One year after launching our first program site, the Center for Independent Media is celebrating our groundbreaking work with our highest monthly readership on record.
The dog days of August delivered 350,000 monthly page views on Colorado Confidential, Minnesota Monitor, Iowa Independent, and our Fellows’ blogs combined. That’s more than our previous peak readership during November 2006. Our one year anniversary also coincides with another major milestone: CIM Fellows have cumulatively generated over 100 million “impressions” on TV, radio, and newspapers. These strong earned-media numbers reflect the quality of our Fellows’ work: reporting on a major bridge collapse in Minnesota, thorough coverage of the Iowa Straw Poll, and ongoing revelations concerning the “culture wars” in Colorado.
In addition, our work continues to win recognition for excellence in journalism: this August CIM Fellow Leslie Robinson in Colorado won first place for commentary in the online news division from the Association of Capitol Beat Reporters and Editors for her series on a Canadian-born elderly woman’s experience navigating the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and a first-hand account of the oil-shale bust on the Western Slope of the Rockies.
We are enormously proud of the bloggers in Colorado, Minnesota, and Iowa, and how their original work has so often outdistanced the traditional media in each of these states. We are on track to launch our fourth state program in Michigan on September 10th. We’ve selected 10 Fellows from the Wolverine State, accomplished men and women with a wide variety of backgrounds, representing Michigan’s diverse population. These are talented and ethical reporters and writers who are going to do great work.
Equally exciting, the Center is going to launch a fifth program this fall, based in Washington DC, with the aim of reporting on Congress and the workings of federal government. We’ll soon be announcing the hiring of an exciting addition to the team here, someone who will be editorial director in Washington and for our programs nationwide.
That’s this summer’s report.
P.S. What stories drove our record-breaking number of page views? Take a look:
Colorado Confidential
Minnesota Monitor
- Fred Phelps Is Coming
- 35W Bridge Collapses into Mississippi River
- Minneapolis Airport Restroom Sting Nabs Idaho Senator