Lakeland airline service | Public school grades | Indie book store

We have only two weeks left in our end-of-year campaign and there’s good news: We have another $2,000 in matching funds from our national NewsMatch funders! What that means is we can match nearly $40,000 in individual donations.  Right now, we’ve raised just over $27,000. And because new monthly donations are matched at the year’s total, it’s amazing what a $10 or $20 gift per month can do for our newsroom. 

Where does that money go? We think of ourselves as a small but mighty newsroom running a lean operation that delivers substantial value for the donations we receive. Here’s what that helps covers:

• Three full-time salaries – mine as executive director, our editor and our staff reporter.
• $15,000 for freelancers reporters and professionals to support our journalism and projects like our free obituary service,
• $9,000 for technical support and maintenance of our website,
• $6,000 on the software and apps we rely on for both news gathering and news delivery
• $1,200 for our email service provider for our newsletters
• $2,000 in necessary insurance like our media liability coverage

All of this adds up. This year the cost to run our newsroom will be right around $200,000.  What you get in return are important, truly local articles like these that would otherwise have gone unreported, such as:

• Expanded Voucher System Could Cost Polk Schools Up To $70 Million
• Lakeland Homeowners’ Insurance Woes Mount As Another Carrier Pulls Out of Florida
• Local Officials Call Property-Tax-Based Home Improvement Financing ‘Predatory’

If you value LkldNow, if you believe easy-to-access, community news and information is vital to our city, if you like knowing what’s happening around town, help us keep it going.