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Key links:
Primary website:
newhavenindependent.org
Primary Twitter:
@newhavenindy

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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.

The New Haven Independent is a nonprofit online local news organization in New Haven, Conn.

The Independent was founded in 2005 by longtime New Haven journalist Paul Bass. It is produced in conjunction with Bass’ Online Journalism Project and funded by foundation grants, sponsorships, and donations, with the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven as its major funder.

The Independent has a staff of about 10, with six of those staffers working full-time as of 2013. The Independent is also home to the Connecticut Health I-Team, two journalists whose coverage of medical safety issues appears on the site. In 2009, Bass and the Online Journalism Project launched another nonprofit local site, the Valley Independent Sentinel with a staff of two full-time reporters, in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley. The Independent’s budget for all three programs was about $420,000 in 2015, down from $550,000 in 2012. As of 2014, 25% of its funding came from foundation grants, down from 75% in previous years, with most of its money coming from individual donors.

The Independent has a partnership with La Voz Hispana de Connecticut where the organizations share office space and Independent stories appear in the print edition of La Voz.

The site had more than 170,000 unique monthly visitors in 2011 according to a nonprofit news report from the Knight Foundation. The Independent suspended its user comments for two weeks in 2012 because of concerns about a lack of civility.

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
May 26, 2021 / Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy
The local news crisis will be solved one community at a time — Local journalism is in crisis. “America’s local news has reached its death spiral phase” proclaimed the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018. Two years later, an oft-cited study out of the University of North Carolin...
Feb. 14, 2017 / Shan Wang
No mugshot exploitation here: The New Haven Independent aims to respect the reputations of those arrested in the community it covers — Last October, multiple Connecticut television stations published a slideshow prominently displaying the names and faces of the 14 women arrested in a New Haven prostitution sting that month. A week later, the New Haven I...
Aug. 4, 2015 / Dan Kennedy
In New Haven, a low-power FM experiment seeks local conversation — and financial sustainability — John Dankosky stood before the 20 or so fledgling radio hosts who had crowded into the New Haven offices of La Voz Hispana de Connecticut and told them not to be afraid to assert themselves in the face of an overly talka...
July 21, 2015 / Joshua Benton
Who’s making money — and who isn’t — in local online news? — Michele’s List is an invaluable compilation of the most promising local online-native news sites trying to make a go of it in this disrupted age. Compiled by Michele McLellan, the list’s admissions criteria a...
April 8, 2015 / Justin Ellis
In the world of nonprofit news, different paths to sustainability for local and state news sites — As the world of nonprofit news matures, the good news is that more news organizations are creating ways to increase their revenue and expand their audience. The bad news: They’re still heavily reliant on grants and...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: August 28, 2014.
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The New Haven Independent is a nonprofit online local news organization in New Haven, Conn. The Independent was founded in 2005 by longtime New Haven journalist Paul Bass. It is produced in conjunction with Bass’ Online Journalism Project and funded by foundation grants, sponsorships, and donations, with the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven as its…

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Encyclo is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
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