Scott Gordon

The sound crew at the Double Door is playing wiffle ball in front of an empty stage. A line drive to right field barely misses Geoff Dougherty's head as he sits at the bar. He's explaining the harsh money and traffic numbers on the Chi-Town Daily News, his slowly growing venture into online citizen journalism--journalism that relies on local residents, not career reporters.

"If you have 100,000 page views a month and you sell ads for every single [page], you're gonna be making $1,000"--and he's expecting a tenth of that this month. Dougherty, 36, has made his living on freelance writing and computer work since leaving his reporting job at the Chicago Tribune in November and starting the site. He's also been doing most of the editing, ad sales and fundraising on his own.

"We could run a pretty decent newsroom on ad revenues from one million page views a month," he concludes.

The word "newsroom" seems foreign in citizen journalism, but so does Dougherty's editorial plan. He's looking beyond the unfocused idealism that's left many citizen-journalism sites like Backfence.com riddled with glorified press releases and hackneyed political rants. Even the better examples, like MyMissourian.com, provide no model for "hyper-local" coverage of a city as dense and varied as Chicago.

Dougherty's solution: Pay people for stories, and send them to journalism school for free. Armed with a $12,000 grant from the University of Maryland's Center for Interactive Journalism, Dougherty and some teachers in Columbia College's journalism department are plotting a special curriculum that will recruit reporters from Chicago neighborhoods--starting with Streeterville, Gold Coast and Bronzeville.

After the sound crew's ballgame ends, the Daily News holds a benefit show with three local artists it has featured: Vultures are Lovebirds, Everyday Celebrity and Jenny Gillespie. Though he's said that journalists are "the worst PR people," Dougherty at least fits in tonight. He's booked shows previously for his own band, the Debauchers, and with his faded Duran Duran T-shirt and scruffy black hair, he doesn't even look like an editor. The site gets eighty percent of the proceeds. With about seventy people (including three Tribune reporters Dougherty knows) showing up at $10 a head, the site's looking at a maximum gain of $560.

"I think there's a lot of kicking tires before somebody buys in," Dougherty says. The site's music and sports blogs are thriving, but most of the local hard news comes from Northwestern University's Medill News Service. In April, Dougherty and his partners from Columbia--Barbara Iverson and Natalie Moore--held a recruitment and training meeting at the Chinatown branch of the Chicago Public Library. Only one volunteer showed up then to take advantage of Dougherty's diligently copied tip sheets on reporting and writing, and Dougherty says he's lost track of her since.

Iverson knows from working with idealistic journalism students that local news doesn't excite most beginners--they'd rather start with "children working in coal mines in Nigeria," she says.

(2006-06-21)

Also by Scott Gordon

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