Dan and Ellen talk with Catherine Tumber, who was a former colleague of Dan's at The Boston Phoenix, a longtime friend, and a source for his 2013 book, "The Wired City." These days she’s an independent scholar and journalist who’s affiliated with the Penn Institute for Urban Research. She’s also a fellow at the MassINC Gateway Cities Innovation Institute and a contributing editor for The Baffler. 

She is the author of "Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World." She holds a PhD and a master's degree from the University of Rochester. She also has a bachelor's in social thought and political economy from UMass-Amherst. 

In our Quick Takes, Ellen is back on the Midwestern beat with good news about a startup weekly paper called the Denison Free Press in Iowa. It's scrappy as hell. Or heck, as they might say in Iowa. Dan has a rave for a new effort to inject $500 million into local news over the next five years. But that rave comes with a caveat. The initiative, known as Press Forward, brings together 22 different foundations in an effort to provide a significant amount of funding for community journalism. But there may be less to that effort than meets the eye.

Ellen and Dan talk with Paul Bass, the founder and former editor of the New Haven Independent. Bass is originally from White Plains, New York, but he arrived in New Haven in the late 1970s to attend Yale, and he has been reporting on all the quirks and glory of his adopted home town ever since.

Bass was the main subject of Dan's 2013 book, "The Wired City," and is one of the news entrepreneurs featured in our forthcoming book, "What Works in Community News."

Bass launched the New Haven Independent in 2005 as an online-only nonprofit. Last fall, Bass announced he was stepping aside as editor, handing the top job over to managing editor Tom Breen.

But he's continuing to play a role at the Independent and its multimedia arms, and he has just launched another venture: The Independent Review Crew, which features arts and culture reviews from all over, including right here in Boston.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the Texas Tribune, the much-admired nonprofit news outlet started by Evan Smith and others in Austin. The Tribune has been a model for other startups, so it rocked the world of local news last month when CEO Sonal Shah announced that 11 staffers had been laid off. Dan reports on another acquisition by Alden Global Capital, the New York-based hedge fund that has earned scorn for the way it manages its newspapers. Alden acquired four family-owned newspapers in Pennsylvania. Worse, the family members who actually ran the papers wanted to keep them, but they were outvoted by the rest of the family.

Ellen and Dan talk with Nicci Kadilak, an educator, author, mom, and founder of the Burlington Buzz. The Buzz is a hyperlocal online news site serving Burlington, Massachusetts, a town of 26,000 people north and west of Boston. Kadilak created the Buzz in early 2022, when a town election was on the horizon and the local Gannett weekly, the Burlington Union, switched to regional coverage. In the 1980s, Burlington was covered by two weekly papers and The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, where Dan worked for quite a few years.  

Nicci uses the Substack platform, and charges a range of subscription fees. She offers news stories about town government, cultural events, sports, and has a section that provides a platform for audio interviews of newsmakers. She allows reader comments, too. Nicci also writes essays at Nicci's Notes, and her debut novel, "When We Were Mothers," is available wherever you buy books online. (Nicci and Ellen met in a Zoom discussion of local news led by Simon Owens for his informative Media Newsletter.)

Dan reports on another effort to leverage tax credits for local journalism, and Ellen has a Quick Take on the decline and apparent death of The Santa Barbara News-Press.

Ellen and Dan talk with Walter Robinson, a longtime investigative journalist and editor of The Boston Globe's Spotlight Team. Robby, as he is known, was instrumental in uncovering the clergy sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in Boston and beyond. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. The team's work was captured onscreen in the movie "Spotlight," where Robby was played by the actor Michael Keaton. 

Robby is a former colleague – he was a distinguished professor of journalism here at Northeastern. He was also a 1974 graduate of Northeastern's journalism program, and participated in the co-op program.

He reported and edited local news at The Globe. But he ranged wide. He reported from 48 states and 33 countries. He covered the White House during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. He was also the Globe's Middle East Bureau Chief, and covered the first Persian Gulf War.  

