The staff of The NewStandard, a reader-supported hard news website, once tried offering content to prominent websites and bloggers who appeared to approach news media with a similar mindset, said The NewStandard’s co-founder and editor Brian Dominick.

“I won’t name specific sites,” Dominick said, “but they include many of the most popular ‘progressive’ web destinations.”

“We are trying to provide them with content that is closer to their standards of ethics and principles, and of greater journalistic accuracy and integrity than the corporate media,” Dominick wrote in a follow-up e-mail. They were offering this free of charge so these sites would not have to “rely on content generated by giant corporations. In return, we just asked for acknowledgement.”

But their efforts fell short.

Dominick noted the “lack of solidarity and mutual aid” among alternative and independent media organizations.

The nonprofit NewStandard is ad-free and also bills itself on the site as “independent and uncompromised.”

The site faces many of the usual financial challenges faced by nonprofit organizations. Because they do not charge for content, it is extremely challenging to convince a substantial portion of those visitors to regularly donate, Dominick said.

“The reason we consider this so paradoxical is that, when they do pull out their wallet, the vast majority give at well above the monthly minimum of $3,” Dominick said. “The mode and median donations are $10, and we [have] just as many members donating more than $10 a month as we have donating less than $10 a month.”

Only a small fraction of the NewStandard audience donates at all, Dominick said. Even still, Dominick said they received nearly $60,000 in monthly donations over the last year. One-time donations account for another $50,000 or so, Dominick said. The site is growing, according to Dominick, so they are poised to bring in more this year.

Because The NewStandard is a nonprofit publication, the tiny staff of four salaried employees often turns in hundred-hour weeks, Dominick said.

“One [of the things that is too difficult to convey on a website] would be how hard we and our writers work,” Dominick said. “I am fairly certain there is no one in the business who puts in more hours under more demands.”

The work is especially tough, Dominick said, because of the staff’s meticulousness.

There is no staff of researchers, so The NewStandard has two full-time editors and an unsalaried part-time editor do the fact-checking and source-vetting. The staff also cross-references most facts and anything controversial, Dominick said, before reporting on any subject.

“We even vet our freelance contributors — we accept no unsolicited submissions,” Dominick said. “Rather, there is an application process just to get into our pool of contracted writers.”

We watch FOX so you don’t have to,” write the News Hounds on their FOX News Channel watchdog website.

The News Hounds are a group of eight media activists who decided to band together after wrapping up work in 2004 as unpaid volunteer researchers for Outfoxed, a documentary about the FOX News Channel by director Robert Greenwald. The expose took an in-depth look at FOX News and the dangers of media conglomerates taking control of the public’s right to know.

Working on the documentary behind the scenes, the Hounds, according to their Manifesto, were “appalled” with their findings regarding the inconsistencies in FOX’s self-proclaimed mission of fair and balanced reporting. In light of this, they decided to “go outside of their own lives and do something,” according to Christina Bradley, one of the original eight News Hounds writers.

“What I saw on FOX News was so totally the opposite of what I’ve been taught to believe was journalism,” said Bradley, who also writes under the pseudonym Marie Therese.

“A year and a half later, I believe none of them. I don’t think any of [the mainstream media] are practicing real journalism anymore,” she said.

The website hosts blogs posted by the Hounds, forums on various issues and events and articles about other news networks — all of which users can comment on. Also featured are links to numerous media resources, blogs frequented by the News Hounds and other news sources.

When asked how they separate themselves from astroturf, Bradley replied by noting two factors: the thriving readership — 300,000 unique visitors — and the connection to the Outfoxed documentary, which Bradley said brings credibility to the site. Bradley also expressed her suspicion of any site that refuses to allow debate.

“We really, really feel the difference between us and [other sites] is we allow conservatives [to participate in discourse],” Bradley answered in response to the question of debate forums.

“If you look through our banning list, it’s tiny,” she said. “It’s a free country.