Amid increased polarization and a pandemic in which misinformation has spread as fast as the virus, editors in Atlanta, Phoenix and Detroit told us in live virtual events that the notion of local news as a public good is more relevant than ever.

Each event examined different aspects of local news, from community journalism in Phoenix to nonprofit startups in Detroit. But all addressed how local news is keeping pace with rapid changes in the media industry and the extent to which these moves reflect demographic shifts in their cities.

Outlier Media, for instance, empowers Detroiters to set its editorial agenda and built an SMS platform to give residents access to the reporting and reporters. “We understand that Outlier’s mission is to serve those who are most underserved in Detroit by news, but also by systems,” executive director Candice Fortman said.

Outlier Media is part of a new wave of mission-driven media organizations that are filling what they see as gaps in coverage. This includes reporting on historically overlooked neighborhoods in Atlanta, making Covid-19 information available in Spanish to Arizona readers, and explaining how Detroiters can file their taxes.

Editors at legacy newsrooms say they are likewise focusing on building new relationships with their communities and the people they cover. They noted that diversifying newsrooms at every level is necessary to better serve communities and to ensure fair and accurate coverage. “Your newsroom should match the community,” said P. Kim Bui, director of product and audience innovation at The Arizona Republic. “It’s the easiest thing to say, it’s very difficult to do. Especially in a local news setting, especially in a small newsroom.”

Finally, in an industry starved for resources, collaboration was viewed as crucial to successfully rebuild a sustainable and robust local news infrastructure.

This year, ProPublica opened regional offices in Atlanta and Phoenix, and expanded its footprint in the Midwest to include reporters in more states throughout the region (one is based in Detroit). It also works with Local Reporting Network partners in many of these regions.

Here are things we heard repeatedly during our events:

The news media needs to increase transparency on how decisions get made.

Canopy Atlanta, a community-led nonprofit journalism project founded in 2020, deploys a unique model in which it pairs veteran Atlanta journalists with community members to empower residents to tell their own stories and to combat “media mistrust,” said co-founder Kamille Whittaker, who is also a managing editor of Atlanta magazine. Known as “fellows,” these community members belong to a specific neighborhood that Canopy Atlanta has chosen as the focus for its issue. “The biggest difference is that we are sourcing our story ideas from the residents themselves versus going in and deciding what the story is,” Whittaker said.

The promise of Canopy Atlanta’s fellowship model was inspired by a pilot program called the Pittsburgh Journalism Project. Led by Max Blau, a co-founder of Canopy Atlanta and reporter for ProPublica’s South newsroom, the program hosted community listening sessions and then coached residents through the reporting and writing process. The resulting story, which Blau edited, was completely different from what he assumed residents would want to talk about. “[Blau] initially went in thinking that residents were going to be interested in gentrification, housing, affordability,” Whittaker said. “But when he actually did community listening and community engagement, he found out they wanted to talk about the aftermath of the Atlanta public schools cheating scandal.” The story later ran on the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Though still in its infancy, Canopy Atlanta has proven to be an important addition to the local news ecosystem. “I’ve learned more about neighborhoods that are within a 2-mile radius from me from reading [Canopy Atlanta] than I have living in Atlanta in the past eight years,” said Stephen Fowler, a political reporter for Georgia Public Broadcasting. “And it’s things that have been chronically undercovered, underfunded and underappreciated.”

Meet communities where they are already gathering

Conecta Arizona is a Spanish-language service journalism project on WhatsApp created in May 2020 to fill a gap in Covid-19 information available in Spanish. Even though almost one-third of Arizona’s population is Hispanic, founder Maritza L. Félix said, there is a dearth of Spanish-language media in the state. “When I founded Conecta Arizona, it was just to combat misinformation through the same channels that it was getting spread: WhatsApp,” said Félix, who refers to herself as the “WhatsApp queen.” Since then, Conecta Arizona has blossomed into a multiplatform enterprise that includes a radio show, a newsletter and a forthcoming podcast.

Outlier Media’s Fortman said delivering news via SMS is “the best way to reach most Detroiters.” Available in English, Spanish, and Arabic, the news service is a two-way channel, meaning consumers can reach its reporters directly 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Our entire model is based on basically this question: What is the best way to get information to people that makes it equal in access, but also is the most high-value, high-quality information needed in order for people to rise from crisis to steadiness,” Fortman said.

