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The media landscape -- especially newspapers -- has changed
dramatically in Connecticut in the past decade. Many daily or weekly
papers have stopped publishing altogether, while others have severely
cut back on their page counts and/or departments, as a result of rising
costs and competition from the Internet.
But Greater New Haven has proven to be a source of innovation in
on-line-only local journalism. One of the earliest is the New Haven
Independent, which debuted just after Labor Day, 2005. It was started by
Paul Bass, a local journalist for more than 30 years who had co-founded
the short-lived print version of the Independent in the mid-1980s.
Back in the infancy of on-line journalism, Bass was incubating the idea
of a hyper-local news outlet -- one that would cover New Haven
government, politics, education, business development, and the city's
neighborhoods in depth. He set it up as a non-profit. "I had experience
in the for-profit model and thought it wouldn't work," he says, adding
that he read on a journalism website "about the idea of journalism as a
public utility like water or air, and a light went off in my head -- try
the NPR [National Public Radio] model." ...
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