On April 7, the Crimson sent out the first edition of its Metro Briefing newsletter, a new weekly roundup of coverage of the Cambridge-Boston area. The Metro Briefing includes summaries of the top local news and arts stories from the past week and a list of local events.

In recent years, student journalists have filled local news gaps around the country, covering statehouses and reporting on higher education to partnering local professional publications. Beyond the Crimson, Cambridge’s primary local news outlet is Marc Levy‘s nonprofit news site Cambridge Day. (Cambridge Day’s newly formed advisory board launched a crowdfunding campaign on Tuesday to raise $75,000; by comparison, the Crimson’s 2020 tax filings show the paper made more than $756,000 that year, 80% of it from donations.) The Gannett-owned Cambridge Chronicle serves the city in name only; on Thursday, there was not a single story on the site’s homepage about Cambridge.

The Crimson’s managing editor Brandon Kingdollar and newsletters editor Elias Schisgall answered my questions via email about the Crimson’s decision to expand its local news offerings. The interview is slightly edited for length and clarity.

If you’re a student journalist filling in local news gaps in your community in an innovative way, get in touch: hanaa@niemanlab.org.

Projects like these, which focus on giving people information they need to make the places they live better, are the focus of a new report, out Thursday, that calls on local journalism’s would-be saviors to focus their energy and funding on collaborative efforts, startups, and community groups — not on legacy news organizations.

“Too much time and energy has been spent propping up and mourning the declining legacy systems,” the report’s lead authors — Chalkbeat’s Elizabeth Green, City Bureau’s Darryl Holliday, and Free Press’s Mike Rispoli — write. All three, of course, run or are part of media organizations that operate squarely outside of legacy media. (Disclosure: Green is my close friend.)

The opportunity now is to shepherd and accelerate a transition to this emergent civic media system. This new ecosystem looks different from what it will replace: while the commercial market rewarded information monopolies, what is emerging now are pluralistic networks in which information is fluid, services are shared, and media is made in cooperation with the people it seeks to serve.

“The Roadmap for Local News” was built on conversations with more than 50 local news folks, leaders of nonprofit news organizations, and funders. It focuses on “civic information” and “civic media,” which it defines like this:

Civic information: High-quality, verifiable information that enables people to respond to collective needs by enhancing local coordination, problem-solving, systems of public accountability, and connectedness.
Civic media: Any practice that produces civic information as its primary focus.

The authors write:

Civic media practitioners are united by a vision of a world in which people everywhere are equipped to improve their communities through abundant access to high-quality information, on urgent health and safety emergencies, the environment, the people and processes of local government, and daily social services like healthcare, education, and transportation. In this vision, the community librarian facilitating conversations around authoritative, trusted digital news is as celebrated as the dogged reporter pursuing a scoop.

They call for “a new level of investment to the civic media field,” with “leaders in philanthropy, journalism, and democracy” “[coordinating] work around the goal of expanding ‘civic information,’ not saving the news business.”

The goal should not be to save legacy businesses that remain in decline, but instead to meet the civic information needs of all individuals and communities.

The report also stresses the need for more open-ended funding (“including conversion of project-based funds to general operating support”), shared services and infrastructure, and major public policy initiatives.

It will require investing significantly more into our current public media system, creating new forms of public funding, and passing a suite of other policy solutions at all levels of government to create the conditions for local civic information to thrive.

Coauthor Holliday also delved into some of the report’s themes in a thread.

We won’t emerge from this by “saving” the old system. We need to accelerate the transition to a new system centered on community info needs & news products that help people act & solve local issues

A participatory public good that's worth investing in. Yes, I made a chart pic.twitter.com/gO97IlfyI1

— Darryl Holliday (@d_holli) February 2, 2023

The development of the report was funded by the Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Democracy Fund, MacArthur Foundation, Walton Family, and American Journalism Project. Funders came together with many of the report’s sources last week to meet at a local news summit at the former Annenberg Estate in California. Lenfest’s Jim Friedlich wrote up the event for our sister publication, Nieman Reports, describing it as “extraordinarily positive.”

Former ProPublica president Dick Tofel offered some criticism of the initiative here. “If the upshot of all this is more money for great journalism, that’s all to the good,” Tofel told me in an email. “What I hope can be avoided are especially two things: a new bureaucracy doling out a pool of funds, and a centralized support mechanism. Both, in my view, would tend to inhibit experimentation and innovation, of which we need more, not less.”

But “most funders seemed aligned in the view that coordinated effort toward common goals and funding of key priorities could best be accomplished through close communication and coordination,” Friedlich wrote, “rather than consolidation into a kind of fund of funds.”

You can read the full thing here.

NEW: I helped a bit with this, and am very happy to see the focus of this effort on the information needs of communities. It's not about "saving" organizations. It's about solving problems. #localnewsroadmap https://t.co/7DAYqGYZAu

— Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) February 2, 2023

I’m not saying this bc I am one of them. But I have colleagues at McClatchy, Gannett and others who work on many of these premises within difficult systems. They deserve to be cheered on.

Go ahead and hate these companies, they still hold power and house good souls.

— P. Kim Bui (@kimbui) February 2, 2023

Proud to be among 60+ news leaders & practitioners who engaged in the development of the #LocalNewsRoadmap.

Released today, the new report is a vision statement for the field, with strategies, evidence, & examples to scale civic media.

Read and share: https://t.co/Dx63QzRCwJ https://t.co/7WIlmQtGjZ

— Mukhtar M. Ibrahim (@mukhtaryare) February 2, 2023

How many times have we heard that old saw resurface in the past several years? But that saying applies to the business of local news revival, too.

We knew that our local fall elections offered a big test for Lookout Santa Cruz. We’d launched just after the 2020 November election, and this election, following a June test run, offered us the ability to show our fundamental essentiality to the wider community. Our coverage — voluminous, analytical, informational, and multimedia — showed our community what a digitally centered news operation can do for local democracy.

“In my years in Santa Cruz, I’ve never seen the scope of coverage you did,” the new mayor, a veteran politico, told us. In total, there were probably almost 100 content pieces, including those on usually neglected school and water boards, but we also wanted to extend into the community itself. We hosted three in-person candidate forums that we Zoomed, and then posted, in short segments, on our site for views to watch later on. We used texting, with help from an American Press Institute grant to solicit reader election questions — and got hundreds of them.

As Lookout Santa Cruz enters its third year, it’s become a primary local news medium for lots of locals. After two years of publishing — through the early news and information demands of Covid and recent, divisive local elections — we’re closing in on meeting the goal of our model: Powering a large, strong, fair, nonpartisan, and trustworthy new news brand on recurring revenue. It’s a model that can work beyond the territory of any single market.

Our advertising business is growing and diversifying. Our membership business has moved beyond a one-size-fits-all paywall, into a nuanced revenue line that aims to maximize both revenue and access for those unable to pay directly. Our student engagement programs help bring emerging adults into civic life and provide a steady stream of recurring revenue as well. Targeted philanthropy helps us build more quickly.

We’re on track to meet our goal of sustainable recurring revenue by next summer. We’re not declaring success yet, but we’re tangibly close, even as we ready ourselves for expansion into other communities. The work is tough and painstaking. We’ve made mistakes; fixing them costs us time and money — the two pressure points for all new ventures. We’ll undoubtedly make more.

In a world of surprises — Twitter self-immolation, Meta exiting news, midterm shocks — all that seems likely is recession. As a fellow local publisher remarked to me last week, “Given what’s already going on with the dailies, recession could be an extinction event.”

Hyperbole? Maybe. All I know is that we have to be thinking “replacement” for the dailies when we see stories like this one in The Washington Post: “They were some of the last journalists at their papers. Then came the layoffs.” As Kristi Garabradt told the Post of her layoff from the “Daily Jeff,” in Missouri’s capital city: “When you’re the paper’s only reporter, you don’t consider yourself nonessential.”

Recession will make remaking local news tougher. Money will be harder to get; timelines may lengthen. The world is unpredictable, but I continue to believe that the need for trusted, fact-based local news will never disappear. How it gets paid for and delivered is all in flux, but people want and value local news and information.

I’ve shared early lessons about our work building Lookout Local in two previous columns here at Nieman Lab, and am offering new takeaways below. My Newsonomics readers will note consistent themes through my 10 years (one million words!) of writing for the Lab. Over the last decade, we’ve seen financial players profit from the death spiral of the local newspaper industry, squeezing the last dollars out of a business dependent on the habits of senior readers. Many readers and journalists have already reached the end timess. Recently, Gannett — which controls 25% of U.S. daily newspaper circulation — forecast an operating loss of $60 to $70 million this year, even before the toll of recession.

The urgency of those who seek to rebuild local news — some advocating billions of dollars in funding — is only intensifying. Will we be ready, as the intersection of democracy and the cratering of the local press become more apparent? The clock is ticking.

Replacing the dailies takes investment — and the melding of mission and model

On hiatus from my analyst work covering the digital transition of national publishers and the demise of the local press, I now fit everything through the local lens: The lived experience of one local news company serving a county of 276,000.

Taking the longest view I can at the moment of that experience, I’m gobsmacked by the convergence between our mission and our business model.

Lookout Santa Cruz aims to help make Santa Cruz County a better place for all who live here. That mission isn’t a news one, per se, but news is a primary vehicle to achieve it.

Lookout is a public benefit company, and we saw mission and model as complementary from the start. The more we invest in community coverage and community engagement, the faster our business grows. The more that small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as larger nonprofits, buy advertising and memberships, the more we’re able to invest. It’s a virtuous circle that serves as a guidepost for Lookout — and, I think, for all of us intent on building pro-democracy local news organizations now.

The local credit union or beloved local grocer buys into Lookout because they like what we bring to the community. With their ad spend, we better our product and expand reach for them at the same time. They believe us when we say we’re built to last — and can compare that to local print, which looks more fragile and fatigued every month. (“We no longer buy print” is the increasing refrain.)

Authenticity is fundamental. But what differentiates our model from many others is size. Despite much advice to the contrary, I believed that we had to offer a big enough product to succeed in our goal to replace the local Alden daily, which is down to less than a handful in its newsroom. (If you missed the latest Alden takedown, check out Hasan Minhaj’s latest Netflix special, starting 12:36 from the end.) Start too small, and it’s too hard to propel the revenue generation forward.

Lookout Local has never been about money itself, but money to the end of the mission — money that can prove out the proposition that a robust replacement for suicidal dailies can, indeed, be built. That’s especially important in the age of Gannett’s trainwreck, Axios Local’s skimming, and the misguided Journalism Competition and Preservation act currently before Congress.

We raised a couple million dollars from the likes of the Knight Foundation, the Google News Innovation Challenge, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and local and regional philanthropists. “That’s a lot of money for a place the size of Santa Cruz,” some told me. But it’s not. Replacement takes investment.

We now have a real local news company growing well in all the vital benchmarks — audience, revenue, community regard, and credibility — with 15 full-tume people working in Santa Cruz Count. We have a newsroom of 10 and a business staff of five. We’re old-fashioned, working in a real office, with face-to-face communication throughout the week.

Without print costs, 80% of our expenses are in people — a terrific advantage going forward. Our staff, paid above local newspaper standards, drives our success and the pace of it. We know we are doing something both contrarian and absolutely vital.

We have to create a set of products — mobile site, desktop site, email newsletters, text alerts, social media posts, reels, events — that are good and newsy enough to merit regular check-ins and reading. We’re big enough to earn the audience, ad effectiveness, and membership value these kinds of operations require — in Santa Cruz and, we believe, more widely.

That means accountability journalism, and an increasing amount of it. This fall, we focused on pesticides near schools, overcrowded jails, teenagers’ fentanyl use, homelessness, and county fair upheaval.

As much as accountability is core to our mission, though, it will never pay the bills — or bring in sufficient readers to engage real thought and change in the communities we intend to serve. So we also offer entertainment calendars, puzzles, obituaries, a job board, and a Community Voices opinion section that in its first six months broadened political and cultural conversation — and served as a vital part of our election 2022 coverage, when we offered endorsements for the first time.

As central as political and civic coverage is, a wider variety of content pushes people from being in-and-out visitors to readers. Food is foremost. Arts, education, coastal life, public health, and culture also serve to satisfy readers.

As we become a primary news medium for an increasing number of people, we’re confronted with fundamental questions of expectation: How do we cover courts, crime, business, traffic, smaller government meetings, and more? As a fellow publisher put it to me recently, “We started offering news of choice. Now, we are expected to be the news of record.”

Here are 11 takeaways as we enter our third year.

Be patient — and aggressive. Acceptance follows on the heels of awareness, but it may take five or six brand touches for someone to really take notice. Before we launched, I’d tell people about what we were planning and receive mainly quizzical looks. I’d say to good news readers, “you know, a through-the-day changing news product on your phone, like The New York Times.” They’d smile and say, “You mean a blog.” They couldn’t imagine a product that didn’t exist: a local, mobile-first news service that changed through the day. Surveying readers about whether they wanted it would have been pointless, and I’m glad we didn’t.

Two years in, though, we hear, “I read Morning Lookout every morning, and know that when something happens you’re going to send me an alert.” We’re now hitting about 250,000 pageviews a month, growing at about 17% year over year. We love direct traffic and benchmark above average on it. We roll with Google and Facebook and also find Apple News to be an ascending brand builder for us.

Keep diversifying revenue streams. That should be a big duh to anyone trying to fund any venture, but I’m still amazed by how many organizations are focused almost exclusively on reader revenue as the ramp forward. We believe deeply in it, but it’s only one support. Here’s our percentage mix, still in flux, of course: 50% advertising; 35% membership, and 15% targeted philanthropy for key growth positions.

Act like a real marketing partner. How many (smart) people in the news revival movement are still allergic to advertising, or buy the line that Google and Facebook have “taken” the local market? Advertising makes up half of our revenue and has doubled over the past year. We call these “marketing partnerships” because that’s what they are — a deeply relationship-building form of community-driven commercial and nonprofit organization development. We call our business side Commerce and Community. We started with branded content (clearly demarcated and untouched by the newsroom) and have now added a range of innovative digital display products, a job board, obituaries, Instagram reels, and event sponsorships. We run no programmatic ads. Our ads reflect the local small business and nonprofit communities back to our whole community of readers. That means they not only bring in dollars, they reaffirm the community itself. It’s a twofer.

Move flexibly into Membership 2.0. It’s time to make the paywall/no paywall argument obsolete. We started with a tight paywall and a high price ($187 a year, or $17 per month). We’re glad we did. We gained real supporters, and we’ve kept them.

Now, though, as we’ve shifted access providers, we’re taking a more nuanced approach to membership. We want to provide access to Lookout to as close to 100% of the communities we serve as possible. That means lots of different kinds of memberships. Memberships now total more than 7,000, and we have 10,000 in our sights by early next year. All are paid for, in a range of ways. We have individual, enterprise, student, educator, and group memberships.

Paywalls should never have become a religious argument in the new news trade. In our work balancing access and revenue, we are building a model that I hope moves that discussion forward. Access control is fundamental; we are finally moving into an era of deploying it more imaginatively.

Show up. Be active, go to events, talk to anyone and everyone — not just the company’s leadership, but the full staff. Events — sponsoring and co-sponsoring them — are key, but it doesn’t stop there. There’s nothing like face-to-face gatherings. Fifteen people on the ground is a community force, multiplying the power and reach of the journalism.

Bring students directly into local news. Our paid access for students is supported by media literacy and civic-minded individual donors, and by the Google News Initiative. This isn’t the old daily Newspapers in Education program that often just dumped newspapers (the better to count for circulation) at schools. We’re doing more than providing access — we’re creating a local news-based curriculum and now see it being incorporated at the high school and college levels. We’re adding student voices into the fabric of Lookout. The societal value is a no-brainer, but we also see how this program can generate recurring revenue going forward — and serve as a model for getting local news to others who can’t, or are unlikely to, pay.

Planning is great, but it’s a lot of improv. The best models only offer a blueprint. From there, it’s relentless problem-solving — something that newsrooms have done daily for decades, and that is essential for building the sustainable business model in each community. Instagram is as much art as science. Some school programs fail to catch on, while educators quickly adapt other stuff our newsroom is producing every day.

Team-building takes time. We’re now fully staffed, with our most recent hires coming from places like the Globe and Mail and Monterey County Weekly. The team matches up pretty well with the across-the-generations readership profile our analytics display. After too much turnover in our first year, we’ve settled in well, though our culture is still forming. We’ve found nothing beats an in-office environment to build both culture and product. It’s as old-fashioned as you can imagine: 10 people sitting around a conference room table talking local stories.

Democracy is local. Santa Cruz has its share of polarization. It looks different here than it does in the red/blue patterns that swamp CNN every two years, but it’s the same phenomenon. For us, the work of building a stronger democracy starts with news and information, fair and deeply reported analysis, and rumor- and fact-checking. It extends to a wide-ranging opinion section and in-person community forums that are then given long life on the site. The more work we do, the more people accept us as a player, and both praise and criticism grow. It’s long-term work, and difficult, but we’ve got to be in the fray as an honest broker.

The tech stack is still unnecessarily hard. We’re not a technology business, though we are wholly digital. But we are a technology-based business. That’s an essential understanding as the dailies gasp for breath and newspapers abandon print. The advantages we have are real and long-term, but they’re still not properly rationalized. From CMSes to access controls to analytics to search optimization, we see a motley assortment of tech with too little integration among the moving parts. There’s real movement toward higher-performance standardization, optimization, and networking, but dealing with partial solutions continues to retard the fundamental work of remaking local news.

Make good friends and lean on them. Workshops, webinars, trainings, and the like are good. But there’s nothing like having friends in the business, enduring the same workloads, confronting the same issues, and understanding that innovation, rather than invention, is largely the name of the game. Six months ago, I wrote about the “3 a.m. Club,” made up of the leaders of the Daily Memphian, Colorado Sun, Baltimore Banner, Long Beach Post, and Block Club Chicago. As we approach 2023, our support for each other is evolving into possible networked solutions, tech and otherwise, that maximize our precious resources. We must all find our friends and stay close to them.

As we finish this year and look ahead, we’re about where we hoped to be, though the journey’s been unpredictable. We’ve built a model that’s working in Santa Cruz County. We believe many parts of it are widely applicable across the country. How do we apply what we’ve learned so far? How could the model, or parts of it, be applied to the world of dailies and large weeklies?

As a publisher and as an analyst, I balance those and numerous similar questions within the bounds of time. The brutal combination of local press destruction and assaults on the democratic process itself pose an unprecedented challenge for our time and place. It’s one we have to get right.

Baquet, who served as the executive editor of The New York Times from 2014 until this year, will lead its new local investigations fellowship program. At the Independent News Sustainability Summit on Thursday in Austin, Texas, Baquet talked about his plans for the pilot program, which will launch early next year.

Baquet told the Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith that he’s looking for “straightforward, classic investigative reporting.” (He also tweeted about the fellowship on Wednesday — the first tweet in eight years from a man who thinks reporters should, generally, tweet less.)

The fellowship is designed to help local outlets publish investigative journalism that they otherwise might not have the resources to do. The stories will also be published in the Times. Baquet said he’ll visit newsrooms to help the shape the proposals he’s interested in:

“Some of the editors we talked to said they don’t have time to come up with proposals. They’re overworked. The last thing they want to do is spend time on another thing. I also think, frankly, in some of the newsrooms we’ve talked to, the editors and the reporters — particularly the reporters — are not advanced enough to know what they have.

And frankly, some of this is selfish. I like being in newsrooms on the front end of stories. I like sitting down with a reporter who has a half-formed idea and trying to figure out what it could look like at the other end…I think that it’s been helpful for the newsrooms to just talk to editors who have a little bit of time. And for the first time, in my career, I have a little bit of time.”

How much pre-reporting should the applications include? “For somebody who’s already got a five- or six-part series reported out already, I’m not sure what we bring to the table,” Baquet said.

“If you have the smoking gun, that’s great, but we don’t have to have the smoking gun,” he added. “When we’re sitting down with editors and reporters, we may look at an application and try to figure out if the inkling is truly an uneducated inkling or an inkling based in reality. Some of the finest journalism I’ve been associated with started out as an inkling.”

Local journalists, both freelancers and staffers, can apply to spend a year working on investigations that hold power to account in their communities or regions. The stories must be local in scope, but applicants should think beyond local governments. Baquet:

“If you want a pitch for why you should do investigative reporting: First off, when we did the Harvey Weinstein stories, it broke the internet for us. The audience for investigative reporting is tremendous. I also think we should not just stick to government in investigative reporting. That’s started to change in the last decade. In a weird way, one reason people came to believe governments were inefficient and screwed up is because they didn’t get a look at bad businesses. Now we’ve gotten a look inside businesses, we get that maybe government is not as bad as we thought by comparison [laughs]. I would argue, if you’re a business publication, do investigative reporting on businesses. It’s harder. You can’t walk into a local business with a FOIA request and demand stuff. But they, too, have former employees. They, too, are regulated.”

Baquet and a team of editors will select eight to 12 fellows and cover their salaries for the year, though the application doesn’t specify how much the fellowship pays. Baquet also declined to share the budget for the program. (Evan Smith: “Well, that’s not very transparent.”)

The fellowship was Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s idea, Baquet said. As his retirement approached, Baquet said Sulzberger suggested that he lead an investigative journalism program.

“I immediately loved it. I grew up in local news. I’ve spent much of my career as an investigative reporter,” Baquet said. “And I actually feel like I owe something to journalists. I grew up in a working [class], poor neighborhood in New Orleans. I’ve seen so much of the world through journalism. I want journalism, and local journalism in particular, to survive and thrive. Anything I can do to contribute to that would make me very happy.”

Smith asked, “How much of this is about what’s lacking in local news, and how much of this is about what’s lacking at The New York Times?”

“If The New York Times just wanted to go do a bunch of local investigations, frankly, we could do it,” Baquet said. “I could send 20 New York Times reporters to do local investigations. But the reason you want to work with younger journalists is just for the reason we said — to teach the next generation.”

Smith also asked Baquet to list some of the ways the Times improved — and worsened — during his tenure. Baquet:

“It’s better than we found it in the sense that it’s a far better investigative operation. It’s better than we found it in the sense that it is no longer truly a print newsroom. It’s a newsroom that actually experiments. It’s got a ginormous podcasting operation, and is creating a whole world of visual journalism. It’s become a very large, modern organization, as it should be, and I think one of the results of that is [that] it’s much stronger financially than it was a decade ago.

What is not stronger? I don’t think we, or any other news organization, has quite licked the trust issue or has figured it out…[Trust] was something we focused on but we didn’t know fully how to do it. We still try. We have a whole group of people working on trust and transparency, but we just haven’t figured it out. Some of the questions of journalism that we face are really big and are going to take a long time to figure out.”

