By: Jennifer Saba While 2008 could pretty much be summed up as the year of the slasher, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation made some end-of-year grants that restored some hope for the industry. The foundation awarded four online community news sites a combined total of $339,000 for staff and content expansion.
The four sites are familiar names in big markets where the daily metros are suffering ad revenue plunges and cutbacks: MinnPost.com (Minneapolis/St. Paul), the Voice of San Diego, the Chi-town Daily News in Chicago and the St. Louis Beacon.
"What we did was not arbitrary," says Gary Kebbel, the Knight Foundation's journalism program director. Between 20 and 25 online sites that Knight plucked from applications were invited to Miami in August. The applicants had the common thread of being new community sites with different business models.
The foundation asked the participants three things: What are you doing? What role are you filling in the community? And perhaps the sweetest one: What can we do to help?
The foundation settled on the four sites and made the one-year grant, which will allow for each recipient to hire a few more staffers to cover subjects deemed important to their communities.
The foundation is observing these burgeoning experiments in hopes of finding new ways to inform citizens ? something that obviously takes more than a year, Kebbel notes. Knight is using page views, time spent and unique users as yardsticks for determining growth. But it is also looking at more subjective ways the sites impact their communities.
Knight wanted the grants to last more than just a year, but given the state of the economy, the foundation needed to be conservative, since it too has taken a hit, Kebbel adds.
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