Dan and Ellen talk with Carlene Hempel and Harrison Zuritsky. Carlene, a journalism professor at Northeastern, recently led a reporting trip to Flint, Michigan. Harrison and other students produced a stunning internet magazine called Flint Unfiltered that takes a deep dive into the causes and effects of Flint's economic downturn and toxic water crisis.

Since 2009, Carlene has been leading students on reporting trips, where they work as part of a traveling press corps. She has taken groups to many countries, including Egypt, Syria, Cuba and Panama. Harrison, a second-year student with concentrations in journalism and data science, joined her on the Flint trip. 

Like so many at Northeastern, Carlene has a background that includes academic achievement as well as wide-ranging professional experience. She has been a professor for 20 years and holds a PhD from Northeastern. She also started her career writing for The Middlesex News in Framingham, now The MetroWest Daily News, and The Boston Globe. She then moved to North Carolina, where she worked for MSNBC and The Raleigh News & Observer.

Dan has Quick Take from Maine. The former owner of the Portland Press Herald is going to have three of his weekly papers printed at the Press Herald’s facility in South Portland, giving a boost to the National Trust for Local News. And he’s also followed through on a plan to open a café at one of his weeklies in a unique effort to boost civic engagement.

Ellen weighs in on a new study of local news by our friend of the pod, Professor Joshua Darr at Syracuse University. Darr teamed up with three other researchers to do a meta analysis of surveys on media trust. They made a number of findings, but the headline is that Americans trust local newsrooms more than national news outlets. This is especially true if the local news outlet has the actual name of the community in its title. But there's a downside: that automatic trust also allows pink slime sites to take hold.