Courtney Lowery, managing editor and co-founder with Jonathan Weber of the New West Network, described the business of the regional news blog for the Rocky Mountains in a talk Oct. 5, 2006, at the
J-Lab Citizen Media Summit in Washington, D.C. NewWest is venture-capital funded, has three full-time employees and 12 paid contributors in major cities of the American West. It projects profitability in two years, based on a combination of advertisements, the inauguration of a print magazine in 2007, staging conferences and running ancillary businesses, such as an indoor-place advertising business recently purchased. Lowery describes the mission of NewWest as sharing information about core cultural, economic and environmental issues for the Rockies. What drives traffic to the site is "killer stories," she says, and constant updating of web pages with fresh material.
DOWNLOAD/LISTEN to an excerpt of Lowery''s talk (23 mins.; 10.3MB, MP3).
Is "citizen journalism" too broad a term? Lowery thinks so, in a video interview with J.D. Lasica of Our Media.
(VIDEO).
