CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

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

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Mar 24, 2011 12:15 PM
CU-CitizenAccess

University-based reporting on poverty in central Illinois
By Kathy Gilsinan
URBANA, ILLINOIS — When Brant Houston moved to the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois area from Columbia, Missouri to assume the University of Illinois's Knight Chair in Journalism, he did what he had long encouraged students to do in the classes he taught on computer assisted reporting: he trawled through census data to get a sense of his community. The poverty rate immediately stuck out as far out of proportion to its presence in local news; in Houston's view, it appeared to be...
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Sep 27, 2011 04:52 PM
Dallas South News

Making the move from blog to nonprofit news site
By Timothy Bella
DALLAS, TEXAS — Shawn Williams was in pharmaceutical sales for nine years before starting his personal blog in 2006. The blog was about South Dallas, an area of more than 500,000 people. He says he first started the blog to try to combat negative images of the African American community that he saw in the mainstream media. When he was let go from his job right around the time the blog was beginning to grow, he decided to take his...
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May 3, 2011 12:23 PM
DavidsonNews.net

Ambitious local news site for Davidson, N.C.
By Justin Yang
DAVIDSON, NORTH CAROLINA — David Boraks, a veteran journalist of thirty years and long-time resident of Davidson, N.C., started DavidsonNews.net after returning from a year abroad in China and Taiwan. Upon returning home, Boraks found that staying updated on current news was not as easy as he had remembered, and so he started an online town newsletter. The newsletter soon evolved into a full-blown news website devoted to the town of Davidson. The site launched in 2006, and Boraks is...
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Aug 8, 2011 11:49 AM
Deadspin

Gawker Media's sports news success story
By Erik Shilling
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — For Deadspin, the impish sports wing of the Gawker empire, the presence of a pink gorilla at a hotel meeting between Tommy Craggs, a Deadspin senior editor, and John Walsh, ESPN's executive vice president for content, must have felt like a crowning achievement. The site made its name most recently by publishing pictures of Brett Favre's genitalia, but has also long been a thorn in the media giant's side, reproducing drunken pictures of several of...
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Mar 24, 2011 03:22 PM
Delaware First Media News

Nonprofit news in text, audio, and video
By Georgia Schoonmaker
NEWARK, DELAWARE — Delaware First Media News, an independent news site specializing in news and commentary about goings-on in the Diamond State, grew from seeds planted in the nonprofit sector. As explained by Micheline Boudreau, DFM's president and a former news director of a public television station in Delaware, all of the journalists who came together to create the website began in nonprofit journalism--a fact which shines through in every aspect of the paper's public interest-oriented content. Read more about...
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Mar 28, 2011 08:32 PM
DNAinfo

Hyperlocal news for Manhattan
By Alex Fekula
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Manhattan surely has more media outlets per square foot than just about anywhere else in the world, but DNAinfo has proved that there's still plenty of room on the island for local news. Conceived by Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, the site is a compendium of hyperlocal news for Manhattan's many communities. The site's ten separate verticals provide coverage of neighborhoods from Washington Heights to Hell's Kitchen. Read more about DNAinfo DNAinfo is privately owned and...
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Jan 5, 2011 08:47 PM
DoD Buzz

A (mostly) one-man show reporting on the Pentagon
By Michael Meyer
WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — Structurally speaking, DoD Buzz is little more than a personal blog dressed up as a full-on news publication. The remarkable thing is that, were it not for more than three-quarters of the stories on the site having the same byline, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. That's true in terms of volume and quality of content, anyway. In other ways, DoDB does have the voice and personality of a one-person product, at least...
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Jul 18, 2011 04:18 PM
E&E Publishing

High-cost subscription coverage of environment and energy policy and markets
By Maura R. O'Connor
WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — Launched in 1998, E&E Publishing started with six employees producing high-priced subscription energy policy coverage out of Washington D.C. and has grown into an award-winning online news outlet with an editorial staff of forty-five and bureaus in San Francisco and New York City. Over the years, the company's readership has grown from roughly 1,000 to 40,000, and includes major corporate subscribers such as General Electric, US state governments, law firms, and lobbying groups. Read more...
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Mar 24, 2011 10:41 PM
ecoRI