The Independent News Sustainability Summit is focused on financial health, journalistic impact, and operational resilience for independent news outlets. It’s organized by LION Publishers, the News Revenue Hub, and the Texas Tribune’s RevLab, with funding from the Knight Foundation, Lenfest Institute, and Google News Initiative. Find the full schedule here and follow along on Twitter here. And if you’re here in Austin too, come say hi.

This isn’t the first time that a state has budgeted money to help local journalism — New Jersey’s Civic Information Consortium gets $3 million from the state’s latest budget, for instance — but the amount in California is especially large:

What is believed to be the largest state allocation ever made in California and in the U.S. to support local journalism, the new Berkeley fellowship program will award up to 40 fellows per year for at least three years with a $50,000 annual stipend to supplement their salaries while they work in California newsrooms covering communities in dire need of strong local journalism.

The fellowships will last three years. Berkeley Journalism students and graduates, and graduates of other programs elsewhere, will be able to apply for the first fellowship cohort as early as May 2023. Chancellor Carol Christ said the fellowship program reflects the campus’s values and priorities, and demonstrates the innovative leader that Berkeley Journalism has become in higher education.

When fellows are chosen, a “particular focus will be put on newsrooms that provide local coverage for underserved and historically underrepresented communities,” UC Berkeley said. The university is currently working to recruit a project director and organize an advisory committee “that reflects the diversity of the state of California, and that also brings others experiences, expertise, and perspectives to the table,” Steve Katz, assistant dean of advancement at the journalism school, told me in an email.

Penny Abernathy, the author of the report and a Medill School visiting professor, writes:

Even though the pandemic was not the catastrophic “extinction-level event” some feared, the country lost more than 360 newspapers between the waning pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022. All but 24 of those papers were weeklies, serving communities ranging in size from a few hundred people to tens of thousands. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement. The country has 6,377 surviving papers: 1,230 dailies and 5,147 weeklies.

Additionally, dailies “are becoming more like weeklies,” Abernathy writes, even if they’re still called dailies for the purpose of this report:

The daily newspaper — printed and delivered seven days a week — has already disappeared in many markets. Forty of the largest 100 papers in the country now deliver a print edition six or fewer times a week; 11 publish a print edition only one or two or times a week and e-editions on the other days.

The report counts 545 digital-only state and local news sites in existence in 2022, a figure that includes “more than 170 local business and special interest sites, community newsletters, and a growing number of ‘networked’ local outlets, some of which span multiple states.”1

Digital-only news sites remain “predominantly a big-city phenomenon,” Abernathy writes. Meanwhile, most communities that have lost local papers and don’t have a digital site to read in their place “are poorer, older and lack affordable and reliable high-speed digital service.”

You can read the full report here.

1. Some things to note about that figure: It excludes large national sites like ProPublica and the education-focused Chalkbeat, and it was reached by “merging lists published online by the Local Independent Online News Organization and the Institute for Nonprofit News.” The only community newsletters included were those with membership in either LION or INN.

A new report from Delaware’s Local Journalism Initiative does just that. It includes extensive excerpts from interviews with a diverse group of more than 250 Delawareans about what they want and need from local news, and what they think has to change.

“While we deeply value the perspective of working journalists, our goal for this report was to center the perspectives of Delaware residents themselves, who have a broad range of awareness of and familiarity with the field of journalism and the crisis in local news,” coauthors Allison Taylor Levine and Fiona Morgan write. “Therefore, we intentionally limited the involvement of current local journalists in our formal community listening.”

Over a six-month period, Levine and Morgan collected Delawareans’ perspectives in a variety of ways: One-on-one interviews, focus groups, an open-invitation community conversation on Zoom, a text message survey conducted in partnership with Outlier Media, and an analysis of public data sources. The authors “intentionally oversampled for Black and Hispanic communities to ensure we heard from people who are historically underrepresented in similar studies,” they write. “We estimate that participants approximately reflect the state’s racial mix with some weighting to Black and Hispanic communities.”

The specific report is a portrait of just one state, but many of the takeaways apply to local news ecosystems in the other 49 states as well, and the report is a model for how surveys in other states might be done.

Here are a few general broad themes from the report and (many!) quotes from residents of Delaware.

Many Delawareans “do not have a reliable, formal source of local news and information.”

Sixty-five percent of respondents to Outlier’s text-based survey “mentioned a legitimate news source as a source of their information. Other sources people listed were ‘friends’ or ‘family’ or ‘online.'”

“Call it that I’m lazy or too busy, whichever one you pick, I don’t have time or desire to go to four or five different locations to get my information. I think we’re lacking a central place that I can go. When I get my national news, I go to one place. I have an app. I go to that major news network. That’s where I get all my national news, one place. That’s where I trust.” — Dover, Black man, 30s

“I’ll get my news from Channel Six, which is usually in Philadelphia. Only if something majorly happens — that’s if somebody died, fire, or severe, severe, severe news, that’s the only time Delaware is typically mentioned. And then for MOT [Middletown-Odessa-Townsend] to be mentioned, it had to be like, life-limb had to be lost.” — Middletown, Black woman, 40s

“I don’t listen to no news. What I do is, let’s say an election is coming up. I’ll talk to those individuals that I trust, that I know are plugged in. I’ll have conversations. And then I’ll spend probably about a few hours doing some research, and I’ll make a decision.” — Rehoboth Beach, Hispanic man, 50s

“I do not like it as much since [The News Journal] went more with the USA Today because I thought you’re just reverberating what I’m getting everywhere else. They lost the Delaware focus. Most people that I know look at The News Journal for the obituaries and that’s about it. And people even stopped in Sussex putting obituaries and because they were charging so much, they just said, ‘Forget it.'” — Sussex County, white woman, 60s

“I don’t want to miss out on anything, I want to get involved and know more about the town. So I belong to every single group on Facebook for Milford. That’s how I get my information. We also have Milford Live, an online newspaper, and we have DelawareOnline. But I follow all these pages and I still don’t get answers. Not even in the media I follow, and that’s what they do, right? That’s what they do for a living.” — Milford, Hispanic woman, 30s

“In the last four or five years, it’s mostly USA Today. There isn’t enough local news in The News Journal anymore, except for maybe crime. Crime seems to be covered pretty good. Fires and crime get a lot of play in The News Journal.” — Kent County, white woman, 60s

“We don’t have a neighborhood Facebook page. My neighborhood is actually just two streets, so really I use the Ring [app] as well. Flyers sometimes are put on our door with local events. But other than the app, if it wasn’t for that, I would never know what was really happening now that my children are young adults and out of school age.” — New Castle, Black woman, 40s

Delawareans want more information about local and state government.

“I think [news] could do a better job explaining what major bills will do and the impact it’ll have. Take away the Democrat-Republican stuff, take away the spending aspect, but just getting to the root of bills and explaining it on a basic level to people of what a certain bill will do.” — Wilmington, Black man, 20s

“Delaware’s a small state, but we are a mecca for corporate law. And a lot of people don’t understand what that means when it comes to economics and don’t understand what it means when it comes to creating jobs and buying houses. If you’re just a normal person…well, all these laws that are affecting you on a regular basis, you might have no idea what’s coming down the pipe. And then of course you’re not an informed voter. So, news is so vital for so many reasons. And I just think we’re cut short on a lot of it, unfortunately.” — Dover, Black man, 30s

“I always thought that there was space for The News Journal to try to create more of a niche to be taken seriously and do good, solid coverage of Dover and everything happening at Leg Hall and the governor’s office and whatever, the courts, the judicial system. You’re sitting in a state that is known around the world because of its courts and because of incorporations and business entities … and The News Journal doesn’t seem like it has ever cared about that.” — Eastern Sussex County, white man, 40s

“A lot of people probably don’t know you have to go to certain websites and look up what was made, what was constructed, whether it was passed or not. And then once it’s passed, there’s so much jargon involved. What does it actually mean? So that type of information put out in plain English for everyone to understand is super vital for those who want to grow and move forward in the State of Delaware.” — Dover, Black man, 30s

Local news is overly negative, especially news about communities and people of color.

“If DETV is 100% positive, then DelawareOnline is 200% negative….Recently, I read a negative story about a fourth-grader. What about the fourth-grader who won the spelling bee? For every three negative stories, they should publish four or five positive stories.” — Wilmington, Black woman, 30s

“Personally, I’d like to know more about local businesses that are opening, so I can see if I can support them, if they need my support.” — Frederica resident, Black man, 30s

“I want to see news that informs and empowers people, period. If there’s news that is relevant to my area, I want to know how it could help grow, empower, inform those around us…In no way is that murder/kill/death news empowering to me…Let’s say that the news is putting out that a new Amazon Fulfillment Center is being made. That’s facts. The empowerment is, what are you going to then do with that knowledge? How does that affect that community? That means that there’s most likely going to be jobs. So, if a person lives in that area and didn’t know that Amazon was coming in there, they now know that it’s big, it’s going to bring jobs, it’s going to affect the community. What can I do to prepare myself to — maybe if I’m down and out — to put myself out for a job? Maybe I start learning people, or maybe I can get into construction, or maybe that bit of information can empower me to stand up and do something in my community.” — Dover, Black man, 30s

There is not enough news for and about Black communities, period.

“Besides groups that cater to the Millennials, there is a total absence of the Black voice in Sussex County. They are not in the newspapers, they are not in the board rooms, they are not in the restaurants, they are not in the school systems. If you want to know what’s going on in the Black community, you’ll have to become Black and move in with a Black family because there is no other way to find out.” — Seaford, Black woman, 30s

“The Delaware Way is like, ‘We don’t want to talk about things that feel like they could be a division or things that could be controversial.’ That leads to a lot of stories that impact communities of color not really being told in the local newspapers.” — Wilmington, white man, 40s

“I’m raising three Black children…and I often see Black people painted in a light that is not favorable. It is something that has been ongoing, I’m sure, since news became news in this country. But when I look around the circles that I move in from church to social to work, if what I saw on the news was a true reflection of who we were as Black people, then I should see that around all my circles, and I don’t.” — Middletown-area, Black woman, 40s

“I don’t say anything on the [Facebook neighborhood] page, because I don’t want to have any problems with my neighbors.” — Middletown, Black man, 40s

“There’s a large Haitian population here. As a Haitian person who grew up here in Sussex County and navigated my way through Delaware, there isn’t a voice for the Haitian community…We love being in Delaware, and we must be at the table also.” — Seaford, Black/Haitian woman, 30s

Residents have a variety of thoughts on paying for news. They do understand it’s a business!

“A lot of the news that funnels in at least to my house for our area comes through those Facebook pages… And if I have to pay for that article, I’ll wait until somebody drops a PDF somewhere. I’m not going to pay for it.” — Middletown, Black woman, 40s

“I follow DelawareOnline’s Facebook page, but they charge a lot for their articles. I don’t read anything I have to pay for…Right now, I piece together a lot of information from different sites, but it would be great if there was one place that had all that information that was free. I would even possibly pay for it — if it was a dollar a month.” — Middletown, Black woman, 30s

“DelawareOnline — and I don’t blame them too much because it’s a business — but everything’s behind a paywall. That’s their right. They have to maintain their business industry. But you know, important information should not be behind a paywall. Feel-good stories, certainly. Op-eds, certainly.” — Wilmington, Black woman, 30s

“It’s insane just trying to navigate through all of the advertising and everything. I know they need to make a living. I know they need to sell advertising. I don’t know if there’s a way they can do that better. Or if there’s funders who would kind of supplement some of that so it’s not so egregious.” — Ellendale, white woman, 50s

Residents want more usable news: On education, housing, food shortages, inflation…

The report’s authors note that “At the time of publication, DelawareOnline/The News Journal currently had not filled its education reporter role. Delaware State News and the Cape Gazette had reporters doing some education coverage in specific school districts. The Newark Post has a good reputation for covering the Christina School District. Delaware Live recently hired an education reporter.”

“It’s a huge diversity and inclusion issue…For the [school] choice thing, I just started stalking the website to find out when it was going to happen, but that should be something that’s just very clearly posted somewhere. Like, ‘Hey, choice opens up this date and it’s going to close this date. Here’s the available schools.’ But you have to go searching and find that information for yourself if you have interest. And if a parent just unfortunately doesn’t have the time for that, their child’s going to be left behind, because it’s almost hidden information that the parent has to spend some time going to find.” — Middletown, Black woman, 30s

“Another challenge that I can see is trying to purchase groceries due to the fact that everytime [sic] I get off of work (which is at 3PM) there is never much left in groceries stores. I wish that there was more information about these shortages available. I mean yes I know we have change shortages but food shortages aren’t really talked about! I also worry about being able to afford groceries with the prices going up constantly.” — Text survey response, man, Bridgeville

“I didn’t know about the DEHAP (Delaware Housing Assistance Program) program that not only helps you with rental assistance, it also helps with down payment money as well as utility resources as well….The lady was saying that there are so many dollars just sitting, but people don’t know how to apply. They’re not provided information. And I feel like the positive things that a lot of these organizations and nonprofits are doing are not being recognized and it’s so difficult to have to hunt for that information.” — Seaford, Black woman, 30s

You can read the full report here.

The pandemic, set on a backdrop of political and economic tumult, further injured a local news industry weakened by decades of revenue decline, ownership consolidation and cuts to production and delivery. In rural and urban communities across the country, residents have little or no access to credible or comprehensive local news and information – they live in what are called “news deserts.”

Studies show that people who live in news deserts or other locations with little local news are less likely to be actively involved in their community or participate in local elections. They are also more likely to believe false information spread online through social media and fake or fringe websites.

Through formal and informal collaborations, college journalists are helping to serve the communities where their universities are located by making sustained contributions to local media. Indeed, an estimated 10% of state capitol reporters across the nation are students. In some states, such as Missouri, students make up a little more than half of their statehouse press corps, according to a 2022 report published by the Pew Research Center.

As a researcher who studies trends in rural community journalism and a journalism professor who teaches in a region with significant elimination of local news reporters and news coverage, we decided to study these collaborations — what we call “news-academic partnerships” — often in areas that have seen local newsrooms suffer the hardest hits, as identified in the University of North Carolina’s news desert report.

For our initial research, we sent surveys to 50 people who are involved in these collaborations, either as faculty members who manage the partnership at a college and university or as journalists at a local news outlet who oversee the partnership. We got responses from more than two dozen of them and learned these partnerships are key ways to sustain local news in places where news coverage is diminishing or critical issues are going underreported.

Local connections

There is not a formal comprehensive list of collaborations between local newsrooms and college journalism programs, and there are many.

For instance, the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism operates Capital News Service, which provides daily breaking and in-depth news stories by students on news stories in Maryland to partner news organizations, including television stations.

Some of these collaborations — such as ones between Franklin Pierce University and the Keene, New Hampshire, Sentinel newspaper – have existed for more than a decade. But our survey found that they have become more common over the past five years with further media consolidation and layoffs. Newer examples include the collaboration between Connecticut College and the local news site The Day.

Student opportunities

In 2019, one of us created a partnership between her beat reporting class at Endicott College in Massachusetts and Gannett, the largest newspaper chain serving communities north of Boston. That year, Gannett bought 21 publications in the North Shore region of Massachusetts with 32 editorial employees serving 22 communities — and downsized them to just 10 publications with 12 editorial personnel, Gannett staff told us.

In a class called Beat Reporting, Endicott students receive classroom instruction on finding and pitching story ideas, conducting interviews, simplifying complex information and structuring various types of stories. Each week the students are assigned to report on stories in cities and towns surrounding the college, to be published in Gannett’s local outlets. In many ways, the class runs like a newsroom, with students involved in every stage of news reporting. In addition to the professor, a Gannett editor works with students on each story, so students get the experience of receiving professional feedback as they see their story through to publication.

In early 2022, there are just nine Gannett publications employing seven full-time journalists serving that same territory. During the spring 2022 semester — the partnership’s fourth year running — 10 students enrolled in the course published over 65 news stories for those publications over the course of the spring 2022 semester. They have worked on stories ranging from environmental issues to health stories to local sports and to profiling community members with interesting stories to tell.

While the benefit to Gannett is clear here — an increase in its capabilities for a few months — students have also benefited from the partnership. Some are publishing their stories in news sites beyond a high school or college publication for the first time. In past semesters, a few students have stayed on with Gannett beyond the course to either intern or freelance for these local publications.

We hypothesize some partnerships, like this one, also benefit the communities that are served by these newspapers and websites, though that has yet to be studied. In some cases, the stories written by the student journalists would likely not have been covered because of limited capacity in the newsroom. Some community members whom students have reached out to for interviews told the students they were speaking to a journalist for the first time.

A 2019 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that only 21% of Americans say they’ve either spoken to or been interviewed by a local journalist, which has declined from 26% in 2016. Speaking with journalists can help build an understanding of how journalism works and increase trust in news.

Universities as partners

News-academic partnerships allow students to put the principles and techniques taught within classrooms into practice. We hypothesize that well-executed collaborations could arguably be seen as competitors to time- and resource-strapped newsrooms in the same coverage area. For now, though, it seems news-academic partnerships are just that: partnerships, and more collaborative than competitive.

We hope they might also lead to new journalistic endeavors, like the start of a new news outlet, or revival of a dying one. For example, in October 2021, the University of Georgia’s Grady College announced it would revive a nearby community newspaper that was slated to close.

However, it’s not an easy task. We have found that faculty members who seek to create or manage sustainable news-academic partnerships often find they face some of the same problems that editors at local news outlets report, such as burnout, high workloads and low pay. For instance, in a follow-up to our initial study, faculty members who oversaw a variety of news-academic partnerships reported receiving little or no additional compensation, nor a decrease in other responsibilities, such as teaching, to balance the workload.

The faculty members we spoke with also felt pressure to deliver professional-level multimedia journalism out of classrooms where students are still learning the craft, as well as the required technologies.

However, academic institutions are theoretically well positioned to sustain meaningful journalism that serves their communities, which are often outside of elite news coverage areas. Many are well funded and provide the physical and mental space for minds to build healthy skepticism and investigate complex issues in society. And many have housed public radio stations for decades, without imposing limits on editorial or financial independence. Even today, recognizing the possibility of political interference from university administrators, some stations have deliberately created policies to maintain their independence.

We think even more universities could be a source for reducing the number and size of news deserts in the U.S., and ensuring communities across the country retain a reliable source of news and information.

The authors of the study looked at a sample of 31 corporate-owned papers and 130,000 articles published by these outlets before and after they were acquired.

The publications they examined ranged from The Denver Post (whose parent company was acquired by Alden Capital in 2010), the New York Daily News (initially acquired in 2017 by Tribune Publishing and then four years later by Alden), LA Weekly (acquired by Semanal Media LLC in 2017), and 28 papers in California published by Digital First Media (also owned by Alden).

Here’s an overview of what the study found:

In Denver, for instance, although the number of articles that dealt with local content increased briefly in the two years following The Post’s acquisition in 2010, from that high point in 2012 to 2018, there was a 68% reduction in the number of local articles published by the paper. Even with the New York Daily News and the LA Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Los Angeles, there wasn’t a relative decrease in the local content post-acquisition, but there was a reduction in the absolute number of local articles produced after they were acquired.

This was a surprise to Andrew Piper, who is the senior author of the paper. “I was a little surprised that the proportionality didn’t really shift,” Piper, who is a professor in the department of languages, literatures and cultures at McGill University, said. “In other words, the newsrooms that are left are still kind of dividing their attention between local, national, regional [news], so that whoever’s left kind of keeping the ship afloat.”

To measure how the concentration of local coverage changed — in other words, whether local news continued to cover many cities and towns within a paper’s coverage area or whether coverage became more focused on the larger areas — the authors assigned values to geographic locations within a paper’s coverage area, starting with the city where the paper was located and slowly expanding further out. They then measured the mention of these different places weekly and compared these weekly calculations over time.

At the LA Weekly, mention of the rest of LA County outside the city of Los Angeles took the biggest hit following acquisition (mention of international locales, the rest of California and other parts of the country also decreased). At the New York Daily News, it was the coverage of the rest of New York state that was most reduced after the paper’s acquisition. At The Denver Post, coverage of the rest of Colorado and places abroad were most reduced.

Finally, the researchers looked at how coverage of national news at the local level matched coverage by national outlets, including Fox News and CNN, following corporate acquisition. They used machine learning to gauge how similar sets of words were being used at the local level that were also similar to the discourse at national outlets. For the Daily News and LA Weekly, there was no similarity post-acquisition, and the outlets were — at least in the case of LA Weekly — much more dissimilar to national outlets after acquisition.

With The Denver Post, however, the researchers found an increase in the discursive similarity following corporate ownership. And in the network of Digital First Media papers in California — because articles in this network of papers were often shared across the network — the common articles were more often national in nature than those articles that were specific to individual publications.

While these findings aren’t particularly new, they help to confirm what was already known, the authors say. One of the reasons for conducting the study “was really to translate a lot of all the intuitions that many of us had, about what was happening, and to kind of introduce ways that we can look at it on a larger scale [and] begin to answer potentially more complex questions about what’s happening.”

As far as next steps and what kind of complex questions: “The obvious next step would be to understand, content-wise, beat-wise, what’s changing?” said Piper. “We don’t yet know these consequences.”

What this means for the future of local news, and especially the continued trend of corporate ownership? “An alternative model is absolutely necessary,” Piper said. “These acquisition events are decisive in hollowing out newsrooms, which means they can’t be relied on as a financial model of ownership and stewardship for local news.”

And even though Piper conceded that he doesn’t have a good answer for what that alternative model would look like, “Given what we’re seeing with the data, we absolutely need another way to conceptualize how local news is going to be produced, distributed, and supported.”

Photo of The Denver Post building by David Shankbone used under a Creative Commons License.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/an-immediate-drop-in-content-a-new-study-shows-what-happens-when-big-companies-take-over-local-news/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/reporting-that-hits-home-covering-science-for-local-audiences/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/reporting-that-hits-home-covering-science-for-local-audiences/#respond Tue, 19 Apr 2022 13:46:46 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=202497 When Sabrina Moreno joined the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia as a general assignment reporter, she wasn’t planning to write about health or science. Then, on her first day in March 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, and the virus started infiltrating Moreno’s reporting, too.

As case counts climbed, Moreno had to pivot from her usual focus on county governance and immigrant communities and figure out which Covid-19 stories she should cover. She interviewed health-care workers about supply shortages and traced the rapid spread of Covid-19 in nursing homes. She also tied in her old beat by investigating how immigrant families were navigating predominantly English-language public health messaging.

Even after she became the lead Covid-19 beat reporter for the Times-Dispatch and learned the list of ingredients that went into the Moderna vaccine, she still didn’t think of herself as a science or health reporter — that’s an identity that she has only recently embraced. “In the beginning, Covid was seen as a beat that only the health reporter wrote about,” she says. “People didn’t understand how this was going to go into every single person’s beat.”

