News414 | Sosh

The 411 on News414

News414 is a service journalism project conceived in October 2019 by three nonprofit newsrooms: Wisconsin Watch, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (NNS), and Detroit’s Outlier Media. The partners applied for and won a $234,000 grant from Google’s News Initiative Innovation Challenge. The newsrooms then invested over $100,000 of their resources to launch News414 in March 2020. The partners believe that:

Journalism can play a critical role in closing racial disparities in health, education, employment, justice, housing, and more.
Information is power. Well-informed people can more easily access the resources they need, hold leaders to account, and forge solutions to challenges in their communities.

We spread the news far and wide across the city of Milwaukee by generating a new landing page for the News414 team.

A New News Strategy

Our goals were to increase awareness of News414 service in 53215 and 53206 neighborhoods, increase participation in News414 service, aggregate data and stories to inform service-based journalism and convert potential investors into new investors. Our strategy was simple and provided insight on how to execute creative on traditional social media channels and email marketing, and informed how to review analytics to determine how things are performing.

Here’s the Scoop

2020 by the numbers: 700 conversations between reporters and residents, 2,200 subscribers, 336,000 text messages sent, 1,117 social media comments, 2,718 community members completed surveys.
In 2020 as the COVID-19 crisis and racial justice movement disproportionately impacted people of color living in Milwaukee’s central city neighborhoods, residents were increasingly concerned about evictions, reliable COVID-19 data, and information on civil rights and elections.