1. Investigate your community’s news and information needs before you launch.
While few news organizations are likely to have a dedicated team of researchers and scholars at their disposal, they can — and should — identify community information needs to guide the development of their site. On the simplest level, that means a reporter should know his or her beat well and do some investigating before launch.

As a journalist in Alhambra, for example, I witnessed firsthand the civic participation gaps and the barriers between ethnic and linguistic groups that our researchers had identified. The lack of civic participation was made evident in 2010 when five incumbents ran unchallenged, prompting officials to cancel the elections.

The need to cross language lines became clear when school and government officials, police officers and other community leaders all told me that they could not understand the most active press coverage of Alhambra: the Chinese-language newspapers. These newspapers target about a third of the city’s population, and yet city leaders had no idea what was being reported. Identifying basic communication needs such as these can help define the goals of a local news source and also establish a baseline that can later be used to demonstrate the site’s impact to funders or other supporters.

2. To effectively build a community contributor team, hold regular meetings, play to contributor strengths, and remember they are volunteers.
We work with community contributors — in our case that means Alhambra residents who volunteer and tend not to have professional journalism experience. Initially, I set about recruiting Alhambrans to report stories that might interest them or their neighbors. I searched for people already producing content online, talked to leaders of community organizations, and spread the word about our new site. Once we launched the site, we featured our contributors prominently with a call for others to get involved.

Monthly meetings in our office space have been crucial to the strength and expansion of our team. They are part newsroom story meeting, part community advocacy, and part social gathering (we always include a potluck dinner). After the first few meetings and the site launch, I no longer had to actively recruit contributors — at least one new candidate would contact me each month. As our reputation grows, so has our team. That doesn’t mean everyone sticks around: like any volunteer community, we have to work to keep people engaged and interested in giving their time. But enough new people come to keep up the site’s content and energy, while a regular base of contributors provide a core continuum.

3. When it comes to community contributions, a personal perspective is often crucial to a story.
Community contributors often want to report because they have an agenda they want heard. Obscuring that under a veil of objectivity just does not work on a community level. I’ve found community contributors are great for insight stories and features, sometimes providing our most creative articles, ranging from a critique of the local food rating system (“A=American, B=Better, C=Chinese”) to a call for new bike laws to a visit to the local psychic “Mrs. Lin.”

One story type that I have found community contributors can consistently produce better than outside reporters is a first-person piece incorporating a wider perspective. The stories that have received some of the highest traffic on our site and met our research metrics of increased civic engagement have tended to be of this type. Some examples include a story on the challenges of inter-generational communication for a child of immigrants, one about growing up Arab or Muslim in a mostly Asian and Latino community, and one about why a church community organizer takes issue with a city ordinance.

Finally—and this is important—keep in mind that these are not professional reporters. Everyone needs an editor, and working with community contributors often means multiple drafts and intensive fact checking. Many times it would have been easier for me to have done the story myself, so it is important to match volunteer reporters with pieces to which they can add value.

4. Crossing language and ethnic divides cannot be achieved through multilingual content alone.
Before we launched, we intended to be a site in the three languages most spoken by our readers — English, Chinese, and Spanish. We quickly discovered that we lacked the resources. And as it turns out, such a plan might not have been worth the effort.

About a quarter of Alhambra residents live in households where no adults speak fluent English. There is a clear need for foreign language media, particularly in the ethnic Chinese community. But that does not mean that the community would be interested if we created a multilingual website. From anecdotal interviewing, we found that these residents are satisfied getting their news from ethnic publications and are less likely to go to a website.

Instead, we found many other important ways to bridge the language divide. Here are four:

• Building a multilingual team, which helps expand the range of stories we can cover and the types of people we can interview
• Translating local foreign-language coverage into English
• Translating selections of our own original content into Spanish and Chinese (through two means: high-quality human translations for select articles and Google Translate function across the entire site)
• Establishing relationships with ethnic press so they print versions of our articles in their newspapers.

5. Use feedback loops as engagement and learning tools.
We use polls and surveys extensively on the site to engage residents, create a link between them and city officials, and improve our coverage. Some of our most successful surveys have ranged from where to find the best local burger or boba to whether the city should ban fireworks sales to which supermarket should come to Main Street.

We often incorporate the findings from these informal polls into stories. It enables more residents to participate on the site in a simpler way than writing a story, and in public policy issues, it offers a means for us to share community feedback with the government. For example, when the city council recently acted to limit pay-for-recycling, less than a handful of people from the public came to the meeting (like most days). But on our site more than 100 people voted to express their opinions, the vast majority against the ban. The city council then decided to grant a reprieve to one market.

We also use the polls to gauge our impact and to see on which topics residents would like more coverage. We have surveyed residents about what stories they would like to see, research questions they would like answered, and even improvements we could make to our website. Engaging the community this way enables us to better respond to their needs. After all, a community news site, like a city itself, is a work in progress.

Alhambra Source is the pilot project of a new Civic Engagement and Journalism Initiative at USC Annenberg. The project aims to link Communication research and Journalism to engage diverse, under-served Los Angeles communities. The Metamorphosis Project is the primary researcher, and Intersections South LA is another project site. This is the first in a series of articles on the topic of creating and evaluating local news websites that strive to increase civic engagement.

“I think there’s a great business model here,” said Merrill Brown, a media management and strategy consultant. “If you can get a quality product out there, local advertisers are looking for alternatives… I think there’s plenty of evidence of that.”

So far, of course, there’s little evidence that profitability will reliably follow. Even many operations that talk about being in the black do so with asterisks – the key players aren’t drawing a salary, or the site is subsidized with other lines of business, for example. Others argue nonprofits will be the winning models for robust public-service news sites. Only today, a seemingly promising startup in Seattle, Crosscut, announced it was transitioning from a for-profit site to nonprofit status.

But many people say it’s not surprising that profits are not there at this point in the innovation cycle, and point to the rapid growth of businesses trying to tease out local advertising dollars. The day of online profits is coming, they say, and for-profit news sites will be best positioned to thrive.

“We’re still at the very early stages of local advertising on the Web,” said Jonathan Weber of Missoula, Mont., who runs a string of Western state websites under the name, New West.

Weber says the potential is already clear in the disparity between the time people are spending online and the amount of local advertising going into the Web. “You’ve got 6 to 8 percent of ad dollars online, but 25 percent of people’s media time is online,” he said. “I very much believe that gap has to close.”

By the volume of people calling him and asking for advice about starting online news operations, Weber can tell there’s wide interest in running community news sites. Some of the aspirants are former newspaper reporters and editors who took buyouts or lost jobs in newsroom downsizing efforts, and are hoping to find a new journalism life on the Web.

Weber tells them two basic things: First, making a go of a community news site on the Web is no picnic. (His own New West operation remains slightly shy of the break-even point after three years of operation.) Second, the long-term outlook is bright. “I think we’re at the front edge of this,” he said.

Brown said the potential of local advertising can be seen in the number of players stepping in at the national level to aggregate community event and hyper-local information. Sites like Yelp, Zvents and Eventful show the potential demand, he said.

Although these and other national players each take a slice from local advertising, Brown said the size of the pie is plenty big. “There’s lots of money in local advertising,” he said. “Advertisers are unhappy with newspapers; TV websites remain poor; and television is overpriced.” One key to success, Brown said, will be the adroit mining of vertical advertising categories like entertainment, fashion, real estate, the arts, etc., that are “revenue-friendly.”

With so much in flux – mainstream media in severe financial trouble and Web participation rising rapidly – it’s impossible (at least for me) to get a solid grip on the scope and dynamics of news-site development on the Web. Will national news aggregators like Ourtown or outside.in grab a strong foothold in communities across the country? Will national lifestyle networks like Glam.com take a big chunk of advertising dollars? Will the wide-scope offerings of a local newspaper be a sustainable model online? Or will a multitude of niche sites – local sports, local politics, local schools, local traffic – be the winning model?

At a minimum, it would seem we’ve entered a period of intense startup fever, with expectations growing that the marketplace is ready (or almost ready) to support Web operations that combine hometown information and advertising.

Peter Krasilovsky, a digital media consultant and blogger, says the entry point for any community news startup has to be the advertiser. Too many website entrepreneurs are still thinking in terms of the newspaper model — assembling a potluck of community news and trusting that advertisers will naturally follow, he said. “That’s a kind of longing for the old ways,” he said.

Successful startups, he said, will begin with the question of what local small businesses need to be successful. One answer may well be advertising on a local news site, but there are likely to be many other answers, and Web entrepreneurs need to be prepared to provide them, even if it’s at odds with their initial mission. “You’re never going to have a successful business until you focus on the advertisers,” said Krasilovsky.

James Macpherson, who runs the Pasadena Now site, is following this strategy, aiming to serve as Internet and e-commerce consultant for Main Street merchants in Pasadena. But all advise that people who get in the game now will need to prepare for some lean (at best) early years.

Like Weber, Macpherson hasn’t yet turned a profit. And Weber gets close to the break-even point by having sideline businesses like hosting conferences on the Western state issues of growth and change, and a small indoor advertising operation.

“There’s going to be a business there,” said Krasilovsky. “But think of it this way. People are going to have to get accustomed to making $30,000 to $50,000 a year instead of $100,000 or $125,000.”

