In a survey of 5,593 adults, Gallup and the Knight Foundation — which have been publishing reports on trust in news media since 2017 — found only 26% of Americans view news media favorably overall. A full 50% of respondents disagreed with the statement that most national news orgs “do not intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public.”

The study sidesteps valid questions about referring to “the media” in survey questions without attempting to differentiate between news sources like, say, Newsmax and The Daily Wire or Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.

As long as you define “the media” as everything from Fox and Newsmax to MSNBC what sane person would possibly say they trust it? 1/2 https://t.co/YXrfWXmTNz

— Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org (@froomkin) February 16, 2023

As other research has found, the Knight/Gallup study indicated Americans trust local newsrooms more than national ones. More than half of Americans said local news outlets can generally be relied on, compared to 35% who expressed the same confidence in national news orgs.

As in previous years, Gallup and Knight found Republicans and younger people were more likely to hold negative views of national news media than Democrats or older people.

This report also found negative views toward media are growing across political affiliations, with the greatest deterioration of trust occurring among political independents. (Before you assume that shift can be attributed to independents who actually lean toward one party or the other, know that Gallup/Knight found 64% of “true independents who do not lean Republican or Democrat” now view news media unfavorably, no different than the independents who did express a lean.)

Newsrooms have been trying to repair credibility and trust with readers for at least as long as Gallup/Knight have been recording the decline. In this report, Gallup/Knight acknowledged those efforts have largely been unsuccessful in stopping — never mind reversing — the downward trend.

“Many Americans say they care about transparency, objectivity and accuracy. But if many news outlets already have high journalistic standards in place, why does trust continue to diminish overall?” the report reads. “This study suggests that many Americans … feel distrust on an emotional level, believing news organizations intend to mislead them and are indifferent to the social and political impact of their reporting. Our analysis demonstrates that these indicators of emotional trust in news are, in fact, distinct from the opinion that news organizations are capable of delivering accurate and fair reporting.”

Americans who get most of their news from a printed newspaper or magazine (35%) were more likely to voice high emotional trust in national news organizations than those who primarily get news online (15%) or radio (20%). Those who get most of their news from television — and that’s the majority of Americans — were split, with those who named a cable news outlet like CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC as their top news source expressing low emotional trust in national news orgs (45%). In comparison, just 17% of network news consumers (ABC, CBS, or NBC) exhibited low emotional trust, according to Gallup/Knight.

The report found low emotional trust in national news was associated with low levels of trust in elected officials and the political process. Americans with low trust were also more likely to agree that an increase of information makes staying well-informed harder because people “have to sort through lots of information to determine what is true and important.”

Falling trust has financial implications for news organizations as well, especially as more turn toward reader revenue. Gallup/Knight found that Americans with more trust in news media are more likely to have paid for journalism.

“People with high emotional trust in national news are nine points more likely than the national average to have paid for it, at 35%,” the report notes. “Only 23% of those with low emotional trust in national news have paid for news in the past, compared with 28% of those with moderate levels of trust.”

Read the full report here.

A new survey from Gallup and the Knight Foundation asked a nationally representative sample of 5,593 American adults a bunch of questions about paying for news. There’s some interesting stuff here! Re: That advertising question, it was one of very few things that over 50% of respondents agreed on, when it comes to funding news.

After that, people are pretty divided. The richest Americans, for instance, are much more likely than Americans from other income groups to say that the primary source of funding for news should be individual donations. Note in the chart below, too, that the poorest Americans were quite a bit more likely than those from higher-income groups to say that the government should be the primary funding source for news.

About a quarter of Americans have ever paid for news directly. Americans making more than $150,000 a year are, not surprisingly, much more likely to have paid for news than those in any other income group (even the $100,000 to $150,000 bracket).

People do not, generally, like the idea of paying customers receiving news before others — though younger adults are more open to it, and to other types of payment models, than older adults are.

Subscription was far and away the most common way to pay for news. (Confusingly, 15% of those who’d paid for news also said they’d paid either with “micropayments” or a “day pass” — where are they encountering those in the wild?)

Only one percent of respondents who “were trying to access a news story online and had to pay to keep reading or watching it” said they would, simply, pay up. (Nearly half, meanwhile, said their first move would be to try to access the story free from a different outlet.)

Democrats are 14 percentage points more likely than Republicans to have paid for news. And college-educated Americans are about twice as likely to have paid for news as Americans who didn’t complete four years of college.

You can read the full report here.

A new report from Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that only a third of the Americans polled in December 2021 said that they pay “a great deal” of attention to national news, down from 54% of who said the same when polled in November 2020 (notably, the month of a presidential election).

The most recent poll results were compiled based on surveying more than 4,200 U.S. adults.

And while the trend of news engagement being down was consistent across a range of demographics, the report’s authors found that Democrats younger than 55 were least likely to be paying attention to national news. Compared to the November 2020 poll, there was a 46-point drop in the percentage of Democrats aged 18-34 saying they paid attention to national news. Among 35-54-year-old Democrats surveyed, there was a 41-point drop from November 2020 to December last year.

The report’s authors noted that this is the first time since 2018 (when they started measuring this trend in news attention) that Democrats overall have reported paying less attention to national news than their Republican counterparts. Democrats were more likely to pay attention to news during the Trump administration, just as Republicans tended to pay more attention during the Obama presidency.

However, Republicans also report a small decrease in how much attention they pay to national news, a trend that the report authors suggest may be because of the constant news about Covid-19 or general news burnout.

The large drop among Democrats, according to the authors, could also be explained by these factors, but their interest in news back in November 2020 saw an “uncharacteristic spike in attention,” possibly because of the presidential election and the “frenzy” that ensued as then-President Trump worked to contest the election’s results.

At the same time, the report didn’t find much of a change in the percentage of respondents who said they paid a “great deal” of attention to local or international news. (That number for local news is 21% and for international news is 12%).

Check out the full report here.

Many of these complaints are dumb ad hominem attacks that seek to delegitimize questions raised by outsiders. But some draw blood. The question is even more complicated for those of us who write about the media; our jobs and our beats intersect in all sorts of ways, of course, but plenty of journalists and news executives still downgrade any criticism coming from someone they think doesn’t “get it.”

So it’s noteworthy when a journalist moves from critic/analyst to builder/CEO. And in this case, the person stepping into the arena is Ken Doctor, who has been writing about the travails of the news business — most prominently the local newspaper business — here at Nieman Lab for more than a decade.

Like most of us in this strange meta-journalism world, Ken had a long career in the coal mines before becoming an analyst. He was, at various points, publisher of an Oregon alt-weekly, managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a vice president at Knight Ridder corporate working on digital content and strategy, and an industry consultant. And now, in what he calls his “sixth career,” Ken is going back into the news business, as CEO of a new startup called Lookout Local. He announced the shift here back in October, and today the company moved out of stealth mode.

Lookout hopes to eventually expand across the country, but it’ll first prove out its model in Santa Cruz, California, where Ken lives; Lookout Santa Cruz will launch later this fall. (They’re hiring!)

What will make Lookout Local different from all the other local news sites out there — from the scale-hungry like Patch to the mom-and-pop neighborhood blogger? Here are a few things that stand out to me:

• Lookout doesn’t want to be a supplement, an adjunct, or an alternative to the local daily newspaper. Lookout sites expect to be the news source of record in their communities. Its Santa Cruz site expects to launch with more than twice as many local news reporters as the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the daily in town that’s been strip-mined by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
• Lookout is local, but not parochial — something Ken says he learned from his days at Knight Ridder, which wasn’t afraid to mix in ambitious original national reporting with local happenings. Lookout’s tech stack will come from the Los Angeles Times. It will add selected national content from partners like ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and Chalkbeat to contextualize its local reporting. And it aims to invest in product development at a level most local sites can’t match.
• Lookout is focused on taking a newspaper-like institutional position in its communities. That means partnerships with local nonprofits or universities, persistent outreach to civic groups and businesses, and the sort of focus on civic improvement a good editorial page used to offer.

It’s that first item that I think is most significant. There are many communities where vigorous digital news sites play important and positive roles in the information ecosystem. But there are many fewer where the largest newsroom is attached to anything other than the local daily newspaper. As private equity and hedge funds continue to bleed America’s newspapers — and as they inevitably start shutting them down altogether — there’s going to be a bigger hole to fill than most local news sites can, at least right now. Launching with more size and greater capacity makes the prospect of a future without local newspapers more tenable.

And Santa Cruz is, in many ways, an ideal market to test Ken’s ideas in. Most obviously — and least replicably — he lives there and already knows many of the key people a new news outlet would most want support from. Santa Cruz is also rich, a college town, and famously activist — all factors that can offer the social capital to help make an effort like this successful.

It’s also a city where the newspaper is in really sorry shape, thanks to Alden. In 2014, the Sentinel had a 20-person newsroom, with reporters dedicated to beats like agriculture, local arts, health care, housing, religion — even surfing. Today, that newsroom has been reduced to six people: a managing editor, a city editor, a sports editor, a photographer, and just two local news reporters. (The city does already have another interesting local news startup, Santa Cruz Local, started by Kara Meyberg Guzman, a former Sentinel managing editor. We wrote about it briefly in December.)

Having edited Ken for a decade, I know there aren’t many people with a deeper knowledge of the local digital news world. Does that mean he’ll be the one to figure out ~~~THE SOLUTION~~~? Maybe! He’s gathered up many of the best ideas of other local startups and tried to mash them into one epic package. He should have the resources to give it a solid go, and he’s adaptive enough to shift strategy as Lookout learns what works or doesn’t. How well his model will apply to other communities — those without Santa Cruz’s advantages, or those where the hedge fund pillaging of the local daily hasn’t been quite so severe — will take time to determine. But it’s got a shot, and that’s enough reason for optimism these days.

Ken and I talked about Lookout and his plans recently. Among the topics we cover below: the news sites he takes the most inspiration from, why nonprofits can’t solve the local news crisis, and how so-called “news deserts” are often “ad deserts” too. I started out asking him how it’s been balancing his writing for Nieman Lab — he broke some substantial news this summer — with launching a startup.

So access. In the AJP model, one of the principles is no paywalls. [The American Journalism Project, co-founded by Chalkbeat’s Elizabeth Green and Thornton, provides venture philanthropy to promising digital local news companies and says grantees’ core product “must be free to the public.” —Ed.]

And I’ve said to them: That’s great, in principle. Yeah, we want everybody to have access to it. I want everybody to have access. But tell me any model that’s going to actually sustain a news company and allow it to grow that isn’t heavily based on reader revenue. And show me any reader-revenue model that is strong enough to do that that doesn’t have a paywall as a foundation. And there is there isn’t one; public radio is its own thing and it’s 40 years old.

So the access model, to your point, is do a paywall, get those who can pay, and there are many of them, to pay — and then provide as wide access as possible to those who essentially can’t or, in some cases, won’t. So we have used, essentially The New York Times’ model there. We want students to have access to Lookout. We believe that’s key to their civics education and democracy. And so we are finding benefactors who will help us get access to students and schools. Students throughout the county is our goal — we’re about halfway there on that.

In terms of coverage, that’s where the mission orientation comes in. It’s got to be a strong business to sustain and grow the journalism we want to do — but we don’t evaluate coverage areas, coverage topics by how much money they’re gonna bring in. We will be very data-centric in following what readers are actually reading and in terms of membership funnel and all of that. But we are committed to covering this whole county, of having at least some of the staff being bilingual. And I’m already working with leaders in south county — for instance, there’ll be a whole series (made hard by the pandemic) of listening sessions. What does that mean, to cover an area that hasn’t been covered? Watsonville is the major city in the south part of the county — how do we get Watsonville and Santa Cruz to understand each other, actually putting together a project on that in addition to the way we assign beat reporters. So I think it’s both access and coverage, and it’ll evolve over time, but we have a very strong commitment to it.

There were attempts at theatrics. Would thousands of retirees have their pensions saved? Would mustache-twirling Alden Global Capital tie McClatchy’s properties to the railroad tracks as its train rounded the corner? And, most intriguing of all, would the Knight Foundation bet $300 million-plus of its $2 billion-plus in assets on trying to revive an old newspaper company?

That last possibility came and went without public acknowledgment, but down the road it may look like a retrospective tipping point in the disappearance of the American daily press.

In the end, any drama was distilled down to a moment of awkward comedy: Passionate supporters of a vibrant free press rooting for what they hoped would be the less damaging hedge fund to come out on top.

Things turned out just as we and everyone else were predicting back in February, when McClatchy and CEO Craig Forman acknowledged their financial dead end and filed for bankruptcy. On Sunday, the board of the No. 2 newspaper chain in the United States picked the winner of its thinly attended auction: Chatham Asset Management should be the new owner of McClatchy.

It is just a recommendation; bankruptcy Judge Michael E. Wiles must still bless the deal, which he’s expected to do July 24. While we’re still waiting on some details of the deal, including how much Chatham will pay and how much McClatchy’s creditors will get, we can sum up this little chapter in daily descent in 10 points.

All lips are sealed, publicly, but numerous sources tell me that, as of today, there are three bidders for the 30-newspaper chain.

We know two of them, and they’re familiar names to those who’ve watched the news industry’s conquest by hedge funds and private equity. And the list doesn’t include the knight-in-shining-armor many had hoped would turn McClatchy into the country’s first nonprofit newspaper chain.

As we’ve known for months, Chatham Asset Management, both McClatchy’s leading investor and leading debtholder, is among them — and still the likeliest to become the company’s new operator by the end of July.

Also bidding is the now-ubiquitous [cue horror-movie intro music] Alden Global Capital, the Randy Smith/Heath Freeman-run hedge fund that operates MNG Enterprises and is in step-by-step pursuit of Tribune Publishing.

There’s also an offer from a third financial player, but insiders report that it’s a non-starter.

While Alden’s participation here isn’t particularly unexpected, it’s significant — and may help explain the tighter hug Alden wrapped around Tribune last week.

The biggest news, though, is who didn’t bid. Last week, I noted that a “leader in the field of nonprofit journalism” was considering making an offer. That leader, as many guessed in offline and online last week, was the Knight Foundation. And in the end, Knight chose to drop out of the process and not make a bid.

Miami-based Knight is the country’s leading funder of journalistic experimentation and innovation. (And its leading generator of disclosures for those who write about journalism.) But it’s in the business of grants and investments, not operating businesses. That it even considered a bid for McClatchy shows how desperate the situation is in the business of local news.

Led by CEO Alberto Ibargüen, Knight felt compelled to consider such a change of course by the twin forces of financialization and consolidation that have quickly consumed the country’s major newspaper chains. Since I began reporting 18 months ago on what I’ve called the Consolidation Games, financial players have come to dominate much of the daily readership across the country.

With Fortress Investment Group managing the new merged companies of Gannett and GateHouse, with Alden owning MNG Enterprises, and with the likely takeover of McClatchy by Chatham, about 40 percent of daily newspaper readership (as measured by print circulation) will have its fate in the spreadsheets of financial engineers. (And that’s before considering what will happen to Tribune, Lee, or whatever other dominos topple next.)

Knight’s month-long assessment

That’s why the Knight Foundation deeply considered a bid — before deciding that the risk it would take on was too great and that its role as an owner would be too problematic.

That Knight didn’t bid will be cheered by some in the widening local news revival community, even as they understood the foundation’s motivation. They wondered how Knight might balance its roles as a funder and as an owner. They wondered if Knight would retain current McClatchy CEO Craig Forman, which indeed was one of the possibilities discussed. They wondered why the foundation might put $300 million-plus into a still-transitioning dead-tree company, rather than investing more in digital-only enterprises. Knight could have mustered answers to all those questions and more, further fueling an existing debate among those in and around the news business.

The likelihood of hedge fund control for McClatchy struck a particular chord for the foundation. Knight is in Miami, where the McClatchy-owned Miami Herald is a key civic player. (Before becoming Knight’s CEO, Ibargüen was the Herald’s publisher.) Then there’s the Knight-Ridder legacy built into its very name. John S. and James L. Knight’s money built the foundation, and the idea of preserving that hometown paper, is a heartfelt one.

Then there’s that McClatchy–Knight Ridder link. In 2006, the smaller McClatchy bought Knight Ridder Newspapers, then the country’s second-largest chain, for $6.5 billion in cash, stock, and debt. The timing proved disastrous; 2006 was the top of the market for newspapers, and all that debt choked McClatchy financially. It staved off bankruptcy for more than a decade until finally succumbing in February. Still, though, in terms of its journalistic DNA, the new expanded McClatchy largely resembled Knight Ridder.

Knight engaged McKinsey for a month-long sprint. They talked to many in the news business about the pros and cons of buying and “transforming” McClatchy. In the end, amid both board and staff concerns, the foundation stepped away from a bid, numerous sources tell me.

The Knight Foundation declined to comment for this story.

It’s hard to overestimate the drama of Knight’s consideration, even if it stopped short. It’s another big reality check for how far American newspapering has been yanked from its civic mission roots, as well as the unorthodox lengths true believers may go to in trying to revive a vital local press.

How will the auction proceed?

With Knight out, this week’s bankruptcy drama may seem less interesting, but it’ll still go forward. (With the proviso that a bankruptcy court hearing today could delay things. Judge Michael E. Wiles will decide if and how the complaint of a “fraudulent transaction” in McClatchy’s 2018 refinancing can go forward. Based on the judge’s previous statements, observers say it’s likely that the threat of a lawsuit won’t much hold off sale decisions — but it could.)

