Woodbury News Net’s Roundabout is celebrating its first anniversary! That’s right. We sent our first email newsletter Aug. 1 to about 100 people. Thanks to supporters like you we’ve grown to 3,300 subscribers! We’re ecstatic, proud, and humbled that so many of you have embraced our mission. From all reports, people have navigated through our Roundabout and come out the other end filled with facts and information about Woodbury. 

Here are a few noteworthy milestones:

Editor
We have a major announcement coinciding with our anniversary. We have a paid, part-time editor on board! Veteran journalist Chuck Nowlen has joined to lead our editorial efforts. 

Nowlen has served as an editor and reporter at the Capital Times in Madison, Wisc., and the Las Vegas Weekly in Nevada, among other publications. He’s committed to our non-profit model and excited to help build our news source. He joins another part-time, paid editorial staff member, Theo Franz, who has a background in freelance writing and is an alum of the Minnesota Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Minnesota.

Our Name
Last spring, some of our volunteers met to pick a name for our venture. We had no shortage of ideas. Lots of suggestions started with Woodbury, like Woodbury Journal and Woodbury Wire. Roundabout surfaced in this discussion but we settled on Woodbury News Net. Net as in network, as in Internet, and as a net to cast for stories from all corners of our city. Keep reading for a bit of a plot twist.

Our organization
After we selected a name, we needed to build our organization. The Woodbury Community Foundation agreed to be our fiscal sponsor, allowing us to use its non-profit status to accept donations. We also began the paperwork to file for our own 501(c)3 status, which we received in the fall. We established our organization’s policies and researched and bought media and general liability insurance. We also registered our domain name and social media accounts for our new name. We set our budget and initial coverage plan. We found SNO Sites in Burnsville to host our website and provide our content management system. We turned to Beehiiv as the software platform for our newsletter.

Launch
Speaking of our newsletter, we launched it in hopes that if you saw our work you’d be more inclined to support us. That first Roundabout was just a handful of items but we quickly grew into full-fledged news articles that we also posted on our website: www.woodburynewsnet.org. Now about that plot twist. Believing the name Newsletter was lacking, we selected The Roundabout, a name that first came up in that spring meeting to name our organization. Woodbury is blessed – or cursed – with roundabouts so we added the 27th one to the city. Our traffic is news and information and we hope we guide you safely through the noise with facts and context. 

While Woodbury News Net was placed prominently in the newsletter over The Roundabout name, we have become known by many of you as The Roundabout. We’ve embraced that with a new logo, and, we’re okay no matter which name you call us.

This month, we added a second weekly newsletter, Out & About, to highlight events so you know about them before they happen. We also highlight dining options as well as arts and culture.

Support
We offer our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has volunteered to make our news source a reality and everyone who spread the word and recruited subscribers. We are especially grateful for our donors. We need money for staff, technology, insurance and other items. The McKnight Foundation stepped up last fall with a major grant for three non-profit newsrooms that included ours. We also thank each of our individual contributors and sponsors as well. We’re now accepting advertising as well to grow our revenue. We provide our coverage for free so it’s accessible to everyone. That means we need businesses, foundations, and donors to step up to make our business model work. 

Onward
More revenue will help us sustain our efforts and add coverage. Stay tuned. As we enter year two, the heart of our work remains as simple as it was when The Roundabout launched. We’re building community one story at a time.

For more information about our leadership team, click here.