Can the nation’s network of private local foundations be rallied to the cause of nonprofit news on the Web? Even if they can, is there enough money there to make a difference in the developing world of local-news Internet startups?

The Knight Foundation, which has given $400 million in journalism grants over the last six decades, is trying to find out. And there are a few early signals that there’s at least some money to be had by journalists trying to make a local news splash on the Web.

The Voice of San Diego, the three-and-a-half-year-old community news site, recently won two grants from the San Diego Foundation – $25,000 to support the site’s own fundraising efforts and $40,000 to tell the stories of San Diego residents who overcame particular challenges to succeed in the community.

MinnPost, a Minneapolis site that celebrates its first birthday Nov. 9, recently won a $225,000 grant from the Minnesota-based Blandin Foundation to produce reporting on rural issues in Minnesota.

These are smallish examples against a backdrop of huge potential needs, as strapped mainstream media scale back reporting resources in their communities. Nevertheless, some Web startups are making the argument that local foundations ought to consider news and information as critical community needs along with traditional territory like the arts and health care.

“We’re getting a lot of attention from foundations,” Andrew Donohue, co-editor of the Voice of San Diego, told me in an interview at the Voice’s offices in San Diego. “They realize if they care about certain things in the community like science and environmental issues, there’s a real problem if there’s no way to get this information to the public. If there’s no journalist around to tell important stories, what do you do?”

With advertising dollars still scarce for Voice of San Diego and their counterparts across the country, the Knight Foundation is spending $24 million to test the theory that local foundations might take local journalism under their wings as a threatened community resource.

I talked by phone with Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer at the Knight Foundation and a digital pioneer in his own right.

“We’re trying to convince foundations that a core community need is not just health, education and welfare, but also information,” Kebbel told me.

Geoff Dougherty, editor and CEO of the ChiTown Daily News, says foundation involvement can’t happen fast enough. “I don’t think the philanthropic community has realized how rapidly local coverage has fallen apart in many urban areas, and how important that local coverage is to the health of democracy,” he said.

The foundation initiative is but one way Knight is aiming to prod innovation on meeting community information needs – premised mainly on the theory that big gaps are emerging in mainstream media’s reporting. Knight is handing out millions more to innovators eager to try out a new proposal. For example, it gave $250,000 to MinnPost and $340,000 to the ChiTown Daily News.

Last week, applications closed on a new round of Knight’s $5 million news challenge, aimed at community news startups.

I asked Kebbel how the Knight Foundation saw its role in digital transformation as it relates to news.

“We’re hoping to lead it,” he said. “We have the luxury of being the industry’s research and development arm, if the industry is smart enough to use it. And we have the luxury of testing things to see if some actually succeed.”

Note: In a future post, I plan to look at the digital innovation strategies of other major journalism funders like McCormick, Carnegie and MacArthur.

Q&A

Here’s more from my interview with Gary Kebbel:

Q. What’s your sense of how independent news sites are doing?

A. I can’t say I’ve studied the sites content-wise. What I can talk about is the fact that you’ve got individuals who have the tools to start sites, and they’re going ahead and doing it. And how long they can sustain it is sort of the big question. They get going on the fact that they can start for relatively cheap, and initially it’s sort of exciting. And then all of a sudden, six months into it, holy criminey, this is a lot of work. So the question is, in that year, have they gotten enough of an audience, have they gotten savvy enough to get advertisers? And also, I think, have they figured out who to partner with? There’s a decent enough amount of people willing to devote time and energy. Our New Voices project, our whole process is to fund startups, and see what startups work. One model is an association with a library, another is a partnership with a university. So who produces and who can make it sustainable? I think quite possibly the model that is going to have the longest staying power is the one associated with the universities.

Q. Does Knight have concerns about losing a place where the whole community comes together?

A. That’s a perfect question. I don’t think we’ve reached a place where we know the answer to that. As you know, the newspaper used to be sort of that place. As we look back on it, we probably thought it was more that place than it really was. Sorry to say. But in the new model, is that place radio or TV? And I think it might be.

Q. Is that because the economics are drifting in that direction?

A. I’d say ease of use. Much as I hate it, people don’t seem to be taking the time or effort to read newspapers the way they use to. But they’re certainly willing to listen to radio on the drive to work or TV, and watch TV in the evening. So the question is, how much of that is local news? I mention radio and TV in part because it’s the structure in place to reach a mass audience immediately, and to overcome literacy issues.

Q. What is the Knight Foundation’s role in digital transformation as it relates to news?

A. We’re hoping to lead it. We’re hoping others see it that it way. We’re doing it through funding principally through the Knight News Challenge, which funds digital innovation and experimentation. We have the luxury of being the industry’s research and development arm, if the industry is smart enough to use it. And we have the luxury of testing things and seeing if some actually succeed.

Q. Joel Kramer of MinnPost told me foundation support will only be there in the startup phase and will disappear after a short amount of time. Is that how you see it?

A. That’s fair. We look more and more at what we do as startup funding. That doesn’t mean we don’t give additional funding. But people really should not come to expect it. And they should not build their sustainability plan on the fact that when the money runs out they can go back to Knight Foundation for more.

Q. Can nonprofit news sites expect to build a member contributor base?

A. I really don’t know. I do think we’re at the stage where more and more sites are experimenting with more and more ways to charge. And I think the public is getting used to paying for some things. If the content is good enough, special enough, speaks to them enough, perhaps micro-payments will be part of the answer, perhaps memberships might be part of the answer. I don’t think any of these will be THE answer.

Q. Tell me about other Knight programs.

A. What we’re doing right now is trying to serve the information needs for communities in a democracy. And overall, we’re trying to increase the information flows in communities, and increase the quality. The News Challenge is No. 1. Another is the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Another leg is trying to get universal access in the 26 Knight communities – wi-fi or wired or whatever. Then there’s the Community Information Challenge. That’s an initiative to pair up startup innovators with local foundations. We’re trying to convince foundations that a core need is not just health, education and welfare, but also information. The business model is the $64,000 question, and nobody has the answer yet. That’s why the Knight Foundation is doing all these experiments.

David Westphal is executive in residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is affiliated with Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and the Knight Digital Media Center.

James Macpherson learned a lesson last year when kicked up a journalism fuss over plans to outsource reporting on his Pasadena website to journalists in India.

“Never get talked out of your instincts,” he told me in a phone interview. When he forgot that adage, he said, “I got in the hole really fast.”

Macpherson, who’s run the news website “Pasadena Now” for the last four years, was so shaken by the criticism he received over his outsourcing plan that he immediately hired four reporters in what he said was an attempt to prove his journalism bona fides.

Macpherson said he almost immediately began losing money. “We did a great job. But it cost $5,000 a week… There was no way I could pay for it.”

So Macpherson got rid of the reporters and went back to his outsourcing plan, which he says is working. (He told an anecdote of how his workers in India delivered him a transcript of a 20-minute press conference at CityHall, about 90 minutes after the event. The cost? $1.70 or $1.80, he said.)

About five reporters in India contribute to the site, mainly by watching webcasts or listening to audio of government meetings and then writing stories.

Macpherson’s for-profit site, rich in community events, arts and culture, is now basically a two-person operation, with lots of help from citizen volunteers – though he doesn’t believe in citizen journalism per se.

Macpherson figures there’s a great future ahead for Pasadena Now. He’s experimenting with Pasadena Hoy, a Spanish language site – he can get translation done for 59 cents per 100 words. And he figures he can make some money on Internet advertising, though not directly.

“My approach is not to sell online advertising,” he said. “It’s to sell the Internet to our clients. We’ll help them develop e-commerce at their own sites. I don’t think newspapers can be in the business of just selling online business on their sites. That’s not a proposition that will keep anyone alive.”

Q&A

Interview with James Macpherson, who runs the Pasadena Now Website in Pasadena, Calif.

Q. What’s become of your outsourcing experiment?

A. I’ve reverted to, refined, and expanded upon people who do not live in Pasadena to create content. At one time I had 4 full-time reporters and, in my opinion, we were doing a great job. But it was financially unsustainable. I did that because I was stung by the criticism about outsourcing.

Q. Can you be more specific?

A. Technology today permits a reporter to virtually experience an event, regardless of where the reporter is located geographically. This reporter can experience an event in real time, and can therefore report with great authority what’s happening. I’m developing long-distance techniques for reporters who aren’t physically present.

I primarily work with Indians. Many of them can produce very well-written AP style stories. Many of them have gone to American universities. The person I’m working with the most now spent 12 years in New York. With Skype and high-speed and new Web applications, they’ve enabled me to do amazing things. There was a press conference Monday. I get transcriptions produced very cheaply. About 90 minutes later I had a transcript of the 20-minute press conference. I think it cost me $1.70 or $1.80.

We’re now experimenting with Pasadena Hoy, a Spanish language site. Translation costs me 59 cents per 100 words. I can afford that. And the community needs it.

Q. What do you consider the heart and soul of Pasadena Now?

A. The heartbeat of what we do has turned out to be coverage of community events – events that people sometimes might consider hokey. Award dinners, benefits, that kind of thing. These are events that typically don’t get covered. We have a huge events calendar, which is the second part of what we do. And we are working slowly to returning to a provider of hard news. That’s a money-losing proposition right now, but we’ll get back to it.

