Episodes
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Today we're talking to ... ourselves. There's lots happening in the local news space, and we want to hit some highlights. We also have a programming note: This will be our final podcast this summer. We're going to make like the French and take August off. Before signing off, we discuss the state of play for newsletters (who knew email is the killer app); podcasts (we're still free and we still do it for love, not money); and advertising (some newspapers are charging a fee if you'd like your digital feed served with no advertising.) Ellen has a remembrance of Jack Connors, a legendary Boston advertising mogul and backer of local news who once tried to buy The Boston Globe. She also finds a refreshing stream of news about local people, businesses, and government on the home pages of hyperlocal outlets in swing states.
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Dan and Ellen talk to Larry Ryckman. Ryckman is editor of The Colorado Sun, the subject of a chapter that Dan wrote for our book, "What Works in Community News." The Sun was founded by journalists who worked at The Denver Post, which had been cut and cut and cut under the ownership of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that the Post staff called "vulture capitalists."
The Sun was founded as a for-profit public benefit corporation. A PBC is a legal designation covering for-profit organizations that serve society in some way. Among other things, a PBC is under no fiduciary obligation to enrich its owners and may instead plow revenues back into the enterprise. And we've found that for-profit models are rare in the world of news startups. But that changed last year, when The Sun joined its nonprofit peers. Ryckman explains.
Dan gives a listen to a New York Times podcast with Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist who wrote âBowling Aloneâ some years back. In a fascinating 40 minutes, Putnam talks about his work in trying to build social capital. He never once mentions local news, but there are important intersections between his ideas and what this podcast is focused on.
Ellen reports on an important transition at Sahan Journal in Minnesota, one of the projects we wrote about in our book. The founding CEO and publisher, Mukhtar Ibrahim, is moving on and a successor has been named. Starting in September, Vanan Murugesan will be leading Sahan. He has experience in the nonprofit sector and also has experience in public media.
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Episodes manquant?
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Today Dan and Ellen talk to Peter Bhatia. Bhatia is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor who is now chief executive officer of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit, non-partisan, no-paywall local news site that launched in spring of 2023. He has also been editor and vice president at the Detroit Free Press, from 2017-2023, and served as a regional editor for Gannett, supervising newsrooms in Michigan and Ohio.
His resume includes helping lead newsrooms that won 10 Pulitzer Prizes. He is the first journalist of South Asian heritage to lead a major daily newspaper in the U.S. He has also been involved in some recent controversies. There's much to talk about.
In Quick Takes, Dan talks about an important press-freedom case in Mississippi. The former governor, Phil Bryant, is suing Mississippi Today over its Pulitzer Prize-winning series on a state welfare scandal that got national attention and even managed to touch former NFL quarterback Brett Favre. Bryant says he needs access to Todayâs internal documents in order to prove his libel case, and a state judge has agreed. Mississippi Today has decided to take the case to the state Supreme Court. Itâs a risk, because it will set a precedent in the Magnolia State â for better or worse.
Ellen highlights an interview with Alicia Bell, the director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. Bell talked to Editor & Publisher about her upcoming report on what it will take to build a thriving local news ecosystem for BIPOC communities across the country. Her estimate: it will take somewhere between $380 million to $7.1 billion annually to truly fund BIPOC journalism across the U.S. That's a big number, but Borealis is a pioneer in this space, and it's important research as national efforts like Press Forward roll out.
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Dan and Ellen talk with Johanna Dunaway, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. She is also research director of the university's Institute for Democracy, Journalism, and Citizenship in Washington D.C.
Dan got to know Johanna when they were both Joan Shorenstein Fellows at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2016. Dan wrote part of his book about a new breed of wealthy newspaper owners, âThe Return of the Moguls.â Johanna wrote a paper that examined how mobile technology was actually contributing to the digital divide between rich and poor.
She recently received a $200,000 grant from the Carnegie Fellows Program to further her work on local news. Among other things, she plans on building out an expansive database that lists local news outlets throughout the United States. She also plans to examine whether the nationalizing of news contributes to the toxic quality of public discourse.
Dan has a Quick Take on what has been a bad year so far for public broadcasting operations, with cuts being imposed from Washington, D.C., to Denver and elsewhere. In Boston, where âWhat Worksâ is based. GBH News, the local news arm of the public media powerhouse GBH, has imposed some devastating cuts. But theyâve also brought in new leadership that could lead to a brighter future. Ellen looks at a new use of print by the all-digital Texas Tribune, the nonprofit news outlet based in Austin.
