Please Help Us Grow So That We Can Bring You More Coverage, More Investigative Reporting and More Diverse Voices
Most of our team either volunteer their time or receive extremely modest honorariums. In addition, we require no subscription fee, run no display ads and we never sell our readers’ data. However, a free press is sadly not free to run. We do have reasonable operational costs and rely nearly 100% on you, our readers, to empower what we do.
In January of 2023, our publication came under the management of the Next Echo Foundation, a nonprofit media organization that has been publishing Cultural Daily for over a decade. With this change also came an effort to expand our coverage and our reporting team, all with the goal of providing readers a more diverse offering of writers and storytelling on the issues that matter.
We’ve made great progress, more than tripling our content, but we still have a long way to go, especially in expanding our coverage on issues that impact marginalized communities and working with more underrepresented writers and visual storytellers that can best inform on the issues facing their communities. To continue this expansion, we are in need of raising funds for the following annual expenses:
1. Hiring two full-time staff members that will serve as editors and contributors. The positions are Managing Editor, which is currently a part-time role; and Editor for Marginalized Voices, a new role that will focus on bringing you investigative stories about issues facing underrepresented communities, while also seeking out writers from those communities who are best equipped to tell those stories, as those are the voices that we most need to hear from. Our goal is to provide fair wages and benefits.
Amount required: $150,000 to $200,000 (salaries, health benefits, retirement contributions, reporting tools)
2. Ongoing News-related Photo Licensing. We receive a nonprofit rate from the Associated Press, but this still requires a few thousand dollars per year to have access to the images we need in order to tell engaging stories that can best inform you. This not allows us to provide more engaging and informed stories, but it also allows us to focus more budget on investigative research and our writers, as opposed to the high cost of flying photographers around the country to cover stories.
Amount required: $3,000
3. Writer Honorariums. In the ideal world, we want our writers to be paid for the work they do. While we appreciate the contributors who are willing to volunteer their services, they work hard and we believe everybody deserves some level of compensation for the time they give us. We would love to offer our writers modest thank you payments that not only recognize their contribution but also ensures we maintain the quality that DCReport was founded on.
Amount required: $20,000 (this would allow us to provide honorariums for up to 275 articles per year)
4. Investigative Resources. Investigative journalism is a costly and extremely time consuming endeavor. We often run into fees for government filings, database access, policy experts and occasional travel, if information and/or interviews cannot be done remotely.
Amount required: $20,000
5. Technology & General Operating expenses. Website hosting and maintenance, email management, web security software, social media management, graphic design platforms, and video editing software are all things that we simply can’t exist without. In addition, we have expenses related to general operations, such as accounting, legal fees and association dues.
Amount required: $25,000.
We ask for your support to implement this expansion and thus further empower our ability to protect your rights as citizens, consumers, workers, investors and voters.
We also offer very limited sponsorship opportunities, so if you or your company would be interested, or if you are aware of any grants that we would qualify for, please reply to this email and we’ll be in touch.
By supporting us via donations, sponsorships and grants, we will continue to be able to offer our content 100% free and without any display advertising … all while continuing to offer fact-based investigative reporting, opinion and perspectives.
Our participatory civic media needs you! CLICK HERE TO DONATE TODAY.
