Ideas

You can be creative, dogged, well meaning and very hard working. You can produce excellent journalism. You can be willing to take risks. You can even mortgage your home to fund your startup. But that does not mean you can make a go of a good news site.

It is often the aspiration of many news publishers to use the eyes and ears of their readers to fuel at least some aspect of their coverage. New tools like Storify and Intersect are making crowdsourcing stories easier and more relevant.

J-Lab launched its Networked Journalism pilot project a little over a year ago. It called for five traditional news organizations to partner with at least five new community news sites in their cities.

Sometimes the time is right. More on the “Anatomy of a Shutdown” for New Hampshire’s Rye Reflections, which is shutting down after a 5-year run. Contrary to what you might expect, it wasn’t a case of running out of money.

J-Lab has funded community news startups since 2005, when the movement to launch independent hyperlocal news websites began in earnest. To date, we’ve seeded the launch of 55 “New Voices” experiments. Now, it’s time to report what we have learned – and it’s a lot.

It’s been five years since J-Lab released the first study on community news sites, “Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?”

The level of creativity was dizzying at this year’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. The winners are already taking their prize-winning ideas to the next level. Meanwhile Grand Prize winner The Sunlight Foundation is taking its “data jamming” mindset into new frontiers, breaking news at the symposium with its latest plans.

The Seattle Times worked with trusted journalists in their hyperlocal partnership to simultaneously report stories around the issues homeless families in their neighborhoods face.