We are Jens Hákun Leo and Torleif Joensen. We started Local.fo in January of 2018 on the theory that foreigners and immigrants are interested in news and information from the Faroe Islands. At that time, Local.fo was the only news media serving news from the Faroe Islands in English.
Local.fo has had a great start and we’ve developed an enthusiastic readership. In the last months, we’ve served over 600 articles and more than 80 picture galleries and videos from events in the Faroe Islands and Local.fo has turned into a 40+ hour/week job for the two of us.
Each week our global readership grows. We’re currently approaching 18.000 readers a month with our website. In July we had readers from more than 170 countries around the world.
Recently we started publishing a physical magazine with a circulation of 6,000 to be grabbed for free at more than 90 public places in the Faroe Islands, much to the delight of tourists and immigrants. Our goal is to publish the physical magazine every month.
Thinking about the long-term self-sustaining plan, we have come to the conclusion that income from advertisements is not sustainable to secure the future of Local.fo, and therefore we might have come up with a better way to do it – donations.
The way Patreon works is a reader can donate whatever they want per month and the donation is recurring each month after that. So anything, from $5/month up, is hugely helpful to the cause.
What We’ll Use the Money For:
Our initial goal is $5,000/month. That money will be enough to keep Local.fo going, indefinitely. Here are Local.fo‘s costs:
- Hosting. We need a robust enough hosting plan to support the highest spikes in traffic we ever get so we don’t crash during those moments.
- Ongoing web development. It’s a website, so there are always upsetting glitches coming out of nowhere and occasionally, we add a new site feature.
- Facebook post “boosts”. When we announce a new post on Facebook, this makes sure that the announcement gets to a larger audience.
- More employee. We need someone to handle things like writing and editing more articles every day, go to events and take pictures/videos, and a bunch of other jobs. These things end up adding up to a several hours every day, and without extra employees, we end up doing it all and have much less time to give the reader what he wants.
- Physical magazine. We have had the pleasure of publishing the first issue of the Local.fo Magazine. Publishing is expensive and in order keep the magazine free of charge, we need your help.
- Information about the Faroe Islands. Several readers are reaching out to us every week with regards to information about the Faroe Islands. We would love to help out, but without funding, this is not possible.
Anyway, thanks for any support you can offer if you decide to, and thanks for being a reader! If you have decided to support us, we will do our best turn your support into making Local.fo better!
-> Click here to support us on Patreon for as little as $5 per month <-
If you have any questions, we would love to hear from you on news@local.fo or on our Facebook page‘s inbox.