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Dan and Ellen talk to Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos. Both are leading an expansion by the MassLive Media Group, which operates MassLive.com.
Macht, the president, previously led the digital transformation of the Harvard Business Review.
Ramos is the vice president of content and executive editor of MassLive. Ramos comes to Massachusetts after leading newsrooms in Miami, Indiana, Memphis, and Chicago.
In Quick Takes, Dan discusses an announcement Google made last week that could prove to be pretty harmful to local news publishers. Essentially Google is going to merge its search engine with Gemini, its artificial-intelligence tool, which is similar to ChatGPT. Soon, anything you search for on Google will give you not just links but an AI-generated answer. Most people arenât going to bother with those links, thus depriving news outlets of much-needed traffic.
Ellen reviews the findings from a recent Pew Research Center poll that studied local news habits. It's perhaps no surprise to see that the US adults surveyed increasingly turn to websites and social media for their news.
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Today Dan and Ellen talk to Anne Eisenmenger, who is president of Beaver Dam Partners and publisher of several weekly newspapers in southeast Massachusetts, including Wareham Week and Sippican Week. Anne has a laser focus on developing and operating hyperlocal for-profit newspapers.
Anne lives in Wareham, and she founded her community news company there in 2010 with the launch of Wareham Week. And, yes, it's an actual print newspaper, with a for-profit business model, and it's packed with ads.
Dan dives into one of the best newspaper stories in the country, which is right here in our backyard, or at least in the western sector of our backyard. It involves the Berkshire Eagle, a daily based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that was once regarded as one of the best small papers in the country. Then it fell into the hands of Alden Global Capital, so we all know what happened next. This story, though, has a happy ending, at least so far, and Iâll talk about it in our Quick Takes.
Ellen talked recently with Paul Hammel, a reporter doing a story on the loss of small-town newspapers across Nebraska. He focused on a couple who sold their paper, in a town of 1,000, but had to come back after retirement when the new owner quit in the middle of the night.
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Dan and Ellen talk to Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher Magazine, which is now much, much more than a magazine. It's a cutting-edge multimedia source of information on innovation in our industry. Mike hosts E&P's weekly Vodcast series, "E&P Reports." And much more. Heâs been a guest on this podcast previously, and todayâs heâs back to talk about a new venture.
Blinder has a new vertical on public media, called Public Pulse. It's newsy and filled with insider information. It aggregates the latest on stories like conflict ignited by Uri Berliner at NPR, and features reporting on trends like the collaboration of universities and public radio stations. Thereâs already an excellent publication in this space called Current, and Public Pulse is a welcome addition to that.
Ellen has a Quick Take on a big award going to MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. The nonprofit Memphis news outlet, which we profile in our book, âWhat Works in Community News,â will receive the Lorraine Branham IDEA Award from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. We discuss other media criticism up for awards, as well.
Dan gives a shoutout to a New Hampshire news project previously featured on the podcast. InDepthNH recently revealed some pretty disturbing details about a state representative â and it came only after a four-year quest to obtain public records. It demonstrates why journalists need to be persistent.
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Dan talks with Josh Stearns, the senior director of the Public Square Program at Democracy Fund. The Democracy Fund is an independent foundation that works for something very basic and increasingly important: to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges. Josh leads the foundation's work rebuilding local news. The Democracy Fund supports media leaders, defends press freedom, and holds social media platforms accountable. (Ellen was stuck in traffic somewhere on the Zakim Bridge in Boston for the duration of this show, but she'll return next episode!)
In our Quick Takes, Dan poaches in Ellen's territory and reports on a development in Iowa, the Hawkeye State. When two local weekly newspapers near Iowa City recently got into trouble, their owner found an unusual buyer: The Daily Iowan, the independent nonprofit student newspaper. Now there are plans to supplement local coverage with contributions from student journalists. Itâs not something Dan would like to see everywhere â after all, we want to make sure there are jobs for student journalists after they graduate. But at least in this case, it sounds like the Iowa solution is going to be good for the weekly papers, good for the students and good for the communities they serve.
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Dan and Ellen talk with Kyle Munson, president of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation. The foundation was launched in August 2020, during the heart of the pandemic. It was a challenging time for newspapers. As Dan and Ellen wrote in their book, "What Works in Community News," the Storm Lake Times Pilot saw a real collapse in local advertising. Art Cullen, the editor, was worried about survival.
