CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

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Apr 2, 2012 03:42 PM
Missouri Journal

Government and political news for the Show Me State
By Tom Marcinko
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI — Corporations are people? Maybe, but Brian R. Hook is both. As owner and sole staff member of the online-only Missouri Journal, he covers Missouri politics with the Show-Me State's well-known skepticism. As a corporation, he is B. R. Hook.com, a media development and consulting firm. "I will be consulting on 'Here's how to do online media,'" Hook...
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May 9, 2012 02:13 PM
Missouri Scout

Subscription-based niche political news from a stockbroker turned political junkie
By Jason Rosenbaum
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI — Dave Drebes didn't take the most conventional path into journalism. Originally a stockbroker, the St. Louis native decided to jump into newspaper publishing in 2001. Drebes and a friend wrote several articles and opinion pieces about the flaws in the St. Louis Board of Aldermen's contentious, racially charged redistricting plans. They printed the articles on a broadsheet and sent the publication...
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Oct 12, 2011 12:02 PM
My Edmonds News

A burgeoning news source and business in the Seattle suburbs
By Caitlin Kasunich
EDMONDS, WASHINGTON — Since graduating from Seattle University in 1979 with a journalism degree, Teresa Wippel's career has veered in and out of journalism, but she hopes that she's back in the fourth estate for good now. She started out working as a community newspaper reporter for a chain of Seattle-area weeklies and a small daily paper in Port Angeles, Wash., before becoming a staff...
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Sep 16, 2011 11:16 AM
MyEugene

Community news and citizen journalism for Oregon's second city
By Leah Binkovitz
EUGENE, OREGON — Consider MyEugene your full-service hyperlocal news site in the second largest city in Oregon. If you're new to town and want to know where to buy dog food or recycle Styrofoam, just ask Jaculynn Peterson, MyEugene's founder and editor. Like many of MyEugene's readers, Peterson is not native to Eugene or the West Coast. But when she moved there in...
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Oct 31, 2011 01:52 PM
MyVeronaNJ.com

Wide-ranging hyperlocal news for a New York City suburb
By Caitlin Kasunich
VERONA, NEW JERSEY — Editor Virginia Citrano has worked at the intersection of journalism and technology for nearly three decades. In 1983, she was hired by the Wall Street Journal/Europe, an early innovator in the use of computers in the newsroom. She got her hands on her first news website in 1995, as an assistant managing editor at Crain's New York Business. From 2000 to...
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Apr 3, 2012 02:28 PM
National Institute on Money in State Politics

Tracking political donations and their influence in all fifty states
By Maura R. O'Connor
HELENA, MONTANA — Edwin Bender believes that building a database is like writing a really good story. "What fascinated me about being a journalist was getting down and taking evidence and saying 'this is what I see,'" says Bender. "When I first started building databases it was like reporting a story. Standardizing names and sorting them, finding out who worked for a bank when they...
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Jul 5, 2011 02:37 PM
NEast Philly

Neighborhood news for working-class Philadelphia
By Alex Fekula
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — While still an undergraduate journalism major at Temple University, Shannon McDonald launched the hyperlocal NEast Philly, an online only news source that provides daily coverage for the Northeast section of Philadelphia. In the site's own words, NEast Philly offers "daily news, analysis, multimedia, columns and commentary on everything that interests the proud, working-class neighborhoods of The NEast." <li...
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Mar 24, 2011 04:04 PM
Nebraska Watchdog

Think tank-funded investigations for the Cornhusker State
By Brendan Buhler
LAVISTA, NEBRASKA — Nebraska Watchdog, which launched in September 2009 with longtime newsman Joe Jordan as its sole employee, is a one-man shop focusing on investigative and statehouse news in the Cornhusker State. The site is part of a network of sites around the country that share the Watchdog name. Jordan spent twenty-nine years as a political and investigative reporter for KMTV CBS in Omaha,...
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Oct 20, 2011 11:41 AM
Neighborhood Notes

Hyperlocal news and advertising in Portland, Oregon
By Maura R. O'Connor
PORTLAND, OREGON — For hyperlocal news sites, one problem looms above all others: while demand for hyperlocal news is growing in communities around America, the small, location-specific audiences targeted by these sites often don't provide enough web traffic to support an advertising-based revenue model. Can hyperlocal sites become financially viable through other means? This is the problem Neighborhood Notes, a hyperlocal website serving...
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Mar 24, 2011 12:53 PM
Neon Tommy

A student-run news site with a national reputation
By David Downs
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — When swine flu heated up international headlines in 2009, University of Southern California's fledgling news site Neon Tommy discovered some cold truths about the official reaction to the disease. Neon Tommy staff obtained forty-four death certificates from Los Angeles county health officials, interviewed family members and doctors, and discovered authorities weren't notifying relatives that the deceased had died from a contagious...
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Mar 24, 2011 04:45 PM
Nevada News Bureau

Franklin Center-affiliated statehouse news for the Battle Born State
By Brendan Buhler
HENDERSON, NEVADA — The Nevada News Bureau is a nonprofit organization launched in October 2009 to cover state politics and statehouse news and provide its work free of charge to other outlets in the Battle Born State. It was originally formed under the auspices of Citizen Outreach, a conservative nonprofit organization run by Chuck Muth, Nevada's leading conservative anti-tax activist. Elizabeth Crum, formerly Citizen...
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Sep 26, 2011 11:27 AM
New America Media

A news wire (and much more) for America's ethnic press
By Lauren Kirchner
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — In 1969, historian Franz Schurmann and journalist Orville Schell founded Pacific News Service to provide an alternative news source about U.S. military actions abroad. Four decades later, a descendant of that project continues the mission of supplementing the American mainstream press with news it wouldn't get otherwise--but this initiative seeks to inform by crossing linguistic, rather than geographic, borders. <!-- OPEN...
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Jan 4, 2011 01:33 PM
New England Center for Investigative Reporting

Hard-hitting investigations in and around the Boston area
By Colin Fleming
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — In less than two years and with an annual budget of less than $500,000, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting has taken on the state division of banks and the Salvation Army. They've brought down a high-level public official, and had their work appear in publications across the state and in every medium imaginable. And they've...
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Mar 24, 2011 12:44 PM
New Hampshire Watchdog

Long-term investigations, libertarian style
By Joel Meares
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE — The draw of presidential politics is a strong one in New Hampshire, home of the first presidential primary. Every four years, the Granite State finds itself inundated with a new band of ambitious hand-shakers, and local political reporters find themselves dutifully shuffling from dinner halls to town halls to school halls, picking up scraps of policy platforms and hints of presidential aspirations...
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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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