Q. How will you do that?

A. We’re going to do it with the community’s help, through establishing a Twitter force and salting the community with more observers and neighborhood associations. I don’t mean citizen journalism. What we are now is not where we want to be.

Q. How do you distinguish citizen journalism from community observers?

A. I like the pro-am model where the amateur people provide the raw information, the raw data. The point is for citizens to Twitter information they have observed. We want their raw information. But we will vet their observation in the way journalists do.
There’s too much inaccuracy and naiveté in a lot of citizen journalism I’m seeing.

Q. Tell me about your metrics – site traffic, profitability and so on.

A. We get about 63,000 unique readers a month. We also have an e-mailed newsletter that goes out every Thursday and we have 19,976 subscribers – mainly an arts and entertainment e-mail. The company is a for-profit company. And someday, just like General Motors, we too might make a profit. Most Pasadena merchants seem to be antediluvian in their attitudes. The Internet is something that they just don’t comprehend. But I don’t give up easily.

Q. What’s your take on the future of community-wide, general-interest news sites such as yours? Can they be successful?

A. I hope they can be. Pasadena is a city of real contrasts. We have billionaires living here. We have 15,000 out of 20,000 students who need subsidized lunches. We all need to live here. We all need to know more about each other. We all need to draw together.
I would like to be one place everyone goes to. We don’t take editorial positions. We try to be totally open to all these groups.

Q. What’s you staff look like?

A. Just Candice (Merrill, assistant editor) and me. When I hired those four reporters we had education, government/city hall, an all-purpose general reporter, a breaking news reporter. We did a great job. But it cost $5,000 a week. I couldn’t do it. Our readership went up. It was great. But there was no way I could pay for it. Never get talked out of your instincts. I got in the hole really fast.

In practice now, with the number of technological advances so prevalent, we now have people in India who are questioning the mayor by cell phone. And a senior citizen volunteer for us is arranging for the conversation, and has a video cam to record it.

Q. What else should we know about Pasadena Now?

A. There’s such potential now. I would love to have community publications syndicated, where something that’s happening in Pasadena we could provide that information to local television and the LA Times with video, audio, transcripts and so on. We should be doing partnering with the local Pasadena paper (Pasadena Star-News). There’s real room here for information sharing.

Q. Advertising?

A. We have no sales staff. One of our best advertisers was Pasadena Ford, which shut down a month-and-a-half ago. My approach is not to sell online advertising; it’s to sell the Internet to our clients. We’ll help them develop e-commerce, their own site. I don’t think newspapers can be in the business of just selling online business on their sites. That’s not a proposition that will keep anyone alive.

David Westphal is executive in residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is affiliated with Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and the Knight Digital Media Center.

Monday: A conversation with Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation, and a wrap-up.

If the future of news is ultra-local, then ChiTown Daily News is gambling in the right direction.

The operators of the three-year-old news operation are counting on interest in Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods to bring readers to their nonprofit site, staffed almost entirely with citizen journalists.

The results so far are inconclusive. Traffic is building, but only recently passed the 25,000 mark on monthly unique visitors. (The Chicago Tribune’s monthly audience is about 150 times larger.) And the work of the citizen journalists, while often surprisingly good, is uneven.

“Performance and longevity have varied widely, and wildly,” editor and CEO Geoff Dougherty told me in an e-mail. “Some of the original crew is still with us; others drop out before writing an article.” But Dougherty added: “I have been enormously surprised by the quality of work that some of our people do – we get great stories this way.”

The site’s work has been bankrolled mainly by a two-year, $340,000 Knight Foundation grant that saluted its pioneering attempt. “Nobody has attempted to create an organized, cohesive system that enables coverage of a large city,” Knight said in announcing the grant.

Managing, directing and editing a citizen staff of 77 with a full-time staff of just four seems a Sisyphean task. Many of the neighborhood sections’ most recent stories are several months old.

“It’s been a lot more work than I envisioned, and fundraising and advertising sales have been harder than I’d thought,” said Dougherty. But reaction from many parts of the city has also been more favorable than expected. And even as ChiTown Daily News gets stronger, he said, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times get weaker because of reporting staff cuts.

Dougherty points to another bellwether.

“It’s also nice to come to work every day at an organization that is very clear about its mission, and one that is growing and (more or less) prospering. It’s a rare experience in journalism right now. We’re all a lot happier than everyone else I know in the business.”

Q & A

E-mailed responses to questions from Geoff Dougherty, editor of the ChiTown Daily News:

Q. I believe you were aiming at rounding up and training 75 or so citizen journalists. Have you gotten there yet, and what’s been their record of performance and longevity?

A. We’ve got 77, though we have not reached our goal of one in each of the city’s 77 neighborhoods. Our coverage is well-distributed in terms of the geographic and ethic breakdown of the neighborhoods, but we do have more than one person in a few places. We’ve still got eight months of funding left on the Knight grant that funded the program, so there’s little chance we won’t reach the goal.

Performance and longevity have varied widely, and wildly. Some of the original crew is still with us; others drop out before writing an article. Some of the articles take quite a bit of effort on our end before publication, while others require minor copyediting. We’ve only spiked two or three articles over the course of the last 18 months, though. Almost everything our people submit is eventually published. I have been enormously surprised by the quality of work that some of our people do — we get great stories this way.

Q. I saw on your site you were talking about 19,000 monthly visitors. What are the trend lines there and what are your most popular sections? Is the traffic what you’d projected?

A. The trend is definitely upward. We were able to double traffic over the six months that ended with the report you saw. We’re currently at 26,000 (monthly visitors). We’re looking to hit 35,000 at the end of the grant period, and 75,000 or so within the following year.

Q. What’s your news coverage strategy? It appears you’re hoping to provide something for everyone in your general news coverage, but then probably really focusing mainly on the neighborhoods. Is that accurate? Are neighborhoods your heart and soul?

A. Our goal is to provide people with nitty-gritty neighborhood coverage as well as distinctive citywide coverage. We focus on trying to cover stories and issues that are unique. For example, we’re the only news organization covering the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which spends a ton of money and is engaged in the largest public works project in American history. Ditto with the Chicago Housing Authority. At the same time, we try to really dig into what’s going on in the neighborhoods.

Q. Have you been tempted to scale back to a smaller niche that doesn’t attempt to be such a one-stop shop? Perhaps speak from a certain point of view?

A. So far this is working really well for us. People seem excited that we’re giving them info they can’t find anywhere else. We’ve identified funding to bring a couple of our beat reporters on staff, so I imagine that’ll lead to more, and more consistent, coverage.

Q. I believe you had begun a fund-raising campaign last spring. How did that go?

A. Fundraising is hard work. We brought a general manager on about six months ago to concentrate on the revenue side of things, and it’s paying off. We’ve got a number of additional grants in the pipeline, have brought in $25,000 or so in individual contributions, and are pushing that number higher every week. That said, our fundraising apparatus is very much in its infancy.

Q. What’s your staff look like?

A. There are four full-time employees — me, another editor, the GM, and our community organizer. Our freelance beat reporters all have serious experience at daily newspapers. Our transit reporter most recently covered city hall for one of the Detroit papers, and our board of education reporter is a former deputy sports editor from Jacksonville.

Q. Tell me what you can about revenue and expenses. What percent of revenue comes from advertising?

A. Advertising makes up a miniscule portion of our revenue — less than 5%. But it’s been growing rapidly since our GM started. During the fiscal year that closed at the end of June, we brought in $206,000 and spent slightly more than that.

Q. What happens when the Knight grant runs out?

A. That’ll be an interesting time. We’ve already started fundraising for the second phase of the neighborhood reporting program, and in fact have secured a $25,000 grant from the Herb Block Foundation. We’re talking with about a dozen other funders, including Knight, and expect some of those conversations will lead to grants. We expect the advertising and individual contributions will help greatly.

Q. When you think about your hopes and dreams on launching the site, how does that match up with your actual experience?

A. When I started this, it seemed like an idea that might work. It’s become clear that the idea does work, generally much better than I ever thought it could, which is amazing. The need for the kind of coverage has increased vastly over the past three years as the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times have shed reporters. So it’s intensely rewarding to be able to fill that need.

It’s been a lot more work than I envisioned, and fundraising and advertising sales have been harder than I’d thought. But we’ve got the machinery in place to make some big strides there, so I’m not particularly worried.

It’s also nice to come to work every day at an organization that is very clear about its mission, and one that is growing and (more or less) prospering. It’s a rare experience in journalism right now. We’re all a lot happier than everyone else I know in the business.

Q. Do you think replicas of the Daily News will blossom all over the country, or are you expecting more of the activity in smaller niche areas online?

A. I’m sure you’ve heard this from folks in San Diego and the Twin Cities, but we’re banding together to help the model spread to other places. I think it’s important that we succeed. While there are certainly some great sites that focus on niches like transit and urban planning, I don’t see niche sites willing to take on the kinds of longer-term projects we’ve done on topics like transit funding and police brutality.

I think there’s a big need for people to have a local news organization that’s working to hold government accountable, sue for access to records, and serve as a central gathering place for news and information.

