(Originally posted 6/30/11)
In perusing for new charts and graphs for my media monopoly resources page, I ran across a great new database from Columbia Journalism Review.
The News Frontier Database is a searchable, living, and ongoing documentation of digital news outlets across the country. Featuring originally reported profiles and extensive data sets on each outlet, the NFDB is a tool for those who study or pursue online journalism, a window into that world for the uninitiated, and, like any journalistic product, a means by which to shed light on an important topic. We plan to build the NFDB into the most comprehensive resource of its kind.
The FAQ page for the database is pretty interesting from a database methodology standpoint (what to include/exclude? what counts as journalism?). The database really shows the emphasis of the CJR folks on journalism revenue models. There's nothing wrong or surprising about this emphasis -- it's just strikingly apparent from the drop-down options that revenue models are an explicit focus of the database.
Adding to the database could also make for a great class project for folks teaching a range of media studies courses. I'm thinking about having a group from my Sports, Media, & Society class beef up the sports listings in the database this fall. The database FAQ page notes that CJR is interested in this kind of involvement:
If you teach at a university and would like to have your students contribute articles and research to the database, e-mail us here. We’ve already had one successful partnership with the University of Alabama, which assigned some of its graduate students to write articles for the database. We’re interesting in pursuing more of these partnerships.
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