ChicagoNow

Last updated

ChicagoNow
ChicagoNow logo.png
ChicagoNow logo
Type of site
Blogging site
Available in English
Dissolved August 18, 2022;19 months ago (2022-08-18)
Owner Tribune Publishing
URL www.chicagonow.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedAugust 2009;14 years ago (2009-08)

ChicagoNow [1] was a blogging site managed by Tribune Publishing, owner of the print Chicago Tribune newspaper. It featured a network of blogs of international, national, and local interest on a variety of topics ranging from crime to public schools to politics and diplomacy. [2]

Contents

Notable ChicagoNow contributors included the staff of the Chicago Reporter , [3] and Shimer College president Susan Henking. [4]

On August 18, 2022, the site was shut down with no announcement. [5]

History

ChicagoNow was launched in August 2009. [6] [7] Its launch coincided with the Tribune company's bankruptcy. [8] As a newspaper-run blogging community, with the initial tagline "a blog by and for locals", it represented what one observer called "a new value proposition for newspapers". [8]

ChicagoNow used Movable Type as its blogging platform when it first launched, then switched to WordPress in 2011. [9]

The website of the Tribune daily RedEye was initially hosted on ChicagoNow but later moved to its own domain. [10]

After the acquisition of the Tribune by Alden Global Capital, ChicagoNow was shut down without warning on August 18, 2022. [5]

Reception

In April 2010, the World Editors Forum described ChicagoNow as a "hyperlocal blog network" that has "a personal quality that many larger newspapers lack." [11]

In September 2010, Time Out Chicago criticized ChicagoNow for hosting an unidentified police officer in what they called "a hate-filled, racist rant by blogger Joe the Cop entitled 'The ghetto shooting template' for three days and counting now." [12] ChicagoNow removed the posts in question, stating that while they don't edit posts, they reserve the right to remove them. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blog</span> Discussion or informational site published on the internet

A blog is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Movable Type</span> Blogging software

Movable Type is a weblog publishing system developed by the company Six Apart. It was publicly announced on September 3, 2001; version 1.0 was publicly released on October 8, 2001. The current version is 8.0.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google News</span> News aggregator website and app

Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.

Boing Boing is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won the Bloggies for Weblog of the Year, in 2004 and 2005. The editors are Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, Carla Sinclair, and Rob Beschizza, and the publisher is Jason Weisberger.

Hyperlocal is information oriented around a well-defined community with its primary focus directed toward the concerns of the population in that community. The term can be used as a noun in isolation or as a modifier of some other term. When used in isolation it refers to the emergent ecology of data, aggregators, publication mechanism and user interactions and behaviors which centre on a resident of a location and the business of being a resident. More recently, the term hyperlocal has become synonymous with the combined use of applications on mobile devices and GPS technology. Use of the term originated in 1991, in reference to local television news content.

The Mormon blogosphere is a segment of the blogosphere focused on issues related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Weblogs, Inc. was a blog network that published content on a variety of subjects, including tech news, video games, automobiles, and pop culture. At one point, the network had as many as 90 blogs, although the vast majority of its traffic could be attributed to a smaller number of breakout titles, as was typical of most large-scale successful blog networks of the mid-2000s. Popular blogs included Engadget, Autoblog, TUAW, Joystiq, Luxist, Slashfood, Cinematical, TV Squad, Download Squad, Blogging Baby, Gadling, AdJab, and Blogging Stocks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WordPress.com</span> Blogging platform owned and hosted online by Automattic

WordPress.com is a web building platform for self-publishing that is popular for blogging and other works. It is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc. It is run on a modified version of the WordPress software. This website provides free blog hosting for registered users and is financially supported via paid upgrades, "VIP" services and advertising.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adrian Holovaty</span> American web developer, musician, entrepreneur

Adrian Holovaty is an American web developer, musician and entrepreneur from Chicago, Illinois, living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is co-creator of the Django web framework and an advocate of "journalism via computer programming".

<i>Babble.com</i> Online magazine and blog network for parents

Babble was an online magazine and blog network targeting young, educated, urban parents. Their site operated a large network of parent blogs, employing many bloggers on the subjects of parenting and child-raising.

