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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Apr 3, 2012 02:28 PM
National Institute on Money in State Politics

Tracking political donations and their influence in all fifty states
By Maura R. O'Connor
HELENA, MONTANA — Edwin Bender believes that building a database is like writing a really good story. "What fascinated me about being a journalist was getting down and taking evidence and saying 'this is what I see,'" says Bender. "When I first started building databases it was like reporting a story. Standardizing names and sorting them, finding out who worked for a bank when they said they were retired. There was a lot of shoe leather reporting." Read more about...
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Jul 5, 2011 02:37 PM
NEast Philly

Neighborhood news for working-class Philadelphia
By Alex Fekula
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — While still an undergraduate journalism major at Temple University, Shannon McDonald launched the hyperlocal NEast Philly, an online only news source that provides daily coverage for the Northeast section of Philadelphia. In the site's own words, NEast Philly offers "daily news, analysis, multimedia, columns and commentary on everything that interests the proud, working-class neighborhoods of The NEast." Read more about NEast Philly McDonald launched the site in November 2008 after taking an entrepreneurial journalism class at Temple....
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Mar 24, 2011 04:04 PM
Nebraska Watchdog

Think tank-funded investigations for the Cornhusker State
By Brendan Buhler
LAVISTA, NEBRASKA — Nebraska Watchdog, which launched in September 2009 with longtime newsman Joe Jordan as its sole employee, is a one-man shop focusing on investigative and statehouse news in the Cornhusker State. The site is part of a network of sites around the country that share the Watchdog name. Jordan spent twenty-nine years as a political and investigative reporter for KMTV CBS in Omaha, winning a Walter Cronkite Award in 2003 for uncovering misleading television ads from a pharmaceutical...
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Oct 20, 2011 11:41 AM
Neighborhood Notes

Hyperlocal news and advertising in Portland, Oregon
By Maura R. O'Connor
PORTLAND, OREGON — For hyperlocal news sites, one problem looms above all others: while demand for hyperlocal news is growing in communities around America, the small, location-specific audiences targeted by these sites often don't provide enough web traffic to support an advertising-based revenue model. Can hyperlocal sites become financially viable through other means? This is the problem Neighborhood Notes, a hyperlocal website serving Portland, Oregon, is currently trying to solve. Read more about Neighborhood Notes Since its start in 2004,...
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Mar 24, 2011 12:53 PM
Neon Tommy

A student-run news site with a national reputation
By David Downs
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — When swine flu heated up international headlines in 2009, University of Southern California's fledgling news site Neon Tommy discovered some cold truths about the official reaction to the disease. Neon Tommy staff obtained forty-four death certificates from Los Angeles county health officials, interviewed family members and doctors, and discovered authorities weren't notifying relatives that the deceased had died from a contagious pandemic. Half the death certificates didn't show swine flu as a cause of death. The...
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Mar 24, 2011 04:45 PM
Nevada News Bureau

Franklin Center-affiliated statehouse news for the Battle Born State
By Brendan Buhler
HENDERSON, NEVADA — The Nevada News Bureau is a nonprofit organization launched in October 2009 to cover state politics and statehouse news and provide its work free of charge to other outlets in the Battle Born State. It was originally formed under the auspices of Citizen Outreach, a conservative nonprofit organization run by Chuck Muth, Nevada's leading conservative anti-tax activist. Elizabeth Crum, formerly Citizen Outreach Foundation's vice president of communications, stepped down from that position to become the site's editor...
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Sep 26, 2011 11:27 AM
New America Media

A news wire (and much more) for America's ethnic press
By Lauren Kirchner
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — In 1969, historian Franz Schurmann and journalist Orville Schell founded Pacific News Service to provide an alternative news source about U.S. military actions abroad. Four decades later, a descendant of that project continues the mission of supplementing the American mainstream press with news it wouldn't get otherwise--but this initiative seeks to inform by crossing linguistic, rather than geographic, borders. Read more about New America Media New America Media is a nonprofit news wire that facilitates both...
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Jan 4, 2011 01:33 PM
New England Center for Investigative Reporting

