Introducing JR500: How You Can Help Us Keep Publishing

The coronavirus pandemic has turned things upside down for a lot of businesses, and independent media is no exception. At Journo Resources we were already surviving on less than £18,000 a year, but this has now dropped even further, as our income from job adverts has fallen to nothing.

We want to make sure we support our community as best we can, throughout the next few months and beyond. We’re determined to make sure we come out of the other side of this, but we need your help.

That’s why we’re relaunching our crowdfunding campaign today, with a whole new range of ‘thank yous’ for our supporters. All in all, we’re hoping to raise £500 a month, which will go towards supporting the freelancers who help the website running every month.

Why We Need Your Help

Journo Resources currently runs on less than £18,000 a year – it’s fair to say we’re a pretty lean team! Despite that, we’re committed to helping half a million people this year, and it’s important to us that we pay all our freelancers a fair rate. However, since the coronavirus has hit, we’re struggling to make ends meet.

Job adverts and event bookings make up the majority of our income and cover our editorial costs, but these have all but disappeared. We’ve already had to stop commissioning freelance pieces, and may have to make further cuts in the coming months. You can see a brief rundown of how we spend our cash (if we had it) here.

⬇️ You can read more about our amazing freelance team in this thread ⬇️

That’s it. Jan is completed™️ – and we helped a total of 29,857 people across our website, events, social, and one-on-one advice ?

We’re a tiny, shoe-string team but we really believe in levelling the media playing field ?

Here’s a little more about the people behind JR ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/8iUF0J6cd3

— Journo Resources (@journoresources) February 1, 2020

We’re already incredibly grateful and humbled to receive an astounding £350 a month from our supporters, and we really couldn’t do it without you. We’re now re-launching our crowdfunding to try to reach £500 a month, so we can keep publishing and supporting our community.

This money will go directly to paying our regular monthly and weekly freelancers, who take care of our admin, jobs board, social media and sub-editing, for some of whom it is their only regular gig. Journo Resources is a collective, and we want to bring everyone with us, and make sure we’re doing the best we can to help our audience.

What You’ll Get

As a supporter, you’ll receive a monthly package of thank yous, sent directly to your inbox on the first of every month. These will include things like:

• Exclusive previews to our big project launches, so you can see them a few days before everyone else. Our May subscribers will get to be the first to play our new retro adventure game, for example.
• The chance to claim a free, reserved places at our new online events, covering everything from pitching to newsletters to social media.
• Additional behind the scenes content – this month we’re sending some joyous extra photos from our #MyHomeNewsroom series.
• Occasional freebies and goodies, such as our exclusive pin badges. We also like to send occasional letters in the post too!

How You Can Support Us

If you can support us, firstly, we want to say a huge thank you, it really means the world to us. There a few ways you can make a regular donation:

• Substack: This is the easiest way to make a regular donation of £3.50 a month. Pop your card details in and they’ll sort out the rest.
• Ko-fi: If you like to donate a custom amount each month or would prefer to pay with PayPal, head over to our Ko-fi account. It’s a bit more fiddly than it should be, but we’ve put together a simple two step guide here.

Finally, we just wanted to end by saying thank you again – and we hope we can shout you all a pint or iced tea once this is all a distant memory.