Rural Public Station Group To Launch Cost-Saving Regional News Network.

High Plains Public Radio, serving rural communities in western Kansas, eastern Colorado, far southwest Nebraska and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles with 13 news/talk-formatted FM stations and five FM translators, is building a network of regional news contributors – including part-time and volunteer community members – to expand local coverage while keeping costs down.

According to plans outlined by HPPR founder and Executive Director Quentin Hope in a report by Niemen Lab, the High Plains Civic Media Network will be coordinated by a lean central editorial team to cover more rural news with fewer resources.

As is the case for many rural public stations, HHPR was heavily dependent on grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before the House's vote in June to rescind $1.1 billion of previously-approved funding for CPB. Hope says the loss of expected operating grants and supplementary funding from CPB – which HHPR had received for 45 years of broadcast operation – amounts to “about $550,000 in lost money over two years, which is around 15% of the budget.”

Enter the Civic Media Network, about which Hope said in a public statement to HPPR listeners, “Rather than a ‘struggle to survive’ I see this work as a time to ‘realize the potential’ of HPPR.”

With the help of a $750,000 grant from Press Forward, a coalition supporting local journalism across the U.S.

HPPR's planned network will include 80-100 people, with “community correspondents” covering general-interest news, “topical correspondents” covering the daily beat, volunteer “community connectors” monitoring local social media, and “regional curators” summarizing and curating stories. In addition to just two full-time “regional reporters,” HPPR plans to hire three new positions to this central team - a network editor, network director, and network digital producer - alongside its existing staff of currently just 10 full-time employees, with just one of those a full-time reporter.

One of the network's goals is to grow HPPR's audience across all media platforms by increasing the number of stories from the current 10-12 per week – “not enough information flow to really build an audience,” Hope says – to 15-20 per day. “If you don’t have enough stuff coming people’s way, they don’t have a reason to come back or to bookmark you,” he says.

Another goal is to give HPPR a presence in most communities without requiring it to pay full-time reporters in every community, thereby strengthening its pitch to county-specific foundations and trusts. Pope refers to the High Plains Civic Media Network as “the next generation of public media, or civic media for the region. That’s a more powerful story and more compelling one — it’s also a more hopeful story, particularly for staff or for the board, that it’s not a struggle to survive, it’s an opportunity…to fulfill the mission you had in mind from the very start.”