Q. Any other thoughts about the Daily News experience?

A. I don’t think the philanthropic community has realized how rapidly local coverage has fallen apart in many urban areas, and how important that local coverage is to the health of democracy. We hope things won’t get too much worse before foundations and individual funders realize they have a critical role to play.

David Westphal is executive in residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is affiliated with Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and the Knight Digital Media Center.

Tomorrow: PasadenaNow covers its community by outsourcing its reporting.

In the spring of 2005, Morris Publications tried something new: It started a website in Bluffton, S.C., a town where it had no newspaper, in a bid for market share via the Internet.

Now GateHouse Media Inc. is trying something similar. Last May, GateHouse launched a community website in Batavia, N.Y., where the Batavia Daily News was firmly established as the local newspaper.

Howard Owens, GateHouse’s director of digital publishing, told the International Journal of Newspaper Technology that GateHouse wasn’t seeing The Batavian as a newspaper replacement.

But when I asked Owens about The Batavian’s mission, he indicated that newspapers may be vulnerable because of an inability to change quickly enough.

“One way to look at it: In the early days of television, broadcast news consisted of a guy sitting in front of a camera reading a newspaper. The vast majority of newspaper websites are still at that stage, or only slightly beyond,” he said. “Any site that is, is vulnerable to disruption.”

The hometown newspaper, the Batavia Daily News, currently has no online presence, though the newspaper has indicated it will soon. Owens said the absence of an existing news website was a factor in The Batavian’s creation – as was the fact that Batavia is only 40 miles from GateHouse’s headquarters in upstate New York.

But he said The Batavian model could work just as well in a community where a newspaper already operates a website.

Interestingly, much of The Batavian’s local content comes right out of the Batavia Daily News, and The Batavian editors give it full credit – even to the point of encouraging its readers to subscribe to the local daily.

The other local news posts are filed mostly by the two full-time news staffers The Batavian employs, one in sports, one in news.

The site is set up to accept files from citizen journalists in designated neighborhood areas, but that’s yet to fully develop. Owens estimates only about 10 percent of the site’s content is user-generated.

Owens acknowledges resistance to the idea of user-generated content, including from some unlikely quarters.

“We’ve hit some roadblocks with people used to dealing with old media who don’t quite get what we’re doing, and that has been a challenge,” he said.

“One tends to think that only old-salt print journalists don’t get new media. Some official sources don’t get it, either. That’s been one of the most surprising revelations.”

Q & A

E-mailed responses to questions by Howard Owens, Gatehouse Media director of digital publishing and head guru of The Batavian:

Q. You’re soon coming up on the half-year mark. Could you give us a progress report?

A. I’ve run lots of websites, some from scratch. Still, making traffic estimates amounts to a guess. We’re a bit ahead of our projections five months in. We’ve received lots of positive feedback. I’ve learned a ton about how to do this kind of journalism. We’ve hit some roadblocks with people used to dealing with old media who don’t quite get what we’re doing, and that has been a challenge. One tends to think that only old-salt print journalists don’t get new media. Some official sources don’t get it, either. That’s been one of the most surprising revelations.

Q. What’s the mission of The Batavian? To see if GateHouse could grab advertising share in markets where it didn’t own the paper? And if so, might we see this model replicated many times over? Or is it feasible only in places where an established paper has no website?

A. First, it was attractive to start in a town without a newspaper website, but that was not a deciding criterion. Really, the most important aspects were the town itself and the proximity to the corporate office (40 miles).

Without giving a lesson on disruptive innovation, anybody who fully understands that term will better understand this project. We could do this with equal success — maybe even more success to this point — in a town where the newspaper had a standard newspaper.com.

One way to look at it: In the early days of television, broadcast news consisted of a guy sitting in front of a camera reading a newspaper. The vast majority of newspaper websites are still at that stage, or only slightly beyond. Any site that is, is vulnerable to disruption.

Q. How many people are on staff? Is most of your content contributed from volunteers?

A. Two full-time. One covering news. One covering sports news. The sports guy spent eight years at the Batavia Daily News covering sports.

I also contribute, but mainly in a traditional blogging (is there traditional blogging?) style. I find things on the net and write about it, mostly. Maybe 10 percent of our content at this point comes from user contributions, if that.

It’s been interesting to see how people respond to “you can submit your own news.” You would think that public officials, politicians, civic leaders, volunteer-group leaders would be all over that… Maybe people, especially the higher-up in that information food chain, still haven’t come to grips with an open news network. They still expect filters and reporters reporting their news.

Q. What’s the heart and soul of The Batavian? Useful neighborhood-by-neighborhood information, or the fact that it is trying to be an all-purpose local news/sports/national/international site?

A. Heart and soul is a bit strong. We’ve found success in these areas:

– Disaster, of course. House fires get traffic, period.
– Big topics … lots of discussion around the terrible downtown shopping mall. We covered this topic heavily in the second month or so and gained many of our current regular users during that time.
– National news has its place. People do want to talk about politics right now. Sarah Palin posts were huge last month.
– And the small topics can get interest, but more hit and miss. We talk a lot about this post that Philip Anselmo (editor) did about some sidewalk chalk graffiti. It was a good post. It’s really how I define hyper-local … just those little observances of life can generate interest. We actually want to do more of this. It’s the cracks between traditional news coverage that can most disrupt traditional media.
– We, and especially I, blog about politics a lot. I’m sometimes skeptical if this helps us grow audience, but our current audience is almost always responsive. I mean, for example, finding posts or stories related to the state offices races and the congressional race.

Q. I was surprised to see the national and international posts there. What’s that about?

A. See above … people like to talk about this stuff. Frankly, I have my doubts about whether we should do this, but I’ve always believed there is value in people of a local community being able to come together even on non-local issues.

The Nation and World section is our lowest trafficked section, which is only three or four weeks old. When we’ve done national politics on the front page, we’ve had those be among our top posts, so we’re still trying to find the best path here.

I’m not looking for nation and world news to draw traffic to the site, but I do hope that it would make it more sticky. Plenty of surveys show that news addicts care about news up and down the news chain.

Q. You’ve said that you didn’t really think The Batavian would damage the longtime daily, the Batavia Daily News (which has plans for a website). And you even summarize the Daily News’ top stories and encourage your readers to subscribe. What’s that about? It sounds a bit fiendish,
if your real aspiration is to take market share.

A. Did radio destroy newspapers? Did television? Batavia/Genesee County is a big enough market to support three media outlets. The Batavian isn’t the biggest threat the Daily faces. It is all the same historical forces that challenge all newspapers.

If you look at the circulation trends, it is not the Internet that is causing the most harm to newspapers. There are larger historical forces at work that go back 80 years.

In the near term, probably even in my lifetime, newspapers should be able to survive and in better economic times, even thrive.

I honestly want people to subscribe to the Daily. I think it’s good for the community and enhances what we do.

Q. What’s ad revenue looking like on your site? Is the Batavian already self-supporting?

A. Oh, we’re a long way from self-supporting. We didn’t project selling our first ad until month 9 and we’re in month 6.

That said, without going into detail, we’re learning a lot about our early ad sales efforts and I’m rethinking what our approach needs to be. I’m not ready to discuss that in detail yet.

Q. What’s your own sense, broadly speaking, of the future of general-interest, online-only news community news sites? Is there a role there, or do you think the trend will be for scores of specialized sites (soccer, business, politics, schools, etc.) to spring up?

A. You can point to several local, suburban successes in online news (Baristanet and WestSeattleBlog come to mind). One way the Batavian is unique, as far as we know, is its rural placement.

I’m dedicated to finding the online business model for local news sites. I see all of the trends toward fragmentation and niche/specialty, but in its way, local niche, too. We simply must, must — for the sake of a free society — find a way to make local journalism pay in a digital world.

Q. What else should we know about the Batavian’s early months?

A. For people who might be tempted to pass judgment on us, it’s still early, for good or ill, it’s still early. We’re learning a lot. We’re growing. We’re optimistic, but it’s still too soon to draw a conclusion one way or another.

David Westphal is executive in residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is affiliated with Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and the Knight Digital Media Center.

Tomorrow: ChiTown Daily News bets on reader reports to capture the local online news market.
Friday: PasadenaNow covers its community by outsourcing its reporting.

Take newspapers’ classic strengths of in-depth reporting and high-quality writing. Convert to an online-only operation.

You’ve got MinnPost.

The nonprofit Minneapolis news site, written mainly by free-lancers who formerly worked for one of the big Twin Cities dailies, is the largest and one of the strongest of the startup websites focusing on local and regional news.

But like everyone else occupying the space of online-only community news, MinnPost founder and editor Joel Kramer finds the business model elusive.

The strength of the Twin Cities market – it has the country’s most literate and civically engaged population – also turns into a liability, because Minneapolis/St. Paul is jam-packed with local news outlets of every stripe.

MinnPost wasn’t even the first entry in the Twin Cities’ online-only news space. Jeremy Iggers launched the Twin Cities Daily Planet in May 2006 as a hybrid of community news written by professional and citizen journalists. Between other online players like Minnesota Independent and dozens of other news websites, there are too many ad sales people chasing too few Web advertisers.

“What really makes things difficult is the high volume of publishers,” said Kramer. “Anybody can be a publisher. There’s just a tremendous number of publishers offering advertising to a still relatively small volume of buyers.”