Few know the numbers in the Alden bid, but most consider Chatham’s approximately $300 million stalking horse offer the odds-on favorite.

Could there be more surprises before July 8 — or even July 10 or so, if the judge provides a couple more days of decision-making, as he may? The McClatchy board, which makes the decision on who to recommend as the company’s buyer to the bankruptcy judge, can still receive new bids this week. Will any appear?

There remains a big question of valuation. What is McClatchy worth today — and more importantly, given the $300 million purchase price, tomorrow or in 2023? Its just-under-$100 million pre-COVID free cash flow, will be substantially reduced by the major continuing advertising crater driven by pandemic and recession.

With significantly reduced revenue — “we don’t even know what the fourth-quarter will look like, much less the next three years,” one keen financial observer says — what is this company really worth?

One answer to that question is: To whom? While Chatham maintains interests in both Canada’s major Postmedia daily chain, and in AMI’s National Enquirer, it can’t fruitfully combine McClatchy assets with either. It can’t — in the parlance of financialization and consolidation — grab the golden ring of “synergies.” Gannett CEO Mike Reed has claimed that the Gannett/GateHouse merger will produce $300 million in synergies, major cuts of what are said to be redundant and overlapping costs as the two companies — quite fitfully, say those inside the merger — become one.

How much could Alden further squeeze if it combined McClatchy’s properties with its MNG dailies and weeklies? The total could be $100 million or more. And what if Alden further crunched together Tribune’s papers, creating an Alden MNG/McClatchy/Tribune rollup? Such a company would approach the new Gannett in size and reach. Together, Gannett and Alden would control almost one-half of U.S. local daily readership.

All of that math means that McClatchy offers a different value to Alden than it does to Chatham. Alden knows its numbers; if it’s bidding, we’d expect it to be playing to win — and beat Chatham’s offer.

But Chatham — by its position as McClatchy’s largest investor and debtholder — is in a unique position, and most observers believe that, financially, its takeover makes the most sense.

As I’ve written, even if Chatham wins McClatchy, what might it do with it afterwards? In fact, Alden’s emergence as a bidder here renews speculation that Chatham may be a short-term owner. It could well move to merge with Alden’s MNG Enterprises — or the new Gannett, as I’ve suggested — sooner or later.

There’s also the glimmer of hope among civic leaders — both the mayors of Miami and Sacramento have written the bankruptcy judge, appealing for a resolution that supports community journalism — that Chatham may be willing to sell individual properties to civic leaders, backed by philanthropy.

For them, this week’s drama is only Act I.

The standstill that’s not a standstill?

While it’s not surprising, this Alden bid for McClatchy could help explain why, mysteriously to some, Alden agreed to a new “standstill” agreement with Tribune last week. Standstills are meant to offer protection against hostile takeovers by current shareholders. This one appears to be an imperfect vaccine.

Alden chairman Randy Smith joining the Tribune board got the headlines last week. Essentially: The Man With A Dozen Palm Beach Mansions Goes Public. But his presence was a bit overblown. First off, the Tribune board isn’t exactly a Trump rally, but rather a small, fairly private boardroom session.

Second, how much do we really care about why Smith, and not his sidekick-in-newspaper-cutting Heath Freeman or some other underling, took the seat? We’ll have to wait for Freeman’s tell-all, but in the meantime, the question is where this month’s events lead. The smart money still says we will likely see a more formal combination of Alden’s MNG Enterprises newspapers and Tribune’s at some point.

As well-documented in Chicago Tribune reporter Bob Channick’s story, the announced “standstill” to push off an Alden takeover rests on some pretty squishy sand. It seems to be a standstill in name only.

As Channick explained: “A filing Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission lays out a number of circumstances — from other major shareholders teaming up to someone making an offer to buy Tribune Publishing — that would terminate the agreement and allow Alden to buy more shares…In fact, Alden itself could make an offer to buy a majority stake in the company, despite the standstill agreement.”

In essence, within the SEC filings, Alden has placed itself in the driver’s seat, able to act when it wants to and fairly able to prevent others from buying Tribune. And all the while, it gets a front-row seat to examine any company financial detail it wants.

And of course it gets the lucky seventh board seat at Tribune Publishing, two months after the company dispatched its two longest-standing and journalism-supporting board members, reducing the board to six. Two of those six, appointed soon after Alden bought a third of the company in November, were hand-picked by Alden.

Add it up, and Alden keeps Tribune right where it wants it while it plays the field.

Or to put it in more graphic terms, as one top industry leader suggested Sunday: “Alden can keep one foot on Tribune’s neck while they’re seeing what plays out with McClatchy.”

In the meantime, as Joshua Benton summed up last week, Alden can continue to let other guys do the cutting, while it assesses longer-term COVID-driven business damage.

Then there’s always, simply, the money. This isn’t the easiest environment to win financing for a newspaper deal. One deeply knowledgeable financial source offers an elegantly simple surmise: “They probably can’t find a way to finance the deal, so they have to wait and see. These guys need leverage to do deals, so this is a delay and blocking tactic.”

Amid a reckoning with institutionalized racism in the news media industry, the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation conducted separate studies that drew similar conclusions: American news consumers don’t feel that the news media represents them and the industry’s lack of diversity is a huge contributor.

“Roughly similar portions of black (58%), Hispanic (55%) and white Americans (61%) say the news media misunderstand them, but they cite markedly different reasons for this misunderstanding,” Pew found. One third of Black Americans, for example, said their personal characteristics were misunderstood. On the other hand, 39 percent of white Americans said their political views were misunderstood. Then, 26 percent of Hispanic Americans felt their personal interests were misunderstood.

The study gets into more specific demographics, too, including political leanings, religious affiliations, and age groups. “Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are far more likely to feel the news media misunderstand them than Democrats and Democratic leaners (73% vs. 47%),” Pew says. “Male U.S. adults are somewhat more likely than female adults to feel this, and those ages 18 to 29 are more likely to say this than those older than them.”

Meanwhile, the Knight Foundation specifically examined newsroom diversity and found that “69% of Americans say that reflecting the diversity of the U.S. population is a ‘critical’ (35%) or ‘very important’ (34%) role for the media. Black (50%), Hispanic (43%) and Asian people (41%) are more likely than white people (30%) to say the media’s role in reflecting diversity is ‘critical.'”

Of the people who want to see newsrooms diversified, they prioritized diversity based on race/ethnicity (35 percent), political views (30 percent), income or social class (18 percent), age (9 percent) and gender (5 percent).

About half of Republicans (51 percent) want to see political diversity increased, while 49 percent of Democrats said racial and ethnic diversity is the most important to them.

As newsrooms across the country look for ways to address diversity issues, both studies (which were conducted before the George Floyd protests beginning in late May) offer at least some insight into how future decisions might be perceived by the public.

NEW RESEARCH: 79% of Americans say news organizations should increase the diversity of their staff — but they disagree on the type of diversity they’d like to see. More new research from @Gallup-Knight: https://t.co/jjwMWSSp3g #trustinnews (THREAD 1/6)

— Knight Foundation (@knightfdn) June 25, 2020

Interesting disparities: White people feel the media misunderstands their politics, for POC it's more about personal attributes: https://t.co/GYVIov7Hq5

— Catherine McGloin (@catmcgloin) June 26, 2020

Race vs politics? "Roughly similar portions of black (58%), Hispanic (55%) and white Americans (61%) say the news media misunderstand them, but they cite markedly different reasons for this misunderstanding."
https://t.co/Zwbc8IO0WF

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) June 26, 2020

"… U.S. adults living in areas with a higher proportion of Hispanic residents were somewhat less likely to feel a connection to local journalists and news organizations …"

*clears throat* I'VE BEEN TELLING Y'ALL THIShttps://t.co/X3jc2ldKei

— Elvia Limón (@elvialimon) June 25, 2020

Asked to identify the two most common sources of misinformation, a combined 68 percent name social media and 54 percent the Trump administration, though more give the Trump administration as their first response (47 percent) than social media (15 percent).

“82% of Democrats, 79% of independents and 73% of Republicans” think coronavirus misinformation is a major problem — but, not surprisingly, Democrats were vastly more likely to identify the Trump administration as a major source of misinformation (85 percent) than Republicans (4 percent). Meanwhile, 75 percent of Republicans identified mainstream news organizations as the main source of false or misleading coronavirus information, compared to just 2 percent of Democrats. So what you’d expect.

Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed said that they were “well-informed” about COVID-19, but 36 percent said they were overwhelmed by the amount of information available. 18- to 34-year-olds were significantly more likely than those ages 55 and older to say that they felt overwhelmed by the amount of coverage:

Knight/Gallup surveyed 1,693 U.S. adults on the internet between April 14 and 20.

The center, based at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY (full disclosure: my alma mater), is doing so with $1.45 million: $900,000 from the Knight Foundation, $400,000 from the Democracy Fund, and $150,000 from the Ford Foundation. It’ll use that money to scale up its services, like providing outlets resources, tools, and opportunities for networking to help their publications survive and thrive during a rough time for all local news.

CCM, founded in 2012, used to be named the Center for Community and Ethnic Media. It also used to publish Voices of New York, a site that highlighted the best of the city’s community and ethnic media (it’s now operated by City Limits) and put on the now-defunct Ippies to honor reporting in ethnic communities.

“We decided to take all the lessons learned in New York and bring them to a national scale, and offer resources and skills and trainings to these outlets that are struggling with the same issues as everyone else,” said Graciela Mochkofsky, CCM’s executive director and a 2009 Nieman Fellow. “But they have less resources, they’ve been marginalized by mainstream media, and don’t necessarily have access to the same conversations that mainstream media editors and publishers have.”

The center is partnering with journalists and organizations in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, and El Paso, she said. People based in those cities will share CCM’s resources with news outlets in their communities through research, media mapping projects, and public events.

Plans for 2020 are well underway:

The Center already has a number of initiatives planned for 2020, including trainings in both New York and Los Angeles in Spanish for Latinx news media organizations on how to combat disinformation. The Center also plans to establish a reporting fellowship across the U.S.-Mexico border to increase resources for the local press during the presidential election year, and will launch a program to help independent outlets in Chicago get access to advertising dollars.

The main goal is to “increase the visibility and sustainability of media outlets that primarily serve immigrants and communities of color, often in languages other than English.”

The Knight Foundation’s contribution is part of its larger $300 million commitment to rebuild the future of local news over the next five years. “Trust is the No. 1 value that these news organizations have,” said Knight director for journalism LaSharah Bunting. “When we look at the industry and we’re all trying to figure out ways to navigate issues of misinformation and disinformation and figuring out what are the ways that we can really bring these audiences in, and get them to trust us more. Here are outlets that already innately have that.”

CUNY is already home to a number of projects around Spanish-language media, including its bilingual journalism master’s program, the annual Latino Media Report, and the Latino Media Summit. A new initiative around African-American media is in the works for this year.

“It’s sad when I read about the demise of local journalism or the new news deserts, to not find in the list of what has been lost or threatened, the thousands and thousands of outlets that still exist serving these communities,” Mochkofsky said. “We’re trying to fill that void and work with these outlets to offer resources to continue doing that work and figure out with them how to reach out to the new audiences that still need them.”

The Putting a Price Tag on Local News study surveyed more than 2,700 adults across the United States and found that 56 percent think local news outlets in their area are doing very well or somewhat well. And even more, 63 percent, think that outlets outside their area were in good shape financially.

Of course, the reality is different. Local newspapers, the engines that create most local journalism, have faced more than a decade of cuts and layoffs, and the financialization of the industry has led to waves of consolidation, often led by companies seemingly more interested in milking them dry than in treating them like community assets. Just last week, we saw the two largest newspaper chains merge into one, driven by the desire to cut up to half a billion dollars in costs, and the next-largest chain, McClatchy, lost 82 percent of its market cap in one week because it can’t afford to pay its pension obligations.

But the survey findings offer newsrooms and management new evidence to avoid a potential market failure, according to John Sands, Knight’s director of learning and impact. “We think this report points to the fact that Americans do value the good that’s being provided to them by local news organizations. They think that by and large, everyone should have access to quality local news, even if they don’t pay for it,” Sands said. “We think that now that there’s empirical evidence that shows that Americans are thinking of local news more as a public good, what sort of policy pathways open up to potentially sustain it?”

Sands said Knight/Gallup wanted to study news consumers’ behaviors along with their perceptions of local news. Researchers conducted an experiment where they asked respondents what their perception of a news organization’s financial health was before and after providing them with Pew data that showed the decline of newspaper circulation and staff between 2006 and 2017.

The results indicate that Americans are “more willing to support local news when made aware of its plight,” the report says. The survey also found that Americans were more likely to subscribe or otherwise support their local newspaper if it were the only one in their area and at risk of shutting down.

Other notable findings include:

• • Democrats (37 percent) are the most likely to pay a monthly or annual subscription fee for local news, compared to independents (27 percent) and Republicans (25 percent).
  • Democrats and frequent local news consumers are also far more likely to think local news is vital and should be preserved than Republicans and less-frequent consumers. Among Democrats who consume a lot of news, 81 percent say it’s a vital resource; among Republicans who don’t, that number’s only 17 percent.
  • Only one in five Americans has supported a local news organization with a donation, subscription, or renewal in the past year, but 86 percent of all Americans think everyone should have access to local news.
  • Americans are divided on how to salvage local news. Less than half (47 percent) think local news should be preserved even if the business is failing, but 52 percent think a news organization should be allowed to fail like any other business. (People who know local news orgs aren’t doing well are slightly more likely to think they should be allowed to fail than those who don’t.)

• At the same time, 60 percent oppose funding local news through local tax revenues, while 66 percent oppose supporting it through federal tax revenue.
• Younger people may not be the most voracious local news consumers, but they are more likely than older Americans to say “private or government institutions should guarantee funding” for local news — 62 percent for ages 18–34 vs. 29 percent for ages 55 and up.

“What our report is suggesting is two things: that there’s an enormous need for some sort of structural, high-level policy conversation to happen,” Sands said. “The second is that, until that policy conversation yields some sort of potential path forward, there are small, incremental educational tactics that local news organizations can use now that there’s evidence that can change news consumers’ behaviors.”

The 2010s’ media industry has been particularly brutal to local news outlets, slicing staffs and closing many newsrooms around the country with devoted efforts to help the remaining outlets transition to digital. Local news is important to save for many civic reasons — see the Local News Lab’s research roundup — but another oft-cited reason is because local news brought more harmony and faith in journalism to its communities. People trusted it, a word that’s at the core of journalism’s problems today (but not the only one).

“The shorter the distance between our neighbors and our news, the stronger our community. There is strength in local, and local leads to trust,” Knight president Alberto Ibargüen said at the Knight Media Forum in February, announcing the foundation’s doubled-down commitment to local news efforts.

There is still strength in local, this new study finds, but local doesn’t necessarily lead to trust. Local news is the second-least trusted local institution, just ahead of local government (topped by libraries, law enforcement, businesses, churches, and more). And respondents to the three surveys as part of this study said that while local news does a good job with highlighting the local sports teams, it can do more with holding local officials accountable. But that’s precisely where local news could also fall into the trap of losing trust — by trying to improve coverage of more nationally inflaming topics on a local level, the researchers found.

“The study findings present a dilemma for local news. The data suggest that moving into more aggressive coverage of social and political issues could further polarize views — and possibly lead to an erosion of trust. However, these are not issues that local news organizations can abandon without abdicating some of their mandate to help democracy flourish,” the report states. “The more it wades into coverage of national issues, the more vulnerable it may be to accusations of bias and a loss of community trust.”

“Local news outlets don’t exist in a vacuum, as this study emphasizes. The same forces that have eroded trust in the national media are now beginning to filter down to the local level,” Knight’s director of learning and impact John Sands wrote. “While more Americans trust their local news outlets more than national, that trust is more fragile than previously understood — and vulnerable to the same perceptions of partisan bias that threaten confidence in the national media.”

“Local news” is a pretty broad term — the researchers asked respondents to list their news sources rather than define local news for them, and the answers vary from “Bret Baier” to “YouTube” to “the Chicago Tribune,” though the top results were Fox News, CNN, and “local newspaper (non-specific).” At another point they identify local news as “a local newspaper; local television station; website or app produced by a local individual, group or organization; local radio station; local magazine” (all followed by “(in print, online or on an app)”).

The study also unpacks the public’s view on trust from different political corners and uses of local news. Some highlights:

Majorities of Americans say local news is doing an “excellent” or “good” job in fulfilling many of its responsibilities. The most notable exceptions are making people feel inspired and holding local leaders accountable for their actions — 52% and 60%, respectively, feel local news does only a “fair” or “poor” job of these tasks.

The largest partisan gap emerges over providing factual local news reports, with 75% of Democrats saying local news organizations are doing an “excellent” or “good” job, compared with 54% of Republicans. Less than half of Democrats, independents or Republicans say local news does a good job holding leaders accountable for their actions….

Overall, the local-national trust gap is driven by Republicans and, to a lesser degree, independents, but this gap is more a function of Republican and independent distrust of the national news media than of high levels of trust in local news media.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to trust local news to perform their roles, but the gap is especially wide when it comes to getting the facts right. Although 51% of Americans do not perceive that their local news has become more biased in recent years, those who believe it has are more likely to see a shift toward liberal views.

That last data point is the highest risk for local news — aside from, you know, finding a sustainable way to support itself — going forward. If you lose the public’s trust and utility for you as a news outlet, what do you have left?

Gallup researchers tried to answer the question of “do Americans trust local news more simply because it is local” with an experiment that compared respondents’ reaction to a news item identified as from a local or national publication. Good news: Respondents did trust the article when it was identified as local versus national. According to the report: “These differences in ratings of the ‘local’ versus ‘national’ news story are modest but statistically significant and indicate a small gain in trust merely from identifying a story as being from a local news organization rather than a national one…A small reservoir of goodwill exists toward local news organizations because they are local, but this could quickly dry up if Americans perceive more political bias in coverage.” (Emphasis mine.)

That’s also a reason why the widely reported growth of Sinclair Broadcast Group — the conservative company known for injecting its ideology into its broadcasts — carries extra risk for local news. Whether a TV viewer agrees or disagrees with Sinclair’s politics — or even if she never watches that station at all — its mere presence can increase perceptions of bias and decrease trust for the entire local news ecosystem.

The crux of this issue:

Perceptions of whether local news is more politically biased today than in the past offer a window into how Americans’ attitudes toward the local news media may shift in the future. An increase in perceived bias may forewarn of a deterioration in trust of local news organizations.

About as many Americans perceive shifts in the ideological leanings of local news organizations compared to five years ago as indicate there has been no change. A slim majority, 51%, say local news coverage has stayed about the same, while 37% see movement in a more liberal direction and 11% in a more conservative direction.

The partisan differences of perceived shifts in the ideological leanings of local news are substantial. Six in 10 Republicans say news organizations in their local area have moved in a more liberal direction, compared with 16% of Democrats who say local news organizations have moved in a more conservative direction. Two-thirds of Democrats perceive no change in local news ideology. Among independents, nearly half (47%) say news organizations in their local area have stayed the same, 38% say they have moved in a more liberal direction and 13% say a more conservative direction.

Trust in local news hasn’t crashed and burned as much as that in national news; but just as “local” isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of word, neither is finding a solution for rebuilding “trust.”

The full report is available here.

After months of work, I’m happy to begin introducing the new company that I’m heading, named Lookout. It’s a wide-reaching new model for local news; we’ll launch next year.

After 15 years providing analysis of the global news industry, the last 10 of them here, I felt compelled to meld together the best of what I’ve seen and heard — the best of the best practices of the trade — in a way we haven’t seen yet. It’s my opportunity, and my calling at this moment, to take the lessons I’ve learned from many of you who lead and work in the news industry and combine them anew. It’s recombinant news DNA for the 2020s.

As John Davidow, managing director for digital at Boston’s WBUR, recently put it after reviewing Lookout’s plans: “It’s like you got in the cafeteria line, but only took the good stuff.”

We are building a city-embracing mobile experience, delivering knowledgeable topical reporting paired with national content partnerships. We’ll meet our audience where they are, via audio, newsletters, and mobile. We’ll connect journalists and readers in multiple ways. Our reader revenue strategy allows for growing customization. In short, Lookout aims to become a true platform, bringing a national standard of digital execution to local news.

Overall, we believe the successful local news outlets of the 2020s will be the ones that authentically embed themselves into the life of the communities they serve. That’s got to be done both digitally and in the real physical world — you know, those humans around you — so the experience is really shared. And those two worlds have to be connected, through news, city guides, community groups, commerce, reader-driven story creation, and more. Facebook, for all that it does, is just an early way-station on the road to authentic community-driven social activity.

The decade now coming to a close has taught us well that the global internet economy values scale. With Lookout, we believe we can prove out a new truism The internet, locally, can uniquely generate and support new valuable individual, group, and advertiser relationships.

So why am I trying to create a new model and company? I could have just written a book about my ideas — Newsonomics 2020, 10 years after my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape The News You Get was published (and excerpted here at Nieman Lab). But the limits of writing and the need for doing have become all too apparent.

I’ve exhorted, cajoled, beseeched, pleaded, and lectured at times, preaching the best practices that I’ve found from the smallest of startups to the global news giants. But the diminishment of local news continues to speed up, the incumbents hobbled by legacy structures. And most of the efforts to fill the yawning local gap — powered by talented and caring journalists — are simply below the scale necessary to replace what’s been lost. One key to Lookout’s model is sufficient editorial and business resources to both make and fulfill a promise to readers in the marketplace.

Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton tells me I’ve written 419 pieces here since 2010. And I’m getting uncomfortably close to a million words here — 903,547 of them before today. I do write long, though usually backed up by ample reporting. Here I ask your indulgence for me to explain a bit about Lookout — based not on reporting, but on months of work.

Digital economics, local focus, necessary scale

“You have to do this,” Walker Lundy, the editor I worked for in the 1990s at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, told me over lunch this summer. Walker usually advises his friends to take early retirement, so I was surprised by the statement. I’ve taken on this mission spurred in part by my unusual constellation of work experience. Lookout will be my fifth career in journalism. At the tender age of 25, I became editor and then publisher of an alternative weekly in Eugene, Oregon. Through city magazine work, years with Knight Ridder newspapers in print and digital, and then as a media analyst, I’ve been able to learn so much from so many news organizations.

Lookout is still a work in progress, and I’ll tell you more as we move toward announcing a launch city, date, and who else is involved. We may well chronicle what we’re doing and learning here at Nieman Lab along the way. In short, though, we intend to offer a local news vision for the 2020s. We want to be part of changing the conversation about what’s possible — and what’s necessary — in the reinvention and revival of new local news institutions.

Lookout recognizes how we consume news today — on demand, at home, at work, in the car, on our phones, in audio, text, and video. Many of us believe that local is as meaningful now as in the heyday of print — but that how we write, present, and deliver local news and information requires a blank-slate start. This isn’t a matter of replicating newspapers digitally.

In fact, we should be able to do more and better local journalism now than we ever have. Consider that a digital-only operation like Lookout will be able to devote about 70 percent of its resources to content creation. The print-based daily model — with presses, newsprint, trucks, big office buildings, and more to pay for — can only afford 12 to 20 percent on content. The digital economics can work if we smartly and appropriately apply the lessons of successful national/global media companies to local ones.

Without the burden of legacy costs and public-company pressures, Lookout can harness the attractive math of digital-only business and the increasingly powerful but inexpensive technologies of our time. Earning our way forward is fundamental to the model.

We believe that new news institutions must stand on their own, earning and growing their own reader and local advertiser revenue. We don’t believe that many local news institutions — as compared to national, state, or regional ones — can do the scale of high-quality work required if they are dependent on ongoing philanthropy.

As a for-profit, public-benefit corporation, Lookout will act with the scale and scope necessary to make readers and sponsors a proposition worth paying for. Our public-benefit structure codifies the centrality of our community service mission. Our for-profit structure allows us to endorse candidates, access capital, and become part of local business communities.

We’re truly digital native, respecting our readers’ intelligence and time to earn a primary place on their home screens. Civic engagement — and betterment — is built into our very fabric. We believe the phone should become a primary tool of democracy, and democracy-building, into what history may someday tell us were the Soaring ’20s.

Everyday democracy

Soaring? That might be hard to believe now, in the final coughs of this exhausted decade, but the means of renewal are in front of us.

I’m not usually at the front of the line in citing popes. However, as Pope Francis described Europe’s malaise in 2014, we suffer from a “weariness” to solve problems. Can citizens, in the midst of messy democracy, find common ground to solve their own problems? Some believe that the wave of nationalism and polarization we see across the world’s democracies is a permanent feature of our societies.

There is plenty reason for pessimism. Our ability to tackle the issues of climate change, affordable housing, education equity, and food security, among many others, seems limited. And yet we’ve never had more knowledge and technologies to address them. What we need to do is activate the democracy, and in that, a vibrant, involved, fair, nonpartisan local “press” is essential.

That need is global. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on the problems of media on four continents. The trajectory of digital disruption differs from place to place, but the loss of local journalism — and its resulting effect on self-governance — is universal.

Back in the 1990s, I invited a young NYU professor named Jay Rosen to Saint Paul. We then practiced, in partnership with Jay, “public journalism.” A substantial part of the newsroom had its doubts, but a crew of dozen or so Pioneer Press staffers seized an opportunity: Do great in-depth series journalism on key topics (crime and safety, intergenerational relations, and more), and then hold public forums to involve the now-better-informed citizenry in seeking solutions.

That’s solutions journalism as we’ve come to know it, done in fits and starts across the country. It’s not new, but like the Internet of yore, it’s very unevenly distributed. What Lookout will ask: How do we build everyday democracy into the very fabric of an everyday news source that readers will check into frequently?

Will it work? Certainly, I’ve run across a lot of skeptics. “Nobody cares much about local news anymore.” “There’s simply no business model for local news.” “Why do you think you can make this work when nobody has?” Indeed, the muscle memory of robust local news is atrophying.

Can it be revived? Yes, if you give it a chance — and enough runway to prove the skeptics wrong.

“It’s amazing how people come up to me on the street, and say: ‘You’re publishing stories about things I never knew about,” Eric Barnes, CEO of the year-old Daily Memphian, told me last week.

We’re appreciative of having the support of the Knight Foundation, Google’s GNI Innovation Challenge, and supportive individuals both national and local as we continue to develop our model and build that runway. In the end, it’s a model, made of digital clay. We intend to get more of it right than wrong.

As we do, we’ll figure out where Lookout, goes from there. How might we expand? Where? How quickly? All that is to be determined. The first job is proving out the ambitious model. Lookout Local, the formal name of the public benefit company, will do what it can to enlarge the notion of what is practical in providing robust modern local news.

Talent + technology

One great lesson of our time: Great companies require talent plus technology.

We’ve seen a remarkable brain drain in the news industry, as digital disruption depleted its workforce, its sense of purpose, and its attractiveness to both journalists and business-side professionals. Talent — hiring it at livable, professional rates — will be one key to Lookout. We must find a way to create a new pipeline of agile, diverse, digital-native journalists serving local communities from coast to coast.

How that talent uses technology will distinguish our successes. There is no question that the 2020s will be a time of unprecedented mixing and matching for humans and tech. It must be talent, with clear journalistic and community purpose, that applies the best tools of the day.

We know what doesn’t work. In this age of fast-expanding news deserts and ghost newspapers, we’re — amazingly — moving back to pre-press times when people largely got their news by word of mouth. And the town criers have a lot of problems telling fact from rumor.

David Rousseau, who heads the impressive and fast-growing Kaiser Health News, offered the phrase “misery index” when we discussed how to parse the worse and worst instances of local news. We agreed that while we could spend time writing that algorithm — deciding what and how we should measure — it’s much better to simply reduce the misery. Rousseau, among many others in the industry, has helped me sculpt Lookout this year, and I thank you all.

The extent of that misery is mind-bending, of course, but sometimes it takes a single phrase to stop us. Retired Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger summed it up most jaw-droppingly: “We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how modern societies would exist without reliable news.” We must face down that prospect.

So that’s a preview. You’ll hear more as we can report it, here at the Lab and elsewhere. While I’ll be devoting most of my time to Lookout, I will continue to write on other topics. Both Josh and I are keenly mindful of potential conflicts, so we’ll clearly remind readers about Lookout with disclosure whenever relevant. Certainly, there may also be topics that become off-limits, and we’ll take the high road on those.

Early in my current career as an analyst, Michael Wolff, now famous for his Trump work, acidly defined my role in the news industry. “You’re the necrologist for the news business,” he told me, speaking of the ancients who read the scroll of the dead. Or, in more familiar news terms, a writer of obits.

Like much of what Wolff opines, it had the aroma of truth. He had a point, but I hope I’ve performed other duties as well. As I look to the 2020s, I come not to bury journalism but to praise what it can — and must — do for all of us.

After $650,000, nearly three dozen newsrooms’ experiments, and one year later, it’s still unclear. Four major journalism funders pooled the money for a fund to support a variety of outlets’ attempts at connecting the use of audience engagement and transparency tools with increased reader revenue. A report studying the first of three rounds of grants highlights some best practices and promising results — with a few “if”s.

Our research found that Hearken and GroundSource can both be used effectively to deepen community engagement, open up relationships with new audience members, and shape editorial coverage, if

1. managed by motivated staff members
2. in newsrooms with ample support from leadership
3. and enough time to employ the services well,

wrote Dot Connector Studio impact evaluators Jessica Clark, Katie Donnelly, and Michelle Polyak in a review of the Community Listening and Engagement Fund. (The bullet points and bolding are mine, not theirs.)

They added:

Little data is currently available from CLEF participants’ reports that connects use of these services with increased revenue or membership. The majority of newsrooms did not report seeing any evidence of increased revenue within the time frame of the CLEF initiative, but there were exceptions. One grantee reported: “The content that comes from our Hearken content absolutely converts to paying [subscribers]. We have both actual and anecdotal evidence.”

The Lenfest Institute, Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, and News Integrity Initiative all contributed to the fund that supported 34 newsrooms’ Hearken and GroundSource experiments over 2018. (These ranged from election coverage to Cephalopod of the Day.) The fund supported between 25 and 85 percent of the first-year costs of using either or both services, from $2,000 to more than $16,000, with an average price of $8,500. CLEF was pitched as a way to help newsrooms produce more relevant and trusted coverage, but the project was also a way to examine the impact of these tools at scale after planting seeds in the industry.

“Our initial thinking was we would give newsrooms a stipend to use the tools for a year and in a year we’d be able to see the results and how that ties to business sustainability. Thinking that that would all happen in one year was not realistic,” said Cheryl Thompson-Morton, program manager at Lenfest. “We also saw with our grantees — and I think this is an issue throughout the industry — that all of these different services aren’t talking to each other.” (The irony of that happening in association with a community and listening fund is real.)

The impact report authors wrote:

While journalists are often encouraged to become entrepreneurs and develop innovative new ways to connect with audiences, there is a gap in dollars for adoption of new tools and services. This can be frustrating to grantmakers, who spend years supporting development only to see promising services fail to thrive. What’s more, because foundations tend to support nonprofit outlets and organizations, for-profit newsrooms and service providers are often left out of the puzzle. CLEF subsidizes the cost of using the services by way of the newsrooms and then support flows to the service providers. In turn, the service providers have not only more income but a new cohort of users to help refine their offerings.

Much has changed on the audience engagement side of the industry over the past few years since CLEF was announced. Audience engagement data itself is sometimes tricky to collect and has sparked many debates, as Laura Hazard Owen laid out here in April 2018. And the tools themselves are constantly changing: The Community Listening and Engagement Fund started with Hearken and GroundSource, which are now setting up shop in Europe thanks to a new investment infusion and undergoing a reinvention phase as a loyalty machine with journalistic benefits, respectively. The third round of CLEF grantees were able to choose from MuckRock/DocumentCloud (which merged services last year), the Coral Project’s Talk (which is now just Coral and part of Vox Media’s tech stack services), and the Listening Post Collective.

The third round, the first with these tools, runs through July 2020, according to Thompson-Morton.

Other highlights from the report:

1. “Newsrooms generally reported increased levels of engagement and higher-quality conversations with audiences. Nearly all of the grant reports we reviewed reported increased engagement. Lenfest’s internal analysis of CLEF from July 2018 found that engaging community members in reporting results in them engaging longer with newsrooms and more with public-powered stories, and spending a longer time on the page than average.”
2. “Embedding these engagement services on their websites also led to an increase in newsletter subscribers. However, while some larger newsrooms were able to add dozens or more new subscribers, overall these conversion rates have been inconsistent.”
3. “Newsrooms also reported that the services help give reporting a longer life, rather than disappearing in social media or in the churn of digital headlines. This allowed newsrooms to resurface and repackage older content that addresses community questions and needs.”
4. “Some newsrooms found the cost of the services and related staffing prohibitive and were unclear as to whether they would be able to continue to use them after the grant period ended. As one grantee put it, they ‘can afford either the tool or the dedicated staffing for it, but not both.’ However, as of May 2019, seven of newsrooms have signed up to continue to use the services after the grant period ended.”
5. “Overall, in CLEF’s first year, the creation of a collaborative funder coalition signaled a strong message of support to the field at large. Newsrooms noticed, and applied.”

The full report is available here.

This isn’t quite personalizing algorithms on a news site’s homepage or platforms surfacing different items in your feed. One local TV station let its followers decide the stories shown on its evening newscast. It used GroundSource to collect story ideas over SMS from viewers two weeks in advance and polling Twitter followers hours before the show began over which topics they wanted to watch. (“An experimental community” beat “oil on Native lands” and “emissions and ride-sharing,” this time.) The unchosen content still was available online for viewers to see.

Netflix has done a similar experiment — and was sued by the Choose Your Own Adventure series publisher — with interactive content, allowing viewers to pick the next step in the show, and plans to do much more. For Cronkite News on Arizona PBS, this was one night of several experiments.

Choose your news!

POLL: Which Arizona sustainability story would interest you the most?

— Cronkite News (@cronkitenews) April 5, 2019

The 30-minute newscast is produced each weeknight by students at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, led by a group of seasoned TV folks. Former Tegna VP of digital audience engagement Frank Mungeam worked with more than 100 students to make Choose Your News happen. As the Knight professor of practice in TV news innovation at ASU, Mungeam has spent the past eight months working on infusing local TV news with new ideas, starting at Arizona PBS’s KAET. He also coached local TV stations as part of Table Stakes, the boot camp funded by Knight. It’s part of the foundation’s recent push to invest $2.6 million in innovating in local TV news.

