Limestone Post Begins 2nd Year As Nonprofit

A year ago, we announced that Limestone Post Magazine became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. For our one-year anniversary (and our fifth year overall), I’d like to take this opportunity to share the progress and challenges we’ve had in this most unusual year, as well as what we have planned.

First, though, Thank You!

I want to thank our readers who have donated to LP. We’ve received generous donations throughout the year, and in our first #GivingTuesday fundraiser last week we exceeded our goal by more than 200 percent!

Several businesses have also supported us through underwriting and in-kind sponsorships. And we have received our first grants.

Limestone Post was one of 26 local organizations to receive an operating support grant this year from the City of Bloomington’s Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association and the Bloomington Arts Commission. We thank them for their support!

Limestone Post was the recipient of a grant from the Zone Arts Program offered by the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association (BUEA) and the Bloomington Arts Commission (BAC). In addition to the members of BUEA and the BAC, we would like to thank Mayor John Hamilton and the members of the Bloomington City Council for making these grants available to us and others that support arts activities in the community.

We also received a grant, called the Arts, Cultural and Destination Marketing Organization Grant, from the Indiana Arts Commission, which was part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding.

These grants have been critical in keeping our doors open — especially in helping to pay our contributors.

Building a sustainable nonprofit

As 2020 began, we continued our transition to a nonprofit organization. In addition to focusing on our mission to post in-depth editorial content, one of our first initiatives was to create a fundraising program. Most of our support revenue would come from three sources: individual donations, grant writing, and business sponsorships/underwriting. As mentioned, we’ve received gracious support from all three sources. But as it is with most not-for-profits, we rely on fundraising to sustain operations, so we’re grateful for your ongoing donations and support.

The onset of the coronavirus changed much of what we were working on, as it has adversely affected nearly every other business in town. Frontline organizations in healthcare and human services, such as Middle Way House and the Shalom Center (now a part of Beacon), as well as treasured local nonprofits like Buskirk-Chumley Theater, Cardinal Stage, and Bloomington Pride, have been hit hard by the pandemic.

Because we understand the struggles facing not-for-profits this year, in March we began devoting space we previously used for advertising to “Community Notices.” We’re pleased that a number of organizations have used this free ad space, including LIFEDesigns, Bloomington Academy of Film and Theatre, Monroe County Public Library, Midway Music Speaks, Sycamore Land Trust, Bloomington Playwrights Project, City of Bloomington Volunteer Network, Visit Bloomington, and WonderLab Museum. Since March, their “notices” have been clicked thousands of times by our readers, sending them to these organizations’ websites to learn more and, hopefully, support them.

Lynae Sowinski is an LP co-founder and founding board member of Limestone Media. | Photo by Chaz Mottinger

Despite the challenges, we’ve taken the time to fulfill some of the responsibilities of running a sustainable nonprofit. One of those is building a strong board of directors. We’re looking to expand our board, but I’m lucky to have the leadership and guidance of our current board members. Allow me to introduce them:

Lynae Sowinski is a Limestone Post co-founder who served the first four years as LP’s Editorial Director. Although she moved to Georgia and now works for the University of Georgia, she still serves as a founding board member for Limestone Post and deserves all the credit for making LP such an editorial success (just ask our contributors!).

Fred Turner is a local attorney and longtime supporter of Limestone Post. We’ve been friends for more years than I can count, and I can always count on him for wise and sound advice.

Rebecca Hill, our newest board member, has extensive experience in the nonprofit sector. Not only has she served as executive director or on the board of many nonprofit organizations, she has also been a founding member of several, including the Indiana Medical Directors Association. Needless to say, her expertise has been invaluable to LP. Becky is also an accomplished freelance writer, so keep an eye out for her byline on an LP article!

Our board leadership and support from the community have kept us afloat and pointed in the right direction. For that, I’m extremely grateful. It motivates us to keep working hard to produce the quality content our subscribers have come to expect.

Speaking of subscribing, it’s free, as always. We’re committed to keeping all of our online content available to everyone, and we welcome the generous and continued support from individuals and local businesses. Subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll send you an email notification whenever we post a new story. We’ll never sell or share your email with anyone else. Most of our subscribers have been with us for years so they don’t miss another great article from our contributors.