ScienceBlogs is an invitation-only blog network and virtual community that operated initially for almost 12 years, from 2006 to 2017. It was created by Seed Media Group to enhance public understanding of science. Each blog had its own theme, speciality and author(s) and was not subject to editorial control. Authors included active scientists working in industry, universities and medical schools as well as college professors, physicians, professional writers, graduate students, and post-docs. On 24 January 2015, 19 of the blogs had seen posting in the past month. 11 of these had been on ScienceBlogs since 2006. ScienceBlogs shut down at the end of October 2017. In late August 2018, the website's front page displayed a notice suggesting it was about to become active once again.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Lindsay (academic)</span> American academic

Thomas Kevin Lindsay is an American academic who briefly served as President of Shimer College. He was the Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities until December 2008. He was also the Director of the NEH We the People initiative, which funds programs, research and other activities that explore significant events and themes in US history and culture, and advance knowledge of the principles that define America. He serves as the Director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tumblr</span> Microblogging and social networking website

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Encyclopedia Dramatica</span> Parody-themed wiki website

Encyclopedia Dramatica is a satirical online community centered around a wiki that acts as a "troll archive". The site hosts racist material and shock content; as a result it was filtered from Google Search in 2010. An administrator of the website was the perpetrator of the 2017 Aztec High School shooting, and users of the site frequently participate in harassment campaigns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Examiner.com</span> Former news website

Examiner.com was an American news website based in Denver, Colorado, that operated using a network of "pro-am contributors"' for content. It had various local editions with contributors posting city-based items tailored to 238 markets throughout the United States and parts of Canada in two putative national editions, one for each country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Posterous</span> Simple blogging platform

Posterous was a simple blogging platform started in May 2008. It supported integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes. It was based in San Francisco and funded by Y Combinator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daily Voice (American hyperlocal news)</span>

Daily Voice, formerly Main Street Connect, is an American community journalism company that says it "bridge[s] the 'news desert' between national and hyper-local, covering town, city, county, and state". It is based in Norwalk, Connecticut, and it operates town-based news websites in various places in New Jersey and in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

Skyrock.com was a social networking service based in France that offered a free space on the web for users to create blogs, add profiles, and exchange messages with other registered members. Skyrock.com ceased operations on 21 August 2023.

DNAinfo was an online newspaper that focused on neighborhood news in New York City and Chicago. It was closed down by CEO and owner Joe Ricketts in November 2017 after writers in its New York branch voted to unionize, a move to which Ricketts was opposed.

References

  1. "ChicagoNow". www.chicagonow.com. Archived from the original on August 20, 2012. Retrieved April 4, 2018.
  2. Rao, Leena (April 24, 2010). "The Tribune Company Finds An Audience For Homegrown Hyperlocal News Site ChicagoNow". TechCrunch. Retrieved February 25, 2012.
  3. "About | Chicago Muckrakers". ChicagoNow. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  4. "About Shimer Prez". ChicagoNow. Archived from the original on May 7, 2013. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  5. 1 2 Kaufmann, Justine (August 25, 2022). "ChicagoNow is now Chicago history after Tribune shuts down blog network". Axios . Retrieved April 3, 2024.
  6. "About ChicagoNow". ChicagoNow. Retrieved August 31, 2011.
  7. Tribune Media Group, "Reach and Engage Chicago's Blogging Community" Archived January 27, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
  8. 1 2 Rachel Davis Mersey (2010). Can Journalism be Saved?: Rediscovering America's Appetite for News. pp. 73–74. ISBN   978-0313392085.
  9. "Welcome to ChicagoNow 2.0". ChicagoNow. June 29, 2011. Retrieved August 31, 2011.
  10. "RedEye | ChicagoNow". Archived from the original on December 18, 2009.
  11. Jaffe, Alexandra (April 26, 2010). "ChicagoNow offers hope for hyperlocal news sites". World Editors Forum. Retrieved February 25, 2012.
  12. Sennett, Frank (September 23, 2010). "Trib's ChicagoNow hosts cop's racist rant three days and counting". Time Out Chicago . Archived from the original on September 26, 2010. Retrieved February 25, 2012.
  13. "Why we removed 2 Arresting Tales posts". ChicagoNow Staff Blog. September 23, 2010. Retrieved February 25, 2012.