Letter from the editor: Our plans for 2026 – we want your input

Dear reader,

I hope you’re staying warm and that your 2026 is off to a good start. I’m writing to share some updates on Door County Knock’s plans for this year and to ask for your input as we decide what to prioritize.

First, a note of gratitude: Thanks to donations from readers like you, we exceeded our goal for our end-of-year fundraising campaign. The $25,185.86 in reader donations we received, together with national and local matching dollars, mean we raised $67,185.86 in total. Thank you so much: This was our most successful fundraising campaign to date, and your support means so much to me and to everyone on our team.

I want to share a bit about where we are as an organization. In 2024, Door County Knock was fortunate to receive a number of grants from major funders of nonprofit journalism. These investments helped us hire our first full-time reporter, better understand our readers and build a membership program. The funding from these one-time grants is going away starting this year, and we’re now entering our next step as an organization: building and growing local support to sustain and continue to expand our work.

We’re working to hire a development director and to grow local philanthropic and foundation-based support. In addition, one of our primary goals for 2026 is expanding our membership program. Over the past year, we’ve seen tremendous growth in our audience: The number of people subscribed to Door County Knock’s email newsletter has gone from 1,700 to 4,900.

Right now, about 5 percent of our subscribers are members (meaning they give at least $1 sometime during the year). We’d like to grow that to 10 percent by the end of this year. Membership is the single most sustainable source of revenue we have: By building a broad base of member support, we can continue producing in-depth journalism even as particular donors or grants change.

We’ve also been thinking a lot about how we can expand the types of stories and information we produce, to provide even more value and public service to you and other Door County residents. We want your input. We’re considering ideas including more frequent updates on local government; a second weekly email newsletter; and additional feature stories and photography projects.

In the short term, expanding our work into these other areas could also mean that we produce slightly less-frequent in-depth stories of the kind we do now. (This is one of the questions we want your input on.) We believe this can be a positive – we’ve noticed that our highest-impact stories often are those that feature the experiences of multiple Door County residents, in addition to experts and data. Emily Small’s excellent reporting in September on violations at a local manufactured home park is just one example. We want to produce more stories like this one, and this approach would allow our team more time to do so.

In the long term, if we hit our fundraising goals for 2026, we hope to hire a second full-time reporter in 2027.

We would love your input on all of the above. If you have a few minutes, please take our short, five-question survey to help shape Door County Knock’s direction for this year. We’ll be collecting survey responses through Feb. 28.

The ideas outlined in the survey are all things we’re excited about, and we want to pursue them all in time. Your input will help us decide which ones to prioritize. Your voice matters: As a people-powered newsroom, our first goal is to be responsive to you.

Thank you so much for reading and for your support.

Sincerely,

Andrew Phillips
Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief
Door County Knock