'Potemkin Village' Redux

In case you haven't seen it yet, Tom Grubisich has a follow-up piece to last years look at Citizen Journalism efforts around the country. While he's not as harsh as he was last year, he again brings up some great points. Muncie Free Press even gets a mention.

From the article:

Muncie Free Press

A little more than a year after he launched MuncieFreePress in Muncie, Ind., KPaul Mallasch says: "We're still afloat! We're still growing." Mallasch still runs the site out of his apartment, and still does a lot of the reporting and other editorial and business chores, while also juggling freelance balls to pay the bills. But he's finally getting help from the community.

"I have one citizen recording and providing audio for her town's council meeting," he wrote in an e-mail. "I have a retired professor writing the occasional column. Tips and press releases of all types are coming in more frequently now. I have another lady writing and reporting on the local CAFO issue [concentrated animal feeding operations that critics say can produce heavily polluted runoff]." Still, he has to lard his pages sometimes with syndicated bulking agent, including a Michael Reagan column.

Mallasch's main online competition is the Muncie Star Press, where he used to work. "We're at about 1/8th of the traffic that the Star Press had when I left a year ago," Mallasch e-mailed. "They're still stomping us in the search engines too, because they've had their domain since '96 and Gannett heavily crosslinks their sites."

Between January and September, MuncieFreePress more than tripled its monthly visitors (from 2,543 to 8,035) and almost doubled its page views (from 38,867 to 74,651).

All this with one person in charge of everything from bandwidth to blogging.

Should note that those are Unique visitors. The actual number of visitors is about double that number.

Questions?

Technorati Tags: Advertising Citizen Journalism Corporate New Media Editorial Grassroots Journalism New Media Independent Online