In recent years, Robby has been focused on the local news crisis in a big way. He has been deeply involved in the New Bedford Light, an impressive nonprofit digital news outlet. He lives in Plymouth, so it's perhaps no surprise that he is a key advisor to the board of directors at the new Plymouth Independent.

Dan has a Quick Take on developments in the junkyard known as Twitter. Ellen reports on a new podcast out of Memphis called "Civil Wrongs." It's produced by a Report for America corps member that examines a racist massacre in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Ellen and Dan talk with Sue Cross, the veteran journalist who will step down as executive director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) by the end of 2023. Sue has led INN since 2015, and has overseen a period of tremendous growth. There were 117 nonprofit newsroom members listed in the INN's 2015 annual report. This year, INN has 425 member newsrooms. She has also been a driving force in the NewsMatch program, a collaborative fund-raising project that has helped raise more than $270 million for emerging newsrooms since its launch in 2016. Before joining INN, Cross was a journalist and executive at the Associated Press. Cross says we are in a golden age of news innovation, and hopes to continue to lend her support. She also says she hopes to spend time on personal projects.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the launch of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit digital site serving greater Houston. Dan provides an update on efforts to extract money out of Google and Facebook in order to pay for news. 

Ellen and Dan talk with Andy Thibault, editor and publisher of the Winsted Citizen in Connecticut. The Citizen is a monthly print newspaper serving Litchfield County and the surrounding area. The only digital presence is the Winsted Citizen Blog. But that's about to change, Thibault says. He's going digital. 

Starting a news organization is never easy, but the Citizen hit a brief speed bump. A speed bump named Ralph Nader. But according to Andy, everything is moving ahead just fine.

Jack Walsh, a graduate student in Northeastern University's journalism program, joins Dan and Ellen to talk about his recent profile of the Chelsea Record,  a 150-year-old weekly paper in the small city of Chelsea, Massachusetts. You can find Jack’s story on our website, whatworks.news.

Dan has a Quick Take on Gannett. Recently, many union journalists at Gannett staged a one-day strike. Yet there are some interesting moves being made at the top of the company as well. Ellen discusses a recent poll about local news and accountability journalism. Surprisingly few  Americans believe that local news media hold public officials accountable, according to a national poll commissioned by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. This shows the devastating impact of the hollowing out of community news. And it calls into question whether local journalism is fulfilling  one of its primary missions. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Brant Houston, who is hard to describe in one sentence: he's an author, an educator, an investigative journalist, an expert in data-based reporting, and a co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

His new book, "Changing Models for Journalism," chronicles the history of change, disruption, and reinvention in our industry over the past two decades. These are themes we explore on this podcast, and in our own forthcoming book. Brant takes us back to the early days of digital, and recounts the early optimism, and the early misconceptions, about the promise and the peril of the internet.

Dan has a quick take on Pink Slime Journalism 3.0. We’ve seen an explosion of such websites as political operatives have sought to take advantage of the decline in real local news. Now, NewsGuard reports that dubious online content powered by artificial intelligence is spreading. 

Ellen looks at the numbers in the 2023 impact report on local news by the INN. And there's some good news: As the nonprofit journalism field expands, the resources to sustain these newsrooms are expanding, too. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Howard Owens, the publisher of The Batavian, a digital news organization in Genesee County, New York, way out near Buffalo. When Dan first met Howard, he was the director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media, which later morphed into Gannett. Howard launched The Batavian for GateHouse in 2008. In 2009, GateHouse eliminated Howard’s job, but they let him take The Batavian with him, and he’s been at it ever since.

The Batavian’s website is loaded with well over 100 ads, reflecting his belief that ads should be put right in front of the reader, not rotated in and out. He’s also got an innovative idea to raise money from his readers while keeping The Batavian free, which we’ll ask him about during our conversation with him.

