Founders Seeking Buyers for SDNN, Local Online News Startup

The San Diego News Network, or SDNN, which launched a regional news website in March 2009, boasted of rapid expansion plans, and which reportedly raised close to $3.2 million, is searching for a buyer.

SDNN is continuing to publish San Diego news on its website with a reduced staff, according to SDNN President (and former San Diego Union-Tribune online executive) Chris Jennewein in a news item published today by the Union-Tribune. Freelancers were told before the Memorial Holiday weekend they would not be paid for work submitted after June 1, and all staffers at its Orange County website, OCLNN, were laid off. Jennewien says the SWRNN website for Southwestern Riverside County still employs some staffers.

Neil Senturia, SDNN’s founding CEO, and his wife, Associate Publisher Barbara Bry, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment this morning. Senturia had talked ambitiously in September of establishing 40 websites nationwide, and last month, SDNN launched a weekly print newspaper that was intended to circulate in the San Diego community encompassing La Jolla, Del Mar, CA, and the UC San Diego campus. A regulatory filing last August shows the company raised at least $707,000 of a planned $2 million investment round, although one local report says SDNN’s total was $3.18 million.

Senturia told me about six weeks ago that he had discussed licensing SDNN’s technology with top executives at the Union-Tribune, which operates the well-established news site, SignOnSanDiego.com. Senturia told me SDNN’s technology was ideally suited to operate as an interactive community hub and low-cost content aggregator, providing local news, sports, events, lifestyle, and entertainment information. Under a syndication deal with SDNN, Xconomy provides news about local technology and life sciences innovation for use on SDNN’s website.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.