CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

ACEsTooHigh.com

Reporting on the science, education, and policy surrounding childhood trauma

WINTERS, CA — In 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the results of one of the largest studies ever... More >

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Oct 5, 2011 08:03 PM
NewsOne

Original and aggregated national news for black America
By Maura R. O'Connor
NEW YORK, NEW YORK— In July 2011, New York City's beaches and rivers were closed to recreational use for five days, after a fire at a major sewage treatment plant led to millions of gallons of untreated sewage being dumped into the Hudson and Harlem rivers. Most New York news outlets focused on the immediate fallout from the leak at the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Harlem, but NewsOne, a website dedicated to news and information for and about...
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Recently Updated: Dec 29, 2010 03:17 PM
NJ Spotlight

Trenton's statehouse startup
By Lauren Kirchner
TRENTON, NEW JERSEY — NJSpotlight.com, which CJR profiled in September 2010, is a policy-focused news site based in the Trenton, N.J. state house. Launched in early 2010 by two former Newark Star-Ledger reporters, John Mooney and Tom Johnson, the site focuses on issues relating to the state budget, environmental and energy legislation, education policy, and health care. "We are nonpartisan, independent, policy-centered and community-minded," says the website. [Profile updated April 2, 2012] Read more about NJ Spotlight Their publisher, Kevin...
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Dec 21, 2011 11:23 AM
NMPolitics.net

State politics from southern New Mexico
By Michael Meyer
LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO — In the spring of 2006, Heath Haussamen was working for the Las Cruces Sun-News in southern New Mexico, an ambitious young reporter covering courts, crime, and local politics amid one of the quieter media markets in the country. Las Cruces is part of New Mexico's second congressional district, which is home to just over 600,000 people living in an area the size of Pennsylvania. The city gets its television from nearby El Paso, Texas rather...
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Jan 18, 2012 12:59 PM
NOLA Defender

Edgy arts and culture coverage for a cultural mecca
By Erik Shilling
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA — After scraping by in New York City for several years as a freelance journalist and screenwriter, in early 2009 Ben Mintz was offered the chance to live in New Orleans for three months to work on a script. Like many before him, he was seduced by the storied city and decided to stay permanently. But Mintz still missed some of the BIg Apple's savvy, if smart-mouthed, local news blogs like those at New York magazine, Gothamist,...
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Oct 24, 2011 11:42 AM
Noozhawk

Reporting (and financing) the news in Santa Barbara, Calif.
By Paige Rentz
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA — 2006 was a tumultuous year for news in Santa Barbara. The daily Santa Barbara News-Press was experiencing a very public conflict between the publishers and editorial staff that resulted in waves of resignations and firings--a situation which ultimately led the National Labor Relations Board to find that management committed unfair labor practices after the staff voted to unionize. Four years later, the local news site Noozhawk believes it has helped fill the void left by the...
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Jan 27, 2012 11:55 AM
NOWCastSA

Multimedia community news for San Antonio, Texas
By Maura R. O'Connor
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS — This spring, San Antonio residents will vote on a five-year, $596 million bond package intended to upgrade the city's infrastructure. The package includes 140 projects across the city, such as improvements to parks, sidewalks, and drainage facilities. Until they go to the polls on May 12, citizens who want to learn details about these projects can visit NOWCastSA.com, an online community news outlet serving the San Antonio area. The site features an interactive Google map that...
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Jan 5, 2011 06:00 PM
Oakland Local

Susan Mernit & co. cover their corner of the Bay
By David Downs
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — Born from the community outrage that followed a local police-on-civilian killing caught on cell phone and spread across the Internet, one-year-old Oakland Local hopes to grow its professional reporting in 2011, while keeping its street-level perspective on the sometimes dangerous California port city it covers. Founder Susan Mernit edits and publishes the Local with an editorial staff of eight--none of whom are paid as full-time employees--serving the gritty city of 447,000. Read more about Oakland Local A...
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May 23, 2011 02:55 PM
Obit Magazine

