David Westphal: December 2008 archive
Well-known news sites to use Knight money to deepen reporting
December 19, 2008
Four poster children for the community online news movement plan to use new cash infusions from the Knight Foundation to strengthen reporting resources on their hometown sites.The Knight Foundation, journalism's biggest funder of digital innovation, announced it was giving $390,000 to the Voice of San Diego, the St. Louis Beacon, MinnPost and ChiTown Daily News. All are non-profits, and the first three represent some of the most ambitious efforts to marshal community news reporting solely on the Web.
By relying on major gifts and foundation money, the sites are trying to create large enough audiences to sustain themselves – through advertising and/or continued philanthropy – when the initial funding peels away. Other, mostly smaller, online news startups are trying to build businesses from the ground up by relying on advertising alone. More...
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Let's build a database of independent news sites
December 10, 2008
Ever since completing some reporting this fall on the status of community news Web sites, I’ve wanted a better sense of whether these new startups have a realistic chance of surviving and ultimately thriving. Last week I got my chance to ask an expert – my OJR colleague Robert Niles.The answer, said Niles, is yes – though I should note his response came after a long pause. Not surprisingly, he had some caveats. The main one is that startup operators need a back-up way to pay the rent and buy groceries for as long as a year after launch. It can take that long for most sites to build an audience and advertising base, Niles said, and the duration seems to be growing, as Internet users’ options grow. Even then, Niles said, operators need to know that costs have to be kept “as close to zero as possible,” and profits are going to be modest. “But yes,” he said, “it’s possible to make money.” More...
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A new Web application that (might) help pay for the news
December 8, 2008
Assume for the moment that the chemistry which made newspapers a business success for hundreds of years no longer works. Assume that billions of dollars in revenue vanish from newspapers because advertisers discover that they have better, targeted options on the Internet. (Given this week’s bankruptcy filing by the nation’s second-biggest newspaper company, Tribune Co., these assumptions shouldn’t be much of a stretch.)What, then, happens to the content that was part of that chemistry? What happens to the news and information we’ve always thought was an integral portion of keeping our democracy humming?
About four dozen people interested in this question were offered a possible answer last week at the University of Missouri: You build an entirely new kind of chemistry, a Web concoction so compelling that people are willing to pay a few bucks a month for it, and part of that money will be used to pay for news content. More...
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