One Way We’ve Learned To Scale Grassroots Community News

Elizabeth Galarza is the first to tell you that she doesn’t have professional journalism skills. So she acquired them.

In March, Galarza’s Savannah-based Pasa La Voz merged with Nuestro Estado, a community news outlet located two hours up the road from her in Charleston, SC. The merger came with Fernando Soto, a professionally trained journalist who now oversees both publications as editor-in-chief. 

The merger brings growth opportunities for both newsrooms – Pasa La Voz – Savannah has already doubled it’s Facebook page views from 1 million to 2 million and Pasa La Voz-Charleston has tripled its Facebook reach to 700,000. The merger may also provide a playbook for the journalism ecosystem in one way to scale grassroots community news.

“If we reach more people, we can bring in more revenue. It’s more sellable,” said Galarza who earned a general equivalency degree in 2003, four years after she was forced to drop out of high school. 

Galarza, who retains the publisher title, researched Soto’s content to ensure that the two publications were value-aligned in how they serve audiences. Then the two decided together that they would keep their Facebook pages separate, but change the names of the publication under Pasa La Voz’s new masthead.

Galarza’s organization went from an all-volunteer group to now a staff of six, including two contract reporters. They also have two volunteers — one supports community engagement and the other produces traffic and sports reporting, said Galarza as she headed out on a major sales call. 

“If we get this advertiser, we’ll be able to convert our two contract reporters to full-time,” she said. 

Neither Galarza or Soto wanted to abandon Charleston’s readership, which already had about 13,000 followers on Facebook at the time of the merger. 

Both communities and their respective heavily rural surrounding counties, receive the same level of quality news and information. They cross-post on Facebook, but only when the story might be relevant to the other audience. All stories appear on their website, which now goes by the name, Pasa La Voz Noticias.

Galarza initially worried about Soto adjusting to his role as editor-in-chief. 

“He’s used to being his own boss. So we talked about whether he would feel weird about the change,” she added. “He said no, that he wanted to be the editor.”

Journalists shouldn’t always view other news outlets as competition, Soto said.

“I do really believe that we can achieve more things for our audiences by working together,” he added. “So it’s a really great case of like, we are just gonna become one and be better.” 

The merger was not without hiccups. 

The newsroom continues to experience difficulties seamlessly merging the two sites into one, which is part of the reason they kept the distinct Facebook pages. 

In his new role, Soto is shepherding stories about water outages that leave 1,000 residents in a Savannah mobile home community without clean water for days or weeks at a time each and every month, sometimes leading to skin rashes. He’s also reporting an ongoing series about police stops in Charleston’s predominantly Latinx neighborhoods.  

He recalls the difficulty of trying to go-it-alone as the publisher of the former Nuestro Estado, now Pasa La Voz-Charleston on Facebook.

While it can be difficult for a news entrepreneur to let go of the vision a newsroom was founded on, Soto suggests publishers and journalists consider a merger as one of the available tools for working towards financial sustainability and audience growth. 

“It’s particularly hard for publishers of color,” Soto said. “Seeking sustainability is more difficult for us. Sometimes I feel like we end up fighting for crumbs.”

In addition to more staff support and reporting, the growth Pasa La Voz Noticias is experiencing also means the newsroom is able to apply for a greater variety of grants and other funding.

“It’s important for us to build things with the mindset of, ‘If we want this to grow, if we want to scale our organization, we have to take ourselves out of the equation and the process of growth because we don’t hold all the answers.’”