Ex-USA Today biz reporter launching Louisville biz news site

Boulevard A former USA Today business journalist plans to launch a business news site on Aug. 1 covering the top companies in Louisville.

Jim Hopkins‘ site will be called Boulevard.

Hopkins will be focusing on 10 big employers in the area — from Amazon to Yum Brands, parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Combined, they employ more than 60,000 workers in the city, and nearly 2 million worldwide.

“Many are in flux right now, which means there’s a growing appetite for news about them,” said Hopkins in a message to Talking Biz News.

“But I’m also going to write about an array of nonprofits that get financial support from those big employers, including a newly expanded arts museum and a terrific regional repertory theater,” he added. “Few cities cover groups like that well. There’s also a lot of money sloshing around in local charitable foundations. The top 82 are sitting on $3 billion in endowments and other liquid assets. That’s a lot of money without a news watchdog.”

Hopkins has been a business news editor and reporter for newspapers across the country. They included The Courier-Journal in Louisville, where he was an investigative reporter in 1996 to 2000, and USA Today, where he covered entrepreneurs in 2000 to 2007 from the paper’s San Francisco bureau.

In 2008, Hopkins started Gannett Blog to focus on a single subject: the Gannett Co., which owns the Courier-Journal and 109 other newspapers.

Within a year, its audience soared to 30,000 readers posting thousands of comments and racking up 300,000 monthly page views. The site’s breaking news coverage and authoritative analysis became an industry must-read for other media reporters at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Columbia Journalism Review.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.