MinnPost has intentionally raised the bar higher by positioning itself as a high-quality content site and so its advertising rates are relatively high.

The site has a roughly $1.2 million operating budget this year and is attracting about 150,000 unique monthly visitors, said Kramer, former publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Many of MinnPost’s first-year metrics have been worse than projected: Advertising has been harder to come by and page views began lower than expected, for example. But audience growth after launch has hit the target of 5-10 percent month-to-month gains, and the site’s paying membership ($10 to $10,000 contributions) at the one-year mark will be almost exactly at the projected 1,100.

Interestingly, some of MinnPost’s strongest traffic comes from readers of staff-produced national stories, which, in the site’s original blueprint were not going to be done at all. “I can tell you after 11 months of watching what people read, we’ve learned that in fact, doing those national stories increases traffic because of the way the Web works.”

That, and the fact that some of the other best-read stories are offbeat pieces that were almost throwaways at the time, makes it complex for a staff trying to stay true to its core mission of serious, high-quality local reporting.

Reflecting the reactions of many news-site publishers, Kramer said the first year has been both enormously rewarding and exceptionally difficult.

Asked to compare the work with his old day job as Star Tribune publisher, Kramer said, “This is more stressful, actually. There’s nothing like starting from scratch in a media world that is so much more in turmoil and so hard to figure out what to do. But I’m having a lot of fun. And I’m getting great satisfaction from readers who tell us we’re the best thing in town.”

Kramer’s standing in the community helps explain the site’s robust startup. Initial funding of $850,000 came mostly from families (including his own) closely involved in the Star Tribune in the days when it was still owned by the Cowles family. The site has also received funding from the Knight Foundation ($250,000) and the Blandin Foundation ($225,000), for rural Minnesota coverage.

Like everyone else, Kramer hopes foundation support will get MinnPost over the startup hump. But he says it won’t last long. “You can’t rely on the foundation model,” he said. “Most foundations want to know what you’re going to do when they stop funding you.”

More promising are paid memberships, and here Kramer draws on the success story of Minnesota Public Radio and its 94,000 member contributors.

“We have only a little more than 1,000 now at MinnPost,” said Kramer. “We think we can get more.”

Interview with Joel Kramer, editor and founder of MinnPost

Q. Next month you’ll celebrate your first anniversary. How will you sum up for your readers the first-year story of MinnPost?

A. First I’d say we’ve been clearly embraced by a growing portion of the community. We’ve had very steady traffic growth. We’re up to more than 150,000 unique monthly visitors now, and a half a million page views. And those numbers have been going up about 5 to 10 percent a month. We also have more than 1,050 paying members, and that was an important part of our long-term sustainability model. Our plan was to hit 1,100 by the end of the first year.

Advertising is weaker than planned, because of the slow economy, but that’s an important part for us to develop because to become sustainable we need to have both membership and advertising dollars.

Q. What was your hope, what is your hope on the mix of advertising and contributed revenue?

A. When we started we said our hope was, by 2011, 70 percent advertising, 30 percent membership. Right now it’s running about 50-50, maybe a little higher on the membership side. It’s pure guesswork because it’s a new model. The key is to get to a sustainable model by 2011. There are a lot of reasons to become optimistic, but the advertising side really needs to get better.

Q. Are the economic problems you talked about mainly the general economy or the new-media economy?

A. The sense in which it’s the overall economy, we’ve had a number of advertisers say they were happy with us, getting good click-through rates, but their budgets have been cut. But in addition, there are the challenges associated with being a startup in the online world. We’re small and many advertisers don’t want to deal with small players. We’re also following the strategy of not being the cheapest player. We’re trying to create a quality environment on the site and charge higher rates, which I believe is necessary to survive.

What really makes things difficult is the high volume of publishers. Anybody can be a publisher. There’s just a tremendous number of publishers offering advertising to a still relatively small volume of buyers. Many buyers don’t really understand online yet. That combination is very difficult for advertising. Some months we’re selling $20,000 in advertising. But that’s less than we’d projected.

Q. The 150,000 monthly uniques. How does that match the goals you set at startup?

A. We started with a page-view goal of 400,000, and we started below 300,000. But the growth rate is what we expected, which is a doubling in the first year.

Q. What’s been your biggest surprise?

A. On the Web you get instant feedback about who reads what, which is something as an old newspaper editor I did not have. And the process of seeing how people use your site and what they read is constantly surprising. One of the challenges is that we started our site with a public purpose which is to do high-quality journalism which we believe is in decline. But when you look at the traffic, often you find it’s the most casual or offbeat story that gets the most traffic. And also, you’ll get a lot more traffic when you get a story of national interest vs. just a local story. So there’s a constant tension in an enterprise like ours, how to do what we set out to do out to do, but also to grow traffic when the things that attract the most traffic are not always the most important story.

Q. You do run quite a few national stories. It surprised me a bit. That’s a shift, that you’re doing more national than you expected?

A. Before we started I thought we’d do everything local. My reasoning for that is that when you’re on the Web, you’re just one click away from national sites that have a lot of resources so why duplicate? But even before we started we did some focus groups with interested readers, and in those focus groups people said to us, ‘If you want a site that we’re going to identify with, as being the site for Minnesotans to come to who are serious about news, don’t make it provincial. We have broad interests.’ So even before we launched we heard quite a bit of that. So even before the launch we decided to do some national work. I can tell you after 11 months of watching what people read, we’ve learned that in fact, doing those national stories increases traffic because of the way the Web works.

We’ve had some very good, solid local stories that have gotten 5,000 readers or more. But others not so much. Our goal is to do serious, high-quality journalism for people who care about Minnesota. That’s our public purpose. But we’re dealing in a medium where you often get traffic from strange things.

Q. Can a general-interest community news site compete with the multiplicity of niche sites springing up?

A. It’s hard to predict the future. I think there is a place for both in the firmament. The way people navigate the Web changes the paradigm that people are going to just a few sites for news. I think it’s very possible, and likely, that both kinds of sites can flourish. We want to be the site that many people who care about Minnesota come to.

We’re not trying to do everything. We’re broad-based but we also have a kind of magazine sensibility that we’ll write about what interests us. In addition to politics, which has been our strongest area, and media, which is our second-strongest, we also do sports, sciences, health, arts. We don’t try to cover anything near the range of topics the Metro newspaper uses.

Q. Talk about your staff.

A. We have two full-time writers, Eric Black and David Brauer, and then a few more writers that write frequently for us. And then a stable of several dozen free-lancers who work less frequently. We have five editors plus a technology person/director of operations. It’s a big infrastructure. We’re not bringing in enough money to cover our costs.

Q. Are you interested in the micro-neighborhood-citizen journalism model?

A. No. I think there’s a place for that. I’m interested in people who are experimenting with that. But I don’t think anyone can do everything. We really have as our mission to do professional journalism. We are interested in ways new technology could enable us to do professional journalism in a more interactive way with the audience. I’m interested in techniques that can expand participation with our work. But not the amateur model. It’s a different game and requires a different approach. It’s not our field.

Q. Are you expecting replicas of MinnPost all over the country?

A. We are in conversations with the ones who have started, the nonprofit sites. And maybe helping others get started. I do think this will happen. Our sites are all somewhat different, in content and funding.

Q. Where are you getting your funding?

A. We got $250,000 from the Knight Foundation. And then a $225,000 grant from the Blandin Foundation. They specialize in rural Minnesota. And our grant was to expand our reach and our coverage outside the metro area. So our goal is to be a statewide publication. Historically, newspapers did that but they stopped because the circulation was too expensive. Building geographical communities on the Web is very difficult. The business model tends to work against it, because the real traffic comes from reaching out to a broader base. We’re spending about $100,000 a month. That puts us in the high range of sites like this. We also are bringing in members and advertising faster.

Q. Are you planning one-year course corrections?

A. One of the interesting things is how fast you change. We’ve changed many, many times We had no full-time writers when we started. We now have two. And they’re our No. 1 and No. 2 traffic-getters. When we started we published mainly once a day. (We have one ad director and one commission ad seller.) Now there’s stuff going up all day long. We still don’t publish a lot nights and weekends. And the reason is cost. But we have found publishing all day works better.

Q. Your career is backwards from a traditional one. You oversaw this huge news operation in Minneapolis as publisher of the Star Tribune; now you’ve got this startup that is not making money yet. What’s that like for you personally?

A. This is more stressful, actually. There’s nothing like starting from scratch in a media world that is so much more in turmoil and so hard to figure out what to do. But I’m having a lot of fun. And I’m getting great satisfaction from readers who tell us we’re the best thing in town. They’re not enough of them yet. And the reporters who tell me they’re doing the best work of their lives.

Q. Talk about your journalism.

A. There are a number of really good reporters experimenting with sustaining their commitment to high-quality journalism and still operate in this news medium. The two people to watch at MinnPost are Eric Black and David Brauer. Eric in particular, he used to be at the Star Tribune, he’s very open with the reader. He’s a good prototype of the change going on. His stuff is more of a conversation with reader. He’ll write in parts as opposed to one long story. It’s a challenge finding reporters like that.

Q. How do you think the digital revolution will shake out with respect to mainstream media?

A. At the national and international level, some good will come out of this, because of the way the Web favors national and international coverage. I’m more worried about the local and regional levels. And it’s why I think there’s going to be need for non-profit journalism at the local level. The dynamic of the Web is not very favorable to spending money at the local level.

