the NEW news 2010

More than eight million visitors engaged with 146 Chicagoland online news and blog sites during May 2010, according to The NEW News 2010: The Second Annual Survey of the Chicago Area's Online News Ecosystem, produced by Community Media Workshop for The Chicago Community Trust.

The online news ecosystem continues to grow while traditional media outlets retool and embrace the web. Use of video is growing, experiments with hyper-local news sites continue and the line between bloggers and niche news continues to blur. But despite the apparently large number of consumers of online information, it doesn't appear there has been any explosion in the number of people actually earning a living producing this information.

While the Chicago area has a proliferation of online news and information sites, when it comes to traffic, the sites of mainstream media clearly dominate.

Six of the eight million unique cumulative visitors reported by all media outlets participating in the survey were to Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, RedEye and ChicagoNow (the Trib's blog site).

The next tier (e.g. Crains, Post Tribune, Fox, Reader, Chicagoist) attracted between 100,000 to 260,000 unique visitors each.

The next tier, attracting between 20,000 and 100,000 unique visitors each covered most of the remaining measurable visitor traffic (e.g., WGN Radio, Centerstage Chicago, Vocalo, WTTW, Chicago Magazine, WBEZ, EveryBlock, Gapers Block, Progress Illinois, Windy Citizen, Time Out, Chicago Defender and the Illinois Review). Seventy-five sites listed were too small to show measurable visitor traffic by commercial tracking sources.