E&P Reports with Mike Blinder

There are over 550 federally recognized tribal governments and more than 300 Indian reservations in the United States. Tribal reservations are sovereign nations and are not required to comply with many federal or state laws, including freedom of information and open meetings laws. Legally, tribe members enjoy the same constitutional rights as every American, but there is no independent safeguard on reservations to protect those rights, such as freedom of the press.

Since tribal councils own the vast majority of the approximately 200 Native American newspapers, little leeway is given to any analysis of government activity. Reporters are often prohibited from writing critical stories about tribal leaders, and access to tribal records on most reservations is nonexistent. As a result, reporters who dare to question the tribal government will often find themselves out of a job or their newsrooms shut down.

Native American journalists often complain that government ownership of the tribal press runs counter to their roles as the watchdogs of their communities. They have long sought independence in their reporting on tribal reservations. Some tribes have enacted laws guaranteeing press freedoms, but governing councils have often displayed a willingness to ignore those laws, as well as orders by tribal courts.

Recently the citizens of Oklahoma-based Muscogee Nation, the fourth largest reservation in the U.S, voted 1,914 to 596 to amend their constitution to include press protections and mandate funding for Mvskoke Media, the tribes' newspaper, radio and TV news outlet.

The Muscogee amendment allows Mvskoke Media to operate "free from political interest or undue influence, harassment, censorship, control or restrictions from any department" of the tribe's government.

In this 108th episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher Mike Blinder explores Native American news publishing and its challenges in providing free and unfettered news to the indigenous American populations it serves. Guests include Rob Collins, project manager with the Oklahoma Media Center and president-elect of Freedom of Information Oklahoma; Angel Ellis, director of Mvskoke Media, the independent tribal media agency of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation; and Sterling Cosper, membership manager of the Native American Journalists Association.

As live events slowly return, America's Newspapers' Senior Leadership Conference took place live at the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs. Just under 200 attended sessions on growing audience, maximizing revenue, building a better internal culture for our operations and more. On Monday, October 18th, 2021, Editor & Publisher's participation included the announcement of the 2021 Publisher of the Year recipient: Judi Terzotis, followed by the moderation of a robust lunchtime panel discussion by news publishing leaders on their views and predictions on the future of the industry.

Topics covered during this lively discussion included:

• Print frequency and what it may look like in the years to come
• Should Google & Facebook be made to pay for the content they monetize from our journalists?
• The future of funding our newsrooms and can local journalism survive on just ad and reader revenue?
• Finding talent and what it will take to recruit and keep employees
• The return of local ownership and how this impacts the future of local journalism

In this 107th episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher Mike Blinder moderates, live from America's Newspaper's Senior Leadership Conference, a panel of industry executives that includes Heidi Wright, COO and Publisher, EO Media Group; Tim Prince, Senior Vice President, Boone Newspapers, Inc; PJ Browning, President and Publisher, The Post and Courier and John Rung, President and CEO, Shaw Media who address the most important and predictions on what the future holds for news publishers.

In September of 2021, Cherry Road Media, a Parsippany, New Jersey-based technology company, announced it had acquired 20 newspapers from the Gannett company, bringing their total count of publications owned to 27. Their list of titles now stretches across seven states: Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota and Alabama.

Cherry Road CEO Jeremy Gulban stated in a recent press release that "This was his way to give back to local communities by supporting media houses that add so much value to our daily lives but are suffering the brunt of a digital age by losing subscriptions."

In the October 2021 E&P cover story entitled: "Under New Management," Sara April, from Dirks, Van Essen & April, the media merger and acquisition firm that represented Gannett in the sale of the 20 properties to Gulban, described the current mergers-and-acquisition landscape as "dynamic," noting that buyer trends have changed in the past three years. April stated: "Before that, the industry saw a lot of large corporate owners buying newspapers. Then, just a few years later, some of those organizations, including Gannett, are now selling off some of them, especially local titles."

In this 107th episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher Mike Blinder interviews Cherry Road's CEO Jeremy Gulban about why his technology company is "all-in" with newspaper ownership and his plans for managing their 27 local publications. And does his future include more growth in the news publishing industry? Also appearing in this episode is Sara April, from Dirks, Van Essen & April, who talks about the recent sale and offers her perspective on the current mergers & acquisition landscape for both buyers and sellers.

