About UnityUpdates
A toolkit for communities to find, train and back the people who tell their stories.
Our Story
Local news has collapsed, and inside a company, a congregation or an association it never existed. The stories that matter most to the people living them are small ones: where the building fund went, why the rates went up, who decided. Those are exactly the stories the big outlets leave on the cutting room floor.
What most communities have instead is a newsletter: a list of announcements that people skim and forget. Nobody decides what should be covered, nobody hands out the assignment, and once a thing is posted nothing distinguishes reporting from rumour. A correction, if it ever happens, is a reply nobody sees.
UnityUpdates is built the other way round. It starts from a desk: the beats your community needs covered, the questions members are asking, and an Editor who decides who covers what. Reporters write under their own names and show their sources. Corrections stay attached. There are no engagement metrics anywhere, because a community newsroom is judged by whether people believe what it prints.
"A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives."
Our Vision & Values
Vision
Every community has a reliable way to find out what is actually happening in it, with the sources shown.
Mission
Give the people who want to report a desk, an Editor and the craft, so the work people want to read gets done.
Values
- AI never writes a story, and every story says what help it had.
- A correction is never deleted or hidden.
- We show no view counts, likes or trending lists.
- A Reporter's view is their own; the Editor does not rewrite it.
Nathan Rohm
Founder
Why I built UnityUpdates
I worked for a huge global media company for a while. I saw the reach and influence it took to hold the attention of the masses, and I watched the mundane, the small and the unglamorous stories get cut so the company could win the most eyeballs with fear, outrage and division. Any story that might upset an advertiser, a partner or an owner was off limits.
Later I watched a friend pour hours into a beautiful community newsletter that nobody read, because the stories inside were summaries and notices. And I once built a team ready to help our community with technology that almost nobody asked for help, because we never told our story.
Each time, we were missing someone assigned to find out what was true, an Editor to back them, and a place to publish that people trusted.
"I want to give communities a toolkit to find, train, empower, and enable people to tell more stories, ask more hard questions, and explore more relevant and important stories."
Nathan Rohm
Our Promise to You
From Nathan, who builds UnityUpdates:
"No one wants to write another newsletter that nobody is interested in. We have to find a way to empower our storytellers with information about what the people want to learn about and then create compelling content that people want to consume."
- Nathan Rohm, Founder
Start your community's newsroom
Set up the desk, name your Editors, and hand out the first assignment.
