As I write the first update of 2010, I would like to reflect for a moment on the year that was, and the year ahead.  2009 was an extraordinary year, both for the challenges it presented and the results we achieved.  Some highlights:

• More people visited our sites than ever before.  In 2008 we logged 7.9 million unique visitors.  In 2009, we logged 12.2 million, an increase of 54% in a non election year. This is a stunning growth rate, which reflects the high quality and value of our daily reports.
• Technoraiti consistently ranks our sites in “Top 100″ most influential sites in the politics news category. The Washington Independent oscillates between first and fifth place, depending on the week.  Many of our state sites are in the Top 20.  This is an empirical reflection of our reporters’ ability to influence the daily conversation online.
• Our reporters won 16 awards for excellence in journalism, up from 15 in 2008.
• We tallied 35 stories that rose to the highest level of “impact journalism”– meaning they demonstrably impacted public debate and advanced the common good.  This is the heart of what we do, and these will be detailed in our annual report, in February.
• All of these results occurred in the most difficult economic period since the Great Depression.  Our donations fell 40%, and we found ways to reduce expenditures, become more efficient and yield impact.  Necessity is the mother of invention and these challenges made us stronger, nimbler, smarter: As I write this, there are 8 editors and 20 reporters producing daily journalism on our six sites.  I want to thank the entire CIM team for doing more with less. Yours is a truly extraordinary accomplishment.
• Earned income became a reality.  We generated over $40,000 in online ad sales, a source of revenue that didn’t exist in 2008.  We have ambitious plans to grow this to $100,000 in 2010.  In addition, we have several new earned income opportunities in development, which we’ll test in 2010.  Some of these are on the cutting edge, in terms of creativity and potential. Details will emerge in the next two months, as these new vehicles come online.

As we look at 2010, here’s what we see:

• New state programs: there are programs under development in three new states. Announcements as to these new states will be forthcoming as the budgets are secured.  We expect to make our first announcement this month.
• We’re going to launch a new web site, The American Independent (TAI), in the next 60 days. This site will be local in focus and national in scope: meaning we’ll be capable of providing close coverage of any local political race in the country, in states where we don’t currently operate programs.  Our aim is to produce on one site a full compendium of key election news in 2010.  More details on our TAI strategy will be provided in future updates.
• Greater engagement with our local readers. We are in process of developing a series of “beta tests” aimed at creating greater community around our news product, both online and offline.  Our aim is to significantly deepen engagement with our sites, and create vehicles for thought leaders, both locally and nationally, to reach civically engaged people in the communities we serve.  There is a major void in this area, which has precipitously widened with the collapse of traditional news media.

And on a trend forecasting note, from my personal perspective, I expect to see continued major collapse in the established news media in 2010.  We are at a major turning point, where all broadcast media are being subsumed by the Internet. The financial model for cable television will come under assault in 2010 as devices for wirelessly consuming streaming video come onto the market. This is likely to create a sudden and cataclysmic drop in broadcast news finances.  Television is poised to quickly enter the same vortex that hit newspapers in 2008, with the exception of live sports programming.  This trend is well defined, starting with the music industry in 1999, newspapers in 2008, and books in 2009 (e-books outsold print books for the first time this past Christmas).  TV is next.

This of course means the sector in which we operate– online news– should continue to see significant audience migration from old media to the new. We see this as a tremendous opportunity to raise our impact, deepen our audience engagement, and diversify our income from being mostly foundation grants.

None of this would be possible without your support.  Thank you.

We look forward to a great new year.

With best wishes,

David

As the 2010 midterm election campaigns begin in earnest, politics reporter Dave Weigel looked into a growing meme among Republicans: that their key to victory would be a call for an all-out repeal of President Obama’s health care reform. But some conservatives told Weigel they had real doubts about the strategy, since repealing health reform could well prove logistically and politically impossible.

One of the main difficulties of covering events in Iran is that the opposition rarely has access to the press. Through a series of connections and technological innovations, national security reporter Spencer Ackerman managed to circumvent these obstacles and speak with a member of Iran’s Green Movement. The interview shed light on the situation in Iran and revealed a growing frustration with the Obama administration’s lack of decisive action to help the dissidents.

While justifying troop escalation in the war in Afghanistan, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized the threat of domestic terror attacks from the tribal regions near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But national security reporter Spencer Ackerman spoke to current and former counterterrorism officials, as well as experts on al-Qaeda, and found that the administration has overstated the threat of attacks from these areas. One former CIA official called Clinton’s testimony before Congress “an oversimplification” that “distorts reality to muster support for a policy.”

David Weigel traced Adam Kokesh’s unlikely transformation from libertarian critic of the McCain campaign to front-runner for the GOP congressional nomination in New Mexico’s 3rd District. Although the 27-year-old Kokesh faces steep odds in a potential general-election match up, given the liberal nature of the district, his rise represents the growing influence of two currents in the Republican Party: the Ron Paul-inspired anti-war movement and the increasingly powerful Tea Party movement.