Science has been part of the fabric of daily life since even before Covid-19 began dominating headlines. Many local reporters just like Moreno have been called upon to cover complex science or health topics, such as the marks of climate change on local ecosystems or the effects of public health policies in communities. And audiences are eager to read stories like these from local sources. Half of U.S. adults turn to local media for Covid-19 news, according to a 2020 Pew survey. They trust local news more, too. A 2019 Knight-Gallup survey revealed that 45 percent of Americans highly trust local news compared to 31 percent trusting national news.

Local reporters’ connection with communities means that how they choose, report, and write stories can make a big impact on their audience. They are in a unique position to inform and empower readers with science stories that matter for their everyday lives, such as the importance of routine health screenings or the environmental value of local wildlife. But at the same time, they may have to tackle these stories on their own, without the support of a dedicated science desk — which many local and regional outlets lack or have lost. Some journalists might have to advocate for including science in their stories on other beats and seek out their own experts to guide their science-news sense.

Getting readers invested in topics as small as a virus or as big as changing weather patterns takes a unique skill set. Reporters writing for a local audience need a solid understanding of who their readers are, what they know, and what they want to learn. They must also have a keen eye for local science stories, which often pop up in places other than the laboratories and hospitals that usually serve as backdrops for national science news. Finally, they have to distill scientific minutiae into stories relevant to readers’ lives — all without diminishing what makes the science important or even just fascinating.

Getting to know your audience

To write local science and health stories that are both relevant and accessible to your audience, you have to know who exactly is in that audience. This deep understanding will help you find stories they will be eager to read and will build their trust in your reporting. Moreno, for example, has a particular interest in covering topics relevant to Latino and immigrant readers — and identifies as Latina herself — so she has fully immersed herself in these communities. “I shop where they’re shopping, I go out to eat where they’re going out to eat,” she says. Patrons in these locales have often helped her find people with interesting stories to tell. For example, a local Spanish-language radio host helped Moreno connect with local Latino faith leaders who had successfully battled severe Covid-19 for her reporting on the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on the Latino community.

But engaging with her community as a journalist didn’t come easy at first, Moreno says. Many members of Richmond’s Latino community refused to speak with her during her first year as a reporter out of distrust of her employer. Many newspapers like the Times-Dispatch have promoted racism and covered their readership inequitably throughout their histories.

Moreno’s strategy to counteract these historical patterns and build trust with her readers is simple: “Keep showing up.” It is especially important to not just contact sources when you need something from them or if an issue affects their community, but to check in periodically, she says. To help her stay organized, Moreno has a spreadsheet that contains not only the contact information for many of her community sources, but also facts that she has learned about them: their favorite food, birthday, whether they have kids. These details make the conversation more personal. “It’s clear that you were actually listening, and not just having this transactional conversation,” she says.

Relationships with her readers have even prompted Moreno to make some of her important public health stories more accessible, by advocating to remove paywalls when possible or personally translating a story into Spanish.

Strengthening readers’ trust in your reporting is especially important when covering science and health, where topics such as climate change and vaccines can easily become charged. Transparency is a major part of building that trust, says Sarah Wade, a freelance journalist and former reporter for the Bristol Herald Courier, which serves communities in southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee. “I make sure it’s clear that I’m working for them,” she says. Doing that, Wade says, includes answering sources’ own questions about her reporting and sharing her process of verifying information she gets from tips.

It’s also important to show that you’re prepared to learn from members of the community. “Be open to not being an expert,” Wade says. For example, after reporting on the health impact of air pollution seeping from a Virginia landfill for Southerly magazine, Wade hosted a listening session with a local environmental-justice group and community leaders to hear their concerns about the landfill. Taking the time to listen to community members also helps journalists expand their idea of expertise for reporting science stories. As Moreno puts it, “People living in this community every single day are experts to their own life and their experience.”

Finding the science in local stories

On a local beat, science stories can hide in plain sight. Reporters can use some key strategies to stay on the lookout for these stories, no matter how far-flung from the lab.

One of the first science stories that reporter Mark Johnson wrote started with a giant, dead blue whale that a tanker accidentally pulled ashore in Providence, Rhode Island in 1998. Johnson was intrigued to learn that scientists had convened to take pieces of the pungent whale carcass for their studies, so he pitched a story to The Providence Journal — where he worked at the time — about the spectrum of research projects that this one whale would enable.

Johnson, who now covers health and science at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and USA Today, has been training his eye on local science stories for over a decade. He says he finds that stories building on what piques his curiosity tend to engage his audience too. From there, he also tries to make sure the story will teach readers something new: information that will inform their daily choices, or just a tidbit that they’ll be eager to share with friends. “I try to figure out day-to-day, week-to-week, What is the most important story that I can tell readers?” he says. When selecting stories, Johnson says it’s important that even if the technical details of a study are complex, the scientists’ goals are simple. For example, some of the scientists taking samples from the blue whale planned to study its eight-foot larynx for research on sudden infant death syndrome.

Articles featuring a local cast of characters can also connect with audiences. For instance, Johnson has covered the science of embryonic stem cells since 2008, after biologist James Thomson at the nearby University of Wisconsin–Madison started trying to reprogram human cells. Suspecting that readers would devour stories about such scientific marvels in their own backyard, Johnson has continued chronicling this field and Thomson’s work, right up to the biologist’s upcoming retirement.

As Moreno and countless other local reporters have found in covering Covid-19, science stories can come from within an audience’s community. Find voices that will carry your story, says WNYC/Gothamist health and science editor Nsikan Akpan. For example, in a story Akpan edited, health reporter Caroline Lewis covers New York City’s first supervised drug-injection site by including the testimony of clients and local residents alongside the scientific evidence backing this public health approach.

Journalists can find inspiration for science stories within communities by figuring out which online platforms their readers frequent. For instance, Wade found that her readers were active on Facebook, so she plugged into Facebook groups, such as those of parents with children at a particular local school — always being upfront about her position as a journalist.

Reaching out to community groups, such as neighborhood grassroots organizations and environmental nonprofits, can be another way to learn about local issues and meet key sources. Freelancer Amy Qin met environmental-justice activists by going to city council meetings, for example. And when she was reporting on pollution near Chicago-area schools for the nonprofit news outlet Block Club Chicago, she found local teachers through the Chicago Teachers’ Union.

Science can be infused into stories on other beats as well. For example, Akpan notes that while working on a story about fear of subway crime in New York City, WNYC/Gothamist reporters Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky and Stephen Nessen interviewed psychologists about the science of trauma in addition to mining police data and talking with subway riders. Similarly, in another Gothamist story, about zoning laws and property development in New York City, reporter Nathan Kensinger pulled in data about intertwining issues, such as sea level rise and pollution. Adding science angles to local stories like these can give them a greater sense of depth and relevance to readers’ lives.

Sifting through the science

All science writing requires carefully dodging unnecessary complexity and jargon. But doing so is especially important in local reporting, where readers tend to look for actionable information in science stories, and excessive technical details might turn them away. Fortunately, local reporters have close access to readers in their own communities, so they can discern what their audience needs to know and calibrate their writing accordingly.

Journalists can gauge what depth of science to include in their stories through their interactions with community members. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Moreno chats with locals, for example, she informally asks them what questions they have about topics such as Covid-19 vaccines. This has helped her not only choose which stories to cover but also tune the level of scientific detail to delve into. She discovered, for example, that her readers were more interested in learning about the side effects of vaccines and hearing from people who had been vaccinated than understanding the underlying science. “That was a really big lesson for me,” she says. “What I think people want or need might not be the information that they want or need to read about.”

It also helps to think about which scientific details readers might need to know as they make decisions and learn about issues in their area. While writing about the landfill, Wade worried that the topic risked being too technical. There were chemicals with complicated names like hydrogen sulfide, and fully understanding how the landfill was interacting with gas wells would require an engineering degree. To prune unnecessary jargon, Wade asked herself if each technical detail was critical. She included the names of some chemicals, such as benzene, because they were important terms she wanted readers to be able to recognize in public records. But when explaining the reactions that were creating the polluting fumes, she skipped the weedy science and stuck to clear ideas, such as overheating piles of trash.

When reporters have to wrangle scientific data into their stories, it helps to add a local lens. National trends may not always match what’s happening on the ground, Moreno says. For example, she realized early in the pandemic that Latinos comprised almost 50 percent of cases in Richmond, dwarfing nationwide statistics, so she focused on this local trend in her stories.

By breaking down local data, reporters can also empower their readers with information they can act on. For example, as Akpan notes, people in New York City are very aware of weather and rising sea levels. That means that stories unveiling the science of unseasonably high temperatures and other climate change issues will resonate with his publication’s readers. “There is more focus in a local beat on giving people things they can use to live safer and happier lives,” he says.

Achieving that can mean taking a few additional steps. When Qin was unpacking a study for her school-pollution story, for example, she and the study author worked together to calculate extra statistics, not included in the study, that would be more relevant to Qin’s readers. Although the study was complicated, Qin says she chose it because it offered an interactive map she could embed in the story, so city residents see how pollution affects their own children’s schools. “There is a direct implication for people’s lives,” she says.

Aparna Nathan is a Boston-based freelance science writer whose writing has appeared in Popular Science, PBS NOVA, and Drug Discovery News. This piece was originally published at The Open Notebook. It is being republished with permission.

Image of the Earth from NASA is being used under an Unsplash License.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/reporting-that-hits-home-covering-science-for-local-audiences/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/a-local-newspaper-in-oregon-punches-above-its-weight-a-politician-it-investigated-wants-to-buy-and-change-it/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/a-local-newspaper-in-oregon-punches-above-its-weight-a-politician-it-investigated-wants-to-buy-and-change-it/#respond Thu, 31 Mar 2022 16:25:10 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=201987 It’s not every day that someone reaches out with an offer to buy the local newspaper. It’s perhaps rarer when that offer comes in as a “P.S” at the end of an email.

But for Les Zaitz, publisher of the weekly Malheur Enterprise in eastern Oregon, the strangeness of the situation didn’t end there. The person making the offer was Oregon’s longest-serving House of Representatives member, Greg Smith, who has been in office and representing northeast Oregon since 2000. (He is running again in this year’s election and is unopposed). Smith, a member of the Republican Party, has long been the subject of critical reporting by the Enterprise.

The dwindling local news landscape has made plenty of news, but stories of small papers thriving are less common. The Malheur Enterprise, which Zaitz bought in 2015 and has led ever since, may be one such happy story. And so news of a buyer — not just a buyer, but a politician who’d been the subject of critical reporting by the very same paper he was offering to buy — raised concerns, as well as questions about what the role of a local newspaper actually is.

It’s true that Zaitz, pictured at right, has been looking for a buyer for the Malheur Enterprise. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and veteran of the journalism industry — most notably at The Oregonian — Zaitz says he is ready to retire. “Next year marks year 50 in this profession [for me],” Zaitz said. “I’ve done my duty. It’s time for me to exit stage left.”

Smith also thinks it’s time for Zaitz to go. “We’re a small-town area. We’re a Toyota, he’s a Ferrari and they just don’t mix,” Smith said.

Over the course of a lengthy conversation, Smith told me his intention in making an offer to Zaitz was to return the paper to local ownership. Zaitz lives about 100 miles away, in neighboring Grant County. “I just saw an opportunity for the Malheur Enterprise to be returned to local roots,” Smith said.

(In response, Zaitz said: “The performance of the paper and its service to the community is what’s important, not the mailing address for anyone who’s associated with the paper.”)

The Malheur Enterprise was established in 1909 to serve the city of Vale and surrounding Malheur County in Oregon. Now published weekly on Wednesdays, the paper — which is available both digitally and in print — has a combined circulation of roughly 3,000 among the nearly 33,000 people who live in Malheur County, which is one of the poorest counties in Oregon. The paper has six employees.

But the offer from Smith was a surprise, and Zaitz initially thought it was a joke.

The idea that locals were “begging” for Zaitz to sell the paper was also news to him. So he went to the Malheur Enterprise’s Facebook page, shared details of Smith’s offer and asked, “Would you like new owners for this 113-year-old paper? Should Greg Smith’s offer be taken seriously?”

More than 80 comments poured in, all with an overwhelmingly similar message: Do not sell the Malheur Enterprise. And especially don’t sell it to Greg Smith. The paper published a two-page spread highlighting the comments.

To many people, Smith’s attempt to buy the Malheur Enterprise seemed suspicious.

The Enterprise had published award-winning reports critical of Smith, and especially of Smith’s intersecting roles in the public and private sectors. Smith is the owner of the privately-held Gregory Smith and Company, which provides business and financial consulting services. But through his committee roles in the legislature, he has overseen decisions that have meant state-funded projects have been awarded to Gregory Smith and Company.

This seemingly dubious — though legal — practice of Smith’s contracting company being the recipient of state-funded work has made Smith a lot of money. It also made him the subject of scrutiny at the Enterprise, especially since Smith also serves as the director of the Malheur County Economic Development Department and has been in charge of overseeing local projects, some of which were sitting undeveloped.

In 2019, Smith and other Malheur County officials tried to get the Malheur County sheriff’s office to open a criminal investigation into the paper. They said Enterprise reporters, phoning Smith’s employees too frequently, might be in violation of Oregon’s “telephonic harassment” law. (The Washington Post also covered this affair.)

That investigation was closed two days after the Malheur Enterprise reported on the development, when the Malheur County sheriff said that the newspaper hadn’t broken any laws in its effort to seek answers from Smith and his employees.

“My employees don’t have the same level of sophistication of dealing with the media, and they were scared,” Smith said when I asked him about this. He said his office and employees have received upwards of 300 public records requests in the past three years.

Zaitz says that Smith’s continued refusal to respond to questions and fact-checks or to sit down for interviews meant that filing requests was the only way for the paper to get answers. “We don’t lay out a public records request because we have nothing else to do,” Zaitz said. “It’s the only way that the newspaper [can get the information] but more importantly, it’s the only way the community can learn the truth about [Smith’s work].”

Nigel Jaquiss, an investigative reporter at Willamette Week in western Oregon, offered some more perspective. “What’s really different here is that there are very few small newspapers the size of The Malheur Enterprise who have somebody with the horsepower of Les Zaitz,” he said.

Jaquiss, who wrote a 2019 profile of Smith investigating his many public and private entanglements, noted that investigative reporting is time-consuming and expensive. Coupled with the potential risks involved in challenging powerful people, “Those factors discourage small papers that may not have the money or the resources or the experience or the aptitude or the appetite from doing what Les is doing,” Jaquiss said.

To Smith, Zaitz’s investigative journalism is relentless and, in some cases, inappropriate.

“He’s the guy that brings a sledgehammer to put a tack on the wall,” Smith said. “What do we do with that in our small little world?”

In early March, The Malheur Enterprise published a story — based on a six-month investigation — entitled “Economic development: Malheur County officials struggle to tell what $900,000 bought” — looking at what nearly $1 million in funds since 2013 to Smith’s private company did for the area.

The comment that Smith provided was based on, as the article describes it, an involuntary, court-ordered interview during which Smith was “combative and insulting, cutting off the interview after 30 minutes.” The Malheur Enterprise then asked Smith for comment for a related editorial. It was during that email exchange that Smith dropped his offer into a postscript.

“I was tired of getting poked in the chest for not doing anything wrong,” Smith said. “And it was like, ‘You know what? If you want to keep poking me in the chest, let me purchase this paper for what it’s worth. And let me put it into local control.’”

Smith’s offer to buy the paper struck many people as a form of intimidation rather than a good-faith attempt at responding to Zaitz’s call for a buyer.

“It reeks of ‘I don’t like this paper’s coverage of me. So I’m going to buy it and they will no longer ask me some questions,’” said Andrew Cutler, publisher and editor of the East Oregonian (which is local to Umatilla County, another county Smith represents).

Smith claims his intention wasn’t to shut down the paper or to manage it on a day-to-day basis. “I have no desire [to run it],” Smith said. “I don’t have the skill set.”

He also said that while his initial email said “no employees included” — and a subsequent email to Zaitz shows that he said he had “staff in place that would run the paper quite well” — he would have rehired at least some current Enterprise staffers. He was strictly evaluating the Enterprise’s financial assets, he said, and didn’t take employees into account. “That’s where I made a mistake because I’m a businessman and my thinking was very business-oriented,” he said.

Smith envisions returning the Enterprise to one of “those small-town papers that reported on football and volleyball and basketball,” he said, a paper that talks about “local events of the day, rather than placing stories that occur hundreds of miles away at the state capitol, or in Washington, D.C.”

The community, he said, “is not looking for [Zaitz’s] editorials on what a dirty dog everyone in the county is. They’re looking for stories about what’s going on with the Future Farmers of America. What’s going on in the gymnasium? What’s going on at the local city hall? You have this gentleman who’s extraordinarily recognized but he’s running a small town newspaper like it’s the Wall Street Journal. And folks don’t appreciate it.”

The paper used to publish “refrigerator stories,” as Zaitz called them, about local happenings, but since he took it over, the paper has consistently published not only stories about local school sports and Future Farmers of America meetings, but also deeply reported pieces that pull back the curtain on local politics. A series of stories in 2021 into a former city councilman ultimately led to that person being ejected from the council.

Asked if he sees a role for accountability journalism at the local level, Smith agreed. “Most definitely we need that. We want journalists to dig into why the community college did X or why the county approved a contract for Y,” Smith said. “We want questions being asked. We just don’t want someone speculating to the negative.”

Zaitz doesn’t see it that way. “The Enterprise is going to go to someone who has experience in journalism, who wants to take this newspaper to the next level and ensure this doesn’t become a news desert,” he said.

And despite his imminent retirement plans, “We’re in no hurry to sell,” Zaitz said.

Photo of a recent issue of The Malheur Enterprise featuring a story on Greg Smith courtesy of Madi Scott/The Malheur Enterprise.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/a-local-newspaper-in-oregon-punches-above-its-weight-a-politician-it-investigated-wants-to-buy-and-change-it/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/we-ask-how-the-bilingual-cicero-independiente-taps-the-community-to-identify-information-needs/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/we-ask-how-the-bilingual-cicero-independiente-taps-the-community-to-identify-information-needs/#respond Thu, 17 Mar 2022 14:00:31 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=201273

This Q&A is part of a series from the Institute for Nonprofit News on how nonprofit news outlets serve communities of color. Nieman Lab is republishing it with permission. You can read more about the series here.

Irene Romulo” is development coordinator for Cicero Independiente, which launched in 2019 to serve the majority Latinx towns of Cicero and Berwyn, Illinois. The interview was conducted by Sara Shahriari, INN’s director of leadership and talent development, and Emily Roseman, INN’s research director and editor.

Sara Shahriari and Emily Roseman: Could you tell us about your news outlet? What sort of services does Cicero Independiente provide? What’s your primary mission?

Irene Romulo: Cicero Independiente is an independent, bilingual news organization serving the people of Cicero and Berwyn, Illinois. Both communities are majority Latinx, working-class towns with a history of corruption and what seems to be a hesitancy to adapt to changing demographics. For example, although monolingual Spanish-speakers comprise a large part of the community, public meetings do not provide interpretation or translation services, making it difficult for people to engage in local democracy.

Our reporting meets the needs of our community by connecting residents to crucial information about local resources, amplifying residents doing good things and investigating local government agencies to push for accountability and transparency. We also pay and mentor local youth to report on issues that matter to them, such as this feature by a past youth reporting fellow.

Shahriari and Roseman: When did you start working at Cicero Independiente? What does your role look like?

Romulo: I am one of the three cofounders of Cicero Independiente. When we first launched all three of us wore many hats, but now I focus on our fundraising and community engagement. A lot of what I do is heavily influenced by my experiences as an organizer. Everything we do comes down to building strong relationships with our neighbors and partners so that our journalism is reflective of what our community needs, and making sure our journalism is accessible.

We recently interviewed some of our readers about their information needs as part of our work with the Listening and Sustainability Lab. One of them said she wants local organizations to be both community-needed and community-wanted. We know we’re community-wanted because of the outpouring of messages, news tips and support that we receive from local residents both in person and online. Our hope is to remain that way.

Shahriari and Roseman:Who does your outlet primarily serve, and how do you know this? Is your current audience different from who your outlet intends to serve?

Romulo: Our primary audience is the Latinx, bilingual community of Cicero and Berwyn. We want to serve people like our parents: immigrants, monolingual Spanish speakers who have specific needs and many stories to tell but who are often left out of mainstream media. We also want our work to center and amplify the experiences of bilingual youth of color who are the driving force behind local organizing efforts. All of our coverage features local experts and community members. We also spend a lot of resources conducting off-line outreach to ensure we’re reaching people who have little to no access to our online content.

Although not currently our primary audience, we also realize that we have a big opportunity to amplify and build relationships with the small, but growing, Black population in this town. Cicero is a former sundown town and non-Black Latinx people have benefited from, and sometimes been behind, anti-Black violence. We have a duty to make sure that we don’t erase or ignore the stories of Black residents.

Shahriari and Roseman: You mentioned specific needs. Could you tell us more about Cicero Independiente’s approach to discovering information needs?

Romulo: Before we even launched, one of our cofounders conducted extensive interviews with local residents at a coffee shop to learn about the topics that interested them the most.

Then at our launch event, which was kind of like a big block party with a film screening, we also asked attendees about what we should cover. After we launched, some of our team members used to spend a lot of time talking to people at bus stops and laundromats to learn about their information needs. These efforts were paused when COVID-19 pandemic restrictions were put in place, so we shifted strategies. We’ve conducted online surveys and Zoom interviews with community members but the most important shift we made was joining existing community spaces to learn about information needs.

Shahriari and Roseman: How did you go into the community without being intrusive?

Romulo: Instead of creating new spaces to reach people, we asked if we could join local coalitions. This included a COVID-19 working group composed of local agencies, representatives of elected officials and local parents. We knew the meetings were public and open to any Cicero resident but we wanted to make sure that our presence as media would not create discomfort for attendees. Before we showed up, we asked organizers if we could attend and we made sure to explain that we wanted to join in order to learn how we, as a media organization, could help make more information accessible. When we’re in the spaces, we also make sure to let people know that everything they say is off the record. If we want interviews, or to share anything someone says, we’ll ask for permission first. We’re building trust, and transparency about our intentions is crucial.

Shahriari and Roseman: What were the information needs you unearthed, and how has your outlet met these needs, particularly for communities of color?

Romulo: One of the coalitions we joined is the COVID-19 working group. At those meetings, our role is to listen, take cues and meet information needs when we can. We’ve partnered with members of the group to host virtual events, create updated resources and investigate the local government’s response to COVID-19. We’ve also created explainers and social media graphics based on questions that have been brought up by parents at those meetings.

Everything we create informed by our involvement in these coalitions is always published in both Spanish and English. The investigations we publish are accompanied by useful information, such as this handy know your rights article that is also available as a poster.

