You may have seen or heard our little tag line that says that the New River Voice is your Voice for the Valley. A couple recent articles I’ve read really bring that line to mind.

The first was yet another about nonprofit investigative journalism, a topic I have discussed in previous Inside Voice entries. The most recent article was published this week by The Washington Post with a headline that read, “Increasingly, nonprofits fill a need for investigative reporting.”

The article went on to say that, “While most print newsrooms remain shrunken and some major newspapers are mired in bankruptcy, new media incarnations are giving the restless and the jobless a second lease on life.” New River Voice (NewRiverVoice.com) hopes to be one of those new media incarnations, and that’s one reason, I think, that I was invited as a fellow to the Knight Digital Media Center’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp last month. We hope that our new nonprofit model will be something that will take root in the community and grow into a strong and vibrant news organization, and the Knight Digital Media Center seems to hope so, too.

We think the New River Valley needs and deserves a strong journalistic organization, and we believe that you will help us to make that happen.

The article mentions difficulties in funding and various streams of revenue. “The larger issue is whether such not-for-profit outfits can become self-sustaining, or will forever be dependent on foundations and wealthy donors,” the article said about some of the established nonprofit news organizations. “If those checks stop coming, these operations could be crippled.”

Thus far the New River Voice has received no foundation grants or big checks from wealthy donors. Receiving a few of those would certainly give us a major boost, but until then we are relying on the New River Valley community—in the way of local businesses to advertise and local folks to donate—to keep us alive and hopefully to thrive.

Besides the financial aspect of a business such as ours, we’re also depending on you to actually want what we provide. Another article that has me thinking this week comes from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The article discusses the painful scenario for “serious journalists” of how mainstream news has gone the way of supermarket tabloids.

“Count on fear and sex to attract the eye,” wrote the article’s author Jack Fuller, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, was editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of the Tribune Publishing Company.

“How could people be taken in by screaming commentators (on everything from health care to basketball), by celebrity gossip, by reports characterized at best by truthiness rather than the rigors of verification?” Fuller added, primarily so he could then establish at least somewhat of a solution for journalists regarding how to overcome this phenomenon.

“It should be clear by now that the challenge for journalists from here forward is not only the steadfast adherence to the values of accuracy and independence and the social responsibility to provide a civic education but also the development of new ways of thinking and talking about how to advance the social mission of journalism in a radically and rapidly evolving environment,” Fuller said. “The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience.”

That’s not an easy challenge, but we hope you will help guide us as we try to offer the news and information you want and that you can’t get elsewhere. Your feedback is important, and we love to hear from you. Remember, we’re your Voice for the Valley … if you allow us to be.

Tim W. Jackson is editor of the New River Voice.