Who's Doing Good Work in Online News? (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series, I took a look at what traditional news organizations are doing to push the envelope in online innovation. But not surprisingly, some of the more advanced work in this area is being done by small startups that can be more nimble and aggressive than their mainstream counterparts. Here's a look at some of the best of these efforts; again, feel free to point out more in the Comments.

• The 2008 Presidential campaign highlighted some of the best startup efforts in journalism. Politico took advantage of political-junkie voids left by The Washington Post and other traditional news organizations to quickly become a leading name in political news. While I'm concerned about the long-term viability of the high expense of Politico's news operation, it's done some smart things to spread its reach far and wide, including syndicating its coverage to other news organizations. The other notable political startup from the 2008 campaign was the marvelous FiveThirtyEight.com, whose proprietor, baseball stats geek Nate Silver, applied that same geekiness to handicapping the electoral college. Nobody did a more interesting job covering the election–or a better job of predicting the outcome, with startling state-by-state accuracy. Now Silver has to figure out if there's a second act in applying his statistical analysis to the political doings in between elections. Also good on the political/government beat: the wonky OpenCongress.org. 

• A lot has been said and written about the crop of startup online newspapers now covering cities around the country. I'm particularly fond of Voice of San Diego, which I think combines solid reporting and writing with a particularly attractive design that has a more personality and flair than your average news site. Pegasus News, covering Dallas, continues to grow as well. Both of these, as well as sites like Minneapolis' MinnPost, primarily rely on professional staffs and are, in effect, newspapers minus the paper. The business models for this are still up in the air, and some, like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost, are relying at least in part on a PBS/NPR-like user-supported model (Pegasus News is a for-profit commercial venture). Others, like Chicago's ChiTown Daily News, are largely funded by non-profit grants. I worry about the long-term viability of these non-commercial efforts as the initial money runs out. To sustain, they have to find workable business models and revenue streams, and non-commercial status doesn't always provide the right motivation to do that.

• Non-profit support of journalism is taking other forms. Pro Publica is a non-profit, independent investigative journalism project whose work appears on its site as well as in major publications and on TV networks. This is an interesting model for journalism largely disconnected from traditional journalism entities. I'm less sanguine about a couple of roughly similar experiments: Spot.us, which hopes to convince readers to make contributions to fund coverage of stories suggested by the audience (seems like a longshot to me); and Global Post, a commercial effort to establish a sort of international wire service (alas, at a time when newspapers are eschewing foreign news in favor of local coverage). But there will be other efforts to supplement what traditional news organizations do by tapping into non-profit sources to fund specialty reporting, I'm sure. The Kaiser Family Foundation already is moving in this direction with health coverage, an area that's faced significant cutbacks in many newsrooms.

• Another foundation-based effort that has gotten a lot of attention is Adrian Holovaty's EveryBlock, which collates all sorts of local data, including news stories, crime logs, real estate sales, etc., and displays it in lists or plotted on a map. With his Knight Foundation grant running out, Holovaty is now looking for a longer-term business model. He's struck partnerships with The New York Times and other papers; that seems to be a good strategy, since EveryBlock seems to work best as the data support for a more well-rounded news product.

• More maps: Google has been tracking the spread of the flu this winter on its Flu Trends map, which cleverly plots Google searches for words like "flu" and "flu vaccine" and purports to be able to show the spread of flu around the country two weeks before health officials know about it. (The Centers for Disease Control is supporting the effort.) At the moment, it looks like Maine and Texas are particularly flu-prone. The flu map shows how Google maps are particularly useful for plotting breaking news about stories that spread over a geographic area. Google Australia, for instance, has created an interactive map showing the devastating bush fires outside Melbourne.

• Another excellent view of the Australian fire story comes from a somewhat unexpected source: Wikipedia, whose entry on the fires is voluminous, comprehensive and up-to-the-minute. A lot of journalists like to knock Wikipedia because it's user-generated and therefore vulnerable to inaccuracies; in fact, the site is surprisingly accurate for most purposes and is turning out to be a very underrated collector of breaking news coverage. Next time a big story on an obscure topic breaks, check Wikipedia–you'll likely find surprisingly complete and ongoing aggregated coverage of the story that's as good as, or better, than anything from a traditional media site.