Shahriari and Roseman: How is your outlet making sure the coverage or product you produce is meeting information needs?

Romulo: We ask. We’re constantly testing out different strategies to reach different members of our community. Although Cicero and Berwyn are majority Latinx communities, we are not a monolith. We need different information and we consume and access things differently. We’ve tried using online surveys, virtual interviews and, to reach younger audiences, quick Instagram polls. We conduct in-person outreach whenever possible.

We also ask other organizations to let us know how we’re doing. Many of them have long-standing relationships and day-to-day interactions with the people we want to reach so their feedback is valuable. We also know that not everyone who lives in Cicero and Berwyn has access to internet-based resources so we also print and distribute paper editions of our work.

Last summer we published an 11-part series documenting the uprisings that took place in Cicero, which recently won two INN inaugural awards. We wondered whether anyone had read them and so we sent out an online survey. One responder said, “I was hearing a lot about [what happened] in the news that didn’t come off the right way but the [series] captured what happened accurately.” This kind of feedback lets us know we’re doing something well.

Shahriari and Roseman: Do you record that feedback? Where and how does your team review and incorporate the feedback you receive?

Romulo: Yes! We use a Google form to track the messages, social media posts and in-person feedback that we receive. We’re not always the best at staying on top of it; we remind each other a lot so that we’re all contributing to keeping track. In the past, we’ve reviewed survey results during our team meetings and we’re constantly sharing insights on Slack. The editorial team, which is very small right now, uses the feedback to decide what stories we pursue with our limited resources. The feedback also informs our projects. Next year, we’re planning to launch participatory reporting projects that have been informed by Zoom interviews with our readers.

Shahriari and Roseman: Anything else you want to mention about how Cicero Independiente serves people of color in your community?

Romulo: In 2020, we launched a paid youth reporting fellowship. Participants receive journalism training and report on issues that matter to them. Running the fellowship is a lot of work but we think it is crucial that we create well-paid opportunities for young people to shape our newsroom.

Two of the fellows that participated last summer are now members of our steering committee and are helping make decisions about the future of our organization. The majority of our reporting contributors and illustrators are also local youth who had never worked with a news organization. Working with them to produce stories they are proud of is a big lift and it often means that our stories take a bit longer to publish but it is worth it. By amplifying the work and the voices of people of color in our community we are helping to create more pathways for them. Some of the people we’ve profiled have received invitations to be speakers at major events after event organizers read about them on our website. Past writers and illustrators are now working with other newsrooms and getting paid to produce work that advances more equitable coverage of communities of color.

Shahriari and Roseman: What’s next for you and Cicero Independiente? What are your plans for 2022?

Romulo: This year we’re prioritizing our internal development. We’re a fiscally sponsored organization but hope to incorporate as a worker-led nonprofit in the future, so we’re working on our bylaws and figuring out what a community advisory board and membership would look like for us.

Cicero Independiente Development Coordinator Irene Romulo (front row in purple) along with reporting fellows and the volunteer steering committee. Photo by Jesus J. Montero.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/we-ask-how-the-bilingual-cicero-independiente-taps-the-community-to-identify-information-needs/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/a-new-publication-springs-up-in-a-former-news-desert-outside-chicago/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/a-new-publication-springs-up-in-a-former-news-desert-outside-chicago/#respond Wed, 16 Mar 2022 16:20:58 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=201291 Tales of local news dying are abundant, but against the odds of today’s media landscape, there are many new ventures taking root. Harvey, Illinois’ Harvey World Herald is one of them.

A southern suburb of Chicago, Harvey is a small town of just about 20,000 people, according to the last census. Harvey is also a majority-minority city, with two-thirds of its population identifying as Black and another third identifying as Latino. About a third of adults 64 and younger live at or below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate is almost 50%.

It’s against this backdrop that Amethyst J. Davis, a Black queer woman who grew up in Harvey, chose to launch the Harvey World Herald just six months ago. The publication was named to the Tiny News Collective’s first cohort, a group of six organizations working to bring local news to their respective communities. As part of this program, the Harvey World Herald and the other five organizations were awarded $15,000 by the Google News Initiative, which also paid for their first year of membership with Tiny News Collective and LION Publishers.

Davis returned to her hometown in the summer of 2020 after five years away, and like many people during that time, was trying to figure out ways to stay safe from the coronavirus. “I had the hardest time finding information on navigating the pandemic,” she said, which was a major driver for starting the publication.

In August 2021, Davis sent out an audience survey to people in the Harvey community (with a focus on current residents) to glean the most important issues. Davis posted the survey to public Facebook pages residents had created and also emailed the survey to several community organizations. Unsurprisingly, Covid-19 was on the top of the list, as was political coverage.

The soft launch of Harvey World Herald was two months after that, when only the paper’s social media channels, its landing page and the weekly newsletter were made available. During that phase, Davis focused on business and economy, as “big needs I identified from the survey.”

The hard launch was on January 31 this year, and the website now features stories on more than just the pandemic, politics, and the local economy. Stories about education and the local arts and culture scene are also being added. With just under six months under its belt, the Harvey World Herald has more than 140 email subscribers to its free newsletter, with a 68% open rate. Visitors to the website, which is also free, are nearly split between new and returning visitors, according to Davis.

Just today, the Harvey World Herald was named as part of the inaugural cohort of the Black Media Product Strategy Program from J+ and the Center for Community Media’s Black Media Initiative at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. This six-month, tuition-free program will train Black-owned newsrooms to build product strategies for digital transformation, audience growth and sustainability. “A lot of Black-owned newsrooms struggle with product thinking and development,” Davis said, adding that this opportunity is a way for the Harvey World Herald to grow and develop sustainably. She added, “We look forward to building community with other Black publishers along the way.”

But given the literacy and digital issues in Harvey, Davis anticipates needing a print version of the Harvey World Herald at some point. “We’re 100% digital, but a lot of our 35-and-older readers ask about a newspaper,” Davis said. “The digital audience is not the same as a print audience.”

I spoke to Davis recently about her background, why she saw a need to launch this new publication, and how she runs this (thus far) one-person show. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Working as an administrator made me a better listener, because people, students, faculty even, only came to see me if something was going wrong. Literally, nobody ever came to see me if anything’s going right. I found the City Bureau Documenters program in Chicago, and it was so dope because they they really live out the ethos of making journalism and democracy more accessible.

As I’m getting into it, I got into self-publishing on Medium. I was thinking about different stories, but I kept coming back to Harvey. I was like, “Man, Harvey just needs its own news outlet.” That motivation really kicked in in the summer of 2020. I went home, got off the train in Harvey and realized the world has changed, but the town is the same as I had left it five years before. I was also trying to get a sense of what was going on with Covid and other stuff in the community and had to find information. So, that also drove home the point that Harvey definitely needs a news outlet, and why not build it from the ground up?

Davis: I used 2020 and my tuition remission [through NYU] to take evening courses in news writing and feature writing and multimedia storytelling, just to get some more training to be a reporter in the community. I was also doing the research on how to start a news outlet. Every night after work, for months on end, I would be on a computer doing research about membership models and revenue streams, audience growth, and taking my classes at the university and trying to figure out how to start a newsroom.

I came across the Tiny News Collective, which helps people from historically excluded backgrounds pursue media entrepreneurship. I applied in the spring [last year] and got in.

Chakradhar: How long had Harvey been a news desert? Do you remember having reliable sources of news growing up?

Davis: The local paper collapsed about 40 years ago. Much of what we had in the interim was really armchair reporting from commercial news media in Chicago.

Chakradhar: Why now? Especially given the local news environment?

Davis: I always say that for every news desert in America, there’s an opportunity to build an institution that works for the public. That institution does not exist here in Harvey. And we know that media at this point — for Black and brown communities, especially — local news media is built for clicks and for profit and not for the public interest. But if the institution isn’t there, you can build it and build it the right way out of the gate.

And why now? Harvey, like any community, needs local news. I need to know about Covid-19. I need to know about the state of the economy. But the city is experiencing a whole bunch of shifts. We have a new mayoral administration after 16 years under arguably one of the most corrupt politicians in Illinois. So, there’s a political shift that’s occurring and questions about whether we’re going to get ethics reform or transparency.

We have a clean slate, so why not use it? Now more than ever, we need to be thinking, “What does it mean for the city going forward?” We are nestled right underneath the third largest city in America with lots of entrepreneurial news outlets. With that proximity, day in and day out, I see the possibilities of where we are, and get inspiration about how we can reimagine journalism. It is possible. Good in the newsroom isn’t easy, but it’s certainly worth it.

Chakradhar: Who do you turn to as models for what to do?

Davis: These are a few news media outlets in Chicago that, through their own storytelling mediums, provide me some inspiration about some different ways we at the Harvey World Herald could build and grow out over the years and scale this in a way that actually pours into the community.

City Bureau in Chicago, for instance. I was telling the program manager for the Documenters program that not only did they help me by giving me tools, but they also set standards and expectations about what a newsroom could be. News doesn’t have to be extracted, and there are parts of journalism that are not worth saving like crime reporting, for instance. In journalism, we could do something like public safety reporting, which is completely different. It’s a different language with possibly a different framing for ways we can really use that sort of news to rethink and reimagine safety.

I also think about WBEZ Chicago and the work that they do covering issues like crime and education. It is public media in a way that actually fosters connection with the community.

Chakradhar: What about on the opposite end of the spectrum: Is there something you’re doing at the Harvey World Herald that is a departure from other outlets?

Davis: I want to carve out a niche for us, where when people think Harvey World Herald, they think young people. It’s a slow process, but this is something I’ve started to do, like in the branding. The name Harvey World Herald comes from the nickname of “Harvey World,” which is something that young people gave the city like a decade or so ago, in an effort to sort of seek a greater sense of identity or you know. Our colorway — purple, white and black — is a nod to the city’s only public high school. And the thing about Harvey is that they love this high school to no end. There are purple and white churches, purple and white sidewalks. People who went to the school in the 50s and 60s where their regalia around the city. Even the newsletter is a nod to a mural in the city. Our newsletter is called “The Renaissance Letter,” which is a nod to a mural called the Harvey Renaissance. But it’s also a double entendre because it also speaks to the revival of the local news.

In the long term, some of the things that I envision Harvey World Herald having is a Youth Advisory Council. I’ll be 25 next month and next year, I’ll be closer to 30 than I am 20. So, the Youth Advisory Board is going to be really critical to make sure we’re hearing from the kids in the community directly about what issues matter to them and how they think we’re covering issues pertaining to young people. I want to make sure we have a paid summer internship program for the kids where they can learn journalism and get published.

Chakradhar: What have been some of the challenges you’ve encountered as part of this venture?

Davis: Harvey is a very word-of-mouth city. So, just trying to get the word out that Harvey now has a local news organization has been a challenge. But trust is also a new thing in the community, because Harvey is oftentimes associated with political corruption and crime. That, coupled with broken promises around development over the years and from people in decision-making capacities with these hidden agendas. Often, I tell people that I feel like Harvey doesn’t even trust itself. So if someone comes along and says, “Hey, I’m trying to do something positive for everybody,” I’ve been met with, “Who are you? Who runs this? Are you even from here? You have no relationship here. Who’s funding you? Are you funded by the politicians?” This community has largely dealt with news organizations that parachute in and write stories on education without speaking to parents, or they write stories about crime without speaking to residents.

Every day, I’m on the phone with folks or showing up in the community in-person day in and day out to build trust with people. It’s definitely been a slow process and huge challenge. Only now, after all these months, I’ve been seeing people come forward and share their stories with me. And it’s in terms of sending in tips and sending in information, but also just being responsive when I reach out when writing a story.

A selfie of Davis after a recent snowstorm working on a story on public transportation renovations coming to Harvey.

Chakradhar: Because you’re having to do so much to educate people about Harvey World Herald, do you consider what you have to do journalism and then some?

Davis: I am currently the only full-time staff member. I have to be reporter, managing editor, director of community engagement, director of outreach and development, and I’m the one sitting down at the end of every month with the budget. I’m going to be the one going door-to-door to local businesses to let them know that there are digital advertising opportunities available with the newsletter and the website.

I feel it, you know, to wear many hats, and I often have to tell myself to not get too comfortable doing any one thing because I have to be so versatile to totally manage a newsroom by myself.

Chakradhar: Let’s talk about that some more. With the exception of a few stories, almost every single byline on the site is yours. How do you make that happen?

Davis: I don’t have a current publishing schedule. That’s still something I’m trying to work out and get a better handle on. What I currently try to do is to stick to reporting for Monday through Thursday and use Friday as a planning day and for business stuff as well. It’s a struggle. It’s not easy, definitely. Like over this the weekend, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be working. But consistency and setting those standards and expectations are the biggest things for people in the community.

Chakradhar: There isn’t currently a paywall on the website. Is that something that might change? What are your plans for bringing in revenue?

Davis: This is a community where a third of folks live below the poverty line. There are people who sell their refrigerators for money because they’re not even using them to begin with because they don’t have food at all. In this context, I just do not see a world in which the Harvey World Herald is not free. The stories on the website are free, the newsletter is free. In my in my world, especially if we’re talking about using the language of the public good, the Harvey World Herald should always remain free.

It is going to take big lifts in order to meet that demand. The current financing I see is that most of our money is probably going to come from philanthropic organizations and advertising, and then the smallest chunk of that is maybe going to be individual donations and subscribers. The long run plan would be for that to shift to individual donations. We’d be 70% reader-funded and less of our funds would come from philanthropic organizations or advertising. I recognize it is going to be a big lift to go from point A to point B. I just do not think there’s going to be a universe in which there are going to be people who don’t see it as a slap in the face to have to pay for local news when you’re going around talking about building a new institution for the public good.

Chakradhar: Are you generally feeling optimistic about the future of Harvey World Herald?

Davis: From a reporter’s standpoint, I feel pretty confident about what we’re going to be doing. From an audience growth standpoint, the newsletter growth has been on a slow incline coming out of the hard launch. As far as the financial outlook, I’m really hopeful. Through the Tiny News Collective, they set up sessions with funders where I’ll be able to get up at the table and get more money. In the absence of that, I really would be very, very worried.

But I’m also hopeful about the financial outlook setting because there have been so many people and organizations that have reached out to me directly to start building relationships. And that’s going to be very important to get the organization out there in other spaces to get more money.

The financial outlook from an individual perspective and building membership — I’m a little bit worried because I still have to do the work of thinking through how we build a really strong subscribing, membership model, to start getting folks to contribute monthly. Currently, the folks who are who signed up for monthly donations are from outside the community, so that is already a reflection of the problem.

Chakradhar: What lessons do you have for others who might be considering a similar venture?

Davis: It is a marathon. It is not a sprint. And that is something I have to keep telling myself, too. Sometimes I get dejected only because I have this vision of what this looks like down the road, and maybe because I’m an Aries, maybe because I’m so attached to the fears and the long-term vision.

I have to remind myself that you don’t just get there overnight. It takes work, but it’s work over time and patience and grace that you have to extend to yourself. Honestly, I keep having to give myself a pat on the back for even having an idea and daring to pursue it because that’s what entrepreneurship is and it can be a lonely road.

Photo of Harvey postcard by Steve Shook used under a Creative Commons license. Headshot of Amethyst J. Davis by Miguel Silva.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/a-new-publication-springs-up-in-a-former-news-desert-outside-chicago/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/if-you-try-to-do-this-with-email-youll-fail-how-dallas-free-press-uses-text-messages-to-reach-communities-of-color/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/if-you-try-to-do-this-with-email-youll-fail-how-dallas-free-press-uses-text-messages-to-reach-communities-of-color/#respond Thu, 03 Mar 2022 15:20:52 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=200942

This Q&A is part of a series from the Institute for Nonprofit News on how nonprofit news outlets serve communities of color. Nieman Lab is republishing it with permission. You can read more about the series here.

Keri Mitchell is executive director of Dallas Free Press, which launched in 2020 with the goal of serving news deserts in Dallas communities. The interview was conducted by Sara Shahriari, INN’s director of leadership and talent development, and Emily Roseman, INN’s research director and editor.

Sara Shahriari and Emily Roseman: Tell us a bit about your news outlet. What’s your outlet’s primary mission? What sort of services does Dallas Free Press provide?

Keri Mitchell: The primary mission of Dallas Free Press is to amplify voices in disinvested Dallas neighborhoods and explore solutions to our city’s systemic inequities. We focus our community journalism efforts on the South Dallas and West Dallas neighborhoods, and we partner with the Dallas Weekly, a legacy Black newspaper in South Dallas. We do a lot of showing up and listening at community gatherings and spend a lot of time building relationships. We use those experiences to decide what topics and issues to tackle, and what needs to be communicated via text versus social media versus a story on our website.

Shahriari and Roseman: Could you tell us more about yourself? When did you start working at Dallas Free Press? What does your role look like?

Mitchell: I’ve been a community journalist my entire career. I started at small newspapers in the Houston exurbs and when I moved to Dallas, I went to my local library branch and found this magazine in a lobby news rack called the Advocate, which covers several Dallas neighborhoods. I recognized it as community journalism but with a magazine approach, which I loved because I’ve always been better at the big picture, why-it-matters side of journalism. That was in 2005, so I went through all of the revolutionary changes to digital journalism and advertising on the job.

In 2017 I wrote a story trying to demystify the politics of the local school board — local Dallas elections are nonpartisan — that was well read and respected. But I flat out didn’t have the resources to do everything I wanted to with the story. We had to keep churning out more website stories and fill up next month’s magazine to stay in business, so I left a lot of good reporting behind. And even if people loved my story, I couldn’t compete with the barbecue restaurant opening down the street in terms of web clicks.

I finally came to terms with the fact that if we want to do civic journalism that sheds light on big issues, and we want to serve communities where advertisers aren’t interested in eyeballs, communities who don’t have the resources or the trust to subscribe, we have to find a different way. I started looking at news efforts across the country, and I saw that this kind of journalism could be possible with a nonprofit business model. So after a lot of research and a lot of prayer and a few panic attacks, I launched Dallas Free Press in January 2020.

Shahriari and Roseman: Who does your outlet primarily serve?

Mitchell: South Dallas and West Dallas, where we focus our community journalism, are historically redlined neighborhoods where the vast majority of residents are Black and Latinx.

Shahriari and Roseman: Dallas Free Press uses text messaging as the main form of communication with residents of South Dallas and West Dallas. Could you tell me more about why and how you chose this strategy?

Mitchell: It’s a pretty simple answer — our readers told us to. Even before launching Dallas Free Press, as we discussed the idea of a community newsroom with West Dallas leaders, they told us, “If you try to do this with email, you’ll fail.” They said we needed to get information directly to people’s phones. They also told us that if we didn’t have Spanish-language content, we would fail. So before we even had a website, we launched our texting service in both neighborhoods, and in both English and Spanish for West Dallas.

Shahriari and Roseman: How do you decide what gets texted? Who leads this work? How many team members does it require?

Mitchell: We actually launched the service with two very talented bilingual interns — one studying to become a journalist and one a community organizer — who carried it for the first few months. It started mainly as a way to communicate about Covid-19; we sent at least one text a week with the neighborhood’s case numbers by ZIP code and trends, as well as some sort of resource, such as a new testing site or a food drive-through. When the vaccine rolled out, we switched to the neighborhood’s vaccination numbers and neighborhood vaccination rates. We announced via text when they had reached herd immunity.

Shahriari and Roseman: What kind of testing and learning did you have to go through to get to this workflow and process? Any mistakes made along the way?

Mitchell: We’re still learning! As we expanded beyond Covid-19 to other topics, we had a few weeks that we sent a text every day. We saw people start to unsubscribe and we pulled back. We’ve found a sweet spot in up to three texts a week — usually some sort of resource, an event, and a round-up of neighborhood news. Ideally we pre-schedule these, but news is news.

One issue has always been translation, which meant we often delayed the Spanish version of our texts, and sometimes weren’t able to send them at all. Now we have a bilingual journalist on staff, which makes a huge difference. We’re working on a more conversational tone, which our texts have always had to some extent, but we receive more responses with questions, prompts and such, so we’re trying to be more creative. Which can be challenging with only 640 characters!

Shahriari and Roseman: What have you seen as a result of this work?

Mitchell: The main challenge is getting people to subscribe, which most are willing to do at the neighborhood events we attend, either for a $5 gift card or just because they want to. We haven’t had a lot of success asking people to sign up digitally, but we’ve had a ton of success via in-person interactions, so we’re putting our efforts there.

I’ve been surprised and thrilled that very few people have unsubscribed from our texts. We’re clear about who it’s for — people who live or work in our neighborhoods — and what it is — news, information and resources specific to the neighborhood. Like our West Dallas friends told us, when we give people the option between email and text, they almost always choose text, or both. I love that people respond to our texts, sometimes even with just a simple, “Thank you,” which means so much. We pay attention to the responses, and we use them as a barometer to determine what else we should — and shouldn’t — cover.

Shahriari and Roseman: Besides text messaging, how else is Dallas Free Press thinking about reaching and serving communities of color?

Mitchell: We’re thinking about how partnering with neighbors and community organizations on events has fostered trust and enabled reach, and has been much more effective than hosting our own events.

Shahriari and Roseman: How are you measuring the effectiveness or impact of this work?

Mitchell: We conducted this survey in partnership with UT Austin’s Center for Media Engagement in early 2021 as the baseline for our organization’s work in our neighborhoods, and will continue building on that research each year.

Shahriari and Roseman: What advice do you have for other news organizations who want to start better serving people of color within their communities?

Mitchell: Show up. Over and over and over again. Show up at run-of-the-mill meetings and celebratory community gatherings so that people don’t just associate you with crises and chaos.

This was the advice given to me by a South Dallas community leader as I started exploring the possibility of Dallas Free Press: “We want to see you, hear you, smell you, touch you, taste you.” It may sound cringey, but after years of community journalism, I knew exactly what he meant: If you show up, it means you’re listening and you care. It means you’re willing to focus your time and energy on us. And if you show up, we’ll get to know you and begin to trust you.

We don’t often think of showing up as part of journalism. We’re supposed to be outside observers, not active participants. That may be true regarding elected officials or those who hold power, but it’s not true for community journalism, which always carries an inherent bias toward the communities it covers. This is even more crucial in communities of color, where explicit bias is really more of a centering and amplifying of Black and Brown voices.

Shahriari and Roseman: What’s next? Is there a story you’re looking forward to in 2022?

Mitchell: We worked hard last year to solidify the new Dallas Media Collaborative, and I’m excited about the stories we’re exploring together on housing justice. We’re also adding a Report for America fellow to our team; that role, coupled with another initiative, will change the way we cover public meetings and civic issues.

I can’t wait to see the stories published by high school journalists who are part of our pathway from Dallas high schools to Dallas newsrooms, and I’m loving working with an incredible local storyteller on a movement journalism project around the history of Dallas’s Black schools.

