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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Feb 3, 2012 04:54 PM
InMaricopa

Online community news for an Arizona town damaged by the housing crisis
By Tom Marcinko
MARICOPA, ARIZONA — When the InMaricopa website launched in 2004, the once-small town of Maricopa, Ariz. was in the midst of a massive population boom. With families seeking cheaper housing outside of Phoenix, the former nineteenth-century mail stop on the Gila River went from 1,000 residents in 2000 to 40,000 in 2010. In 2006, housing prices began to level off, two years before the town gained national attention from ABC's Nightline as the "Poster Child for the Housing Crisis," and...
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Mar 11, 2011 11:11 AM
Inner City Press

A one-man show reporting on the United Nations
By Armin Rosen
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Every weekday at noon, a spokesperson for the United Nations briefs the media in the auditorium at the Dag Hammarskjold library, just adjacent to the world body's towering Secretariat building in New York. And every weekday, Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press is there, asking about topics that no other member of the press corps will touch. His website is starkly organized, with a look that brings to mind early Geocities pages and the...
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Jul 26, 2011 08:20 AM
Innovation Trail

Public radio takes to the web to cover upstate New York's transitioning economy
By Maura R. O'Connor
ROCHESTER, NEW YORK — Fifty years ago the economy of upstate New York was rooted in industry and manufacturing, but in recent decades these sectors have dramatically declined. In the 1980s alone, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs were lost, according to the Albany Times Union. "Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse were heavy industrial areas," says journalist Juan Vazquez. "A lot of the economy was based on manufacturing... There's a definite transition of what the economy is going to be here. How...
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Jul 11, 2011 03:48 PM
Inside Facebook

Data-heavy news and analysis of the Internet's hottest property
By Arvin Temkar
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA — As the social networking behemoth Facebook shapes the way people think about everything from privacy to public relations, and as rumors continue to circulate about a possible 2012 IPO that could value Facebook at over $100 billion, the site Inside Facebook, which analyzes the company's growth, has become increasingly relevant. Internet media entrepreneur Justin Smith started Inside Facebook in April 2006 to provide coverage of and research on the rapidly growing social network. Geared specifically for...
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Mar 24, 2011 03:48 PM
Inside the Hall

The go-to site for Hoosier basketball fanatics
By Connor Boals
BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA — What began as a couple buddies blogging about their passion for their alma mater has grown into a mecca for fans of Indiana University basketball. Inside the Hall is the perfect web resource for a region known for its devout basketball culture. Started by Alex Bozich, Ryan Corazza, and Eamonn Brennan in 2007 as a hobby, the site soon grew to a legitimate resource for stories from a fan perspective. The three are all IU grads themselves...
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Oct 24, 2011 07:04 PM
InsideClimate News

Environment news and investigations
By Alysia Santo
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — After experimenting with a variety of quick-hit approaches to environmental coverage, a four-year-old online news startup focused on climate change is moving in a slower, more involved reportorial direction. Originally launched in 2007 as SolveClimate News, the site announced on September 6, 2011 that it had hired an executive editor, Susan White, and changed its name to InsideClimate News “to better reflect the investigative mission it will pursue under her leadership.” The addition of White, formerly...
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Apr 5, 2011 01:06 PM
Intersections South Los Angeles

USC students report on their neighboring communities
By David Downs
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — When conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly needs a sparring partner on immigration issues, his producers occasionally turn to a totally under-the-radar nonprofit news site, Intersections South Los Angeles. The two-year-old site, a hybrid of hyperlocal reporting and user-generated news, runs on grant and university funds and operates out of the University of Southern California. Editor-in-chief Willa Seidenberg, a journalism professor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, says the operation's goals differ from those...
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Jan 5, 2011 04:26 PM
InvestigateWest

