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You've been sent a story from New Voices (http://www.j-newvoices.org/): New Era Media New Era Colorado Foundation http://www.j-newvoices.org/1008/ A Boulder, Colo., foundation will start a blog site covering Colorado news and politics aimed at young people. Initial content will come from 10 citizen contributors (ages 17-30), who will research, develop and post stories. CONTACT INFO Steve Fenberg Executive Director New Era Colorado Foundation 720-565-9317 E-mail Twitter Website   A Boulder, Colo., foundation will start a blog site covering Colorado news and politics aimed at young people. Initial content will come from 10 citizen contributors (ages 17-30), who will research, develop and post stories. Community contributions will also be invited. In addition, the site will develop feeds that can be posted to Facebook profiles and other social networking applications. Check back for future news and updates.   • June 2011 • December 2010 • May 2010   Social Media Fuels New Era Readers June 2011 Since it launched in April 2010, New Era News has attracted more than 114,000 visits from almost 80,000 unique visitors. Readership has been growing steadily, fueled to date by more than 27,000 Facebook referrals. The site, which seeks to engage young people in politics and current events, relies on interns and volunteer writers to produce content.  Recruitment has been robust. “There are currently about 60 people signed up with blogger accounts and about 15 signed up with guest blogger accounts on the site,” reports Executive Director Steve Fenberg. Fenberg says that many former interns continue to contribute content even after their formal internship has ended. “We feel like we’ve built a strong foundation and have engaged thousands of young people in important political discourse that otherwise would not have become engaged,” says Fenberg. After Facebook, search engines refer the most traffic to the sites. While the site has been successful in raising one-time donations from individuals, it has been harder to attract support from businesses targeting young people because they often don’t have paid advertising budgets, Fenberg says. Moreover, the site is too small to attract support from large media funders. The plan going forward is to seek support from local family foundations. As the 2012 elections get closer, the site plan to produce several series that include candidate profiles, explanations of ballot measures and other election-related coverage, Fenberg said. “New Era News has been a fascinating project for us over the past few years,” he said. -Emily Harwood New Era Focuses on Return Visitors and Ad Sales December 2010 New Era News boasts substantial web traffic despite its fledgling status. Since its launch in April 2010, New Era News, an online source of politics and news focused on Boulder and Denver, Co., has had more than 40,000 unique visitors. “The vast majority of our readership is within Colorado and mostly come from the front range areas of Boulder and Denver,” said Steve Fenberg, founder and executive director of New Era Colorado and the New Era Colorado Foundation. Of the total number of visits, 67 percent are first-time visitors and 33 percent are return visitors. “Since our site has only been live for less than a year, we expect to have more new visitors than returning visitors,” Fenberg said. New Era News initially focused on bringing new eyes to the site, but moving forward that goal will start to shift, he said. New Era hopes to retain a higher percentage of return visitors in the future. To keep readers coming back, New Era News has been thinking of ways to keep content fresh and innovative. It continues to recruit new writers to keep a variety of voices on the site. “We currently have about 10 active writers that produce content at least weekly,” Fenberg said. Another dozen writers supplement this work with occasional content. And New Era News recently purchased flip cameras to encourage interns to produce small-scale online videos. “These short videos will track the legislature, city council decisions, and other local community and political news,” Fenberg said. “We’ll have the ability to embed these videos on other websites around the state, thus placing our content in front of new readers.” Internally, New Era News is also making a push to increase Facebook fans. “We hope for this to translate into increased readership and traffic of the website,” Fenberg said. As New Era News looks to the future, funding will be important to the success of the site and they have experienced challenges jump-starting the an online advertising program. “Although we’ve put together sales packets, promotional materials and approached several local businesses in the area, we haven’t seen very much interest so far,” Fenberg said. Most businesses are cutting back on advertising budgets, which has made it difficult, he said. But in In the new year, Fenberg plans to take on this challenge as well. “Next year we will begin to have New Era Colorado’s Development Coordinator work on this program in an attempt to make it more effective,” he said. - Lori Grisham New Era News Launches, Gets National Attention May 2010 New Era News, a blog for young people to read and write about politics, launched in March and is off to a running start. Right away, both the Huffington Post and the popular blog Jezebel drove traffic to a story called “Can Feminists Wear Aprons?” - a cultural piece exploring the popularity of aprons and their intersection with modern feminism.  NewEraNews.org’s Steve Fenberg Discusses Site’s Launch from J-Lab on Vimeo. Kristen Painter, the story’s author, was thrilled with the attention:  “People are actually reading your stuff and New Era has done a really good job of utilizing social media to drive traffic to the site.” The story got close to 15,000 hits and 300 comments, said Painter, a journalism graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder - and at the bottom was a link to the New Era News. This kind of cross-posting has helped build the site’s name recognition and reputation quickly, explained Steve Fenberg, executive director of New Era Colorado Foundation.  The Boulder-based organization aims at increasing political engagement of young voters and is the driving force behind the blog. “Our traffic is a lot higher than we thought it would be,” Fenberg said. “The first month we had over 6,500 unique visitors.” Getting the site launched wasn’t easy, reflected Fenberg.  Deciding what the site would look like and its functionality took a lot of time.  New Era hired Quilted, a small design cooperative based in Boston and Berkeley, to build the site.  “We wanted it to be very personal so that people saw the writers as one of their peers,” he said. “Little things help, like having an Avatar of the person’s face.” The site’s main contributors are ten student interns and two editors, but members of the community can also get involved. “We wanted it to be very participatory,” Fenberg said. “So you can just click ‘create an account’ and actually start writing and submitting content.” Editors review everything before it appears on the site and select stories for the front page. Although New Era News does not pay contributors, Fenberg said they haven’t had trouble keeping the site fresh since interns participate for school credit and there is great enthusiasm for the blog. “A lot of people want to be published and we are a non-profit and are not exploiting free labor. We are providing an outlet and letting it be a learning experience for everyone,” he said. Painter, author of the popular apron story, blogs three to four times a week. Although she is one of the more experienced writers on staff, she points out that New Era News is supportive of new writers. “It’s a really easy environment,” she said. “And it’s really conducive to writing about what you want to write about but also asking you to step outside some of the things you would normally report.” New Era News attributes much of their success to the blog’s unique content and perspective, Shad Murib, the site’s editor, said. “We hope that we can find a good niche that people are able to come back to and they realize that there is a group of people who are interested in journalism - in both consuming it and producing it,” he said. Fenberg said finding that identity is key. “I think it’s important to identify a very specific need before you go about building the site and the personality of the site,” Fenberg said. “Once you have that need in mind it’s easier to know what your mission is and where you’re going.” Although New Era Colorado Foundation is a non-partisan political awareness group, Fenberg admits that some of the pieces on the blog are left-leaning. As New Era News moves forward, Fenberg says their next major goal is to diversify the voices represented. “It is an area where we do have to be careful because we’re talking about politics and it’s hard to write about politics without some kind of opinion coming through,” he said. “But we want it to be as open and as diverse as possible.” Regardless, he is happy with where they’ve come in just a few months. The main lessons Fenberg learned also makes good advice for future start-ups: “Expect things to arrive that you didn’t plan for and be flexible and go for it.” —Lori Grisham