This might be a good time to say how honored we are to receive the 2020 Media Innovator Award for Best Regional Digital News Media (NPO)—Midwest. The Media Innovator Awards, presented by Corporate Vision Magazine, a publication in Staffordshire, England, “are based on merit, not the number of votes received,” says Corporate Vision’s website. “Our process works to ensure that we reward parties based on their excellence in the industry, the quality of their products and their dedication to service. To move successfully from nominee to winner, there must be evidence of extensive expertise and skills, dedication to customer service and client satisfaction with an ongoing commitment to excellence and innovation.”

All the more reason for us to keep working hard!

Editorial mission

When Lynae Sowinski and I launched Limestone Post in 2015, our goal was to focus on in-depth, long-form stories about the important and interesting topics that make our community so dynamic. We didn’t want to constrain our writers by word count. Our stories would start at 800 words, but they could be as long as the writer needed to tell a compelling and informative story. We’ve published articles of more than 10,000 words, but the average is probably around 2,500. With photos, that would be about eight to ten pages in a standard print magazine.

Before we launched, I was prepared for the inevitable question: How will Limestone Post be different from any other publication in town? It was a valid question, so I’d describe our focus on long-form journalism and how we didn’t want to duplicate what anyone else in town was doing. We weren’t going to compete with the daily news outlets; we weren’t going to cover city hall every day. And we weren’t going to do clickbait stories like Buzzfeed and other websites were doing at the time.

Shortly after we launched (and frequently since then), people told us how different Limestone Post was — and, more importantly, that they liked it. When someone sent me an email saying “Limestone Post fills a gap in the local media landscape,” Lynae and I knew we were hitting our marks.

Another difference is that we wanted our writers’ voices to come through. We would have high editorial standards, but we wouldn’t require contributors to follow any formula or template. They could write a straight journalism article, a literary nonfiction piece, a personal experience story, or however they felt was the best way to cover the topic. That became our tagline — “Writers with a voice, photographers with a vision.”

Such unique, in-depth storytelling is why many of the articles we published years ago are still being read today. They have a long shelf life because the writers include so much information and add layers to their work: context, histories, and multiple points of view.

One example is the article Michael G. Glab wrote about Bloomington’s tap water in 2016. It still gets read nearly every day by visitors to our site. At the time, the City of Bloomington’s Utilities Department was recording higher levels of contaminants in our drinking water. The story was covered by other media (quite well, in many cases), and there was no reason to repeat what they did. So Glab wrote about more than contaminants — he analyzed the entire water-treatment system, interviewed numerous experts, and considered the various effects of what tainted water means for consumers. Even though some of the data in that article is now dated, readers still find much of the information useful.

Sarah Gordon’s 2016 article ‘Are Market Forces Ruining B-town’s “Sense of Place”’ has had lasting impact. | Photo by Natasha Komoda

Another article with long-term impact is one Sarah Gordon wrote a few years ago when it was reported that the Chocolate Moose building would be torn down to make way for student housing. The old building was a local icon. It wasn’t architecturally significant, but it was a gathering place and many people were sorry to see it go. Again, several news outlets covered the story, and we didn’t want to copy what they were doing. So our story only hinged on that event. It was more about historic preservation in general; specifically, Sarah wrote about our community’s sense of place — and whether developers have an obligation to a community’s identity when they’re designing their projects.

Sarah’s story became the inspiration for our first print edition, called A Sense of Place — a commemorative magazine that coincided with the bicentennials of Bloomington and Monroe County. We told our contributors to tell the history of our community through art — long-form stories, photos, poetry, illustrations, paintings, even recipes. (You can find copies of the magazine in a few places around town, but if you donate $10 or more to LP, we’ll mail a copy to you.)

Sarah’s “Sense of Place” article has also become part of Rachel Bahr’s English 11 class at the Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship (ASE). Each year since 2016, students in the class have completed a project, called “Sense of Place,” and shared their work with Limestone Post. As student Richelle Elkes described this year’s project, “The purpose … was to allow students to question how people’s personal identities change over time, how it can be tethered to a specific building/location, and what a ‘sense of place’ might be.” The ASE project is one we look forward to every year, and we’re proud to be a part of it.