Ellen and Dan talk with Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Before he was at Penn, he taught media studies at NYU. He is the author of "Democracy Without Journalism," among other books.

Pickard has contributed to the debate about the local news crisis in many different settings. He worked on media policy in Washington at the New America Foundation, and he served as a policy fellow for former US Congresswoman Diane Watson.

Dan has a Quick Take on two pieces of federal legislation that might have helped ease the local news crisis died at the end of the last Congress, and there's not much chance of them getting revived any time soon — not with the Republicans now in control of the House. But one of those ideas has made it into a bill that's now being considered in Massachusetts.

Ellen's Quick Take is on something close to home. She's joined a group of Brookline residents who are launching an independent nonprofit news site called Brookline.News. The Steering Committee has been raising funds, and is recruiting for a founding editor-in-chief.