Posted by chicagomedia.org on September 11, 2009 at 15:44:37:
Chi-Town Daily News cuts staff
By: Ann Saphir
Sept. 11, 2009
(Crain's) -- The non-profit Chi-Town Daily News has laid off all its staff members, blaming a recession that's already helped send the city's two biggest metro papers into bankruptcy.
"We ran out of money, and we got laid off," says Alex Parker, one of four full-timers who were laid off Thursday. Mr. Parker covered public health for the organization.
"It's really unfortunate not only because we've lost our jobs, but because we were doing really good work; we had reporters covering things no one else does."
Editor Geoff Dougherty said he plans to launch a new for-profit news organization to take the place of the venture he founded in 2005, and expects his staff to resume their jobs in about four weeks.
"We've concluded that as a non-profit we cannot raise the money we need to build a truly robust news organization that provides comprehensive local coverage," he said in a note on the Web site.
The Daily News needs at least $1 million a year to run, he said. Last year, the organization was able to raise only $300,000, and "this year due to the economic downturn, it was unclear whether we would be able to maintain that level of revenue," he said.
Mr. Dougherty, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, augmented his small full-time staff with a crew of freelancers and a hundred volunteer journalists.
It covered many public affairs issues that the big newsrooms often ignored, sending reporters to meetings of school boards, water boards and the Chicago Housing Authority, for example.
The volunteers will continue to provide news to the Web site until the new venture can start, he said.
In an interview with Crain's earlier this year, Mr. Dougherty said he expected demand for his site to grow as other newspapers cut staff. He said his goal was to build a $2-million business funded equally by foundations, advertisers and individual contributors, but he acknowledged he was finding it hard to win the support of philanthropies.
Mr. Dougherty said he has some investors lined up and will be recruiting more "over the next few weeks." The parent companies of the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times are in bankruptcy proceedings, pushed there in part by the steep slide in advertising sales after last fall's credit crisis.