Dataviz is a project currently being built at the University of Southern California. It's a news outlet that covers two areas of major interest to any urban audience: crime and traffic. And it's done purely through data and data visualizations with minimal text.
The idea: Traditional news writing is costly to produce and time-consuming to digest. Once a reporter writes an article, its relevance is fleeting, and so are the opportunities to monetize it. The idea is to work with regularly occurring databases (such as crime) that are cleaned and sorted automatically. This allows numerous “stories” to be created from the same data. Example: A chart showing that violent crime in Los Angeles has risen by 12% over the past year. However, because all of the data is geo-located, tailored stories can also be delivered based on your neighborhood. Example: While crime in the city overall is up, in your neighborhood it has dropped by 8%. Because so much of this can be generated automatically, the costs of production go down dramatically. This allows the news staff to focus on deeper analysis.