Watchdog.org
|
Type of site
|
News |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Founded | September 2009 |
| Owner | Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 89,003 (December 2015[update]) |
| Commercial | No |
| Current status | Active |
Watchdog.org is a network of American news websites that features reporting on state and local government from a conservative perspective. It is a project of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, an online news organization. Watchdog posts stories on Watchdog websites and syndicates them. Watchdog broke the story of the phantom congressional districts in the wake of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Watchdog.org's stated mission is "to restore oversight of our state governments, to hold politicians and bureaucrats at all levels accountable for their handling of taxpayers’ dollars and to promote individual liberty and free markets." Watchdog's websites reflect a focus on government waste and public employee unions. Columbia Journalism Review said the productivity of the Watchdog sites was "impressive," and noted the commitment to original news reporting, as opposed to news aggregation or punditry.
Watchdog.org is a project of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. The Franklin Center received 95% of its 2011 revenue from the donor-advised fund Donors Trust. Watchdog.org has state-based investigative reporters in more than 40 states. In 2012, Watchdog had sites in 18 states. In 2014, the Franklin Center said they had one reporter in each of 14 state capitols and two in Nebraska and Virginia. Most of the Watchdog sites have one staff reporter in addition to accepting contributions from citizen journalists via a platform called Watchdog Wire.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism of the Pew Research Center surveyed and analyzed nonprofit news organizations active on the state or national level in 2011 and again in 2013. The studies found that the most consistently ideological of the news outlets were those that were organized in networks, specifically the conservative Watchdog network and the liberal American Independent News Network.
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