I’m most excited about pushing the envelope on what journalism looks like. Because of our nonprofit model, we don’t have a publication to fill, weekly website click quotas to meet or anyone to answer to — except our South Dallas and West Dallas readers. So we’re free to ask:

What matters most to our neighbors? And what are the best ways to tell those stories?

Photo of Dallas Free Press founder Keri Mitchell (left) and community leaders discussing potential solutions to affordable housing by Nitashia Johnson.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/if-you-try-to-do-this-with-email-youll-fail-how-dallas-free-press-uses-text-messages-to-reach-communities-of-color/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/denver-is-newsbreaks-test-market-for-original-local-news-on-a-national-app/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/denver-is-newsbreaks-test-market-for-original-local-news-on-a-national-app/#respond Tue, 01 Mar 2022 16:03:09 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=201005 NewsBreak, which calls itself “the nation’s leading local news app,” has been trying something new in Denver. The national company’s gambit is to see if the app can gain traffic, engagement, and downloads by providing — wait for it — original local news.

There was no big splash or news conference like we’ve seen from startups Denverite and The Colorado Sun. Not even a press release touting its hires like Axios Denver.

But for the past three months at least, the Mountain View, Calif.–based NewsBreak has been paying full-time and part-time journalists in Denver, along with a dedicated editor, to publish local news on its platform. NewsBreak, which claims 45 million users, has also inked deals with Denver’s CBS4, KBCO radio, Axios Denver, and Sports Illustrated’s Mile High Huddle.

The company pays those outlets to republish some of their content in full on its widely used app. (These deals aren’t unique to Denver; the app pays news outlets elsewhere, too.) Also on the NewsBreak Denver app, the platform publishes headlines and ledes of stories from other news sites it doesn’t partner with and sends readers directly to the outlet with a link. Because of its large user base, some news managers say the app can be among their largest web traffic referrers — and sometimes the largest.

“Because the app is pretty popular, it does two things,” said NewsBreak Denver’s editor, Sara Hansen, who was previously a breaking news editor at The Denver Post. “In some cases, it’s helping supplement the budgets of these news sources, and in other cases, it’s driving traffic to them.”

All of this is another indication that a national company sees a potential audience it can monetize with the help of (and by providing) local news. And the development once again makes Colorado the setting for a local journalism experiment.

“For a variety of reasons — largely because the app is very popular in Denver and they’ve got a pretty high engagement rate in Denver — they decided to use Denver as a test market,” said Hansen, who was recruited by NewsBreak via LinkedIn and started Dec. 1.

Denver, she said, is the only city where NewsBreak has a paid staff.

The local team includes full-time staffer Steven Bonifazi, who covers Covid-19, lifestyle, mental health, and more; Margaret Jackson, who reports on business; Matt Whitaker, who covers natural resources, energy, and climate; David Heitz, who reports on Denver City Hall and homelessness; and Brittany Anas who covers travel, restaurants, and lifestyle. They work remotely and stay connected over the web.

NewsBreak just hired Heather Willard as its public safety reporter and is hiring a part-time general assignment reporter this month. “And then we’re hoping to hire more,” Hansen said.

My trophy arrived yesterday for the Local Champion award from @newsbreakApp . I love covering Denver for NewsBreak and am honored to be chosen from among 1,400 creators. The trophy is the iconic "N" NewsBreak logo. Thanks again, NewsBreak! #journalism #LocalNews pic.twitter.com/9YWPnezb1l

— David John Heitz (@DavidJohnHeitz1) February 16, 2022

As for the tweet above, what makes Heitz different from those other 1,400 creators for the app, Hansen said, is that he’s a paid staffer and others are paid by the click.

In Denver, she says, NewsBreak content breaks into three categories: Denver news staff content, aggregated media content, and contributor network content. “In other markets,” Hansen says, “it’s just aggregated media and contributor network.”

The app, backed by more than $100 million of investor capital, also generates revenue from ads and sponsored content. Its push alerts are frequent. In February, the company hired veteran producer Jim Bell of the Today Show and Tonight Show to oversee strategy. “NewsBreak’s ambition is to re-invigorate local news using cutting edge AI technology and old-fashioned journalism,” he said in a statement.

As for the unique Denver team’s approach to reporting original local news, Hansen says she’s trying to do second-day, big-picture, and trend stories, and to put the news of the day into context. NewsBreak can aggregate breaking stories from elsewhere so its journalists don’t need to jump on everything. Hansen acknowledged some had criticized an earlier iteration of the app for promoting clickbait and is trying to mitigate that. (The site is still getting popped for it.)

While this particular experiment is specific to Denver, it’s not the first time the company has tried to move beyond derivative aggregation. Last fall, Digiday explored NewsBreak’s reinvention “after about a year of trying to get into the original content business.” From that piece:

In the fall of 2020, NewsBreak’s original content aspirations got off to a buzzy start among freelancers, thanks to an offer that few other platforms or outlets could top: Guaranteed minimum payments of $1,000 per month for those who qualified.

At the time, NewsBreak was asking for content that might complement the hard news it was aggregating from other outlets, and it had no problems taking content that had already been published elsewhere, a boon to writers who had been trying to eke out income using other platforms including Medium. Many quickly uploaded dozens of pieces that had already been published elsewhere on the internet. 

That quickly changed. By the spring of 2021, NewsBreak wanted news from writers’ local communities instead, which it would rate using a ten-point scale, called a CV score, with higher-rated content getting surfaced more and its writers getting paid more. The CV score took several things into account, including how localized, differentiated and well-written the content was. Before long, NewsBreak changed again, discarding the scoring system and asking for local features built using original reporting, which it would either accept or reject.

Now, it looks as if NewsBreak is trying out something else again. And “right now Denver is the test,” Hansen says.

Earlier this month, Sentinel Colorado managing editor Kara Mason, who’s based in Aurora, asked Twitter what the deal was with NewsBreak, wondering if it was “just another website ripping off local journalism again.” She says she posted that tweet because she felt that some original stories NewsBreak published about Aurora were fairly close to what her independently owned weekly newspaper had reported, like one about Aurora deciding not to reopen a decades-old adult daycare.

“If we’re covering the same things, I don’t know who’s benefiting from that,” Mason says. Sure, it’s “original,” she added, “but is it?” Mason thinks the Sentinel has City Council covered, for instance.

My own introduction to NewsBreak was interesting. About a year ago, someone from the company reached out on LinkedIn saying they’d stumbled across this newsletter, and asked if I wanted to talk about potentially joining the platform in some capacity. I downloaded the app, but it didn’t wind up becoming a go-to for my Colorado Springs news consumption. Over Zoom one day I chatted with one of NewsBreak’s representatives about this newsletter, and the person indicated the app wanted to get into local original content … somehow. They gave me an $80 Amazon gift card for my time.

I hadn’t thought about the app much since then until I saw Mason’s tweet. It was around the time that a story by NewsBreak Denver’s David Heitz, about his personal experience with homelessness, was bouncing around my social media feed.

The experience on the streets, he told me, was “pure hell,” when I reached out to him sometime after reading it to ask about his relationship with the app. “Writing for NewsBreak just makes me feel very alive again after such a dark period,” he said. “And it’s such a great fit. I sort of feel like I did when I worked for Los Angeles Times Community News as an editor in the 1990s. They were in a big expansion phase and the company culture was just so positive. NewsBreak is like that, too.”

Heitz said he’s been writing for the app for 16 months (his profile shows he has nearly 7,000 followers there) and the company has moved from pay-by-the-click to an hourly wage, at least in Denver. “You definitely feel very much a part of a community writing for NewsBreak, compared to other freelance gigs I’ve had,” he said.

Following HuffPo Denver in 2009, Denverite in 2016, The Colorado Sun in 2018, and Axios Denver in 2021, NewsBreak enters well-trodden ground in the local news game. It will be worth watching how it plays out and whether what it learns here will inform future markets.

“It’s early on, but the powers that be are happy with it,” Hansen says, adding, “They’re in the process of starting two more pilot projects in Pennsylvania and Arizona.”

Corey Hutchins is the interim director of the Journalism Institute at Colorado College. This piece is republished from his “Inside the News in Colorado” newsletter, which is underwritten by Colorado Media Project and Grasslands and comes out each Friday. Subscribe here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/denver-is-newsbreaks-test-market-for-original-local-news-on-a-national-app/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/forget-national-politics-for-a-sec-a-new-site-brings-a-local-lens-to-criminal-justice-and-voting-rights/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/forget-national-politics-for-a-sec-a-new-site-brings-a-local-lens-to-criminal-justice-and-voting-rights/#respond Mon, 28 Feb 2022 19:34:12 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=200581 Bolts, a new digital magazine dedicated to local policy, is unapologetically down-ballot.

Launched earlier this month, Bolts is bucking the trend toward nationalization of political news to focus on local elections and policy. Instead of focusing on the top of the ticket — i.e., presidential candidates and hotly-contested congressional races — the site will focus on criminal justice and voting rights as they play out in states, counties, cities, and towns across the United States.

The newsroom, for now, consists of founder and editor-in-chief Daniel Nichanian, formerly of The Appeal, and managing editor Michael Barajas, who has written about mass incarceration. (They are currently hiring for a story editor and staff writer.) Bolts has initial funding for its envisioned full-time team of four, plus “a healthy freelance budget.” The nonprofit newsroom has received funds from Justice Catalyst, The Just Trust, and others and plans to continue to seek foundation and individual donations to back its work.

Just in: I’m thrilled @BoltsMag, the outlet I’m launching, is now live! https://t.co/oeOaNFuhGL.

We cover the nuts and bolts of power & political change, from the local up — those overlooked elections & decisions that shape policy.

Follow us on here, then start reading! ↓

— Taniel (@Taniel) February 9, 2022

It’s a broad mandate for a big country and Bolts is partnering with other news organizations and freelancers to find and report out local stories. Bolts launched with a story on New York’s chronically understaffed parole board produced with New York Focus and has followed with other local collaborations, including a piece on stalled efforts to allow voting from prison with the Portland Mercury last week.

“Our bet — or our hope — is that there’s a far larger audience than the media often assumes that wants to know and learn from the battles around local power, whether it’s from an interest in the issues of criminal justice and voting rights or because of an interest in political change and the movements that have really centered on these issues in recent years,” Nichanian said. “There’s a lot of institutional creativity going on in local movements. There are overlooked offices and types of power that have not really been used for progressive change or racial justice before that activists want to bring into play.”

Local protections are no replacement for federal protections and can’t match the influence of U.S. Supreme Court decisions — plus, covering federal politics is “tempting” given the attention and clicks it can garner, Nichanian conceded.

“It’s always important to keep in mind the national reasons we might be covering something locally, but that’s different than federal politics, which can become this black hole of attention and resources if you start going there,” Nichanian said.

Many Americans are newly awake to the importance of voting rights and local election administration, in particular, following Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election in 2020. There are more reporters on the “democracy beat” and more news organizations putting an emphasis on covering the ins and outs of voting. At the state and local level, officials and advocates are taking steps to strengthen democratic processes even as federal legislation has stalled and some states have restricted access to the ballot.

“I think I would have a hard time convincing Daniel we should do a story on, say, attempts to pass the federal voting rights bill,” Barajas said. “One, I think it’s covered very well elsewhere and, two, my sources [in Texas] are focused on local things. They’re focused on, ‘Okay, what do we do in the face of this failure to move anything?’ I think there’s a lot of discussion about Congress’s failure to strengthen the Voting Rights Act, but I see very little coverage and discussion about what local election administrators are doing about that.”

“Issues that seem really intractable at the national level often aren’t at the local level,” Barajas added. “That’s why we think there’s a lot of opportunity for coverage there — because there’s so much movement happening. In a lot of communities, there’s just not always the infrastructure to cover it.”

Bolts is also putting resources toward developing cheat sheets and “What’s on the Ballot?” features. One of the first pieces published was a database of who runs elections in each state and how those people are selected or elected. Nichanian said the feature was designed for the public, yes, but also for advocates and fellow journalists hoping to make sense of the patchwork of election administration in the U.S.

On Tuesday, Texas will hold hundreds of primary elections across the state, and Bolts created a cheat sheet of 40 contests to watch. True to its focus on criminal justice, it’s also published an exhaustive list of who’s running for district attorney and sheriff — local positions that make critical decisions about sentencing and policing — in the state this year. (More than three-quarters of the district attorney races are uncontested, meaning voters will have a single choice on their ballot.)

The team at Bolts hopes that their focus on the nitty gritty — the nuts and bolts, if you will, of local politics and power — will pave the way for more work in more places than they could ever hope to cover by themselves.

“It’s always surprising the degree to which basic information that would allow further work, including further coverage and journalism around these institutions of government, is missing,” Nichanian said. “It’s research that often gets left behind the scenes or treated as a proprietary resource, but it’s public information. This is allowing more coverage, more high-quality journalism, by providing a sort of information infrastructure.”

Photo of bolts by Alexander Baxevanis used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/forget-national-politics-for-a-sec-a-new-site-brings-a-local-lens-to-criminal-justice-and-voting-rights/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/12/airbnbs-home-alone-stunt-is-confusing-me-and-news-orgs-have-answered-literally-zero-of-my-questions-about-it/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/12/airbnbs-home-alone-stunt-is-confusing-me-and-news-orgs-have-answered-literally-zero-of-my-questions-about-it/#respond Thu, 02 Dec 2021 17:01:21 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=198234 Airbnb is doing a marketing thing: It appears that you plus three other people can win a one-night stay in the house in Winnetka, Illinois, that was the setting of 1990 hit film “Home Alone.” From Airbnb’s press release:

This season, fans are set to have their dreams come true with an overnight stay in the original Home Alone house. While the McCallisters are away on their annual trip (all of them but the pet tarantula, this time), four guests will get the opportunity to relive their favorite scenes from the holiday classic and let their inner eight-year-olds run free for the evening without the interruption of pesky intruders.

Big brother Buzz McCallister will join thousands of Hosts on Airbnb by opening the doors to his family’s Chicago home as the ultimate gift this month. Following the release of Home Sweet Home Alone, the all-new holiday film now streaming on Disney+, this Airbnb stay offers a trip down memory lane and an unforgettable way to celebrate the holidays.

“You may not remember me as particularly accommodating,” says Buzz, “but I’ve grown up, and I’d be happy to share my family home — my pizza, even — with you this holiday season. Just try not to let my tarantula, Axl, loose this time.”

Buzz will host a one-night stay* for up to four guests at the McCallister residence on Dec. 12 for only $25**.

Ha, that’s fun. I’m a ’90s child and have pretty fond memories of that movie, and even more, of that house! O.K., let’s be honest: Now that I’m 37, it’s really just about the house. I want to spend a night in a cozy beautiful Christmas house and pretend it’s 1990 again, just for one evening. Is Airbnb really offering me the chance to do that, all by myself or (if I so choose) three similarly minded mom friends (I am absolutely not bringing my kids)? Hmm, guess I’ll read a little more of the press release.

During their stay, guests will enjoy:

• A cozy holiday scene with twinkling lights and a perfectly trimmed tree in celebration of the season.
• Booby traps galore (but don’t worry — you’ll be setting them, not sidestepping them!).
• Surprisingly searing splashes of aftershave and ample opportunity to scream into the mirror.
• All the ’90s favorites their hearts desire, including plenty of Chicago’s finest pizza and a candlelit dinner of microwavable Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.
• A meet and greet with a real-life tarantula.
• A viewing of the film franchise’s newest holiday adventure, “Home Sweet Home Alone.”
• A LEGO Ideas Home Alone set to take and build at home.

“We may all be older and wiser now, but we’re never too old for holiday hijinks,” Buzz said. “So this year, spend the holidays not-so-home-alone at my parents’ house.”

This actually raises more questions. Let’s say I’d like the “cozy holiday scene” and pizza only. Let’s say I want to pretend this is my house, which definitely means no PR person hovering around encouraging me to have fun, and no visit from a tarantula handler. Also, could we actually just skip the viewing of Home Sweet Home Alone? I’d prefer to read by that fire — again, quietly.

Also, why is it only $25 (“plus taxes and fees”), you can “request” to book the stay on December 7, it’s only available Dec. 12, presumably many people will “request” to book, and yet Airbnb is adamant that this “this one-night stay is not a contest”? Isn’t this, like, a $25 entry fee?

Haha, well, I suppose it’s too much to expect answers to these questions from a press release. So let me turn to the gabillion legitimate news sites that covered this December Fool’s joke. I’m sure after reading some mainstream news outlets I’ll have a better sense of what’s going on.

NBC News:

In addition to a picturesque Christmas home, guests will get to set booby traps, similar to Kevin’s antics in the film, although AirBnB says those staying in the home won’t have to worry about fending off intruders, like Culkin did in the film.

Guests will also be treated “Chicago’s finest pizza and a meet and greet with a real-life tarantula,” according to Airbnb.

A screening of the newest “Home Alone” film, titled “Home Sweet Home Alone,” and released last month, will cap off the night.

Well, that’s just a rehash of the press release.

CNN:

Perhaps most surprising is the home’s host: Buzz McAllister, Kevin’s pugnacious older brother. Buzz has apparently mellowed out enough to allow guests into his childhood home, per Airbnb.

Scoring a stay at the McAllister place won’t break the bank — again, it costs just a quarter of one hundred bucks — but it will be competitive. Booking opens on December 7 at 2 p.m. ET, but the home will only be available for one night the following week.

BUT BUZZ MCALLISTER ISN’T A REAL PERSON. So is the actor who played him 31 years ago literally going to be in this house with me the entire time that I am there? Is he going to be pretending he is Buzz and do I have to pretend … oh God, what will I be expected to pretend?

“Hey I’ve had a long day, I think I’m just gonna go to bed.” Am I seriously going to have to say that to a stranger?

Maybe the famously impartial BBC can answer this.

Guests will be greeted on arrival by Devin Ratray, who played his older brother Buzz.

“You may not remember me as particularly accommodating,” Buzz is quoted as saying in the press release.

“But I’ve grown up, and I’d be happy to share my family home — my pizza, even — with you this holiday season. Just try not to let my tarantula, Axl, loose this time.”

Other perks include booby traps, aftershave and a mirror to scream into, and 90s junk food.

No. Moving on.

Entertainment Weekly:

And on a rather meta note, Buzz adds that you can “wind down” and “enjoy a viewing of the film franchise’s newest holiday adventure, Home Sweet Home Alone, on Disney+.” Clever, clever, clever. You got us again, Disney+!

Despite looking like a mansion from the outside, the listing only mentions two bedrooms, and one and a half baths, which raises a question: How the hell did a family of what appears to be a thousand people live there? One and a half baths? For five kids? No wonder poor Catherine O’Hara couldn’t keep it together.

Haha I like the skepticism here, except it really only raises more unanswered questions about what you will be … in. Will it be this house? Surely you should know before you book four tickets to Chicago?

Deadline:

Booking for the one night stay will open on Dec. 7 at 2 p.m. EST. No price has been set as of yet, and guests will be responsible for their own travel.

“After you’ve worked up an appetite, you can feast on all the comfort food your hearts desire, including plenty of Chicago’s finest pizza and a candlelit dinner of microwavable Kraft Macaroni & Cheese,” the listing states. “Then, when you’re ready to wind down, you can enjoy a viewing of the film franchise’s newest holiday adventure, Home Sweet Home Alone, on Disney+.

I thought the price was $25. Is it not? Speaking of the $25: Airbnb notes in its press release that it “will make a one-time donation to Chicago’s La Rabida Children’s Hospital.” Is that donation going to consist of the $25 of everyone who tries to get in on this? And OMGGGGG stop mentioning the Kraft mac and cheese.

A lovely bowl of mac & cheese. Just for you. Where do we sign up? https://t.co/DAdZOxpbcm

— Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (@kraftmacncheese) December 1, 2021

I feel more and more awkward thinking about the handler who would have to make me the mac and cheese because there is no kitchen access.

The Chicago Tribune offers further reporting, sort of, but doesn’t explain where your handlers will be sleeping.

When guests step through the door, they’ll take in the bold wallpaper, red carpet runner and pictures of Buzz on the wall. Bask in the living room’s holiday ambience with a Christmas tree, stockings hung over the fireplace — the whole gambit. Visitors will sleep in Kevin’s parents’ room — complete with four-poster bed, father’s after-shave, vintage clock radio and old-school, big-box television. (Should there be kids, a second guest bedroom is available as well.) …

Airbnb reps said they tried to figure out the physics of how the sled scene down the steps would work, but opted to have a potential sledding excursion planned instead, a safer option. A member of Buzz’s “McCallister Security” team will arrange meals.

Does “potential” mean “optional”? It’s a stranger taking you to some hill somewhere?

“There’s no downside to this,” Ratray told People Magazine.

Airbnb did not immediately respond to my many questions. Update: Airbnb responded to my many questions by quoting parts of its press release.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/12/airbnbs-home-alone-stunt-is-confusing-me-and-news-orgs-have-answered-literally-zero-of-my-questions-about-it/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/the-vulture-is-hungry-again-alden-global-capital-wants-to-buy-a-few-hundred-more-newspapers/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/the-vulture-is-hungry-again-alden-global-capital-wants-to-buy-a-few-hundred-more-newspapers/#respond Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:55:05 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=197987 Nearly 11 years ago — January 20, 2011 — longtime publishing executive Martin Langeveld wrote a particularly prescient piece for us here at Nieman Lab. On the surface, it was about a management change at a single newspaper chain, MediaNews Group. The man who’d built that company from scratch was a swashbuckling Texan named Dean Singleton.

McClatchy is a special case; Alden tried to buy it out of bankruptcy, but Chatham was its largest creditor and thus had an inside track. (Reminder: Chatham likes to call this moment “late-stage media consolidation,” which means the consolidation has spread all throughout your lymph nodes and it’s time to settle your affairs.)

But other than McClatchy, all of these companies have been sorted into three buckets: two big ones, No. 1 Gannett and No. 2 Alden, and one smaller one, No. 3 Lee Enterprises.

It was pretty clear this day would come. Lee is the biggest acquisition target left out there, with papers in 77 markets across 26 states — not to mention “nearly 350 weekly and specialty publications.” Adding it to its MediaNews/Digital First/Tribune menagerie should bring it close to Gannett in size, if not quite there.

Based on last year’s circulation numbers, a combined Alden+Lee would sell 7.627 million copies a day, behind only Gannett’s 8.596 million. They’d both be far ahead of the new No. 3, McClatchy, which is way back at 1.747 million.

You can read the offer letter Alden sent Lee’s board here. It hits the same notes that nocturnal Alden usually does in its rare visits to the sunlit world: “Alden Global Capital, LLC is a significant investor in American newspapers,” “committed to ensuring communities nationwide have access to robust, independently minded local journalism,” “a reaffirmation of our substantial commitment to the newspaper industry,” “scale is critical for newspapers to ensure necessary staffing and in order to thrive in this challenging environment,” blah, blah, blah.

