CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

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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 12, 2011 03:45 PM
CTNewsJunkie

Giving the good stuff to Connecticut's political insiders
By Alex Fekula
WINDSOR, CONNECTICUT — Like many married couples, Christine Stuart and Doug Hardy share a weekly ritual. Unlike most married couples, theirs involves obsessing over state politics. Stuart and Hardy spend their Thursday nights preparing the "Friday Night Fix." The "Fix" is a weekly e-mail roundup of Connecticut political news, covering everything from the state's most recent budget battle to the fate of a particular piece of...
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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...
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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...
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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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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...
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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...
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Apr 10, 2013 02:51 PM
District

A student voice from the Savannah College of Art and Design
By Meredith Qualls
SAVANNAH, GA — After beginning in 1995 as a weekly student-run print publication at the Savannah College of Art and Design, District relaunched as an online-only in 2008, becoming part of the early wave of student publications to scrap their print product. "We wanted to go digital because we felt like that was where the industry was headed, and all of our students...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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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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...
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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...
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