Together they are foundations of economic growth. Any city’s 21st century future will depend on its ability to attract and retain these doers, thinkers and innovators — and to expand their ranks. Exactly because of the outsized importance of inclusive economic growth and technological change, there is urgency to create more equitable systems and accessible pathways to these professions.
The data are clear: All net new jobs in the American economy come from new businesses, according to influential research, and each tech worker supports 4.4 additional local jobs. Innovation economies are necessary for communities to thrive in the future around the world.
Despite today’s global scale, entrepreneurship and innovation remain distinctly local phenomena. Our cities are where global ideas begin. Before the world is changed, invention takes place in garages, at meetups between neighbors and on whiteboards and lab benches. These local breeding grounds require dependable and open news and information resources to make them more efficient and accessible — spurring new ideas and innovation.
Into this ecosystem comes Technical.ly, a news organization that connects a community of technologists, entrepreneurs and other professionals invested in their hometowns. Dynamic local growth, inclusive innovation, skills of the future and digital equity are central to our specialized reporting. We contribute to more innovative, competitive and accessible local economies.
Technical.ly envisions a world in which entrepreneurship and innovation can come from anyone anywhere — to ensure all communities thrive.
Since its founding in 2009, Technical.ly has brought journalistic rigor to issues that are routinely filled with hype and hyperbole. We chase and challenge national trends by telling the stories of technology and innovation and the pursuit of equitable economic growth in five local communities and counting, growing a single online community of change-makers. Our work is for established entrepreneurs and technologists; those aspiring to join their ranks and the people supporting their work. Technical.ly is one of the country’s longest-running online-only local news organizations, and our impact is clear:
These trends ensure the importance of accessible news gathering, cross-city evaluation and open online communities.
Our big discovery? Quality local journalism is an effective strategy for growing a community of hard-to-reach professionals (many generally underrepresented in technology companies). We focus on equipping them to be more productive, better connected with peers and more invested in the communities where they live. For nearly 1 in 3 of our readers, Technical.ly is the only local news organization they read regularly.
As a part of our journalism and community engagement strategy, Technical.ly develops career-long, meaningful relationships with the hardest-to-reach passive job seekers and business builders. This allows us to make tech careers more accessible, share greater insight into company hiring and business strategies and retain these news consumers over the long term. Our communities and relationships, then, are our most important asset as a news organization. We grow that community by engaging both established veterans and those aspiring to join these highly productive economic and innovation circles.
This flywheel is positively self-reinforcing. We start first by informing our community of technologists and entrepreneurs, whom our clients and advertisers want to meet to hire and engage. Our philanthropic partners invest in us both to ensure our work remains free and accessible for aspiring technologists and entrepreneurs and to deepen our coverage of local economic change, which strengthens our community for all.
Technical.ly’s growth has coincided with an accelerating collapse of local news. That has deeply informed our approach to sustainability. Technical.ly addresses obstacles to local economic growth by making information and connections intentional and accessible. Our journalism is a critical component of a business model that also includes fee-based business research and analysis on technology, economic growth and entrepreneurship and story-based advertising products that help jobseekers research hiring companies and entrepreneurs learn about business services. We work with philanthropy to deepen our impact, while retaining a sustainable model.
This revenue model that mixes business solutions and philanthropic support results in a powerful outcome for our communities: our news gathering and information sharing remains free and accessible — unusual for business publications that typically reinforce existing inequalities. The connections we make reflect the diverse cities we serve.
As a new generation of local public affairs newsrooms develop, the Technical.ly multi-local model will allow us to contribute specialized reporting and expertise that will benefit the industries, technology and entrepreneurship ecosystems and the people who power them.
Our approach to local journalism is informed by and in response to the reality of web-powered global scale: Our single distributed newsroom holds deep subject matter expertise that results in reporting on many key issues across multiple locations. This creates a strong network effect; With each new market we report on, we grow our expertise and online community, including community members across the globe, with diminishing additional expense, which is a sustainable and generative model for growth. Local news ecosystems gain expertise, and Technical.ly allows entrepreneurs and technologists to tap into a growing community of like-minded professionals.
Why is all this important? We believe issues of equitable economic growth, digital transformation, civic technology and inclusive innovation must be understood as key to the future of cities. We believe innovation can come from anyone anywhere, and journalism can play an integral role in spurring more inclusive and accessible communities.
At this critical moment in our organization’s history, Technical.ly has outlined a pathway that builds on our strong foundation to expand our journalism and our global community of entrepreneurs and technologists who are invested in their hometowns.
For decades, business creation has been on the decline in the United States. Many slow-growth cities struggle to reimagine future economic growth. Rates of women and Black and brown people in entrepreneurship and tech jobs had remained stubbornly low. Economists have worried about fading productivity gains, and policymakers have scrambled to establish innovation ecosystems in response to unfilled jobs —even as immigration and domestic migration rates have sagged.
Then a global pandemic upended many of these trends, adding uncertainty and indecision. Meanwhile, the rise of remote work and distributed companies risks further decoupling the most economically privileged among us from their neighbors. If surging tech economies exist only online, then who will ensure those gains benefit those who might be left behind?
These worldwide trends are playing out locally. Yet long-standing legacy news organizations and inventive journalism nonprofits typically lack the resources and expertise to track, chart and challenge these powerful trends that have a significant impact on local economies.
Technical.ly’s goal is to continue to change the world—and the regions where we work:
A world in which Technical.ly publishes in cities around the globe is a world in which innovative local economies are more inclusive, accessible and effective.
Today, Technical.ly is one of the world’s leading chroniclers of local economic transformation and one of the country’s most vibrant communities of entrepreneurs and technologists.
The pandemic’s spark set in motion this strategic visioning process which began in fall 2020, as a pandemic surged and a view of the future slowly emerged. Across dozens of interviews and input from former and current Technical.ly employees, business clients, readers and other stakeholders, we have set forward this five-year plan to guide us through December 2025.
In that time, Technical.ly will transform from a regional news site into a global community of technologists, entrepreneurs and other professionals invested in their hometowns, and powered by an industry-leading digital media company.
Our strategy to accomplish this is as follows:
In addition to more detailed internal metrics, we set these goals for each of our five priorities:
This work is ambitious. We can’t do it alone. As a community company, Technical.ly both serves and relies on our community. Our work will make economies more inclusive, effective and accessible. This has real world impacts on the careers of the marginalized and those traditionally underrepresented to ensure more equitable growth. Invest in us and the stories we tell for the accountability and solutions we bring to communities you care about. To tell us your story, contact our newsroom here. To work with us, review our services here. Or just know you are part of our future. Thank you.
Christopher Wink
Co-founder and CEO at Technical.ly
