CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

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Dec 8, 2010 03:40 PM
FactCheck.org

A "consumer advocate" for voters
By Justin Yang
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — In a world of 140-character tweets and political attack ads posted on YouTube, information has become easier to access and easier to release. It's also become more difficult to discern between what information is true and what is false. FactCheck.org rose to the challenge of making those calls in political discourse leading up to the 2004 election and has continued to...
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May 26, 2011 11:04 AM
FailedMessiah.com

News and investigations from within ultra-orthodox Judaism
By Armin Rosen
ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA — A few days after a team of Navy SEALS killed Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden, Shmarya Rosenberg, whose website FailedMessiah.com is perhaps the Internet's only English-language news source devoted to news from the insular world of ultra-orthodox Judaism, received a tip from one of his readers in Brooklyn. The reader had e-mailed him a scanned picture from a Yiddish-language...
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Jan 5, 2011 04:17 PM
FairWarning

Consumer-oriented investigative journalism
By Colin Fleming
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — As the Los Angeles Times newsroom braced itself for another round of buyouts in 2008, Myron Levin, an investigative reporter who had tracked corporate misconduct and lax government regulation for the paper for years, thought hard about what he wanted to do with his career. He took a few walks around the block, talked it over with some colleagues, and then finally...
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Mar 24, 2011 11:39 AM
Fayetteville Flyer

A music site that made the leap to general news
By Sam Eifling
FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS — Not long ago Todd Gill and Dustin Bartholomew were part-time musicians working in advertising. In late 2007 they began blogging about the music scene around Fayetteville, Arkansas. Gill saw it as little more than a hobby, but bands, he found, were natural self-promoters, pushing friends and family to read their coverage. Interviewing musicians, reviewing shows, and running a calendar of events led to...
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Oct 25, 2011 04:50 PM
First Arkansas News

News, musings, and pre-television radio serials
By Tyler Jones
BENTON, ARKANSAS — "Benton resident. Rogue journalist. Recovering attorney." Scary words if you're a city official caught using public property for campaigning purposes. Just two weeks after launching First Arkansas News, founder Ethan C. Nobles, whose 'about' statement above is brief but bold, broke such a story after filing a Freedom of Information Act request for the e-mail records of Arkansas...
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Jun 20, 2011 04:22 PM
FITSNews

Impolitic South Carolina political news
By Joel Meares
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — In May 2010, Will Folks, the onetime spokesman for South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, sparked a sex scandal as juicy as his former boss's trip to the Appalachian Trail (by way of Buenos Aires). That month, Folks claimed he had had an "inappropriate physical relationship" with State Representative Nikki Haley--then running in a competitive Republican primary for...
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Feb 3, 2011 05:14 PM
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

A pioneer bilingual investigative nonprofit
By Justin Yang
MIAMI, FLORIDA — When the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR) received a $100,000 grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation in September of 2010, it marked the launch of Florida's first nonprofit bilingual online investigative reporting organization. Located at the International Media Center at Florida International University, FCIR is emerging as a leader in investigative news and an innovator...
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May 30, 2012 01:58 PM
Florida Voices

A digital editorial page for the Sunshine State
By Annie Wu
TAMPA, FL — In 2008, Rosemary Goudreau was laid off as editorial page editor of the Tampa Tribune. She found work in public relations, but missed the constant immersion in issues and ideas afforded her by life in a newsroom. "On the other side of the fence, I saw the need for a place that made it easy to know what people were talking about, and for...
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Mar 24, 2011 04:00 PM
Front Porch Forum

Social networking and citizen journalism in northern Vermont
By Armin Rosen
BURLINGTON, VERMONT — Vermont-based social networking site Front Porch Forum has earned an intense regional following, partly thanks to its success as a venue for hyperlocal citizen journalism. FPF users within 120 small, geographically specific networks write daily and weekly newsletters covering the most quotidian neighborhood news, from church talent shows to snow removal reports. (Since FPF newsletters aren't archived online, we can't provide...
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Mar 24, 2011 03:38 PM
Gapers Block

Chicago's first city-wide news and culture blog
By Armin Rosen
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — Today, Gapers Block is a smartly designed Chicago blog with everything you'd expect to see on a web-specific and geographically focused publication: there's an events calendar, as well as tabs for food, arts, music, and politics. But if Gapers Block looks typical, that's only because of its own influence on the "city blog" genre. When it launched in 2003, Gapers Block...
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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...
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Nov 30, 2011 03:19 PM
GazeboNews

News and "stuff" for two affluent Chicago suburbs
By Justin Peters
LAKE BLUFF, ILLINOIS — When, in 2006, Adrienne Fawcett moved to Lake Bluff, Illinois, a leafy suburb thirty-five miles north of downtown Chicago, the local news scene was in repose. "I felt the people I was talking to in the community had a better sense of what was going on than the media covering the community," she remembers. At the time, the town of 5,722...
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Jan 3, 2011 04:31 PM
GigaOM

The site offers predictive technology coverage, and has itself been a leader in earning web revenue
By Sean Gandert
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — What started out as a personal blog that combined former Forbes and Business 2.0 reporter Om Malik's mutual interests in technology and opinionated blogging has become a full-fledged business. Despite running an editorial staff of twelve and working as a "jack of all trades" for the site's business and technology sides, Malik still personally writes on GigaOm nearly every day....
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Jan 5, 2011 01:35 PM
GlobalPost

A new news agency helping to fill the gaps in foreign reporting
By Dohini Patel
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — GlobalPost has breathed life back into the foreign news agency business. Philip Balboni and Charles Sennott, two ambitious and entrepreneurial international news journalists, founded the for-profit site in 2009. They say the site sets out to have a distinctive American voice and American style of storytelling while reporting on news from every corner of the world. GlobalPost has complete editorial...
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Jul 6, 2012 09:04 AM
Gossip Extra

Celebrity news goes local in South Florida
By Brian Patrick Eha
PALM BEACH, FL — Starting in 2004, Jose Lambiet had a near seven-year run as South Florida's go-to source for celebrity news and society gossip. He plied his trade for the Palm Beach Post in a column called "Page Two"--a deliberate homage to the New York Post's "Page Six." While other reporters skimmed the surface of breaking news, the Belgian-born Lambiet tapped his sources in the Palm...
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