When Alabama Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith announced that he was switching parties, it seemed a symbolic victory for the GOP. But Weigel uncovered a different sentiment among conservative leaders in Griffith’s own district, who voiced a deep distrust of the newly minted Republican. A GOP candidate for Griffith’s seat told Weigel that he had every intention of challenging Griffith in a primary, and others on the right said they would support a primary challenge against Griffith, calling him an “S.O.B.” and “liar.”

Legal reporter Daphne Eviatar investigated the revival of military commissions in the United States as a means of trying terror suspects. The Supreme Court declared these commissions unconstitutional in 2006, and after Congress reinstated them with a new law in 2008, President Obama suspended them earlier this year. Now about a dozen military commissions cases are being revived, and sources raised questions about their efficacy and constitutionality.

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Editor John Tomasic took top traffic with his exclusive interview with Gov. Bill Rittter, in which the governor decried a trio of anti-tax initiatives heading for the Colorado ballot next year and challenged his Republican opponents to come out strongly against them. Ritter specifically called out former Congressman Scott McInnis, who has yet to take a stand on the issue.

Following a tip from a conservative blogger, editor John Tomasic broke the news that GOP senate candidate Jane Norton had, while speaking to a small group of Tea Partiers in Alamosa, proposed abolishing the federal Department of Education. Tomasic confirmed Norton’s remark with sources present at the event and went on to interview her campaign, which seemed unaware of the statement but said it was consistent with Norton’s small-government views. Tomasic’s story became a top-trafficked report, and the day after its publication ProgressNow launched a campaign citing TCI’s coverage and entreating petitioners to “tell Jane Norton to get serious about education, not pander to extremists.”

Dave Williams’ reporting on the questionable practices of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association’s (IREA) board spurred state Rep. Claire Levy to draft legislation aimed at cleaning up energy co-ops’ campaign practices. Levy’s bill seeks to ensure all co-op members have adequate information about how to get on the ballot, that they have the same access as current board members to the names and contact information for the full list of co-op members, and that co-ops are not sending out election propaganda on behalf of incumbents using rate payer funds. She plans to introduce the measure next month.

Williams also reported that, as IREA girds itself for a battery of bills aimed at regulation, the association has put another Republican lawmaker on its payroll. State Sen. Mike Kopp, whose background is in ministry and public administration, recently signed on with the global-warming-refuting co-op as its corporate efficiency expert. “What Mike brings to our operation is experience regarding certain things to make the thing run better,” Schroeder said of Kopp, although he couldn’t come up with the current senator’s exact title.

John Tomasic analyzed the little-covered speech by Sen. Michael Bennet on the floor of the Senate before casting his vote for the health care reform bill. Tomasic noted that the plain, straightforward speech presaged the heated election campaign he will be waging this year against Andrew Romanoff on the left and Jane Norton on the right. He also highlighted Bennet’s centrist views and his apparent disappointment with the partisan rancor that hobbled the key reform. “I will vote for health care reform because it is a step in the right direction,” he said. “But I will not go home and defend the actions of a Washington that is out of touch.”

Jason Hancock interviewed Senate majority leader Mike Gronstal and got him on record vowing to block any Republican efforts to push for a vote on same-sex marriage, which was legalized last year in a ruling by the Iowa Supreme Court. Republicans may try to force a vote on a marriage amendment, the Democrat from Council Bluffs said, but he will not allow any bill banning same-sex marriage to come to the floor. “I will not write discrimination into the constitution of the State of Iowa,” Gronstal said. “I’m going to block that at every opportunity. There will be no vote on the constitutional amendment.”

Although former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad has yet to declare his candidacy to reclaim his old office, Lynda Waddington reported that he’s already drumming up support on robocalls in eastern Iowa. On the call, Branstad angles for support from both fiscal and social conservatives, touting his “proven record” of income tax cuts and indicating he will “fight for traditional marriage.” Branstad has been hit by social conservatives who have been wary of his moderate positions. The robocalls came from a Washington, D.C.-area number that’s been linked to possible push-poll calls on taxpayer-funded abortion and health care reform “death panels.”

Jason Hancock broke the news that retired West Des Moines architect Mark Rees set up a federal campaign committee to run against U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell. Rees has no political or government experience and told Hancock that he would seek a solidly centrist and bipartisan approach to office. Three days later, Hancock culled the same sources to find that Urbandale physician Patrick Bertroche has also thrown his hat in the ring. Hancock’s scoops were widely tweeted and linked by competing media in Iowa.

Hancock also profiled moderate Republican strategist Doug Gross, who has gone from being his party’s standard bearer to one of the most controversial figures in Iowa politics, a journey that matches the GOP’s quest for direction. Conservative opinion-shapers in Iowa told Hancock that they believed Gross was involved in former Gov. Terry Branstad’s re-election campaign, but described him as a possible “poison pill” because the moderate has become public enemy No.1 for many Tea Partiers and evangelical Christians. Hancock’s reporting was circulated widely in the conservative blogosphere.

Soon after U.S. Rep Steve King said that the perceived problems surrounding ACORN were “thousands of times bigger than Watergate,” Lynda Waddington reported that King himself had repeatedly voted for programs that fund ACORN in 2005 and 2006. The duality suggests that, as scholars told Waddington, many legislators and most Americans had only scant knowledge of the organization before it became a conservative talking point.