The foundation is set up as a nonprofit, so it can receive tax-free donations and philanthropic grants. In turn, it has doled out grants to small papers in western Iowa, including the Carroll Times Herald, La Prensa, and the Times Pilot. These grants were critical because the crisis in local news has hit rural areas hard.
Dan has a Quick Take on The Associated Press, which is the principal source of international and national news for local newspapers around the country â and in many cases for state coverage as well. Two major newspaper chains have announced that they are going to use the AP a lot less than they used to, which will result in less money for the AP â and either higher fees, less coverage or both for their remaining clients.
Ellen looks at Outlier Media, a woman-led team of local journalists in Detroit. They formed a network called the Collaborative Detroit Newsrooms network to produce and share news for underserved populations. They've won a major international award from the Association of Media Information and Communication. Executive editor Candice Fortman traveled to Barcelona to pick up the juried prize.
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Dan and Ellen talk with Emily Rooney, the longtime host of the award-winning show on WGBH-TV, "Beat The Press." Dan was a panelist on "Beat the Press," which had a 22-year run but was canceled in 2021 by GBH. The show, which is much missed by many former viewers, had a brief second life as a podcast.
Emily has got serious television news cred. She arrived at WGBH from the Fox Network in New York, where she oversaw political coverage, including the 1996 presidential primaries, national conventions, and presidential election. Before that, she was executive producer of ABCâs "World News Tonight" with Peter Jennings. She also worked at WCVB-TV in Boston for 15 years, from 1979â'93, as news director and as assistant news director.
There's a revival of interest in responsible media criticism. Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr recently wrote an op-ed calling for the restoration of a public editor position at The New York Times, The Globe and other news outlets.
Dan has an update on one of our favorite topics â pink slime. Wired magazine has a wild story out of rural Iowa involving a Linux server in Germany, a Polish website and a Chinese operation called âthe Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.â Ellen recounts a legal saga in Southeastern Minnesota involving the sale of a newspaper group and allegations of intellectual property theft. It's all about a single used computer and its role in creating a media startup.
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Dan and Ellen talk with Teri Morrow and Wayne Braverman of The Bedford Citizen in the Boston suburb of Bedford, Massachusetts. Wayne is a longtime journalist who is now serving as the managing editor of the Citizen. Teri, the executive director, has lived in Bedford since 1996, and has been active in local government. Dan wrote the chapter on this homegrown, grass-roots news site in "What Works in Community News." In the book, he tells the story about how the free digital site grew out of co-founder Julie McCay Turner's desire to find a home for information on a church plant sale.
Dan has a Quick Take on an unlikely good news story. The media industry is in the midst of another painful downturn, with news organizations from The Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times to CNN cutting their newsrooms and with The Messenger, a high-profile national startup that never seemed to make sense, shutting down after less than a year. But there's one news organization thatâs hiring journalists and that says itâs succeeding at the very tough job of selling ads. You wonât believe who he's talking about, so stay tuned.
Ellen talks about the robots that may come to steal our jobs. Or at least help us compile real estate listings and police blotters. It's all part of an initiative undertaken by that venerable journalistic organization, the Associated Press.
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Ellen talks with Laura Pappano, an award-winning journalist who has written about education for more than 30 years. Laura has a new book out from Beacon Press. The title is "School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education." By the way, Beacon also published our book, âWhat Works in Community News.â Dan and Ellen are recording their segments separately, because Ellen was travelling. So, don't worry, they're not breaking up.
Ellen has a Quick Take on a philanthropic gift from Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, that is designed to cover full tuition for many graduate students in journalism at the City University of New York. That's good news for students wondering whether to take on $50,000 or more in tuition debt to get a master's degree in journalism at a private university. Craigslist destroyed the classified ad market, but Newmark continues to make his mark as a philanthropist.
Dan offers two cheers for billionaire newspaper ownership. With the news business dealing with a difficult round of layoffs, a number of media observers have jumped to the conclusion that billionaire owners are not the solution to what ails journalism. Well, of course it isnât. No one ever said otherwise. But the record shows that civic-minded ownership by wealthy owners has proven to be a workable solution in several cities.
