Geoff Dougherty

In 2005, Dougherty founded the nonprofit Chicago Daily News, an online-only news organization devoted to hyperlocal coverage of Chicago neighborhoods. The name echoed that of the Chicago Daily News, a newspaper which had folded in 1978 and had been held in high regard by him.[1] He even used Craigslist to advertise for writers.[1] The organization shortly changed its name to Chi-Town Daily News. In 2007, it received $340,000 in funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to build a network of trained citizen journalists to cover their Chicago neighborhoods.[2]

The news organization won national attention for its business model and journalism, including coverage in The Washington Post.[3] and Boston Globe.[4] Chi-Town Daily News attracted some criticism from traditional journalists, who argued that citizen journalism would encourage news organizations to lay off full-time, professional reporters in favor of unpaid volunteers incapable of producing high-caliber journalism.[5] Chi-Town Daily News closed in September 2009, citing a lack of available philanthropic funds to continue operations.[6]

In 2010, Dougherty and a group of former Chi-Town Daily News reporters launched Chicago Current, an insider political paper modeled after Politico.[7]

Before launching the two online newspapers, Dougherty was the computer-assisted reporting editor at the Chicago Tribune, where he undertook investigations on coal mining[8] and food safety.[9]

Earlier, he served as computer-assisted reporting editor at the Miami Herald, where he played a key role in the paper's investigation into the flawed presidential election of 2000, and the subsequent effort to examine and analyze all of the discarded ballots in Florida.[10]

Dougherty is now a journalist for U.S. News & World Report, performing quantitative analysis on health care-related topics. In 2015, he and Steve Sternberg reported on increased procedural complication rates for surgeries at low-volume hospitals.[11] This led Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and the University of Michigan Health System to impose policies of minimum volume for certain procedures.[12]