Local TV isn’t perfect, and often the flashy shots and on-camera hype overwhelm the civic duty of providing information. (We won’t go into the Momo challenge again.) While viewership is declining, there’s still a steady base of followers.

“We are all trying to answer the question of how we present and deliver news to the next generation of news consumers,” Mungeam said. “Who better to engage with to come up with an answer to that question than the future consumers and the future journalists?”

Choose Your News involved 60 students essentially pre-producing three shows ahead of time. Mungeam wrote up a case study on the setup:

We divided our 30-minute broadcast into three distinct blocks. Each show block featured a different audience engagement technique: The first segment used live audience voting to determine what story would air in the second block; during the second block, we solicited real-time social reaction; and in the third segment, we featured the ‘voice’ of the audience, including live curation of comments from social media.

Other experiments included explainer videos (the Shorenstein Center and Northeastern University found that Vox explainer-style videos could help boost the younger folks’ interest in local TV news), a Ken Burns-style documentary about the Grand Canyon, and segments devoted to specific topics. Not everything worked: “We had incremental losses within almost every one of the things we would call wins.”

Mungeam sees these endeavors as small-scale explorations, as he first explained it to me when he joined ASU eight months ago:

If you think about legacy news organizations, they have advantages. They’re big with a lot of resources, a lot of people who have routine tasks they know to do very well.

A big boat does not turn quickly or easily. It is not easily parked in a new or unusual place. If journalism innovation is our goal, as you’re on your journey there are all these islands of opportunity potential innovation you’d like to explore, it’s hard to get that big ship over there, whereas the zodiacs are smaller, nimbler, faster, [and can] go check out an island.

Redirecting those bigger boats is a work in progress. The Table Stakes for TV program involved 10 stations from ABC, Graham Media Group, Raycom, Univision, and others and was part of the grant from the Knight Foundation that brought Mungeam to ASU in the first place. The first cohort focused on improving newsroom workflow, targeting specific audiences, emerging platforms, and new revenue sources. Mungeam summarized the stations’ progress over the past year here, including San Antonio station KSAT’s sold-out membership model.

“The wonderful thing about doing innovation in student newsrooms is that the students don’t say ‘That’s not how we do things here’ or ‘We tried that once and it didn’t work,'” Mungeam said. But it seems as if local TV stations themselves — not just competing — are starting to stop saying that, too.

It was just a strange, spooky thing that happened, cut together in an attempt to play the strangeness and spookiness up…. Absent any background on media consolidation in this country, nor knowledge of what Sinclair is and what political angles they push on their viewers, such a middle-of-the-road viewer could simply conclude that “you can’t trust the news,” and, when confronted with this video evidence that “they’re all reading from the same script,” simply mark down his or her internal confidence in news media in general.

In light of Sinclair’s attempted acquisitions of more local TV stations, the Knight Foundation and Gallup polled Americans this summer on their views of local news consolidation. (The more recent merger-in-progress of the country’s two largest newspaper chains adds further justification for the question.)

They found that respondents were much more concerned about national ownership bias than about potential cuts in the budgets or local news coverage.

“More than nine in 10 Americans are ‘very’ (66%) or ‘somewhat’ (26%) concerned that the owners’ views would influence coverage if a large company purchased their local news organization,” Megan Brenan and Zacc Ritter wrote of the findings. “Meanwhile, 77% of U.S. adults express concern that new owners would cover less news unique to their local area — 35% are very concerned about this and 42% are somewhat concerned.”

The GateHouse-Gannett merger is still being worked out, and though more details emerged this week, the companies’ employees likely have as many questions as the readership. There’s no “explain a very complicated transaction to your audience 101,” but Trusting News has some general guidelines on laying out your newsroom’s ethics and funding in a clear way. (Business breakdowns are nice and all too.)

“Americans’ greatest concern about the trend of ownership consolidation of local news is the potential for political bias seeping into their local news coverage,” the Gallup/Knight authors wrote. “Perceived bias in the news reduces trust, which could erode overall trust in local news as an institution.”

That’s a remarkable result, given that — with Sinclair a very clear exception — most consolidation in both local TV and newspapers has been driven far more by the quest for profit than for hearts and minds. No one is arguing that the private equity funders behind the Gannett–GateHouse merger want to influence politics in Peoria and Poughkeepsie; they just want to make money.

(If anything, chain ownership often reduces an outlet’s political distance from the middle; plenty of local newspaper publishers and station owners liked the political influence their positions came with.)

Meanwhile, the cuts to newsrooms and the delocalization of coverage are very much real and have real impacts on local communities. It’s a sign of just how differently people view their local news outlets (broadly unpartisan, trusted, familiar) from national ones (highly ideological, distant, worthy of skepticism).

You can’t avoid consolidation these days — well, unless you’re the Department of Justice — but journalists can work to mitigate its impact on their audiences’ trust.

The Charlotte Journalism Collaborative will be comprised of:

1. The Charlotte Observer
2. Latinx-focused La Noticia
3. Tegna-owned WCNC-TV
4. QCity Metro serving the African American community
5. NPR news station WFAE 90.7 FM
6. LGBTQ-geared QNotes
7. The Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte
8. The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, and
9. News advocacy/community engagement group Free Press.

It will spend its first year jointly reporting on the affordable housing crisis in Charlotte, based in a metropolitan area of 2 million people, beginning this spring. (The grant lasts for two years with the hopes of the collaborative, according to Knight, “grow to include other media organizations and become self-sustaining.”) A Charlotte Observer story last month described the crisis:

The Charlotte region’s population increased by 15 percent between 2010 and 2017, while the number of housing units grew by 10 percent, according to the report. Richard Buttimer, director of the Childress Klein Center for Real Estate at UNCC, told a crowd at the college’s uptown campus that the key driver of Charlotte’s economic growth — its low cost of living — is at risk.

The number of vacant units declined as the market had to accommodate additional population growth without enough supply. Now, Charlotte’s vacancy rate of around 7 percent is among the lowest compared to its peer cities like Atlanta and Indianapolis, according to the report.

This initiative is similar to the Solutions Journalism Network spinoff project Broke in Philly, spearheaded by Resolve Philadelphia. That’s the second iteration of a collaborative involving The Philadelphia Inquirer, WHYY, Technial.ly, NBC10/Telemundo62, Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, and others. Broke in Philly zeroed in on economic inequality in the Philadelphia area.

“At a time when local journalism jobs are disappearing and trust in media has hit an all-time low, the Solutions Journalism Network has taken on the challenge by organizing collaborative journalism reporting projects that promote excellent reporting and civic dialogue. The model has the potential to be part of a new wave of great local reporting, which is vital to building strong communities,” Karen Rundlet, Knight’s director for journalism, said in announcing the collaborative.

Knight is putting up $150,000; separately, it pledged $300 million for journalism (mostly local) earlier this year. The foundation (surprise) foreshadowed its focus on collaboration this year with its 2019 prediction for Nieman Lab, highlighting Resolve Philadelphia’s work and noting it has also helped fund the Detroit Journalism Collaborative, though that is less topically driven:

Gone are the days when a single news organization had the resources to dominate local news coverage, or when multiple news organizations would enter fierce competition to “win” on the same local story.

While competition used to drive strong news coverage and accountability reporting, a new information environment driven by technology and battling today’s challenges — from misinformation to declining trust in media — demand solutions from a variety of sources and players. In 2019, we’ll see an increase in multidisciplinary collaboration among sectors, institutions, and news organizations working to better serve local audiences.

How much impact can one news outlet have? We’re about to see how much six (+ three other partners) can do.

Those funders, journalists, and yes librarians too gathered in Miami this week. Presentations largely centered on amplifying diverse local news efforts to rebuild trust in the media more broadly, with a danah boyd keynote; the staple AI + ethics panel with Julia Angwin, Craig Newmark, and others; a showcase of exemplary projects like City Bureau and Resolve Philadelphia; and the launch of the American Journalism Project, a venture philanthropy effort co-led by Chalkbeat founder Elizabeth Green and Texas Tribune founder John Thornton, with $42 million in its first fund. (Green’s one-month-old son also made a cameo appearance when Thornton shared a photo to explain her absence.)

One more thing to keep in mind: The welcoming of local foundations into the journalism-funding fold is great — unless your local area doesn’t have much of a philanthropic community to speak of.

while it's great that some cities are able to find a local benefactor or a foundation that loves that place, this is predominantly going to happen in the kind of cities that are able to support the creation of wealthy people in the first place.

— Heather Bryant (@HBCompass) February 27, 2019

Here’s Knight’s summary notes of those sessions, but folks on Twitter also shared lively (and lovely) quotes from the forum. Here’s our collection of the topline thoughts:

On the role local media can play:

Are we preparing young people for citizenship the way we are trying to prepare them for, say, careers in science? #infoneeds

— Karen Rundlet (@kbmiami) February 25, 2019

Local news is a place to rebuild trust. “The shorter the distance between our neighbors and our news, the stronger our community.” #infoneeds @knightfdn

— Brian Norman (@BrianNorman13) February 26, 2019

"The way we inform ourselves is insufficient to meet the demands of the 21st Century," @ibarguen @knightfdn as he launches the Knight Media Forum in Miami. "We're here because we think one of the 3 ways forward is local news." Looking forward to great conversations. #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/Cj3dcYmiQP

— Dawn Garcia (@degarciaknight) February 26, 2019

Main focus here is local news, but Ibarguen says need to consider role of AI to solve disinformation problems and whether laws need to evolve to current landscape (eg: apply product liability law to digital products?)

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) February 26, 2019

Researcher danah boyd on disinformation, media manipulation, and why YouTube is vital for journalists to pay attention to:

At #infoneeds @zephoria points out that a lot of young people get essentially ALL their news — and do most of their search — on YouTube. Journalists do not even begin to understand this.

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) February 26, 2019

This is why journalists have to not only be discerning, but also in constant, ongoing conversation with the communities they serve. #infoneeds #newsvoices

— Alicia Bell (@aliciacbell) February 26, 2019

Google’s design assumes people will click on the result and consume content. But @zephoria shows that the headline and notification is often the end of the story, not the beginning. All frame and no content—ripe for exploitation. @knightfdn #infoneeds

— Brian Norman (@BrianNorman13) February 26, 2019

"Journalists do the work of conspiracy theorists and the far-right when they amplify the words that have been staged for them" @zephoria speaking on data voids and internet algorithms' and bad actors' influence in spreading disinformation. #InfoNeeds

— Grace Dearing (@GraceDearing) February 26, 2019

Now we get to the fun part of @zephoria’s talk on local news where she criticizes capitalism, hedge funds, and private equity’s role in decimating community-rooted media #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/xfFNdfdFGA

— Mike Rispoli (@RispoliMike) February 26, 2019

Resilience isn’t about deleting content; it’s about having networks of people that you can turn to and trust, danah boyd says. Real solution is thinking about our communities and realizing information bridges them. #infoneeds

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) February 26, 2019

When you are in a position of power, you are in a position to amplify. Choose to amplify messages that bring communities together, not hate. You aren’t reporting the discord; you’re amplifying it- @zephoria #Infoneeds

— Mike Rispoli (@RispoliMike) February 26, 2019

On emerging and existing efforts to engage and equip communities to participate in journalism:

“Community journalism won’t survive unless the community supports it.” -Steve Waldman, Report for America #infoneeds

— Alicia Bell (@aliciacbell) February 26, 2019

.@bechang8 of @city_bureau lays out 4 interrelated crises in journalism #Infoneeds pic.twitter.com/LFhAkfu8aR

— Lindsay Green-Barber (@WhimsicaLinds) February 26, 2019

Core tenets of @JournalismProj
1/market failure in local news
2/local journalism central to democracy
3/The fix is a “we the people” fix

Could not agree more. So exciting to see the scale and ambition needed to transform local news coming into fruition. @knightfdn #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/i0kchvgxlT

— Elizabeth Hansen (@ehansen02) February 26, 2019

"Funders don't always have answers, they have money," says Karen Rundlet of @knightfdn — looking to work with communities to surface solutions, which is why @soljourno approach is generative for informing communities. #infoneeds

— Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast) February 26, 2019

“To get where I’m going I need to walk away from where I was” John Thornton quoting Winnie the Pooh on why American Journalism Project believes in creation of new news organizations rather than fixing legacy media as it announces $42M launch #infoneeds

— Burt Herman (@burtherman) February 26, 2019

.@evanasmith: “We have no competitors, only current and future collaborators.”

THAT is the new mindset leaders need to build the next news ecosystem. #infoneeds @TexasTribune @JournalismProj

— Elizabeth Hansen (@ehansen02) February 26, 2019

American Journalism Project putting in place grant process by June, to give out first in Q4 2019. Key criteria will be journalism bona fides, local support, convening community of interest, public mission #Infoneeds

— Burt Herman (@burtherman) February 26, 2019

Why local journalists need to pay attention to AI/automated decision-making:

There's no repository of information about how/where AI is being deployed in various communities. Lack of local reporters exacerbates ignorance. People need to be asking more hard questions of policymakers. @LatoyaPeterson #infoneeds

— Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast) February 26, 2019

.@LatoyaPeterson makes the case for specialized watchdog journalism for local and community use of AI. YES! this requires a fluency and new knowledge base for local governance journalists #infoneeds

— dana coester (@poetabook) February 26, 2019

Better to use the term "automated decisionmaking" rather than AI to clarify what's going on, says @JuliaAngwin There's too much baggage around the word "intelligence" #infoneeds

— Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast) February 26, 2019

.@JuliaAngwin: Ask of automated decision making tools – 1) what does this mean for autonomy? 2) what is the due process/method to dispute outcomes? 3) what is the disparate impact? #infoneeds #AI

— Lauren McKown (@laurenmckown) February 26, 2019

Good things to keep in mind (broadband access!):

This is a point that keeps coming up at #infoneeds: binary of nonprofit vs. for-profit isn't working anymore, "the OS is broken," and we need to move to "for profit for purpose."

— Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast) February 26, 2019

I’m still stuck on how we create equitable access to web based technology when so many of our communities have limited (to no access) to broadband. That means many of our communities are aggressively being left behind for the future. #infoneeds

— Candice Fortman (@Cande313) February 26, 2019

This round up of academic research on the impact of local news on civic outcomes and democratic health may be of interest to those at #infoneeds. https://t.co/ubAgbyc9l8

— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) February 27, 2019

Why “ethnic media” is not an additive and framing it as such is harmful:

Jennifer Preston asks @MirtaOjito why Spanish-language news media tends to have higher trust from communities they serve. One answer: place for immigrants to get basic info about snow days, flu shots, etc. Also: townhalls. Get close to community. Listen. @knightfdn #infoneeds

— Brian Norman (@BrianNorman13) February 27, 2019

Such a great point by @MirtaOjito: English-speaking media do their reporting top-down. Start with gettin info from people in position of power, then go to the community for quotes. Think about how that impacts the journalism, or what that signals to the public. #infoneeds

— Mike Rispoli (@RispoliMike) February 27, 2019

Misinformation fuels distrust/division, but so does missed information: people/places/priorities that are unrepresented. So is some journalism inherently more trustworthy? Hearing @city_bureau & also “bottom to top” Spanish-lang reporting from @MirtaOjito, I say yes #infoneeds

— Julie Moos (@juliemmoos) February 27, 2019

“It’s important that we stop thinking of ethnic media as a ‘nice to have,’ as something on the side. It’s a must have.” #infoneeds @knightfdn #communitymedia @Qcitymetro pic.twitter.com/JqecZjBSJ2

— Mauri Ingram (@MauriI) February 27, 2019

Only people of color reporting on their community are labeled as biased. Why have this term “ethnic media” when it’s journalism. “We are giving people a lens that the mainstream media is not covering. We are close to the communities… “ Julio Varela, @futuromedia #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/eGxxHmIkHe

— Charles Thomas (@cthomasclt) February 27, 2019

On the dynamic between funders and grantees:

As funders, we know who we know and we tend to give credibility to folks like us, Im says. We realized we needed to find the people who wouldn’t come to us. #infoneeds

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) February 27, 2019

Don’t just inform. Don’t just engage. Equip the community to do journalism and promote civic engagement- @d_holli #InfoNeeds

— Mike Rispoli (@RispoliMike) February 27, 2019

.@thorntonaustin on the importance of #nonprofit local news: We need to think about our local news organizations as fundamentally civic rather than commercial in nature. #infoneeds #lovelocalnews

— Anusha A (@AnushaA100) February 27, 2019

Kathy Im (@macfound): Foundations should give unrestricted funding to those closest to the ground.

The #infoneeds room: pic.twitter.com/Ygr0aGecoL

— Alicia Bell (@aliciacbell) February 27, 2019

Pretty radical statement from Kathy Im of @macfound, reflecting on power dynamics between foundations and grantees: "What does it mean to share power — and relinquish power? Letting people who are closer to the work decide…putting the resources in their hands." #infoneeds pic.twitter.com/gFKusxKTJa

— Dawn Garcia (@degarciaknight) February 27, 2019

Speaking of radical transparency – wonderful to hear John Bebow, @CenterforMI say that this is the last time someone like him should present on their work & need to amplify more diverse voices in spaces like Knight Media Forum. This is what builds trust. #Infoneeds @jwmcconnell

— Chad Lubelsky (@clubelly) February 27, 2019

Kathy Im of @macfound talking about the urgency + moral imperative of funders to share power and relinquish control and support the people closest to the work do their job was *the* highlight of this conference. Watch the video. Funders need to grapple w/ their power! #infoneeds

— Molly de Aguiar (@MollydeAguiar) February 27, 2019

"Newsrooms are providing information to help people live their lives. We're making the case that news is a cause. And we're at the beginning of something." – @knightfdn's @kbmiami on why journalism is a public good. #infoneeds

— NewsMatch (@NewsMatch) February 27, 2019

The funding announcement follows the Knight Commission’s release earlier this month of a report outlining its recommendations for 21st-century journalism. With the $300 million pledge, Knight roughly doubles the amount of funding it commits to journalism on a yearly basis (that amount had averaged about $30 million a year over the last decade).

“Gone are the days when a single news organization had the resources to dominate local news coverage, or when multiple news organizations would enter fierce competition to ‘win’ on the same local story,” Knight folks wrote in their 2019 prediction for Nieman Lab. “In 2019, we’ll see an increase in multidisciplinary collaboration among sectors, institutions, and news organizations working to better serve local audiences.”

“We’re not funding one-offs,” Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation president, said in a statement. “We’re rebuilding a local news ecosystem, reliable and sustainable, and we’re doing it in a way that anyone who cares can participate.” The foundation called on “other funders and individuals across sectors” to participate as well. (Disclosure: Nieman Lab has received Knight funding in the past.)

The bulk of the funding is going to “national organizations working in partnership at the local level,” with the largest single grant — $20 million — going to American Journalism Project, a venture philanthropy organization cofounded by Chalkbeat CEO Elizabeth Green and Texas Tribune cofounder John Thornton that aims to provide grants and support to mission-driven local news nonprofits.

Other local news initiatives receiving funding:

— ProPublica ($5 million): To advance partnerships with local news organizations to strengthen local investigative reporting, data-driven reporting and audience engagement. The support will also help expand ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, allowing it to hire local reporters.

— Report for America ($5 million): To expand the reach of Report for America, a national service program, help them place journalists in underserved local newsrooms across the country and train the next generation of journalists working in local news organizations. Report for America is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project.

— Frontline ($3 million): To increase the scope and impact of Frontline’s high-quality documentaries and multimedia approach to reporting on local issues and establish up to five geographic hubs around the country involving partnerships with local newsrooms.

— NewsMatch ($1.5 million): To support a national matching-gift campaign to grow fundraising capacity in nonprofit newsrooms and promote giving to journalism among U.S. donors. Launched by Knight Foundation in 2016, NewsMatch has grown with support from Democracy Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and other foundations and corporations, and has helped nonprofit news organizations raise more than $14 million.

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is receiving $10 million to help local newsrooms defend the First Amendment and hold decision-makers accountable,” and the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund also gets a fresh $10 million.

Also receiving funding are three organizations focused on combating misinformation and building news literacy:

— The News Literacy Project ($5 million): To expand the impact of a nonpartisan educational nonprofit that empowers educators to teach news literacy to middle and high school students. The organization will also bring its signature NewsLitCamps to several communities where Knight invests; the professional development program provides teachers and librarians with an introduction to news literacy, teaching resources and the opportunity to connect directly with journalists working in their communities.

— Solutions Journalism Network ($5 million): To expand a model that advances community engagement and civic dialogue to produce rigorous reporting that highlights solutions, rather than problems. The initiative will help bring the Solutions Journalism Network to more communities, including those where Knight invests, and will encourage collaboration with newsrooms participating in the American Journalism Project.

— Cortico ($2 million): To help journalists build trust by better understanding the communities they serve and the issues people care about. Cortico’s listening system — the Local Voices Network — uses machine learning to analyze online and offline community conversations. Cortico is a nonprofit created by leaders at the Lab for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab.

Finally, Knight is “investing an additional $35 million in research to support the creation and expansion of research centers around the United States.”

You can find out more here.

The optimistic answer: More in 2019 (the realistic answer: unclear), or at least they’ll get closer to cobbling it together. WordPress.com is launching a new toolkit, called Newspack, for small and mid-sized publishers to streamline their technical decisions — and make choices that add to the potential of finagling a business model. Kinsey Wilson, former digital guru at NPR and The New York Times and now WordPress.com’s president, is leading the initiative, working with the News Revenue Hub and Spirited Media as development partners.

“We’ve seen through our work at the News Revenue Hub how many small and medium-sized news organizations struggle with their websites. They’re limited by everything from stale design and poor user experience to mobile responsiveness and SEO,” said Mary Walter-Brown, the hub’s CEO. “They’re also not always optimized for lead generation or fundraising. Over time it becomes extremely difficult for them to grow audience and serve their readers. It also makes it difficult to implement any kind of reader revenue program — like membership.”

“The goal is to both make sure that the catalog of publishing tools as well as business tools they need to be able to run what one hopes is a sustainable news operation are addressed simultaneously,” said Wilson, who also built the NPR Digital Services to help 100 member stations make these same decisions. “It’s not simply a CMS for a newsroom, but a full business system that enables publishing and monetization at the same time.”

As an open source system, WordPress has 54,291 plugins. That’s a lot of choices for publishers to add to their sites, a game of roulette to figure out which ones actually add to your site’s experience and aren’t security-questionable. Wilson said the team of eight developers is putting together a set of plugins like Google’s Site Kit, automatic backups, anti-spam features, and more to be determined by newsroom partners to help publishers with little to no tech experience get started — and through January 2020, it’s free.

Newspack is funded with $2.4 million from the Google News Intiative ($1.2 million), the Lenfest Institute ($400,000), the Knight Foundation ($250,000), a to-be-identified academic partner ($200,000), and one name that the industry learned a lot about in 2018: Consensys, the crypto venture group that backed blockchain startup Civil Media, is chipping in $350,000. So, yes, the Civil publishing-to-blockchain plugin will be one of the ones offered — but not required — in the toolkit.

Publishing partners who apply by February 1 will be able to use Newspack with no price tag during the grant period — it’s between $1,000 and $2,000 depending on the size of the news organization once the grants run out — but Wilson and the News Revenue Hub are looking especially for local newsrooms with single or double digit staffs.

Local newsrooms have, unfortunately, come in last place in the transition from advertising to subscription-based business models in the digital shift (see The New York Times’ 2.54 million digital subscribers and The Dallas Morning News’ 24,000 digital subscribers). Part of that is decision paralysis in launching, pushing, and running their digital reader revenue options — which is where the News Revenue Hub comes in.

Walter-Brown’s team is now helping WordPress build a proof of concept with Newspack and Spirited Media, the startup network of local news in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Denver. The aim is for six news sites to shepherd in Newspack in the first six months of 2019, with 50 more sites migrating in the second half of the year.

“What will be different about this [compared to the regular WordPress.com experience] is the ambition to take the very best practices from the industry as a whole — not simply the initial partners up and running with us — but we will canvas as widely as we can what’s working with people, what’s not, what’s essential for running a website, and trying to incorporate as many of those features as we can,” Wilson said. “It’s not rocket science to put a CMS together. It is a bit of rocket science to figure out how to make the most effective use of it and create a sustainable business model.”

Calls for platform teamwork are not new — but having someone who can lead the partnership from the tech side with a digital media perspective is, since Wilson, who started at Newsday and also worked in leadership at USA Today, joined Automattic, WordPress’s parent company, in February 2018.

Wilson arrived at the Times as strategy and innovation editor in 2014 (Ken Doctor unpacked the context here) after building a digital content strategy at NPR, including the NPR One app. The CMS market is heating up, with the Washington Post’s Arc Publishing and Vox Media’s Chorus onboarding more and more publishers in 2018. But a CMS geared toward finding sustainable revenue for local newsrooms — well, that gets an extra gold star.

49 percent of high school students and 51 percent of their teachers say they don’t trust the media to accurately and fairly report news, a Knight survey out today found, though the sample sizes are a bit warped (nearly 10,000 students vs. 500 teachers). This backs up similar findings with college students earlier this year.

But — potential silver lining alert — the teens overwhelmingly (89 percent) agree that people should be able to express unpopular opinions. 65 percent of students said protecting free speech is more important than protecting people from offensive speech. That’s good news for a generation some people seem to consider the most snowflakey and silo-chambered, following only the flop accounts that reinforce their own beliefs.

Over half of the teen respondents here, though, did say that social media can limit expression when users block those with opposing views and are less likely to share their views because of possible online dialogue dustups. 59 percent of the students say they use a messaging app as a news source, which has been a trend of more information and conversation happening out of the main feed.

The Knight researchers point out that most students are fairly united in their opposition to censorship compared to past studies. But the numbers are decreasing slightly: “About 6 in 10 students believe print and online newspapers should be allowed to publish any story without government censorship. This support has declined by 2 points since 2016. Similarly, more students say journalism ‘keep[s] leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done’ (72 percent) than say ‘keeps leaders from doing their job’ (28 percent) when asked to choose, but in 2016 the split was 79 to 21 percent.”

“High school students continue to show strong support for First Amendment freedoms, but they don’t trust all of the expression it protects,” Sam Gill, Knight’s vice president for communities and impact, said in announcing the survey’s findings. “They are increasingly skeptical of the ability of news media to report fairly and accurately. This is a wake-up call from an emerging generation.” (Disclosure: Knight has funded Nieman Lab in the past.)

This generation follows one that had grown to somewhat trust (or at least pay attention to) news organizations that later flop over, exhausted from VC money and gutted of staff. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan put the bursting media bubble into generational context with her take on Mic’s collapse:

With the tragic demise of local newspapers, places like Mic have become the entry point into the craft for a lot of young journalists. What’s more, their newsrooms have been admirably diverse, a diversity that their journalism has admirably reflected.

As they go under, such entry points disappear. And the journalists who have been through this ugly process — sometimes more than once — burn out.

“They are taking the brunt of this,” [the Post’s ad tech director Aram Zucker-Scharff said, “and it’s psychologically damaging.”

The high schoolers in this Knight survey might be a diploma or two short of entering the workforce, but is there a trickle-down of this turnover to this media’s consumers, not just the producers? (Anecdotally, friends expressed their frustration to me over DNAInfo’s ripped-out-from-under-them-rug last year.)

In general, Americans are skeptical of the accuracy of news on social media, according to Pew data from September. But 40 percent of teen respondents to this Knight survey actually trust content posted by people more than that posted by traditional news organizations, compared to 26 percent who said the same in 2016.

A majority of the 3,000+ college students surveyed earlier this year said freedom of speech and of the press is secure, though both those numbers dropped from 2016 data: 73 percent —> 64 percent and 81 percent —> 60 percent, respectively. They, like these high schoolers, also said campus climate tensions have prevented people from speaking their minds at risk of being offensive or taken the wrong way.

My colleague Laura Hazard Owen shared college students’ direct thoughts about the media from a survey in the fall. In light of these high schoolers’ responses, they’re worth revisiting:

I spend more time trying to find an unbiased site than I do reading the news I find.

It is really hard to know what is real in today’s society; there are a lot of news sources and it is difficult to trust any of them.

The fact that people consider news on social media as news is the most troubling fact, I mean nine times out of ten, a headline is only designed for ‘clickbait’ for ad revenue — I don’t use or trust news on social media.

Professors often believe that news that comes from print sources or large media outlets tend to be more reliable. While this may have been true previously, there are some lesser known or smaller creators, like those on YouTube or vigilant “civilians,” that have quickly become either more reliable or diverse in their reporting, and these sources should be considered more seriously in course assignments, though it should be asked, by professors, that students think critically about the source and try to use multiple sources from any platform.

Their end goal is selling advertising.

The full Knight report on the high schoolers’ media attitudes is here.

“You can’t ask dedicated, veteran career journalists to completely change the way they work without explaining why,” the Mercury News executive editor said at a panel discussion I moderated at Stanford two weeks ago. (The panel’s fitting title? “The Last Stand for Local News.”)

“So I shared some very simple charts with the newsroom, showing the decline in our circulation and staffing over the past decade, and how that trajectory would put us out of business in the mid-2020s if we don’t make some drastic changes. We then started talking about reorienting the newsroom to serve a digital subscription audience, and we’ve made major progress since.”

Chase knows that his staff can still churn out great work, as do many of the 23,000 or so remaining journalists in U.S. daily newsrooms. But that doesn’t change the numbers.

Out of business. In seven years. That’s not hyperbole. It may be optimistic.

Over the past 30 months, The Mercury News has lost 34 percent of its daily print subscribers. It’s lost 19 percent of its Sunday ones, dropping to 118,000 copies. Last week, I reported on several Gannett papers that had seem recent declines of a similar scale.

This is the state of the local daily newspaper business today: Simple survival is the question. Which prompts another question: Are we moving into the NINO age? As in, newspapers in name only, to borrow from the RINO slang of pre-Trump Republicanism.

2018 may prove to be a turning point. The year has already been marked by an unforeseen acceleration of decline in the core local daily newspaper business, both in advertising and in circulation. At the same time, the hushed whispers of a local news emergency have grown louder. There’s talk — both public and private — of the need to raise huge amounts of money in order to address a crisis a decade in the marking.

Is this then a reckoning — the year when a green wave of cash began to find (and fund) a future for local news? Or is it just a minor swell, soon to be swept aside just as others have before it?

Today, there are more than 1,200 dailies extant in the United States. A good 98 percent of them are likely profitable — but the understanding that daily print may be on its last legs is near-universal within the industry. Their prospects are growing as thin as the print newspapers themselves.

The industry’s third-quarter financial results, rolling out this week and next, will confirm that anxious reality; one publisher called it “death rattle” in a call this week. The financials will parallel the way-down second quarter.

GateHouse has begun to close down newspapers that it just can’t make work, albeit in small places like Arkadelphia, Arkansas (pop. 10,650). Shuttered newspapers figure to increase in number and in market size in the next few years. A third or more of print dailies’ readership is now 70 or older — a waning market the redefines the word “mature.”

More anecdotally, I saw an unexpected firestorm via social media as I reported last week Gannett’s decision not to publish midterm election results in Wednesday’s print editions. The tweets and comments I saw got to the very existential questions of the local press and its place in the lives of readers.

The print product itself — in most, but not all, cities and towns — continues to shrink, a “news” paper in name only. Too little news, too little understanding of the community, too distant from readers’ concerns of today. Newspapers in name only.

As the reports of the country’s local news demise have piled up, one standout has been Penny Abernathy’s latest census of loss, its documenting of “ghost newspapers” haunting “news deserts.” (What’s next, American Horror Story: Deadline?) As one headline put it, “About 1,300 U.S. communities have totally lost news coverage.” As regrettable as that it, the harder-to-quantify loss of coverage in all the communities that still have a paper is likely even larger.

It’s not just the words on pulp that matter here, of course. But local papers’ ho-hum digital products can only show the journalism their disappearing newsrooms can provide.

It’s the basic stuff of community news and information that’s going, going, and gone. Did you try finding relevant news, information, analysis, or endorsement as you filled out your midterm ballot?

The Mercury News’ Neil Chase painted a picture of civic loss at the Stanford session.

“In the past, with a larger staff, we would cover local government meetings and activities in many of the 101 cities in our nine-county Bay Area,” he said. “Today we don’t have the people to sustain that operation. It’s not just about writing up what happened at the meeting; we guessed before and we know now, from online stats, that many of those stories didn’t draw tremendous attention. But if you don’t have reporters in city hall listening to the meetings, looking for themes, meeting people who attend and pursuing bigger stories, you don’t have the accountability that local journalism should provide.”

One hundred and one cities in the epicenter of Silicon Valley, the world’s economic engine, are now covered by (or “covered by”) a newsroom that has lost nearly 90 percent of what was once a 425-person operation 15 years ago.

None of this is news, you might say. These trends at least a decade old. (A decade ago was the last time the industry actually grew in revenue year over year.)

But we only read occasional reporting of the deepening decline. Denver attracted big, but brief, national attention as Digital First Media, owner of both The Denver Post and The Mercury News, slashed a third of the staff there. Even the most earnest of the chains, McClatchy, has seen revenue declines force it to cut 15 percent of its newsroom jobs in one of its regions, just this year.

Shrunken by 60 percent in newsroom staffing and in total revenue, and by more than that in profit, the old question — Will there ever be a time without daily papers? — seems downright quaint. It’s as if we’re waiting for a telegram telling us to turn off the lights. Things are getting dim enough that that final flip of the lightswitch seems increasingly beside the point.

“Moving the needle”

Into this situation walks John Thornton. He made his money as a venture capitalist. Unlike most in the news business, he starts with the capital problem.

“When capital markets say ‘shrink,’ that’s what you do,” says the cofounder of The Texas Tribune, the nine-year-old outlet that stands as the most successful local digital nonprofit news site in the country. “When capital formation is the industry’s biggest problem, the second one doesn’t matter.”

It’s a laugh line, but one with a bite.

Money. Talent. Excellence. Growth. Thornton talks a different game than most in the journalism business — with money first in line. Money, we forget, enables journalism, and Thornton can talk as easily in billions as in millions.

Take this aphorism: “It’s expensive to grow too slowly.” That comes from Thornton’s years as a Texas Ventures partner, but he also applies to his vision of how to rebuild a once vital industry. Small-scale incrementalism won’t do it, he says.

Thornton and his co-conspirator in reviving local journalism, Chalkbeat’s Elizabeth Green, have set out on a grand adventure, with a grand name befitting the times. Their American Journalism Project went public this fall, with both the Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund providing initial support.

