Community news belongs to the community.

This is the concept that led me to develop Carson Now, the idea that for a news organization to truly serve the community, it needed to belong to the community.

Part of this idea comes from my experience of being on the front lines as corporate media cutbacks resulted in communities not being well served in terms of news coverage.

So my idea was to create Carson Now as a nonprofit organization, whose mission was limited to serving the community. Nonprofit media organizations are a fairly new development, with sites like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost leading the way.

I used Voice of San Diego as the model. I even had their completed IRS forms to use as a guide to obtain 501(c)3 nonprofit status. It all seemed so simple.

But when it comes to the IRS, there is no simple.

People had tried to warn me that becoming a nonprofit is not an easy task, and that it would be much easier to follow the for-profit route, and just operate in the same community-minded way.

Unfortunately, I ignored their advice.

Finally, last weekend, I received some very good legal advice from an attorney with a lot of experience in nonprofit organizations. His conclusion was that I would likely have to spend more money trying to obtain and maintain nonprofit status than the organization would earn in revenue.

He made me realize there was a big difference between Carson Now and the model site I was following. Voice of San Diego is a much bigger organization, and began life with a big pot of donated money that helped them get started. For an organization as small as Carson Now, this just would not work.

So, last week I relented and officially incorporated Carson Now as a for-profit LLC. It was a somewhat expensive lesson, in terms of wasted time and money, and there is a lot of work ahead to remove the word “nonprofit” from our logo and other materials. But it’s a relief that it’s done, and we can move on.

What will not be removed is the spirit in which Carson Now was created. I didn’t create this website to get rich. The days of media moguls like Hearst and Pulitzer are long gone. The media business is going through a massive restructuring as we all hunt for the next business model that will allow us to survive.

I believe that model is based in the simple mission of serving your community, working together in an open, cooperative way that benefits everyone. And that is just what Carson Now is going to do.

Now that all of this nonprofit/for-profit stuff is behind me, I can dedicate more time to producing stories and bringing you the news.