Reflecting the communities they cover

Newsrooms are working to diversify their ranks, not just racially but also economically and linguistically. “Numbers can be tokenism,” the Republic’s Bui said. “I will fully admit, some newsroom survey was once like 7% of the newsroom is Asian management, and I was like literally that 7% is me,” Bui said with a dry chuckle. “Numbers can be configured to say whatever you want. It’s really about actions.”

Nicole Carr, a reporter in ProPublica’s South newsroom, echoed Bui’s comments and said that diversifying newsroom leadership is a crucial step toward accomplishing objective and fair coverage. “When you’re talking about the lens of objectivity, we can’t have this conversation without addressing the people who call the shots,” said Carr, who previously worked as an investigative reporter for WSB-TV. “Take television. The people who make the decisions are not the people you see in front of you that the public thinks they know as representative of a particular outlet.”

“Collaboration is the future of journalism”

The events gave special attention to innovation and solutions. While the solutions varied, most of them viewed collaboration as a cornerstone to success. “Collaboration is the future of journalism,” Fortman said.

“We are in a very competitive business,” said Robin Kemp, the founder, CEO and executive editor of The Clayton Crescent, a one-woman newsroom just outside Atlanta, “but in Atlanta there is more of a conversation happening between outlets. I think the more we can leverage that given the huge disparities in coverage areas, resources, everything, the more we can do that, it really helps everybody out.”

Kemp, who has worked in print, broadcast, cable news and digital media, captured the nation’s attention last year during the presidential election for her coverage of the absentee ballot count in Clayton County, Georgia. She was the only journalist at the counting location for the entire count.

Nicole Avery Nichols, editor-in-chief of Chalkbeat, suggested that part of collaboration is “holding each other accountable and making sure we are connected with our community and working on their behalf towards a public good.”

The events were sponsored by McKinsey & Co., which did not have a say in the topics covered or the speakers selected.

“I love waking up [in LA] every morning,” Merida, who was named executive editor of the LA Times in May, told Richard Tofel, the former president of ProPublica, in a panel at the Texas Tribune Festival on Thursday. “It’s sunny, it’s beautiful, my mood lifts — the psychology of it!”

While Tofel had asked about the differences in the two papers “besides location,” it is partly location, Merida said, that makes the opportunity at the LA Times exciting. (Merida was The Washington Post’s managing editor before leaving to become editor-in-chief of ESPN’s The Undefeated in 2015.)

I’m gonna first just talk about the location. Where we’re centered. We’ve been doing a series called “The United States of California,” which talks about how California is a state of innovation in so many different ways. It’s where things start.

I was on vacation and met somebody at the same resort. She happened to be running a foundation that was in California and said she thought that there was so much possibility in Los Angeles, that Los Angeles was to the 21st century what New York was to the 20th century, and that it was the place where people were coming, the place the country was headed.

We’re in a great location. If you were going to try to redefine the modern newspaper and said, Where can I do that? Where can I really experiment with what a newspaper is? — You’d say: I got it. The perfect place is Los Angeles.

So many people are coming here and there are so many people who live here of different ethnicities and backgrounds. Technological advances for media, the changing media ecosystem, the streaming wars, entertainment — it’s all centered here. …

We’re in perhaps the most exciting city in the country in arguably the most important state in the country. The LA Times is smaller [than the Post], and in some ways when you are smaller you can be nimbler. You can move faster, you can try things easier. We don’t have to turn around a whole big ship. We can try things. And I think we will experiment aggressively and fearlessly.

Newspaper as straitjacket

Tofel mentioned that, in a conversation between them prior to the one at the conference, Merida had described the concept of a newspaper as a “straitjacket.”

Merida:

I spent 40, 41 years in newspapers and I came in reading The Washington Post as a kid. They’re beautifully curated things. When Jeff Bezos first bought the Post, [he was talking about] the marvel of just the curation — that every day, there’s a hierarchy that human beings put together, a physical newspaper, that has an architecture to it. It’s amazing that it comes out every day.

[But] a lot of the people — including my sons, both of their parents are newspaper people! — do not immediately gravitate [toward it], say, well, let me go and get myself a newspaper subscription!

We have to understand that there’s a generation that didn’t grow up with the paper being dropped on the doorstep, feeling that the newspaper is the way they need to get their information. I’m just talking about the term “newspaper.” We have to account for that everybody did not grow up with that habit, everybody does not think that [to get] “news,” that to be informed, requires them to get a newspaper subscription.

