By David Gordon, associate editor
The Chippewa Valley Post is taking a major step forward this week with the hiring of a part-time community reporter.
We’ve also added three significant words to our logo, as noted below.
Madeline Fuerstenberg, who is finishing her sophomore year in the UW-Eau Claire journalism program, will be covering various local events as well as doing some feature writing and in-depth reporting. She also will assist with such mundane newsroom tasks as editing (or rewriting) press releases.
She brings a solid journalism background to the CVPost. Throughout her senior year at Deerfield (WI) High School, she had an internship with the weekly Cambridge News/Deerfield Independent and the following summer she was a freelance reporter for the paper.
At UW-EC, she was a staff writer for The Spectator in her freshman year and served as the paper’s news editor this year as a sophomore. Her responsibilities in that position included finding content, assigning and editing stories and page layout.
In the summer of 2018, she was part of the UW-EC team that conducted geographical and archaeological research at various Holocaust sites in Lithuania. The group, under the direction of Geography Prof. Harry Jol, used Ground Penetrating Radar and other tools to search below the surface at various sites around the country, including suspected locations of synagogues and mass graves.
This summer, she’ll take a break from her CVPost responsibilities and return to Lithuania for three weeks as part of Jol’s research team. In the longer term, she said she aspires to write for National Geographic and hopes to travel the world and expose herself to as much culture and history as possible.
Addition to the CVPost logo
If you look carefully at our logo above the headline for this article, or elsewhere, you’ll notice a small but significant change. Starting today, our logo carries an additional phrase underneath the bridge image.
It still says “Community Supported Journalism,” because that’s defined our goal from the time we launched the website in early 2015. Under that, however, we’ve added “No Subscription Required.”
We’re indebted once again to Lee Heike and his crew at Hookd Promotions, who designed our original logo and updated it for us quickly and creatively.
Three words added
We’ve added only three words but they’re significant! We’re committed to bringing you Chippewa Valley news that would otherwise go unreported – particularly news of the nonprofit sector. We’re also committed to the principle that our reports should be available to anyone with access to a computer.
No subscriptions, no paywall!
That’s where the meaning of “Community Supported Journalism” in the logo’s first line becomes crucial. We’ve been steadily encouraged and supported verbally by a wide range of community members. But verbal community support doesn’t pay the bills, even for a 501(c)(3) organization like us.
Those bills range from website hosting costs to expenses like printing brochures and business cards to paying a web technician . . . and a new community reporter.
Our fiscal model from the start has included income from voluntary community supporters, both individuals and nonprofit organizations. It was fascinating to learn on Tuesday that The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah has announced plans to turn itself into a community-supported nonprofit news operation .
It’s apparently an idea whose time has come. We’re very appreciative of the financial support we’ve received from parts of the community over the past four years, but it’s time to broaden that base of support. That, in turn, will enable us to expand our coverage.
What this will mean for our audience is more live staff coverage and less reliance on press releases. If that seems to you to be worth supporting, please see the information that follows this article for two ways you can help provide that support.
At the same time, please think a moment about the significance of the three new words in our logo. And do follow Madeline Fuerstenberg’s expansion of our coverage of people and organizations that usually don’t quite make it into the for-profit local media.
If you’re glad to see the CVPost’s expansion of its community coverage, please consider supporting some of the cost of that expansion.
There are two convenient ways to do that: become an annual member of the CV Post at $50 or more by clicking the Donate button below or click here to learn how you can become an automatic monthly Friend of the Post.