More Promotion & Courses on: Hardhitting journalism, uncovering corruption, done by local web outlets independent of newspapers

The NYT caption for above photo: "The nonprofit site Voice of San Diego.org has a staff of 11 people. Many are young, some of them refugees from newspapers. Its audience is small, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors."

Hi mediabistro,

Maybe you already promote this a lot and I just haven't noticed, but if you don't, then perhaps you will promote this more, and add a place where links to such sites can be posted.

The sites are local news outlets publicly financed, uncovering corruption.

These sites are mentioned in a NYT article I read today (and really enjoyed reading)
because it highlighted, to me, two ideas which I totally embrace in my thinking:

(1) the need for FAR MORE hardhitting investigative journalism;

and

(2) the fact this is sometimes being done by local web outlets uncovering corruption (that otherwise goes overlooked).

Check out the article here:

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

November 18, 2008 - By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA - Technology

SAN DIEGO — Over the last two years, some some of this city’s darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way....

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Thanks,
Susan aka summer