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Key links:
Primary website:
backfence.com

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Backfence was a network of user-driven hyperlocal news sites that launched in 2005 and closed in 2007.

Backfence was founded in 2005 by Mark Potts and Susan DeFife with five staff members and two community sites in the Washington, D.C., area. It raised $3 million in local and national investment and eventually expanded to 13 sites near Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco.

In January 2007, DeFife left the company, and it laid off most of its employees. It finally shut down in July 2007.

Backfence averaged about one full-time staff member per site, though its content came from users, who could blog, edit wikis or post photos there. The company was supported by self-service display and classified advertising. The site was considered at the time one of the bellwethers of the “citizen journalism” movement.

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Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: May 10, 2011.
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GlobalPost is a for-profit online foreign news service. The site was founded in January 2009 by Philip Balboni and Charles Sennott with $8.5 million in private funding. It is based in Boston and had a staff of about 18 as of 2013, as well as about 70 part-time correspondents in 50 countries, who are generally…

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