The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

What kinds of digitally-based journalism in the U.S. is the commercial market likely to support, and how?

This report focuses on news organizations that do original journalism, defined for our purposes as independent fact-finding undertaken for the benefit of communities of citizens. Those communities can be defined in the traditional way, by geography, but can also be brought together by topics or commonalities of interest. We also look into media companies that aggregate content and generate traffic in the process.

This report focuses mostly on for-profit news enterprises. The authors recognize the outstanding work done by such national organizations as ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as local sites like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost. But for the purposes of this study, the authors felt it was more valuable to spend time examining organizations that rely as much as possible on the commercial market.

Project leads: Lucas Graves, Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave

May 10, 2011