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We talk with Wendi C. Thomas, the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Thomas founded MLK50 in 2017 as a one-year project designed to focus on the antipoverty work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King had traveled to Memphis in April of 1968 to support striking sanitation workers who were fighting for safer working conditions and a living wage.
But MLK50 became much more than a one-year project. She and her staff have gone on to produce journalism that has changed the dialogue, and changed lives, in Memphis. Her work has garnered numerous awards. In 2020, she was the winner of the Selden Ring Award for her groundbreaking investigative series, "Profiting from the Poor," an investigation of a nonprofit hospital that sued poor patients over medical debt. The series, co-published with ProPublica, had major impact: the hospital erased $11.9 million in medical debt. MLK50 is one of the projects that we profile in our book, âWhat Works in Community News.â
Ellen has a Quick Take on the situation at Houston Landing, a highly anticipated and well-funded nonprofit newsroom that launched in 2023. Dan's Quick Take is on The Baltimore Sun, the venerable 186-year-old daily newspaper that at one time was home to the infamously caustic writer H.L. Mencken. Earlier this month, Alden Global Capital sold the Sun to a right-wing television executive who hates newspapers. But not to fear â public interest journalism is alive and well in Baltimore, as Dan will explain.
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Dan and Ellen talk with Norma Rodriguez-Reyes, the president of La Voz Hispana de Connecticut. La Voz started circulating in New Haven in 1993, but fell on hard times. Norma helped take charge of the paper in 1998 when it verged on bankruptcy. Under her direction, the newspaper has grown into the stateâs largest-circulation Spanish-language weekly. It reaches more than 125,000 Spanish speakers across Connecticut.
Norma is among the folks highlighted in Dan and Ellen's new book, âWhat Works in Community News,â which, at long last, will be out by the time you hear this podcast. In addition to her work at La Voz, Norma is the board chair of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit umbrella that includes the New Haven Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel, and WNHH community radio. The Independent and the radio station both work out of La Vozâs offices in downtown New Haven.
Ellen has a Quick Take on a surprising development in local news on Martha's Vineyard.The ownership of the weekly Marthaâs Vineyard Times has changed hands. Longtime publishers and owners Peter and Barbara Oberfest sold the Island news organization to Steve Bernier, a West Tisbury resident and longtime owner of Cronigâs Market. And the acting publisher is Charles Sennott, a highly decorated journalist and founder and editor of The GroundTruth Project. He also helped launch Report for America.
Dan discusses a hard situation at Eugene Weekly, an alternative weekly in Oregon thatâs been around for four decades. EW has shut down and laid off its 10-person staff after learning that the paper was the victim of embezzlement.
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Dan and Ellen talk with Andy and Dee Hall, co-founders of Wisconsin Watch. Wisconsin Watch was launched in 2009 as the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. It's nonprofit and nonpartisan, and it has grown a lot over the last 14 years. Andy is retiring on December 31 of this year, and is helping the new CEO, George Stanley, with the transition.
Dee Hall, co-founder and former managing editor of Wisconsin Watch, is also moving on, and is now editor-in-chief of Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom with a clear mission: Floodlight investigates "the powerful interests stalling climate action." Floodlight partners with local and national journalists to co-publish collaborative investigations.
The What Works podcast will resume after the holidays, and Dan fills listeners in on events surrounding the launch of our book, âWhat Works in Community News,â which is coming out on January 9. We'll be talking about the book that night at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner in Brookline, MA.
Ellen has a Quick Take on Signal Ohio, a well-funded nonprofit news startup in Ohio. It's expanding into Akron. We've worked with a Northeastern graduate student, Dakotah Kennedy (no relation to Dan), on this podcast. She is now a service journalism reporter for Signal Cleveland. For more reporting on the media meltdown of Akron's Devil Strip, check out Dan's story here and a NiemanLab story here.
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Dan and Ellen talk with Bob Sprague, a pioneer in hyperlocal journalism and the founder of yourArlington. Bob, who has lived in Arlington since 1989, was not only the founder: he was the editor of the website until July 1 of this year, when he retired. The new editor is Judith Pfeffer.
Bob was an Arlington Town Meeting member in 1994, and was also a journalist. He has been a reporter and an editor at The Boston Globe and Boston Herald, among other publications. He founded the town's website in 1998, but also recognized a need for an independent, nonpartisan source of information. In 2006, he launched yourArlington.
