Helping news entrepreneurs and their communities flourish

🌳 TNC unveils its 2025-27 Strategic Plan

By Amy L. Kovac-Ashley

With equal parts delight and humility, we now publicly launch Tiny News Collective’s first strategic plan. This plan is the culmination of seven months of deep thinking and imagining by the greater TNC community: our team, our board, our members, our funders and our partners. We are grateful for the time and attention — two nonrenewable resources — that our stakeholders invested in this plan and in our future.

Tiny News Collective has been experiencing its own transition as an organization, just as the local news and information landscape has been shifting and changing. We are moving out of our founder phase and into our growth phase, so now is the perfect time for us to set out our strategic priorities and major goals for the future.

One of the most meaningful parts of this process was working on articulating our values, which I believe provides a central foundation for our work. Through this process, our members — all early-stage news founders themselves — had an active role to play in providing feedback and suggestions that helped us arrive at the five values we landed on: community, integrity, resourcefulness, transformational impact and hope. We had deep conversations with members about the meaning of hope versus joy and what transformational impact looks like. They pushed us to get specific on how our values will show up in what we do, the members we serve, the partnerships we take on and how we advocate for our members in the wider journalism field. They made our values stronger, by acting in the true sense of the word collective. We encourage you all to take a deeper dive into these values and what they mean to us on Page 7 of the report.

Ultimately, we exist to support and be of service to early-stage news founders, to make their work as news and information providers and community connectors more accessible. They are ushering in the future of local news, which puts community news and information needs at the forefront. That’s why we lead our four priorities by focusing on our membership. All other priorities flow from there.

We hope that this plan gives a clearer picture of who we are, what do we and where we’re going. We invite you to join us on that journey. The community is what compels us forward.

Happy reading! ❤️‍🔥

Featured image: The team at The 51st set up listening tables at farmers markets and other community gatherings to hear from residents of Washington, D.C., about their news needs and desires. (Photo courtesy of Shedrick Pelt / The 51st)

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