New York News Websites : CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

Jun 13, 2011 04:27 PM

All Over Albany

Conversational news, events, and culture for the New York capital region

By Dylan DePice

ALBANY, NEW YORK — All Over Albany is a conversation starter. The Albany, N.Y.-based blog covers local news, events, and culture with a mission to provide its readers with fodder for a casual but informed exchange. Editors Mary Darcy and Greg Dahlmann created the site in 2008 after working together at WAMC Northeast Public Radio. At the time, they sensed that there was a...

Jun 8, 2011 12:17 PM

Ars Technica

The old guard of tech news, mixing context, the long view, and a sense of humor

By Isaac Olson

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Since its founding in 1998, Ars Technica has grown to become a trusted, go-to source for news, reviews, and information about scientific advancements, technological breakthroughs, video gaming, tech policy, gadgetry, software, hardware, and everything in between. However, Ken Fisher, the site's Massachusetts-based founder and editor-in-chief, claims Ars Technica's success as one of the oldest and largest tech-focused websites isn't...

Jun 6, 2012 01:47 PM

Big World Magazine

A travel webzine that pays its contributors

By Tom Marcinko

big.world.magazine.png NEW YORK, NY — Brooklyn-based editor and publisher Mary D'Ambrosio has taught a graduate level summer travel writing course at New York University for the past decade. A couple of years ago, she noticed something about her students' work: she liked it better than the usual travel magazine fare. "They weren't going to write 'Ten Hot Hotels in Rome,'" she says. "They were going to...

Aug 18, 2011 12:25 PM

Birthplace Magazine

News and reviews for the NYC hip hop scene

By Julia Pyper

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Birthplace Magazine was created with a mission: to highlight the best of New York hip hop. The name comes from New York's status as the musical genre's hometown. Built on a solid foundation of ideas and expertise, the website has gained momentum, but now faces a number of marketing and editorial challenges before it can continue to expand....

Dec 5, 2011 11:54 AM

Brownstoner

Covering (and riding) Brooklyn's real estate wave

By Maura R. O'Connor

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — In 2004, a number of forces inspired Jonathan Butler to launch popular Brooklyn-based website Brownstoner.com. He was working at a hedge fund in Manhattan, a job that was losing its luster for him. A self-described real estate junkie, he had just submerged himself in the city's market for months and finally purchased a brownstone house in a quickly gentrifying...

Sep 13, 2011 11:23 AM

Buffalo Rising

A grassroots print startup hits its stride online

By Paige Rentz

BUFFALO, NEW YORK — The mission of Buffalo Rising is embedded in its very name. A decade ago, as Elmwood Avenue shop owner Newell Nussbaumer began to witness a resurgence in his native city, he saw grassroots movements growing and activists who needed a voice. He sought to provide that with Buffalo Rising, first a tri-annual and later a monthly print product, and...

Dec 29, 2010 03:47 PM

Capital (New York)

Observer vets hope to "do well by being good"

By Joel Meares

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — When Capital launched in beta in June 2010, it joined an ever-swelling scrum of startups crowding the most covered, and coverable, city on Earth. How did Capital's co-founder Josh Benson, a longtime writer and editor at the New York Observer, hope to break out from the pack? You can find his answer on Capital's About page: "The premise of Capital is...

Aug 1, 2011 11:53 AM

ClearHealthCosts.com

Guiding consumers through the health care marketplace

By Maura R. O'Connor

PELHAM, NEW YORK — Jeanne Pinder had a storied career in print journalism: she was born into a newspaper family and spent twenty-three years at The New York Times. But today Pinder is venturing into new territory by founding a start-up website that aims to bring transparency and accountability to the health care marketplace. ClearHealthCosts.com was launched in beta form by Pinder in...

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...

Mar 28, 2011 08:32 PM

DNAinfo

Hyperlocal news for Manhattan

By Alex Fekula

Dna.info.png 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...

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...

Jan 3, 2011 01:35 PM

Gawker

Pioneers of Internet snark branch out toward general interest news

By Sean Gandert

NEW YORK, NEW YORK— The rise of Gawker has been well-documented. Founded by Nick Denton in 2003 as "the source for daily Manhattan media news and gossip," the site's urbane tone of bemusement in line with the old Spy, coupled with the Internet's ability to feature near-instant commentary on events, turned the site into a quick, widely imitated success. But the current version of...

