Your trusted source for community news
By Kate Bergeron & Erin Cooper
As residents of Farmers Branch, we’ve watched our beloved city grow, change, and be challenged by multiple issues.
As journalists by trade and passion, we’ve struggled with the lack of coordination between organizations when it comes to communications as well as the lack of coverage of issues that are important to us. We care about our neighbors, our parks, our businesses.
It’s frustrating for us to hear of political, criminal, and even good activities through larger media entities like the Dallas Morning News or local news stations.
We know news can best serve its local residents when it is provided by local residents. Both of us have done it before.
Publisher Kate Bergeron has been a journalist since 1997 and was the editor of the now-defunct Leadville Chronicle for two years. She freelanced consistently for the Sun and Country Messenger newspapers in the St. Croix Valley area of Wisconsin and Minnesota before moving to the Dallas/Farmers Branch area in 2015. She has homeschooled her three children since 2006, successfully graduating two of them.
Digital Editor Erin Cooper earned a degree in journalism from Tarleton State University. After graduation, she went on to write for three small town newspapers including Aledo Community News, Stephenville Empire-Tribune and Weatherford Democrat. For the last 10 years, Erin has worked in nonprofit marketing.
As a result of more than a year of discussions and hard work, we now introduce you to the Branch Herald, which we vow will remain an independent, local news organization, owned and managed by Farmers Branch residents for Farmers Branch residents.
We have researched and explored a myriad of ways to make this digital newsroom a reality.
It is well known that the past business model of newspapers does not work in the 21st century. Paper and transportation is cost-prohibitive, the marketing atmosphere is fierce, and consumers demand free content.
We hope to create a better business model that focuses on the people and events in the small geographic area of Farmers Branch. You are our customers: residents, business owners, and the many people who work in Farmers Branch but commute from other cities. We hope to serve you by providing news you want to know about in the local area.
As believers in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, our first priority will be to provide local government activities with fair, balanced, impartial and transparent reporting. This includes city hall and the Carrollton Farmers Branch Independent School District, but also state and federal governmental departments that affect Farmers Branch residents and business owners.
For example, we’re as concerned as you about the construction on Interstate 35E. We are keeping our eyes on the Texas Department of Transportation and will share updates with you.
We also believe local residents want to know more about the people, events, and businesses in the city and would prefer to work with local businesses.
We’ll keep you up to date on what is happening.
Initially, we plan to publish twice a month on the second and fourth Sundays each month. We hope to publish weekly by the start of May, but realize this may not be a realistic goal.
We are two passionate people with journalism backgrounds creating a start-up. We plan to start small and add to the Herald as we gain footing. We anticipate that we’ll start with four to six stories per issue plus a calendar.
We are fortunate to have a small team of people helping us, including Ryan Figueroa and Spencer Benway, who have volunteered their time to write stories for us.
Additionally, we plan to organize candidate forums for the local May elections with the help of the Metrocrest Chamber of Commerce.
Lastly, as consumers ourselves, we enjoy and prefer free content. While content cannot be created for free, we are dedicated to keeping our content free for readers, which means we will offer advertising and other opportunities for local organizations to communicate with our readers.
We also plan to create crowd-funding opportunities soon.
Thank you for your support. We appreciate it. Please tell us, respectfully if possible, how we are doing and give us suggestions on how to improve. We’re in the process of creating focus groups to help us create this new digital product, but we know there will be other suggestions as well. We know we won’t be able to follow every suggestion, but we want this to be a true community news source for Farmers Branch.
We’re also active on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram - look for us there.
