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 2nd 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.
Just picking up on the theme of new news, in the “truth is stranger than fiction” category:
Dan Pacheco is no slouch in the world of citizen journalism: his printcasting.com site promises to help you “start your own local magazine in minutes” (intrigued? I am) and has grant support from the Knight Foundation. But as he posted June 15, “Citizen Media Goes Fisher Price” (also at PBS MediaShift Idea Lab, where I first read it) his daughter scooped him and the rest of the news media with a tornado picture she snapped with a Fisher-Price camera in the suburbs of Denver earlier this week.
In a nutshell, there’d been some freaky weather in the Denver area for several days, so Dan was on the lookout already for tornados; his daughter walked into the home office to tell him she’d spotted a weird cloud, he went to grab his camera, tweeted it , and started taking pictures. The 6-year-old naturally grabbed her camera as well (who knew fisher price made a $64 digital camera?) And they all ended up on the local TV news. Anyway, read it there, at his blog, as Dan tells the story great, with video and pictures.
His takeaway is that “a confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we’re witnessing the birth of a completely new — and arguably better — breaking news system that involves everyone.”
Yes! but also, that new system is still going to incorporate some kind of Big Media that reaches out to wider audiences.(Like, in this story CBS 4, the local TV news guys). That role is still key to a better news ecosystem. Anyway, I get a kick out of imagining a 6-year-old on the weather–or any other–beat.
One reason there has not been much posted here over the past 10 weeks or so is that we’ve been busy pulling together a report on the state of local online news in Chicago, The NEW News: Journalism We Want and Need for The Chicago Community Trust. It’s not about how to pay for local news, but why we pay for it–and about who’s doing what online in Chicago.
It’s the first time anyone we know of has tried to assemble a report quite like it, that combines a directory of who’s doing what, some thoughts about where local print and online news is actually at in terms of coverage, and some thoughts on the kind of news we want. Some key thoughts:
- There’s less local news in the newspaper, these days, but no guarantee that online news publications will do any better.
- Online news publications will need to adopt some of the characteristics of local news—include news vetted by editors, copy editors, etc., select stories that both entertain and inform their audiences, and perhaps most importantly that they create a forum for one conversation, a universal feature that is hard to arrive at on the Internet, which drives us toward so many unique, small, even idiosyncratic news sources.
- Assembling such a report in such a short period of time (we surveyed producers of more than 80 online news publications, looked for trends in local news coverage in the Tribune and Sun-Times over 20 years—mostly, it’s declined, and conducted focus groups with nonprofit community leaders) was a job of work.
Our main goal was to add a different note to the conversation about how to save news… for audiences that are able to hear it. It will be too bad if the folks we respect and admire in metropolitan newsrooms are unable to take it in or get much benefit from the research.
One columnist’s take
Shame on me for not living up to my own spokesperson training rules: I spent two hours explaining all this to Phil Rosenthal, Tribune media columnist, explaining what we did and did not find about local online news in Chicago, to wind up reading a column this morning in which he says he thinks the whole project was waste of time. Now why am I surprised?
Obviously you can read his column here, and draw your own conclusions, but he seems to have wound up feeling that everything is fine in the news business so why don’t we just keep things the way they are. Hello? Shouldn’t have to explain to the media columnist, why the status quo is unworkable (our study does not focus on the news business’ money problems but they are obviously a sign that things need to change).
Find out for yourself… download your own copy here.
As struggling local newspapers continue to abandon the printed page, foundations, entrepreneurs and journalists are launching “hyperlocal” and watchdog news Web sites.
Where and who are they? What do they tell us about the new media landscape?
We’ve pinpointed significant news Web sites emerging around the United States and beyond by creating this custom Google Map for the Community Media Workshop.
Chicago is fertile ground for a number of “new news” sites, such as LISC/New Communities, Chi-Town Daily News and EveryBlock, to name just a few.
Click on the map, then zoom in or search it for specific locations to get a closer view of the emerging players in online news.
Have more sites to add? Please tell us in the comments!
–Elsa Wenzel
Today, at the first of four planned focus groups to dicuss what nonprofits at least view as the kind of news they want and need, there was some sentimental attachment to the news… but not much.
Among other questions we asked leaders of arts groups from museums, theater groups, and visual arts groups was what they would do if the Tribune and Sun-Times stopped publishing tomorrow (which according to today’s Crain’s is a possibility).
“I’d take my laptop down to the kitchen, I guess,” one person responded. Ouch! I was struck by 3 points in no particular order: Read the rest of this entry »
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