Hard-hitting investigations in and around the Boston area
By Colin Fleming
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — In less than two years and with an annual budget of less than $500,000, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting has taken on the state division of banks and the Salvation Army. They've brought down a high-level public official, and had their work appear in publications across the state and in every medium imaginable. And they've done it all with only two full-time staff writers. Read more about New England Center for Investigative Reporting Veteran reporters...
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Mar 24, 2011 12:44 PM
New Hampshire Watchdog

Long-term investigations, libertarian style
By Joel Meares
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE — The draw of presidential politics is a strong one in New Hampshire, home of the first presidential primary. Every four years, the Granite State finds itself inundated with a new band of ambitious hand-shakers, and local political reporters find themselves dutifully shuffling from dinner halls to town halls to school halls, picking up scraps of policy platforms and hints of presidential aspirations as they go. That's what the public wants to know, after all. Read more...
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Jun 28, 2011 01:18 PM
New Haven Independent

Connecticut-based leader in nonprofit community news
By Arvin Temkar
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT — The nonprofit New Haven Independent, which has been delivering serious-minded local news to residents of New Haven, Conn., and the surrounding area since 2005, takes a lot of pride in how it interacts with the community. In fact, the site's editor maintains that its readers are as integral to the editorial process as its reporters. "Our readers do our typos," explains Paul Bass, editor and founder of the site. Bass, who has been a reporter for...
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May 25, 2011 01:12 PM
New West

News, analysis, and culture reporting for the Rocky Mountain region
By David Downs
MISSOULA, MONTANA — All over the harsh terrain of the Rocky Mountains, local fears of rampant development burst with the real estate bubble, leaving communities to confront a new enemy: economic stagnation. On the frontier of the struggle is New West, a six-year-old digital guide to news, analysis, and culture for the Rocky Mountain region. Based in Missoula, Montana, and Boulder, Colorado, the company's network of writers and editors cover Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico. While focusing...
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Oct 5, 2011 08:03 PM
NewsOne

Original and aggregated national news for black America
By Maura R. O'Connor
NEW YORK, NEW YORK— In July 2011, New York City's beaches and rivers were closed to recreational use for five days, after a fire at a major sewage treatment plant led to millions of gallons of untreated sewage being dumped into the Hudson and Harlem rivers. Most New York news outlets focused on the immediate fallout from the leak at the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Harlem, but NewsOne, a website dedicated to news and information for and about...
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Recently Updated: Dec 29, 2010 03:17 PM
NJ Spotlight

Trenton's statehouse startup
By Lauren Kirchner
TRENTON, NEW JERSEY — NJSpotlight.com, which CJR profiled in September 2010, is a policy-focused news site based in the Trenton, N.J. state house. Launched in early 2010 by two former Newark Star-Ledger reporters, John Mooney and Tom Johnson, the site focuses on issues relating to the state budget, environmental and energy legislation, education policy, and health care. "We are nonpartisan, independent, policy-centered and community-minded," says the website. [Profile updated April 2, 2012] Read more about NJ Spotlight Their publisher, Kevin...
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Dec 21, 2011 11:23 AM
NMPolitics.net

State politics from southern New Mexico
By Michael Meyer
LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO — In the spring of 2006, Heath Haussamen was working for the Las Cruces Sun-News in southern New Mexico, an ambitious young reporter covering courts, crime, and local politics amid one of the quieter media markets in the country. Las Cruces is part of New Mexico's second congressional district, which is home to just over 600,000 people living in an area the size of Pennsylvania. The city gets its television from nearby El Paso, Texas rather...
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Jan 18, 2012 12:59 PM
NOLA Defender

Edgy arts and culture coverage for a cultural mecca
By Erik Shilling
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA — After scraping by in New York City for several years as a freelance journalist and screenwriter, in early 2009 Ben Mintz was offered the chance to live in New Orleans for three months to work on a script. Like many before him, he was seduced by the storied city and decided to stay permanently. But Mintz still missed some of the BIg Apple's savvy, if smart-mouthed, local news blogs like those at New York magazine, Gothamist,...
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