Revenue: Online Community Journalism

TCU in Fort Worth recently played host to an excellent journalism workshop focused on helping community newspapers turn a profit with their websites.

I was invited to speak to this gathering of highly engaged newspaper execs. The 30 participants in this 3 day workshop represented a variety of local newspapers throughout Texas. They were all  committed to building sustainable business models for their digital news efforts.

Tommy Thomason; program director of TCU’s Texas Center for Community Journalism, is doing an amazing job with this series of workshops. With funding from the Texas Newspaper Foundation, attendees get intensive, non-stop training and development that really stands out amongst state news organizations.

WOW. No tuition, room or food charges during these workshops on the TCU campus in beautiful Fort Worth. In the past, workshop topics have included photojournalism, writing and editing, advertising sales, management, page design, developing an effective Web edition, sportswriting, and circulation.

Tommy Thomason was the founding director of the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism. He left that position to become the founding director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism. Thomason began his career in journalism in the early 1970s with the Associated Press, working as a sportswriter in Arkadelphia and Little Rock.

Dr. Thomason has taught journalism at five universities and has been at TCU since 84. In 1987, he was one of the winners of a national teaching award in Journalism Ethics from the Poynter Institute of Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.