CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
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Mar 24, 2011 12:15 PM
CU-CitizenAccess
University-based reporting on poverty in central Illinois
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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... -
Sep 27, 2011 04:52 PM
Dallas South News
Making the move from blog to nonprofit news site
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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... -
May 3, 2011 12:23 PM
DavidsonNews.net
Ambitious local news site for Davidson, N.C.
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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... -
Aug 8, 2011 11:49 AM
Deadspin
Gawker Media's sports news success story
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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 24, 2011 03:22 PM
Delaware First Media News
Nonprofit news in text, audio, and video
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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... -
Mar 28, 2011 08:32 PM
DNAinfo
Hyperlocal news for Manhattan
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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... -
Jan 5, 2011 08:47 PM
DoD Buzz
A (mostly) one-man show reporting on the Pentagon
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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.... -
Jul 18, 2011 04:18 PM
E&E Publishing
High-cost subscription coverage of environment and energy policy and markets
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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... -
Mar 24, 2011 10:41 PM
ecoRI
Community engagement through environmental news (and composting)
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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... -
Mar 28, 2011 01:43 AM
Education News Colorado
The "paper of record" for Colorado education policymaking
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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... -
Oct 24, 2011 11:00 AM
Eleven Warriors
News and commentary on Ohio State football
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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... -
Sep 28, 2011 11:48 AM
Engadget
Tech news the AOL way
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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... -
Dec 13, 2011 11:28 AM
Eugene Daily News
Sports and lifestyle news for Eugene, Oregon
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EUGENE, OREGON — When publisher Kelly Asay and his business partner Jeff Tunnell, the two co-owners of the Eugene Daily News, launched the site in February 2011, they had no journalism experience. The entrepreneurs and video game developers thought their expertise with the Internet and digital media would help them avoid the difficulties that some print, radio, and television news outlets have struggled... -
Oct 31, 2011 11:33 AM
Evanston Now
A hyperlocal news site holds its own in a media-saturated Chicago suburb
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EVANSTON, ILLINOIS — As a native Evanstonian, Bill Smith remembers a time when the small suburban municipality just north of Chicago had only one paper to its name, the weekly Evanston Review. "For the latter half of the century there had been a few start-ups, but those mostly failed," he says. Today, that field has expanded, thanks in part to Smith, who logs around sixty... -
May 7, 2012 01:46 PM
Eye on Annapolis
Unadorned, up-to-the-minute news for Maryland's capital city
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ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND — Eye on Annapolis, a website covering Maryland's Chesapeake Bay and capital city of Annapolis, has forged a pragmatic model for local news coverage, carving out a niche for itself among the city's media by providing readers quick and frequent news updates. The site focuses on breaking news including traffic reports and crime, as well as a community calendar, coverage of...
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If you operate a news outlet and would like your organization to be included:
Editor's Spotlight On...
Startups covering high school sports
- Republic Tiger Sports Extensive sports coverage for a school district in Missouri
- San Fran Preps Exhaustive high school sports reporting for San Francisco
- Yadkin Valley Sports High school sports news for eighteen schools in central North Carolina
Startups covering state politics
- The Arizona Guardian Niche political news for a state everyone's watching
- Quorum Report A pioneer in niche online coverage, reporting on Texas politics since 1998
- CTNewsJunkie Giving the good stuff to Connecticut's political insiders
Startups run by married couples
Recent CJR.org posts about the future of news
The News Frontier
- The Kickstarter Chronicles Fiction, in serialized and small forms
- The Kickstarter Chronicles Beauty pageants for seniors and case law books for zombies
- The Kickstarter Chronicles A few words to the wise
- ICYMI: tweet chats Building a community 140 characters at a time
- CJR Audio: investing in local news startups Talking shop with investor/ publishers Alice Rogoff (Alaska Dispatch) and Vincent LoVoi (This Land Press)
- The Kickstarter Chronicles Printing the Internet and updating an office
- The Kickstarter Chronicles Punching up community radio in Iowa and punching out Mike Tyson in 8 bits
- The Kickstarter Chronicles Watching homicides in DC and a good dam love story in NC