Newspapers owned by Cherry Road Media now include:

• Pratt (KS) Tribune
• Kiowa County (KS) Signal
• Hiawatha (KS) Penny Press
• Butler County (KS) Times-Gazette
• McPherson (KS) Sentinel
• The Leavenworth (KS) Times
• Wellington (KS) Daily News
• Dodge City (KS) Daily Globe
• Newton (KS) Kansan
• Garden City (KS) Telegram
• St John (KS) News
• Hays (KS) Daily News
• Ottawa (KS) Herald

Raw Story is an American progressive news website founded in 2004 by John K. Byrne. It describes its mission as bringing attention to stories they see as downplayed or ignored by other media outlets.

Raw Story's recent reporting has focused on homegrown extremism. One such story entitled "We're gonna kill Congress": Trump's far-right supporters promise violence at today's DC protests," was published the morning of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, predicting exactly what would happen on that fateful day.

A few years ago, Raw Story began a partnership with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston and the website he founded, DCReport.org, as part of a significant push into increasing their investigative reporting. DCReport's team of journalists produces content for RawStory.com's ad-free subscription program. In return, Raw Story funds (through donations) DCReport. Raw Story hosts exclusively this content first, but then allows any publisher to use it (with attribution) after 72 hours.

In this 105th Episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher Mike Blinder explores Raw Story's editorial mission and the today's news media ecosystem as a whole, with their Publisher, Roxanne Cooper, staff reporter Jordon Green and contributor David Cay Johnston.

For decades many federal agencies have been prohibiting reporters from talking to anyone without first requesting access through a public information officer (PIO). And over those years, these "PIO chokepoints" have gotten tighter and tighter, including oversight on conversations and demands for questions ahead of any interview. Reporters today are often not allowed to speak to anyone, even after acquiescing to censorship and controls.

First Amendment attorney and head of the Brechner Center, Frank LoMonte, wrote in a 2019 article: "Although the practice of gagging public employees from giving unapproved interviews is pervasive across all levels of government, decades' worth of First Amendment caselaw demonstrates that blanket restrictions on speaking to the media are legally unenforceable."

In July, twenty-five journalism organizations, including the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) , called on the Biden administration to end these prohibitions and allow reporters to interview government sources without oversight.

In this 104th episode of "E&P Reports," publisher Mike Blinder speaks with SPJ immediate past president and opinion editor at the San Diego News and Tribune, Matt Hall along with Chair of the SEJ and an editor at the Chesapeake Bay Journal, Tim Wheeler about how their two organizations (along with others) are working towards helping the industry

With a mission to help Black-owned newspapers to "survive and thrive," ten Black newspapers have joined forces to create Word in Black, a platform to "amplify the Black experience by reporting, collecting and sharing stories about real people in communities across the country,"

The initiative is part of the Fund for Black Journalism, founded last year by the Local Media Association (LMA), who initially received funding from the Walton Family Foundation to do stories about COVID-19 and education. The idea was to create a national site to house the ten newspapers' stories about the issues. That site became WordInBlack.com, which soft-launched in May and covers racial equity, K-12 education, police reform, healthcare disparities, social justice, politics, opinion, sports and LGBTQ issues and rights.

The ten participating newspapers include:

• New York Amsterdam News
• Atlanta Voice
• Houston Defender
• Washington Informer
• Dallas Weekly
• Baltimore/Washington Afro
• Michigan Chronicle
• Seattle Medium
• Sacramento Observer
• Louis American

In this 103rd episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher Mike Blinder speaks with Nick Charles,

The Managing Director for Word in Black, Francis (Toni) Draper, CEO/Publisher The Baltimore/ Washington AFRO and Larry Lee, President, Publisher at The Sacramento Observer. They discuss the state of the Black-owned newspaper industry and what Word in Black is doing to support these publishers.

JournalList.net is a non-profit membership organization that originated and currently maintains the trust.txt reference document. Trust.txt is a simple page of code with the goal that it would be used worldwide to distinguish legitimate news organizations from non-legitimate ones.

The idea of having a universal code that achieves mass adoption by digital platforms is not a new one. Back as early as 1994, before the internet reached widespread use, a company called Nexor initiated the robots.txt reference document to aid early search engines, like WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista, to correctly crawl and index page contents correctly within any Website. Today it is estimated that over 90% of global sites have this file placed within their route directly that anyone can see (https://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt, https://www.cnn.com/robots.txt ).

