Philly Basketball 24 • 7 • 365

City of Basketball Love

Current Section

Home

CoBL announces 2024-25 coverage fundraising campaign

02/05/2024, 10:00am EST

By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
––

In 2023, CoBL published more than 1,200 articles, covering hundreds of teams and thousands upon thousands of players from Southeastern Pennsylvania and beyond.

And it still feels like we’re only scratching the surface.

We’d like to cover more basketball next season — but to do that, we need your help.

That’s why we’re launching the 2024-25 CoBL Coverage Campaign, to boost our coverage abilities for our next season of coverage. This campaign is all about our freelance contributors, expanding the amount of stories we can assign to them and paying them a better wage.

Our ask to the Philadelphia basketball community this year is to help us raise $50,000, all of which will go towards increasing the quality and quantity of CoBL stories. That includes donations from individuals, teams, booster clubs, and anybody else connected to the Philadelphia basketball community who wants to support our coverage.

Why do we need to increase our fundraising? Because our contributors deserve it.

When CoBL started, we used to rely on largely unpaid labor, and we were able to put out too many articles on too small a budget. At the time all of our writers — leadership included — were a bunch of college students and recent graduates, so that didn’t feel exploitative.

Now, though we are still a small outlet, we strive to pay our contributing writers, even if we can’t afford per-story fees that are as large as some of the major news outlets. Currently, our contributors earn $50 per story, and our senior contributors $75 per story. Will will be increasing our pay per story next year, and those rates will both rise — but if we don’t have more funds, that will mean fewer stories produced on a weekly basis.

This past year, we assigned out more than 500 stories to our contributors, at a cost of $39,000 to CoBL. In order to afford the same amount of content while paying each of our writers more, that requires at least $46,000 — and in order to increase pay and pay for more stories, we need to raise even more than that.

So we’re turning to the Philadelphia basketball community.

Last year, we raised a little more than $30,000 from our readers and the local basketball community — that’s donations brought in through our PayPal and Patreon pages, from booster clubs and teams around the area, from parents and fans who’ve sent in checks and/or donated online. And we did that without a significant drive or push.

All year long, we’ll be pushing towards our goal of $50,000, which will help us expand our operations for the 2024-25 season. If we surpass our goal, we can increase our coverage more and more — everything we raise from the community will go only into our contributors’ pot. That’s how we can send out Andrew Robinson, Rich Flanagan, Joseph Santoliquito, Jared Leveson, Jerome Taylor, Justin Procope and others out in the community on a regular basis to make sure we’re getting as many stories written as possible. It will also allow us to grow our staff as we look to continually enhance and diversify our coverage.

If you’d like to contribute to our 2024-25 CoBL Coverage Campaign, you can do so in numerous ways:

If you’d like to donate a set amount per month ($3, $5, $10 or more), you can do so at our Patreon account; our Patreon also has annual options so you only get billed once per year.
If you’d like to make a one-time donation, you can do so at our PayPal account here or by sending a check, made out to CoBL, to 614 Fairview Road, Narberth PA, 19072.

Because CoBL is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, all donations made are tax-deductible.

We’ll update everybody regularly how our progress is going towards our fundraising goal this year; make sure you follow us on Instagram and Twitter to stay in the know!

As always, we appreciate all your support.

Thank you,
Josh Verlin

City of Basketball Love
Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief