Dan and Ellen talk with Adam Gaffin, founder of the Universal Hub and inventor of the French Toast Alert System). Dan wrote a profile of Adam for CommonWealth Magazine in 2008. Adam has been a local connector since the earliest days of digital self-publishing — well before blogging, putting he put together a directory of websites called New England Online in the early ’90s and then morphing that into Boston Online.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a young journalist who lost her job at West Virginia Public Broadcasting after she reported on alleged government abuses in the state's foster care and psychiatric system. The journalist, Amelia Ferrell Knisely, alleges that there was political interference with the station, WVPB, which receives state funding. 

Dan examines an important First Amendment case involving a citizen journalist in Texas. Roxanna Asgarian of The Texas Tribune broke the story. Many of the local news projects that we’re interested in here at What Works are just a few steps beyond citizen journalism, and we are firmly of the belief that the First Amendment protections enjoyed by large news outlets should be applied to small outlets and citizen journalists as well. It remains to be seen whether a federal appeals court in Texas agrees.

Dan and Ellen talk to Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher, the once and future bible of the publishing industry. Mike also hosts E&P's weekly vodcast series, "E&P Reports." Blinder has interviewed everyone from Richard Tofel, founding GM of ProPublica, to Jennifer Kho, the new executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, to professor and media critic Jeff Jarvis. Blinder probes important issues like government support for community journalism, the role of platforms, and the impact of chain consolidation.

Dan has a Quick Take on the failure of two bills in Congress that would have provided some government support to newspaper companies. It's fair to say that the federal government is not going to be riding to the rescue of local news, and that communities had better get about the business of providing coverage on their own. Ellen reports on the City Paper in Pittsburgh, an alternative weekly, which has just been acquired by a subsidiary of Block Communications. The Block family has achieved some notoriety for its mismanagement of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Media observer Margaret Sullivan called the Post-Gazette a tragic mess under the Blocks.

Ellen and Dan talk with Margaret Low, the CEO of WBUR, one of Boston's two public radio stations. Margaret started as CEO in January 2020. She has had a 40-plus-year career with NPR, and started as an overnight production assistant at Morning Edition. At NPR, Low rose through the ranks and ended up in the top editorial job, where she oversaw 400 journalists worldwide, covering events like the Arab Spring, the re-election of Barack Obama, and the Boston Marathon bombing. She led a digital transformation of her newsroom. She turned Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, the Saturday morning quiz show, into a live production. She came to WBUR from The Atlantic, where she was president of AtlanticLIVE, and produced more than 100 live events a year.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the launch of Signal Cleveland. It's well-funded, with $7.5 million to start with, and Rick Edmonds of Poynter Online writes that the news outlet has big goals: It wants to expand throughout Ohio within a few years. 

Dan's Quick Take is on a case in New Hampshire that is of interest to those of us who ascribe to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As Dan puts it, we’d like to think that if the First Amendment means anything, it means that you may not be punished criminally for criticizing the government. But that’s not what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit decided recently. In that case, the court ruled that New Hampshire’s criminal libel law passes constitutional muster. The case was especially pernicious because the defendant, Robert Frese, was charged with claiming, among other things, that the police chief in his town of Exeter was a coward who had “covered up for a dirty cop.” That statement may be entirely false; but the idea that someone could be charged with a misdemeanor for criticizing the police is pretty chilling. InDepthNH has a story here. The case even garnered a Muzzle Award in 2019.

Dan and Ellen talk with Crystal Good, the founder of Black by God, the West Virginian. She's a sixth-generation West Virginian, and she's a storyteller and poet. She has also been a model and an advocate. She describes Black by God as an "emerging news and storytelling organization centering Black voices from the Mountain State." She wants to provide a more nuanced portrayal of Black residents in the Appalachian region.

Dan and Northeastern graduate student Dakotah Kennedy first heard Crystal Good speak in September at the Radically Rural conference in Keene, New Hampshire — not from the stage but from the audience. Dan and Dakotah wished she had been onstage, invited her onto the podcast, and she graciously agreed. Black by God has a lively website, and publishes periodic print editions. Which Crystal seems to deliver herself.

Dan has a Quick Take on social media. It's in free fall. Is that good for local news? Bad? Or does it just mean a changed environment that they’re all going to have to navigate? Ellen's Quick Take is on a hyperlocal mogul named Mark Adams. He's expanding his empire into Montana.

Dan and Ellen talk with Mary Margaret White, the CEO of Mississippi Today, a nonprofit digital news outlet that has been covering the state for more than six years. The staff has a robust presence at the statehouse in Jackson, and provides cultural and sports coverage, as well. 

Mary Margaret is a Mississippi native. She has a bachelor’s in English and journalism and a master’s in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi. She also spent almost 10 years working for the state, with jobs in arts and tourism. Her work has appeared in The Listening Post Collective, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and on Mississippi Public Broadcasting radio.

Dan has a Quick Take on a major transition at the New Haven Independent. Last week the indefatigable founder, Paul Bass, announced he was stepping aside as editor of the Independent. The new editor will be Tom Breen, currently the managing editor. Luckily, Bass isn't going anywhere but will continue to play a role. Ellen's Quick Take is on another big transition at the Texas Tribune. Economist Sonal Shah is becoming CEO at the Tribune in January. Shah, who has had leadership roles at Google, the White House, and other high-impact nonprofits, replaces co-founder Evan Smith, who is taking a role as senior adviser to the Emerson Collective. It's a big transition at a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Smith says he'll continue to spread the local news gospel in his new role. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Nancy West, executive editor of InDepthNH.org. 

Nancy was an investigative reporter during her 30-year career at the New Hampshire Union Leader. Nancy founded the nonprofit New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism in 2015. She has also taught investigative reporting at a summer program for students at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a recent article by Dan Froomkin in Washington Monthly. Froomkin, who is now editor of Press Watch, used to work for The Washington Post. He has been critical of owner Jeff Bezos. Froomkin is taking aim at the content management system developed by The Post under Bezos. The Post licenses this system to other news outlets around the country. That kind of market power worries Froomkin.

Dan's Quick Take is on the state of journalism in Vermont, a subject we've talked about on a recent podcast. And about a good piece of media criticism. Bill Schubart, a journalist who writes a column for VTDigger, wrote a column critiquing a recent New Yorker piece by Bill McKibben on Vermont journalism. But Schubart also looked inward and wrote that Digger itself is having problems.

Dan and Ellen talk with Jeff Jacoby, longtime columnist for The Boston Globe Opinion Pages. Jeff also writes the weekly "Arguable" newsletter.

Jeff holds degrees from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School, and before entering journalism, he briefly practiced law. He was also an assistant to Dr. John Silber, the prickly president of Boston University. 

Prompted by a column Jeff wrote in June, and spurred on by the impending midterm elections, the podcast features a free-form discussion of whether newspaper editorial pages should endorse candidates in presidential races. 

Dan has a Quick Take on a big story out of Woburn, a suburb north of Boston. Woburn has an independent newspaper and is covered by The Globe and other outlets. But this story wasn't broken by any of the usual suspects. Ellen's Quick Take is on an opinion column in The Washington Post by Perry Bacon, who calls for $10 billion in government funding to support a news outlet in every congressional district in the country.

Dan and Ellen talk with David Cicilline, who represents the First District of Rhode Island in Congress. Cicilline, who is a Democrat, is part of a bipartisan group of US representatives and senators sponsoring the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. Co-sponsors include Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota; Republican Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana; Republican congressman Ken Buck from Colorado; and Senate and House Judiciary Committee Chairs Dick Durbin , an Illinois Democrat, and Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat. 

The JCPA removes legal obstacles to news organizations’ ability to negotiate collectively and secure fair terms from gatekeeper platforms that use news content without paying for it. The legislation also allows news publishers to demand arbitration if they reach an impasse in those negotiations. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on new research being done by the Institute for Nonprofit News. The INN just released 2022 fact sheets on three types of nonprofit newsrooms: local news, state and regional news, and national and global news. While each group shares some similarities, INN found that geography matters in terms of revenue models and audience development. 

Dan takes a few more whacks at Gannett, because the stock is skidding, and newsrooms are being hit with unpaid furloughs, buyouts, and the threat of layoffs. 

Dan and Ellen talk with David Dahl, editor of The Maine Monitor.  David was most recently a deputy managing editor at The Boston Globe. Among his jobs at The Globe: directing hyperlocal Your Town coverage. The pull of Maine was strong, however. He and his wife, Kathy, have a home in Friendship, Maine. When he decided that he was ready to turn the page, he looked Down East.

Dan has a Quick Take on Bulletin, a feature developed by Facebook to compete with Substack. Sarah Scire has the scoop: Bulletin is shutting down. Ellen has a Quick Take is on a new kind of media audit by the Alliance for Audited Media, which has been verifying newspaper circulation for 108 years. The organization says it's branching out, to audit standards of ethics in journalism. Ellen asks: Why?

Dakotah Kennedy, a graduate student at Northeastern University, contributes on-the-ground interviews from attendees at the recent Radically Rural conference in New Hampshire. Our podcast with Terry Williams, creator of the conference, can be found here.

Dan and Ellen talk with Anne Galloway, the founder and editor-at-large of VTDigger in Vermont. Like many journalists, she was laid off in 2009 from her job as Sunday editor of the Rutland Herald and Times Argus. VTDigger, which is a nonprofit, started with a $16,000 budget with no employees. As she put it in a recent letter to readers, it has grown beyond her wildest dreams. It's the largest newsroom in Vermont. It has dozens of employees and more than 550,000 monthly readers. Galloway not only built the organization, she also wrote notable investigative pieces. Among other issues, she broke open a fraudulent scheme that involve developers at Jay Peak. Dan visited Galloway and wrote about the newsroom in his book, "The Return of the Moguls."

Ellen has a quick take on a study about the state of U.S. democracy from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The study says it's critical to fight disinformation, and advocates rebuilding trusted local news sources. Dan reports on a promising merger between public radio station KERA and the Denton Record-Chronicle, a daily newspaper that covers the suburbs north of Dallas. This move was facilitated by the National Trust for Local News, which raises money and connects legacy newspaper owners with possible buyers in order to keep them from either shutting down or falling into the hands of corporate chain owners. Our podcast with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of the trust, can be found here.