We have to change how people think about a newspaper. We’re here to engage them in all kinds of storytelling — storytelling that happens in the world where they consume it.

People now consume sports in so many different ways — multiple different screens. They have a second-, third-screen experience with it. There are fantasy sports leagues. Entire bars that are targeted for specific fandom around teams. There’s just a whole ecosystem of the way people consume [sports].

We have to recognize that and account for it [for news] … We have to tell people, look, we do a lot more than you think and we’re essential to your lives. We can make it so that what you need and what you want come together and it’s worth it to you to pay for us, the same way you might pay for Netflix or ESPN+.

“Other things to put inside your mind”

The biggest thing he learned as editor-in-chief of The Undefeated, Merida said, was “that there are a lot of ways to reach audiences.” At the helm of The Undefeated, he explained, he was largely starting from scratch and building culture rather than coming into an existing one.

As Los Angeles Magazine reported on Wednesday, when Merida took over at The Undefeated, that publication was “mired in reports of a toxic work environment under original editor in chief Jason Whitlock.” And within five years, Merida was able to help turn things around enough that the site “was scoring speakers like Barack Obama for its events, its journalism was winning industry awards, and it had entered book publishing and music production.” Needless to say, The Undefeated was a different atmosphere from the one at The Washington Post, where he worked for more than 20 years.

There are brilliant people in [The Washington Post’s] newsroom, but most of my life was confined inside that newsroom. And as smart as everybody is inside that newsroom, there are a lot of smart people outside the newsroom, too. You need to have other ways to expand your mind — other things to put inside your mind. […]

How do we create entry points to journalism that are beyond simply what we write — the stories we write and edit and publish digitally and in the newspaper? Is there an entire way to bring people to it through social content creation, just the way that people engage on TikTok and Instagram and Twitch and other platforms? Can we get audiences to look at our work differently?

And not everybody who creates content for the LA Times will want to be employed there, Merida said.

There are opportunities to do original work and to partner with people who may not have a Los Angeles Times badge. They may not want to be employed by the LA Times. But they may be doing something really interesting. They may want to periodically write for us. They may want to produce for us. They may want to do things with us, but not be an LA Times employee. There’s a whole world of creative people out there.

“My early mentors were people who were breaking down the doors and trying to fight for more inclusion”

Merida is the second Black executive editor of the LA Times, but “there’s never been a Latino editor in a city where Latinos outnumber non-Hispanic whites and outnumber Blacks by more than 3 to 1,” Tofel said. “How, in your judgment, has the LA Times been doing serving its Latino audience and covering the Latino community?”

The LA Times currently employees perhaps the largest number of Latino journalists of any daily in the country, Merida said — about 100 in a newsroom of 550.

“Which is not to say that we are where we need to be. We have a Latino population that’s roughly half of the county of Los Angeles. There’s a lot we know we need to do and we’ll continue to be aggressive about that. I’m glad we have a lot of tremendous Latino journalists bc they can help me. They can help me figure out what to do to keep pushing forward. It’s central to who we are at the LA Times, and where we need to go, and what we need to become.

The representation has always been important to me. Inclusion, empowerment, visibility, they always have been core to me. My early mentors were people who were breaking down the doors and trying to fight for more inclusion. People like Bob Maynard and Nancy Hicks Maynard and others who started the Maynard Institute and, before that, the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, which I’m a graduate of.

Part of my orientation in this profession has been to push for more inclusion and representation. We need more Latino journalists in the ranks of management and throughout the entire place. That is certainly on my mind, coming in and working at the Los Angeles Times.”

Kevin Merida and Richard Tofel’s conversation at the 2021 Texas Tribune Festival is available online if you buy a festival ticket.

Here are four important ways I think they can make a bigger difference:

Make fewer, larger grants

One of the principal challenges of practicing philanthropy is saying no to people who ask for money within the power of your gift, many of whom could make good use of it. In far too many cases, the response is to try to say no to as few such supplicants as possible, to spread the available resources around. Consortia arise to facilitate this — trade associations, donor collaboratives. The showering of smaller grants is widely applauded (each recipient, its executives and Board members, chimes in) and grantmakers feel good about themselves. They shouldn’t.

