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Mar 27, 2012 01:19 PM
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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