Jul 27, 2011 02:48 PM

Gotham Gazette

Detailed reporting on New York City governance

By Connor Boals

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — It's no secret that many Americans are shamefully uninformed about their elected representatives, particularly at the local level. The blame for this can often go as much to local press as to citizens themselves, but thanks to Gotham Gazette, an online source for what's happening in the world of NYC government, citizens of the nation's largest metropolis will...

Mar 24, 2011 01:03 PM

Gothamist

A pioneer of the city blog format

By Armin Rosen

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — In an over-saturated New York media market, there are few news sources that can claim even a modest percentage of the city's attention. Gothamist's constantly updated coverage of offbeat, interesting, and generally important news stories in New York City lacks the ubiquity of, say, the front page of the New York Post, but it's getting there. The site's New...

May 18, 2011 03:33 PM

GothamSchools

Original reporting on the largest school system in the country

By Arvin Temkar

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — As battles rage over education reform nationwide, one tiny New York news site reports on New York City's public school system--the nation's largest--with coverage that endeavors to be "fact-based, constructive, and non-ideological." GothamSchools reports on the nitty-gritty of the city's education system, from explaining how schools shut down to analyzing mayoral policies. <li...

Jan 3, 2011 04:54 PM

indieWIRE

Independent film news for fans, filmmakers, and insiders

By Sean Gandert

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — IndieWIRE is a daily news site and online resource that covers all aspects of specialty and independent film. Founded in 1996, the site is known for its dogged coverage of film festivals around the world and its efforts to support the independent filmmaking community itself. The site's multifaceted approach to film coverage has earned it a following among fans...

Mar 11, 2011 11:11 AM

Inner City Press

A one-man show reporting on the United Nations

By Armin Rosen

Inner.City.Press.png 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...

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

innovation.trail.png 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...

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...

Jan 5, 2011 07:50 PM

LiveScience

Science news at light speed

By Brett Norman

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — LiveScience cranks out a high-volume mix of newsy and fun science curios in its efforts to chase after the fickle attentions of Internet wayfarers. Readers are voting approval with their clicks--an impressive three million-plus uniques per month--and the site, with a full-time editorial staff of five, has the relatively rare distinction of being profitable. As part of a...

Oct 6, 2011 05:15 PM

MediaStorm

Multimedia outlet meets production house

By Lauren Kirchner

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Above the cobblestone streets of Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood, the producers, engineers, and cinematographers of MediaStorm are producing some of the most arresting and moving stories online today. While side-stepping the news cycle in favor of more timeless features, their particular brand of multimedia narrative is attracting online viewers from 170 countries around the globe. It has also helped the...

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...

Sep 14, 2011 02:48 PM

Oswego County Today

An early online news source by a mayor-turned-newsman

By Paige Rentz

FULTON, NEW YORK — When Mayor Don Bullard lost his bid for re-election as chief executive of the small city of Fulton, N.Y. in 1998, he and three members of his city hall team set out in search of a way to continue working for their community. In the waning years of the last millennium, online news was still a young industry, but the former...

Jul 18, 2011 11:55 AM

paidContent

Covering the business of digital media since 2002

By Joel Meares

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — In 2008, when Guardian News & Media bought Rafat Ali's ContentNext Media, Ali wrote that the acquisition marked the "2.0 phase" of his company. It was an aptly webby phrase from the man who six years earlier founded ContentNext's flagship site, paidContent.org, with the aim of obsessively covering the economics of the then just-emerging world...

Feb 24, 2012 12:28 PM

Patch (New York)

AOL's fast-growing hyperlocal network

By Lauren Kirchner

patch.new.york.png After the first three Patch sites launched in suburban New Jersey in 2009, an expansion into New York's Westchester County and Long Island communities wasn't far behind that same year. Today, New York is home to seventy-one Patch sites and counting. In addition to Patch's usual suburban targets, the network has also grown to include individual, geographically small but highly populated neighborhoods within the boroughs...

Jan 5, 2011 06:26 PM

ProPublica

The web's best-known muckraker

By Colin Fleming

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — In the world of investigative nonprofit news organizations, ProPublica is a giant. Its staff of nineteen reporters has broken big stories on everything from the lax supervision of British Petroleum to the dangers of drilling for natural gas. Founded in 2007 by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor...

May 20, 2011 12:13 PM

Remapping Debate

An NYC-based site that seeks to throw a wrench in conventional wisdom on public policy

By Isaac Olson

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Armed with flexible hypotheses rather than fill-in-the-blank assumptions, the public policy focused e-journal Remapping Debate aims to cut through the all-too-common political smokescreen to expose the true motivations behind--and the aftereffects of--top-level decision making, political or otherwise. Be it digging into the true cost of social security or taking a well-rounded look at proposed healthcare reform, Remapping Debate, launched...

