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In the midst of so much horrendous financial news about American newspapers, a story in the New York Times a month ago came as a tonic. “Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs,” by Richard Perez-Peña, focused primarily on voiceofsandiego.org, a site where in the last couple of years some of San Diego’s “darkest secrets have been dragged into the light,” but it said “similar operations” have cropped up in other cities, including Chicago, and “more are on the way.”
The unnamed Chicago operation was the Chi-Town Daily News, which Dougherty, a former Tribune reporter, launched three years ago. Last year the Knight Foundation gave him $340,000 so he could put together “a network of trained citizen journalists to provide coverage of local and hyperlocal news.” Dougherty’s Web site is an important work in progress, but by his own admission it’s had no particular impact yet as a watchdog. Actually, Perez-Peña’s headline writer got a little carried away. The papers discussed in the story don’t share muckraking credentials — they share a business model that leans a lot more heavily on grants and reader contributions than on ads.
Here’s a link to the Knight Foundation’s press release announcing the Chi-Town grant and three others — all to online news sites cited by Perez-Peña in the Times. While you’re there listen to the interview with executive editor Scott Lewis of voiceofsandiego.org. He describes not just the ideas and ambitions of new journalists such as himself and Dougherty, but also how much fun it is to be part of a small, presumptuous bunch of young reporters. These sites are attempting to create some sort of alliance, Lewis says — “It’s definitely going to solidify into something national, but with local entities.”
