Gotham Gazette

via outside.in

In recent weeks, we've been following some "hyperlocal" New York City media and journalism developments.

On Sunday, The Huffington Post launched a New York edition, which is partnering with community newspapers like the Bronx News Network and The Riverdale Press and offering up its citizen journalism unit to the online politics and policy publication The Gotham Gazette. (Incidentally, as we reported last week, The Gazette just won a $250,000 grant to build a City Council watchdog wiki that will combine citizen journalism with reporting and fact-checking by the Gazette's editorial staff.)

As my colleague Gillian Reagan recently noted, The New York Times' new Web site The Local, which covers Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, has launched a virtual assignment desk that encourages readers to "Be The Journalist"—the site lists meetings that need covering, and readers volunteer to attend, take notes and file a report to be edited by the blog's staff.

And back in May, we profiled a not-for-profit organization that's campaigning to acquire the ".nyc" top level domain when it becomes available in 2010 in order to set up a city-wide network of neighborhood Web sites.

So we read with interest Fred Wilson's post about local media today on A VC. He writes:

A prototype of Councilpedia.

City Council member items, the discretionary money council members can give to community groups in their districts, have come under a great deal of scrutiny in the last few years. There was the slush-fund scandal, and following that, a series of revelations about council members handing out money to organizations that employed family members (helpfully rounded up in today's Daily News). There are also several organizations that received member-item money that are currently under investigation.

These are the types of story that Gotham Gazette, a daily online news digest of New York politics and policy, hopes will be unearthed when it launches Councilpedia, its planned wiki of City Council voting records and campaign contributions that will fuse citizen journalism with reporting and fact-checking by the Gazette's editorial staff.

“Sometimes you’ll see a council member make a vote or take a position on something and you’ll wonder why this person is doing that,” said Gail Robinson, the Gazette’s editor in chief, “and sometimes the history of who his or her supporters are can inform that.”

via knightfoundation.org

Yesterday, the Knight Foundation announced the winners of its 2009 News Challenge for innovative online journalism projects. Journalists from The New York Times and ProPublica won the top prize of $719,500 to fund DocumentCloud, a data-archiving program designed to enhance investigative reporting for news organizations, bloggers and the public. And the Gotham Gazette took home the third place sum of $250,000 for the development of Councilpedia, an in-depth wiki about the New York City Council that will fuse citizen contributions with reporting and fact-checking by the Gazette's editorial staff.

We also found at least four additional New York-specific projects on a list of this year's 60 finalists:

• NewsMine: NYC - To create an online marketplace where bloggers, journalists and news organizations can legally find, buy and sell the rights to use full-resolution multimedia news content.
• New York Stories - To create a video portrait of New York City through an online site that aggregates professional and citizen news videos.
• Town Hall Online - To engage more New Yorkers in the key issues affecting their neighborhoods by hosting 25 interactive online discussions during the 2009 election season.
• Go Green NYC - To raise awareness about environmental justice and public health issues in New York through a bilingual web portal.

We're trying to track down the contestants to learn more about what these projects entail. We also have a call out to the Gotham Gazette's editor to talk about Councilpedia, but in the meantime, you can read a little more about it over at Nieman Lab.