Community engagement through environmental news (and composting)
By Daniel Denvir
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND — Frank Carini, a Boston native with an accent to match, has gone from sports writing to composting. He founded ecoRI.com in September 2009 after spending twenty years at newspapers on the North Shore in Massachusetts, Cincinnati, and in Newport, Rhode Island. "I was getting sick of the direction of where we were going," he says. "Too much covering press releases and crap like that." Read more about ecoRI Reading progressive magazines like Mother Jones, he says,...
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Mar 28, 2011 01:43 AM
Education News Colorado

The "paper of record" for Colorado education policymaking
By Dohini Patel
DENVER, COLORADO — Education News Colorado is an online-only news site devoted exclusively to in-depth coverage of Colorado state education news and policy. The site began operating in its present form in 2008, but can trace its roots back to Headfirst Colorado, a state-wide quarterly print magazine that, until current EdNews publisher Alan Gottlieb came aboard in 2006, would have been more accurately described as a policy journal than a journalistic entity. When he arrived as editor, Gottlieb began to...
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Oct 24, 2011 11:00 AM
Eleven Warriors

News and commentary on Ohio State football
By Erik Shilling
PATASKALA, OHIO — Jason Priestas was a lonely Ohio State football fan when he moved to Chicago seven years ago with his wife. He was only a six hour drive from Columbus, but he felt like he was living on the opposite end of the globe. So, in August 2006, he did what many tech-savvy fans do: he started a blog. Five years and several million page views later, it has turned into something more than that, a continuously updated...
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Sep 28, 2011 11:48 AM
Engadget

Tech news the AOL way
By Richard Nieva
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Engadget is a one-stop hub for enthusiastic tech consumers, featuring breaking news updates, product reviews, podcasts, multimedia, and more. Light in tone, just edgy enough to amuse but not offend, and often genuinely informative, it's tempting to compare the site to a tech version of Gawker--and, in fact, Engadget was founded in 2004 by Peter Rojas, the tech writer who founded Gizmodo for Gawker Media's Nick Denton in 2002. Read more about Engadget Engadget's purpose...
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Dec 13, 2011 11:28 AM
Eugene Daily News

Sports and lifestyle news for Eugene, Oregon
By David Riedel
EUGENE, OREGON — When publisher Kelly Asay and his business partner Jeff Tunnell, the two co-owners of the Eugene Daily News, launched the site in February 2011, they had no journalism experience. The entrepreneurs and video game developers thought their expertise with the Internet and digital media would help them avoid the difficulties that some print, radio, and television news outlets have struggled with when branching out online. Read more about Eugene Daily News "They've tried to bring traditional media...
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Oct 31, 2011 11:33 AM
Evanston Now

A hyperlocal news site holds its own in a media-saturated Chicago suburb
By Ian Fullerton
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS — As a native Evanstonian, Bill Smith remembers a time when the small suburban municipality just north of Chicago had only one paper to its name, the weekly Evanston Review. "For the latter half of the century there had been a few start-ups, but those mostly failed," he says. Today, that field has expanded, thanks in part to Smith, who logs around sixty hours a week as publisher of the local news site Evanston Now. Read more about...
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May 7, 2012 01:46 PM
Eye on Annapolis

Unadorned, up-to-the-minute news for Maryland's capital city
By Maura R. O'Connor
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND — Eye on Annapolis, a website covering Maryland's Chesapeake Bay and capital city of Annapolis, has forged a pragmatic model for local news coverage, carving out a niche for itself among the city's media by providing readers quick and frequent news updates. The site focuses on breaking news including traffic reports and crime, as well as a community calendar, coverage of local politics, education, business, and columns written by residents. (Check out 16-year-old Fish Stark's smart and savvy...
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