At some previous companies that Alden has tried to acquire, there’s been resistance — from management, employees, civic leaders, or all of the above. Remember, it tried to eat Gannett in 2019, but the company successfully fought back — though that resistance pushed it into the arms of another suitor, GateHouse. Tribune reporters battled valiantly, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to keep Alden away.

But frankly, I’d be surprised if Lee put up much of a fight this time. Financing was a major question in the Gannett push; Alden is offering to pay cash here. The Tribune deal took place over in multiple stages over a longer period of time, giving opponents time to strategize; here, Alden says they want to have it all wrapped up “in approximately four weeks.”

And frankly, Tribune owned papers in big metros like New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Orlando, and South Florida, the sort of places where you can rev up some media attention. Lee’s biggest papers are in St. Louis, Omaha, Tulsa, and Buffalo. Its headquarters are in a suburban office park in Davenport, Iowa; Tribune Tower this ain’t. And, at least at this writing, Lee isn’t pushing back against Alden. It’s not commenting to media reporters, whereas Gannett was cranky from the jump.

There are still some other chains to be had, of course. Advance is still out there, should the Newhouses ever grow itchy. Hearst still has a few big metros, though newspapers are a declining part of their business. Ogden is Lee-like in a number of ways. And the newspaper business is still much more decentralized than many American industries, with hundreds of papers still owned as single units — in the lucky places, still by families with a connection to and investment in the community.

But it’s as clear as ever that Dean Singleton was thinking in the right direction back in the early 1990s. He thought there would be just three newspaper companies left standing, and he wanted MediaNews to be one of them. After this deal — and whatever aftershocks follow it, as the boards of smaller chains see themselves on the outside of a two-horse race — we’ll be left with Gannett, Alden Global Capital, and then everybody else.

And Gannett is selling — “confident that we will be able to execute on $100-125 million in additional asset sales this year” — while Alden is buying. With cash.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/the-vulture-is-hungry-again-alden-global-capital-wants-to-buy-a-few-hundred-more-newspapers/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/how-journalism-in-middle-america-helped-get-communities-through-the-pandemic/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/how-journalism-in-middle-america-helped-get-communities-through-the-pandemic/#respond Thu, 18 Nov 2021 13:00:55 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=197920 News of the pandemic’s devastating effect on journalism was conveyed by headlines across the nation telling of newsroom closures, layoffs and furloughs.

But how did so many local news organizations — especially newspapers — manage to survive the pandemic? Weeklies beefed up their daily online news coverage, business models were blown up, and existing rationales for why journalism matters became more than theoretical to rural journalists.

Their determination to survive and serve as a public health lifeline for their communities fueled an oral history project that my colleague Teri Finneman and I conducted, interviewing 28 journalists across seven states in the middle of the country. We learned how locally owned and family-owned newspapers made it through Covid-19.

“There’ve been times that we’ve had to reach out to mayors and different cities and communities across the state … to make sure that … knew that [journalists] were deemed essential workers,” said Ashley Wimberley, executive director of the Arkansas Press Association. That label exempted news workers from stay-at-home orders and designated them as critically needed by their communities.

There were no easy answers. Not in Louisiana, where I teach journalism at Louisiana State University. Not anywhere.

Oral history grabs the first impressions of history for those living now, looking back at what just happened. It helps people understand the present and how to move forward, out of a crisis. But it also records events for scholars and citizens in the future.

“Always remember that when you’re putting those stories in your newspaper, that you are printing your community’s history,” Amy Johnson, the publisher of the Springview Herald in Nebraska, told us.

Benny Polacca of the Osage News in Oklahoma told us something similar: He encouraged journalists covering some future pandemic to “do your due diligence in order to come to some type of understanding, some type of argument, some type of focus, if you were going to be reporting or researching the time of Covid-19.”

Often, it’s journalism on the coasts that gets the attention of researchers. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times — these big news organizations are written about constantly.

By talking to journalists in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, our project pushed back against this tendency to ignore the middle of the nation and its important journalism. As a kind of new essential worker, journalists found themselves in charge of explaining complicated guidance from state and local officials about Covid-19, how schools would work and where to get help.

“I hope that, through this, that our role as journalism, they [the public] realize how important it is that the information we put out, you know, how it affects them every day,” Johnson said.

Kansas Press Association executive director Emily Bradbury had a message for these journalists who were working for news organizations increasingly threatened with being shut down: “I want them to know that in the midst of an emergency, in the midst of what can seem like a hopeless situation, when they look at their financials, that what they’re doing is important. And what they’re doing matters, and that no one else can do what they do, and they look out for their communities like no one else.”

Loans, side hustles, and deals

Reporters and editors found new ways of paying the bills. That meant accepting government subsidies in the form of Paycheck Protection Program loans. It meant, for some, going door to door and asking readers to subscribe, or keep subscribing. It meant consolidating newspapers, putting out more online editions, or taking pay cuts.

“People just don’t understand. It costs a lot of money and time to do this, and I just wish … people appreciated or understood the value and the cost of really providing this service,” said Bonita Gooch, the publisher of The Community Voice, a Black newspaper based in Wichita, Kansas.

Some publishers took on side hustles to bring in revenue, creating ad copy for local business or doing marketing work.

At The Kingfisher Times & Free Press in Oklahoma, for example, Christine Reid, the paper’s editor, created ads for a local vocational-technical school. “I’ve also tried to use that as an avenue to … generate more ads for the newspaper,” Reid said.

Some papers worked out advertising deals with local businesses as consumers shopped more locally.

Local publishers did whatever it took to stay afloat. As some of our initial findings have shown, that showed both opportunity and hesitancy about change.

“We’re gonna have to rely less on advertising revenue and more on subscription revenue, and so we’ve got to make sure we’re offering a unique product that they want to pay for,” said Letti Lister, the president and publisher of the Black Hills Pioneer in Spearfish, South Dakota.

We saw tentative signs of hope, as journalists got financial and moral support from their readers during a fraught election. “If anything, it’s rallied the troops, if you will, in our community because they trust us, they know that we’re going to report the news in a timely manner and keep the public up to date,” said Amy Wobbema, publisher of the New Rockford Transcript in North Dakota.

But there was still hesitancy over what newspapers had to do to adapt. Some journalists are uncomfortable with receiving government funding and would rather rely on community support.

As South Dakota Newspaper Association executive director Dave Bordewyk put it: “Sort of, ‘Look, contribute to our newspaper … because if you value that importance of local news and journalism, then we need your support beyond just subscribing to the newspaper or advertising, which has gone away.’”

Ultimately, the pandemic showed that more research needs to be done on journalism in rural areas. We managed to talk to only a fraction of the total number of small-town journalists and publishers. Other scholars have already learned that local journalism helps reduce violent partisanship and reinforces institutions. Other scholars have found that institutions like local courts and governments get increased legitimacy as a result of local news. More sustained scholarly attention will likely turn up other benefits that the public isn’t yet aware of.

“That’s what we hope. What I hope comes out of this is that readers can understand that, and can … have a renewed value on what that [local] publication has done for their community during this pandemic,” Bradbury told us.

William Thomas Mari is an assistant professor of media law and media history at Louisiana State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Photo by Mike Licht used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/how-journalism-in-middle-america-helped-get-communities-through-the-pandemic/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/public-access-television-channels-are-an-untapped-resource-for-building-local-journalism/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/public-access-television-channels-are-an-untapped-resource-for-building-local-journalism/#respond Wed, 10 Nov 2021 19:43:04 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=197695 On October 20, Community Media Day, Public Media Network (PMN) celebrated forty years of operating Kalamazoo, Michigan’s Public, Educational, and Governmental (PEG) access cable channels. Distinct from local public broadcasting, PMN’s legacy is built on teaching residents how to produce homegrown cable television programs. PMN also cablecasts town council and school board meetings, public safety announcements and municipal job postings, local affairs talk programs, and special events such as high school graduations. In addition to these community services — staples across all PEG access media — PMN also recently began focusing more on producing local journalism, such as stories on gun violence and encampment evictions.

PMN’s pivot demonstrates an untapped potential for public access stations to produce local journalism at a time when other sources are rapidly disappearing.

Access to local news and information is critical, especially during pandemics, elections, and other high-stakes moments. Yet it’s increasingly clear that a profit-driven news system alone cannot provide everyone with the media they need to navigate daily life. As local journalism’s commercial model continues to collapse, public and nonprofit media institutions can serve as informational safety nets.

The worsening journalism crisis demands that we begin discussing how we might build this system, one committed to universal service. One starting point is to re-imagine and use already-existing public infrastructures that produce and disseminate vital information, such as libraries, public broadcasting stations, and post offices. As the PMN example shows, public access media outlets are another avenue that deserve attention.

Since the 1970s, these small-scale media operations anchored by cable channels have provided civic information to a wide range of U.S. audiences. Some 2,500 PEG operations existed during the medium’s heyday in the 1980s when operations like PMN were established. Most, managed by fledgling cable companies, became unsustainable models due to mergers and other operational challenges. Nonetheless, according to the Alliance for Community Media interactive database, over 1,600 operations — a mix of entities now managed by nonprofits and municipal communication departments — currently maintain 3,000 PEG channels scattered across the country.

Three quarters of PEG operations today are small, managed by one to three employees, and generate hyperlocal programming for a couple of cable channels typically listed as “local access” on a cable system’s programming guide. While the number of local access channel operations has diminished over the years, these smaller operations still serve as reliable community information sources, especially in areas where local journalism has dwindled. In large cities like Philadelphia, Pa., these channels are typically operated independently. But in smaller localities like Bedford, Mass., the PEG facilities are usually managed by one organization or municipal department.

But PEG media’s contemporary relevance and future potential is almost entirely absent in conversations about the local journalism crisis. These channels don’t specialize in producing conventional journalism, but as one recent case study shows, access media centers anchored by PEG infrastructure facilitate something that traditional newsrooms often can’t: diverse community engagement. Like PMN, Philadelphia Community Access Media (PhillyCAM) is an example of community media center that serves multiple generations of marginalized people of color through its participatory local journalism programs. PMN and PhillyCAM’s unique participatory approach pairs citizen journalist volunteers with experienced news coordinators. In an episode of PMN’s new “Community in Focus” series, members of Kalamazoo’s South Asian immigrant community narrate solutions they are seeking for people who lack housing. PMN has even started offering journalism training for its Neighborhood Voice Network members and recently aided the launch of Southwest Michigan Journalism Collaborative.

Although skeptics see PEG channels as relics from a bygone analog era and incapable of producing stories without encountering government interference, most public access channels today stream their channels online, upload content to app-based platforms such as Roku and leverage social media to promote audience engagement. PMN and others such as Grand Rapids Community Media Center (GRCMC), Akakū Maui, Community Media Access Collaborative (CMAC), and Greater Northshire Access Television (GNAT-TV) have used their infrastructure to engage residents in local news information reporting processes. Some, such as Brookline Interactive Group and PMN, have even begun experimenting with virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree video storytelling labs.

PEG stations’ ability to keep up with today’s technology was especially useful during the Covid-19 pandemic. When Covid halted in-person community activities, PEG media practitioners used their technical expertise and neighborhood networks to help struggling communities
including local government officials, teachers, and elderly residents — transition to virtual public life. A recent Center for Media and Social Impact study found that many communities, especially in rural and exurban areas, relied on PEG services to communicate when people were forced into isolation. Community leaders relayed timely public health updates via virtual town halls, press conferences, and safety bulletins. PEG stations also circulated vital information across multiple platforms such as cable channels, over-the-air radio, social media, and online streaming sites. These integrated communication services proved crucial, especially in communities that suffer from spotty broadband connectivity and severely limited local journalism.

But the future of this important infrastructure is in peril. Federal and state-level regulatory decisions that erode local control have detrimental consequences for public access channels and other public communication infrastructure. PEG stations’ primary funding comes from cable subscribers according to the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984, which authorizes state and municipal governments to collect monetary compensation and receive local channel access in exchange for a cable company’s use of public rights-of-way (like sidewalks and streets). Through negotiated agreements with cable companies, localities have long relied on cable subscriber fees to pay for PEG infrastructure expenses (staffing, facility maintenance, and equipment purchasing). But as consumers switch to streaming media services, local governments lose their ability to collect funds that sustain PEG access channels’ infrastructure. Access media advocates are concerned about the financial implications of pay TV subscriptions dwindling at a 4% annual rate.”

Instead of letting PEG channels wither due to commercial market fluctuations, we should publicly fund and expand the precious communication infrastructure that access media offers. A national fund that distributes local journalism grants, based on demonstrated community need, could benefit public access media centers interested in building collaborative, solutions-oriented types of journalism programs. Modest grants in the range of $100,000 to $300,000 would enable small operations to hire editorial staff, train and compensate community reporters, and forge collaborative partnerships with other news organizations.

Ensuring non-discriminatory access to a baseline level of essential information that the market can’t support is paramount, especially for communities of color that have never been well served by commercial media. We need robust communication infrastructures that produce reliable information and provide a forum for local perspectives and diverse stories. These local newsrooms — for and by the people — must look like the communities they serve.

As we continue to face an ever-worsening journalism crisis, it is worth reimagining how investments in PEG outlets could help address local information and communication needs. We should leverage and expand such invaluable community infrastructures — before they vanish altogether.

Antoine Haywood is a PhD candidate and Penn Presidential Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. His research focuses on local storytelling networks and understanding the contemporary relevance of community access media. Before Annenberg, Antoine spent fifteen years working as a community engagement director in the PEG access media field. Victor Pickard is a Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. His most recent book is Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. The authors consulted the Buske Group, Alliance for Community Media, and Public Media Network while developing this article.

Image of Old TV by Tomislav Medak/Flickr used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/public-access-television-channels-are-an-untapped-resource-for-building-local-journalism/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/lauded-local-news-co-op-shuts-down-without-warning-leaving-its-co-owners-in-the-dark/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/lauded-local-news-co-op-shuts-down-without-warning-leaving-its-co-owners-in-the-dark/#respond Tue, 19 Oct 2021 18:57:38 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=196904 Akron, Ohio’s “community-owned magazine,” The Devil Strip, gained attention for its unusual business model: It claimed to be the “first community-owned local news cooperative in the United States.”

It was a model built on community trust — which made it extra-surprising when, on Monday, The Devil Strip’s staff announced on social media that the site had been shut down, and they had all been laid off. A statement did not appear on The Devil Strip’s website. Its founder, Chris Horne, who was asked to take “a sabbatical” in September, posted this tweet thread.

pic.twitter.com/kgpts6C3ub

— The Devil Strip (@akrondevilstrip) October 18, 2021

Can a community-owned site just … do that: In becoming a co-op in 2019, The Devil Strip said its “vested co-owners” (each of whom had donated at least $330) would be able to “vote on important issues” about the magazine, following “the ‘one person, one share, one vote’ principle.” But those co-owners — there were 94 of them — weren’t told The Devil Strip was in financial trouble, much less consulted on a path forward.

The Devil Strip’s staff of nine — including two reporters whose salaries were paid in part by Report for America — found out on Friday that there was no more money to pay them beyond that week’s payroll.

“We took the weekend and learned Monday morning that the majority of the board of directors had resigned,” Jes Holbrook, the publication’s editor-in-chief, told me. “That’s when the staff was laid off.”

In the comments of The Devil Strip’s Facebook page, readers expressed confusion: “What’s the point of a co-op if the people have no say?” one wrote. Another: “What? Not even a chance for us owners to help raise additional funds?”

“No indication at the annual meeting over the summer of 2021 that there was concern, but no financial recap despite my request before the meeting,” another co-owner recalled.

A follow-up email to members and co-owners on Tuesday created more confusion. The three remaining members of The Devil Strip’s board of directors said they were launching a GoFundMe to raise $75,000 to “have a fighting chance” to rehire staff (who have not said if they will return) and keep the publication going.

Some co-owners commented on Facebook that they needed more financial transparency before they would contribute. (“I do not want you to fail. I want to contribute additional funds, however we need more details before we go blindly. This team needs held accountable for the lack of transparency and hasty decisions. Why are we here right now? What got us to this place?“) But in its first six hours, the GoFundMe raised $4,796 from 60 donors.

Any Ohio resident who was 18 or over could be a co-owner of The Devil Strip as long as they were paying at least $12 a year. Once someone had paid $330 in total, they became a “lifetime, permanent co-owner” who could “vote on important issues that shape our future, join a committee or serve on our our Board of Directors.”

The Devil Strip was founded by Chris Horne, who researched community funding models for journalism as a 2019 Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford.

On September 26, The Devil Strip had announced that Horne was taking a “sabbatical.” “Because TDS is run by a dedicated staff and board of directors, fundamentally nothing will change,” the site’s Board of Directors said in a statement at the time.

Horne and The Devil Strip’s board members did not respond to my interview requests. But in a Medium post, “The truth about my sabbatical,” published on September 27, Horne wrote:

I wanted The Devil Strip to become a cooperative because I believe in shared ownership, governance and responsibility, but then I became a roadblock. I wouldn’t let go and let our staff and board do their jobs.

Some of that is my ego. Most of it is mental illness. I’ll unpack that more during my sabbatical, but right now I’ll say the more important The Devil Strip has become to more people, the more pressure I’ve felt not to let anyone down … because I base my self-worth on what I can do for others. […]

My sabbatical is also the co-op’s next step. Just as I have to figure out who I am outside of The Devil Strip, The Devil Strip has to figure out what it is without me. Good news! Our team, our contributors, our board and our member-owners don’t need me because Chris Horne has never been what makes The Devil Strip special. They are.

Julie Cajigas, a professor of practice at the University of Akron, adviser to its student paper, and a co-owner of The Devil Strip, said the publication fills gaps in local news coverage. She recalled a series, “Faces of the Homeless,” that profiled a homeless mother who had a baby about the same age as Cajigas’s baby. “I reached out to that mom and was able to do some things for and with her,” she said. “I feel like [other media outlets] are not telling those stories … to lose something like [The Devil Strip] is really significant to the community.”

In addition to revenue from its members, The Devil Strip had received a total of $589,652 in philanthropic funding as of the end of 2020, according to its Donors page. Some of the larger contributors to that pool of funds included the Knight Foundation, which gave a total of $225,000 as of the end of 2020, and the Lenfest Institute on behalf of the Facebook Journalism Project, which gave $100,000. Any 2021 donations are not listed on The Devil Strip’s site.

This post was updated several times on Tuesday and Wednesday.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/lauded-local-news-co-op-shuts-down-without-warning-leaving-its-co-owners-in-the-dark/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/media-consolidation-and-algorithms-make-facebook-a-bad-place-for-sharing-local-news-study-finds/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/media-consolidation-and-algorithms-make-facebook-a-bad-place-for-sharing-local-news-study-finds/#respond Wed, 13 Oct 2021 13:00:23 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=196652 The combination of local news outlets being bought out by bigger media conglomerates and the ever-present influence of social media in helping spread news seems to have created a new phenomenon, according to a new study: Issues of importance to local audiences are being drowned out in favor of harder-hitting news pieces with national relevance.

The study, published last week in Digital Journalism, was conducted by Benjamin Toff and Nick Mathews, two researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The idea for this research evolved partially because of the treasure trove of data available on the website CrowdTangle, and Toff and Mathews wanting to make use of that. “It occurred to us together that we could use [CrowdTangle] data to examine the degree to which local media engages with readers on social media platforms,” Toff said, adding that the idea took off from there. (It’s probably also good that Toff and Mathews thought to do this work now. Toff told me he is “very concerned” about possible changes at CrowdTangle with its founder and CEO’s departure, as it may curtail access to “one of the few sources of data we as researchers have to what people are interacting with on Facebook.”).

For this study, Toff and Mathews looked at a dataset of nearly 2.5 million Facebook posts that were published by local news organizations in three U.S. states. They chose the three states of Arizona, Minnesota, and Virginia for a couple of reasons. One was background knowledge on the media landscapes: Mathews had previously worked in Virginia and Toff had grown up in Arizona, and as current Minnesota residents, having the context about the local media in these states was important.

The other reason was to find states that weren’t on extreme ends of the news spectrum. “None of them are particularly extreme as far as being really small states [with limited media outlets] or on the other extreme like New York, which has such a dominant media presence,” Toff said.

Once they had a list of media outlets in the three states — along with detailed information about their ownership status and type, such as whether the outlets were owned by a multi-state chain or publicly owned — the researchers analyzed that information along with the millions of Facebook posts to identify any patterns in engagement. (For the purpose of this experiment, Toff and Mathews stuck to total engagement, which was all possible interactions including page follows, and didn’t examine individual interactions such as reactions or comments on Facebook).

They also sorted the posts into categories of hard news and soft news. Hard news stories covered topics such as politics, education, and health, while soft news included sports, arts and leisure , and — because they found so many posts of this variety on Facebook — animals.

The study revealed a few trends:

• Ownership patterns related to activity and engagement on Facebook: “[P]ages owned by publicly traded, multi-state chains were among the most active on the platform,” the study found. These Facebook pages were also “more likely to have higher rates of interactions…on a per post basis than privately owned multi-state chains or pages owned by public or governmental organizations.”
• Outlets owned by chains tended to post more repurposed content, but that led to less engagement: Chain-owned outlets, with more resources and access to the wire service or other sites owned by the same company, had access to more content, which they could use on their own platforms. “The idea is that it allows them to have a wider reach on the platform,” Toff said.
• When it came to the type of news, hard news of national importance won out: Posts about hard news stories, especially on a national level, consistently brought more engagement than the softer, more locally relevant stories. “Even local organizations get more bang for their buck when they post about non-local subjects,” Toff said.

The combined effect: Local news, especially of topics that don’t rise to national importance, may be lost in the shuffle.

Co-author Nick Mathews put it this way on Twitter:

No previous study has provided as extensive empirical evidence on how locally focused news content fares on social media. While we cannot say definitively that social media is “killing” local news, on balance and put mildly Facebook does not appear helpful to its survival.

— Nick Mathews (@Nick_Mathews) October 8, 2021

The study used data from 2018 and 2019, after when Facebook changed its algorithm to emphasize “meaningful social interactions,” so Toff is interested in seeing how these trends may have looked prior to that big change. Anecdotally speaking, Toff said that those changes made it harder for news organizations to get people to see their content.

A harder question to answer now is how much of these trends is driven by variations in people’s attention versus Facebook’s algorithms, since it’s hard to separate the two, Toff said.

Still, Toff said that the findings underscore the frustration often felt by news organizations and how they feel they are held captive by Facebook and other social media platforms. “You gotta go where people are spending time, but there’s so much [about these places] that can’t be controlled,” Toff said. “There’s a lot of hesitancy about becoming overly reliant on companies that have their own interests, ultimately, and they’re not always aligned [with news companies’ interests].”

