7Montes - Value Local Identity and Community Networks in Trás-os-Montes

As it happened successfully on a national level with the existing 7MARGENS  publication, this public will now be served with a complimentary news service  focused on understanding and framing the events from an identity-building  perspective. This will ensure the delivery of the same unique proposal of quality  free content, a sense of belonging to the project and reader-based donations, to  be applied to this local region.  

Another huge existing gap for the users, is the inability of the news to travel the last mile of proximity to the remote isolated communities due to the limitations  or costs of physical newspapers or digital direct interactions. This project will solve this gap by using the human relationship network to share easy-to consume audio content or texts. To do this, our news and audio content will have versions ready for more basic digital devices, for example, able to be shared as a  WhatsApp audio or messages in not smartphones. 

Due to the extreme local characteristics of some sub-regions of this extended  region, this project will target initially two groups of beneficiaries as vehicles to  expand, as a human-led network, to the older and isolated community members:
A. Habitants of larger cities and towns with better digital infrastructure and more  modern ways of life. 
B. Immigrant readers who live in other areas and but are still in touch with their  family members that still reside in the region.

These groups will be given incentives to recognize when they redirect to others, like being interviewed, selecting a topic for a story, or being visible in the website  section. 
Another value of this approach is that the richer and more digital-able  beneficiaries will feel as an integrated part of the project, strengthing their  community and identity links, and at the same time encouraging them to be  donors of the edition. 
This will keep these communities more connected, cohesive resilient and  informed. 

Target group

Goals of the project

1: Number of Local Readers Engaged 
The more local inhabitants we are serving in this region, the more we are  successfully fighting the lack of quality news. Some possible success estimators  could be: 1.500 subscribers for the new newsletter, 10.000 monthly readings, 
2: Active Network Community 
Since the content forwarders are key to this project to reach the last-mile  proximity, the number of them who are active is a measure of success. A  reasonable threshold would be to have more than 200 active content forwarders. 
3: Territory Penetration and Cover 
There would be limited success in delivering the previous two impacts in a few  territories. A complementary important impact factor is to get readers in a large  (ex:50%) of the 23 sub-municipalities of the region. 
4: Multiplication Effect 
The spread and quality of the project results could generate more similar projects  by 7MARGENS or by others in similar regional news deserts. That would be a very  important impact of this project, 
5: Minimal Environmental Impact 
We must ensure, through our choices, that there is minimal or negligible  environmental impact, by restricting carbon-intense mobility and resource usage.  We believe we can actually have a secondary positive effect if some of our stories raise awareness to best practices and issues on this topic.

Implemented activities 

• Selection and training of journalists in the region.
• Creation of an editorial board made up of people from the region.
• Construction of a website and brand declination.
• Creation of a Newsletter.Creation of media and audio support content.
• Creation of an automatic reading present on all articles on the platform.
• Collection, writing and editing of more than a hundred stories, reports, journalistic investigations and news.
• Launch of an advertising campaign.

Impact addressing news deserts

As several important local mentors tell us, 7MONTES managed to offer the region, the country and local expatriates a different vision of the reality of the region, creating a new, different and quality news flow. The main contribution of the 7MONTES project was to consolidate our organization due to the challenges that we had to face together. On the other hand, we gained knowledge and experience in building web metrics and sound translation of news.