It’s been a wild year for Susan Mernit and her startup news site, Oakland Local.
She has taken the promise of a $25,000 two-year grant from the New Voices program and created a viable news site covering the underserved city across the San Francisco Bay. She has also leveraged that to raise an additional $102,700 in support from other foundations.
“The launch went amazingly well,” Mernit said, recalling back to Oct. 19, 2009. Stories about Oakland Local ran in three other media outlets and had over 1,800 people view the site on its first day. That number quickly settled in at about 800 visitors a day, still 200 percent more than expected.
The challenge then for Mernit and her two co-founders was to maintain that level. “We worked incredibly hard as writers to do that,” she said, “simultaneously writing stories ourselves for up to six hours a day, working to get content from partners and working to build a writers’ list to work with. It was intense!”
The site was experiencing 30 percent month-over-month growth and was quickly outgrowing its home. On the technical side, the team made changes on the fly: They removed a poll that took up too much processing time and made the site load slowly; they had to increase bandwidth and move to an off-site private server sooner than expected.
In the seven months since, Oakland Local has published more than 3,000 stories, blog posts and photo galleries from 52 contributors.
The first year statistics, which were published on OL’s site in an effort for transparency, include:
- 386,466 visits, with 608,428 page views
- 1.77 pages per visit, 1.58 minutes average time on site
- 151,336 unique visitors
In addition, they count more than 3,100 fans on Facebook, 1,626 Twitter followers and 783 registered site users.
Central to the site’s success, Mernit explains, has to do with their growing roster of non-profit and community partners, at more than 35 so far in the first year. Described as “training wheels” to allow partners to build capacity on Oakland Local before branching out, these partnerships include online writing and social media training, as well as publishing or promoting content for other outlets.
It hasn’t been a completely rosy ride. Susan Mernit explained: “As the site quickly grew in local influence and popularity, we found ourselves explaining to other media organizations that had a longer tenure in Oakland, but less understanding of how the web operated that our page views and credibility could be a tool to help them gain more readers and attention, rather than a means to deprive them of readers and influence.”
She and her team found writing about the issue on their site to be useful, helping them reflect on and affirm their core mission. The productive dialogue, she said, led to “a better understanding of some of the frustrations of those who feel caught in the digital divide.”
Challenges now also revolve around infrastructure and sustained growth. The team has sublet co-working space and will bring aboard about six interns for the summer.
The next six months will also find the team focused on building revenue “in a way that fits in with our core mission.” Mernit’s goal is to be able to fund up to three staff members.
With site growth slowing now, down from a high of 30 percent a month, Oakland Local staffers will continue their outreach “to a wider pool of local people,” in order to increase their audience base.
And Oakland Local will continue to focus on lean mobile phones as a delivery device. The site was initially designed to function correctly on mobile devices, and this remains central to its mission of access for all.
