Award-winning online news site closes as funds dry up

A US online news start-up, The Washington Independent (TWI), is to fold at the end of this month. Launched three years ago, it aimed to combine hard-nosed investigative reporting with up-to-the-minute news coverage. It achieved excellent journalistic results, winning awards for its reporting and praise from many newspaper reporters and editors. But, as editor Aaron Wiener writes in an explanatory posting "TWI was not just a journalistic experiment; it was also a financial one, and ultimately, the successes of the former couldn't sustain the strains of the latter." The site relied on donations, primarily from foundations seeking to promote journalism in the public interest, but Wiener said "those donations began drying up long ago." Note his concluding remark: "The crisis in the world of journalism today isn't really about journalism — it's about the bottom line. Reporters and editors everywhere are trying to find a way to keep their very good work alive." Sources: Washington Independent / Columbia Journalism Review