It’s been a month since we released the second annual NEW News report, and we’d like to thank everyone for the feedback and responses we’ve received.

It was our goal to send the initial survey to as many of Chicago’s online news providers as we could find, but unfortunately, we missed a few. Marina City Online is one of those sites. It’s a great hyper-local site that covers the 1,400-resident community of Marina City and the River North and North Loop neighborhoods of downtown Chicago. Let us know if we’ve left other sites off so we can be sure to include them in future surveys, updates and reports.

Another challenge that’s become clear after the release of this year’s NEW News is tracking online news traffic to Chicago-area sites. Last year, as the Workshop tried to rank online news sites, we asked online news providers to give us their site traffic numbers. We found out this is easier said than done. Some sites are forthcoming with traffic numbers, and others have reasons for keeping that information private.

Because we were aware of these concerns and because we weren’t ranking online news sites this year, we conducted our own research using compete.com to identify where Chicago readers were getting their online news. You can read more about those findings here. Although this information proved very useful, Newcity let us know that our numbers for their site were too low. In fact, according to their site traffic measures, they have over 40,000 readers a month to newcity.com and chicagoweekly.com. As our researcher pointed out, compete.com often underestimates traffic numbers, especially for smaller sites. Newcity also uses a service called Quantcast to track site visits. Quantcast allows people to use code on their web site to get a more accurate measure, as well as insights about site visitor demographics. Some sites have it, but others don’t, which is why we used Compete despite its limitations.

We don’t know how to solve the site traffic problem yet, but it’s possible we’ll ask for traffic numbers next year if we attempt to rank sites again. Or, maybe a service will emerge that accurately tracks site traffic for smaller blogs and hyperlocal sites, as well as the big outlets like the Chicago Tribune online.

We appreciate everyone’s responses to the NEW News report. The online ecosystem continues to change rapidly, and your feedback helps us keep up!

The Residents’ Journal!

But wait, what did they win?

The Community Media Workshop surveyed online news providers to inform the 2nd annual NEW News report, released earlier this month. We encouraged online outlets across the Chicago area to participate, and in an effort to boost the response rate, we offered a $100 visa gift card.

More than 120 outlets responded to the survey, and we randomly selected one participant to win the $100 prize. Congratulations to Residents’ Journal! And thanks again to all the online news providers who gave us valuable information and insights about the changing media landscape and the challenges facing the new news.

More than eight million people visit Chicago-area online news sites each month, according to our new report released today. While the report highlights a proliferation of online news and information sites in the Chicago area, when it comes to traffic, the sites of mainstream media clearly dominate. Six of the eight million unique cumulative visitors reported by all media outlets participating in the survey were to Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, RedEye and ChicagoNow (the Trib’s blog site).

The 2^nd annual NEW News report, produced by Community Media Workshop and funded by the Community News Matters program of  The Chicago Community Trust, surveyed 121 online news outlets about issues ranging from salaried employees to the type of content being produced.

According to the report, most of the online sites surveyed rely heavily on unpaid bloggers and reporters and piggy bank financing. More than 60 percent of sites surveyed had no more than one person working full time on the site. A similar percentage reported that no one receives health insurance from their online news outlet.

Read more about the online news ecosystem in our eco-friendly, online-only report.

I’ve been meaning to share this for a while. At the end of the summer, one of the more intriguing responses to our annual survey of nonprofit communicators was to the question, “How has the economic crisis affected the way your organization communicates?”

It was a bit of a good news/bad news response:

• Read the rest of this entry »

I’m proposing a new definition:

Geoghegan: verb, trans., (from attorney Thomas Geoghegan, whose run for the U.S. Congress seat previously held by Rahm Emanuel in 2008-09 received plentiful national but scant local news coverage). To be obscured from local Chicago news coverage in spite (because?) of national prominence.

Example: Although the arrival of protesters and the nation’s top union officials in Chicago posed a serious challenge in the debate over banking regulation, consumer financial protection, and related issues this week, local news outlets largely Geogheganed the topic, giving it minimal coverage.  (* note and disclosure, I used to work with National People’s Action the group co-sponsoring and organizing the Showdown in Chicago). Read the rest of this entry »

Reporter Tara Malone and Publishers Mary Gavin and Susan Noyes spoke at a Meet the Press forum we co-sponsored with Evanston Public Library yesterday (more pictures at the Community Media Workshop Facebook page)

Used to be, questions at a meet the press panel sponsored by the Workshop focused on how to reach the journalists and how to pitch them.

Yesterday we held a communications strategy and Meet the Press forum at the Evanston Public Library and we had some of that, but more questions were about the future of the news and how the panelists were experiencing changes in the business. One takeaway: print’s not dead yet.

Our panel featured:

• Mary Helt Gavin, publisher of the Evanston Roundtable
• Tara Malone, beat reporter for The Chicago Tribune (notably, one of the crew who brought us the preferntial treatment for U of I insiders story), and
• Susan Noyes founder of MakeItBetter.net, an online news and community site for the North Shore. Read the rest of this entry »

Lovette Ajayi of CMW responded to comments about the NEW News report during the Making Media Connections conference while holding down the registration table Wednesday and Thursday (photo by Jonathan Werve)

We’re getting emails, other folks are getting emails, phone calls… a lot of questions and comments on The NEW News: Journalism We Want and Need. Well, our goal was to start some more conversation, and we have. I only wish more of the reactions were online in one findable spot rather than in side conversations in email and such. (Note to skimmers: this post got long, skip to the end if you want to just catch the bottom line)

First, two points of news about the survey:

• It’s still open: Anyone who feels their site was missed (or misrepresented) can add to the list. Take it here.
• More detailed info is coming. Maybe we’ll even transfer all this information to a wiki, per Kiyoshi Martinez’s suggestion. In any event it’s always been our plan to build out communitymediaworkshop.org/newnews with detailed info from the study–our designer has created wireframes for the site and I’m just getting ready to send Demetrio the final tables. Of course we wanted it to be ready for the study release but we just ran out of time.

Next point: phew, journalists are tough! On each other. There have been some great comments, for example by Alexander Russo here and here. Very flattering to have him dig into the details and deserving of an explanation. He notes: Read the rest of this entry »