Twenty-five thousand dollars (a common sum for these sorts of grants) over a period of years or from a group of funders sounds like a lot of money, and to most individual recipients (or donors) it is. But to organizations giving away (or spending) millions, it simply isn’t. Sure, an assemblage of such gifts can add up meaningfully1, or repetition each year can be sustaining, but any national donor large enough to put out press releases that issues one about making a bunch of $25,000 grants is either trying to fool other people or themselves.

Instead, it’s critical to risk your popularity, exercise your judgment, and make fewer grants for larger sums. The applause may not be as widespread, but the impact will be greater.

Take some real risks

Institutional philanthropy loves to think of itself as “risk capital,” and it surely could be (nothing is stopping it), but the track record here is spotty at best. Very few of the most important or enduring innovations in nonprofit journalism began with institutional funding. Perhaps even more indicative, you almost never hear of funders acknowledging the failure of past grants. True risk capital does this frequently — failures are the surest proof you were taking risks. If you fear failure, or being seen to fail, you are not inclined toward risk — and you are missing opportunities to spur change.

Support for startups or genuinely new efforts from established organizations are probably the easiest ways to take genuine risks. If you do, force yourself to conduct and publish a meaningful assessment of whether the risk paid off. Celebrate failures, and what can be learned from them, as well as successes.

Insist on metrics for success, but…

In the last decade, “metrics” became something of a dirty word among leaders in nonprofit journalism. It needn’t be.

Funders should insist that grantees agree in advance how success will be measured, and it’s essential that whatever metrics are chosen be something that could be attained — but also might not be. The key, however, is that it should be the grantee, not the donor, who chooses the metrics, and how they will be measured. News organizations should have to satisfy prospective donors that they are sufficiently ambitious and accountable, but they should not have to meet one-size-fits-all objectives.

Streamline the process

This is the most prosaic of my recommendations, but it can make a real difference in the operations of grantees. If you are giving them your money, you shouldn’t want to waste their time, or any of your funds. Donors can help in at least the following ways:

• Provide prompt decisions. Long waits for funding decisions produce inefficiency among potential recipients, and should very rarely be necessary. It’s even okay to say “no, for now.”
• Give multi-year grants when possible. If you are almost certain to renew your funding, save the transaction costs on both sides and set a longer commitment in the first place.
• Never require the submission of reports, or, even worse, the creation of evaluations, you won’t actually read and substantively comment on. This may seem self-evident, but you would probably be surprised at how often such a rule is currently honored in the breach.  In more than a decade of filing hundreds of grant reports, more than 90% have gone unacknowledged (if you don’t count computer-generated emails or perfunctory thank-yous), and only a handful ever yielded a substantive response.

Most of these rules for donors aren’t particular to nonprofit journalism, and could apply widely across philanthropy. None are novel. But I think each of them is worth emphasizing, and could significantly boost the field if pursued.

I am enormously grateful to those who responded, over the years, to appeals from me, and from my colleagues at ProPublica and elsewhere. But as I step back from day-to-day fundraising, I am reminded of words written in the first edition of one of my previous employers, the Wall Street Journal. They could be a motto both for nonprofit journalism and the people who labor to fund it: “We appreciate the confidence reposed in our work; we mean to make it better.”

1. ProPublica, for instance, received almost $7 million last year — nearly 20% of total revenues — from more than 43,000 smaller donors. Smaller donors, as a group, are by far the organization’s largest supporter, which I regard as a significant source of strength.

That’s a sentence, for better or worse, I could have written quite a few times in recent years. CPI was founded in 1989 by legendary investigative journalist Chuck Lewis, who ran the place for its first 15 years. But since then, it’s gotten new leaders in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2014, 2016, 2019, and now 2021, and not all of those departures were happy ones.

(Even that relative stretch of stability from 2007 to 2014 featured what I’d consider a finalist for Worst Idea in 21st-Century American Journalism: converting a deep-diving investigative newsroom that published a few times a month into a win-the-morning machine that would publish “10 to 12 original investigative pieces” a day (!), all of it to be monetized with ads (!!) and a $50-a-year membership for an ad-free site (!!!). Oh, and giving it the cringeworthy name “iWatch News.” Internal projections said they’d get 50,000 paying members within a year and be pulling in $16 million in annual advertising within five — all of which would more than pay for a planned $80,000 TV studio. And who should run this “Center 2.0”? How about John Solomon — a guy known at the time for putting The Washington Times “into a near-death spiral” and writing the sort of misleading stories that your employer’s ombudsman call “‘gotcha’ without the gotcha”? Not to mention a guy who’s since been known for turning Circa into a right-wing farm team for Fox News, prompting a staff revolt and management review at The Hill over sketchy pro-Trump exclusives, being labeled a “disinformation” vector by Fox News researchers, and becoming a main driver of pro-Trump, anti-Ukraine “smears” and “architect of Trump’s Ukraine conspiracies.” Yeah, that guy. iWatch News died a quick death.)

