NEWS

 

News of Davidson is an online-only source of community news and information. Our website went public on September 15, 2017, but that was after more than a year and a half of tireless work behind the scenes to make sure that we laid the necessary groundwork to set us up for what we hoped would be a successful and long-term effort. We listened to stakeholders to assess what people in Davidson wanted.

In early 2016, we set up our 501(c)(3) organization, with the help of some local legal folks who connected us with a Charlotte law firm that handled our organizational work pro bono. We worked with a local web designer, Kathy Davis, who helped translate our ideas into reality.

It was during that time that we established some of our ground rules.

• We would start out as an all-volunteer effort.
• We would not charge for a subscription or use a firewall for paid content.
• We would not accept advertising. And while we initially considered having “sponsors,” our donor support led us to believe that we could sustain our operations exclusively on donations.
• We would not accept material from producers of content that do not a have direct connection to Davidson.
• We don’t allow public comments on our web site. We did not feel that we had the ability to adequately monitor such comments.
• We don’t publish the police blotter.
• We don’t do “gotcha journalism.”

News of Davidson publishes news releases from a variety of sources: local nonprofits, the Town, Davidson College, and local businesses. While all of these are important, we knew that our local nonprofits often had difficulty getting their news to the community and could least afford to pay for advertising or simply hope that they would get unpaid media coverage.

Most importantly, News of Davidson is also extremely fortunate to tap into the talents and skills of local residents. We have a number of writers and columnists who contribute amazing original articles and poems for News of Davidson. Our volunteers, from writers to editors, have decades of experience in their fields of expertise.

Changes Over Time

Several aspects of our coverage have evolved over the past 6+ years. Initially, we had an RSS feed and our subscribers got a notification when we published an article. That didn’t last too long. We learned that as our content increased, our readers didn’t want their email inboxes to overflow.  In March 2018 we looked to MailChimp to create email notifications for News of Davidson. Those emails went out once a week on Wednesday mornings. That allowed us to discuss content at a weekly Editorial Board meeting on Monday.

It was also in 2018 that we added our NewsofDavidson.photos website to provide a platform for our photographers Bill Giduz and Jane Campbell to share more photos than we typically place in an article. That platform also allows us to share video clips.

We initially had a calendar function on our website. However, the functionality became too labor-intensive for our volunteers. As a result, we focused on creating a weekly article about upcoming events in town. The article was called “Ready, Set, Weekend in Davidson.” We added a second email that originally only included a link to that one article, which is a compilation of nearly a dozen local calendars of events.

We navigated COVID and did our best to make the challenges of lockdowns easier for our community. Our weekly editorial board meetings shifted to virtual Zoom meetings, and we still leverage that platform to meet to this day.

During COVID we renamed our article “Ready, Set, Social Distancing in Davidson: Week X.” We compiled things our readers could do online or virtually. We also compiled a list of interesting, mostly wildlife, web cams that could take our readers across the state and around the world in the midst of a pandemic.  We did that for 29 weeks.

As we came out of COVID, we changed our weekly article to “Ready, Set, This Week in Davidson.” We also realized that with the amount of content we were publishing, our Friday emails should have more content than our events summary.

We initially contemplated having a presence on several social media platforms, but ultimately settled on only having a Facebook page. It is not our primary effort. We have used our page to live stream several events. Far more often, we share events from the Town or other organizations to help publicize their events.

In 2020, we added an “In Memoriam” section to offer families a free option for publishing a loved one’s obituary. We don’t have a maximum length, and we will publish more than one photo if requested.

On a VERY few occasions we have opted to send a stand-alone email with an especially urgent news item.

More recently, we added a “ICYMI – In Case You Missed It” section in our email for previously published items about upcoming events. We often get press releases well in advance of an event and try to keep a running tab so our readers know what is still coming up in the days and weeks ahead.

We also recently added to our list of ground rules. We don’t use AI to generate our content.

While our determination to support our local nonprofits remains steadfast, our efforts to support them have also evolved. While some nonprofits have their own staff or volunteers to write and generate content, many do not.

In 2020, we created Meet the Need. It is our proactive effort to ask local nonprofits what they need: from more volunteers to donations of items or funds. We remain committed to evolving to better meet the needs of our local nonprofits.

What has Remained the Same

• Neither local nonprofits nor local businesses pay to publish information in News of Davidson.
• We continue to be an all-volunteer effort.
• We continue to do our best to highlight things that are going on in our town.
• We continue to rely on donations from our generous readers to make all of it possible.

What is abundantly clear, we aren’t the Charlotte Business Journal or the Charlotte Observer. Nor are we trying to be like the local (Charlotte) TV or radio stations that sometimes venture to Davidson to cover a story.

We are a group of a handful of over 50-year-olds who not only gather all of this material, we do all the work behind the scenes too. Several members of the team navigate the “back end” of our WordPress site to publish each and every article. Our writers, editors, treasurer, and photographers do all of this because we believe we have an important role to play in our community.

We are News of Davidson, and we are proud to be your nonprofit source for community news and information. And we greatly appreciate the overwhelming support we receive from members of our community, whether the support is financial or words of moral support.