Billy Penn is Brady's biggest digital bet

Jim Brady

Nobody can accuse Jim Brady of not putting his money where is mouth is. Literally, now.

Brady, whose last major gig was as editor in chief of Digital First Media, launched his Philadelphia-based civic news startup Billy Penn last October to much media fanfare. After all, Brady is himself a much beloved veteran digital journalist and one of the form's earliest and loudest advocates.

Brady told the story of Billy Penn to publisher attendees of the Key Executives Mega-Conference, an annual meeting of the Local Media Association, Southern Newspaper Publishers Association and Inland Press Association, on Tuesday, Feb. 24. He has laid out his ambitions for the site – millennially-targeted, mobile centric, civic-minded – to many media outlets before, but one of the most striking details came as almost an afterthought late in his presentation: the site is financed totally out of his own pocket.

Brady will be out $225,000 this year, and "it'll lose close to $500,000 before it gets anywhere close to turning this," he says, "but it will take a while."

Read more at NetNewsCheck