About the Bronx News Network

To meet the growing demand for local news in Bronx communities we need to make the Norwood News even stronger and bring the same kind of critical newsgathering to uncovered neighborhoods. To accomplish all this, we are launching the Campaign for a Bronx News Network, which will give Bronxites a voice that echoes from their neighborhoods all the way down to City Hall and up to Albany and beyond.

Local news matters in Bronx neighborhoods. It circulates the civic lifeblood, gets people working together and holds decision makers accountable. Now that large newspapers are cutting staff and big media companies are gobbling up formerly independent community weeklies, we can't think of a more urgent time to support, strengthen and expand our efforts. And in these difficult financial times, what better way is there to help small businesses than an affordable way to advertise?

Recently, in collaboration with the Mount Hope Housing Company, we introduced the Mount Hope Monitor to cover Community Board 5 and started a journalism program for teens. We also launched the West Bronx Blog, the first news and policy blog in the borough -- a must-read for community leaders and decision makers.

But we're just getting started. The Bronx News Network (BNN), a nonprofit, will strengthen existing nonprofit neighborhood news outlets and create new ones. To launch the Network, including a newspaper in vastly underserved Community District 6 (East Tremont, Belmont), we need to raise $160,000 over the next year. While we hope to receive foundation funding, we can't do this without our readers, advertisers and other supporters.

BNN will provide publishing services (advertising sales, billing and layout) to other nonprofit newspapers so they can focus on reporting the news. And we'll create an innovative virtual newsroom where reporters and editors at different papers can work together on articles and investigations that no single community newspaper would have the resources to pursue. BNN correspondents will report on Bronx elected officials in the City Council, Albany and Washington. Graduates of our youth journalism program will move on to internships and, eventually, full-time positions at BNN and participating newspapers.

With your contribution, we will create a national model for bringing news that matters to underserved neighborhoods and rebuilding the broken media landscape from the ground up.

Thank you for supporting this worthy effort.

Click here to make your donation to the Bronx News Network.