[Editor's note: This is day four of OJR's a week-long look at the state of independent local online news start-ups. Each day's report will include a feature article, as well as a Q&A with one or more of the day's sources. If you missed the first three installments, here they are:
Part 1: Sites on the rise; business models remain elusive
Part 2: Experience makes MinnPost a top online new startup
Part 3: No paper? No problem! News companies use the Web to enter new markets]

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.

[Editor's note: This is day three of OJR's a week-long look at the state of independent local online news start-ups. Each day's report will include a feature article, as well as a Q&A with one or more of the day's sources. If you missed the first two installments, here they are:
Part 1: Sites on the rise; business models remain elusive
Part 2: Experience makes MinnPost a top online new startup]

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.