Plowing through emails, tweets and RSS feeds last night, I found another great story of entrepreneurial journalism: Planet Princeton founder Krystal Knapp profiled by The News Frontier, an impressive and important project from the Columbia Journalism Review (and a good companion to Nieman Lab’s Encyclo).
Knapp, who I had the pleasure of working with at the Poynter Institute in Jan., has gone from freelance to Facebook to founder. It’s a compelling example of a news entrepreneur identifying a need and working hard to fill it. For example, the need to cover local elections with urgency that digital journalism allows – and demands. From the News Frontier piece:
Even though Knapp began posting just a few months ago, she’s already made a name for the site with a couple of scoops. She broke the story of a Republican challenger in the Princeton mayoral campaign. “It was literally like my second post,” she says. Knapp kept her edge through the primaries: “None of the other papers had the results right away.”
Another great piece of this story is Knapp’s involvement with the New Jersey Hyperlocal News Association which provides support and networking for the state’s local news startups. I can picture a day when most states have such an organization, culminating in the annual hyperlocal news association conference. (Not that anyone needs another conference to go to, of course.)
Read the entire Planet Princeton profile at the News Frontier site.
Mark Briggs 
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