While single-subject websites all serve a defined community of interest, participants in our study conveyed a range of strategies for identifying and engaging their target audience within a given niche. Some are aimed at an elite readership of subject specialists. Archinect and IA Reporter mainly serve an audience of dedicated professionals; Archinect targets practicing architects and academics while IA Reporter focuses on legal professionals interested in international arbitration. OpenCanada, a website devoted to Canadian foreign policy, serves an elite national readership interested in global affairs. That scope consciously limits the size of its audience. “It’s a double niche,” said founder, Taylor Owen. (Owen is also the Director of Research at Columbia University.) “Instead of just the one niche of foreign policy, we add another filter to that, which is Canada.” In a hybrid model, HealthMap is targeting a mix of medical professionals (as information consumers) and the general public (as information providers). The model relies, in part, on self-reporting by citizens, who contribute data on the spread of infections in their vicinity. In a similar mode of thinking, SoccerDrugs (Fussball Doping), a website focused on doping in professional soccer, has a target audience of sports fans and sports officials—both the consumers and sources of information.
Other websites are explicitly aiming for a general audience with a particular interest, such as Deep-Sea News and FactCheck.org. Within their respective domains—oceans news and political accountability—each platform was created to serve a broad public with accessible insights in its field. Craig McClain, the founder of Deep-Sea News, describes it as a strategy of “outreach,” rather than “in-reach.” We also found a diversity of approaches in the initial setup of single-subject news outlets. Deep-Sea News and StartUp Beat are staffed by a single founding editor and fueled by volunteer contributors. Two of the publishers in our study, OpenCanada and FactCheck.org, were parented by and embedded within think tanks. Their respective institutions, the Canadian International Council and the Annenberg Public Policy Center, provided grant funding and goods in kind, such as office space and IT support. Other publishers have come to operate within a network model with affiliated sister sites, a fusion of hyperlocal and hypertopical beats. Homicide Watch Chicago was founded as a sister site to Homicide Watch websites in Washington, D.C. and Trenton, N.J. Education News Network (Chalkbeat) formed through a partnership between niche news sites Gotham Schools and EdNews Colorado. Their respective founders are soon launching affiliates in Tennessee and Indiana. Bleacher Report is a network of hypertopical news beats focused on specific sports teams. “It’s hundreds of individual niches. It’s the Vancouver Canucks or Michigan State basketball, and we are an amalgamation of all those,” said Bleacher Report’s King Kaufman, Write-Program Director. Tehran Bureau, which started as a self-funded independent news site, was subsequently adopted by PBS FRONTLINE. In January 2013, founder Kelly Golnoush Niknejad moved the site to The Guardian, which now contributes fundraising support and goods in kind to boost its operations. SoccerDrugs (Fussball Doping) similarly grew out of the investigative unit of a German newspaper, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. It
then moved on to independent operations when the founding publisher, Daniel Drepper, enrolled as a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Homicide Watch Chicago was parented by the Chicago Sun Times; Managing Editor Craig Newman says they were given the space, resources and autonomy to functionally run as an internal startup. He describes the model, which works as a de facto return to beat reporting within the newspaper ecosystem: These [Homicide Watch] folks are in the newsroom, but they’re not quite part of a newsroom structure…there’s a lot more flexibility there. It has the ability to focus really narrowly on one content area, one problem, one issue, which in this case, it’s a broad problem, but it is a very narrow focus when you get down to it. This person was killed, and here’s what it means to the people around him. It’s essentially a hyper-narrow beat, and they don’t get called away onto other nonsense, or they don’t get sucked into tangent conversations about crime as a whole in the city. It’s putting a lens on this one very specific problem. Single-subject news startups have also been wholly acquired by mainstream media partners. Bleacher Report was purchased by Turner Sports in August 2012, roughly six years after it went live. Capital New York, a single-subject website not currently included in our research group (due to an initial 20 website cap for the preliminary study), was acquired by POLITICO in September 2013. In at least one case, a mainstream media acquisition ended in divorce. TreeHugger, a website dedicated to issues of sustainability and design, was bought by the Discovery Networks in 2007 for a reported $10 million. After years of disharmonious operations, it was subsequently given away for free
to the Mother Nature Network. Lloyd Alter, the website’s managing editor, said that TreeHugger fared better as an independent news site than it did under Discovery, even from a financial perspective. He recounted: The marriage never worked out. The TV people never understood the digital people, and vice versa. The TV people couldn’t figure out how to sell ads against it. As soon as they went away and we could sell Google ads and others, without paying for Discovery’s massive overhead, we were doing great. Suddenly we’re on a breakeven basis. It’s pretty much through ads alone. We’re a nimble, standalone business. The Discovery experience hurt us in the long run. Everyone was miserable, the editor had to answer to them all day. We were overwhelmed by all-hands-on-deck meetings at Discovery. There was just no fit.