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Building blocks in the emerging local news ecosystem

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Statistics
Unique monthly visitors

33,692
Average page views

145,311
Average visits

84,781
E-newsletter

  • Yes, a single newsletter
E-newsletter subscribers

254
Facebook likes

15,865
Facebook followers

10,354
Twitter followers

1,349
Instagram followers

951
You Tube

211
Revenue

  • Less than $50,000
Primary revenue source(s)

  • Subscription (including paid e-newsletter, pay wall)
Ad products

  • Traditional Web display advertising sold directly by your organization
Paywall

  • Yes, a hard paywall
Distribution

  • Direct to web/mobile
Total personnel/contributor FTE

2
Date of most recent publisher update

05/07/2019
Last Publisher Update

  • 2019-05-07 17:38:43 UTC
The Ohio County Monitor
The Ohio County Monitor

News for Ohio County, Kentucky, covering local and state issues, health news and other areas. Co-founders are Lee and Dustin Bratcher. Revenue: subscriptions and advertising.

Who is in charge?

Lee & Dustin Bratcher

Job title

co-owner/co-editor

City

Beaver Dam

State

KY

Zip code

42320

Year launched

2012

Tax status

  • LLC

Geographic scope

  • Other

Other geographic focus

Small City & Large Rural County

Population of coverage area

24,000

Scope of coverage

  • General news or a number of topics that are not necessarily closely related to each other

Primary focus

  • Current news and events

Topics of coverage

  • Crime & justice
  • Education & schools
  • Events in coverage area
  • Government
  • Politics

Watchdog journalism?

  • Yes, occasional

Facebook link

https://www.facebook.com/OCMonitor/

Site Twitter handle

https://twitter.com/ocmonitor

Effective engagement practice

Social media is how we tend to get a vast majority of our traffic with almost all of that coming from Facebook. It is effective for us because it is all automated through our site so we don't have to spend any time or money to accomplish. Very handy for a 2-man shop.

Revenue challenges

We provide public safety information and obituaries for free as our community only has a weekly newspaper and sometimes funerals can be over before the newspaper prints. Our biggest challenge isn't getting readers and it isn't our readers trusting us, it is getting our readers to value the work that we do to the point where giving us the equivalent of 17 cents per day for daily news for our community that has never had daily news. Bottom line, cut and dried. Everything we put out for free is read almost religiously, but we put our a major story behind the paywall and we get bashed for not offering it for free.

In the news

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/ohio-county-liars-table.php

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/sourcing-innovation-from-a-rural-journalism-lab.php

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2018/from-rural-news-audiences-to-russian-tweets-this-new-research-has-some-useful-takeaways-for-reporters/

https://www.ft.com/content/955f7d84-c60e-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675

https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/inside-3-organisations-approach-to-community-minded-journalism/s2/a720367/

https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-year-of-investing-in-processes/