Now two months after the hard launch of The Square Beacon, the tally of readers who have made monthly pledges supporting this website has reached more than 50. They have pledged a total of around $500 per month.

If you’re one of those, thank you!

If you’re not, please consider joining them now, instead of waiting.

Pledges of $500 a month translate to $6,000 a year. That’s not enough for a person to live on. The website software tells me that  around 2,500 people visit The Square Beacon most weeks. So I’m hopeful that the number of people who help support The Square Beacon can improve to better than the current 2 percent of regular readers.

As a one-person operation, I don’t have a lot of extra time to plow into work that doesn’t somehow help The Square Beacon provide coverage of local government to Bloomington area readers.

But I will invest some extra time if I can help improve local news coverage by others.

Next week I’ll have a chance to do that. I’m supposed to talk to a class of student journalists at Indiana University’s media school about covering Bloomington’s city council. The basic idea is to walk through a quick preview of the city council’s Wednesday night agenda for March 4. Continue reading “Square Beacon Benchmark: It pays to prepare for city council meetings” →