• The most interesting non-traditional journalism efforts are those that are using technology in new and interesting ways to manage, display and interact with news stories. Check out NewsMixer, developed by a group of Medill School of Journalism students, using the Cedar Rapids Gazette site as a guinea pig. NewsMixer is like reader comments on acid. Partly reliant on tools developed by Facebook, NewsMixer lets readers comment on stories, ask (and answer) questions about stories and talk among themselves, in an interactive format that brings stories to life in whole new ways. Great stuff. Another interesting news technology is OneSpot, from a startup headed by my former colleague Matt Cohen. OneSpot allows Web publishers to create sophisticated newsfeeds using tools that aggregate and filter news from myriad sources to create smart collections of targeted content. The Wall Street Journal's site is using it, and the company just announced a $4.2 million round of financing–no small feat in the current economic environment. The VCs must think OneSpot is onto something. One more cool news technology: Aggregate Knowledge, which bolts onto news sites, analyzes user behavior and reading patterns, and suggests stories that similar visitors read. Look for it at the bottom of story pages on WashingtonPost.com and Philly.com. 

• Two of my favorite areas for news organizations to be exploring are aggregation and niche markets, and Alan Jacobson's Tween Tribune taps into both of these. The site brings together stories of interest to kids between 8 and 14 and invites them to comment on them. It's an interesting effort, and Jacobson is marketing it to newspapers and schools as an updated version of the old newspapers-in-education gambit. Like Gannett's MomsLikeMe, mentioned in Part 1, this is a good example of aiming an interactive news product directly at a particular demographic niche–something that general-interest news organizations have never quite figured out. There's lots of money in those niches if you can get them right.

• If news organizations are going to thrive online, they're going to have to find ways to inexpensively capture advertising from smaller local businesses. A quiet startup called PaperG has patent-pending technology in stealth mode called PlaceLocal that can instantly create online display ads by searching the Web for business information like photos, awards, and logos. Disclosure: I'm an advisor to and investor in the company, so I've seen the technology–and it's very cool. Not surprisingly, it's already attracting a lot of interest from publishers. PaperG also has another piece of advertising technology, FlyerBoard, already deployed at Boston.com and WeeklyDig.com, that can quickly turn any piece of printed advertising into a simple Web ad attached to a mini-site (you can see it in action on the upper right side of the WeeklyDig home page–it's the little bulletin board). Similarly, TurnHere is creating thousands of high-CPM video ads by deploying low-cost videographers to shoot short videos of local restaurants and other businesses.

That's a long list, but there are doubtless other first-rate examples of news (and advertising) innovation worth sharing. Again, please add other good efforts to the Comments. And thanks to Mark Stencel and Chris Krewson, who pointed a few of these examples out to me–Mark especially, who suggested the idea for these posts.

Comments

[David Cohn]

Just for the record - my response to the LA Times article on Spot.Us.

http://www.digidave.org/adventures_in_freelancing/2009/02/spotus-gets-first-great-critique-we-are-listening-learning-and-plotting.html

As noted in the article: I remain cautiously optimistic. I don't think it's a silver bullet - but I do have every reason to continue to see how much further I can take this.

[Tex]

Great point about Wikipedia. To people who still knock them, I say "Of course it's not perfect, but it gets more comprehensive, accurate & better-sourced every single day"

[Matt Cohen]

@Tex Not only is the coverage on Wikipedia of major news events excellent, it starts from the beginning and gives you the background in detail. A typical news story only gives you latest, and leaves you struggling if you don't know the history. It's getting to be my first stop for "read more" reading.

[Mark Briggs]

Also check out Newsgarden at The Bellingham Herald, which is built on a social news mapping platform we're developing at Serra Media (end shameless promotion).

http://bellinghamherald.serramedia.com

Our vision is that combining professional journalism and user-submitted information in the same place online, then organizing it geographically, can build micromarkets for local news publishers, be they traditional newspapers or independent journalism start-ups.

[Daryl Pereira]

Does anyone have any examples of crowd-sourced journalism around non-profits (particularly in healthcare)?

[Mark Potts]

Daryl: That's a good question, and crowdsourcing examples on any subject are conspicuously absent from my list because I haven't seen any really good ones lately. The classic example is the Fort Myers News-Press' crowdsourced investigation of local sewer fees (http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=CAPEWATER), but that's three years old now. Anybody got any others?

[rb cason]

Mark: You produce great work. Informative and interesting.

[Edward]

You should check out World Politics Review (http://www.worldpoliticsreivew.com)as well. We're a small start up that has built a low-cost model that allows us to more aggressively provide premium foreign policy analysis and opinion.

[Dwayne "football picks" Bryant]

Great post. I agree with what you said about Wikipedia. It really is a great source of breaking news coverage.