After yesterday’s announcement of the Chicago News Cooperative–and of the new network’s deal to share content with The New York Times–CNC editor Jim O’Shea discusses the venture on Chicago Tonight on WTTW, Chicago’s public TV station (and a CNC partner).
A couple interesting tidbits to point out: O’Shea describes one of CNC’s goals to be the cultivation of news literacy among Chicago’s citizens–a fantastic idea, we’d say; CNC’s initial membership rate will be, O’Shea says, $2 a week (“less than people pay for a cup of Starbucks, sometimes”), with a lowered student rate of $1 a week; and one of the perks of subscription/membership will be participation in social networks that the CNC plans to establish. Oh, and: the idea for the news co-op came to O’Shea, he says, quite suddenly: “I just woke up in the middle of the night, and–I’ll never know why, but–I thought, ‘What if we created a co-op?’ So I got up and got on my computer, and started researching co-ops…and here we are.”
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.