Q. Is there philanthropy enough to go around for this?

A. Foundations alone, definitely not. You can’t rely on the foundation model. Most foundations want to know what you’re going to do when they stop funding you. I do think there’s a lot of individual money around – a lot less than a couple of months ago. We have 94,000 contributors to Minnesota Public Radio. We have only a little more than 1,000 now at MinnPost. We think we can get more.

David Westphal is executive in residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is affiliated with Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and the Knight Digital Media Center.

Tomorrow: We talk with Howard Owens about GateHouse Media, Inc.’s online-only community news site in Batavia, N.Y.
Thursday: ChiTown Daily News bets on reader reports to capture the local online news market.
Friday: PasadenaNow covers its community by outsourcing its reporting.

SAN DIEGO – The 10 reporters, editors and photographers working out of a small office on a former military base here represent some of journalism’s brightest hopes.

The nearly four-year-old website they work for, the nonprofit Voice of San Diego, is doing some of the best and liveliest muckraking reporting of any Web-only news staff in the country.

Mostly former newspaper reporters, the Voice’s staffers have rattled off a string of exposes that has grabbed the attention of the city’s power structure. They think their site will prove not only that local journalism can thrive on the Web, but that their enterprise can grow many times over as mainstream media continue to decline.

There’s just one thing missing: a business model. Even with a small operation like this – 10 people reporting about the nation’s eighth-largest city – it’s not clear whether sustained funding will materialize.

Buzz Woolley, the San Diego businessman who created and still bankrolls a large chunk of the operation, says advertising is unlikely to fund more than 10 percent of Voice of San Diego. The rest of the site’s budget, about $780,000 this year, will have to come from small contributions and philanthropy, he said.

“How exactly is that going to happen?” he said in a phone interview. “I don’t know. But nonprofit journalism is starting to strike a note with people. They know something like this is going to have to be done.”

The Voice of San Diego is at the leading edge of a growth industry – online-only news sites that in some places are establishing themselves as players in their hometown media landscapes.

They come in all sizes and shapes, from mom-and-pop shops focused on a single community concern, to seven-figure operations that reflect wide civic interests. While nearly all of the sites struggle to find advertising dollars, the number of communities served by online-only news staffs continues to grow.

Most are nonprofits, though some are testing the waters of commercial viability, convinced that opportunities will widen as mainstream media continue to struggle.

Some, like the $1.2 million-a-year MinnPost and the brand new St. Louis Beacon, cover the meat and potatoes of traditional community news – city hall, politics, education, the arts, crime, mass transit – mostly using professional journalists as reporters.

Others, like the ChiTown Daily News, are deputizing “citizen journalists” to write about their neighborhoods – territory most newspapers have been forced to scale back in recent years, or never really achieved. The Daily News has carved up Chicago into 77 neighborhoods and is recruiting a citizen journalist for each.

One newspaper company, GateHouse Media Inc., is trying the citizen approach by starting a website, the Batavian, in a community where someone else owns the local paper – a possible sign that the newspaper competition that used to exist in most communities could return, in a new Web form.

Jan Schaffer, executive director of the new-media center J-Lab at American University in Washington, D.C., says many of the new sites are taking an entirely different approach by focusing on a single topic, and by reporting as participants in that topic as opposed to journalism’s traditional outside-in approach.

“People may not necessarily be looking online for cover-the-waterfront sites, or geographic or regional sites,” said Schaffer in an e-mail. “Instead they want ‘picky’ sites that offer them stuff that they like knowing because it’s useful and interesting and doesn’t waste their time with must-cover stories.”

Some of the sites winning Knight Foundation grants this year as part of its New Voices project attest to the specialty trend: Digital Journalism in the Nation’s Birthplace of Aviation; Green Jobs Philly; Immigration: The View from Here; Voices for Veterans; Family Life Behind Bars.

But one thing unites nearly all of these experiments. Profit or nonprofit, they’re struggling to make ends meet.

“Some day, just like General Motors, we too might make a profit,” said James Macpherson, who with one other paid staffer operates the Pasadena Now site. Macpherson stirred up controversy a year ago by disclosing plans to outsource some of his community reporting to India – a plan he is now carrying out. (A recent transcript of a City Hall press conference cost him $1.70, he says.)

He complains that merchants in Pasadena are “antediluvian” when it comes to the Internet. But Macpherson says, “I don’t give up easily,” and he’s experimenting with a Spanish language companion site.

Sites like Voice of San Diego and Pasadena Now are fascinating because they represent first-generation experiments to find a local-news alternative to the newspaper and television powerhouses that dominated their hometowns for decades.

Often, as in the case of the St. Louis Beacon and its roster of Post-Dispatch alums, staffs are made up largely of experienced journalists who took buyouts from the big local daily. Some of the reporters and editors who recently left the Palm Beach Post, for example, are now talking about setting up a community news site.

Might someday we look back at this moment and see in sites like Voice of San Diego and the New Haven (Conn.) Independent the birthplace of a new kind of journalism that would find its Web financial moorings? Or will the Internet dynamic of fragmentation work against the newspaper model of presenting a grab-bag compendium of community interests?

Some of the Web editors I spoke with say part of their optimism comes from an assumption that legacy media have only begun to fade. It’s certainly not hard these days to find new-media thinkers predicting their outright collapse.

Karin Winner, editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune, says those prognosticators are way off. At her office a few miles inland from the Voice, she told me she has every expectation that the combination of a newspaper’s printed sheet and website will continue to be an unbeatable and superior source of community news. “It has the brand and the resources to maintain that position,” she said.

The new websites certainly are starting from far back. MinnPost, with one of the more robust audiences at 150,000 monthly unique visitors, still has less than 10 percent of the traffic of the Twin Cities’ dominant daily, startribune.com.

But the playing field is changing quickly. Nearly all of the nation’s metropolitan dailies are in the thick of major staff cutbacks caused by advertising declines.

Winner’s own paper has been forced to reduce its news-gathering force because of the Internet-induced loss of advertising, and she’s part of a management team that’s supervising the likely sale of the newspaper by the owning Copley family.

Others say that even if newspapers and local TV outlets maintain strong news-gathering positions, their staffs will be so depleted that windows of opportunity will only grow for new-media players.

These forces are prompting discussion at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, where I work, about arming journalism students not just with traditional and new media skills, but also with entrepreneurial proficiency that will help them in a world populated with new-media startups.
Still, where will the money come from?

Woolley, the Voice of San Diego founder, makes a case for foundation funding, which he expects to provide 80 percent of his site’s future revenue. One hopeful sign: The local San Diego Foundation has approved two grants for the site – one to assist with fundraising and the other to sponsor reporting on citizens who overcame challenges in contributing to the community.

The Knight Foundation, journalism’s dominant philanthropic funder, has multiple irons in the digital revolution, and one of them is to encourage community foundations to support Internet news startups. “We’re trying to convince foundations that a core need is not just health, education and welfare, but also information,” said Gary Kebbel, journalism program director at the Knight Foundation.

But like Schaffer, Kebbel is skeptical of prospects for websites that essentially try to replicate the community-wide coverage of newspapers on the Internet. Television and radio, he says, are more likely to fill the role of community unifiers.

In any case, Knight Foundation is generally not going to provide more than startup funding.

Knight’s main role, Kebbel said, is to “fund startups, and see what startups work.” The beneficiaries, he added, “should not build their sustainability plan on the fact that when the money runs out they can go back to Knight Foundation for more.”

Joel Kramer, whose MinnPost site celebrates its first birthday in November, got a $250,000 Knight Grant, and he accepts that sustained foundation funding will be hard to come by.

He’s more hopeful about the individual-contributor model, noting that MinnPost will meet its first-year target of having 1,100 member-contributors. The example of Minnesota Public Radio, with 94,000 members, suggests there’s vast room for improvement. “We think we can get more,” he said.

Meanwhile, everyone is hoping that, someday, local Web advertising comes around. But these early adopters don’t think it will be anytime soon.

Kramer said there are both supply and demand problems now. Advertisers are in short supply, and those that do business are on the Web often don’t want to deal with small operations like local news websites, he said.

“What really makes things difficult is the high volume of publishers,” he said. “There’s just a tremendous number of publishers offering advertising to a still relatively small volume of buyers.”

While MinnPost some months reaches $20,000 in ad sales, that’s only 20 percent of overall spending and less than projected at startup.

James Macpherson, who operates the Pasadena Now website, says his plan is to become an all-purpose e-commerce consultant to advertisers as a way to subsidize his website.

“I don’t think news sites can be in the business of just selling online business,” he said. “That’s not a proposition that will keep anyone alive.”

Howard Owens, a new-media veteran, says it’s way too early to assess the future of his startup, The Batavian, or of the general world of online-only news.

Acknowledging the trends toward Internet niche sites and fragmentation, he expressed optimism about finding the business model for local news sites.

“We simply must, must – for the sake of a free society – find a way to make local journalism pay in a digital world.”

Q & A

More on the Voice of San Diego from my interview with co-executive editors Scott Lewis and Andrew Donohue:

Andrew Donohue (left) and Scott Lewis, co-executive editors of the Voice of San Diego

Q: Give us a bit of history of Voice of San Diego.