Ahem. Where were we? Anyway, despite still producing lots of great journalism (including two Pulitzer winners since 2014, not to mention a gazillion other award-winners), there has long been a sense that CPI wasn’t quite reaching its potential. To put it in numbers: In 2004, CPI had a full-time staff of 40. In 2009, ProPublica launched with a staff of 36.

Today, ProPublica’s staff page lists 174 people. CPI’s has 26.

Under its previous CEO, Susan Smith Richardson (now at The Guardian), CPI recentered its journalism on a single topic (though one that touches a thousand others): inequality. You can see the change in how the center describes itself. Before: “The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom investigating democracy, power and privilege.” Now: “The Center for Public Integrity inspires change using investigative reporting that reveals the causes and effects of inequality. “

The new CEO is Paul Cheung, best known for his role the past three years as director of journalism and technology innovation at the Knight Foundation, the largest philanthropic player in the field. Before that, Cheung worked in various journalism management roles at NBC News, AP, the Miami Herald, and The Wall Street Journal; he also spent four years as president of the Asian American Journalists Association.

I hopped on Zoom last week to chat with Chueng and current CPI editor-in-chief Matt DeRienzo, who joined the center a little over a year ago and has been part of that shift to inequality. Cheung was just finishing up his final days at Knight (today’s his first day in the new job); our conversation has been edited for length, clarity, and the false impression that none of us say “um” or “like.”

Benton: I don’t know if you guys have ever talked to Rodney Benson at NYU — he does a lot of work around studying nonprofit news as well as public media. One thing he wrote some years ago, that has always kind of stuck with me was — the United States doesn’t have this huge public-funded media institution like, say, the BBC. We have this booming nonprofit sector, which is wonderful, and performs some of that role a big public service broadcaster would.

But public service broadcasters are generally pretty attuned to the idea that they need to reach everybody. Like, the BBC has very much a mission that it is supposed to be universal, that it should try to represent and to reach the entire British community. And Rodney’s complaint was that a lot of nonprofit outlets in the states have been more satisfied reaching an audience that’s mostly highly educated and upper-middle-class — elites, by whatever definition of that term. It’s a tough problem for nonprofit outlets, I think, to reach outside the Beltway and New York, people who have no Acela stop anywhere nearby.

ProPublica sponsored Amy Silverman‘s “State of Denial” series with The Arizona Daily Star through their Local Reporting Network. The plain language translation appears alongside versions you’ve likely seen before: a Spanish translation and audio.

This is the first time ProPublica has produced a translation into plain language. We’ve increasingly seen newsrooms experiment with accessibility, including The New York Times’ Braille and audio versions of their special section on disability, but ProPublica’s translation appears to be the first time a plain language version has been produced by a news organization that isn’t specifically produced by and/or for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

To get a sense of the difference, here’s part of the editor’s note written by T. Christian Miller, a senior editor at ProPublica, and Arizona Daily Star editor Jill Jorden Spitz that follows a disclosure that Silverman has a daughter, Sophie, with Down syndrome and that her family receives assistance through the state agency centered in her investigation, Arizona’s Division of Developmental Disabilities.

The original editor’s note:

There’s a lot of talk in journalism today about bias, with the assumption being that reporters who believe something can’t write about it fairly.

Of course, there is some truth to that idea — we would not let our education reporter advocate for school choice, for example. But it’s not realistic to believe that journalists are robots without opinions. We have lives and experiences that make our reporting richer, provided we remain vigilant about keeping our opinions out of the stories we publish.

The project happened because of Amy’s quest to provide a bigger and broader life for her daughter than society told her was possible. Did she come to this project with preconceived notions? Probably, just like the ones we all hold. Did it damage the integrity of her reporting? Just the opposite.

