ONA Weekly #303 – Online News Association

How newsrooms are helping people help each other

We’re inspired by all of the news organizations creating dedicated sections for their communities to ask and volunteer for help. Check out a few approaches below:

Boston.com launched Boston Helps, a dedicated page to connect community members to each other
Dallas Morning News placed the Be a Neighbor widget at the bottom of every coronavirus article (which is embeddable!)
Newsday used the same widget to launch the Together Long Island community board
Nice-Matin developed the Solidarité Coronavirus platform to facilitate connections

Do you have a similar section on your news site? Tweet a link at us at @ONA.

ONA Community Circles

Over 150 people have signed up for ONA Community Circles since yesterday’s launch. We’re seeing strong interest in connecting with peers around determining worthwhile projects to develop, motivating distributed teams and identifying funding opportunities. Over the next week, we’ll be matching peers according to preferences for topics, meeting frequency and goals. Some Community Circles will meet for sharing personal experiences. Others will aim to create resources for the broader community, or prototype bigger projects. There’s a spot for you: Sign up now.

We checked in. You responded.

A few weeks ago, ONA Executive Director/CEO Irving Washington sent our global community a check-in email and invited people to complete a short survey to share their needs and how we can help. We received hundreds of thoughtful, heartfelt responses outlining a variety of concerns. Learn what’s top of mind for the digital journalism community.

Upcoming events

ONA Local groups host networking and training events for journalism and technology communities around the world. All events are currently happening online. Find a group near you.

April 9: ONA Ciudad Mexico: Reporteando el coronavirus: Verificando el material encontrado en redes sociales

Career opportunities

ONA’s Career Center is an excellent resource for jobs, fellowships and internships in digital journalism. Recent postings include:

Reporter, Spectrum Magazine
Editor-in-Chief, Simons Foundation
Journalist Product Manager, Wick Communications
Six Digital Journalist roles (multiple regions) and Executive Producer, Weather, Spectrum Networks
Region Collaborative Manager, Local Media Project, Solutions Journalism Network
Director, Charlotte Journalism Collaborative
Business Development Associate, The GroundTruth Project, Inc
Chief Revenue Officer, VTDigger

On our radar

U.S. local newsrooms can soon apply for the COVID-19 local news relief fund, Facebook Journalism Project
Distributed newsroom playbook, Fathm
RSF launches Tracker 19 to track Covid-19’s impact on press freedom, Reporters Without Borders
Fund for Investigative Journalism announces coronavirus rolling grant, Fund for Investigative Journalism
Covering COVID-19: Resources for journalists, International Center for Journalists