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Windy Citizen was a Chicago-based local news site that used crowd curation to determine its lead stories. It was founded in 2008 and shut down in 2012.
Windy Citizen relied on user submissions for its content. It used a Digg-like mechanism for determining stories’ popularity, asking users — whose identity on the site was tied to their social networking accounts — to vote stories up or down. The site’s front page consisted of the most popular posts on the site at any given moment. At one point, Windy Citizen had about 100,000 unique monthly users.
Windy Citizen was founded by Brad Flora, a developer and journalist. Flora shut the site down in 2012 because of a lack of revenue needed to keep it running.
In 2010, Flora won a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to develop NowSpots, an experiment in real-time advertising that works by syndicating social media-based messages from sponsors. Flora experimented with the advertising on the Windy Citizen site, and the site remained operational after Windy Citizen’s closing.
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit investigative journalism project based at Boston University, the first such organization that covers local and regional issues. The Center was founded in 2009 and is funded by the university as well as a $400,000 Knight Foundation grant. The Center was staffed as of 2012 by four…
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