5 Innovative Websites That Could Reshape the News
In today’s Digital landscape the way we produce and deliver news changes almost on a daily basis. Recently, I spent a week at USC’s KDMC, Knight Digital Media Center as part of an entrepreneurial journalism fellowship, and talked about many things, from monetizing, to marketing, to content generation, and branding. And as part of my research, ran into a great Mashable post many would benefit from .
The write-up in collaboration with the Poynter Institute takes a look at five “innovative” news driven websites using today’s digital tools, crowd and community generated content as well as public databases, as well as aggregated content.
All but one “ChicagoNow” which is backed by the Tribune are pretty much independent efforts which is what I’m mostly interested in, and what many of you may also be working towards.
You can find the complete write up here. In the meantime, these are the five sites the post talks about, and that you should definitely take a look at:
And…. I would actually like to add a couple of my own:
SacramentoPress.com a for-profit Community Generated Content driven site running its own CMS Platform and Advertising network. SacPress also trains their community contributors, something we like to do at AlamoCityTimes.com with what we call our ACT-Now Camps where local contributors learn hands-on story telling basics, social media skills, multimedia and digital tools how-tos.
There’s also a recently launched site in Texas, The TexasTribune.org, non-profit, running on WordPress and with a huge bank account (about $4-million) and producing strong journalism reports, as well as data-base aggregation. Contrary to many of the above, The TXTribune does not believe in community generated content. They do believe, however, in salaries unheard of in today’s on-line news ecology like $300k for their CEO and as high as $90k for reporters.
The TexasTribune is a product of donations and grants including a Knight grant. The SacramentoPress.com on the other hand took second jobs, and personal savings/investments. Ben Ilfeld, one of SacPress founders, says his site took about $300k to launch and get to where they are now: profitable, however he expands most of their income is put back into their product.
Stay tuned for a complete profile on Ben and the SacramentoPress.com I recently put together as part of research I did for my KDMC Fellowship, Knight Digital Media Center, Entrepreneur Boot Camp going on this week at USC in Los Angeles: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201005/1850/
