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 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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Mar 27, 2012 01:19 PM
West Philly Local

Hyperlocal news and events for 50,000 Philadelphians
By Caitlin Kasunich
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — Just across the Schuylkill River from Center City Philadelphia, Western Philadelphia--or "West Philly," as the locals call it--is home to about 50,000 people, many of whom are students or professors at the University of Pennsylvania or Drexel University, both of which in the neighborhood. While Philadelphia media outlets run stories on West Philly as part of their broader coverage of the metro area, two veteran journalists and current residents of the community, married couple Mike Lyons and...
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Sep 29, 2011 11:02 AM
West Seattle Blog

Defining hyperlocal in both news and business
By Erik Shilling
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON — In a city that is known for its steady rain, it's not surprising that it was the weather that put West Seattle Blog on the map as well. The blog, which now averages more than 80,000 visitors per month according to Quantcast and is routinely cited in breaking news stories by the Seattle Times, started in 2005 merely as a hobby for Tracy Record and Patrick Sand, the two co-founders. But during a powerful windstorm that knocked...
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Mar 24, 2011 03:27 PM
West Virginia Watchdog

Think tank-funded West Virginia political news and investigations
By Brendan Buhler
CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA — West Virginia Watchdog is a one-man shop focusing on investigative and statehouse news in the Mountain State. The site is part of a network of sites around the country that share the Watchdog name. The Watchdog's sole editorial employee is Steven Allen Adams, who is also a stringer for Reuters and contributes to a Charleston, W.V. entertainment news website called Kanawha Valley Live. West Virginia Watchdog was originally launched in June 2009 as the West Virginia...
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Jan 4, 2011 03:26 PM
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Investigative reporting for the Badger State
By Colin Fleming
MADISON, WISCONSIN — In just under two years, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism has broken over twenty-five major stories, ranging from the increased dependence on immigrant labor in the dairy industry to the stories behind the alarmingly high Native American suicide rates. The two-person team, led by executive director Andy Hall out of an office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has also had its work picked up by numerous news organizations throughout the...
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Apr 17, 2012 12:47 PM
Worthit2u.net

Bringing online news to rural Georgia
By Tyler Jones
SYLVESTER, GEORGIA — Matt Medders was too young to be the chairman of the Worth County Commissioners, and Sherry Walls knew it. Although beating the incumbent by 208 votes, Medders was a few months short of meeting the legal requirement that the commissioner for the rural county in southwest Georgia be at least 27 years old. Before she could break the story for the weekly Sylvester Local News, where she worked as a reporter, Medders and the paper's editor approached...
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Recently Updated: Jan 5, 2011 07:19 PM
WyoFile

Enterprise reporting for the Equality State
By Alex Fekula
CASPER, WY — [UPDATE: On September 5, 2012, the Knight Foundation announced that WyoFile was yet again a recipient of its Community Information Challenge Grant. The site received $62,000 from Knight and an equal amount from the Wyoming Community Foundation. It will hire one full-time reporter dedicated to the Wyoming Legislature and one part-time minority reporter, who will cover the Wind River Indian Reservation.] Even though WyoFile covers the goings-on of the least populous state in the union, it still...
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Oct 31, 2011 01:45 PM
Y’all Politics

Extensive aggregation and commentary on Mississippi politics
By Alex Fekula
JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI — Mississippi-based businessman Alan Lange loves politics--so much so that he launched a website in his spare time to cover the 2004 mayoral election in his hometown of Jackson, Miss. His reasoning was simple: "I wanted to cover [the race] in a way that hadn't been done before." His method was to create a centralized place for information about the race, consisting of both aggregated news items and original documents. Read more about Y'all Politics But when the...
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Nov 21, 2011 11:38 AM
Yadkin Valley Sports

High school sports news for eighteen schools in central North Carolina
By Erik Shilling
ELKIN, NORTH CAROLINA — After earning his undergraduate journalism degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1993, Eric Lusk spent more than a decade patrolling small town sports beats at a number of newspapers across the state. In 2006, he got a job at the Elkin Tribune, which has a circulation of around 4,000. But just a year later the privately-owned paper was sold to a conglomerate, and, soon after, gutted, with a number of staff layoffs. Lusk...
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Jan 4, 2011 03:45 PM
Yale Environment 360

In-depth environmental news, commentary, and analysis
By Brett Norman
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT — Yale Environment 360 is an online magazine that publishes long-form environmental journalism by prominent reporters, academics, and policymakers. A nonprofit backed primarily by two heavyweight philanthropic foundations, e360, as it's known, isn't subject to the market pressures squeezing many outlets. That leaves its full-time staff of three to focus on producing in-depth news, commentary, and analysis--and, more recently, extended video reports--on a wide range of environmental topics, from climate change and energy policy to coral reef...
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Oct 31, 2011 02:26 PM
YubaNet

Online news stretching the Sierras
By Tyler Jones
NEVADA CITY, CALIFORNIA — "The legacy media don't see this area as a market," says Pascale Fusshoeller, editor and co-founder of YubaNet in Nevada City, California. When looking at a map of the Sierra Nevada, one can understand why. The Range of Light, as John Muir described it, stretches 400 sparsely populated miles along California's Central Valley, containing the country's natural shrines of Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and Sequoia. Read more about Yubanet "The geography of the landscape directly reflects...
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