The VC Thornton now evangelizes VP — venture philanthropy.

So how does he connect venture philanthropy to capital formation? He applies (and adapts) the Texas Tribune model, one of the past decade’s best journalism success stories. He’s been asked a million times: “Why aren’t there more Evan Smiths?” — the Tribune’s founding editor and CEO. AJP intends “to go where the great people are.”

In his model, AJP will fund the hiring of top talent in the areas in which most journalism startups are deficient: revenue creation and state-of-the-art technology. If a first round of funding is raised, some 25 to 35 journalism organizations will receive $1 million to $2 million each to make top hires and more to “move the needle.”

In other words: Jumpstart journalism; don’t try to grow too slowly.

The AJP dream: Prove out new sustainable, fundable models of local journalism and “catalyze” $1 billion in funding for a next wave of journalism.

Thornton is just one of many now talking about big numbers in new funding.

This fall, both the Knight Foundation — long the lead sled dog in digital journalism funding — and the Lenfest Institute redoubled their efforts. Together, they announced another $20 million, in joint funding, for local news. More may be on the way.

Google and Facebook see the pockmarked landscape as well. Google’s new Google News Initiative, announced in March, aims to provide $300 million of value to U.S. news organizations over three years, though that’s largely through tech assistance. Facebook, at an earlier stage of publisher cooperation, has launched a variety of projects. There’s Civil, in the process of retooling its ambitions after an unsuccessful token sale.

That’s just the public talk about assembling some of the millions a new journalism may require. From coast to coast, people increasingly anxious about the interwoven failings of our local press and local democracies are quietly laying out plans.

Meanwhile, others are building from the ground up, brick by brick.

Serial news entrepreneur Steve Waldman’s grand plan calls for the funding of as many as 1,000 new local journalism jobs by 2022. With his Report for America cofounder Charles Sennott, Waldman has lined up national and local philanthropy to fund new reporting positions at all kinds of local media. RFA is funding 13 positions this year, a number it hopes to keep growing, especially in ways that can be funded for the longer term by local interests.

At the same time, there are some green shoots of journalism peppering those news deserts. The Institute for Nonprofit News now counts more than 190 nonprofit member sites, according to executive director Sue Cross, employing more than 2,200 journalists. About half of those sites focus on local news.

The collective work of those 2,200, and hundreds of others in LION Publishers — the local independent online news publishers group, which overlaps to some degree with INN — grows more impressive year by year. They could, individually or collectively, be the foundation of something big and new. Or they might not be. They fill gaps in many communities — but like water poured into a hole at the beach, they’re facing a coverage problem that only gets deeper.

Public radio, well positioned to address local news woes, has rolled out its own new programs. “We believe we are in a unique spots with our national/local combination,” says Bruce Auster, NPR’s senior director for its Collaborative Journalism Network. “The difference for us is that we have the local infrastructure.” Translation: radio towers and local audiences. Many smaller public radio stations serve mainly to pass on national programming. This initiative is bringing more of them in the news loop, both around regional reporting and through topical teams that slice from national to local and back up. NPR’s partnership with Kaiser Heath News is indicative, with 27 stations so far partnered on a health policy reporting team.

Altogether, 1,800 journalists work for local public radio stations, though most of them are attached to larger metro operations. The big and evolving idea: connect and grow those 1,800, combined with the strength of NPR’s own 400 journalists, to improve local coverage. In the run-up to today’s election, NPR’s network used its network of political reporters and editors to cover all 36 gubernatorial races in 2018.

NPR has just hired Nancy Barnes, the highly regarded top editor at the Houston Chronicle (and the Star Tribune before that) as its new top chief news executive. Barnes, who starts after Thanksgiving, has the experience and vision to build on the current initiative.

Where do you aim the money?

This new funding mojo is eye-catching, but is only begins to answer all the question of local news in the 2020s. Money is good, but by itself it won’t re-invent local news.

If tens of millions really can be raised, where should that money be directed?

We can all agree that reporting — actually finding out stuff and letting the citizens know and understand it — is what’s needed. But how does such reporting get first funded and then sustained? Does it make sense to build something completely new? Something in tight connection to the existing legacy news brands? Something in between?

Here, funders like Knight and Lenfest have straddled that question. Their support of Table Stakes speaks to sparking change at the dailies. Meanwhile, their technology initiatives intend to both encourage innovation among independents and create regional news alliances.

There are those brave civic-minded souls who have bought dailies, from all the billionaires we’ve covered to the new owners of the Berkshire Eagle, who bought it from Digital First Media. The Eagle, just named “newspaper of the year” by the New England Newspaper & Press Association, serves as a prime example. The challenges — financial, technological and cultural — can be overcome, with enough money and vision. But it’s not for the faint of heart.

The financial analysis itself can be mind-bending. It’s a question McClatchy faces in seeking to merge with Tribune Publishing: How can any potential buyer of a single paper accurately value that property?

As Tribune (R.I.P. Tronc) now concludes its torturous, nearly year-long auction process, we can see the financial-engineering rationales — the ones I’ve argued are now driving industry decision-making — come to the fore.

Acquisition valuation has traditionally been about the “multiple”: How many times a company’s annual earnings will a buyer pay? Ask any non-buying industry observer about that math, and they’ll chuckle: “You tell me what the earnings will be in 2019 and 2020.” In other words, if the only way to maintain steady profits in an industry in steep financial decline is to cut those creating the product — how reliable can a projection of future earnings really be?

Consider the big picture of the U.S. daily newspaper industry. At its height, it pulled in about $55 billion in annual revenue. No organization has conducted an annual count of that revenue in half a decade.

In talks with industry experts and by extrapolation, I can now estimate current annual revenue at somewhere between $18 billion and 20 billion. Annual EBITDA runs about 10 percent on average, say the experts. Operating margin? Maybe 8 percent. So in total, the newspaper industry generates somewhere around $1.5 billion in profits today. That’s everyone, including the nationals (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post), which are now functionally in a different business than their former peers in the local press.

(By mind-bending comparison, Google alone takes in about $37 billion a year in EBITDA.)

If that math seems too daunting, investors — philanthropic and otherwise — can focus on the new. What will it take to actually build new, sustainable, and growing local journalism operations?

Hiring reporters works — in the short term. What about top digital strategists? Those who can bring in and build new and sustainable revenue? Product builders able to wield the smartphone for the benefit, not detriment, of local news companies? Staff who know how to connect with audiences, socially — and in the community. Difference makers? How do you hire those, who in John Thornton’s words, “move the needle?”

There’s far from a consensus on how money — even if raised in unprecedented amounts — should be spent.

One movement sure to grow focuses on the statehouses across the 50 states, as dailies have cleared out their reporters, leaving lonely AP staffers to the job. We’ve seen a rush of Texas Tribune–like troops to fill the gaps — in some states. CALmatters, VTDigger, The Connecticut Mirror, The Nevada Independent, and Mississippi Today are among those populating that terrain.

That’s a clear and useful model — but it doesn’t solve the need of readers for local news from their cities and towns. And local news is where the core problem is. As The New York Times redefines success in the digital age — growing revenue again, thanks to nearly 4 million total subscribers, we can see an approaching digital crossover in the national news business. But in our lives, in our politics, and in our elections, it’s the news where we live — local — that requires revival.

In 1961, the playwright Arthur Miller said that “a good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” We need local news that feels, authentically, like communities talking to themselves.

• For-profit newspapers and TV stations siphoning advertising dollars
• Billionaire benefactors who don’t always play nice and/or play music
• Started-from-scratch scraggly independent outlets started by bought-out or laid-off reporters
• A chain-based model scattered across towns with appealing demographics
• Organizations drawing support solely from foundations and crossing fingers that it lasts
• Chasing virality (though that goes for pretty much the entire news industry)
• Venture philanthropy?

Swallow that bile in your throat — at least for the last item. Local news is swimming in quite the pickle juice, as we’ve documented here before. Two of the brains behind a couple nonprofit, mission-driven, local-centric news organizations think venture philanthropy could help similar outlets get closer to the bullseye of sustainable local news as a public good.

Are billionaires trying to swipe local news again? (Nope.)

The concept is called the American Journalism Project, and there are a few threads in it to unpack.

Let’s start with the people leading it: veteran news organization builders Elizabeth Green of Chalkbeat and John Thornton of The Texas Tribune. Each bootstrapped the early days of their organizations, with Green constructing Chalkbeat out of her education reporting experience (inspired in part by venture philanthropy in the education sector — we’ll define that in a second) and Thornton powering the Tribune with his own funds, earned via his own venture capital work. Each went from 0 to several million dollars in revenue in under 10 years.

But their efforts still lacked a certain scale, impacting only a few cities. The entire local news sector faces dark storm clouds — not just education reporting or Texans. Some of the most encouraging news in the space has come from the nonprofit news sector, with $350 million in annual revenue and 2,200 journalists employed. But fledgling outlets in particular are still missing crucial components — smart business sense via dedicated revenue employees, and the ability to operate with some financial runway, rather than juggling money stresses with investigating the State Agency of Everything and Building So Much Trust and Strong Audiences, all at the same time.

“Everybody in those organizations are doing more than one jobs — they’re doing four to five. If you’re doing four jobs, you’re probably not doing any well,” Thornton said.

As they built out their news organizations, the dream of equipping others — they’re keeping their day jobs — to build local news outlets as public goods persisted. So Green and Thornton came up with the American Journalism Project, a bland name for a venture philanthropy firm, built by and for journalists/journalism funders, aimed at supporting existing and emerging local news outlets.

(The Lenfest Institute has also given a whack at venture philanthropy, with its model of flooding the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania news ecosystem with funds to innovate. AJP will not focus on a specific geographic area.)

After the 2016 election, Green told me, “I asked myself what is the one thing I could do beyond what I’m already doing to stand up for democracy.” As a joke, she’d floated the idea of raising $1 billion to propel mission-driven local news to friends — but then she started to think about it more seriously. “You know when you’re trying to quit an addictive habit, you tell people, and then they hold you accountable?… I was like: My part can be using the skills I’ve used at Chalkbeat to take this clearly good idea and make sure someone accomplishes it. I had this side project of trying to organize people around it, like community organizing.”

Green’s self-described “chain of intentional nagging” eventually led her to Thornton, and the pair realized their visions lined up almost perfectly. They’ve since raised $400,000 in initial funding from the Knight Foundation and Democracy Fund (disclosure: Knight has been a Nieman Lab funder) for the logistics of kicking off. They hope to raise around $50 million in a “first fund” to strengthen 25 to 35 local outlets, with the goal of catalyzing an annual $1 billion — in both direct funds raised and a ripple effect for other investors spread throughout the local news sector.

“We support their goal and expect to be among those foundations and investors contributing to that first fund,” Jennifer Preston, Knight’s vice president of journalism, told me. “In addition to providing capital, they’ll also provide the guidance, discipline, and expertise that many of these organizations need to succeed.”

“I think this exact idea, the formation with the venture philanthropy take is new, but within it there are different pieces that have been tried by others,” Teresa Gorman, Democracy Fund’s local news associate, said. “The idea that nonprofit news needs to be more business savvy isn’t a new one. The idea that more local foundations and local philanthropy needs to support news and information is not a new one. What’s exciting is that it brings a few of those ideas together…that also respects what scale looks like on the local level.”

So, the next thread:

What exactly is venture philanthropy?

In a typical venture capital firm, the partners evaluate promising startups for investment and mentoring potential, getting involved on the company’s board and connecting advisers and resources. But they’re not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts: They also expect a payout (or at least a decent shot at one) in return.

Meanwhile, in a typical foundation, program officers determine what grants to give to what organizations, but with much less direct involvement (beyond expecting metrics on the grant’s impacts). They don’t expect monetary ROI aside from the public benefit the investment generates.

Venture philanthropy falls in between the two: The firm draws in capital from mission-minded individuals or groups and invests in promising social enterprises while also heavily coaching them along the way — and not necessarily expecting a financial ROI. (Again, the Lenfest Institute has also been practicing this.)

“Some people would say, ‘You [at Knight] fund all these nonprofit news organizations like News Revenue Hub — why wouldn’t you just make investments directly? Why would you make an investment in this fund?” Preston said. “The reason for that is that they’re not just raising a fund. They’re going to run it like a VC firm — identify the best leaders and the best sites for success. They’re not just going to give money but help ensure the success of sites.”

In both her Medium post introducing AJP and our conversation, Green seemed to grimace whenever mentioning the apparently dirty words of venture philanthropy. She’d seen the concept in action in the charter school space as an education reporter, but Green kept thinking: Why was no one trying it in journalism?

“In the education world I cover, at the point I entered the beat in 2006, if you were creating your own organization to solve a market failure in education, you were one of 20 people you knew taking on that similar journey,” Green said. “Why is that in the education sector there are so many people doing this and in my world there aren’t? One of the differences that I realized is that in the education sector, there was an intentional effort to create a social enterprise. And one of the main vehicles was venture philanthropy firms.”

Thornton, a practiced VC himself, had already put venture philanthropy thinking into practice at The Texas Tribune. “On and off over the last decade, I have been obsessing to a lesser and greater degree to how you make capital formation happen to make public journalism happen,” he said.

So here’s the third nut:

How will the American Journalism Project work, and where can you get in on that $1 billion?

Three parts to remember: Investment, intensive support, and evangelism.

• Starting now through mid-2019, AJP is recruiting venture philanthropists — foundations, families, individuals worried about the political climate and the plight of local news — into the firm. Thornton said many of the people they talk to are so consumed by national news that they need to be reminded of the significance of local reporting — or they’re people who understand the crisis of local news but feel overwhelmed by the need to scale. “Journalism philanthropy is only a generation old. In geological time this is happening fast,” he said.
• As it collects the initial capital, AJP will also start distributing it through grants. “That means identifying these smart, high-capacity leaders to represent the information needs of the country and [who] look like the country,” Green said. “We have to identify those people in organizations and identify the right size of a gift that will position them for growth.”

  Those grants will also come tied to a venture philanthropy partner: “The partners, as at a VC firm, would have experience building media businesses, experience in building philanthropy, experience in building the product team for example,” Green added. “Not only could the social entrepreneurs have access to this really smart person who’s helping them figure out their strategy — the partners will also have the job of connecting the organization and their leadership to resources in the field that can help them.”

• Third, the firm will launch multiple cycles of investment and support, based off the growth from the primary stage funds. The goal is to grow a culture of philanthropic support toward journalism, which journalism has already been noodling — but newer donors still need some convincing.

“Ten years ago when we started the Tribune, we got patted on the head and people said, ‘This is cute,'” Thornton said. At the same time, Green “started to talk to different philanthropists and journalists [about raising $1 billion for local news] and would say, ‘So you should go do it!’ They’d say, ‘Okay, Elizabeth’ and pat me on the head.”

Maybe now people will stop patting their heads and start patting their own wallets.

Table Stakes was launched in 2015 by Knight and Temple University, bringing leaders from four metropolitan newspapers in the U.S. together to gameplan for their digital transition. Lenfest was founded in 2016 and began supporting the newly rebranded Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative in February 2017, expanding to 12 newsrooms.

Now, the new collaboration will center around three pillars, explained Lenfest executive director Jim Friedlich and Knight’s vice president of journalism Jennifer Preston:

• Expanding Table Stakes to meet “the technology, business, and audience realities of the future” to include as many as 16 new regions and especially ethnic media.
• Creating a technology resource hub to draw in lessons from the Lenfest Local Lab’s product experiments and other initiatives supported by Knight’s challenge grants, as well as to share best practices on using certain journalism technology (think Chartbeat, Parse.ly, WordPress) and bolstering journalism tools like DocumentCloud (which Knight scooped up from near-infrastructure extinction last year; DocumentCloud has since merged with MuckRock.) The institutional home of the hub is TBD.
• Investing more into Philadelphia, home of the Lenfest Institute and a city of focus for the Knight Foundation, as a “live lab” of testing the products in the local lab, the strategies from Table Stakes, and other ideas.

The joint fund welcomes both additional funders and active participants.

“It’s not just an initiative — it’s an opportunity for others to join to address these challenges for local news, around the country and in Philadelphia,” Preston said. (Disclosure: Knight has provided funding to Nieman Lab in the past.) She pointed to the work of NewsMatch, which brings together major journalism boosters like Democracy Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Facebook Journalism Project to, well, match donations to nonprofit news organizations at the end of each year.

Individuals who start salivating at the dollar amount in this article’s headline can wait in line. But seriously, the fund is a five-year commitment, with at least four organizations (not necessarily limited to newspapers, Friedlich said) joining Table Stakes through 2024. (The initiative periodically calls for applications to the next round.) Friedlich said the team will start putting out feelers for the second pillar of the tech resource hub, and open grant calls are forthcoming for the third pillar of Philly-specific investment.

“It’s not Philly for Philly’s sake, but it’s important to us that if we invest in a project like [the independent collaboration hub] Resolve Philly, what does it take to succeed and then scale that to other markets,” Friedlich said.

Knight and Lenfest have repeatedly focused on local news before, but the organizations see this fund as the next level in concentrating on and addressing the crisis, Preston and Friedlich agreed. Earlier this year, Lenfest and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center convened dozens of industry leaders from various organizations to prioritize potential solutions for local news sustainability. If you need a refresher on why local news deserves this prioritization, here’s how we phrased it then:

Local news has borne the brunt of the crashing journalism ecosystem, with still high levels of trust from readers but little trickle-down of subscription dollars while the ad revenue still whirls over to Facebook and Google. Poachers — a.k.a. some of the corporate leaders taking advantage of what income does remain, *cough* Tronc, Digital First Media, *cough* — don’t exactly help. And there aren’t plentiful resources for each local organization to experiment in the same way that national organizations can, though there are some efforts being made to strengthen ties across the local news industry.

