When OpenFile founder and CEO Wilf Dinnick was still working as a foreign correspondent for CNN in the Middle East, he was summoned to the network’s London office where the senior executives showed off iReport, their citizen journalism project. “They said that if the twin towers fell today, people wouldn’t be watching it on CNN, they would go to YouTube,” he recalls. The light bulb went on, and Dinnick says he started to think about the power of user-generated content and what some call “networked journalism.” The result of that brainstorm was the creation of OpenFile, which launched last month in Toronto and plans to expand to several other cities over the coming months.
OpenFile is not doing “citizen journalism,” says Dinnick. Instead, it uses trained journalists — many of whom have come from one of the mainstream media outlets in Canada, which have been shedding staff — as the core of its hyper-local news operation. So in Toronto, for example, former newspaper editor Kathy Vey acts as something like a managing editor, dealing with contributors and making sure that the stories they are working on are appropriately handled and reported. The company’s name came from the idea that any user of the site can suggest a story or post a news tip, which then “opens a file” on that topic that both readers and the journalist assigned to the story can contribute to.
The idea, Dinnick says, is to make reporting on local issues — whether it’s an abandoned building that residents feel is an eyesore, or a zoning change for a specific site — an ongoing process that the community can become a part of, rather than a one-off story that a reporter sitting in a newsroom miles away from the community files and then forgets about. Although the journalists working for OpenFile are not really bloggers, the startup’s approach seems very blog-like, with readers contributing comments and suggestions, and even uploading images and videos, which the reporter can then work into the ongoing story about that topic or issue.
When it comes to funding, Dinnick says that OpenFile approached a number of the major media entities in Canada as well as some traditional venture capital sources, and wound up getting a substantial amount of seed funding from a large financial player in Toronto that doesn’t wish to be identified — enough to fund the company’s capital requirements for at least three to four years, the former reporter for CNN and ABC says. OpenFile has also signed up a number of national advertisers for the site and is building a local sales force, and has been having discussions with some of the large media companies in Toronto about partnerships and syndication opportunities as well.
There are a number of startups and digital ventures that have been trying to make hyper-local journalism work at some kind of scale in the U.S., including sites such as ** and **, as well as aggregators like Outside.in and Topix.net — and of course the 800-pound gorilla that is Patch.com, the local journalism venture that AOL was planning to spend upwards of $50 million on this year alone. OpenFile is similar to Patch in at least one sense, in that both it and Patch are looking to cover communities by hiring a journalist who can effectively become an editorial co-ordinator for that local effort by finding freelancers, bloggers, etc.