about  /   archives  /   contact  /   subscribe  /   twitter    
Share this entry
Make this entry better

What are we missing? Is there a key link we skipped, or a part of the story we got wrong?

Let us know — we’re counting on you to help Encyclo get better.

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Key links:
Primary website:
chicagocurrent.com
Primary Twitter:
@chicagocurrent

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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 Chi-Town Daily News was a nonprofit local news site in Chicago that folded in 2009 and reorganized as the for-profit Chicago Current.

The Daily News was launched in 2005 by former Chicago Tribune reporter Geoff Dougherty and had a staff of eight at its peak. The site was funded by a combination of membership fees and grants, receiving $440,000 from the Knight Foundation.

After raising just $600,000 since 2005 on an intended budget of $1 million to $2 million, the site laid off its staff and suspended operation in September 2009, announcing a switch from a nonprofit to a for-profit model. The organization was reborn in November 2009 as the Chicago Current.

The for-profit Current is available online for free but charges for home delivery of its print edition. The Current’s revenue comes from print and online advertising, and it has three full-time staff members. Dougherty hopes to break even on it by late 2010.

The Daily News was a general-interest news site, though it was heavy on local public-interest stories. The Current exclusively covers local politics.

In 2007, the Daily News began using a volunteer citizen-journalism model to attempt to cover public-interest stories in each of Chicago’s neighborhoods, as well as city-wide issues. The money for the effort came from the Knight Foundation.

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
Dec. 14, 2009 / Jim Barnett
Are news nonprofits doomed to reliance on big gifts? A study in fundraising — and sustainability — I’ve been studying journalism nonprofits one way or another for about five years now, and I confess that in all that time, I’ve looked at their business models really as being slightly different iterations of the sam...
Oct. 13, 2009 / Jim Barnett
Teaching nonprofits how to fish — Like a lot of people who are concerned about the future of journalism in the digital age, I’m still wondering what we’re supposed to have learned from the demise of Chi-Town Daily News last month. So I called...
Sept. 23, 2009 / Jim Barnett
Seeking fundraising help from the pros: Where ProPublica is turning — A frequently misunderstood aspect of nonprofits is the idea that fundraising is somehow a tin-cup substitute for a smart business plan. That misunderstanding gained traction in some circles a couple of weeks ago when Geo...
Sept. 14, 2009 / Jim Barnett
Buying time in Chi-Town — Like many, I was disappointed to read Friday that the editorial team behind Chi-Town Daily News was giving up on its nonprofit business model in order to launch a new, as-yet-unnamed, for-profit news site about city news...
Sept. 8, 2009 / C.W. Anderson
The future of news in 4 dimensions: How real news orgs fit in the model — In my last post, I spent a lot of time laying out a fairly abstract framework for how we can think intelligently about future kinds of news organizations. I argued they could be usefully evaluated and charted on four fac...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: May 10, 2011.
Make this entry better
How could this entry improve? What's missing, unclear, or wrong?
Name (optional)
Email (optional)
Explore: INDenverTimes
INDenverTimes logo

INDenverTimes is an online local news organization founded in 2009 after the death of the Rocky Mountain News. Plans for the Times were announced by former Rocky staffers in March 2009, a few weeks after the Rocky stopped publishing. The Times hoped to bring in 50,000 paid subscribers and fund a 30-person newsroom, but they…

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

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.
Some rights reserved. Copyright information »