The Knight Foundation and Gallup shared their latest findings on mixing the perfect potion, after previously testing whether articles featuring their sources or community-rated trust metrics would improve readers’ trust in media organizations. Spoiler alerts: Nope and nope. (Disclosure: Knight has provided funding to Nieman Lab in the past.)

This time around, Knight/Gallup researchers did this thing where they just asked (and also tested) their survey respondents what helps increase or decrease their trust in news organizations. In addition to deeper questions, respondents were able to select from 35 different factors for determining trust in organizations, such as “The type of media it uses — newspaper, TV news, radio or website” and “Its commitment to accuracy — not reporting stories before it verifies all the facts and being willing to correct mistakes it makes.”

(Note: The Reuters Institute for Journalism asked similar questions in a multi-country study last November.)

Here’s the bad news first: The majority of U.S. adults say that in recent years they have personally lost trust in the media. About a third of those who identify as being on the political right “have lost faith in the media and expect that change to be permanent.” Good news: 69 percent of all those who say they’ve lost trust believe that it can still be restored.

The most important factors are accuracy and minimized bias; 71 percent also said a news organization’s commitment to transparency is very important (bonus points if the organization provides “fact-checking resources and providing links to research and facts that back up its reporting”).

“These results indicate that attempts to restore trust in the media among most Americans may be fruitful, particularly if those efforts are aimed at improving accuracy, enhancing transparency, and reducing bias,” the researchers write. “The results also indicate that reputations for partisan leaning are a crucial driver of media distrust, and one that may matter more for people themselves than they realize.”

But the researchers also acknowledge that centering on a common definition will be difficult: “A major challenge in fostering trust in the news media is that accuracy and unbiasedness are often in the eye of the beholder.”

Here are some snippets of what respondents — young and old(er), Republican and Democrat, news nerds and news avoiders — say matters when it comes to earning (or losing) the reader’s trust:

Nearly four in 10 U.S. adults who are inattentive to national news (39 percent) say they do not trust any news organizations. That compares with 17 percent of those who pay a moderate amount of attention to national news and 8 percent who are highly attentive.

[Of those who lost trust], five percent say negative stories about President Donald Trump and 3 percent say news organizations that protect or support him cause them to lose trust.

In all, three-quarters of respondents mentioned bias-related reasons at least once in their comments as a reason they did not trust news organizations, and two-thirds mentioned accuracy-related reasons at least once.

Republicans, Democrats and independents are about equally likely to bring up inaccuracy as a reason they distrust certain news organizations. Republicans (36 percent) are somewhat less likely than Democrats (43 percent) and independents (49 percent) to raise the bias issue in general terms, though 17 percent of Republicans, compared with 3 percent of independents and 1 percent of Democrats, more specifically mention liberal or anti-conservative bias.

Young adults (aged 18 to 34) are twice as likely as older adults (aged 55 and up) to say politically focused or partisan bias is a factor in their lack of trust in news media organizations, 18 percent to 9 percent, respectively. Young adults (47 percent) and middle-aged adults (47 percent of those aged 35 to 54) are also more likely than older adults (34 percent) to mention biased, slanted or unfair reporting more generally.

Thirty-nine percent of Republicans versus 28 percent of Democrats mention accurate and factual reporting, and 43 percent of Republicans compared with 33 percent of Democrats remark on a news organization having fair, unbiased or nonpartisan reporting. In contrast, at least twice as many Democrats as Republicans mention fact-checking, research and verifiable facts (25 percent to 9 percent), good or professional journalistic practices (24 percent to 12 percent), and history or longevity (11 percent to 3 percent).

While accuracy and bias are commonly mentioned when Americans indicate why they trust or do not trust particular news organizations, accuracy is mentioned more often than unbiasedness as a reason for trusting an organization, and bias is mentioned more often than inaccuracy as a reason for distrust.

Young adults (83 percent) see links to research and facts to back up reporting as more important to earning their trust than adults 35 and older (65 percent) do.

Older adults seem especially sensitive to news organizations’ records of making mistakes — 62 percent of those aged 55 and older say it is a very important factor in their trust in news media organizations, compared with 48 percent of adults younger than 55.

Read the full report here.

From the 830 applicants, these foundations awarded 20 projects a total of $1 million. As Stearns notes, this is just one of several new efforts by funder confront the problem of misinformation, including the News Integrity Initiative and the Knight Foundation’s commission on “Trust, Media and Democracy.” Since the call launch, the number of such efforts has continued to grow, including new ones involving social media platforms directly. A philanthropy-funded research collaborative with Facebook recently announced its first request for proposals from researchers. WhatsApp also announced a call for proposals. At the same time, while the public discussion about misinformation is at a high pitch, as Stearns points out, “issues of trust in journalism extend far back into our nation’s history.”

In an effort to learn more about different approaches to fighting mis- and dis-information, Dot Connector Studio (DCS) developed simple tags to code the entire set of proposals by subject and strategy, such as “media literacy,” “AI,” and “mapping/visualization.” (Each project could be categorized with multiple tags.)

While the applications remain confidential, DCS wishes to share these tags with the larger research community in the hope that they may be helpful in ongoing efforts. Creating such taxonomies in emerging fields can also help practitioners and funders to connect with, compare, and refine similar projects. This is done in similar to spirit to First Draft News’ publication of definitions and taxonomies for the study information disorder; the Hewlett Foundation-sponsored review of scientific literature on disinformation; and other efforts to share information on best practices in this sphere.

The tags DCS used changed over time, as we got deeper into the dataset. This process itself yields insights. For example, DCS collapsed more specific tags into the catch-all category of “minority,” because tags such as “African American,” or “Latino,” applied only to a handful of projects. Similarly, DCS struck tags pertaining to specific audiences, such as “conservative,” “disabled,” “elderly/senior,” and “women,” because there were not enough applicants to warrant such tags useful.1 And other distinctions began to emerge that prompted the creation of new tags.2

Here’s the full list of tags.

List of tags and definitions

• AI: Projects that employ artificial intelligence to augment information.
• Annotation/context: Projects that add to existing texts by providing additional notes, background information or contextual information.
• Audio/radio: Projects that use radio or podcasts to deliver information.
• Bias busting: Projects designed to puncture filter bubbles across ideological divides or increase cross-cultural understanding.
• Civic engagement: Projects focused on bringing community members together to discuss issues, connecting them to government representatives.
• Credibility/credentialing: Projects designed to assess, rank, or rate credibility; projects that mark specific information sources as high-quality or trustworthy.
• Crowdsourcing: Projects that collect and employ input from users.
• Curation: Projects that select, organize, and present a set of information sources
• Data: Projects that yield a new set of machine-readable information usable by developers, by data journalists, in visualizations, etc. (For example, an API.)
• Digital tools: Projects that create an app, widget, plugin, or interactive feature designed to provide mobile access or enhance users’ experience on existing digital interfaces.
• Exhibits: Projects that include physical displays of collections of work.
• Events: Projects that involve live community events, such as town halls.
• Fact-checking/verification: Projects that flag and/or correct false information; projects that provide means to confirm that underlying material is authentic (i.e. a way to track whether a photo is faked, a video moment is in proper context, etc.).
• Film/video: Projects that use film, video, or television to deliver information.
• Games: Projects that develop games or employ game design or game theory concepts
• Human-centered design: Projects that involve user experience and cognition in project design.
• Immigrants: Projects geared towards immigrants or focused on the topic of immigration.
• Library: Projects in which libraries played a key role, either as a partner or as a physical space.
• Local: Projects that take place in specific communities.
• Low-income: Projects geared towards low-income people or focused on income inequality.
• Mapping/visualization: Projects that illustrate and showcase data findings using imagery.
• Media literacy: Projects designed to teach individuals how to think critically about media, how media is constructed and how to be discerning about information sources.
• Minority: Projects geared towards minority populations or focused on race or ethnicity.
• N/A: Project applications that are incomplete, incoherent, or make no connection to misinformation.
• Network building: Proposals to strengthen multiple journalism organizations by providing systematic support.
• Open government: Projects that make government data accessible and available.
• Reporting: Projects that center on original writing and reporting.
• Research: Projects, typically from universities, that are designed to investigate hypotheses and uncover new information.
• Rural: Projects geared towards rural populations or intended to address rural/urban divides.
• Science: Projects that focused on improving communication and correcting misinformation in the realm of science (particularly climate science).
• Social media: Projects in which social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is a main focal point or that involve developing new social media platforms.
• Training: Projects that involve teaching a set of skills to a group of people, including professional development on misinformation for journalists and educators, and training citizens on journalism skills.
• Voting: Projects that are designed to make it easier for citizens to register to vote and participate in elections.
• Youth/students: Projects geared specifically towards young people, including college students and young adults.

We hope you find this schema useful. Questions? Contact us here.

1. Among the notable changes:
   • DCS pulled out journalism subcategories into their own tags: “training,” “data,” and “local.” “Journalism,” was too broad to be applied effectively, and was changed to “reporting.” (Investigative journalism projects are coded under “reporting.”)
   • “Archiving” was removed.
   • “AI/bots” changed to “AI.”
   • “Media literacy education” changed to “media literacy” to include projects outside of the educational realm.
   • “Fact-checking” was combined with “verification” due to overlap among these types of projects.
   • “Mapping” changed to “mapping/visualization” due to overlap among these types of projects.
   • “Original research” changed to “research” to include applied research as well.
   • “Mobile/app” changed to “digital tools” to include browser extensions and widgets as well.

2. • Tags for various types of media/platform, such as “audio/radio,” “film/video,” “games,” “exhibits,” and “events.”
   • Tags for common strategies, including “annotation/context,” “bias busting” (which we use to describe projects designed to pierce filter bubbles or increase cross-cultural understanding), “credibility/credentialing,” “network building,” and “open government.”

   Finally, DCS observed multiple projects that were located in libraries or focused on science, and therefore added tags “library” and “science.”

But what does your average Mark or Campbell think?

According to a new survey by the Knight Foundation and Gallup, American adults feel negatively about major Internet companies tailoring information to them individually, acting as content arbitrators that enhances bias, and not being transparent about their methods. (Note: Knight has provided support to Nieman Lab in the past.) Those major internet companies in this context are Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter (surprise).

Of the 1,203 U.S. adults interviewed earlier this summer, most got their news from Google (53 percent daily/a few times a week) or Facebook (51 percent), with only 23 percent coming from Yahoo and 19 percent from Twitter. The survey’s authors kindly broke out the percentages we’ll highlight here by familiarity with algorithms, generation, and education level.

54 percent said internet content curated by the companies’ algorithms is a bad idea (including 16 percent who felt it is a “very bad” idea), while 45 percent thought it was good. But that’s mostly split along generational lines, with the young folk in favor and the Boomers against.

~ Waves ~ have been made lately in the platforms-with-political-biases realm, thanks to another memorable move by a platform leader: Twitter leader Jack Dorsey’s interview with Fox News frontman Sean Hannity. That was seen as a placation of conservatives outraged at their “censorship”, which has snowballed into Alex Jones calling Dorsey a good “patriot.” It’s notable that 71 percent of the adults surveyed thought promoting a company’s preferred political agenda was a reason for their content surfacing methods, with 43 percent of those believing it was a major reason. And 49 percent think the companies don’t do it to “help support a more informed society by connecting people to important news” (they said it, not me). Those numbers break down along party lines, with 66 percent of Republicans in the “major reason” camp, 42 percent of independents there, and only 29 of Democrats. (73 percent of those interviewed think the companies should show all people the same topics, disregarding their interests or past browsing/search history.)

Only 15 percent of respondents feel that the major internet companies are doing enough to stem the spread of misinformation, with 48 percent strongly feeling they aren’t. Through the political party lens, 19 percent of Democrats, 15 percent of independents, and 10 percent of Republicans feel the companies are doing enough against misinformation.

A whopping 80 percent of those surveyed were in favor of excluding a news item from a news feed or results page if it contains misinformation, but they’re not necessarily asking for individually-flagged posts to solve the problem (65 percent are against excluding a news item if users have complained about it). They say these opinions are based out of concern for giving people a biased picture of the news, elevating the company’s preferred points of view, constraining certain points of view, and increasing the influence of certain news organizations over their competitors. Republicans feel mostly strong about all this.

The report pointed out that a majority of respondents do not think that the displaying of certain news items is an endorsement by those companies of the accuracy of the information — but still, 43 percent do think so.

And 60 percent said they are usually aware of the news organization behind the link surfaced on Google/ Facebook/Yahoo/Twitter, with younger and/or college-educated respondents tending to be more aware than their opposites.

These charts speak for themselves:

But there’s also an interesting gender breakdown around the latter. Women think the companies should be held accountable, whereas men feel it’s the users’ responsibility to ensure Americans get an accurate and unbiased view of the news.

Using the same setup as a previous study that found the identification of the news organization in a link doesn’t increase trust either, researchers with Gallup and the Knight Foundation tested how users responded to average trust ratings for various news outlets. Those ratings were determined by a) the user personally, b) the community of users in the study, c) “people like you” based on demographics, and/or d) any two of the above. And of course, a control group. (Disclosure: Nieman Lab has received funding from Knight in the past.)

News flash: It didn’t help.

“Opinion-based metrics that convey the general impressions of the public seem to drive confidence downward,” the researchers concluded. But they also noted “it seems that the more people know, the more skeptical they become.” Which should be a good thing, right? Right? (Bueller?)

Here’s what those ratings looked like on the testing platform:

The study involved nearly 12,000 users, who rated at least one article during the experiment in the spring. Many people felt comfortable rating around three stars:

The findings do suggest that the personal, community, and “people like you” ratings could affect an individual’s trust rating. People who only saw their specific average gave out higher trust ratings than those in other experimental groups. But seeing the ratings from others without seeing their own had a negative effect on the scores the user gave.

The experimental platform’s media spectrum — placing the “progressive research and information center dedicated to…correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media” Media Matters as the liberal equivalent to 100PercentFedUp, which describes itself in the site’s About section as “two moms inspired by the life of Andrew Breitbart…exposing the lies of the left & MSM propagandists” — has its own peculiarities, as my colleague Shan Wang mentioned in our previous writeup of the sister study. But trust in the right-wing end of the spectrum did increase when shown the “people like you” average, though the left end actually dropped.

“Overall, we hypothesize that showing others’ opinions, on average, through the community or ‘people like you’ feature in isolation creates cognitive dissonance that results in a user choosing to have a lower level of trust in a news article or outlet,” the researchers wrote.

But people actually seem to trust news articles they click into less when the stories come labeled with the news outlet that published it. That’s especially true with certain outlets, including Vox, Fox News, and Breitbart News. (As my colleague Laura Hazard Owen asked in her coverage of a previous Knight study analyzing people’s perceptions of bias, do people know what Vox does? Are they confusing it with Fox? Are they familiar with Breitbart News?)

That’s the finding from more than 3,000 U.S. adults who looked at and rated the trustworthiness (on a scale of 1 to 5) of articles over a four-week period via an online platform built by Knight Foundation and Gallup specifically to study people’s reactions to news content. The stories participants evaluated came from the “pre-identified media outlets” Media Matters, Vox, The New York Times, AP, Fox News, Breitbart News, and 100PercentFedUp. (Disclosure: Knight has been a funder of Nieman Lab.)

Users were shown news articles in the categories of economics, politics, and science under one of four design conditions:

• without an image or an indication of the news outlet it came from,
• with a source but no image,
• with no source but an image that the news outlet had originally paired with the story, or
• with a source and an image.

The Gallup-Knight study found that:

Channels with source attribution had a lower overall mean trustworthiness rating per article, dropping from 3.22 to 3.08 in channels with no images and 3.23 to 3.07 in channels with images.

The effect of attaching an image to content was similar at 3.22 to 3.23 in channels with no source attribution and 3.08 to 3.07 in channels with source attribution. Images selected for content do not seem to affect the overall trustworthiness level.

We find no statistically significant difference in the effect between those who rated more, or fewer, articles.

Trustworthiness ratings dropped when readers in this study saw Vox, Fox, or Breitbart as the source of a news article. When its content was evaluated by people who didn’t see the source label, Vox achieved about the same mean trustworthiness score per article as AP or The New York Times. Among the seven sources the study looked at, the AP and Times had the highest mean trustworthiness score per article. Breitbart News, 100PercentFedUp, and Media Matters ranked lowest in trustworthiness even when readers didn’t see them labeled.

Just as a general note, it’s consistently jarring to see news operations like “The New York Times” and “The Associated Press/AP” on the same spectrum to the left of a “news” site called “100PercentFedUp,” which publishes good faith, fact-based journalism such as “THIS IS AMAZING: In 1984, the New York Times said Trump would be our BEST president…They forgot.” (This particular story, later given a new headline, now comes with this glorious correction: “We like to think our readers can think subjectively and “get” our nuanced titles once they read the article…We believe that the New York Times INADVERTENTLY DESCRIBED HOW TRUMP WOULD BE A PERFECT FIT FOR THIS TIME IN AMERICA, therefore, THE BEST PRESIDENT ‘FOR THIS TIME IN AMERICA'”.)

