Times Of San Diego - San Diego Startups

Times of San Diego is an independent news website covering the San Diego, California metropolitan area.

History

Times of San Diego was launched on March 13, 2014, by Chris Jennewein, an Internet news pioneer who introduced the first complete online newspaper at the San Jose Mercury News in 1993.

Content and Format

The site includes original stories by its staff and guest contributors, edited articles from City News Service, some aggregated content and op-ed columns by a variety of authors. The site publishes 20 to 25 articles daily.

Times of San Diego is arranged into 10 content sections and also offers a free email newsletter. The site is supported by national and local advertising. It is a WordPress site that uses responsive design to automatically re-size for smartphones and tablets.

Staff

Jennewein, who has over 25 years of online experience, is editor and publisher. Contributing editors include former Patch employees Ken Stone, Debbie Sklar and Alex Nguyen, contributing photographer Chris Stone, and several local college students. A number of well-known San Diego journalists and critics, notably Pat Launer, are occasional contributors.

Audience

The site reaches between 150,000 and 200,000 unique users every month, according to its published reports. The audience is young, with readers aged 25 to 44 constituting the largest segment. Nearly 60 percent of reading sessions are from Southern California. Quantcast reported that the site had 160,523 monthly unique users for the period June 9 - July 8, 2015.

Notable Coverage

Times of San Diego broke a story in February about the San Diego Fox News affiliate, KSWB-TV, mistakenly using a photograph of President Obama in connection with an article about a rape suspect. Readership was over 550,000 nationwide, and the story was picked up by news sites worldwide.

Significance

Times of San Diego differs from other recent local-media startups in providing full daily coverage of news in a large metro area, rather than infrequent in-depth articles. It differs in this regard from Voice of San Diego, a decade-old startup, and has passed that website in audience size. Times of San Diego's contributing editors have been featured on local radio programs and have led training sessions for local journalists. The site is featured on Michele's List, a widely followed directory of local media startups produced in collaboration with the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Times of San Diego contributing editors won four awards from the San Diego Press Club in October 2015 and 13 awards from the San Diego Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in July 2015.

Awards

Times of San Diego was named the Small Business of the Year for the 39th Senate District of California and was honored in Sacramento at California Small Business Day.

References