Investigative journalism for the Pacific Northwest
By Colin Fleming
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON — Seattle's InvestigateWest may have a small budget and a tiny newsroom--but the organization's impact consistently belies its size. Founded in 2009, the small investigative nonprofit led by former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffer Rita Hibbard has emerged as a major player in regional journalism, reporting on everything from chronic homelessness to the widespread poisoning of children by rat poison. Read more about InvestigateWest In 2010, the site produced a massive expose on the risk of what Hibbard calls "second-hand...
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Jan 4, 2011 02:10 PM
Investigative Newsource

Investigative journalism for San Diego and beyond
By Colin Fleming
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA — Investigative editor Lorie Hearn does it all. She runs the business, raises the funds, edits the stories, does the books, and dusts the office. She even brings the bagels and cream cheese. Hearn, a former editor for the San Diego Union-Tribune, now leads Investigate Newsource, formerly known as The Watchdog Institute, a three-person nonprofit investigative outlet run out of San Diego State University. The site has covered everything from the Staff Congressional Cigar Association, a smoking...
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Jan 3, 2011 06:21 PM
Investigative Reporting Workshop

Multimedia reporting in a university setting
By Colin Fleming
WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop is one of sixteen university-based investigative journalism centers, but the only one in the nation's capital. Founded in 2008 by Charles Lewis and Wendell Cochran, both veteran journalists and professors at the university, the Workshop produces original reporting and mentors the next generation of investigative journalists. This dual mandate creates a unique newsroom; undergraduate and graduate students work alongside veteran professors to create original content that appears in outlets from...
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Oct 31, 2011 03:15 PM
Issue Media Group

A network of feel-good local business news sites
By Erik Shilling
DETROIT, MICHIGAN — It's been six years since Paul Schutt and Brian Boyle founded Detroit-based Model D, a business news website that orients itself toward the positive side of the job loss-plagued Motor City. The site was the first of what would turn into Issue Media Group, a network of nineteen city-based websites, from Tampa Bay to Toronto. In each case, Schutt, Boyle, and a third business partner, Deepa Ramsinghani, have employed roughly the same template: optimistically-minded business, technology, and...
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Jan 5, 2011 04:38 PM
iWatch News (The Center for Public Integrity)

Twenty years' worth of investigative journalism for the public welfare
By Colin Fleming
WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — The Center for Public Integrity celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2010 with a YouTube video detailing its many accomplishments. The organization has won more than forty national journalism awards, pursued more than seventy major investigative projects, published sixteen books, and, perhaps most significantly, has been cited in print and electronic media more than 15,000 times. Now, the Center has started to embrace the complexity of the web. Read more about Center for Public Integrity Charles...
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May 18, 2011 12:08 PM
Jersey City Independent

Eye-opening alternative news for a bedroom community on the Hudson
By Sara Germano
JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY — Unfortunately, it's not difficult to imagine how a city of nearly a quarter-million residents could be wanting for local news coverage these days. When that city exists in the shadow of media-manic Manhattan, that fate becomes even more understandable. Such was the case for Jersey City, a bedroom community located along the Hudson riverfront bordering the Big Apple, until a couple of scrappy, enterprising journalists began the alternative news and culture site Jersey City Independent....
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Mar 24, 2011 10:35 PM
Journal Watchdog

A print startup's bold online muckracking operation
By Armin Rosen
GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA — The purpose of Journal Watchdog, an online news site launched in January of 2009 and based in Greenville, South Carolina, couldn't be any clearer: on the site's "About Us" page, the words "We are a watchdog website" are emblazoned in bold, twenty-four-point font, with a link to a page containing salaries of various state employees positioned just a couple inches above on the site's masthead. A project of Community Journals, a publisher of weekly newspapers serving...
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Jan 19, 2012 03:19 PM
Leimert Park Beat

A hyperlocal news site and social network for a neighborhood in Los Angeles
By Chasen Marshall
LEIMERT PARK, CALIFORNIA — Eddie North-Hager moved to Leimert Park, an 11,000-person neighborhood in Los Angeles, because it was the type of community in which he wanted to raise his family. And yet whenever he read anything about the area in the news, it seemed that he encountered endless versions of the same negative story. "If you would search for things about the neighborhood online, you were going to get a crime or a gang story, when that's not the...
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