A Quick Look at Next’s First Week, and an Offer to Do More in Your Community

Even if you're completely disinterested in Santa Monica, I get video bombed near the 1:25 mark

(If you haven't checked out the new site yet, stop by http://santamonicanext.org. If you want to help us out, you can donate through the Streetsblog L.A. or Santa Monica Next donation pages, our KickStarter, or just join us for the Streetsblog L.A./Santa Monica Next fundraiser on September 22.)

Santa Monica Next has now been up and running for a full week. We're proud of our first separately-branded community news website and are excited to watch it grow. This week we've written a couple of times with news about our launch, ran a feature on our first event of the week, and published two unique news stories by Gary Kavanagh. The first reviewed the popular Tour da Arts. The second was a preview of service and farebox changes coming to the Big Blue Bus.

I know some of you have wondered why we chose Santa Monica first, and others want to know what they need to do convert their own blog into a Southern California Streets Initiative website. If you're interested, here's what we're looking for before investing in a new website...

1) A writer who is regularly published, even if it's on a personal blog, who understands Livable Streets issues
2) A writer comfortable confining their work for us to a specific geographic area
3) Some source of revenue, be it the ability to turn out people for a fundraiser or an advertiser/sponsor. We consider these websites professional journalism, and want to launch with clear expectations for an annual budget. I would note that this isn't a way to support our non-profit. I am not making a dime off of Santa Monica Next (at least at this point) and have put a lot of work into it.
4) Someone who has some flexibility in their schedule. We're not saying that you need to work on your site full-time, but to do it justice you will need to cover some public meetings and events.

If we agree to work together, we'll help create the website, cover the first year of hosting fees, provide support with creating a Kick Starter Campaign and/or launch event, provide a template (the current SMN one is temporary while we develop a permanent template for all our non-Streetsblog websites), and help reach out to advertisers and sponsors. We can use the name of the larger organization to help attract inerns and other pro-bono writers, and our status as a federal and state recognized non-profit is a huge help in fundraising.

If this sounds like a good deal to you, and you meet our four qualifications, drop me an email at damien@streetsblog.org. I'd be happy to talk with you.