Andrew: Neil Morgan was almost the grandpa of journalism in San Diego. He worked as a reporter in town and was the editor in chief of the Evening Tribune a long time ago. Later he became Metro columnist when the papers combined. He knows absolutely everybody in this area. One day in the fall of 2004 he showed up at work and got a pink slip. He was such a beloved guy in the community. He got together with Buzz Woolley, who had been interested in journalism for a long time and was unhappy with what the community was getting from the Union-Tribune. I think Buzz had always been interested in starting a newspaper, but it was way too expensive. Buzz said to Neil, I don’t want to lose your voice in this community. They came up with the idea of an online nonprofit, which right now makes a lot of sense but in the fall of 2004 it was pretty revolutionary.

From there we just sort of established ourselves. The site launched in February 2005.

Scott: We took a more investigative look. We came up with the basic philosophy that we wouldn’t cover anything unless we could cover it better than anyone else, or no one else was covering it. So our stories need a lot of context and depth and an investigative focus.

Andrew: The key was there was a gap identified by our founders when we started. And that gap has grown farther and faster than anyone imagined since then. We’ve been fortunate to fill it.

Q: Would you talk a little bit about metrics? Audience, funding, staffing and so on.

Scott: Last month, 61,000 unique visitors. Time on site averaged more than 8 minutes. The traffic is all from San Diego.

Andrew: Six beat reporters, plus two editors. Scott does the column and blog. I do the investigative projects. We have a multimedia photography specialist. And then we have Web content producer, plus a development director that does the fundraising. So that’s 11 full-time. Our annual budget is $780,000 for this year. We’ll come in a little under that.

Revenue comes from four major sources. We have major contributions. Buzz continues to support us, this year supplying about a third of our budget. We also have a couple of others like Irwin Jacobs who give more than $15,000. Then we have 715 individual donations from different people. These are people who give between $35 and $5,000, and that’s growing rapidly. Maybe $70,000 or $80,000 this year from that. Then grants and foundations, which have been growing this year. And then we got a grant from the San Diego Foundation for the first time this year, to spur our fundraising , and a year-long campaign to talk about community heroes who have overcome challenges. Then advertising and sponsorships, which are coming on. We do Google Ads, but they’re bringing in less than $10,000 a year. We’ll never sell products on our site. But advertisers will use our site to send messages.

Scott: It’s only in the last year that we’ve ramped up foundation grant money. And that’s our top priority going forward.

Andrew: We’re getting a lot of attention from these foundations. They realize if they care about certain things in the community like science and environmental issues, if they care about these traditional philanthropic efforts, there needs to be an information delivery system. If the newspaper falls apart, or no journalist around to tell important stories, the effort to tell your story is a problem. That’s why I’m excited about what Knight is doing to educate foundations. The newspaper industry has been cluster-bombed; something’s got to replace it.

Philanthropists don’t want to mess with the editorial product. We’ve had no problems with donors wanting to change our message. But they do want to be recognized for having brought about some specific additional coverage. So over time we will have “sponsored by”ads.

Scott: At first we thought we could pitch people on the high-minded idea of saving journalism. But then we realized you actually had to touch these people emotionally – what is it this person cares about? Well, they care about science, so talking about science is where you have to be.

Individual memberships will be a big deal, but that will be slow. The big growth area is foundations and grants.

Andrew: We’ve found people are quite invested in us – more so than you get invested in newspapers. We were nervous about people trying to interfere at first. But that wasn’t a problem.

Q: What are the content areas you focus on?

Andrew: Our big deal is quality of life issues in San Diego – the things that really drive change here, that have big impact. We do politics, education, environment, public safety, housing and jobs, and science and technology. That’s our core.

Scott: We’re really well known for our government and City Hall coverage. Stories we’ve broken this year have changed the city more than anything else. But we also have been strong on housing – without the boosterism in the way it’s covered elsewhere.

Andrew: We try to see an issue all the way through. We don’t hit on something and leave. We keep hammering to see how it plays out.

Scott: We used to get happy and excited when we scooped the Union-Tribune. But they’ve lost so many of their strong reporters and editors, now it’s just sad to see what’s happening. I think they’re particularly bad at a particularly bad time.

Q: Do you have a gut feeling of how this plays out?

Andy: The newspaper franchise is going to have to define itself. What are we going to be in the future? They’re still trying to be everything for everybody. And, yes, we’re going to see more niche publications. We’re not going to do reviews here of concerts downtown or other entertainment.

Scott: One thing we’re noticing is a lot of people think there’s a technological answer to what’s happening in journalism. I don’t think what we’re facing is a technological problem. We contribute greatly to this community without every having a fulltime IT person. We’re going to see more aggregators. But the people who put money into content are going to stand out, and that’s why we’re excited about this alliance for other nonprofits.

Q: Does Voice of San Diego have the potential to grow substantially or will you continue to be small?

Scott: I think we could have a budget as high as $10 million some day. A lot of newspapers are making that much from the websites these days. I could see us having 40 reporters. But we’ll grow slowly.

Q: Have you thought about citizen journalism?

Andy: We’re not big believers in citizen journalism. We don’t see them as being the answer. We do use them in a different level of engagement. We’re always soliciting their ideas. We tap into our everyday readers more than most publications would.

One of the early mistakes we almost made, we almost made as our first hire a very expensive Web developer, almost because we were intimidated by the technology. We stopped at the last second and realized we could hire two reporters. And we thought let’s just have a simple site and hire these two reporters. And we were lucky; Scott learned how to do the technology. We learned this stuff isn’t that tough. Scott’s our IT department.

Q: Aren’t these killer jobs?

Andrew: You should see how young we looked like three years ago.

Scott: It’s long hours, but everybody likes being here at the start of this. We just have a job opening now and we have 80-90 applications.

Q: What do you tell journalism students about the future?

Andrew: I just spoke to high school students recently, and I said we are very optimistic. We feel there will be plenty of opportunities. There’s a massive upheaval now. But we feel we’re fairly confident there will be jobs.

Scott: I take a little different tack. I might be a little worried. Maybe there will be more opportunities at places like ours. But I am a little worried about what’s happening to our industry. Only in our dreams would we have 40 reporters.

Q: Many people are thinking that the way to go on the Web today is to have passionate voices who are invested in this or that cause or activity and to write from a point of view. Are you tempted by that?

Andrew: We push our reporters to report so well that they write with authority. There’s never writing with an agenda, but we do feel writing with authority is the way to go.

A sampling of community news websites

Here’s a look at some of the players in the community-news Web world:

Voice of San Diego
Launched: 2005
Target audience: San Diego County.
Content: All local. City hall, development, real estate, education, science, environment.
Staff: 6 reporters, 2 editors, 1 photographer, 1 Web content producer, 1 development director.
Key leaders: Buzz Woolley, key funder and board member; Scott Lewis and Andrew Donohue, co-executive editors.
Status: Non-profit. Budget of about $780,000.
Metrics: 61,000 monthly unique visitors. Average time on site: 8-plus minutes.

MinnPost
Launched: 2007
Target audience: Minneapolis/St. Paul and the state of Minnesota
Key content areas: Politics, media, sports, sciences, health, arts. Focus mainly is on local and state but site frequently covers national politics.
Staff: 2 reporters, five editors, 1 IT/operations manager, several dozen free-lancers.
Key leaders: Joel Kramer, editor and founder.
Status: Non-profit. Budget of about $1.2 million.
Metrics: 150,000 unique monthly visitors. Time on site not stated publicly because of problems with counting methodology.

ChiTown Daily News
Launched: 2007
Target audience: Chicago metro area
Content: Individual coverage of 77 Chicago neighborhoods plus unique citywide coverage.
Staff: 2 editors, general manager, community organizer.
Key leaders: Geoff Dougherty, editor.
Status: Nonprofit. Budget of $206,000.
Metrics: 26,000 monthly unique visitors. Average time on site: One minute 35 seconds.

The Batavian (Batavia, N.Y.)
Launched: 2008
Target audience: Batavia, N.Y.
Content: All local. Neighborhood, city hall, sports.
Staff: 1 news editor, 1 sports editor.
Key leaders: Howard Owens, GateHouse Media Inc.
Status: For profit.
Metrics: 10,000-plus unique monthly visitors (Oct. 1-21). No report on average time on site.

Pasadena Now (Pasadena, Calif.)
Launched: 2005
Target audience: Pasadena residents.
Content: Civic events, entertainment calendar, awards.
Staff: 2 editors.
Key leaders: James Macpherson, publisher.
Status: For profit
Metrics: 63,000 unique monthly visitors. Average time on site: 12 minutes.

St. Louis Beacon (St. Louis)
Launched: 2008
Target audience: St. Louis region.
Content: Politics and public issues (including the economy education, race, environment), science, health, arts.
Staff: 4 full-time editors, 3 part-time, 2 full-time reporters, 1 part-time, 1 public insight journalism analyst, presentation editor, general manager, office manager, several dozen free-lancers.
Key leaders: Editor Margaret Wolf Freivogel, associate editor Robert Duffy, board chairman Richard Weil.
Status: Nonprofit. Budget of about $900,000 per year.
Metrics: Site too recently launched to provide meaningful data.

