The Arkansas Times plans to roll out a new publication focused on LGBT topics and boost its coverage on the rehoming of adopted children in the state through two crowdfunding campaigns.
The success of the newspaper’s fundraising effort — more than $26,000 in three weeks — to add reporters to the Mayflower oil spill story in 2013 led Editor Lindsey Millar to again take the unconventional route for the new projects, he said in a recent interview.
“The reporting that came out of that was good and well received, and it seemed to make a difference,” Millar said. “So that experience made us think that doing something along those lines in other situations would be worth experimenting on.”
The newspaper posted two campaigns on the fundraising website IOBY.org in recent weeks, seeking a combined $144,270.
The first campaign, aimed at providing more resources for the publication’s coverage of the rehoming of adopted children, raised more than $12,000 in less than a month. With those funds, Millar said the newspaper was able to bring in Kathryn Joyce, who wrote the book “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption.” Joyce will start the last week of April.
You might recall that the Times broke a story about Republican Rep. Justin Harris that shed light on the fact that giving away adopted children was legal in the state. Legislators responded with a new law banning the practice.
The second project is more ambitious, and the Times is allowing several months for it to reach its $128,785 goal. With those funds, Millar said, he plans to launch Out in Arkansas “almost immediately” after the money is raised, which he said he hopes to do by July.
The newspaper wrote in an online story that Out in Arkansas “will be integrated into the Times website, and also have its own stand-alone website, as do other publications like The Upshot on the New York Times’ website and FiveThirtyEight on ESPN.com. There will be stories online every day, and some of these stories will also appear in the weekly Arkansas Times. Out in Arkansas will also appear in print twice a year, in a glossy magazine format.”
Millar said the newspaper has “some things already in the hopper” that the staff is working on before bringing on an editor to oversee news specifically about gay and lesbian issues.
The Times said in its posting on IOBY.org that, in the new publication, “we’d more aggressively look to expose discriminatory policies and people in positions of power — in schools, municipal government, law enforcement, the health care system and among employers.”
Millar said the Times will be promoting the crowdfunding campaign in the coming months, including special events that will be announced at a later date.
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