Former Chicago Tribune reporter takes it to the street

By Geoff Rynex: Geoff Dougherty had had enough.

No more working hard to uncover a story, sometimes for a year, only to have it pulled at the last minute.

No more bosses. No more corporate interests getting in the way of solid investigative journalism.

No more Chicago Tribune.

After more than a decade in the mainstream media, Dougherty decided to call it quits at the Tribune last Novembver and start up his own news organization. The website he created took the name of a legendary Chicago paper: the Daily News.

With the Chi-Town Daily News, Dougherty saw an opportunity to do everything he thought the mainstream media was failing to do, especially in the realm of the Internet.

"That’s really where the future of the industry lies, so my thought was 'Well, rather than wait around ten years to see how that develops, why not actually be in a position to develop it?'" Dougherty said.

In the mainstream media, Dougherty saw a trend of newspapers striving to meet the demands of Wall Street at the expense of the readers and at the cost of quality. He was dismayed to see newsrooms cutting staff and stories in order to maximize profits.

"There’s an assumption embedded in that which is that people are so dumb that they’re not going to notice that it’s a worse product," he said. "But that’s clearly not true. They are noticing that it’s a worse product because they’re not buying it anymore."

So how will the Daily News revive and innovate the news? Along with a non-profit corporate model run by PublicMedia Inc., of which Dougherty is the CEO, his plan is to include hyper-local coverage reported by citizen-journalists and to spark discussion about local issues on blogs.

"To tap into that knowledge base and create a dialogue rather than a one-way flow of information I think is a great and powerful thing," Dougherty said.

But Dougherty's website takes advantage of more than just citizen journalism and news blogs. The Daily News hyper-local coverage includes podcasts about Chicago sports teams and the local music scene, RSS feeds, and plans are in the works for a cooking blog.

The key to the Daily News’ success however, aside from staying on the cutting edge of media, will be an unusual dedication to local news.

Dougherty concedes that papers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune will keep the market in national and statewide coverage, but believes that the Daily News will become the destination for in-depth local news in Chicago. Dougherty hopes soon to have a dedicated citizen journalist in every neighborhood of the city.

"It empowers people to take action to make their lives better and the government more responsive. I think this kind of reporting is the most important kind of reporting we can do."

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