Empowering Local News Entrepreneurs with Resources and Community

Amy Kovac-Ashley is the Executive Director of Tiny News Collective, helping founders around the country launch newsrooms with impact.

Amy Kovac-Ashley grew up in southern California and came up as a journalist in a number of different organizations. She worked at small local news organizations, larger regional papers, magazines, and even a stint in TV.

Eventually Amy transitioned to the “journalism support space”, where she’s passionate about helping journalists of all stripes. She works to broaden the term journalist to be more inclusive of people on the business side, as well.

This career shift set Amy up perfectly to take on her current role as Executive Director of Tiny News Collective, a non profit dedicated to providing tools, resources, and community for people looking to build sustainable news organizations that reflect and serve their communities.

On this episode of Small Press, Big Ideas, Amy and I discuss the story of her career, her passion for journalism, and dig into the work that TNC is doing with it’s founders.

We talk about how she sees the pros and cons of the non profit designation for small publishers. Ashley also stresses that entrepreneurs in the space should not be forgotten, and that the for profit model is working around the country as well

Amy talks about how TNC helps budding news entrepreneurs, how they strive to help news entrepreneurs in areas historically underserved or harmed by journalists, why some ideas for local journalism don’t scale, and why other attempts have failed.

We also discuss some examples of the founders TNC works with, the types of people that they work with, and how they’re connecting with these founders.

Listen to the full episode in you podcast app of choice, or just click play at the top of this page!