CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

Results

Organizations filtered by Membership.

Oct 26, 2011 06:00 PM
Berkeleyside

News and notes from California's most quotable town
By Daniel Luzer
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA — Frances Dinkelspiel had worked as a journalist for two decades--reporting for the Syracuse Newspapers and the San Jose Mercury News--before she and two other colleagues started Berkeleyside.com. In Dinkelspiel's opinion, Berkeley is too interesting a city not to have its own hyperlocal news site. "The University of California's here, it has this really long liberal radical political tradition, it's the...
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Jan 28, 2012 01:43 PM
CHARLIE Magazine

Perfecting the local online glossy in Charleston, South Carolina
By Chris Benz
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA — "When you start something, what your role ends up being is quite different than what you imagined it to be," says Caroline Nuttall, founder of CHARLIE, a local culture magazine based in Charleston, South Carolina. Originally a publicist, Nuttall founded the website in 2009, and expanded it successfully to a niche market, profitability, and a part-time staff of...
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Jun 20, 2012 12:52 PM
Chicago Phoenix

Chicago LGBT media goes digital (and grows up)
By Ian Fullerton
CHICAGO, IL — Gay media in Chicago has struggled in its search for identity. In recent years, two of the city's most prominent LGBT publications, Gay Chicago Magazine and the Chicago Free Press, shut down after transitioning from the traditional "bar rag" format, with content centered on entertainment and sex culture, to a more issue-related news and features focus. Some observers speculated that revenue problems...
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May 18, 2011 12:59 PM
Crosscut.com

Robust nonprofit local news coverage for Seattle
By Sara Germano
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON — David Brewster couldn't have been the only Seattle citizen concerned about the potential demise of one of his local papers, but back in the mid-aughts, he was ahead of the curve. In 2006, Brewster, a thirty-five-year veteran of the local media landscape and the founder of alternative newspaper Seattle Weekly, was phasing out of his role as director of Town Hall Seattle, a...
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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...
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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...
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Feb 23, 2011 06:32 PM
Honolulu Civil Beat

A journalistic "civic square"
By Alex Fekula
HONOLULU, HAWAII — Honolulu Civil Beat is the brainchild of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and former eBay exec Randy Ching, both of whom attended high school in the Aloha State. The pair shared a common goal, in Omidyar's words, of "empowering citizens and encouraging greater civic participation through media." In keeping with this mission, they envisioned a site that considered audience participation to...
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Recently Updated: 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,"...
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Sep 20, 2011 02:23 PM
Open Media Boston

Boston news and progressive commentary
By Evan MacDonald
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — About five years ago, Jason Pramas identified what he calls a "metropolitan news vacuum" in Boston. He noticed that local news outlets were focusing more on beats like entertainment and sports than on local issues like labor strikes, social injustice, and community news. At the time, Pramas was a Ph.D candidate in public policy at the University of Massachusetts-Boston with an acute...
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Aug 16, 2011 11:54 AM
Planet Princeton

One reporter goes from freelance to Facebook to hyperlocal
By Leah Binkovitz
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY — When friends and readers complained to Princeton-based reporter Krystal Knapp that they couldn't find her stories on NJ.com, a combined web presence for papers owned by Advance Publications in New Jersey, she decided to start her own site serving the city she loves. Knapp was, and continues to be, a freelancer for The Times of Trenton, but she wanted...
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Jan 3, 2011 05:34 PM
Salon

The general interest online magazine has learned to get specific
By Sean Gandert
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — Just because Salon is the oldest general interest publication on the Internet doesn't mean that it's been standing still. Founded in 1995 as a web journalism alternative, producing articles as intelligent and well-written as its peers in print, the website's path has been bumpy, but it is still recognizably the same outlet that first appeared over fifteen years ago. The...
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Oct 27, 2011 02:56 PM
The Bay Citizen

Local civic journalism in the national spotlight
By Lauren Kirchner
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — [UPDATE: In May 2012, the Bay Citizen merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting, the oldest nonprofit investigative news organization in the United States and the parent of state-level investigative nonprofit California Watch. The merger allowed the organizations to expand their reporting resources, save money, and diversify their funding base. The merger brought together 75...
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Jan 5, 2011 08:37 PM
The Chicago News Cooperative

Newspaper-style journalism for the Chicagoland area
By Alex Fekula
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — [UPDATE: On February 20, 2012, Chicago News Cooperative editor and CEO James O'Shea announced that CNC was suspending its website, as well as its contributions to The New York Times, in order to " reassess our operations and determine if there is a more sustainable path to the future."] The Chicago News Cooperative was famously the first outside news organization...
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Oct 24, 2011 11:24 AM
The Faster Times

Creative revenue earning from an online publication/writers' collective
By Brett Norman
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...
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Jul 20, 2011 12:47 PM
The Forum

Local news for four small New Hampshire towns
By Georgia Schoonmaker
DEERFIELD, NEW HAMPSHIRE — When Denise Greig and some colleagues founded New Hampshire-based digital newspaper The Forum in 2005, web-based journalism hadn't really made its way to the rural communities that it served. "When we took on [this project], we were explaining the Internet to our funders," laughs Greig, the current chair of The Forum's board of directors. Six years later, with The Forum...
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Jun 7, 2011 11:27 AM
Twin Cities Daily Planet

Citizen-powered local news for Minneapolis and St. Paul
By Armin Rosen
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA — The Twin Cities Daily Planet focuses on a combination of neighborhood-level news and coverage of progressive, social justice-related issues in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. But it wants to be more than just a news-gathering operation. The Daily Planet is just as committed to creating journalists--or, perhaps more accurately, citizens who engage with their communities through journalism--as it is to publishing them,...
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Oct 26, 2011 05:27 PM
Village Soup

A small media chain blends print and digital local journalism
By Lauren Kirchner
ROCKLAND, MAINE — [UPDATE: On Friday March 9, 2012 Village Soup president Richard M. Anderson announced the closure of all Village Soup publications. In a story announcing that the company's properties would be sold at auction, the Bangor Daily News reported that Village Net Media, the Village Soup parent company, faced two outstanding loans from the First National Bank of Damariscotta. The initial...
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