Pegasus News
Launched: 2006
Target audience: Dallas/Fort Worth metro area
Content: Neighborhood news, arts/entertainment, civic events, schools, searchable databases.
Staff: Site lists 12 news staffers; 5 on the business side and two IT staff.
Key leaders: Mike Orren, founder and president.
Status: For profit; sold to Fisher Communications in 2007.
Metrics: 392,000 unique monthly visitors.

New Haven Independent
Launched: September 2005
Target audience: People who live, work or play in New Haven, Conn.
Key content areas: hard news and reader debates; multimedia; politics, government, criminal justice, housing, neighborhoods, health care, schools.
Staff: 3 full-time editorial employees, 1 part-time local staffer, 1 state capital reporter on contract, part-time Webmaster, citizen contributors.
Key leaders: Paul Bass, editor and publisher; Melissa Bailey, managing editor.
Status: Non-profit. Budget of about $200,000 a year
Metrics: 45,000 unique visitors on average month.

NewcastleNOW.org
Launched: October 2007
Target audience: Town of New Castle, NY, containing the hamlets of Chappaqua and Millwood, and portions of Mt. Pleasant, Ossining and Mt. Kisco. Population: approximately 18,000.
Content: Local: town hall, real estate development and transactions, schools, police blotter, high school and recreation league sports, gardening, performing arts, science, environment; letters, op-ed.
Staff: Editor, managing editor (and photographer), publisher (and Webmaster), advertising executive. Plus two freelancers and 100 citizen journalists.
Key leaders: Founders Ann Marie Fallon (publisher and Webmaster); Susie Pender (editor); Christine Yeres (managing editor and photographer).
Status: Nonprofit, first-year budget of $17,000.
Metrics: 5,500 monthly unique visitors. Average time on site: 4.3 minutes.

The Forum (New Hampshire)
Launched: 2005
Target audience: Candia, Deerfield, Northwood and Nottingham, N.H. (pop. 16,000).
Content: All local with minor exceptions for national and regional political coverage. Town boards, arts, outdoors, youth sports, recreation, library news.
Staff: All volunteer. Ad manager works on commission. Occasional stipend for editor positions. 300 volunteer writers, photographers, editors, reporters.
Key leaders: Maureen Mann, founding member and managing editor for three years, former board chair; Deb Boisvert, founding member and current board chair.
Status: Nonprofit. Budget of about $20,000.
Metrics: 2,800 monthly unique visitors. Average time on site: 4 minutes.

Ann Arbor Chronicle (Michigan)
Launched: September 2008.
Target audience: Ann Arbor area.
Content: All local content. Daily postings of local news, features, public meeting coverage, opinion pieces, cartoons.
Staff: Two full-time, plus more than a dozen “correspondents” contributing to a feature modeled after Twitter.
Key leaders: Mary Morgan, David Askins.
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model.
Metrics: 4,000 unique visitors for the first month in operation.

YubaNet.Com (Nevada City, Calif.)
Launched: September 1999.
Target audience: Sierra Nevada, Calif.
Content: Regional news, features, public meeting coverage, opinion pieces, world news, national and environment, cartoons. Wildland fire information service.
Staff: Two full-time, plus free-lance contributors.
Key leader: Susan Levitz, founder and publisher.
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model.
Metrics: 70,000+ unique monthly visitors. Average time on site: 2.5 minutes.

Texas Watchdog (Houston)
Launched: August 2008
Target audience: Texas
Content: Local and state government in Houston and around Texas, but so far we’ve been mostly focused on Houston and Dallas. We want to branch out, though.
Staff: Three reporter-editors in Houston, one reporter in Dallas, and an intern in Houston.
Key leaders: Editor Trent Seibert.
Status: Nonprofit; we’re trying to get our paperwork through the IRS right now.
Metrics: We just launched three months ago, so the numbers are all over the place. There’s a lot of difference between the day we launched and the day we got one story linked-to by Drudge Report.

The Dagger Press (Baltimore)
Launched: September 2007.
Target audience: Suburban Baltimore, with most coverage based in Harford County.
Content: Local news and opinion, politics, education, local sports, entertainment.
Staff: No full-time staff, 2 editors, 6 outstanding contributors, and, of course, our readers, who participate daily.
Key leaders: Brian Goodman, founder, and Steve James, technical director.
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model.
Metrics: 5,500-plus unique monthly visitors. Average time on site: 5.46 minutes.

blogdowntown (Los Angeles)
Launched: January, 2005
Target Audience: Downtown Los Angeles
Content: News and information about what’s going on in downtown from restaurant openings to City Hall.
Staff: One editor, plus eight writers and contributors.
Key Leaders: Eric Richardson
Status: Non-profit as of September, 2008. About to start first fundraising campaign.
Metrics: Roughly 20,000 uniques monthly.

SunValleyOnline (Idaho)
Launched: October 2004.
Target audience: Sun Valley area and 2nd homeowners & visitors to the resort community.
Content: All local content. Daily postings of local news, features, public meeting coverage, events calendar, photos, blogs.
Staff: Three full-time, plus dozens of citizen contributors to news, blogs, photos, events and more.
Key leaders: Dave Chase.
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model.
Metrics: 25,000 unique visitors in a typical month (has been as high as 100,000 during breaking news – fire, Larry Craig incident, Arnold Schwarzenegger breaking his leg)

West Seattle Blog (Washington state)
Launched: December 2005 (moved to news format starting December 2006)
Target audience: West Seattle, a peninsula with 20 percent of the city’s population.
Content: Local news, photos, video, event previews, “happening now” reports, member forums, some sports/entertainment coverage, some human-interest features. Areas of specialty include transportation, development, education.
Staff: Two full-time, part-time editor/writer job posted, pays freelancers for assignments.
Key leaders: Tracy Record, Patrick Sand (co-publishers).
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model. (No AdSense) Did not sell/run advertising until November 2007; site has since become self-sustaining, with revenue covering all business and family expenses for its operators (wife-husband team).
Metrics: 45,000-plus uniques and 530,000-plus pageviews monthly. Average time on site 4-plus minutes. (All stats per Google Analytics)

Black White Read (east Dallas, Texas)
Launched: August 2006.
Target audience: residents of six (and growing) east Dallas neighborhoods.
Content: Hyperlocal news and information, community calendar, restaurant and theater reviews.
Staff: Full-time editor, half-time photo editor, photo assistant, 5-6 regular professional contributors, 10-12 regular amateur contributors. Two full-time sales reps. Principals include technology person and sales and marketing professional.
Key leaders: Steve Crozier, Bryon Morrison, Ed Wagner
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model.
Metrics: 4,500 unique readers in an editorial area covering about 6,200 homes.

The Common Language Project (Seattle, Wash.)
Launched: January 2006.
Target audience: National and Seattle area.
Content: Investigative multimedia features, international and local.
Staff: Three half-time volunteer staff. One will become a paid position in 2009; all three to be paid positions in 2010.
Key leaders: Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill, Jessica Partnow.
Status: Non-profit. Foundation grants, individual donors and earned income (freelance payments and speaker fees) each bring in one-third of our income. Currently an all-volunteer organization though international projects has been fully funded and able to pay staff as well as cover expenses and staff are sometimes paid contractors on a project-by project basis.
Metrics: 4,000 unique visitors/month on actual site; many more through placements in other mainstream and alternative outlets.

Evanston Now (Illinois)
Launched: April 2006.
Target audience: Evanston area.
Content: All local content. Daily postings of local news, features, public meeting coverage, opinion pieces.
Staff: One full-time. Several freelance contributors.
Many local residents posting comments.
Key leader: Bill Smith.
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model.
Metrics: 8,000 to 10,000 unique visitors per month.

MyDedhamNews (Mass.)
Launched: January 2009
Target audience: Dedham, Mass.
Content: All local content. Daily postings of local news, features, public meeting coverage, business news, daily podcasts with news roundups, sports.
Staff: One full time, with over 500 registered users on the blog
Key leader: Brian Keaney
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model.
Metrics: Too soon to say.

News from Cornwall and Cornwall-on-Hudson
Launched: July 2006
Target: Cornwall, Cornwall-on-Hudson (N.Y.)
Content: All local politics, arts, culture, community. Extensive calendar.
Key leader: Nancy Peckenham
Status: For-profit. Local advertising revenue model.
Metrics: 5,000 unique visitors/month.

Investigative Voice (Baltimore, Md.)
Launched: February 2009.
Target audience: Baltimore and the state of Maryland.
Content: Investigative reporting, so far on city crime and city government, but looking to expand.
Key leaders: Stephen Janis, Luke Broadwater, Regina Holmes.
Status: For-profit. Local advertising and a pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth subscription revenue model.
Metrics: 1,000 unique visitors the first day.

To add to our database: Send us information about your community news site, at dwestpha@usc.edu.

Tomorrow: We look at MinnPost.com, and see how a former major-metro print newspaper publisher is faring in the online world.
Wednesday: We talk with Howard Owens about GateHouse Media, Inc.’s online-only community news site in Batavia, N.Y.
Thursday: ChiTown Daily News bets on reader reports to capture the local online news market.
Friday: PasadenaNow covers its community by outsourcing its reporting.

David Westphal is executive in residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is affiliated with Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and the Knight Digital Media Center.