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.” Source: CJR’s Guide to Online News Startups

 

“‘Before we launched the database there was no comprehensive resource documenting the many online-only news sites, both national and local, that have emerged in recent years. It’s a big, highly diverse world — overwhelmingly so — and we wanted to help people get a sense of what’s out there. We’re not comprehensive yet in terms of the sheer number of sites we’ve documented — that will come — but we are comprehensive in the amount of data we collect on every site we profile.

Another major reason was that there’s a lot of talk about online news and online news business models, but very little reporting on how online news sites actually function — and that’s especially true for local news sites. We wanted our contribution to that conversation to be more fact-based, more rigorous.

We felt that news readers could use this type of resource to discover new sources of information, and we wanted people in the field of online journalism to have a resource through which they could look at what other sites were doing around the country and compare, contrast, do research, get ideas, hear war stories, etc.’” Source: 10,000 Words