Today we’d like to introduce you to Cassie Young.
Hi Cassie, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I was soaring in my career in government research and innovation when I began hearing from peers that they learned more from my social media accounts than from the local news. I realized people were hungry to understand what was going on in Columbus and that my work in government and community organizing wouldn’t go as far if people were starved for information about their own community. With no journalism background, I set out to figure out how to build a local news outlet.
While gaining experience on a documentary-style shoot, I met local freelance journalist and cofounder Jaelynn Grisso. Grisso was frustrated that it didn’t seem journalists were doing enough to get out from behind their desks and talk to everyday people. She had formerly worked for major investigative news outlets like Mother Jones as well as a local news publication in Honolulu and was freelancing in Columbus at the time. When we met, she was considering moving away because she was feeling like there weren’t any Columbus outlets doing the work she wanted to do.
We hit it off as we discussed angles of my then indie documentary project: Columbus, Ohio’s development. Jaelynn determined she would stay in Columbus to team up with me to give Columbus an independent news publication.
We quickly decided to stick to a nonprofit model to maintain editorial independence. Additionally, we decided to create a “deep dive model”, in which Matter investigates an issue of local importance with multimedia content. So, we turned my documentary project into our first investigation into Columbus’ growth and development: DevelopUS.
Shortly after, cofounder Marisa Twigg published a photojournalism piece about poverty in Columbus neighborhoods in OSU’s the Lantern. I promptly contacted her and luckily, Marisa was working for ENGIE (a global energy provider) and graduating from the Ohio State University with a degree in environmental policy and decision-making, where she had also taken journalism courses.
The synergy between us three’s visions and passions for what local media could and should be was undeniable and we immediately began building nonprofit organization Grey Matter Media and its news publication Matter. We designed an intentional model that takes what works in traditional journalism and combines it with carefully crafted changes to make our journalism more accessible and impactful. We assembled a team of passionate volunteers and began publishing content about development in central Ohio in November 2018.
In case you don’t know, there are many reasons Columbus needs more independent, locally owned news. First off, the news industry is shrinking across the country and in Ohio as well. From 2014-2019, Ohio lost 40% of its newspaper journalists. And that’s a problem, because journalism is the 4th estate or the check on all 3 branches of government. In fact, studies indicate more journalism can strengthen democracy and even increase voter turnout.
And Columbus is no exception. Many of our city’s news publications have been bought up, shut down, and consolidated over the past 2 decades. In fact, one large media conglomerate based outside of Ohio now owns most of Ohio’s newspapers. You may think of publications such as Columbus Alive, the Columbus Dispatch, and Columbus Monthly as local and separate publications, but they are all owned by this same big national company, Gannett.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Grey Matter Media is our nonprofit and Matter is its news publication.
Matter was founded in 2018 because of a shared vision by three people from different worlds: government, journalism, and environmentalism. The common vision was to create engaging, investigative, human-centered, independent, multimedia local news.
Matter is one of the very few Columbus publications that is independent, locally-owned, or nonprofit and it is the only one founded by millennial women, 2 of whom identify as LGBTQ+. It is the only local publication that creates explanatory and investigative multimedia content that is community-informed. And we are the only local outlet to dive deep into the issues impacting the people here. Our audience trends young, including Gen Z, Millennial, and Gen X.
Our leadership, reporters, and board are a diverse mix of people from various age groups, career, racial, gender, geographic (within central Ohio), and other backgrounds, resembling the larger Columbus community.
Rather than scratching the surface of a slew of topics, we dive deep into specific issues affecting people in central Ohio in order to provide better context to things that matter. We have shared 50 stories via articles, explainers, mini-documentaries, and other mediums for immersive storytelling.
We aim to make the news as accessible as possible, providing it for free, and even posting our articles in their entirety on places like our Instagram. Our goal is to meet our readers where they’re at, and for the majority of our audience, that location is Instagram. We gained a whole new audience, including people nationally, from livestreaming protests to our Instagram as well.
Matter goes beyond traditional journalism in proactively engaging the community in our work. We engage with our audience on social media, send most pieces of our content to a targeted list of relevant stakeholders, have hosted 8 events (many being innovative and multimedia) and 11 livestreams, and built a portable audio/visual studio to further meet people where they are.
For the first year of our existence, our only “matter” was DevelopUS, an investigation that is still open today. DevelopUS explores city and economic development, as well as related issues like gentrification. We have published content ranging from a mini-documentary about a hotly contested development project, to an explainer about historic districts, to an interactive map that allows residents to explore how economically segregated various neighborhoods in Columbus are.
In January 2020, we raised enough small donations to began paying its team.
When protests erupted in Columbus and across the country in June of that year, us Matter cofounders were out in the streets live-streaming from our personal accounts. That’s when the posts and messages began to pour in: people were turning to Matter for reliable protest coverage. The problem? Matter wasn’t covering policing nor protests.
We had envisioned opening our next investigation with community input in the form of a city-wide poll and meetings with community leaders. But we changed our vision to stick to our value of being community-informed and opened an investigation into local policing issues based on what we were hearing and seeing on the ground. We saw a spike in audience and donations as a result and our coverage of local policing has pushed the mainstream media to cover the issue in new ways we have not historically seen.
Our work has garnered praise from those ranging from residents in the neighborhoods we’ve covered to activists, to famous poets, to government officials.