Jan 9, 2012 12:15 PM

RiverheadLocal

Local news and web advertising for Riverhead, Long Island

By Maura R. O'Connor

RIVERHEAD, NEW YORK — In 2009 Denise Civiletti tried to switch careers, but in the end she came back to journalism. She had taken a job in public relations with a local hospital after working as a publisher and editor for a decade in her hometown of Riverhead in Long Island, New York. Health care, she thought, was a growth industry that would offer better...

Jan 25, 2012 12:56 AM

Sheepshead Bites

Hyperlocal stories by the seaside in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

By Caitlin Kasunich

sheepshead.bites.png BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Nearly four years ago, the late renowned Brooklyn blogger Robert Guskind pointed out in his coverage of the 2008 Brooklyn Blogfest the pressing need for hyperlocal news sites in the borough's least-covered communities. "While some neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens and Park Slope are written about at length, others, such as Sunset Park and Sheepshead Bay - where...

Dec 31, 2010 12:24 AM

Slate

The Internet's old guard general interest publication has never slowed down

By Sean Gandert

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — "Slate's overall mission is to create really intelligent, witty, durable web journalism; [that mission] has been more or less the same since 1996," says David Plotz, the site's editor. Slate is perhaps best known as one of the first publications to prove that a high-quality editorial product could exist and thrive online, but it didn't earn that reputation...

Jan 5, 2011 06:08 PM

Streetsblog

Public transportation reporters/advocates in NYC, DC, LA, and SF

By Alex Fekula

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Transport-obsessed site Streetsblog--which focuses on everything from bike lines to subway fare hikes--was born, appropriately, in transport-obsessed New York City. Originally launched in 2006 by Aaron Naparstek, it has since branched out to cover transportation in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Streetsblog has its origins in the advocacy movement, focusing on local...

Jan 5, 2011 08:10 PM

Talking Points Memo

The pioneer of web-based political journalism

By Lauren Kirchner

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — What began as Josh Marshall's personal blog during the Florida vote recount of November 2000 has since expanded into a profitable multimedia brand of fast-paced political news coverage. The TalkingPointsMemo.com homepage now acts as a conduit to several different frequently-updated news sites and blogs, a poll tracker, and a video channel....

Jan 4, 2011 04:37 PM

The Awl

NYC-based cultural witticism from two Gawker alumni

By Alex Fekula

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — The team at New York City-based The Awl has some advice for anybody waiting on some seed funding to launch their dream startup: don't wait. The Awl launched in early 2009 when founders Choire Sicha, Alex Balk, and David Cho set out to start their own site with little-to-no financing beyond their personal savings. It wasn't much, but "there...

May 10, 2011 04:29 PM

The Batavian

Small town news and innovation in local online advertising

By Justin Yang

BATAVIA, NEW YORK — The Batavian began as an experimental project by GateHouse Media, a newspaper publisher with properties in twenty states. The company wanted to launch a community-oriented news website, and chose Batavia, N.Y. because of its proximity to the company's Fairport, N.Y. headquarters; an added bonus was that The Daily News, the local paper for Batavia and Genesee County, lacked...

Aug 9, 2011 10:58 AM

The Big Lead

From independent sports blog to corporate flagship

By Erik Shilling

the.big.lead.png NEW YORK, NEW YORK — The Big Lead first entered the consciousness of the sports media world around 2006, when then-Kansas City Star sports columnist Jason Whitlock trashed a series of colleagues in a flame-throwing interview that, for a few days at least, lit up the Internet. Less than a year after that the site received a bigger, if more unlikely,...

Mar 15, 2012 11:41 AM

The Brooklyn Ink

Student reporting on Brooklyn and beyond

By Tom Marcinko

brooklyn.ink.png NEW YORK, NEW YORK — At about 1:30am on Nov. 15, 2011, student reporters at The Brooklyn Ink received a tip that police would soon clear protestors from New York City's Zuccotti Park, the focal point of Occupy Wall Street. Rather than get their professors out of bed, the students jumped on the story, providing live coverage throughout the...

Oct 24, 2011 11:24 AM

The Faster Times

Creative revenue earning from an online publication/writers' collective

By Brett Norman

the.faster.times.png NEW YORK, NEW YORK — For a twenty-eight dollar "membership" in The Faster Times, you can get a critique of your dating profile by the publication's sex and dating expert, Meghan Pleticha. For $500, you can get a one-hour fencing lesson from Ken Mondschein, a research scholar at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, who writes about the politics...