Photo of Facebook News Feed by Dave Rutt used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/media-consolidation-and-algorithms-make-facebook-a-bad-place-for-sharing-local-news-study-finds/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/local-news-blues-the-employees-of-small-newspapers-see-a-bleak-future-this-survey-says/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/local-news-blues-the-employees-of-small-newspapers-see-a-bleak-future-this-survey-says/#respond Thu, 07 Oct 2021 16:46:00 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=196588 Small newspapers, with circulations under 50,000, make up the vast majority of newspapers in the U.S. And the majority of their employees are pessimistic about these papers’ futures, a report out Thursday from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows.

Researchers Damian Radcliffe and Ryan Wallace conducted their survey online between August 4, 2020, and September 8, 2020; the researchers received 324 usable responses “from a mix of editors, reporters, publishers, and other roles” at print newspapers with circulations below 50,000. It follows up on a similar survey conducted in 2016 … except that one was quite a bit more optimistic.

“Small-market newspapers” make up more than 97% of all newspapers in the U.S., Radcliffe and Christopher Ali have estimated in their previous research. In this survey, respondents came from news outlets in 44 states; “the greatest number of respondents came from Oregon (10%), Kentucky (9%), California (8%), Virginia (6%), and New York (6%),” and about two-thirds of respondents identified as reporters or editors.

The vast majority of respondents (82%) were white, despite what the report’s authors describe as “significant efforts … to contact professional journalism organizations that work with media employees from different backgrounds.” Thirty-six percent of respondents said they’d been working in local media for 20 years or more.

A quarter of respondents worked at family-owned papers, followed by major chains such as Gannett and Hearst (18%).

Among the findings:

— The overall trends are depressing.

Sixty-one percent of respondents held a “slightly negative” or “very negative” opinion about the prospects for the future of small-market newspapers. Four years ago, the situation (to our surprise) was reversed, with 61 percent of 2016’s sample being “very positive” or “slightly positive” about the future of their industry.

Forty-three percent of those surveyed “said they felt less secure in their jobs than at the beginning of the Covid crisis” (compared to 31% who felt no change and 11% who felt more secure). Almost all the survey respondents said they work 40 hours or more per week; 37% said they work 50 to 60 hours a week. And 49% of respondents said that over the past three years, “the number of stories they personally produce in an average week has increased.”

And many respondents thought their newsrooms were doing a poor job of making their staffs more racially diverse. (Remember that 82% of this survey’s respondents were white.) Forty-three percent of respondents said they disagreed with the statement “My news organization is doing a good job with racial diversity,” with the rest mixed between agreeing, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and not knowing/not answering.

(One respondent: “My paper is owned by Alden Capital. The only diversity it is interested in is mixing up the models of BMWs the executives drive to work on any given day.”)

— Print still plays a pretty big role in respondents’ work. More than half work with both print and digital output, but “where respondents work on a single channel, they are more likely to be focused on print (27% vs. only 11% that are digital-only in their role).”

More than a quarter (27%) of respondents said they “dedicate more time to print products than they did three years ago.”

Not surprisingly, 57% of respondents said “their focus on digital products and tasks had increased.”

— (Almost) everyone became a Covid reporter. Almost three-quarters of respondents (74%) said they had “been involved in Covid-19 reporting”; most respondents (58%) hadn’t covered health or science previously.

Despite the additional work that Covid created — 36% of respondents said that they worked more hours during the pandemic than previously — many also felt it was an opportunity for local news. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they were satisfied with how their paper covered the pandemic.

“Our readership has exploded since Covid,” one respondent wrote, “and we believe it’s due to how local our coverage is.”

“People recognize local papers’ coverage can be more relevant than national outlets,” another respondent wrote.

— Competition from social media, from TV, from life.

“People think that they don’t need to read a newspaper because they saw some headlines on the internet or they follow the local gossip Facebook page.”

“Facebook comments can be genuinely detrimental to a paper, through ways such as troll posts and people copy-pasting paywalled articles in the comments.”

“It’s been difficult for us to keep our readers interested, especially in our long-form, investigative pieces, which also cost the most money and time. In an age of quick-hit news, promoting those pieces upon which alt-weeklies are built has been a particular challenge, and we’re having to shift to a more daily-like model for our digital content.

The attention span for long, investigative pieces just isn’t there, especially if it’s ‘bad’ news, like the kind dealing with systemic racism, environmental injustice, corruption in government. … It’s all so important, but it’s depressing in large quantities. Everyone has information fatigue these days, and we just can’t get readers to invest in those important stories.”

— Who wants to work at local papers? There is some sense in the survey that jobs at local newspapers are not appealing.

“So much gloom and doom has circulated about small towns and about newspapers that no one is willing to work for them,” one respondent said.

Another:

“It seems like all young journalists want to work in NY or DC. The position I filled was open for six months before they hired me, and the salary is well above average for an entry-level journalist.”

Another:

“Much of this goes back to monetary resources being scarce, but I’m surprised by the lack of applicants whenever a position perfect for an entry-level reporter was posted. With eight public universities in our state I’d be lucky to get one applicant per graduating class.”

Another slightly different but related issue:

“The main disconnect between our staff and our readers is not politics, race, gender, or even where we are ‘from’ (about half our newsroom grew up here). It’s age. Our readers are old, older, and oldest, and usually there’s a 40- to 50-year age difference between our reporters and our readers. That’s a difference in perspective and outlook that’s hard to overcome.”

There’s more on digital tools, social networking, remote work, and other interesting stuff in the full report here.

Photo by armin djuhic on Unsplash.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/local-news-blues-the-employees-of-small-newspapers-see-a-bleak-future-this-survey-says/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/chicago-public-media-is-exploring-a-deal-to-acquire-the-chicago-sun-times/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/chicago-public-media-is-exploring-a-deal-to-acquire-the-chicago-sun-times/#respond Thu, 30 Sep 2021 20:48:11 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=196434 Chicago Public Media, home of NPR station WBEZ, could change the fate of one of the city’s two daily newspapers.

On Wednesday, Chicago Public Media’s board of directors signed off on a “non-binding letter of intent” to pursue the acquisition of the Chicago Sun-Times, the second largest newspaper in circulation in the city after the Chicago Tribune.

If a deal is finalized, it would make the Sun-Times a subsidiary of Chicago Public Media, WBEZ reported, and “create one of the largest local nonprofit news organizations in the nation and be a national model for the future of local journalism.”

While the Sun-Times wouldn’t be the first American newspaper to explore the non-profit route, this may be the first time a public media outlet has offered to help one.

The Chicago Sun-Times could be one of the best-known newspapers to give up the pursuit of profit, under a plan that would see it become a subsidiary of NPR-affiliated Chicago Public Media. https://t.co/y94CQiklRE

— Kevin McDougald (@kevinmcdougald) September 30, 2021

As Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy points out, it’s unclear what the tax status of the Sun-Times would be under this deal. Non-profits aren’t allowed to endorse political candidates, for example, and whether or not those matter is a separate question, but it’s a long-held newspaper tradition that the Sun-Times also participates in. Still, Kennedy was optimistic about the announcement, writing that he hopes “it becomes a model for what might take place elsewhere.”

“Public radio (and/or television) in many markets is in a good position to pick up the slack if the legacy newspaper starts getting squeezed by corporate ownership,” Kennedy told me in an email. “They already have a high profile in the community and have a fundraising apparatus in place.”

So far, financial support for this deal would come from Sun-Times investor Michael Sacks, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, though how much hasn’t been disclosed. Chicago Public Media CEO Matt Moog said that individual donations would also be a form of revenue in this partnership, which WBEZ already receives as a nonprofit.

WBEZ and the Sun-Times’ joint statement said that both news outlets would operate independently and continue to serve their respective audiences, but that they would “broaden their impact” by sharing each other’s content across their platforms (i.e. WBEZ republishing print stories, the Sun-Times sharing or collaborating on podcasts, co-hosting future community events).

I really hope details of how content sharing and workflows get ironed out soon for both newsrooms’ sake. Each create unique and vital content. The pre-Zell era of Tribune “synergy” was supposed to share content for Trib, WGN, others.
https://t.co/ndxBh1WcLL

— Elliott Ramos (@ChicagoEl) September 30, 2021

Moog and Chicago Sun-Times CEO Nykia Wright both said that there were no plans to reduce or lay off staff in this deal, and it would instead be an opportunity to expand both newsrooms.

Fascinating development out of Chicago (and h/t to ⁦@RobertFeder⁩ on the scoop)
Can’t imagine ⁦@WBEZ⁩ agreeing to absorb future print losses, so wonder if ⁦@Suntimes⁩ might go all digital? https://t.co/Y6lVLhcV55

— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel) September 29, 2021

Should the deal go through, it would be the fourth time the Sun-Times has changed ownership since 2009.

Somewhat similar deals have taken place in other cities. In 2018, WNYC in New York, KPCC in Los Angeles, and WAMU in Washington D.C. acquired digital news sites Gothamist, LAist, and DCist, respectively. In 2019, Colorado Public Radio acquired Denverite.

But acquiring a print newspaper is different, stressed Chris Krewson, executive editor of LION — who struck a note of caution about the deal. “The overhead of the new digital newsrooms tends to be exponentially smaller; this is pretty key, in my mind,” he wrote me in an email. “If you were going to start a nonprofit organization to serve a city or region in the year of our lord 2021, why on Earth would it look anything like a metro daily newspaper?”

The Chicago Sun-Times, post-bankruptcy, was losing $4.5M per year in May 2017.

It later sold to local investors for $1… three years before Covid took roughly a quarter of most newspapers' circulation.

"This isn't a fire sale," though.https://t.co/81dIXsoEd3

— Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) September 30, 2021

“I saw far too little in this announcement about what Chicago needs, news and information-wise, and a whole lot of optimism around what, essentially, has already been sold for the sum total of its obligations,” Krewson said.

As a lifelong Chicagoan who happily grew up in a two newspaper town and now works daily with every news outlet in Chicago, I’d say this is the best damn news that Chicago journalism has had in a long time. Bravo @Suntimes and @WBEZ https://t.co/27lyCo3i8R

— Becky Carroll (@beckycarroll7) September 30, 2021

Hoping this @WBEZ takeover not only helps keep the @Suntimes afloat but also inspires it to continue working on diversity. As others have pointed out, white men still make most of the editorial decisions there while WBEZ has a team that better represents the city it covers. https://t.co/vhzPPRS5wC

— Jennifer Schulze (@NewsJennifer) September 30, 2021

Chicago Sun-Times building by Don Harder used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/chicago-public-media-is-exploring-a-deal-to-acquire-the-chicago-sun-times/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/tuning-out-after-your-party-wins-local-election-results-and-local-news-consumption-are-linked-a-study-finds/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/tuning-out-after-your-party-wins-local-election-results-and-local-news-consumption-are-linked-a-study-finds/#respond Thu, 30 Sep 2021 16:02:43 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=196312 One of the surprising effects of a local election — specifically a gubernatorial election — seems to be that the demand for the local newspaper associated with the winning candidate’s party goes down after the election. Or so a new study finds.

The work builds on previous research from Allison Archer, an assistant professor in the University of Houston’s Department of Political Science and the university’s Valenti School of Communication. As part of her graduate course work, Archer found that demand for newspapers affiliated with a winning presidential candidate — newspapers that lean in the direction of the candidate’s political party — goes down after the candidate wins the election. “A lot of research on media is about how it might affect public opinion or election choices,” said Archer. “But this is thinking about that relationship in a different way, about how politics might affect us [in media] and media demand.”

[Read: When local newspapers shrink, fewer people bother to run for mayor]

The study, published last week in American Politics Research, was done in collaboration with Joshua Darr, an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. Darr, who heard Archer speak about her research on presidential elections and local newspapers at a talk, was intrigued and wondered if a similar effect would be found for gubernatorial elections. Presumably, they thought, elections for state governors could show a more direct impact on local newspaper demand, given the more local nature of these contests. “Gubernatorial elections often are associated with different people gaining or losing their jobs, and different programs being implemented or disabled,” Darr said.

So, they set out to find out. They submitted several interlibrary loan requests, Darr said, to find 70 years’ worth of circulation data about local newspapers in Virginia and New Jersey. They chose these two states because they are the only ones in the U.S. that have gubernatorial elections in years without a Congressional election or a Presidential election.

What they found was that, regardless of political party, if a particular candidate won the governor’s seat, that person’s affiliated newspaper saw subscriptions go down after the election.

Why? “One potential explanation is anxiety of a loss,” Archer said. “Anxiety in general increases information-seeking.” So, those who were rooting for the losing candidate might be motivated to increase their media consumption in order to better inform themselves for the next time around or for possible explanations for why this happened.

“People get interested in the election and get an emotional or psychological benefit from their side winning,” Darr said. At the same time, if you’re on the winning side, “You might disengage relative to those with the opposing party, which now feels threatened,” and therefore more likely to plug back in. It’s similar to how MSNBC saw a surge in viewership after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Darr explained, or how Fox News experienced a rise in viewership during the first years of the Barack Obama presidency.

One of the other findings, however, was not so immune to political affiliation: Demand for independent newspapers seemed to surge following a Democratic candidate’s gubernatorial win, and the shift also occurred largely among Democrats.

“They’re not seeking out partisan affiliate newspapers as much, but it’s not like their interest is completely dead,” Archer said. And while this study didn’t measure this, the trend seems consistent with other findings that have more broadly found that Republicans don’t seem as interested in mainstream news as Democrats. “And that’s why there might be some of these partisan signals and patterns,” Archer suggested.

In some ways, this study is largely historical in nature because the data included only go up to 2005, before the decimation of local newspapers began in earnest. In 2021, few communities have two local newspapers. “It’s hard to say how the study’s findings would translate to today’s landscape,” Darr said. But, he and Archer suggest in the paper, hyperpartisan local news sites could be a future area of focus.

Future research could examine if newspaper content—in print and online—shifts to retain or attract new audiences following a gubernatorial transition. In-depth interviews or surveys of editors and journalists could also be conducted to assess news professionals’ awareness of these dynamics. And as the local media landscape continues to become more populated with partisan news websites, future work examining how state-level elections affect consumption of these local partisan outlets will be needed.

Photo by Anke Van Boxstael used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/tuning-out-after-your-party-wins-local-election-results-and-local-news-consumption-are-linked-a-study-finds/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/covid-sinclair-broadcasting-and-changing-job-roles-5-recent-studies-on-the-state-of-local-tv-news/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/covid-sinclair-broadcasting-and-changing-job-roles-5-recent-studies-on-the-state-of-local-tv-news/#respond Wed, 29 Sep 2021 23:42:28 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=196332 There is no shortage of surveys indicating many Americans don’t trust the news media. The U.S. registers the lowest levels of trust in news out of 46 countries included in the 2021 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

But for many in the U.S., the medium matters, and local TV news remains among the most trusted ways Americans get their news. When it comes to local politics, coronavirus information and weather forecasts, more Americans turn to local TV than any other news medium, according to the Reuters Institute report, based on a YouGov survey of more than 92,000 news consumers.

That means the judgment of local TV news directors, producers and reporters shapes not only the information viewers absorb, but how they interpret what’s happening in their communities and nationally.

“It is not simply the case that only outlets like Fox News or MSNBC persuade viewers — so can local news, at least with certain types of content,” University of Pennsylvania political scientist Matthew Levendusky writes in an April 2021 paper discussed below.

With stories like Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy, everyday financial stress, and school reopenings playing out in different ways across different communities, TV continues to be an important source of reliable, relevant information — so we wanted to see what the research had to say about the state of local TV news.

Rural residents exposed to big city TV news more likely to follow Covid safety guidance

The effect of big-city news on rural America during the Covid-19 Pandemic. By Eunji Kim, Michael Shepherd and Joshua Clinton, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2020.

Research published in September 2020 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals the importance of local television news on how people perceive Covid-19 safety guidance.

“For some rural residents, their local news often focuses on urban communities with issues quite different from their own,” the authors write. They offer Sullivan and Delaware counties in upstate New York as examples. Sullivan County residents get their local news from New York City-based affiliates. Delaware County, just north of Sullivan, gets local news from TV stations in Binghamton, a city of 45,000.

“Largely by chance, depending on where they live, otherwise similar rural residents receive their local news from stations located in cities experiencing substantially different versions of the Covid-19 outbreak,” the authors write. They examine stats from mobility data firm cuebiq on the percentage of residents in 771 rural counties across the country who stayed home during the first week of April 2020.

They also surveyed 9,081 residents from 705 of those counties on their efforts to social distance, their media consumption and concerns about Covid-19. All respondents were white, in order to avoid “differences due to race and ethnicity,” the authors write. The overall racial makeups of the counties studied were 85% to 90% white on average.

Rural residents exposed to local news from a top-25 media market reached were more likely to social distance than those outside of a top-100 media market. Top-25 media markets, ranked by the number of households reached, include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas. Rural residents in top-25 TV news zones were more likely to say they wore a mask outside during the period studied and more likely to stay home, except for trips to buy food. The authors note that political ideology remains a stronger predictor of whether someone followed pandemic health and safety guidance.

“Our results show that rural individuals who may have otherwise been predisposed to be less likely to engage in social distancing during the Covid-19 outbreak are more likely to do so than similar rural individuals because they happen to receive their local television news from one of the more impacted cities,” they conclude.

How local is local TV news? The influence of Sinclair Broadcasting

As University of Virginia media studies professor Christopher Ali notes in a recent book chapter, it’s no longer the norm that “broadcasters should be responsible to, and reflective of, their communities of license,” with the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates broadcast TV, having left it over the past three decades “to broadcasters, and not the regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of public policy, to ensure local communities are served.”

To that end, it’s impossible to discuss local TV news without mentioning Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s biggest owner of local TV news stations. The company has major network affiliates including Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC in 86 of 210 local markets as of June 2021, according to the company’s most recent quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

How does local TV News change viewers’ attitudes? The case of Sinclair Broadcasting. By Matthew Levendusky in Political Communication, April 2021.

By the mid-2010s, many Sinclair stations were located in key presidential battleground states, helping to consolidate the company’s influence as a national political powerhouse. As Levendusky explains in his April 2021 paper, local news programming on Sinclair stations “focuses more on national topics, and presents them with a right-wing slant.”

But in March 2021 the pandemic had halted local ad revenue and the company announced layoffs of 5% of its workforce.

While local TV news reporters have traditionally covered local stories, Levendusky explores how Sinclair’s station acquisitions from 2008 to 2018 bubbled up to national politics — specifically, viewers’ perceptions of President Barack Obama.

He writes that Sinclair “embraces the ‘cable newsification’ of local news, where local news comes to look more like the partisan outlets on cable,” concluding that “when Sinclair buys a local TV station, there is no effect on viewers’ underlying predispositions, such as their partisanship or their liberal-conservative self-identification. But their approval of President Obama decreases, and they become less likely to vote for Democratic presidential candidates as well.”

Local news and national politics. By Gregory Martin and Joshua McCrain in American Political Science Review, February 2019.

Likewise, a February 2019 paper in the American Political Science Review explores how news content changed at 10 stations Sinclair acquired in early September 2017.

The authors analyze transcripts of 7.41 million 2.5-minute segments from 743 local news stations across the country during the last eight months of 2017, finding that “Sinclair-owned stations consistently spend more time on average on national politics and less on local politics.”

The stations Sinclair bought in 2017 on average spent 25% more time covering national politics than the sample average through the end of the year, at the expense of local political coverage. Those new Sinclair stations also adopted a more conservative slant relative to other stations in their markets, the authors find.

The authors also measure change in viewership following a change in ownership.

“If anything, viewers prefer the more locally focused and ideologically neutral coverage to the more nationally focused and ideologically conservative coverage,” the authors write. “Existing Sinclair stations acquired prior to 2017 see significantly lower viewership for their news broadcasts compared with other stations operating in the same market, paying a ratings penalty of about one percentage point.”

The changing work of local TV journalists

Follow the leader? Optimism and efficacy on solo journalism of local television journalists and news directors. By Justin Blankenship and Daniel Riffe in Journalism Practice, December 2019.

Journalists at news organizations of all sizes and across all media have for years been asked to do more with fewer financial and staff resources.

Communication researchers often explain that this has increasingly resulted in reporters taking on “solo journalism” projects.

As the authors of a December 2019 paper in Journalism Practice put it: “Solo journalism is the work practice in which a single reporter is expected to gather information, write, shoot video, and edit their news stories on their own.”

From December 2015 to March 2016, the authors surveyed 159 local news station directors across the country and 222 reporters working at those stations to understand the effectiveness of solo journalism at TV newsrooms.

The authors initially sent surveys to 396 directors in 209 market areas, with 40% of directors completing the survey. Among the journalists, 1,856 surveys were sent with a 12% response rate. Of the news directors, 17% worked at stations in a top-30 market; 20% worked at medium-sized stations, ranked from 31 to 70 in market size; and 63% were at small stations, from 71 to 210 in market size.

As for the journalists, 12% worked in a large market, 47% were in a medium-sized market, and 41% were in a small market. About half of journalists and roughly one-quarter of news directors were women.

More than 90% of news directors reported they had some solo journalists on staff, while 60% of journalists said they sometimes worked as solo journalists. Both agreed solo journalism represented “the future” of TV news, with journalists more likely to feel solo journalism is bad for the industry and its rise “mostly due to economic reasons.”

“As the ‘decision makers’ in the newsroom in several respects, it is incumbent on [news directors] to understand the unique challenges that solo journalism presents and make sure that reporters have the support they need to succeed,” the authors write. “They should also understand that their news staff may not share the same perception of solo journalism as they do. Effectively communicating that the reason that more solo journalists are being hired (whether it is fully economic or not) and finding ways to demonstrate the advantages of the work practice will likely help increase morale and motivation.”

News work: The impact of corporate-implemented technology on local television newsroom labor. By Carey Higgins-Dobney in Journalism Practice, May 2020.

In addition to doing more with less, TV journalists are often expected to incorporate new technologies into their work with an eye toward maximizing profits for conglomerate owners, explains Carey Higgins-Dobney, a communications professor at California State University, Fresno, in a May 2020 paper in Journalism Practice.

“Field equipment is smaller, lighter, and able to be linked to a station via cell phone, allowing one person the physical ability, although no extra time, to do the jobs previously completed by two or three, eliminating the ‘need’ for photographers and engineers,” writes Higgins-Dobney.

In late 2016 and early 2019, Higgins-Dobney gathered initial survey responses from 81 TV news employees, followed by hourlong interviews with 32 TV news employees, some of whom also took the survey. All participants worked at stations in top-25 markets. Survey takers and interviewees included producers, reporters, writers, editors, engineers and other on-air and behind-the-scenes TV newsroom employees.