And the plain language version:

Some people worry that reporters have bias. They think reporters shouldn’t write about things they care about. They worry the reporters won’t be fair.

We think writing fairly is important. But reporters are people. We all have things we care about. We think knowing a lot about the things we care about makes our writing better. We make sure not to write our opinions though.

We started writing this story because Amy cares about it. She cares because it affects her family. We don’t think caring makes the story less fair. We think caring makes it better.

Both the editor’s note and investigative series were translated into plain language by Becca Monteleone, a professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo. Monteleone says, historically, when people have written about individuals with intellectual and development disabilities, they’ve been “writing about rather than for or with.”

“When you do that, there are some real and oppressive consequences,” she said. “You can then tell a person with an intellectual disability, ‘Oh, you don’t understand, so I’ll make decisions on your behalf.’ I think that’s a really dangerous paradigm to set up. When you write things down in plain language, more people have access to the same information.”

Monteleone regularly uses the accessibility tool for consent forms and research summaries within her own practice and research. Her process begins with a close read of the original text — in this case, Silverman’s original investigation, after edits by Miller and Spitz — and ends with a completely rewritten work.

“It’s pretty common in journalism to start with somebody’s personal story and then zoom out and then back in,” she said. “Rather than doing that, in plain language, you would try to keep all of the individual stories in their own chunks and work chronologically through them.” Monteleone works “paragraph by paragraph” and doesn’t aim for a literal word-for-word translation.

She simplifies sentences, writes in active voice, changes lists into bullet points, and when new characters are introduced, clearly explains their role. When writing in plain language, Monteleone either removes unfamiliar words, jargon, and idioms or — if they’re central to the story or appearing in a crucial quote — spells them out. Although she runs the text through AI-powered readability checkers, Monteleone said the process winds up being “more art than science.”

Silverman — who was selected as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow for 2020 — said plain language isn’t without controversy within the disability community. She emphasized that Monteleone was an expert and that though the final product should be effortless to read, a plain language translation isn’t a “try this yourself at home” project.

“If you don’t do it the right way, it can be very infantilizing. Saying ‘Here’s a separate version for you’ can be really tricky. We wanted to present it without judgment and in an inclusive way,” Silverman said. “We don’t want to assume that somebody with IDD [intellectual and developmental disabilities] is going to want to read the plain language version just because they have IDD; they may want to read the original version.”

The plain language version has found an audience outside the disability community, too. T. Christian Miller said that, internally, the plain language description of ProPublica resonated. Some of that spilled over to Twitter:

We also published this story in more accessible plain-language English, audio & Spanish.

Love the plain-language intro: “@propublica is a group of reporters. We write stories that look at how the people in charge behave. We make sure they are not doing anything wrong or unfair.”

— Ariana Tobin (@Ariana_Tobin) November 5, 2020

Miller said he hadn’t heard of plain language translations before working with Silverman and Monteleone but producing one fit with ProPublica’s goal of making its journalism accessible to a broader audience — and especially its subjects. (It got a careful legal read, and Miller’s not convinced plain language translations are a great idea for journalism about say, a highly litigious private individual, rather than a public agency.)

In the coming weeks, ProPublica — including engagement reporters Beena Raghavendran, who read the audio versions, and Maya Miller — will work to share the different versions and sift through additional community responses as they come in.

This is so cool. I love the idea of translating into plain language, both for accessibility purposes and because it’s an interesting writing exercise. More outlets should experiment with this https://t.co/8Q2HVxJdvG

— Sam Mintz (@samjmintz) November 6, 2020

This is just an incredible project about the treatment of folks with developmental disabilities, and also I think maybe a lot more things should be written in plain language like this “translated” version: https://t.co/xpu7RGzJFV

— Lydia DePillis (@lydiadepillis) November 5, 2020

You can read the original version or the plain language translation at ProPublica.

Co-founders Greg Moore, Ken Ward Jr., and Eric Eyre — formerly the top editor, award-winning environmental reporter, and investigative reporter at The Charleston Gazette-Mail, respectively — have cast Mountain State Spotlight as a civic institution, one they hope will derive its support and stories and raison d’être directly from the community. Moore will serve as executive editor and CEO while Ward will continue as a ProPublica reporter but contribute mentorship and investigative guidance as editor-at-large.

