The Owl
The OWL is your little local news group. They're anti-corporate and highly personal. No other news organization puts their reporters this on the ground and this close to your day to day life. Their work covers a WIDE range, from hobbies and guides to national events in Philadelphia. They don't have the clout of big-media news, but then, big-media news doesn't have their community connections.
Structure
The OWL is heavily decentralized community driven new site. They employ several dozen independent reporters, as well as hundreds of volunteer reporters who submit news as it happens. They aim to cover every little detail of the city. The staff work from home or offices of their own arrangement, multiple editors oversee several sections of the site at large.
From an ownershp perspective, any reporter who's contributed for over a year is a shareholder. The number of shares depends on their duration with the reporter, volunteer or staffer, and the total scale of their contributions. This is to ensure the paper can survive all outside influences. It's nigh on impossible to sell the site and the entire leadership structure serves at the choice of the shareholders.
Reporters who intend to leave are expected to surrender their shares. Shares may not be sold to outside individuals.
Culture
They're all reporters with a love of writing. That's really the only common denominator among the staff and volunteers. Their dreams and interests vary wildly. Several volunteers use the site almost as a personal blog for their hobbies. Most staffers are there either as their side-gig or as their start in journalism. The bulk of them want to talk about what's happening around them, as they see it. Many see themselves almost as historians, preserving a first-person record of their world.
Public Agenda
The OWL exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to document, organize, and distribute news of the community. They do nearly zero lobbying (they have a position on freelancer laws) and strive to present facts seperate from their analysis of what they mean, giving their audience a chance to firmly grasp what happened and make a better decision about what it means. Their articles are open to fact-checking by members of the community and members of local academia only.
Assets
It's almost not worth counting their assets. They don't have much. They have less than $10 Million in the bank, and most of that is spoken for. Their yearly profits are typically less than $5 million. They tend to heavily reinvest in the community any time they get ahead. Their greatest assets are their workers and website, their relationship with the community.
Financially, management has comitted to having a pension for all staffers who spend more than 20 years with them. They've also committed to paying their more active volunteers, even if it's only a small amount. They aim to be the good-guy paper with what they have.
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