Site Specific

Three-year-old nonprofit the New England Center for Investigative Reporting is striving to keep serious, in-depth reporting alive in New England, and Boston University has been behind it every step of the way by providing a home as well as funding.

ZGS Communications’ Spanish-language news site Holaciudad partners with TV network Telemundo and mixes local news with national content in its effort to serve Spanish speakers from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds.

Examiner.com, the Clarity Digital Group-owned local-content network, has opened up new audiences with a recent deal to provide its vetted user-created content on niche topics to CBS Local. The deal also creates new revenue streams for the network, adding to what is already drawn from display ands and sponsored content.

In Rhode Island’s tony tourist town, Tom Shevlin, the founder of local news site Newport Now, turned the usual digital story on its ear by buying the town’s print weekly after leaving the paper to start the site. The union has been a success so far, earning nearly half a million dollars in annual revenue.

In the small New York community of Batavia, local news site The Batavian — which started life as an experiment for Gatehouse, but has since gone independent — has thrived on a mix of breaking news, photography and display advertisements.

In small Berkeley, Calif. — known for its strong liberal streak — Berkeleyside, created by three veteran journalists, has carved out an online space by finding a formula to covering every aspect of the Bay Area community and engaging its readers.

Sacramento Press didn’t stop at creating its content management system or digital media service, it started its own digital ad agency, the Sacramento Local Online Digital Ad Network, which connects 63 area sites ranging from blogs to the local PBS and NPR sites for coordinated digital ad buys.

Nonprofit news site The Bay Citizen got a jump start to success early in its life with a unique content relationship with the New York Times that provides two pages of local news for the newspaper’s Northern California edition.

Baristanet — launched in 2004 with a $6,000 investment by novelist and former New York Times columnist — is bringing a coffeehouse, DIY-style of hyperlocal news to its audience of affluent, educated, largely female readers in northern New Jersey.