Local Journalism Needs Community Support to Flourish

The Citizen Bulletin exists to tell important hyperlocal stories for grassroots, low-income communities residing in small towns and rural areas. Image by William White | Unsplash

BY DIVINE DUBE, Editorial Director | @Village_Scribe | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | DEC11, 2020

Journalism is facing a sustainability crisis. Community members can help support quality journalism through their connections, money and expertise amongst other valuable contributions.

BULAWAYO (The Citizen Bulletin) — When the first person tested positive to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Zimbabwe in late March 2020, I was in the middle of an academic year at Stanford university, in the United States, where I was studying models for sustainable hyperlocal journalism as a John S. Knight Journalism fellow.

I had taken a year-long hiatus from my work in Zimbabwe to focus on my studies. The pandemic abruptly ended my vacation from regular work. Despite a huge research workload coupled with a COVID-19-induced anxiety, I had to remotely join my small editorial team in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, to provide editorial guidance for the coverage of the health crisis.

Several local newsrooms across the country had started jostling to cover the pandemic, arguably the big story of the century. But there was also an emerging challenge. As most newsrooms focused their attention on big cities where the virus first emerged, news deserts in communities traditionally undercovered by the mainstream media also grew exponentially.

This left stories of ordinary folks in small towns and rural areas underreported and information about the then novel virus scarce. This is what miffed me and I knew The Citizen Bulletin was best positioned to address that gap. It is the reason for its existence.

From 2016 when we first joined the local news ecosystem as producers of hyperlocal content, we’ve sought to focus on underreported issues in Matabeleland, zeroing in on the plight of ordinary citizens who face a litany of challenges that include lack of access to quality health care, poor education and dilapidated infrastructure.

A student reporter from The Citizen Bulletin uses her phone to record a video at Ngozi Mine, in the outskirts of Bulawayo. Image by Julia Thomas | The Citizen Bulletin

And now with the emergency of COVID-19, we were presented with a new opportunity to rejuvenate our mission, telling important hyperlocal stories for grassroots, low-income communities residing in small towns and rural areas where news gaps in local reporting are a common phenomenon.

From March, we have covered a dozen of issues about the impact of COVID-19 on local populations from the plight of cross border traders struggling to keep their small business afloat, special interest groups such as people with disabilities and albinism struggling to access essential services, small health centres overwhelmed by patients who can’t access referral hospitals due to travel restrictions and under-resourced schools grappling to provide quality education in the middle of the pandemic.

These stories and many others, which we deliver to our audiences primarily via WhatsApp broadcasting and group sharing, have not only empowered our communities with the information they need to stay safe from the virus, but have galvanized them to hold local leaders and government bureaucrats accountable for the delivery of public goods and services.

As the fateful year comes to an end, my team and I are happy that the COVID-19 pandemic, despite many of its undesirable effects, has renewed our relationship with our audiences; something that we have always yearned for. When we first launched, we wanted to build our news outlet on a foundation of listening.

This year, thanks to the emergency of “coronavirus journalism”, we managed to reconnect with our communities, building trust and delivering quality journalism at a time our audiences needed information the most to fight the invisible enemy— COVID-19. We also leveraged the milieu to launch some memberful routines which we hope to incorporate into our 2021 editorial plans.

While we cherish our commitment to serve local communities, the truth that we have to tell, consistently, is that quality journalism needs funding. This is where audience engagement comes in. Grant funding alone cannot sustain quality, impact focused journalism. Community participation, in many different forms, is needed now more than ever, to sustain local journalism.

At The Citizen Bulletin, just like in many other local news outlets, the conversation about funding and sustainability has been one of the most sacred yet important since we came into existence. As a nonprofit news outlet, we are particularly hit hard by journalism’s financial pressures. Beyond grant funding, which constitutes more than 80 percent of our annual budget, we believe the future of our work lies in community cooperation.

Our plan is to grow our news organization into a member-driven entity. This is a new phenomenon, especially in Zimbabwe where journalism is yet to be regarded as a public service such as health and education. As such, we know that for us to launch a successful membership program we need the courage and tenacity to climb mountains.

We’re encouraged by the fact that community co-op models have worked successfully for other local initiatives outside journalism. We’ll make deliberate efforts to learn how we could apply the same strategies to our membership program in support of sustainable hyperlocal journalism.

As we work on designing our membership program, we’d like to invite you to join The Citizen Bulletin, and become our founding member. You can send us a WhatsApp or email message using details at the end of this article, expressing your interest to become part of us. Membership entails a lot, but at the very basic, and as defined by the Membership Puzzle Project, here is what it encompasses:

‘...a social contract between a news organization and its members in which members give their time, money, energy, expertise, and connections to support a cause that they believe in. In exchange, the news organization offers transparency and opportunities to meaningfully contribute to both the sustainability and impact of the organization.’

The above conceptualization of membership illustrates a promising future which we are building for our news organization. We look forward to having you — our reader — as a full member. We hope to engage you further with finer details about our envisaged membership program at the beginning of 2021.

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Our latest and last newsletter edition of 2020 is unusually long and carries with it COVID-19 updates and important hyperlocal stories from different parts of our coverage areas in Matabeleland. All our platforms—including this website will be live throughout the holiday, and you will be able to explore our latest stories.

Thank you in advance for reading and sharing our content.

Our team will be taking a short break next week and will be back with fresh and exciting ideas early next month. While we take this much needed break we ask you to give us feedback on our work, and share ideas to help us better serve you in the coming year.

Send us an email or WhatsApp message on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or +263 71 863 6460 respectively.

We wish you an exciting holiday. Adiós.