Local Sports Site May Not Be Paying The Mortgage, But $5500 Ain’t Bad

CNATI.com is a local sports news site covering the sports teams of Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s (by its own admission) “light-weight.” So when you want to cover your baseball team’s spring training, which costs thousands of dollars, what do you do?

Try to sell more ads? Get a corporate sponsor? Instead, CNATI put up a donation box. They were hoping to get $4,000, which is about half of what the average media outlet spends when sending a reporter to cover six weeks of spring training.

“Part of our reasoning is a proof-of-concept (proving that we can do more than the big guys with less) and part of it is downright necessity,” wrote Lee Heidel, CNATI.com’s publisher.

Incredibly, by the 18th of last month, the site had already raised $5,100. Now, with a week to go before donations close, 169 contributors have raised a total of $5,500.33.

Um, how awesome is that?

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