It’s been two months since CityBeat joined LINK Media, and in that time, we’ve made a number of important behind-the-scenes improvements.
Our goal during that time was to stabilize operations, get everything back under one (local) roof, and ensure that systems and processes were in place so we could continue publishing without interruption.
There’s still some work to do (improving our events calendar experience, for instance) but for the most part, the behind-the-scenes work is done. Now, it’s time to work on the part you do see: our coverage.
The purpose of independent or “alternative” news organizations is to fill coverage gaps left by “traditional” media outlets. I put alternative and traditional in quotation marks because, honestly, the media landscape has changed so much in the past 20 years that I’m not sure those terms mean much anymore.
The major media corporations have gutted newsrooms, slashed coverage and no longer operate the robust reporting organizations they used to, and what used to be considered alternative media is now often the first source of information for communities, not the second or third.
In Northern Kentucky, our first publication, LINK nky, was founded because none of the Cincinnati media outlets were covering NKY the way it deserved to be covered. Now with CityBeat, we’re going to work hard to identify and fill coverage gaps wherever they exist in Cincinnati (and boy, do they exist.)
We’ve gotten some feedback from readers already, but in order to find out more, we’ve launched our first CityBeat reader survey. This short, anonymous survey gives our readers – new and old – a chance to tell us why they read CityBeat, what we’re doing well and what we can do better in the future. We take these responses very seriously, and the information we get from this survey will be used to inform our coverage moving forward.
So please, spend three minutes taking the survey and let us know what you’d like to see in the pages of our print edition and on the website. And if you have more to add, you can always email me at lacy@citybeat.com.