Professor Tim Franklin and Zach Metzger talk with Spencer Graves about how you can help yourself by helping improve local media. Franklin is the leader of the Local News Initiative and the Metro Media Lab in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago on Lake Michigan. Metzger is Director of their State of Local News subproject of the Local News Initiative.

Medill Local News Initiative

News deserts are growing, and democracy is under siege. The Local News Initiative is working to document how this is happening and highlight organizations that are bucking this trend. Their work includes six distinct projects:

1. What drives people to pay for local journalism

2. Human-centered design for local news products

3. Local news accelerator

4. Understanding media markets

5. Medill news leaders project 2019

6. The State of Local News Project

Key results from each of these six projects can be summarized as follows:

1. What drives people to pay for local journalism. Key findings of this project include the following:

1.1. Find your own unique strength; don't mimic others.

1.2. Intense news consumers are more likely to drop a subscription, possibly annoyed by ads.

1.3. News outlets should encourage regular visits over intense reading.

1.4. Readers who use ad blockers are more likely to stay.

1.5. Both customers and companies benefit when consumers connect a product to their life goals.

2. Human-centered design (2018-2019): A key product of this project supports "Timelines", which can attract audiences with a sequence of short (less than 20) slides with a strong chronological narrative.

3. Local news accelerator. This project included four sub-projects:

3.1. Shared services.

3.2. Six-month cohort program in which local news organizations develop a project core to their missions.

3.3. Day-long Chicago Local News Summit.

3.4. Week-long innovation and leadership academy.

4. Understanding media markets, which worked to correlate local news consumption with other demographics.

5. Medill news leaders project 2019, which conducted over 50 interviews with news industry leaders (completed in 2019).

6. The State of Local News Project: This project is extending Penny Abernathy's path-breaking inventory of news deserts in the US, with annual reports since 2016. They now have two decades of data on news deserts and dynamic change in the news industry in the US.

Tim Franklin

Franklin is the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern.

Franklin was appointed by Governor J.B. Pritzker to serve on the Illinois Local Journalism Task Force, a bipartisan group studying the local news crisis in the state and recommending potential policy solutions. He also serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Local Media Foundation, the charitable trust affiliated with the Local Media Association, one of the largest local media trade associations in North America representing newspapers, TV stations, radio outlets, digital-only news sites and R&D organizations. He also serves on the board of the Alliance for Trust in Media and The Associated Press Standards Advisory Panel. He also recently served on the board of the Google News Creators Project. He has been at Medill since 2017. Between 2014 and 2017 he was president of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he almost doubled their revenue in three years.

More details and a moderated discussion of issues raised in this interview are supported in the Wikiversity article on “Medill says you can help yourself by helping improve local media” with a video.

Copyright 2025 Tim Franklin and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.