The Chi-town Daily News: Creating a New Supply of Local News

This 9-page case study from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in the United States (US) explores the Chi-Town Daily News, an all-local nonprofit news website that serves readers in the city of Chicago (Illinois, US).

As detailed here, the publication, founded by journalist Geoff Dougherty in 2005, focuses on original reporting on local issues by both professional and volunteer reporters. With financial support from a Knight News Challenge grant, which began in March 2007, the Daily News has been actively recruiting and training residents as "volunteer grassroots journalists", with the aim of having at least one from every Chicago neighbourhood. These volunteers work under the supervision of professional editors, writing the bulk of the articles on the site, which are generally about local civic issues (e.g., changes in the school board, updates to the sewer system, a deficit in the health system) - with local sports or arts news occasionally interspersed. A small group of paid professional journalists (freelancers) are assigned to cover important stories that are more complex or not being covered by the volunteers. Dougherty, who is simultaneously Chief Executive Officer (CEO), chief editor, and the site's developer, sees the publication as a way to explore the possibilities of developing a sustainable news organisation beyond a profit-driven model.

Author Matt Hampel finds that the Daily News has had unprecedented success at one of the toughest challenges of participatory news media: inspiring unpaid contributors to consistently undertake journalistically sound reporting on serious issues. In June 2008, between 10 and 20 articles were being posted weekly, with about half written by volunteers and half by freelance reporters. Unlike other participatory news sites, the Daily News is devoted to original reporting and has very little opinion or repackaging of wire reports. Articles are written in a serious, straightforward style and usually feature some of the elements of traditional news stories (e.g., the inverted-pyramid structure, quotes from multiple parties, original research).

However, with limited resources, its goal of building a full-scale publication and attracting a significant audience for that reporting are proving to be a challenge. Dougherty's insistence that high-quality original reporting be more important than article quantity meant that in its first months, the Daily News was able to post new articles only a few times a week. As a result, the initial burst of interest from readers was not maintained and traffic lagged. Though new content appears steadily, the Daily News seems far from its goal of being able to produce a steady stream of in-depth reports. And the 7 blogs on the site, including one by Dougherty, are low-volume in terms of posts and have attracted few comments.

Craigslist has produced the greatest response to the Daily News' call for participation, bringing an average of 5–10 prospective volunteers from each listing on the classifieds site. Volunteering for the Daily News is largely pitched to prospective neighbourhood reporters as "bottom-up news" in which a local is the best person to write about her community. As of mid-2008, Chi-Town had trained 65 reporters, representing 35 of 77 neighbourhoods. The predominantly African-American south and southwest areas of the city have turned up few volunteers. The organisation expects that it will need to go in person to specific neighbourhoods to recruit volunteers from the final 10 or 15 districts.

The Daily News has developed a 6-module training programme for the neighbourhood reporters. Classes, which are taught by staff, last a couple of hours each and address topics such as reporting, news writing, interviewing, photography, and ethics. Online materials complement the classes, with clear simple guidelines on journalism practice. Organisers have found the training events to be a reliable source of volunteers; current neighbourhood reporters are encouraged to attend the training sessions, and will eventually be invited to lead them alongside paid staff. Every article submitted to Daily News editors is held to the same standards and goes through the same editing process, regardless of whether it was contributed by a volunteer or a freelance reporter.

The Daily News has a large rotating photo section on its home page. Photos are selected from Flickr, and photographers are credited with a link back to their photostreams. However, "little information about the photos is displayed." The organisation has a video camera, but few of the volunteers are confident with the medium. The home page of the site once featured an online video player, but there was not enough content to keep it fresh. The Daily News will be running videography workshops, which editors hope will encourage more multimedia coverage as volunteers become familiar with the technology.

Daily News staff have realised that one reporter in each neighbourhood is insufficient to cover all newsworthy events, and envision a pool of 300-400 producing roughly 5,000 articles a year, supported by 6 editors and 6 interns on an annual budget of US$1 million. However, the largest problem for the Daily News is retaining volunteers. Also, "[t]he challenges of keeping up with needed maintenance and improvements on the technical side will almost certainly require Dougherty to relinquish technical control and hire new staff. The current idiosyncratic system could prove time-consuming for a new developer to take over, and the organization may eventually find it more effective to implement an open-source or low-cost content management system."

Hampel concludes by stressing that covering the stories that the large newspapers ignore is an important mission but that, at present, the site's "collection of articles on events in far-flung neighborhoods and disparate issues simply do not add up to a 'must-read' publication for ordinary people....Promoting civic engagement would seem to be an obvious goal of reporting on schools, the transit system, and local politics, which are largely ignored by other media. However, the Daily News site has not developed the kind of online community that enlivens many participatory media sites - comments on articles and personal details about authors are practically nonexistent. Plans to increase face-to-face interaction among volunteers may spark the kind of participation that is currently lacking on the site."

Fundamental questions - for the Daily News or any other effort to get volunteer journalists to cover local interest stories ignored by mainstream media - remain: Is there an intrinsic value to reporting ignored stories, even if each story is read by a only few hundred people at most? How many readers is enough to justify the effort? Should the organisation focus on building community engagement neighbourhood by neighbourhood, in effect creating a network of hyperlocal news organisations?