Chicagotalks.org Welcomes Citizen Journalists as Chi-Town Daily News Folds

Gapers Block: Merge – Chi-Town Daily News Folds broke the news about the online news site Chitowndailynews.com – 2007 winner of Knight news challenge grant ($340,000) – and its current economic problems, suggesting it was in trouble.

But Chi-Town Daily News’ Geoff Doherty told the rest of the story on his site, writing, “We’ve concluded that, as a nonprofit, we cannot raise the money we need to build a truly robust local news organization that provides comprehensive local coverage.”

He continued, “The Daily News needs $1 million to $2 million per year to do a great job of covering a city as sprawling and complex as Chicago. And despite hundreds of phone calls and letters to foundations, corporations and individual donors over the past four years, we’ve never come close to that.”

Another Knight News Challenge grant awardee, Dave Cohn, aka DigiDave, of Spot.Us weighed in on Chi-Town Daily News’ abrupt ending, noting that Doherty did not demonstrate much transparency, though there were some signals the organization was in trouble. Dave notes that any organization is a reflection of its founder, a statement that I would have to agree with in my role as co-founder of Chicagotalks.org. Here is Dave in his first video post:

Chicagotalks.org has been working with its core of student reporters and won two prestigious investigative awards. We are now moving into a new phase of development and are actively looking to connect with passionate community residents who are writing about their neighborhoods as residents, not as pro-type journalists. We would like to add voices from people talking about the world they live in to our professionally covered stories. Our vision of the future is to stay true to local, citizen-focused and citizen-generated news. We have had the support of funders and Columbia College Chicago, but we believe the outlines of new ways to generate revenue are starting to be visible.

WE WANT YOU, so register, send us your pitch, or just call us and tell your story using your cell phone. Contact us at 312 436-1820 (or use the handy widget on this page) Bloggers are welcome, too.

More on the melt-down of Chi-Town Daily News:

Fernando Diaz, former staffer at Chi-Town Daily News, weighs in at ChicagoNow:

“As with the majority of news organizations today, Chi-Town was undone by the management. The Daily News sank because of Dougherty. But it rose because of the scoops and dogged reporting of the talented journalists who briefly called it home and the citizens, a diverse group of people who cared about their communities, who would drop by the newsroom after a hard day’s work to cover their corner of the world for the rest of us.”

“Dougherty’s inability to accept help from these hungry reporters who believed and still believe in the importance of journalism, admit when he was wrong and delegate the basics of running a business simply caught up to him,” Diaz writes via Chi-Town Daily News: Confessions of an ex-staffer – ChicagoNow News & Opinion.

Volunteer coordinator for Chitown Daily News, Frank Edwards, in Gapers Block:

“Personally, I’m pretty disappointed. I wish we’d known about this sooner, I wish we had more details. I’ve put a lot of work into this organization, and have built the volunteer program from the ground up, and would hate to see it just vanish. We found out about this on Wednesday, so it’s still pretty fresh. I wish we’d had more time to digest this and prepare for unemployment.”

“At C-BOM, we discussed ways to diversify our funding streams and work together as a community to achieve long-term sustainability (find detailed notes from the event here.) One of those ideas was to create a local blog ad network, pooling our page views to attract larger advertisers and sharing revenue. I sincerely hope Chicago’s blogging community–my community–follows up on the ideas we explored that day,” he writes via BREAKING: Chitown Daily News Shutting Down – Chicagosphere.

From Crain’s: In an interview with Crain’s earlier this year, Mr. Dougherty said he expected demand for his site to grow as other newspapers cut staff. He said his goal was to build a $2-million business funded equally by foundations, advertisers and individual contributors, but he acknowledged he was finding it hard to win the support of philanthropies.