Our community open house last Wednesday was the first in a series of steps we’ll be taking as we determine the future of The Eudora Times.
During the meeting, we discussed that reporters Lucie Krisman and Riley Wilson from the KU Journalism School will be the primary news team covering the city in the next few months. At the same time, a group of journalism students from the University of Missouri will be conducting research to determine possible content and revenue strategies for our news outlet.
This is a rare and exciting partnership to have two journalism schools working together to address the future of news in hopes of creating a model that can work in other communities around the nation. Eudora is at the center of what we think is a very important experiment.
The immediate goal is to determine whether there is enough community support to continue The Eudora Times into the future. Although consumers have become accustomed to receiving news online for free over much of the past decade, the fact of the matter is that doing journalism costs money.
We’re a small operation with student help and can operate with less than most newsrooms. However, we’re still a small business that will need community support to survive. In the short term, we’re looking at establishing a fund similar to Go Fund Me while we work on our business strategy. We hope to have more on that soon.
Some misperceptions are out there on social media that we’re funded by the city or are some entity of the city, and taxpayers will see us appear on their bills. This is not accurate. We are an independent operation not related to City Hall. We just had our open house there since it was an accessible space easy for the community to find that could fit a crowd.
Our open house attracted a great group of engaged Eudora residents interested in learning more about who we are. They let us know they want a centralized place to find accurate information about their community and the human interest stories happening within it. We discussed a lot of ideas.
Some of the easier ones we can implement right away are starting a weekly events calendar and creating an email newsletter with our content from the week. If you would like to receive this newsletter, email us at eudoratimes@gmail.com. We’ll start this in the next few weeks. It will be the same information placed on our website during the week but will go straight to your inbox like a weekly newspaper delivery.
In addition to our regular news coverage, we will also explore starting letters to the editor, a history column, a parenting column, a recipe column and a podcast focused on the movers and shakers in the city. Down the road, we’d like to be able to add engagements, anniversaries, obituaries and other society news. Furthermore, we will be looking for advertising support.
With a part-time staff, we will need to prioritize each week what news we’re able to cover. Lucie and Riley will also establish set times they will be in Eudora each week where they will be available to chat with residents.
Overall, we’re working to become a community voice for Eudora and look forward to what we discover along our journey.
Teri Finneman
Editor
You can reach us at eudoratimes@gmail.com.