CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

TRVL

A free iPad travel magazine

BUSSUM, NETHERLANDS — Two Dutch guys met at a party in Amsterdam. A month later, they had a magazine. Jochem Wijnands, who... More >

Search Sort Sort startups by location,
biz model, staff size, etc.

To learn more about the database, and how you can help us improve it, please see FAQ.

Feb 8, 2012 07:43 PM
TownSquareBuzz.com

Community and sports news for a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb
By Tom Marcinko
McKINNEY, TEXAS — TownSquareBuzz.com, an online-only news site in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of McKinney, Texas, owes its existence to president and founder Angie Bado's passion for local sports. In 2005, she brainstormed with local sports writers about ways to fill the gaps in area papers' declining sports coverage, and launched McKinneyNews.net, a site dedicated to the mission, that same year. Read more about TownSquareBuzz.com The former educator, who wears a "News Junkie" t-shirt to the gym, was happy to...
Continue reading
Nov 1, 2012 10:24 AM
TRVL

A free iPad travel magazine
By Hiten Samtani
BUSSUM, NETHERLANDS — Two Dutch guys met at a party in Amsterdam. A month later, they had a magazine. Jochem Wijnands, who used to run an online photo agency, and Michel Elings, a technology consultant, found they had a shared passion for travel. They put their heads and networks together to create TRVL, an iPad-only magazine that is the highest rated magazine app on Apple's App Store. Each issue of the weekly magazine features a single destination through content that...
Continue reading
Mar 24, 2011 11:50 AM
TucsonSentinel.com

Continuing an underdog media legacy in Tucson
By Alex Fekula
TUCSON, ARIZONA — After a 138-year run, the Tucson Citizen, a daily that reported on such historic events as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, closed its doors in May of 2009. Dylan Smith, the Citizen's online editor, was among the many journalists displaced by the paper's disbanding. Not content to let the Arizona Daily Star claim victory in Tucson's newspaper war, Smith undertook what to him was an obvious move: he gathered several former Citizen colleagues and formed TucsonSentinel.com...
Continue reading
Jun 7, 2011 11:27 AM
Twin Cities Daily Planet

Citizen-powered local news for Minneapolis and St. Paul
By Armin Rosen
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA — The Twin Cities Daily Planet focuses on a combination of neighborhood-level news and coverage of progressive, social justice-related issues in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. But it wants to be more than just a news-gathering operation. The Daily Planet is just as committed to creating journalists--or, perhaps more accurately, citizens who engage with their communities through journalism--as it is to publishing them, and since it launched in 2006 it has helped attract and train scores of paid contributors,...
Continue reading
Jul 25, 2011 04:00 PM
Universal Hub

A wicked smart Boston hyperlocal
By Connor Boals
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — What started as a simple online directory of businesses, restaurants, and other establishments serving Boston has grown into a full-blown hub of Beantown information. After a layoff prompted him to take his side project full-time, Adam Gaffin set about building Universal Hub into a hyperlocal news hub with an original Boston twist. If you want the day's biggest stories, stick with The Boston Globe. But if you're a Bostonian looking for a ground-level view of your city,...
Continue reading
Jan 5, 2012 11:22 AM
Urban Milwaukee

Reporting and advocacy on urban issues in the Cream City
By Paige Rentz
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN — After merging two local blogs to launch a news site several years ago, web developers Jeramey Jannene and Dave Reid have a strong presence in downtown Milwaukee, serving up local urban news on their combined effort, Urban Milwaukee. Jannene and Reid do not shy away from writing with a very defined perspective. "We're not simply reporting; there's a level of advocacy there," says Reid. At the core of it all, says Jannene, is the intersection of design...
Continue reading
Mar 24, 2011 03:16 PM
UtahPolicy.com

Political news for Beehive State political insiders
By Chris Benz
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH — For an example of how to deliver a massive amount of information with minimal manpower, look no further than UtahPolicy.com. Founded in 2004, the site is a news aggregator, but it also aggregates politicians' press releases, pdfs of proposed legislation, and other original materials. All of this is leavened with a dash of original reporting and analysis. Read more about UtahPolicy.com The for-profit site, run by former Deseret Morning News managing editor and Republican political...
Continue reading
Recently Updated: Oct 26, 2011 05:27 PM
Village Soup (Defunct)

