In the crowded media market that is Detroit, Deadline Detroit has carved out enough room to grow its fledgling staff.
The Internet news source based in downtown Detroit (it calls the Compuware Building home) is looking to add a web developer intern and a news intern. The 1-year-old publication currently employs six full-time workers (four journalists and two advertising account executives) after hiring its first intern earlier this year.
Deadline Detroit publishes a combination of aggregated news content and its own original stories. Its stories range from hard news pieces covering the latest in the Motor City's fiscal calamity to providing opinion space for some of the region's up-and-coming editorial voices, such as Jeff Wattrick and Darrell Dawsey.
"Our commentary has been fairly sharp," says Bill McGraw, co-founder of
Deadline Detroit. "We have experienced journalists. What we do is kind of edgy. We try to be lively and interesting. Our motto is never be boring."
McGraw, a longtime staffer at the Detroit Free Press, co-founded Deadline Detroit with Al Lengel. Lengel wrote for The Detroit News for more than a decade before jumping to the Washington Post to cover law enforcement in 1990s during Detroit's newspaper strike. Lengel started
TickleTheWire.com, an online news aggregator for the law enforcement community, and was looking to raise funds for it when the idea for Deadline Detroit was born.
Compuware Ventures, the venture capital arm of its namesake parent, led the first round of seed funding for Deadline Detroit. McGraw expects to raise another round of venture capital later this year and hopes to grow Deadline Detroit's staff to close to a dozen people. These are goals that don't seem out of reach in a news town that is never boring.
"The rest of the world finds Detroit interesting and that's good for us," McGraw says.
Source: Bill McGraw, co-founder of Deadline Detroit
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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