The former director of development for the City of Columbus thanked us for our explainer on area commissions, stating that “educating residents on issues this complex is one of our ongoing challenges”.
Activists have told us that our coverage compels them to act, which was our intention in creating Matter to begin with. Community organizers appreciate our livestream coverage and our explanatory and investigative content related to issues of community importance.
Even famous poets have tweeted their concerns with mainstream outlets like the Dispatch and their support of independent local news, specifically naming Matter. And other journalists have said that they were excited to see that a “local group is finding a model that works and being completely authentic in their approach.”
Our biggest measure of success is the impact we have on people. The most telling feedback we’ve received in regards to the impact we’ve had is from a woman with PTSD who said our protest coverage made her feel safer: “I always know what’s going on and I know if something is going on, your team is there … As a Black woman living here, it’s a really scary place to be sometimes so again, I just really value you and your team.” She also became a monthly donor.
During the summer of protests, Marisa Twigg was one of the only reporters out around midnight and captured video of an incident in which CPD drag one protestor in the street and body-slammed another. I sent the resulting article and video to CPD and in a public records request, we found internal emails indicated several officers were investigated as a result.
And in March 2021, the day before we were set to publish reporter Edie Dirskill’s piece that included leaked documents showing Police Chief Quinlan stalled reforms he personally opposed, Quinlan was suddenly demoted by the mayor. Edie exposed to CPD’s public information officer himself that their public-facing accountability dashboard existed – let alone was inaccurate.
This is the kind of exposure of corruption that drives public accountability, and that is the bread and butter of what we do and where our vision (stated above) comes true: we give the public – and even sometimes public officials – the information they need to act. That’s that civic engagement we love to see!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road to building Matter has been anything but smooth, but that simply shows we aren’t one someone else’s path. The primary challenges we’ve faced include a lack of entrepreneurial experience, lack of funding, and burnout.
Us cofounders are all three young Millennial women and first-time entrepreneurs who have never built a nonprofit or a news organization from the ground up before. And we didn’t have the money to hire attorneys and consultants, so we stumbled through all the legal requirements of becoming an Ohio nonprofit and the legal risks of being an investigative news organization, largely on our own.
Funding has been an immense challenge. None of us have fundraising experience, so we muscled our way through getting a small donor program up and running and busted our butts to engage new audiences through community and our own events.
Although we have had some success in building up a small donor base and have had up to 120 members (monthly donors) at a time, soliciting and maintaining relations with that many small donors is labor-intensive and at times expensive. Small donors are our #1 source of funding and that’s the way we prefer it, because we prefer to answer to community members rather than advertisers and large donors.
We’ve been very proud of the community support we have received and while we continue to grow that base, a focus of ours at this stage is securing larger size donations from individuals, businesses, and foundations.
Grants are our #2 funding source, but have been more competitive and harder to secure than we expected. We do get a size-able grant each year from NewsMatch, which matches the donations we bring in during our end-of-year fundraiser.
This year, we got our first big grant – a fellowship from Local Independent Online News (LION) publishers and Meta. The funding and fellowship supports us in having someone on staff to focus on building revenue and financial sustainability for our organization.
And what timing, because we needed it! Our founders are not wealthy and we did not start with any wealthy backers, so we don’t have sizeable seed funding and a safety net to the level many of our nonprofit peers do.
Another challenge is we have found that Columbus completely lacks a culture and infrastructure for news philanthropy. If you start an arts nonprofit, there is lots of local funding from grantors and foundations and this simply isn’t the case for our industry. The Columbus Foundation doesn’t have a fund for media, for example. And this isn’t surprising given we are one of the only local news nonprofits in Columbus. Without larger financial support from such funders, we aren’t as sustainable as if we were able to diversify our revenue streams in that way.
Financial and emotional burnout are very real in this business, and we know that is true for journalists and especially news entrepreneurs on the whole. We have been no exception. All 3 of our co-founders have become extremely financially and emotionally drained from the workload and stresses inherent in startup work and investigative journalism. The year we covered protests was traumatic and we had to power through in order to survive as an organization, not getting time to recuperate.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
Both COVID-19 and national unrest in 2020 taught us that especially in times of crisis, people are in dire need of trustworthy sources of community information, validating our mission.
The pandemic has likely negatively affected our ability to fundraise. We saw an uptick in donations when the pandemic first hit, but that was due to our protest coverage and renewed interest in supporting that work. Now that everyone is emotionally and financially burnt out following the national unrest and 2+ years of the pandemic, in 2021 we were unable to match the fundraising growth we saw in 2020.
We’ve learned as a startup in this climate, it’s more important to live your values as an organization versus sticking rigidly to your plans. We have had to alter some of our goals, but we have found that is okay to do when crisis hits and you are being responsive to the communities you serve.
Pricing:
- We accept donations and sponsorships of all sizes and we encourage recurring monthly donations, because they help make us a more sustainable nonprofit and keep the news free for those who can’t afford it. Our donate page is here: https://bit.ly/3ubQhfh
Contact Info:
- Email: hello@matternews.org
- Website: matternews.org
- Instagram: instagram.com/matternews_
- Facebook: facebook.com/matternews.org
- Twitter: twitter.com/matternews_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClVpHbydnEU1mpFUZCa9-AA
