Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
A year in, The Guardian’s European edition contributes 15% of the publisher’s pageviews
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
June 19, 2009, 10:33 a.m.

Knight News Challenge: How a young editor turned a $0 big idea into a $95,000 small idea

When Adam Klawonn quit his job at a shrinking major metropolitan newspaper in 2006, he did what so many other journalists have: launched an online news operation that looked a lot like a newspaper’s web site, only with less stuff.
 
On The Zonie Report (“A New Kind of News for Arizona”), he set out to cover growth, immigration, the environment. The big issues. “The traditional papers were going local, and they were pulling back their bureaus,” said Klawonn, now 30. “It seemed like it was just wide open.”
 
And from the start, he seemed to be doing everything right — learning enough PHP to slap together a sharp-looking Web site; shooting videos and producing podcasts; painstakingly tagging articles into a dozen geographic categories; looting his bank account for a freelance budget; hiring a New York Times stringer for what turned out to be award-winning environmental reporting.
 
After two years, it was clear: The Zonie Report was — have you guessed, dear reader? — a complete commercial failure. Without a single town to target, advertisers shunned the site. And though Klawonn’s scattered readers gave him 20,000 pageviews a month, they passed on his offer of CafePress mugs and T-shirts.
 
So last year, Klawonn started sketching out the plan that, this week, landed him a $95,000 Knight News Challenge grant: a news service devoted entirely to Phoenix’s six-month-old light rail system. Its working title is Daily Phoenix.
 
Plan B is narrower. Much narrower. Old idea: regional trend stories about migrant labor. New idea: opt-in text alerts about train delays. Old content: “In Prescott, a water war escalates.” New content: the details of every crime within a five-block radius of each rail stop.

With his business partner, newly minted Arizona State MBA Aleksandra Chojnacka, Klawonn will offer businesses a chance to be included in twice-daily text messages to mobile subscribers. “It might be, ‘Two-for-one sandwiches!'” Klawonn said. “It might be, ‘Extended happy hour over here!'”

A print tabloid, conceived in part for advertisers still focused on physical objects, might include coverage of government actions that relate to rail transit.
 
Klawonn’s remains in a tight space: he figures his Plan B will cost $220,000 in its first year, far more than The Zonie Report ever has. He figures he has until spring to secure the next round of private grants or investments, and he’s confident that with his new idea, that’s possible. And he still believes in his first big idea, which he still hopes can become a sort of NewWest for the Southwest, or at least for Arizona. After all, believing in regional policy reporting has gotten him this far.
 
“The Zonie Report was a journalistic success and an economic revenue failure,” Klawonn said. “I just thought if I could hang in there in some way and prove that I’m committed to this field and that I’m interested in trying new things, that something was going to break my way.”

POSTED     June 19, 2009, 10:33 a.m.
PART OF A SERIES     Knight News Challenge 2009
Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
A year in, The Guardian’s European edition contributes 15% of the publisher’s pageviews
After the launch of Guardian Europe, one-time donations from European readers increased by 45%.
Press Forward awards $20 million to 205 small local newsrooms
In response to the volume and quality of applications, Press Forward doubled the funding and number of grantees for this open call.
Midwestern news nonprofit The Beacon shuts down its Wichita newsroom
“We’ve realized that we can’t do it all, and have made the decision to no longer have a staffed newsroom in Wichita.”