What Works: The Future of Local News

Ellen and Dan talk with Hanna Raskin, founder and editor of The Food Section, a Substack newsletter devoted to covering restaurants and trends in food across the South. Before starting her Substack last year, Hanna was food editor and critic for eight years at the family-owned Charleston Post & Courier in South Carolina.

Hanna also covered food for alternative weeklies, including the Mountain XPress in Asheville, North Carolina, and Seattle Weekly.

Dan offers a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit news project that finally made its long-awaited debut. He wishes them all good luck but has some issues with their business model, which includes a hard paywall.

Ellen's Quick Take is on a Pew Research Center study on trends in digital circulation at locally focused publications. The bottom line: digital is trending up, print circulation continues to tank, and readers are spending less time on site.

Dan and Ellen talk with their colleague at Northeastern University, Dr. Meredith Clark. Dr. Clark is an associate professor in the School of Journalism & the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern. Before arriving at Northeastern, she was a faculty fellow at Data & Society, an independent nonprofit research organization based in New York that examines some of the questions being raised by the massive increase in the use of data in all aspects of society.

Dr. Clark's research is on the intersections of race, media, and power, and she's studied everything from newsroom hiring and reporting practices to social media communities. Her media diet is wide-ranging and eclectic. Our interview touches on many cultural icons, including poet Audre Lorde and Captain Olivia Benson, the fictional "Law & Order SVU" crime solver.

In Quick Takes, Dan discusses Gannett's recent move to dismantle some of the chain's regional editorial pages and Ellen tips the hat to two of the 2022 recipients of the prestigious Freedom of the Press Award, Wendi C. Thomas, founding editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and Mukhtar Ibrahim, founding publisher and CEO of Sahan Journal.

Dan and Ellen talk with Steve Rosenberg, editor of the Jewish Journal in Massachusetts, and Linda Matchan, who was named associate editor in February.

Both Steve and Linda had long and productive careers at The Boston Globe. Steve worked for 15 years as a staff writer and columnist, writing about cities and towns north of Boston. He was also editor of the Jewish Advocate.

Linda worked at the Globe for 36 years. During her extensive career, she did a little bit of everything, from investigative reporting to feature writing to spot news.

Dan shares a Quick Take on the Uvalde Leader-News, a twice-weekly paper that not only had the difficult task of covering the school shootings that claimed the lives of 21 people but that was also a victim of those shootings. Here's a link to Rachel Monroe's riveting New Yorker story on Uvalde and its aftermath, as well as the emotional remarks by US Senator Amy Klobuchar and others at a memorial in Washington for victims of gun violence.

Ellen discusses the ethical dilemma posed by the Online News Association's new "3M Truth in Science Award." (Teresa Carr broke the story in Undark and NiemanLab.) Ellen reached out to longtime science journalist Judy Foreman to get her perspective.

Dan and Ellen talk with Professor Otis Sanford, who is something of a journalistic legend in Memphis. As a general assignment reporter at The Commercial Appeal in 1977, Sanford covered the death of Elvis Presley. He also covered courts, county government and politics before being promoted into management. After stints at the Pittsburgh Press and Detroit Free Press, Sanford returned to The Commercial Appeal. In 2002 he was named managing editor and in 2007 he became editorial page editor.

As opinion editor in Memphis, Sanford launched a Citizen's Editorial Board. While that was a number of years ago, Sanford was ahead of the curve in terms of community engagement.

In 2011, Sanford joined the University of Memphis Department of Journalism faculty. He holds the Hardin Chair of Excellence in Economic and Managerial Journalism. He still writes a column on politics and events in Memphis. It's published in The Daily Memphian, a thriving startup founded by journalists and business people who were disappointed by the rounds of layoffs at The Commercial Appeal. The Daily Memphian is one of two digital newsrooms launched by journalists who left the Commercial Appeal. The other newsroom is the award-winning MLK50, started by Wendi C. Thomas, another Commercial Appeal veteran, to cover income inequality, race and justice issues.

Dan has a quick take on the latest from The Baltimore Banner, a digital start-up that will be competing with the Baltimore Sun, acquired last year by the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

Ellen looks at the new Votebeat site, a Chalkbeat spinoff that just might help election integrity.

Kara Meyberg Guzman is CEO and co-founder of Santa Cruz Local in California. Before the Local, she was managing editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel. She left her job at the Sentinel, which is owned by Alden Global Capital's Media News Group, in 2018, citing differences with the company's management. Kara connected with another former Sentinel reporter, Stephen Baxter, and the two of them hatched a plan for the Local. They focus on public policy issues that affect the whole county, like housing, development and public health. The Local is a private company, owned by the co-founders. The revenue model is a mix of memberships, business sponsorships, grants, and advertising. But the mission is simple. As the website puts it: We strive to understand Santa Cruz in all of its complexity.