A small media chain blends print and digital local journalism
By Lauren Kirchner
ROCKLAND, MAINE — [UPDATE: On Friday March 9, 2012 Village Soup president Richard M. Anderson announced the closure of all Village Soup publications. The statement did not make clear how the closure would affect the nine independent news organizations which use the Village Soup platform under licensing agreements. Anderson was not immediately available for comment. We'll post further updates to this story when and if they're available.] In the early 1990s, before the World Wide Web went mainstream, Richard M....
Continue reading
Jan 5, 2011 05:30 PM
voiceofsandiego.org

A nonprofit news innovator in Southern California
By David Downs
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA — Exposing the darker side of a sunny beach city, the six-year-old news site Voice of San Diego is having a larger influence than its small size might suggest. With 170,000 unique visitors a month, the nationally renowned nonprofit has an annual budget of $1.2 million (mostly from grants), a slim staff of fifteen, and a content-sharing deal with NBC San Diego. The Voice uses the cash and the reach to break community-focused investigative stories that have,...
Continue reading
Mar 25, 2011 03:09 AM
VTDigger.org

Deep coverage for the Green Mountain State
By Daniel Luzer
MONTPELIER, VERMONT — As the name suggests, VTDigger (pronounced "V.T. Digger," not "Vermont Digger") aims to provide deep coverage of local issues in the Green Mountain State. "I wanted to follow stories in-depth," explains Anne Galloway, the publication's editor-in-chief. "Not all of our stories are investigative; but we want them all to go deep." While it's not all hard-hitting political stories--the day after Christmas, Digger featured a story called "Vermont's Other Residents," a photo essay about farm animals--the site focuses...
Continue reading
Oct 26, 2011 06:13 PM
Washington Independent Review of Books

Serious-minded reviews of books across the literary spectrum
By Daniel Luzer
WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — When newspapers across the country have to cut costs, their book sections inevitably end up on the chopping block. David O. Stewart, president of the Freedom to Write Fund, which is dedicated to education and public advocacy on behalf of writers, says that he and the other members of the Fund became concerned about shrinking book review sections and the decline in newspapers' cultural coverage overall. So they decided to create a new publication entirely...
Continue reading
Jul 11, 2011 01:18 PM
Watchdog New England

A catalyst for investigative reporting in Boston and beyond
By Isaac Olson
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — Watchdog New England, the website of the nonprofit Initiative for Investigative Reporting at Northeastern University, aims to revive and strengthen investigative reporting throughout New England's six states--not as a news outlet in its own right, but as an ally to the region's more than eighty daily newspapers and countless weeklies. For now, the site primarily exists as a compendium of links to databases, informational documents, and other online resources that inspire and fuel in-depth, hard-hitting reporting. Eventually,...
Continue reading
Jun 14, 2011 09:53 AM
Watershed Post

News and environmental reporting for the Catskills
By Brett Norman
DELHI, NEW YORK — The Watershed Post, an online news source for five counties in upstate New York, made a splash last fall with its real-time coverage of widespread flooding that swept one woman to her death in the Neversink River. Its editors call this back country in the Catskill Mountains a "news desert," mostly bereft of local media coverage, but one of the area's defining features is its invaluable wetness: the rivers and reservoirs that feed water to New...
Continue reading
Feb 22, 2012 01:38 PM
Welles Park Bulldog

News and sports for Chicago's North Side
By Ian Fullerton
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — The Welles Park Bulldog takes its name from a picturesque public park in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, and delivers insight and opinion on politics, culture, and sports for a dense stretch of residential and mixed-use boroughs on Chicago's North Side. The site's founder and publisher, Patrick Boylan, first had the idea that would eventually become the Bulldog in 2009. "I had been playing around with the idea of putting out 'block club' updates for neighbors to talk about...
Continue reading
Oct 31, 2011 10:00 AM
West Orlando News Online

Left-of-center community news for Orlando, Fla.
By Paige Rentz
ORLANDO, FLORIDA — For Keith Longmore, it's a point of pride that the Tea Party has targeted West Orlando News Online, the left-of-center local news site he publishes in Orange County, Florida, for a service it provides to locals hit hard by the foreclosure crisis. According to Longmore, posting information and links to help readers apply for government assistance programs is all in a day's work for the small staff, whose mission, at the end of the day, is "trying...
Continue reading