Making the most of the dead beat
By Lauren Kirchner
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY — Obit, an online magazine launched in 2007 to examine life, death, and the transitions in between, isn't as dark as you might initially think. "What death can mean to the living and what living may have meant to the dead," reads a tagline on its masthead. "Death is only half the story. Obit is about life..." reads another. Far more than just an outlet for obituaries--although it has many of those as well--the site is an...
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Oct 24, 2011 04:44 PM
Ocean Beach Bulletin

Hyperlocal news for San Francisco's western edge
By Alex Fekula
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — San Francisco is home to one of the largest urban beaches in the country, Ocean Beach. The surrounding neighborhoods, the Sunset and the Richmond District, resemble suburban sprawl more than a city, and are comprised mostly of families, surfers, and those seeking a quieter, less urban-intensive lifestyle. The Ocean Beach Bulletin provides hyperlocal coverage for this part of town, a section of San Francisco that often falls below the radar of larger, city-wide outlets. Read more...
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Mar 24, 2011 12:49 PM
Oklahoma Watch

An investigative nonprofit for the Sooner State
By Brendan Buhler
NORMAN, OKLAHOMA — Oklahoma Watch is a nonprofit investigative reporting website launched in December 2010 under editor Tom Lindley, a veteran of the state's two major daily papers, the Oklahoman and the Tulsa World--credentials that Lindley says got him the job, as the two papers share resources with Oklahoma Watch and the editors of both papers sit on its executive board. Lindley says Oklahoma Watch's mission is to expose that which is broken in the public sphere and get the...
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Sep 20, 2011 02:23 PM
Open Media Boston

Boston news and progressive commentary
By Evan MacDonald
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — About five years ago, Jason Pramas identified what he calls a "metropolitan news vacuum" in Boston. He noticed that local news outlets were focusing more on beats like entertainment and sports than on local issues like labor strikes, social injustice, and community news. At the time, Pramas was a Ph.D candidate in public policy at the University of Massachusetts-Boston with an acute interest in activism and social media. He decided to fill the void. "It seemed like...
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May 20, 2011 01:35 PM
OpenSecrets.org

Exhaustive reporting on money in politics
By Daniel Luzer
WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — In 1983, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Hugh Scott (R-Pa.) founded the Center for Responsive Politics in order to "track money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy." This government watchdog eventually gave birth to OpenSecrets.org, a searchable database of campaign contributions and a center for investigative journalism about money in politics. Read more about OpenSecrets.org The name comes from one of the organization's original publications. Throughout the 1980s, the Center for...
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Sep 14, 2011 02:48 PM
Oswego County Today

An early online news source by a mayor-turned-newsman
By Paige Rentz
FULTON, NEW YORK — When Mayor Don Bullard lost his bid for re-election as chief executive of the small city of Fulton, N.Y. in 1998, he and three members of his city hall team set out in search of a way to continue working for their community. In the waning years of the last millennium, online news was still a young industry, but the former mayor (who has since died) decided to venture into this new territory along with his...
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Mar 24, 2011 11:45 AM
Ozarks Unbound

One man (and three contributors) in the wide world of northwest Arkansas
By Sam Eifling
FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS — The challenges have been twofold for Christopher Spencer, the veteran reporter who founded Ozarks Unbound after he was laid off from his gig at the Morning News of Northwest Arkansas. The first, simply, is revenue. The second is establishing a journalistic brand when there's only one of him (with three contributors) cranking out news about northwest Arkansas, a metro region of nearly a half-million people that is home to the University of Arkansas, Tyson Foods, and Walmart....
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Jul 18, 2011 11:55 AM
paidContent

Covering the business of digital media since 2002
By Joel Meares
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — In 2008, when Guardian News & Media bought Rafat Ali's ContentNext Media, Ali wrote that the acquisition marked the "2.0 phase" of his company. It was an aptly webby phrase from the man who six years earlier founded ContentNext's flagship site, paidContent.org, with the aim of obsessively covering the economics of the then just-emerging world of digital content. And the phrase aptly conveyed just how different Rafat Ali's company was in 2008 than it was...
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