Go Fund Us
Listen to this articleSince the launch of our little site, we have been gratified to learn that between the LAPX and our parent site, the Baltimore Post-Examiner, we have reached 2 million unique views. That’s a lot of views of a lot of excellent reporting, entertainment and opinion.
The Baltimore Post-Examiner was founded in 2012 by journalists from The Washington Post, The Frederick News-Post, The Baltimore Examiner and freelancers from The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. Baltimore Post-Examiner features articles encompassing multiple genres: news, politics, music, blogs, poetry, movies, art, travel, health, and more. We partner with Maryland Reporter and publish all of their content – an extremely important partnership because Maryland Reporter is the only site dedicated to covering what is going on in Annapolis. As our tagline suggests – a little bit of everything.
And then we went West, to Los Angeles, starting the LAPX in November 2013. Between the two sites we have featured hundreds of writers, producing content from all genres: for Baltimore Post-Examiner – which makes us the largest online publication not tied to a newspaper in the Baltimore-Washington market. Our business model was partially designed to help aspiring and unemployed journalists find work and to give veteran journalists who began their career pre-Internet a chance to return to the career they love. And we have been successful in that regard with journalists transforming their careers to the corporate world and to other news organizations – and we even helped journalists get Fulbright scholarships.
It is extremely gratifying — and sad — when one of our contributors leaves LAPX/BPE because they have a new gig elsewhere. It means they get noticed when they contribute to our sites.
In the past year our sites have been averaging 60,000 impressions/reads per month. Our traffic increased so much that we had to upgrade our server to prevent it from crashing. And all this comes with a cost.
We need your help to pay for administrative costs, server costs, tech costs and to help offset some of the costs to continue to bring you quality content. Our stories have made a difference – from reporting on abuses of a judge ordering a defendant to be shocked in court to lacrosse players threatening to maim their freshman teammates – and to the countless political insightful stories and entertainment stories that have become water cooler conversations — we even have a sports reporter in the field. We are proud of the work – but more proud that we were able to help journalists who started here to build a portfolio of work and landed a job.
Our current revenue is exclusively generated from advertising — and it is insufficient. That is why assistance is requested. Unlike so many presidential candidates, we don’t have any wealthy donors or SuperPACS — we survive on advertising alone. So, like many small start-ups our funding doesn’t always meet the needs.
One option for us at this early juncture was to start a Go Fund Me campaign. We hope to raise enough to cover our costs until we can rely exclusively on our advertising — which is increasing with each passing month.
Click Here to donate. Our goal is $8,000. If you contribute $100, our sports reporter, Claudia Gestro, will give you a shoutout in one of her upcoming videos. Be sure to watch all her videos on our YouTube channel. In fact, go follow her on Twitter and retweet all of her tweets — and ours too.
We have an exciting future ahead of us and you can be a part of it all.
We are not the typical news website – nor do we wish to be. We will be offering more than news and blogs, but an opportunity for fiction writers, poets, comedians and musicians to showcase their talent and skills. Much like when the Beatles formed Apple Corps Ltd, they opened the door to all kinds of inspiring talent that never really got a shot. From that came the likes of James Taylor and others. We hope by providing a similar approach we can shine the light on some tremendous undiscovered talent and at the same time offer some familiar voices who live in Los Angeles and beyond.