Dan has a Quick Take on the latest report on the state of local news by Penelope Muse Abernathy, whoâs now at the Medill School at Northwestern University. The report has a lot of bad news, some good news, and some interesting information from The Boston Globe and from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is one of the news outlets that we profile in our forthcoming book, âWhat Works in Community News.â
Ellen talks about another local startup, The Belmont Voice. The Voice has an impressive roster of advisers from the print and digital world. -
Dan and Ellen talk with Priyanjana Bengani, a fellow in computational journalism at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia. Her work focuses on using computational techniques to research issues in digital media.
Her most recent project, published in the Columbia Journalism Review, focused on uncovering networks of âpink slimeâ local news outlets. There have been several iterations of pink slime sites over the years, such as the North Boston News. (There's no such place as "North Boston," by the way.) They get their name from the pinkish beef paste that is added to hamburger meat.
In Quick Takes, Dan revisits Press Forward, the $500 million philanthropic effort aimed at revitalizing local news. When Press Forward was announced a few months ago, many observers were worried that a national, top-down effort might clash with local needs and local concerns. Fortunately, Press Forward is now getting involved in the grassroots in an attempt to leverage its funding and help a wide range of local and regional news projects.
Ellen delves into a piece in Racket, an alternative news site in Minneapolis. (The What Works podcast with editor and co-owner Em Cassel can be found here.) Racket takes a steely-eyed look at Steve Grove, the new CEO and publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Just before taking the journalism job, Grove settled a lawsuit alleging he withheld public records from the press when he was a state government official.
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Ellen and Dan talk with Meg Heckman, a colleague of ours at Northeastern University's school of journalism. Meg is an associate professor and author. She had a long career as a journalist. She spent more than a decade as a reporter and, later, the digital editor at the Concord (NH) Monitor, where she developed a fascination with presidential politics, a passion for local news and an appreciation for cars with four-wheel drive.
Her book, âPolitical Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party,â documents the lasting impact of New Hampshire publisher and conservative activist Nackey Loeb.
In Quick Takes, Ellen calls attention to a piece in ProPublica by journalist Dan Golden about his history working for the local daily in Springfield, Massachusetts. Turns out the good-old-days in newspapering weren't all good. Golden cautions against recreating them.
Dan takes a look back at an example of how diligent local news reporting can have an enormous impact nearly 45 years after the fact. Recently the EPA proposed a ban on trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent thatâs been linked to leukemia, birth defects and other health problems. The road to that ban began in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1979, with a super-smart young reporter Dan had the honor of working with. Dan wrote about it here.
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Dan talks with Jason Pramas, executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and editor-in-chief of a new project called HorizonMass. (Ellen expects to return for the next episode.) Jason is a co-founder of BINJ, which partners with community publications on investigative stories and civic engagement initiatives, and offers training programs to promising young journalists.
Now Jason is making a bold bet on the future of news by training a new generation of journalists. He's launching HorizonMass, a statewide digital news publication with a focus on public interest journalism. At HorizonMass, college interns work as reporters, designers, marketers, and editors. They work alongside more experienced professional freelance writers.
Later on, in Quick Takes, Dan looks at some data about news referrals from social media giants, specifically Facebook and X, or Twitter, or whatever it is this week. Large news organizations had become reliant on both of those platforms while the sort of local news outlets that we track here at What Works were more dependent on Facebook alone. In any case, those days are drawing to a close, and itâs long past time for community journalists to be asking themselves: Whatâs next?
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Dan and Ellen talk with Catherine Tumber, who was a former colleague of Dan's at The Boston Phoenix, a longtime friend, and a source for his 2013 book, "The Wired City." These days sheâs an independent scholar and journalist whoâs affiliated with the Penn Institute for Urban Research. Sheâs also a fellow at the MassINC Gateway Cities Innovation Institute and a contributing editor for The Baffler.
She is the author of "Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World." She holds a PhD and a master's degree from the University of Rochester. She also has a bachelor's in social thought and political economy from UMass-Amherst.
In our Quick Takes, Ellen is back on the Midwestern beat with good news about a startup weekly paper called the Denison Free Press in Iowa. It's scrappy as hell. Or heck, as they might say in Iowa. Dan has a rave for a new effort to inject $500 million into local news over the next five years. But that rave comes with a caveat. The initiative, known as Press Forward, brings together 22 different foundations in an effort to provide a significant amount of funding for community journalism. But there may be less to that effort than meets the eye.
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