Forbes.com, the website of the national business magazine, featured an article on three online new sites of San Diego.
The story looks at how the future of local news journalism is doing in the Internet world, highlighting three sites competing for online readership: the San Diego News Network (SDNN) that is earning through ad money; the nonprofit, independent VoiceofSanDiego.org that depends on donors; and The San Diego Union-Tribune’s site (SignOnSanDiego.com) which is confronted with an uncertain future.
The article looks at how SignOnSanDiego.com is doing in the midst of the economy. The two online-only publications, SDNN and voiceofsandiego.org, are trying to carve their own local niches to keep journalism progressing into a more digitally focused world.
From the article:
If you want a glimpse of what local news may soon look like in big cities with shrinking newspapers, head to San Diego. Here you’ll find a Web news venture that gives writers a cut of the ad money created by their own stories; another whose nonprofit founders raise money from readers to buy laptops for their reporters; and a third venture which, in spite of the $10 million it nets each year, faces a very uncertain future.
All three are vying for the attention of 3 million San Diegans, an affluent-skewing population living in neatly landscaped suburbs and large beachfront properties. The area is rife with biotech startups and defense contractors. San Diego is California’s second-largest city, yet it’s a one-newspaper town whose newspaper is faltering. Ad revenue at the San Diego Union-Tribune has dropped 40% since 2006.
You can read the whole story here.
