July 5, 2011 – A project funded by the Chicago Community Trust, Knight Foundation, and Driehaus Foundation has identified more than 400 “new news” websites that provide news and information to residents of Chicago – and are replacing a smaller number of traditional mass media outlets.

A report released late last month analyzed the sites and concluded websites, podcasts, video streams, and mobile applications are replacing a mass media model that has been around for decades.

The report emphasized a need for sites to link to each other, describing this as a “new news ecosystem.” Many sites, especially those operated by traditional media, do not link to other sites. Those that do, link only to sites related by content. The sites that receive the most links are “major sources of original news reporting” such as chicagotribune.com, gapersblock.com, and chicagoist.com.

The trend, however, is not entirely positive, says the report. “Few of the [smaller] news publishers in the Chicago area can afford to hire professional journalists. On the other hand, there is potential strength in the openness of digital platforms and the lowering of barriers to entry. Suddenly, anyone can publish news of any topic.”

The study was done by Rich Gorden, a professor and director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

“We’re still in the infancy of developing methods to identify and rank influential sites on the Internet,” says Gorden (left). “I think Chicago’s in the forefront of this work. We’ve now had three serious efforts…to get a handle on it. As far as I know, there’s no other similar effort in other major metros.”

Chicago Community Trust has been trying to improve this new news ecosystem since 2009, when it used money from a $24 million grant to establish the Community News Matters program.

Over the past two years, representatives of Chicago Community Trust have struggled to explain why Marina City Online – a news and information website serving River North, averaging 5,423 visits per month so far this year, and currently providing links to almost 200 other sites – has never been recognized by CCT as a source of online information. With effort, MCO was able to get into 2011 media guides published by the Community Media Workshop, another CCT project, but it is not among 439 sites the project calls its “best approximation of the core of the Chicago news ecosystem.”

• Read the entire report
• Related story: Menagerie of local sites compete for space at online news trough