Dan and Ellen are also joined by Sebastian Grace, who just received his degree in journalism and political science from Northeastern. Everyone in journalism is freaking out about ChatGPT and other players in the new generation of artificial intelligence. Seb wrote a really smart piece, which is up on the What Works website, assuring us all that we shouldn’t worry — that AI is a tool that can allow journalists to work smarter. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on Mississippi Today, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for stories that revealed how a former Mississippi governor used his office to steer millions of state welfare dollars to benefit family and friends. Including NFL quarterback Brett Favre! We interviewed Mary Margaret White, the CEO of Mississippi today, on this podcast in November 2022. And reporter Anna Wolfe has a great podcast about her prize-winning series. 

Dan observes that journalism these days is often depicted as deep blue — something that liberals and progressives may pay attention to, but that conservatives and especially Trump supporters dismiss as fake news. But Steve Waldman, the head of the Rebuild Local News Coalition, says it’s not that simple, and that the local news crisis is harming conservatives even more than it is liberals.

Dan talks with Lara Salahi, a professor of journalism at Endicott College, where she teaches a range of courses, from feature writing to digital journalism. She has also been a digital producer for NBC Universal, and a field producer for ABC News. 

Salahi has also done some consulting and writing on science and health projects. She was executive producer on a podcast called Track the Vax, which ran during the height of the pandemic. And she collaborated with Pardis Sabeti, a systems biologist and Harvard professor who researches infectious diseases like Ebola and Lassa virus. They wrote a book together in 2018 that is still relevant: It's called "Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic." They updated the paperback with a new preface and epilogue in 2021 to reflect on the Covid19 outbreak, and the lessons learned from past epidemics. 

In Quick Takes, there’s so much going on that Dan discusses three developments. One involves the future ownership of the Portland Press Herald in Maine as well as its sister papers. The other is about a dramatic, unexpected development in hyperlocal news in New Jersey. The third involves some very good news for a daily paper in central Pennsylvania.

Dan and his Northeastern University colleague, Meg Heckman, pay tribute to a legendary journalist — Mike Pride, the retired editor of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire and the former administrator of the Pulitzer Prize. Mike died on April 24 in Florida of a blood disorder. He was 76, and left his imprint on journalism in many ways. Meg worked at the Concord Monitor for more than 10 years.

Ellen was out of pocket for this podcast episode but did the sound editing and post-production. She'll return next week. 

Linda Shapley, the publisher of Colorado Community Media, describes herself as a longtime denizen of the state's media ecosystem. Indeed, she was at Colorado Politics and worked for 21 years for The Denver Post. “I’ve been a lieutenant for a lot of really great generals," she once said. "This is my opportunity to be a general.”

CCM is a group of about two dozen weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. They were saved from chain ownership two years ago when they were purchased through a deal led by the National Trust for Local News. Last August we spoke with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the trust.

Shapley has talked about the power of representation as a visible Latina leader in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by white men. She says she hopes to use her position to encourage more diversity in journalism. Her mentor at the Post, Greg Moore, was a previous guest on What Works. You can listen to his episode here.

Shapley grew up in northeastern Colorado, in a rural county. Her father had a dairy farm. When Dan was in Colorado doing research for our book, she told him that dairy farming is a lot like newspapers, because cows don't know it's Christmas.

Also this week, we talk with Madison Xagoraris, a graduate student in the Media Advocacy Program at Northeastern University's School of Journalism. Xagoraris recently reported on KefiFM, a Boston-based Greek music outlet dedicated to serving the Greek and Greek American communities in the Boston area and throughout New England.

Ellen has a Quick Take about retired journalists who are busy launching startup newsrooms. Nieman Reports has a piece by Jon Marcus that looks at the Asheville Watchdog in North Carolina, and the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts. These journalists say they want to help bolster the profession they gave their lives to by setting up nonprofit community news sites and mentoring younger reporters and editors. They aren't playing pickleball.

Dan is in a Colorado state of mind: His Quick Take is on the fifth anniversary of the Denver Rebellion, when the staff of The Denver Post rose up against further newsroom cuts being imposed by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. That rebellion sparked a revolution in Denver journalism.