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.
There’s something about McHenry County which keeps drawing me back to conduct training. Maybe its the sprawling landscape or the mom and pop shops that still keep their doors open, but most definitely its the people.
At my last training at the Shaw Center for Corporate Training, I was once again delighted to work with about 30 nonprofit staff working from Seniors Centers to Emergency Preparedness to issues of homelessness and affordable housing. Read the rest of this entry »
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:
Have you read the “Obama plan” for health care? I finally started this morning.
If you’re like me you’ve probably finally started to pay attention now that the debate has reached a crisis (I know, I’m not proud of my ignorance, but what can you say). Getting caught up to the headlines got me curious about how some longtime local health-care advocacy organizations have been dealing with the related issues of finding their issue in the spotlight and moving their work onto the Web, and next week I’ll share some case-study-type thoughts from a couple of local organizations, with a little about both their take on the debate and how they are handling the attention.
Meantime, I did some background research, and the first thing I found was the “Obama Plan,” more or less. It’s right here, with specifics and everything. I got there from whitehouse.gov but the page, “Healthreform.gov” is officially maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services. Read the rest of this entry »
The line is from Romeo and Juliet. The character Mercutio says it — three times — while he dies in a swordfight defending the honor of his friend (it’s in the middle of the play and helps set the action that sends the main characters –spoiler alert, if you’re still in junior high school — to their deaths).
It’s a pretty apt description for the state of things in the state Capitol this aft. High drama there, with the governor addressing the legislators, and so on. Read Capitol Fax for the latest–I think–it’s hard to understand. Not so hard to understand: elected officials have messed up and the folks hurting the worst are the ones with the least.
“Long-term chronic under-capacity”
Case in point: Fred Ludwig. Two weeks ago he called and we chatted briefly about how to build a story bank of individuals who would be affected by service cuts if (when, it now seems) the state’s “doomsday” budget is enacted. The agency put out a news release (PDF download) June 15 announcing 12 layoffs. Today, it was Fred’s turn.
When we checked back today, he told us he was in the middle of cleaning out his desk. Today was his last day, he’d just been laid off, after 18 months as communications staffer for the Thresholds social service agency on Chicago’s North Side. Read the rest of this entry »
Kara Carrell responds to a question at Making Media Connections (photo by Bob Black)
Last year, about half the folks who took our first-ever impact survey (an end-of-the-fiscal-year survey on what they did with what they learned from us) told us they did something different online as a result of what they learned.
Since this is the second year we’re doing it, we will be able to make some comparisons between now and this time last year–of course one of the things we hope to learn more about is how economic challenges of these days are affecting how we communicate for the better/for the worse.
Looking forward to hearing more about how you and others used lessons learned from The Workshop in the past 12 months! Take the survey yourself, it’s right here.
Oh, and when you’re done, give us your name and contact info so we can add you to a raffle to win an iPod Nano as a small thank-you for your feedback.
Thanks!
P.S. have you seen the gallery of photos from our most recent conference? Taken by Bob Black, Olga Lopez, and 1 or 2 other volunteers, they came out great!
Sure, you know what you need to make you feel better in an economic crisis: capacity building.
Well, maybe or maybe not, but this morning Chicago’s Donor’s Forum organized a panel with Thom Clark from the Workshop and other local capacity builders offering some insights on how to stay afloat. Read the rest of this entry »
I hope Ken Davis is happy. Something really has come out of Sunday’s Journalism Town Hall thang. Maybe not what he imagined (a shot in the arm for old-school newsies?). Instead, I predict quickening of the pace for new news practitioners. Be careful what you wish for, right?
I’m a little out of sync on the topic compared to, say, Kiyoshi Martinez, who just frickin’ breaks the business model conversation down and reassembles it (nice work), Geoff Dougherty’s constructive plan for the $2 million newsroom, or Windy Citizen’s back and forth on how the hell a journalist keeps her damn job.
Because of what we do at the Workshop, it’s the content that matters more to us — the promise of news to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” to quote the ever quotable Mr. Dooley (ie columnist Finley Peter Dunne) — and the power of metropolitan journalism to set agendas for the region.
So let’s just keep in mind the goal we want to hit. How good a job do our existing news outlets do at that? How can we redesign them to do even better? Or is the system perfect right now, just broke?
Diana Pando caught PMR 2009 participants listening to Carolyn Grisko.
No doubt about it, folks, we’re in a new era: less means less when it comes to the news.
“As a former journalist you have a pretty good sense of what makes news,” Chicago PR firm president and former Chicago Public Radio reporter Carolyn Grisko told the Professional Media Relations workshop trainees this morning. “But this past year my news sense has been just whacked.”
Pitching is just more of a crapshoot than it used to be, she said… and encouraged our group to think about how they can integrate social media into their larger work.
Read the rest of this entry »
Recognizing in recent years that CMW has not served the arts community as well perhaps as we could, and with co-sponsorship by League of Chicago Theaters and help from Arts & Business Council and Chicago Artists Resource, next week we’re presenting a free discussion:
The Incredible Shrinking Media and What It Means For Your Arts Organization
6 to 7:30 p.m., Thursday, January 15 at Columbia College Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th Floor
Are you noticing the more press releases you send out the less arts coverage you see in the news? As media shrinks and newsrooms become understaffed the arts become more underrepresented in traditional media. Reflecting on what the new year may hold for arts groups in traditional and new media will be:
Sylvia Ewing, on-air talent at WTTW, Young Chicago Authors board member, & consultant
Catey Sullivan, Chicago Theater Review Examiner
Scarlett Swerdlow, Illinois Arts Alliance
Kris Vire, Time Out Chicago theater critic
I’m moderating. The panelists will share their insights on the trend of shifting media and new online alternatives to help arts organizations reach new audiences and increasing their visibility using new online media.
When we asked Sylvia to be on this panel, she was so funny… she recalled periodic discussions of what I am learning is a perennial problem over the past five years or so. It strikes me that this is one of those issues where there’s never enough coverage, right? Especially in Chicago, which has so much going on and tremendous recent growth (In 2006, authors of a Donnelley Foundation study of arts groups in Chicago called the 1,158 arts nonprofits “surprising” and noted a surge of new groups in recent years). Anyway, a success story Read the rest of this entry »
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