Of those who took the survey, 83% said they were producing stories or providing technical support for more newscasts than they had previously. Of those, 71% had not seen a pay bump and 10% had taken a pay cut since their workloads increased.

“Beyond their paychecks, concerns of journalistic integrity, accuracy, and professionalism abound as they complete more duties for more information platforms than ever before while learning new corporate-implemented technologies and juggling the duties of consolidated, and often changing, job descriptions,” Higgins-Dobney writes.

One producer interviewed called it a “classic newsroom sink or swim. We’re going to throw it in there, give you a minimal explanation and hope it works.” Inside the studio, respondents indicated “solo crew production” through automated systems was common.

While the survey and interviews were not meant to be representative of everyone working in local TV news, Higgins-Dobney concludes that the responses paint “a picture of how much those covering the largest cities in the United States are juggling an ever-growing load of job responsibilities while providing relevant information to the communities they serve while lacking input on the tools they use to do so.”

Clark Merrefield is a senior editor at The Journalist’s Resource. This article is republished from The Journalist’s Resource under a Creative Commons license.

Photo by Sven Scheuermeier on Unsplash.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/covid-sinclair-broadcasting-and-changing-job-roles-5-recent-studies-on-the-state-of-local-tv-news/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/07/i-have-to-come-to-bury-knewz-not-to-praise-it/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/07/i-have-to-come-to-bury-knewz-not-to-praise-it/#respond Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:00:22 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=194390 Knewz is dead, and shame on anyone who bought even a sliver of the hype. It’s standard marketing practice to pump up your new product — revolutionary! transformative! — but Knewz set a new bar for empty boasts backed by product nonsense.

For those of you blessedly unfamiliar, this terribly titled site was a dull knewz, er, news aggregator from Knewz, um, News Corp, first teased in 2019 and launched 18 months ago. What was its angle? Here’s the press release from its launch, reduced and rendered as PR blank verse, the poetry of bad ideas.

The thing is, News Corp knows how to get “more leverage in its relationship with Google and other platforms.” It’s the oldest publisher m.o.: Gain enough power through your editorial page and news slant to convince politicians it’s easier to do your bidding than to cross you. Hey, it just worked out great in Australia! (Said News Corp CEO Robert Thomson: “Particular thanks are certainly due to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Rod Sims and his able team, along with the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who have stood firm for their country and for journalism.”)

“News will be transformed by Knewz”

Eighteen months later, I think we know how this one turned out.

Look, if you want to make a mediocre conservative news aggregator, make a mediocre conservative news aggregator! If you want to make OnlyFans and teachers behaving badly your core beats, fine! But don’t cloak it in fairy tales about fighting the platforms and helping the little guy and battling clickbait and bias.

1. In the comments, please leave your own take on what Dow Jones CEO Robert Thomson is saying here. Is “nous” used here in the “term from classical philosophy for the faculty of the human mind necessary for understanding what is true or real” sense? Is it the French nous, meaning “we”? If, presumably, it’s the former: British pronunciation or American? Is “nous” supposed to rhyme with “Knewz”/”news” or “house“? Or has Knewz been pronounced “nowss” all this time? Thomson is Australian, if that helps.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/07/i-have-to-come-to-bury-knewz-not-to-praise-it/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/the-great-unbundling-of-local-news/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/the-great-unbundling-of-local-news/#respond Wed, 30 Jun 2021 14:05:02 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=194223 Traditional local news sources, especially local newspapers, used to bundle news and information on a whole range of local topics. Local politics comes first to mind. But they have also covered stories that help build community, featuring local people who participate in local sports and local events, in addition to providing information such as weather forecasts, traffic updates, or shop opening hours. In the last year, local news has also been tremendously important in covering the local consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.

This bundle of some hard news, some soft news, and other information was a major selling point in the past. Even if people didn’t care that much about local politics, they had to get the local paper if they wanted to know where to go, what to do, or what jobs were available in the area. But as this year’s Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows, audiences no longer think that the local paper is the best source for most of this.

[Read: Many people worldwide say they’re losing interest in news … but more are paying for it]

The survey data was collected in January and February 2021. The survey looked at the local topics people are interested in across 38 markets and also at the sources they think are best at providing this information.

The study started out by asking people which local topics they had accessed in the last week. Out of a list of 15 topics, coronavirus updates and the weather were sought after most in every market. Local politics ranked third, but only a third of respondents saying they looked for it. Self-reported access to local political news was highest in Romania (45%) and Norway (43%) and lowest in the UK (17%) and Japan (18%). In the U.S., local news about crime was on par with local politics, with about a third saying they looked for either either. Access rates were lower for all other topics, with never much more than 25% accessing them, except in a few countries where local news is generally stronger (like some Scandinavian countries).

When asked which source was best for the selected local topics, no single source came out strong across all. Rather, people’s preferences varied strongly depending on the type of information they were looking for. Traditional sources are often considered best for politics, crime, and the economy, and the local newspaper remained unrivaled when it came to local announcements. However, a majority of respondents preferred to rely on social media and search when it came to finding local jobs, housing, or information on shops and restaurants.

This picture varied slightly when we looked at individual markets, but the digital disruption was visible even in stronger local news markets like Norway, where 45% are paying for digital news and out of those 57% pay for one or more local outlets in digital form. The United Kingdom is among the markets where traditional sources struggle the most. There, social, search and other websites were preferred by half (and often much more than half) of the respondents across the 15 topics placed in the survey. And among those that subscribe to digital news in the UK, just 3% subscribe to a local newspaper.

In the United States, we saw a somewhat different pattern, partly due to the strength of local television, which respondents saw as the best source for both local politics and coronavirus information. Only 21% of our U.S. respondents still felt newspapers were best placed to provide information about things to do. RISJ found that 21% of U.S. respondents subscribed to some form of digital news; of those, less than a quarter (23%) were paying for a local newspaper.

While the local newspaper used to solve problems and performed many jobs for readers, many users now find that other sources are better able to fill these roles. The data lays bare a great unbundling of local news that undermines traditional business models and underlines the importance of a much clearer value proposition for local news media companies that want to stand out from the many alternative sources of local information available today.

According to the “jobs to be done" theory formulated by the late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, people don’t buy products for the sake of buying them, but only to solve a problem they have. Our data suggests that traditional local news media could focus on critically covering local politics, health, and businesses as people still consider them the best source for these. Doubling down on a few things, rather than trying to provide information on all topics we asked about, could help channel resources and avoid potentially investing in audiences that have since turned to specialized providers that do only one thing, but do it very well.

This won’t be easy in the current financial environment, but it is critically important to avoid a situation where local governments and local politicians are not subject to scrutiny from local media. While it might be less of an issue that the local paper is no longer considered the best source for the weather, it will be crucial for local journalism and local communities to not lose the battle over political information.

Anne Schulz is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. She is researching questions surrounding news audiences and digital news with a focus on local news, social media, news literacy, and trust.

Photo by armin djuhic on Unsplash.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/the-great-unbundling-of-local-news/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/05/the-local-news-crisis-will-be-solved-one-community-at-a-time/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/05/the-local-news-crisis-will-be-solved-one-community-at-a-time/#respond Wed, 26 May 2021 14:54:30 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=193319 Local journalism is in crisis. “America’s local news has reached its death spiral phase” proclaimed the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018. Two years later, an oft-cited study out of the University of North Carolina found that some 2,100 community newspapers had ceased publishing since 2004, leaving the country with large swaths of “news deserts” — areas that are unserved by any local news source.

But though the collapse of community journalism is real enough, we believe that its causes are only partly understood. Researchers generally focus on the changes wrought by technology over the past quarter-century — changes that tell an important story, but not the whole story.

It’s true that classified ads offered by Craigslist, a mostly free service, wiped out what had accounted for about 40% of newspaper revenues overnight. And yes, Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising, leaving news organizations to fight over scraps.

Our view, though, is that these challenges would be manageable if it weren’t for corporate greed. Starting in the 1970s, publicly traded chains began taking over newspapers, extracting massive profits and cutting back on coverage, leaving the business unprepared for the deluge that was to come. More recently, hedge funds have moved in, bleeding newspapers of their last remaining revenues rather than investing in the future. Compounding all this is that, in many cases, corporate owners take on massive amounts of debt to build their chains and then extract revenues from their newspapers to pay it down.

The Covid-19 pandemic, whose end in the U.S. may finally be coming into view, resulted in further layoffs, furloughs, and closures, according to the Poynter Institute.

Yet even in the midst of this carnage, innovative, independent local news organizations are serving their communities and providing them with the news and information citizens need to govern themselves in a democracy. Examples include nonprofit startups, news co-ops and even old-fashioned newspapers that are reinventing themselves under local leaders who bought them back from chain owners.

We plan to report on these and other projects in a book tentatively titled What Works: The Future of Local News, to be published by Beacon Press in the second half of 2023. We hope to show that there are alternatives to the decline of local news, and that entrepreneurial journalists are charting a path that others may follow. A few examples:

• When a group of Twin Cities journalists, many of whom had been laid off or pushed out of traditional newsrooms, launched MinnPost in 2007, they envisioned a fast-twitch website that would trounce the sinking Star Tribune with wide-ranging scoops throughout the day. Set up as a nonprofit, nonpartisan enterprise, MinnPost was initially funded by four philanthropically minded local families. More foundation funding followed, as did a public radio-style membership model that brings in money from readers and from ticketed events. Then the unexpected happened: red-hot competition from none other than The Star Tribune, which had been purchased by a local billionaire sports mogul. So MinnPost pivoted, shifting from a fairly traditional news bundle to a site devoted to longform narrative, analysis and investigations focused on politics, policy and culture. MinnPost holds lessons for digital sites in search of a viable business model and a permanent foothold in a competitive local news environment — and shows that an entrepreneurial ethos and willingness to experiment can help keep the flame of local journalism alive.
• In the fall of 2016, two young journalists who had left their low-paying jobs at the twice-weekly, hedge fund–owned Willits News flipped the switch at their new venture: The Mendocino Voice, a website with the ambitious goal of covering rural Mendocino County, California. Over the past four and a half years, publisher Kate Maxwell and managing editor Adrian Fernandez Baumann have won attention for their up-to-the-minute reporting on wildfires and earthquakes, their in-depth video interviews with local political candidates, and civic initiatives such as a Super Tuesday party at a brew pub in Ukiah, the county seat, just before the pandemic-induced shutdown. Now they are taking a bold new step: They are reorganizing as a cooperatively owned news project, handing over governance to their audience and what they hope will be a growing corps of journalists. “We are going to be owned by our readers and our staff,” Maxwell told the gathering on Super Tuesday. “We think that’s the best way to be sustainable and locally owned.”
• For nearly 16 years, the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit website, has been providing exhaustive coverage of issues such as school reform, neighborhood development and local politics. Founded by alt-weekly veteran Paul Bass, the Independent was the principal subject of Kennedy’s 2013 book, The Wired City. Since then, the Independent has morphed into a multimedia, multiethnic powerhouse. Whereas the first iteration comprised a small, all-white staff covering a city that was one-third African American, the current staff better reflects New Haven’s diversity. Moreover, in 2015 the Independent launched a low-power FM radio station, WNHH, encompassing a wide variety of voices from throughout the community — including Mubarakah Ibrahim, who hosts a morning show. “I bring the diverse lens of being Muslim, being a woman, being African American,” Ibrahim said as the station was getting off the ground, “and so all of that, I think, lends me a different version of how reality intersects for me and for people like me.” The Independent’s long-standing partnership with the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz Hispana Connecticut provides a bridge to the city’s Latino community as well.

Elsewhere, unfortunately, corporations and hedge funds continue to hack away at the infrastructure of local news. In late 2019, two behemoths, Gannett Co. and GateHouse Media, merged to form a chain controlling about 500 papers across the country — most of them the sort of news outlets that are vital for informing their communities about goings-on at city hall, in public schools, and across neighborhoods. Even though both chains had been cutting for years, it was soon revealed that the new Gannett would be looking to slash at least another $400 million.

Earlier this month came even worse news. The hedge fund Alden Global Capital, already notorious for its devastating cuts at papers like The Denver Post and The Mercury News of San Jose, will boost its share of Tribune Publishing from 32 percent to 100 percent. Tribune owns some of our most storied newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Daily News of New York and The Baltimore Sun.

Long before the financialization of the newspaper business, journalism was not seen as a route for wealthy people to get wealthier. Rather, it was an opportunity for people to serve their communities while making a decent living. The projects we plan to write about will, we hope, inspire others who live in areas that are either unserved or underserved by news organizations.

There is a better way, and we intend to tell that story.

Ellen Clegg is the retired editorial-page editor of The Boston Globe, a science journalist and the author of two books: ChemoBrain and The Alzheimer’s Solution. Dan Kennedy is a professor of journalism at Northeastern University, a contributor at GBH News and the author of two books about the future of news: The Wired City and The Return of the Moguls.

Photo of mailboxes by Dave Wilson used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/05/the-local-news-crisis-will-be-solved-one-community-at-a-time/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/04/maybe-just-shut-up-about-national-politics-if-you-want-to-reduce-polarization/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/04/maybe-just-shut-up-about-national-politics-if-you-want-to-reduce-polarization/#respond Thu, 01 Apr 2021 15:47:59 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=191772 It’s Thanksgiving 2021, and thanks to the magic of vaccines, you’re celebrating it back in your hometown with your family. What a wonderful occasion — threatened only by the annual potential for you and Uncle Theo to get into fights about gun control, abortion, Donald Trump, “illegals,” and (in odd years) pedophile cannibals and the true meaning of “pizza.”

Your family is polarized about some big issues. How should you deal with it over turkey and stuffing?

Ⓐ — Spend some time in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving watching Fox News and researching who Dan Bongino is, the better to understand your uncle’s point of view.

Ⓑ — Spend that time instead reading left-wing Twitter and preparing several dozen devastating owns with which to counter your uncle’s expected arguments.

Ⓒ — Organize a structured dialogue in which you and your uncle have uninterrupted times to express their views in a clear way, focusing on your shared humanity and the fact that you both want what’s best for the country.

Ⓓ — Just shut up about national politics and talk about, well, anything else: the weather, the weird cousin in Ohio you all hate, football, how the mall you used to hang out in is really sad now. Anything else.

Efforts to reduce political polarization in America have often looked a lot like Ⓐ, Ⓑ, and Ⓒ.

Ⓐ presumes the problem is the echo chamber. You and your uncle each consume too much news that aligns with your viewpoints, and exposure to the other side’s arguments will give you a new appreciation for them.

Ⓑ presumes the problem is a lack of facts and fact-checking. The reason your uncle doesn’t agree with you is that he’s been told a bunch of lies, and if you can only show him the truth, debate-style, you can come to a new understanding. (He thinks the same thing about you, by the way.)

Ⓒ presumes the problem is the absence of humane contact. You spend too much time around people who agree with you about everything, and that’s led you to reduce the other side to a caricature. Get in the same room with some agreed-upon ground rules and talk it out — you’ll realize it’s a person on the other side of the aisle, not an ideology.

Those are all fine and good. But what are you actually going to do if you want to lower the temperature at Thanksgiving? Probably option Ⓓ: You’re probably just going to shut the hell up about national politics. It’s the one subject that gets everyone’s motor revving, so just talk about something else.

Some new research out this week suggests that, for all the high-minded good intentions behind those other strategies, shut the hell up about national politics can actually reduce political polarization — not just at a dinner table, but in an entire community.

That’s according to a new short (68 pages) book called Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization. (It’s free to download until April 21, so grab that PDF.) The authors are LSU’s Joshua Darr, Colorado State’s Matthew Whitt, and Texas A&M’s Johanna Dunaway. Here’s the abstract:

Local newspapers can hold back the rising tide of political division in America by turning away from the partisan battles in Washington and focusing their opinion page on local issues.

When a local newspaper in California dropped national politics from its opinion page, the resulting space filled with local writers and issues. We use a pre-registered analysis plan to show that after this quasi-experiment, politically engaged people did not feel as far apart from members of the opposing party, compared to those in a similar community whose newspaper did not change.

While it may not cure all of the imbalances and inequities in opinion journalism, an opinion page that ignores national politics could help local newspapers push back against political polarization.

The local California paper in question is The Desert Sun, the Gannett paper in Palm Springs. On June 7, 2019, executive editor Julie Makinen announced the opinion pages would be “taking a summer vacation from national politics”:

For the month of July, we’re taking a break from all the machinations of Washington and putting the focus back here at home.

That means no columns, no cartoons and no letters about the president, Congress, the Supreme Court, etc. Have a burning opinion about any of those things? Save it up, we’ll get back to that in August.

Why this recess? Let me explain.

Earlier this year, a trio of university researchers from Louisiana State, Texas A&M and Colorado State published a fascinating — and troubling — study that found that the ongoing extinction of local newspapers across the nation contributes to political polarization…

We all know that national news coverage these days has an intense focus on the partisan war in Washington. According to the research study, published in the Journal of Communication, folks who have lost their local newspaper or have given up on it turn to national news outlets. Then, they apply their (increasingly hardened) feelings about national politics to their local city council or state legislature.

The result? More partisanship close to home.

So, as an experiment, for 31 days, the Sun ran opinion pages focused entirely on local issues. No national columnists, no Trump takes, nothing.

For some of you, this may sound like a horrible diet: What will I do for a month without Marc Thiessen, or Leonard Pitts? What will we talk about, if not Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi?

Well, let me gently suggest there’s lots more to discuss: How about homelessness in the Coachella Valley? The state of our schools? Our unfunded pension liabilities?

Of course, it doesn’t have to be all about problems. The op-ed pages are also a forum for highlighting the good in our midst.

Darr, Whitt, and Dunaway — who you may have figured out were the “trio of university researchers” Makinen was referencing — then tracked political polarization among Palm Springs-area residents before and after the all-local month. As a control, they did the same for those in the circulation area of another California Gannett paper, the Ventura County Star, which ran its opinion pages as usual.

Was the Sun able to follow through on its commitment? Yep. Nationally syndicated columnists disappeared; about half of their usual space was given over to syndicated opinion from California, including from the nonprofit CalMatters. “Mentions of President Trump, who normally dominates the news, essentially disappeared”: Only 1 percent of letters to the editor and 0 percent of editorial and op-eds included his name. (In the month before the experiment, those numbers had been 38 and 32 percent.)

The subject matter moved from something Ilhan Omar said to traffic, development, downtown revitalization, schools, and other local issues you can’t read about on NYTimes.com. Of note: Despite Palm Springs being a two-hour drive from the Mexican border, immigration as a subject virtually vanished from opinion section once people were asked to focus on local issues.

(One thing didn’t change: The Sun’s opinion pages didn’t get any more diverse in terms of who was writing pieces. “We find no evidence that localization improved gender equality or racial diversity: women continued to be underrepresented, as did Hispanic/Latino writers, who did not contribute to opinion in proportion to their population in the area.”)

Some topics moved from also-rans to mainstays; local arts moved from 4 percent to 28 percent of published letters to the editor. Editorials and op-eds focused much more on education and environmental issues. The share of pieces that mentioned either the Democratic or Republican Party fell by 60 percent.

One unexpected change: When the subject matter got more local, the authors writing became more corporate. Before the experiment, about three-quarters of op-eds had been written by opinion journalists. Moving to local dropped that to one-third. Who filled the gap? Executives from local companies and local elected officials, mostly. In a way, that makes sense: There isn’t a pool of local opinion journalists waiting to be pulled into service, and more specialized local topic matter favored people whose jobs connect with those topics in some way. But it’s worth noting that emphasizing local can easily mean emphasizing local elites.

So — the Sun pulled off the experiment. What impact did it have on polarization? The researchers focused specifically on affective polarization, which basically means thinking the other political party is filled with a bunch of dumb idiot mean jerks, not that you actually have policy disagreements. (That’s issue polarization.)

Those surveyed in the Desert Sun’s circulation area didn’t, as a whole, become less affectively polarized versus those in the Ventura County Star’s. (One opinion section can’t fix the world, people. And obviously not everyone in those cities reads the paper.)

But they did find significant evidence of reduced polarization in three specific subgroups: those who prefer to get their news from the local newspaper over other options; those who have higher levels of political knowledge; and those with higher levels of political involvement. (There’s quite a bit of overlap among those groups — they’re much more likely to have been exposed to the revamped opinion pages than others.) “The divergent changes in affective and social polarization across our two communities, while positive in all cases, show how The Desert Sun Opinion page experiment slowed polarization in Palm Springs.”

A complicating factor here is that affective polarization actually went up in both cities over the span measured. (National politics was still a thing! People were still getting plenty of news from other sources! Donald Trump was still tweeting!) But polarization increased less in Palm Springs in these groups than it did in Ventura.

Is the effect size huge? Nah.

Taken together, these results corroborate the claim of Iyengar et al.: affective polarization is tough to change, and large shifts in this metric are unlikely. It would strain the bounds of credulity if we observed dramatic decreases in affective polarization in Palm Springs as a function of a one-month experiment by a single news source, especially when limited to the opinion page. However, we observe a consistent pattern across our three conditional models: in each case, affective and social polarization rise less in the treated Palm Springs community. This dynamic demonstrates that local newspapers can slow polarization by adjusting the focus of their opinion page.

(The study didn’t look this, but I’d wager ten bucks that shifting a paper’s news pages from national to local would have a similar depolarizing effect.)

Oh, and here’s one other thing that’ll appeal to the suits: Web traffic to the Sun’s opinion pages nearly doubled in July 2019 compared to the year before.

Newspapers across the country have spent time evaluating the future of their opinion sections. Some have dropped editorials entirely; others decided to skip an endorsement in the 2020 presidential race, judging that the cost of angering one-half of their readers wasn’t worth the moral clarity. In Palm Springs, the opinion editor during the experiment, Al Franco, took a Gannett buyout last December; the position’s being filled now thanks to nearly $60,000 raised by a new local nonprofit, the Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation.

(It should go without saying that more local opinion is likely to make local foundations and philanthropists see the section as something worth supporting financially. I doubt those donors’ intent was to cover George F. Will’s syndication fee.)

When local editorial boards shrink, it’s tempting to fill the void with more nationally syndicated columnists, more national politics. These findings suggest that may do more polarization harm than good, and that investing in local opinion pages means investing in local civic culture.

Local newspapers are uniquely positioned to unite communities around shared local identities, cultivated and emphasized through a distinctive home style, and provide a civil and regulated forum for debating solutions to local problems. In Palm Springs, those local issues were architectural restoration, traffic patterns, and environmental conservation. The issues will differ across communities, but a localized opinion page is more beneficial for newspapers and citizens than letters and op-eds speckled with national political vitriol. When national politics was removed from The Desert Sun, the space filled with state and local concerns, and afterward people did not feel so far apart from one another. In Makinen’s words, if we want to help local newspapers continue to make American democracy work better in spite of the existential crises they face today, “let’s talk about home.”

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