Columbia Community Connection Is Just a Click Away
By Rodger Nichols
In the alphabet soup of government agencies Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted during the New Deal, CCC stood for the Civilian Conservation Corps, a government-run work relief program that hired unemployed people to work on government lands. The idea was to provide a living while doing good for the public.
That could serve as a motto for a modern, local CCC: Columbia Community Connection. Born out of the COVID-19 shutdown, this online news organization was founded on those ideals, as well as a commitment to transparency, accuracy, and immediacy.
“I was working for The Dalles Chronicle, and they decided to close the newspaper,” Tom Peterson says. “I think they called on a Friday, and they said the doors will be locked after we get the last paper out on Wednesday.”
Tom says he had become familiar with Facebook and how it worked, distributing news and information.
“I started talking with my wife, Peggy, about what we could do online, where we don’t have the expensive startup costs of a printed product like a newspaper or a magazine.”
He says they had a basic concept of distributing on Facebook and Instagram in some form of product that would be easily accessible.
Peggy was an early supporter of the idea and helped shape the direction of CCCNews. She manages the company’s bookkeeping and provides an essential second set of eyes for proofing and quality control.
“We felt like it would be great to pierce social media with something that was fact-based and people could have kind of a level playing field, at least for the basic information,” Tom says. “We also thought that we could reach a lot of people fairly quickly if the vehicle delivering the news was electrons.”
The original name Tom and Peggy proposed was The Dalles Connects, but that fell by the wayside in favor of the triply alliterative Columbia Community Connection.
Then he got a serendipitous call from Robin Denning.
“I was working with the county and the public health department to try and create the COVID response,” Robin says. “We ended up building the vaccine distribution online system and all these other projects, which were really hard. I was very busy, but my work needed a newspaper. Community development stalls when you don’t have community journalism supporting community development.”
Robin says she had talked with her staff a few years earlier about perhaps trying to compete with The Chronicle, but realized being dyslexic posed a hindrance.
Robin previously tried to work with The Chronicle to modernize access to their coverage, and Tom had been a part of that work. But capacity, the cost of video creation, and a newspaper with an established business model made that impossible at the time.
“Then Tom came along,” Robin says. “I didn’t want to do the writing, just the technology, and Tom didn’t want to do the technology, just the writing. It was perfect.”
The 2 scraped together about $10,000 for a few computers, an office, and some working capital to get started.
Tom says it has worked so well because he, Peggy, and Robin had similar ideas about what they wanted to do.
“While Robin is the tech side and really has this kind of genius for figuring out how to deliver our message, we both agreed that we kind of wanted to be solutions-based journalists,” he says. “We really wanted to get a lot of voices in the paper that were kind of on the margin or weren’t being heard previously. I think we’ve done that to a fair degree.
“I know we were the first full-time bilingual news source in the Gorge. There’s definitely been bilingual radio and bilingual newsletters, but we’re really consistent and make everything bilingual all the time.”
CCCNews also has a goal of presenting a diverse stable of contributors.
“I felt like we’ve done a pretty good job of assembling a lot of different voices,” Tom says. “We continue to look for people who would like to write, and we do pay for that, pretty well. We try to support those folks as much as we possibly can.”
Writer Joshuah Albert joined the staff 2 years ago.
“I went to school to study film, digital film, and media,” he says. “I wanted to write movies. But the school decided to shut down.”
His girlfriend brought Josh to The Dalles, and he decided to take a stab at working for CCCNews. Tom and Robin asked him to cover the 4th of July parade. The work impressed them enough that they hired him full-time.
“It’s the first job I’ve ever had where I felt like you take nothing and you make something,” Joshua says. “A lot of companies don’t do that.”
CCCNews has 2 sources of revenue: advertising and donations.
“Say somebody is changing up their business or they have something they want to announce,” Tom says. “For $99, we’ll put it up on the site and also on social media. It could be posted to 20 or 30 groups, depending on the reach of the business. We have a series of other advertising opportunities that we offer, including a podcast.”
Donations contribute an estimated 25% of the company’s income.
“We are constantly asking because we were working for free for the first 2, 3 years,” Tom says. “People can sign up for monthly donations—$5, $10, $20, whatever amount they want. We receive a lot of one-time donations.”
CCCNews’ website reaches around 80,000 unique readers a month, with 120,000 to 140,000 page views per month.
“We’re accessible and affordable,” Tom says. “I’m proud that we’ve built an organization and good information, and connections with people so that we’ve achieved those numbers. That’s really the success.”