There’s much to report in this final update. We’ve changed our name (and our URL) to the more catchy ChicagoTalks; we’ve won our first national award for an investigative series that ran just two months after last year’s launch; and we’re averaging more than 3,500 unique visitors a month without any marketing or promotion of the site (though we plan to do so in the future).
We reached our goals in terms of training young journalists and publishing “hyperlocal” news online for Chicago residents in a number of neighborhoods. We have been able to keep a pretty constant supply of stories, averaging at least one new story on the home page five days a week. We have built up traffic and audience for the site. We have cross-linked to, aggregated content from and worked with other community news and citizen journalism sites. As far as engaging citizens as consistent contributors to our site, our results are mixed, as we explain below.
