By NYU Staff

With hot button issues such as health care reform and the H1N1 virus recently dominating the political discussion, Health News Florida— an independent, non-profit, news website has been a “go to” source for Floridians. The three-year-old site aims to provide the public with information about evolving state and local health policy, and is currently trying to raise about 50 percent of its budget through advertising and sponsorships.

Health News Florida reports on topics that range from Medicare and physician malpractice to the legalization of marijuana, and tries to fill the gaps left open by many distressed newspapers that have trimmed health care coverage.

But one of the most prominent issues covered to date, was based on a faulty report by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration addressing the cost of health care reform proposed by Congress for the state. The result: editor Carol Gentry did some digging and set the record straight. “Health news is a difficult niche to focus on,” said the site’s executive director Ben Wilcox. “It requires a lot of background knowledge which most reporters don’t have unless they have extensive health news reporting experience.”

Although covering such niche issues can sometimes limit the scope of an organization, Health News Florida has managed to attract a fairly decent number of people to their site, reeling in about 55,000 new visitors in the last quarter and over 130,000 visits from returning parties in the same period. “I think people are definitely interested in news that hits close to home,” said Wilcox. “If someone’s local hospital receives a poor performance rating or a good one people want to know about it.”

And while the company tries to expand its readership by utilizing marketing campaigns, that include encouraging subscriptions to its free daily e-Alerts, it also, like many similar business models are seeking new ways to beef up revenue. Currently Health News Florida is almost 100 percent funded by grants from seven Florida based health foundations that committed to providing funding for three years beginning 2008. But the company’s managers hope to raise about 50 percent of its budget via advertising and sponsorships by the year 2011.

Even with the help of a newly hired director of marketing and advertising, Health News Florida has managed to raise just $5000 in advertising so far. “The challenge for us is to build the advertising and underwriting program by educating potential clients about the opportunities we offer,” said Wilcox. “I don’t know if we will reach our goal of raising 50% of our budget through advertising by 2011, but I do think we will be able to raise a substantial amount.”

But apart from employing several marketing techniques as a means of boosting numbers, the website has established key partnerships to help attain its goals. To date, they have initiated relationships with Kaiser Health News as well as the Associated Press to distribute some of their original reporting to state newspapers free of charge. “Our goal is to get the information to the public at no cost,” said Wilcox.

Collaborating with other organizations is certainly one of the keys to success, especially when operating in uncharted territory, but Health News Florida isn’t the only one that has figured this out. The Center for Independent Media—a non-profit, non-partisan organization that runs several public websites, including the Colorado and Washington Independent have capitalized on the daily linkages to websites such as The Huffington Post, as well as Twitter feeds. Reporters are required to submit weekly reports enumerating “key performance indicators,” which are audited by the Center. “We have made exceptional progress,” said the organization’s outreach director Hanaa Rifey.

Since the start of 2009 the company has increased the number of site visitors by more than 400,000—a 60 percent jump, and the number of page views burgeoned to greater than 600,000 overall or almost a 70 percent rise by the end of October.

Head of Poynter’s News Transformation Initiative Bill Mitchell also believes that in this business, collaboration is king. “More collaboration is key to getting things covered going forward,” he said. “No individual business model these days adds up to what it used to be. News organizations must figure out how to fill the gaps.”

And while new media models continue to shoot up around the country, topics of funding and ultimately sustainability continue to arise. The organizations that are able to be aggressive enough to add value and create dependencies are the ones who might find some way to last. Enterprises like News Health Florida and the Center for Independent reporting are trying to do just that. “We don’t know exactly how sustainable a model like ours is,” said Wilcox. “We are exploring all options.”