Just a few years ago, the ads.txt file was created by The Internet Advertising Bureau to allow online buyers to check the validity of the sellers from whom they buy for internet fraud detection.

Now comes Scott Yates, a lifelong journalist and entrepreneur. In the past three years, he has devoted most of his time and energy establishing JournalList.net with a mission to introduce and promote the adoption of a new reference document —Trust.txt. This is a file that news publishers will add to their websites to signal their affiliations with other trusted news organizations.

In this 102nd episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher Mike Blinder speaks with JournalList.net founder and Executive Director Scott Yates about their mission to have the Trust.txt reference document adopted and utilized by journalistic sites worldwide as a means to establish their authority as a trusted, credible, legitimate news outlet.

The Radically Rural Summit started in 2018 as a partnership between The Keene Sentinel and a local non-profit called The Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship. This organization provides space, tools and connections to assist in the successful development of entrepreneurs who are committed to building a vibrant community. Each year Radically Rural hosts an event with a mission to help share ideas and build networks tailored to rural communities and give a stage to those who have found solutions to rural problems so that others can learn and implement them in their communities.

This year's event will take place on September 22 and 23rd, 2021 and will specifically feature sessions focused on sustaining community journalism, which will include

• Building Trust: Measures to secure faith in local journalism
• Funding News: Media organizations successfully find philanthropic help for their missions
• Crazy Good: Tools to make you a better – and more efficient – journalist

In this episode of E&P reports, Publisher Mike Blinder interviews Terrence Williams, President & COO of the Keene Sentinel and Julianna Dodson, the director of Radically Rural, on how their yearly "Summit" has grown from a small-town gathering to an event attended by people from across North America. We also discuss how this year's event focuses on helping to ensure the financial health of local journalism.

Perhaps you know Henry Scott from years in senior management positions at the New York Times or as VP/ CMO at Creative Loafing. However, you may not know that Henry decided in 2012 to move to West Hollywood, California to start a digital-only local news presence he called WEHOville.com.

In 8-years, he built a viable, profitable business with a sizable audience consuming award-winning content across multiple platforms. Then, just a few months ago, Scott sold the site to enter the world of media consulting, hoping to help others gain the same success he did as a local "news disruptor." As part of this mission, he has crafted a lengthy, fact-filled manifesto he calls: "Want to Launch a Local News Website? Been There. Done That. Here's What You Need to Know."

In this 20-page, 11,000+ word document, Henry Scott offers actionable, real-world advice for anyone who wants to enter the world of news publishing as a pure play digital-only platform. Sections within the document include:

• "Where's the Money?"
• "What is News…"
• "Creating the Site"
• "Clicks? Impressions? What Did We Charge and Why?"
• "There's More Than a Simple Display Ad"
• "How to Get Your Name Out There"
• "How to Gain Subscriptions"
• "Sell, Sell, Sell"

And more!

In this 100th Episode of "E&P Reports," Publisher Mike Blinder goes one-on-one with industry veteran Henry Scott on why he spent 8-years dedicated to building a successful, profitable local news Website and what key lessons he learned others could use to mimic that success.

With a mission to "investigate inequality with and for the people who are affected by it," The Center for Public Integrity(CPI) is one of the oldest nonprofit investigative news organizations in the country.

Over the years, their reporting has led to hundreds of law and policy changes, forced the federal and state governments to release information critical to the public interest, and held corporations to account for abuses of power. It was also recognized with the Pulitzer Prize and countless other news publishing industry awards.

CPI collaborates with other organizations, particularly local news outlets, to publish data-driven and narrative journalism that reveals the causes and effects of inequality and exposes discriminatory systems in employment, housing, health care, education, and access to democracy.

Recently CPI announced the appointment of Paul Cheung as their new Chief Executive Officer. Cheung's background includes 20 years of experience in leading industry digital transformation working for NBC News Digital, The Associated Press, The Miami Herald, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as managing a multimillion dollars investment portfolio for the Knight Foundation.

In this episode of E&P Reports, Publisher Mike Blinder speaks with CPI's new CEO Paul Cheung and CPI's Editor-in-Chief Matt DeRienzo about the organization's near-term plans. They also discuss how Cheung's digital background may affect their methods to continue in their mission to fight inequality in America.