Mountain State Spotlight, which is in the process of becoming an independent 501(c)(3) group, has received financial support from the American Journalism Project, ProPublica, and Report for America as well as hundreds of individual donors. The emotional and operational support from its partners in nonprofit journalism has been just as important as the initial funding, Ward said.

“We have a team of people who are helping us to understand how to turn a bunch of reporters into a well-oiled machine that can do the stories that West Virginia needs but also raise the money and run a operation in a way that will make it sustainable,” Ward said. “That’s what every community needs, not just good journalists, but a good journalism organization.”

The co-founders are joined by four Report for America members, an engagement fellow, and interns. (Erica Peterson will come on as managing editor in October and the search is on for a political reporter and VP of operations and development.) Even at launch, Mountain State Spotlight is already one of the largest newsrooms in the state — a fact that you could let inspire or depress you.

All of this has come together impressively fast. In late February, The Charleston Gazette-Mail let Moore, then its executive editor, go. (A few months before he was fired, Moore had announced the newspaper had met its new publisher’s demand to double digital subscriptions ahead of schedule.) Within days, Ward followed him out the door.

Ward, who’d spent nearly 30 years at the Gazette, had helped to secure four Report for America positions and didn’t want to lose the chance to work with the emerging journalists, some of whom he knew were West Virginia natives like himself. For Report for America to agree to place members with the new outlet, though, the co-founders needed to have an organization by June 1.

“We could have done things differently. We could have spent six months or a year building up the organization, raising money, hiring a development director,” Ward said. “But I didn’t want to lose the staff of reporters — just phenomenal emerging journalists that are going to do incredible work here — so we were in a race.”

ProPublica, a nonprofit chasing investigative stories with impact, and the spirit of “sustained outrage” championed by the Gazette’s former publisher, W. E. “Ned” Chilton III, have served as inspiration from the site’s earliest days. For now, the site will focus on watchdog reporting and government accountability, rather than features or, say, coverage of West Virginia University sports. Ward also emphasized sustained journalistic attention and follow-up stories, arguing that sporadic reporting doesn’t yield solutions for entrenched problems.

“If you’ve found some injustice, you can’t just report about it once,” he said. “You have to keep coming back to it, and either what you’re doing is reporting about something somebody did about it, or you’re coming back to it because nobody’s done anything and you’re going to remind everybody that nobody did anything.”

One of those longstanding problems? The high percentage of West Virginians living without reliable internet. Mountain State Spotlight has published a piece on the issue, and it’ll figure into the news site’s distribution plans, too.

“I look at my mom, who lives here in Charleston, and regardless of the quality of her internet, she doesn’t really want to read it digitally. We have not only a lack of good internet access, but we also have a population that trends older, that is less interested,” Ward said. “Do we have all the answers to fix that? No. But in my experience in legacy media, the answer was to throw your hands in the air and say, ‘There’s not much we can do.’ Well, I don’t find that acceptable. We have to find ways to reach those audiences.”

One of those ways is partnering with local daily and weekly newspapers across the state, who will be able to publish Mountain State Spotlight stories for free. Another is meeting West Virginians where they are.

“It’s a heavy Facebook-using state. A lot of folks may not have great broadband internet access but they have a cell signal and visit Facebook on their mobile device,” Ward said. “I know we’re all supposed to think in the media world that Facebook is evil, but if that’s where some of our potential readers are — and where the West Virginians are who need our stories — then we need to go there and more effectively use that platform. I haven’t seen a media organization in West Virginia who has really harnessed that power yet. We’re going to try to do that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If so, ProPublica wants to hear from you.

There are many more questionnaires on the ProPublica site, including one for general leads that don’t fall into any preexisting category, and they form the bedrock of what the publication calls engagement reporting. The investigative newsroom has been using the online callouts and surveys to solicit tips, find sources, and identify affected communities since it launched in 2008. Some of their crowdsourced reporting has won awards you’ve heard of and the nonprofit site uses its public interest journalism to help drive donations.

Now, as ProPublica approaches its teen years, their engagement team is revamping to help their reporters better find — and comprehensively report — investigative stories with an impact. They’re also working to formalize processes that have become somewhat unwieldy as ProPublica has undergone a growth spurt that led to a correspondingly large leap in the number of submissions they receive through callouts and other channels. ProPublica has grown from 98 to 139 people in the past three years — not including the Local Reporting Network reporters that ProPublica sponsors — and the engagement team is now five strong.