Partisanship is clearly at play in these findings of trustworthiness. The study found:

Democrats and Republicans both favor sources representing their ideological preference when source is hidden, but Democrats appear to make a sharper distinction.

Interestingly, Democrats appear to view content from The Associated Press/AP as more trustworthy when source is shown, while Independents and Republicans show no change or a decrease in trustworthiness depending on the channel comparison.

The full study is available here.

How do we respond to tragedy? That question is never far from the work of journalists, and Friday’s Annapolis Capital Gazette assault only made it more intimate, with journalists becoming one with the story they’ve covered time and again.

Numerous journalists responded to the murder of five of their own by restating the truths of local journalism. The humorist Dave Barry (“Sorry, I’m not feeling funny today — my heart aches for slain journalists“) captured it as well as anyone:

There are over 1,000 daily newspapers in the United States, most of them covering smaller markets, like Annapolis or West Chester. The people working for these newspapers aren’t seeking fame, and they aren’t pushing political agendas. They’re covering the communities they live in — the city councils, the police and fire departments, the courts, the school boards, the high-school sports teams, the snake that some homeowner found in a toilet. These newspaper people work hard, in relative obscurity, for (it bears repeating) lousy pay. Sometimes, because of the stories they write, they face hostility; sometimes — this happens to many reporters; it happened to me — they are threatened.

The Annapolis shootings would of course have been tragic in any year. But in 2018, it’s impossible to understand them without considering the cleaved national context of journalism itself. Certainly, the craft has never been under greater pressure, financially or in terms of public trust. We still don’t know how the madness of fake news fury will redefine the very nature of the journalist/reader relationship in the digital age.

Today we, like apparently many Americans, choose our realism. Millions of Americans have never valued journalists more, seeing us as providing an essential service. (From Edelman’s annual trust survey: “The biggest gain in credibility in the latest survey was for — ahem — journalists.“) At the same time, fake news purveyors, foreign and domestic, have cynically divided democratic populaces, content to make journalists collateral roadkill. The contradictions take real, daily form. As newsrooms, like airports and schools, must put in place physical security measures, engaging with the communities they serve grows more difficult.

As we have read this weekend in the sense-making out of Annapolis, such engagement — in reporting, in community events, in governmental meetings, and in just being seen around town — separates what the local press has always done differently, and by its nature better, than the national press. It’s what the American local press in the best of times has done in cities and towns across our 3,000-mile landscape, and it’s a task uniquely required at this time in American history.

Here are a few of the other big questions we’re watching in today’s news industry.

What does Norm Pearlstine have planned in L.A.?

There’s a lot of chatter around Patrick Soon-Shiong’s pick of news veteran Norm Pearlstine as his new editor-in-chief. “He pulled a Cheney,” several sources observed of the appointment. Like the man who famously headed up George W. Bush’s vice-presidential search, only to end up with the job himself, Pearlstine’s role, in part, was to help the L.A. Times’ new owner pick his first editor-in-chief. As I pointed out in May, though, his job always encompassed more than just that selection process.

Given unlimited financial capacity, sole ownership, and a clean slate, Soon-Shiong and Pearlstine have been able to take a cartographer’s tour the past couple of months.

Do they map out the next Los Angeles Times — the Times of the 2020s — as a global creature? Or as one focused on the fastest, closest, maybe most intriguing part of the globe — Asia? Should it (as Michael Ferro was only the latest to fantasize) turn its Hollywood (er, El Segundo) base into a worldwide entertainment franchise? Or does it try to launch itself into the national space, taking a page from Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post playbook, adding a couple of hundred journalists and entering our frayed political conversation more fully?

Of course, Bezos saw in his investment — $250 million, or half of what Soon-Shiong paid Tronc for the Times and San Diego Union-Tribune — the power of the Post’s home city. With Washington the country’s center of politics and policy, reclaiming that national position didn’t require a big leap of imagination — just resources, smart leadership, and the proper application of the technologies of the day.

The L.A. Times’ case is trickier. Once roughly on par with the Post (and even The New York Times) in stature and resources, its home turf is Southern California. Does that mean embracing, defining, and explaining a new California ethos, one that’s also emerging fitfully nationwide? How would the West Coast’s deep blueness color that sort of a role in our bizarre political landscape?

What does Patrick Soon-Shiong want his L.A. Times to be? And, importantly, what kind of business does he want it to be?

Hyper-successful businesspeople don’t like to lose money at anything they do, even if they can easily afford it. So how do Soon-Shiong and Pearlstine meld an audience and product vision with a new business model? Among the multitude of questions: How will they harness technology to forge that new strategy? While many have focused on the extra journalistic headcount Bezos has provided Post editor Marty Baron, his funding of a similar number of new technologists has made its business transformation — most notably, passing 1 million digital subscribers — possible. The L.A. Times became the first Tronc paper to implement the Post’s Arc platform earlier this year. So what will it now do with it? And how compatible with Arc will Soon-Shiong’s AI-aided notions for revolutionizing journalism be?

Pearlstine, a now fashionably youthful 75, quickly acknowledged that finding a successor became part of his role the day his position was announced. Certainly, if Soon-Shiong had been able to lure either the Times’ Dean Baquet or the Post’s Baron — each a former L.A. Times editor — the publishing world’s skepticism about his plans would have melted away. With Pearlstine in charge, though, many will wait and see.

It’s easy to look at the hiring of a New Yorker septuagenarian as less than au courant, and yes, the hiring of a younger, even female, editor-in-chief would have sent a far different message. But in hiring someone of Pearlstine’s long industry stature — The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc., and Bloomberg — the newbie publisher has hired someone who should be able to set up the new lines of church and state at the new Times properly. That’s no insignificant task. Soon-Shiong’s innovative medtech career has been all about crossing lines, and with Pearlstine, the Times’ staff and readers should be assured that the Times’ coverage won’t be bent to fit the owner’s own interests or beliefs.

Pearlstine’s big and immediate test will be in hiring. In the past couple years of Tronc chaos, the Times has lost lots of talent, most notably to the Post and New York Times. Can Pearlstine reverse the flow and lure top people with a golden promise of building the next Times? That’s not just a question of finding a successor-in-waiting; it’s about repopulating and adding new newsroom talent, both those with gumshoe journalistic skills and those with a deep digital sense of reader connection. Watch who gets hired — that will tell us a lot about the reality of the new Los Angeles Times.

Will AT&T follow through on its promises for an independent CNN?

As a federal judge okayed AT&T’s deal to buy Time Warner, few people focused on the questions of its ownership of CNN. Certainly, they’d come up during the lengthy merger battle, but only here and there. John Stankey, AT&T’s newly appointed head of Time Warner, immediately said all the right things about CNN, its independence, and its value to our struggling democracy. We have no reason to doubt him.

And yet as we look around the world, at the rampage of press-strangling authoritarianism from Russia, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary to China and the Philippines, let’s recall how concentrations of media power have often been coupled with the erosion of democratic freedoms. One usual course: Major telecommunications companies come to own major news operations and then bend them to the political needs of their owners, when push comes to expedient shove.

We would seem far away from that point today — but then again, so many of our democratic norms have been blown away in such a short time. I still recall AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson paying his courtesy call to Trump Tower — one that seemingly didn’t do much to soothe the presidential-elect beast, given his feral hatred of CNN itself. That photo still bothers me, though.

We will, and should, watch CNN for any signs of business and political interference, though I don’t expect any in the short term. But the politics and pressures of our time are as likely to get worse as better, and we shouldn’t lose sight of this concern, which is exacerbated by longer-term trends and the ongoing quest for bigness, which accelerates year by year.

Perhaps the marriage of pipes and content in the U.S. can proceed differently; Comcast’s stewardship of NBC/MSNBC hasn’t appeared to be problematic. But certainly, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News shows the clear and present peril of a politicized, regime-echoing “news” company. If CNN, one if its two main counterweights, were neutralized — or turned — imagine how our national debate would morph overnight. We now know, on so many fronts: It can happen here.

Consider — and savor, for the moment — the unaffiliated and feisty we’re-news-companies position of The Washington Post and The New York Times, today and back to Watergate times. What’s been the value of that independence over the past two years? Priceless.

What’s the sound of a towel being tossed in?

It would be something like the multiple thwacks we heard last week, as new milestones in the ongoing consolidation of news media continued just about daily.

Warren Buffett tossed in one of those towels Tuesday. He announced that he was doing the ultimate outsourcing — paying Lee Enterprises $5 million or so a year, plus partnership incentives that could double the Lee take — to run his newspapers in 30 markets.

Recall that just six years ago, the Oracle of Omaha — and a leading supporter of civil society and of the role of the press — seemed to be giving beleaguered newspapers a vote of confidence, buying 63 newspapers from Media General. It was a year before Jeff Bezos bought the Post. Both deals seemed to signal that smart, caring money saw a future in transforming print franchises into digital.

But while one of them has done that gloriously, one never got far from the starting gate. As Berkshire Hathaway Media CEO Terry Kroeger departs, perhaps for a political future, the disappointment here is in BH Media’s lack of transformation. While Buffett himself has run hot and cold publicly on the prospects of the newspaper industry, for some reason, he squandered the chance to use his reputation and capital to actually innovate. The BH Media playbook, such as it was, always seem to trail even its struggling chain peers, leading to the same results and same layoffs. Maybe more was going on inside the company — but whatever it was plainly didn’t work.

Perhaps the Media General deal was widely misunderstood from the beginning. I found Roy Greenslade’s Guardian piece on the 2012 sale, and the seemingly jaundiced view expressed by both the FT’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and me may have been too close to the eventual truth:

[Media columnist Jack Shafer] cites media analyst Ken Doctor, who regards the Media General deal as “more a feat of financial engineering than a newspaper deal” because it includes a $400m loan and a $45m line of credit at 10.5% interest in exchange for warrants that would give Berkshire Hathaway almost 20% of Media General.

And Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the Financial Times points out that the warrants obtained by the “well-meaning billionaire” are worth $19.5m.

So, once Media General dumps the Tampa Tribune, the company will essentially be a profitable TV station owner, a business that Buffett knows and likes. Then there is the valuable newspaper real estate too.

And then Greenslade concludes with this observation from Shafer:

Buffett’s recent newspaper acquisitions don’t indicate the industry has returned to health. But if he starts selling, you’ll know that it’s dead.

Buffett hasn’t sold, but he has thrown in a towel.

Lee, which owns papers in 47 largely smaller markets, gets good marks from its peers for its operating prowess. That’s meant the management of decline, which all those peers have contended with, and a brick-by-brick building of a more digital business. But still, in 2017 only about 28 percent of Lee’s ad revenues were digital, and it saw an overall revenue decline of 7 percent — about the industry average.

For Lee, the deal buys one precious commodity: time. If it can earn out that $10 million a year, that’s a shot of much-needed revenue.

How much will the two companies combine? Not that much, apparently, which is a bit of a headscratcher in an era where cost efficiencies drive strategy.

“Regarding regional management, BH Media will remain a separate company with its own management, personnel, and systems. Lee’s role will be to guide BH Media management,” a Lee spokesman told me. “As [Lee CEO] Kevin Mowbray mentioned, we do expect that both Lee and BH will benefit from our combined larger operating scale, primarily in digital sales, shared services and vendor contracts.”

So BH Media’s national costs go away, replaced by Lee fees. Berkshire Hathaway had previously been a significant shareholder in Lee, but it isn’t any longer. Still, Buffett’s long familiarity with the company and its chair (and retired CEO) Mary Junck provides the logic for the dealmaking.

One day before the BH Media semi-exit, another big newspaper chain headed for the showers. Gray TV — now the country’s No. 4 local broadcast player; another rapidly consolidating industry, as the FCC has undone decades of restraint on bigness — bought Raycom’s 65 stations (some of which it will have to divest) for $3.65 billion.

That leaves Raycom’s more than 100 CNHI newspapers — some smaller dailies and many weeklies, largely across the Southeast — as refugees from the deal. They’re now up for sale, less than a year after CNHI formally combined with broadcaster Raycom. Who will buy them?

Newspaper brokers are busy this week.

Would traffic signals help people separate real from fake?

Yes, they might, says a new Knight Foundation-funded Gallup Poll. The survey found that both “signals” and neutrally written descriptions of websites did help survey respondents separate news wheat from abundant chaff.

For the survey, Gallup used NewsGuard’s system of tagging. The new Steve Brill/Gordon Crovitz startup applies green (“aims for accuracy”) and red (“doesn’t meet minimum standards” signals to websites (not stories) and provides “nutritional labels” for those descriptions. (Samples here.)

This is what Gallup found:

The news source rating tool worked as intended. Perceived accuracy increased for news headlines with a green source cue and decreased for headlines with a redsource cue. Participants also indicated they were less likely to read, like or share news headlines with a red source cue. The source rating tool was particularly effective for participants who correctly recalled that experienced journalists devised the ratings, compared with those who did not recall that information.

The source rating tool was effective across the political spectrum. The perceived accuracy of news articles with a red source cue decreased similarly among Republicans and Democrats, with the sharpest decline occurring when the headlines had a clear political orientation that matched the users’ political beliefs.

The source rating tool did not produce known, unintended consequences associated with previous efforts to combat online misinformation. Our experiment did not produce evidence of an “implied truth effect,” an increase in perceived accuracy for false stories without a source rating when other false stories have a source rating, or a “backfire effect,” a strengthening of one’s false beliefs following a factual correction.

Knight, one of NewsGuard’s funders, sees the survey (conducted independently of the principals) as support for the NewsGuard notion.

For its part, the startup is on track. In July, it will begin providing its browser plugin free to libraries to get its product to market. By fall, it plans to make its full product publicly available.

Meanwhile, its staff of “several dozen full-time and part-time” journalists continue their review of the news web, affixing signals and writing labels. The goal: have 98 percent of U.S. news consumption covered by site tagging by fall.

The big question looms: However good this attempt to defang fake news might be, how will the public see it? That will take some major platform — Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft — to take it public. And — so far — no movement on that front.

The state of the journalism industry might be much more tattered right now if not for philanthropic dollars helping to sustain national and local news outlets like ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and others. Nonprofit news organizations have made so much progress in the past decade that now there’s even an playbook for how to make your own. But where is this money coming from, who is it going to, and how are these dollars reshaping journalism? (A piece by Julie Reynolds pointed out that the Knight Foundation has, in the past, invested in Alden Global Capital, the parent company of the “strip-mining” Digital First Media.)

A study co-published by the Shorenstein Center and Northeastern University (and funded by a couple of foundations itself) zooms in on the role played by foundations in the journalism world. Researchers Matthew Nisbet, John Wihbey, Silje Kristiansen, and Aleszu Bajak analyzed more than 30,000 grants (totaling $1.8 billion) from more than 6,500 foundations between 2010 and 2015.

Their analysis has some thought-provoking takeaways, but unsurprisingly: “Our findings suggest that many innovative projects and experiments have and continue to take place, but grantmaking remains far below what is needed.”

The study’s main findings:

— Thirty-two percent of the $1.8 billion went to industry-supporting initiatives rather than direct journalism — university programs, professional development groups, and research and technology development. Public media received 44 percent of the $1.8 billion, but it wasn’t evenly distributed across the country/stations. And national news nonprofits got 12 percent (“the leading two dozen recipients were also notable for featuring six deep-vertical news organizations that specialize in coverage of topics like the environment, and six nonprofits that have a clear ideological perspective”), while local/state news nonprofits received 5 percent of the total pool.

U.S. foundation funding for nonprofit media-related activities, 2010–2015:

U.S. foundation funding for public media by state, 2010–2015:

— Some of the 30 interviewees (including thought leaders, stakeholders, and nonprofit experts) expressed frustration with a “pack philanthropy” culture. The leading nonprofits like the Texas Tribune or ProPublica, they say, are able to attract a lot of foundation dollars in a competitive funding environment. They serve as an example for how others can do it, but they can also soak up some of the funding opportunities, and foundations can be risk-averse about funding early-stage ideas.

— The Freedom Forum was the top funder of “nonprofit media-related activities” in terms of amount of money granted, with nearly $175 million across 10 specific grants. The Knight Foundation provided about $133 million in 352 grants, the second highest amount given and the second highest number of grants (the Silicon Valley Community Foundation awarded 700 grants). (Disclosure: Knight is a funder of Nieman Lab.)

— Magazines like Harper’s, Education Week, and Mother Jones received 62 percent of all foundation money given to magazines ($80.7 million total). The funding was split between a third for Harper’s, a third for left- or right-leaning magazines, and the last third for education or other issue-based magazines.

— On the local level, Knight drove the highest proportion of funding dollars (20 percent, or $16 million) through 56 grants. The highest recipients across all foundations were the Texas Tribune, the Institute for Nonprofit News (a consortium of 150+ smaller nonprofit newsrooms), Bay Citizen (which has since merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting), Chicago Reporter/Catalyst Chicago, and MinnPost. The researchers’ breakdown:

Eleven of the top 25, and six of the top 10, focused on producing local/state public affairs coverage. Six including two of the top 5 specialized in local/state investigative reporting. Three were local/state deep vertical nonprofits, three sought to foster collaborations or increase capacity among local/state nonprofits, and two specialized in facilitating local citizen journalism and deliberation.

U.S. foundation funding for local/state news nonprofits by state, 2010–2015

You can read the full report, with its detailed analysis and more meaty charts, here.