This brief study investigates the influence of Internet websites operated by independent non-traditional media outlets with a Chicago Illinois focus. In order to do this, we characterize the content, traffic, and audience composition of 13 different independent Chicago-specific websites, 7 of which were listed by Tribune in their October 23rd filing with the FCC, and compare them with 11 websites operated by traditional media companies based in the Chicago area.

The findings of this study demonstrate the following:

• The independent Chicago-specific websites do not publish appreciable amounts of original local news content.
• Close to 60 percent of the stories in our sample of Chicago-specific websites were on nonhard news topics such as sports and entertainment.
• Only 13.7 percent of the stories in our sample of Chicago-specific websites contained original reporting. But the bulk of these stories were on soft-news topics, such as concert and restaurant reviews.
• In total, only 5.5 percent of the stories in our sample of Chicago-specific websites contained original reporting on hard news topics such as crime, local governance, education and local politics.
• More than half of the stories on “hard” news topics linked to stories on Web sites owned by traditional media.
• The independent Chicago-specific websites have very small audiences. The average number of unique visitors in a single month to the independent Chicago-specific websites was just over 14,000. The average number of unique monthly visitors to the websites of the two major Chicago newspapers is nearly 80 times as large. Furthermore, the physical space presence of the traditional media outlets would make their viewership far larger.
• The audiences of the independent Chicago-specific websites are very transient. Only 12 percent of the visitors to the independent Chicago-specific websites viewed the site between 2 and 30 times in a month. However, 28 percent of the visitors to the websites of the dominant Chicago daily newspapers, and 19 percent of the visitors to local TV websites were frequent users, viewing the sites between 2 and 30 times in a month.

The results of this study (and that of our prior study which examined city-specific websites in 16 other media markets) demonstrate that though the Internet provides another medium for the dissemination of local news, it has yet to actually compete with, or diminish the influence of the traditional newspaper and broadcast news outlets. Thus, the presence of these city-specific local websites does not provide a
compelling reason to remove important ownership protections that maintain citizen’s access to a vibrant and diverse local news media.