Columbia Journalism Review : The News Frontier Database

The online news outlets below were recently added to the News Frontier Database, or updated. If you'd like to recommend an organization for inclusion in the NFDB, let us know via email here. If you operate a news outlet and would like your organization to be included, click here.

AUGUST 9, 2011 10:58 AM

The Big Lead

From sports blog to corporate flagship

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — The Big Lead first entered the consciousness of the sports media world around 2006, when then-Kansas City Star sports columnist Jason Whitlock trashed a series of colleagues in a flame-throwing interview that, for a few days at least, lit up the Internet. Less than a year after that the site received a bigger, if more unlikely,...

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AUGUST 8, 2011 11:49 AM

Deadspin

Gawker Media's sports news success story

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — For Deadspin, the impish sports wing of the Gawker empire, the presence of a pink gorilla at a hotel meeting between Tommy Craggs, a Deadspin senior editor, and John Walsh, ESPN's executive vice president for content, must have felt like a crowning achievement. The site made its name most recently by publishing pictures of...

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AUGUST 1, 2011 11:53 AM

ClearHealthCosts.com

Guiding consumers through the health care marketplace

PELHAM, NEW YORK — Jeanne Pinder had a storied career in print journalism: she was born into a newspaper family and spent twenty-three years at The New York Times. But today Pinder is venturing into new territory by founding a start-up website that aims to bring transparency and accountability to the health care marketplace. ClearHealthCosts.com was launched in beta form by Pinder in...

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JULY 29, 2011 01:42 AM

PubliCola

Extensive political coverage for Seattle and Washington state

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON — Seattle-based online news source PubliCola is named for Publius Valerius Publicola. Publicola is an agnomen meaning "friend of the people," and P.V. Publicola was one of four Roman aristocrats credited with establishing the first Roman Republic by helping to overthrow the Roman monarchy--the Federalist Papers were published under the pseudonym "Publius" in his honor. As a news site, PubliCola serves...

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JULY 28, 2011 03:16 PM

Rust Wire

Reporting on urban and social issues in the Rust Belt

CLEVELAND, OHIO — Rust Wire, a collaborative media project which bills itself as "a voice for change in the Industrial Midwest," was founded in 2009 by Angie Schmitt and Kate Giammarise in order to challenge the notion that some economically enfeebled towns in the Midwestern United States "weren't worth saving." The site, which features original reporting and photography, first-person essays, and opinion...

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JULY 27, 2011 02:53 PM

A2Politico

Accountability journalism in Ann Arbor, Mich.

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN — When the daily Ann Arbor News announced in July 2009 that it would be cutting back publication to two days a week and firing a vast majority of its staff, the college town of Ann Arbor, Mich. suddenly became, after 174 years, a city without a daily newspaper. That's when Patricia Lesko, a higher-education book publisher and thirty-year resident, saw an...

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JULY 27, 2011 02:48 PM

Gotham Gazette

Detailed reporting on New York City governance

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — It's no secret that many Americans are shamefully uninformed about their elected representatives, particularly at the local level. The blame for this can often go as much to local press as to citizens themselves, but thanks to Gotham Gazette, an online source for what's happening in the world of NYC government, citizens of the nation's largest metropolis will...

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JULY 26, 2011 08:20 AM

Innovation Trail

Public radio takes to the web to cover upstate New York's transitioning economy

ROCHESTER, NEW YORK — Fifty years ago the economy of upstate New York was rooted in industry and manufacturing, but in recent decades these sectors have dramatically declined. In the 1980s alone, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs were lost, according to the Albany Times Union. "Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse were heavy industrial areas," says journalist Juan Vazquez. "A lot of the economy was based on...

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JULY 25, 2011 04:00 PM

Universal Hub

A wicked smart Boston hyperlocal

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — What started as a simple online directory of businesses, restaurants, and other establishments serving Boston has grown into a full-blown hub of Beantown information. After a layoff prompted him to take his side project full-time, Adam Gaffin set about building Universal Hub into a hyperlocal news hub with an original Boston twist. If you want the day's biggest stories, stick...

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JULY 21, 2011 05:46 PM

Common Language Project

In-depth human rights reporting and multimedia storytelling

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON —In 2005, three friends on their way to becoming freshly anointed college grads had an idea. They were budding journalists with global ambitions who didn't want to sit on their hands while foreign coverage in American newspapers continued to fade. The three, Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill, and Jessica Partnow, decided to take a trip to about a dozen countries in Southeast Asia and...

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JULY 21, 2011 12:18 PM

Sports Gab Network

A network of over seventy sports blogs with a special focus on the NFL

MOUNT LAUREL, NEW JERSEY — An increasingly large player in the world of sports fan blogs, the Sports Gab Network has been one of several such news sites in the past couple of years to give many of the traditional online sports news sites a run for their money. The site was founded with just one contributor in 2006, when an NFL blog written...

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JULY 20, 2011 12:47 PM

The Forum

Local news for four small New Hampshire towns

DEERFIELD, NEW HAMPSHIRE — When Denise Greig and some colleagues founded New Hampshire-based digital newspaper The Forum in 2005, web-based journalism hadn't really made its way to the rural communities that it served. "When we took on [this project], we were explaining the Internet to our funders," laughs Greig, the current chair of The Forum's board of directors. Six years later, with The Forum...

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JULY 18, 2011 04:18 PM

E&E; Publishing

High-cost subscription coverage of environment and energy policy and markets

WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — Launched in 1998, E&E; Publishing started with six employees producing high-priced subscription energy policy coverage out of Washington D.C. and has grown into an award-winning online news outlet with an editorial staff of forty-five and bureaus in San Francisco and New York City. Over the years, the company's readership has grown from roughly 1,000 to 40,000, and includes...

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JULY 18, 2011 11:55 AM

paidContent

Covering the business of digital media since 2002

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — In 2008, when Guardian News & Media bought Rafat Ali's ContentNext Media, Ali wrote that the acquisition marked the "2.0 phase" of his company. It was an aptly webby phrase from the man who six years earlier founded ContentNext's flagship site, paidContent.org, with the aim of obsessively covering the economics of the then just-emerging world...

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JULY 15, 2011 11:39 AM

HealthNewsReview.org

A watchdog for health care journalism

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA — The job of a health care reporter is to provide accurate, objective coverage of the health care industry. Yet in Gary Schwitzer's opinion, that rarely happens in the American media. "The marketing forces in health care are so overwhelming even good journalists may not realize they're being sold a bill of goods when they are," says Schwitzer, a former news reporter for...

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The News Frontier Database

Innovation Trail
Public radio takes to the web to cover upstate New York’s transitioning economy

ROCHESTER, NEW YORK -- Fifty years ago the economy of upstate New York was rooted in industry and manufacturing, but in recent decades these sectors have dramatically declined. In the 1980s alone, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs were lost, according to the Albany Times Union. "Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse were heavy industrial areas," says journalist Juan Vazquez. "A lot of the economy was based on manufacturing... There's a definite transition of what the economy is going to be here. How are we going to sort of re-image ourselves?"

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