I am thrilled and honored to report Jay Rosen, Callie Crossley, Dan Gillmor and Bill Densmore have weighed in with advance praise for “The Wired City.” Their reputations precede them. You can read what they have to say by clicking here.
The Wired City
Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age • By Dan Kennedy
The Wired City 
How is the New Haven Independent a successful financial model? It pays a small number of journalists a small amount of money. Ms. Crossley’s description of the Independent’s readership of “robust” was close. But “miniscule” would have been more accurate.
@james: Thank you for your interest in “The Wired City.” Two responses: (1) The Independent employs four full-time journalists. None of them is getting rich, but their pay is not out of line with what people earn in community journalism in general. And though four full-timers is not a lot, it is roughly equivalent to the number of full-time reporters the New Haven Register assigns to cover New Haven. (2) No question the Independent’s audience is smaller than that of the Register. But it is read closely by government officials, community activists and involved citizens, and thus has influence and reach beyond its numbers.
I agree that the Independent can’t be the model for all media. We need all models in the mix. For the record: We do pay salaries and benefits on a par (sometimes higher) to what the state’s print dailies offer (except for the top editor/finance position). Also, we don’t cover 20 communities, so some of the numerical comparisons to corporate regional dailies are apples to oranges. According to Google Analytics, we have over 300,000 unique visitors a month. About a quarter of them return to the site, a number comparable to the number of households in our two main coverage areas. We do not do SEO to try to boost up the stats; we’re more interested in cultivating an engaged core of readers who appreciate intelligent local reporting and what to do something with it. As a not-for-profit, we do not sell advertising based on eyeballs and clicks. We raise philanthropic money based on doing good work and making an impact.