Jul 5, 2012 03:13 PM

The Hechinger Report

Strengthening education reporting nationwide

By Hiten Samtani

the.hechinger.report.png NEW YORK, NY — In September 2011, reporter Jon Marcus wrote a story for The Washington Post which showed that, despite increased enrollment thanks to an expanded G.I. Bill, colleges weren't doing enough to support the unique needs of veterans pursuing higher education. Shortly after the story was published, colleges in the DC area added coordinators to help veterans with services. Over eight...

Jan 5, 2011 08:23 PM

The Huffington Post

The online news behemoth grows up

By Michael Meyer

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — As of the writing of this profile, the "BIG NEWS" header at the top of The Huffington Post's homepage reads: "Unemployment, Katie Holmes, Natalie Portman, Health, Lindsay Lohan, Smarter Ideas, More..." It's the mix of topics that might be floating around the head of a conscientious, politically astute fifteen year old--but given that HuffPost only recently entered the second...

Oct 24, 2011 04:57 PM

The Ithaca Independent

One man among the gorges

By Daniel Luzer

ITHACA, NEW YORK — The major daily paper of Ithaca, N.Y., the Ithaca Journal, is, like eighty-two other daily papers in America, part of the Gannett chain. Over the last decade or so, Ithaca resident Ed Sutherland, who writes business news for computer blog Cult of Mac, started to notice a change in the paper. Over time, much of the content in the...

Dec 15, 2011 11:32 AM

The Lo-Down

News for New York's Lower East Side

By David Riedel

the.lo.down.png NEW YORK, NEW YORK — When husband and wife Ed Litvak and Traven Rice started The Lo-Down, a hyperlocal news site reporting on Manhattan's Lower East Side, it wasn't with the intention of creating a business. Litvak, a television news producer, and Rice, a filmmaker, took the site live in January 2009 after two years living in the neighborhood, and thought of it...

Apr 20, 2012 06:22 PM

The Local East Village

NYU student reporting for the NYT

By Maura R. O'Connor

east.vallage.local.png NEW YORK, NEW YORK — In 2009, The New York Times made drastic changes in its approach to local news. The year saw the closure of the papers City section, but also the launch of The Local. A web-based hyperlocal reporting initiative, The Local created two separate sections of nytimes.com: one devoted to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene and...

Mar 12, 2012 01:58 PM

The New York World

Accountability journalism from recent Columbia J-School alums

By Tom Marcinko

the.new.york.world.png NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Last October 18, the day The New York World went live with a mission to expand journalism education and hold local and state governments accountable, editor Alyssa Katz posted a story by World reporter Sasha Chavkin about a private bus line in Brooklyn that ran a city bus route under a franchise agreement. Despite being open...

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,...

Conversational news, events, and culture for the New York capital region

The old guard of tech news, mixing context, the long view, and a sense of humor

A travel webzine that pays its contributors

News and reviews for the NYC hip hop scene

Covering (and riding) Brooklyn's real estate wave

A grassroots print startup hits its stride online

Observer vets hope to "do well by being good"

Guiding consumers through the health care marketplace

Gawker Media's sports news success story

Hyperlocal news for Manhattan

Tech news the AOL way

Pioneers of Internet snark branch out toward general interest news

Detailed reporting on New York City governance

A pioneer of the city blog format

Original reporting on the largest school system in the country

Independent film news for fans, filmmakers, and insiders

A one-man show reporting on the United Nations

Public radio takes to the web to cover upstate New York's transitioning economy

Environment news and investigations

Science news at light speed

Multimedia outlet meets production house

Original and aggregated national news for black America

An early online news source by a mayor-turned-newsman

Covering the business of digital media since 2002

AOL's fast-growing hyperlocal network

The web's best-known muckraker

An NYC-based site that seeks to throw a wrench in conventional wisdom on public policy

Local news and web advertising for Riverhead, Long Island

Hyperlocal stories by the seaside in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

The Internet's old guard general interest publication has never slowed down

Public transportation reporters/advocates in NYC, DC, LA, and SF

The pioneer of web-based political journalism

NYC-based cultural witticism from two Gawker alumni

Small town news and innovation in local online advertising

From independent sports blog to corporate flagship

Student reporting on Brooklyn and beyond

Creative revenue earning from an online publication/writers' collective

Strengthening education reporting nationwide

The online news behemoth grows up

One man among the gorges

News for New York's Lower East Side

NYU student reporting for the NYT

Accountability journalism from recent Columbia J-School alums

News and environmental reporting for the Catskills

CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

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