Chi-Town Daily News Folds

Thanks for the link!

Was it really such great work? How many of their stories made you call up a friend and say "Hey, check out this awesome story!"? One? Two? Any?

Like I was saying last week. I'm glad these guys gave it a go, but the problem wasn't the funding, it was the product.

Here's the full thing:

The editorial team at the Daily News is moving on to launch a new, for-profit local news venture.

Over the past four years, the staff, volunteers and supporters of Chi-Town Daily News have built an impressive thing -- a new kind of news organization that works aggressively to hold public officials accountable to voters and empowers members of long-ignored communities to tell their neighborhood's stories.

We've been privileged to work with a fantastic group of foundations and other supporters, including the Knight Foundation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Abra Prentice Foundation, and others too numerous to name here. Their advice and financial support have been instrumental to all that we've achieved, and we owe them a heartfelt thanks.

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.

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.

Last year, we raised about $300,000. This year, due to the economic downturn, it was unclear whether we would be able to maintain that level of revenue, let alone move quickly to expand our coverage.

So, after much soul-searching, we've decided to turn our efforts toward a business model that will support the kind of vibrant public affairs coverage that Chicago deserves. Ultimately, we believe we will be able to fulfill the same mission we set out to accomplish with the Daily News, though with a different business structure and a slightly different approach.

We've got some angel funders lined up, and will be recruiting additional investors over the next few weeks. I'll be announcing more details about the new venture shortly.

Meanwhile, we are talking with local organizations that we believe will be able to fund and grow the neighborhood reporting program. We expect to quickly place that program with an organization that will be committed to citizen journalism and great local news coverage, and one with the resources to make the program even bigger and better.

In the interim, we'll continue to update ChiTownDailyNews.org with the work of our existing volunteers, and with content from our partnership with Loyola University's City News reporting class.

Thanks for posting that, Kiyoshi. That's a pretty damning assessment of what happened, though it is funny to read coming from someone who works for a site that pays its writers in pennies.

Great piece, Mike. That's the best rundown I've seen yet. So they knew as early as last Friday? How is everyone just now hearing about it? I had no idea.

Mike, I didn't read Fernando's entry as a flame.

Geoff didn't delegate. As much as I admire him, I found that fault with him. I expect he would agree with that assessment.

Geoff is an entrepreneur. As a former entrepreneur I know that there often comes a point in the growth of the enterprise when you need to delegate. Geoff didn't. It is a difficult thing to do, it is your baby and you have a built-in fear that the woman who says she wants to care for your baby is going to strangle it instead.

From the view of being a community writer, one of those volunteers who are supposed to transition, the CTDN led me to believe community journalism isn't going to develop into a strong model. Strong voices may develop, Megan Cottrell is a great example, but not a model of challenge either to the MSM or the special interests.

There is a great story told, not of Geoff and the CTDN, but of another very good local site. The operator got press passes for a number of community journalists to cover the Obama event at Grant Park on election night. I believe he gave out four or five passes. Maybe he'll see this post and correct me.

As the night wore on, he needed stories for the next day about the event. Instead the Citizen Journalists called in to say that it was a wild party, or something like that, and there wouldn't be a report...

I remember him expressing frustration that he wasn't at that party AND had no copy for the following day.

Citizen Journalists, because they write when they want and about what they want, are not dependable. Geoff's great model was to add a core of writers who are paid for content. The great fault here was the copy wasn't always inclusive of all the readers AND he didn't sell ads.