects site created through the University of Kansas specifically to support faculty/student work. More on that soon.
In addition to our financial strategy, I’ve also been working on adding regular column features to our online newspaper. This includes bringing on board a parenting columnist. Kelly Hagen will write regular parenting columns for us under the banner “Ask a Dad.”
He’s been a parenting and humor columnist for many years now, and we hope you’ll enjoy him. If you have questions about the crazy ride that is parenting that you’d like to send him for his column, you can reach him at kelly.hagen@gmail.com. You will remain anonymous if you ask a question. Kelly is not a trained child psychologist, but the father of two adds a touch of advice and humor to regular parenting problems.
We’ll also be starting recipe of the week and pet of the week features. If you have a favorite recipe you would be willing to share, please email us at eudoratimes@gmail.com. We’ll have a correspondent reporter work with you to get a column set up.
For our Furry Tales pet of the week feature, send us a picture of your pet along with a short story explaining that “paw”-some personality to eudoratimes@gmail.com. We’d like to feature a pet every week on our Facebook and Instagram pages.
We also were told there was interest in having a history column. Ben Terwilliger and I will continue discussions this week on the best way to get that started.
We also would like to get a weekly events calendar started. If you have an upcoming community event you would like featured in our events calendar, email us at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
We launched our first e-newsletter on Friday. This is a round-up delivered straight to your inbox of top items that we posted online during the week. Email us if you would like to get on the listserv. Our plan is to release it every Thursday afternoon as our “weekly newspaper.”
Thanks so much to everyone who has supported us and dropped us a kind note so far. We’re back at it and will be bringing you more and more news as we get rolling.
Teri Finneman
Editor
You can reach The Eudora Times at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
Comments