Dan has a Quick Take on a new report by LION Publishers that has some really positive findings about funding and sustainability for local news startups. Anyone who's thinking about starting a community news project ought to take a look at it. Ellen highlights the work of Katherine Massey, a columnist who was killed in the racist massacre at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo.

Dan tips the hat to Anne Galloway, the founder and executive editor of VTDigger, who has announced that she's giving up the editor's position and is returning to the reporting ranks. She'll be an editor-at-large focusing on investigative reporting. Anne started Digger 13 years ago as a one-woman operation after she was laid off by the Rutland Herald. Today, Digger has 32 full-time employees and is regarded as one of the leading digital sources of regional news in the country.

In this Encore Edition of What Works, freelance investigative journalist Julie Reynolds talks about her singular pursuit of the truth about Alden Global Capital, the secretive New York hedge fund that has gobbled up newspapers across the country, stripping assets and firing reporters. Reynolds connects the dots from Alden to Cerberus Capital Management, the "shadow bank" that backed Alden's recent takeover of Tribune Publishing. Dan explores pink slime news sites, and Ellen reports on some good news for newspaper readers in the town that inspired Frostbite Falls, home to Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Dan and Ellen interviewed Julie in October 2021 but her research is still valid today, an unfortunate circumstance for the future of independent local journalism.

Jonathan Dotan is founding director of The Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford University. The lab focuses on tools to help historians, legal experts and journalists protect images, text and other data from bad actors who want to manipulate that data to create deep fakes or expunge it altogether.

He has founded and led a number of digital startups, he worked at the Motion Picture Association of America, and he was a writer and producer for the HBO series "Silicon Valley." While he was working on "Silicon Valley," a character invented a new technology that got him thinking: What if everyday users could keep hold of their own data without having to store it in a cloud, where it is open to hackers or the government or other bad actors?

Dotan also shares a link to a valuable resource for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of Web3.

Dan has a rare rave for Gannett's effort to rework its police beat. And Ellen unpacks a recent survey about violent attacks against broadcast reporters.

Kristen Hare is a journalist, media watcher and faculty member at Poynter Institute in Florida. Kristen not only documents trends in our beleaguered industry, but she also teaches local journalists the critical skills they need to cover their communities effectively. Before joining Poynter's faculty, she spent eight years covering local news for Poynter's website. In addition to all of this, she also spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guyana, in South America. At Poynter, she writes a weekly newsletter about local news called Local Edition. She's also got experience in a number of local newsrooms. She has reported for the St. Louis Beacon and the St. Joseph News-Press in Missouri, and she still keeps her hand in by writing feature obituaries for the Tampa Bay Times. Dan has a Quick Take on a tax credit for news subscribers in Canada, which apparently isn't working all that well. Maybe it's something in the permafrost. Ellen looks at a fight for control at the 50-year-old alternative paper, the Chicago Reader.

Mike Shapiro is the founder and CEO of TAPinto, a network of more than 85 online local news sites in New Jersey, New York and Florida. Shapiro launched TAPInto in 2008. Back then it was called TheAlternativePress.com and the goal was to build a network of hyperlocal news sites covering New Jersey towns.

His core idea is relatively simple. Would-be editors and publishers are actually franchisees. They pay a fee to buy into a turnkey operation that gives them access to technology and marketing resources. Shapiro's team provides training and maintains the infrastructure, but these publishers are responsible for maintaining and growing their readership. Some have journalism backgrounds, but some join because they love their communities and want to become small business owners. There are now more than 90 franchises all over New Jersey, New York and Florida. The name was changed as the network grew: Shapiro no longer sees it as an alternative to just one newspaper, but as a way to TAPinto any community.

Dan has a Quick Take on a new survey by the Medill school of journalism at Northwestern University that finds that readers in Chicago aren't willing to pay for local news, and Ellen nerds out on a recent NiemanLab report on the importance of local coverage of science.

Ed Miller is co-founder and editor of the weekly Provincetown Independent. Founded in October 2019, the weekly competes with Gannett's Provincetown Banner. The Independent covers Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet and Eastham and Miller explains why he believes that a print-centric strategy is essential on the tip of the Cape. The Independent is a hybrid organization — a for-profit public benefit corporation that works in tandem with a nonprofit that Ed and co-founder and publisher Teresa Parker have also created. Up until now, the nonprofit, the Local Journalism Project, has operated under the fiscal sponsorship of the Center for the Study of Public Policy. But they have now created their own independent nonprofit and applied for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. As we learned from Ed in planning this podcast, the first meeting of the new LJP board was happening the very day the episode was taped.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the abysmal results for the News Leaders Association newsroom diversity survey.

Dan reports on a startup newspaper in Queen Creek, Arizona, that will be called the Queen Creek Tribune and will make its debut on Sunday, April 24. It will be a total-market penetration print paper with a 20,000 press run.