Engagement editor Ariana Tobin told me how she explains engagement reporting to someone who’d never seen the inside of a newsroom: “Sometimes you get evidence through the tiny corner of a forgotten public record that you cleverly request. Sometimes a deep background source tells you something and leads you to someone else. But sometimes, for stories about big systemic harms, what you really need is lots of people pointing you in the same direction, or who can share multiple pieces of evidence that add up to something larger and more compelling,” she said. “It’s taking individual stories, combining them, and adding some journalistic muscle.”

She also takes inspiration from the courtroom in explaining her job: “There’s all different kinds of lawsuits. We’re sort of the class action of an investigative story, harnessing and channeling the power in numbers.”

Choosing the next big story

Tobin says late winter — January through March — is when many ProPublica reporters are making decisions about what projects and stories to pursue. Right now, the engagement team is trying to flag potential areas of interest for reporters and put submissions in front of teams looking to choose investigative projects “sooner rather than later.”

“I think an important role that engagement can play in your newsroom is that it helps you make that really hard decision about what to cover,” Tobin said. “Hopefully a good tip can help you choose your reporting and, once you’ve started reporting on something, help guide the work you’re doing on that subject.”

Some topics seem to lend themselves better to engagement reporting than others. “We have this incredible treasure trove of stuff that people have told us over time on a lot of different topics,” Tobin said. “But some topics in particular have always had a wealth of engagement.” Those include callouts that involve health, workplace or labor issues, and motherhood.

Sometimes an engagement approach can lead to an entirely different focus than the callout was designed to find. One callout led to reporting about age discrimination at IBM, for example, after the team noticed many of the submissions mentioned the tech sector and IBM in particular. “The more that we poked at this, the more people who wanted to talk about it, which is a great sign for any project,” Tobin said. (ProPublica published a case study about how engagement reporting produced the IBM story.)

For that reason, ProPublica uses “evergreen” callouts with no intended deadline, like this one for people working in the federal government. Although tips are just the beginning of a journalist’s reporting process, certain themes can emerge — like recurring issues or complaints from workers at specific agencies — that reporters can then substantiate and use as leverage or insider insight.

Of course, not everyone with a story to contribute is getting a ProPublica newsletter in their inbox, checking its website, or following reporters who share callouts on social media. That mandates an offline component as well.

Knowing that African American mothers are three to four times more likely to die or nearly die in childbirth, engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo knew she had more work to do when she noticed that most of the callout responders she was seeing were white. She built partnerships with other publications, including Cosmopolitan, The Root, and Univision, to share the callout link more widely and reached out individually to mothers groups in the south.

ProPublica engagement reporting fellow Maya Miller, tweeted an example of a print flyer that could be posted in community hubs. The team also uses local organizations, online communities, in-person events, and other tactics to help spread the callouts, depending on the story.

A brief note: very grateful to work somewhere that truly creates space for journalists to work w/ communities.

Help us continue this work by sharing the callout in group chats or online communities, or by printing this flyer and putting it in a community hub: pic.twitter.com/O5W1NxwpPJ

— Maya Miller (@mayatmiller) February 25, 2020

Streamlining “an onslaught” of tips

I asked Tobin to take me through the trajectory of a submission from aspiring tipster to, ultimately, the reporter who will see, read, and possibly follow up on it. “The most honest answer is that this is the moment where we’re perfecting that process,” she said.

Information can come in through many different channels. The publication’s tips page mentions emailing a reporter directly or using Signal, WhatsApp, snail mail, or SecureDrop for sensitive information. But ProPublica hopes to collect as many of its tips as possible through the callout questionnaires, which ask open- and close-ended questions, accept supporting materials like photographs and documents, and can be tailored to individual topics. (A callout for information about secret Facebook groups that publish racist, sexist, and hateful content specifically asks for screenshots of their administrator list, member list, and about page, while one on sexual violence in Alaska asks victims and survivors to select from a checklist of abuse “patterns.”)

Once completed, the questionnaires provide structured data that the engagement team can sort, filter, label, and standardize before plugging into a system that the newsroom has access to. Right now, Tobin says she’ll use Slack, Keybase, or good old-fashioned email to flag tips for the newsroom or, if she knows a colleague is actively working on a specific topic, a particular reporter.

ProPublica is currently using the ScreenDoor platform for all of their callouts. For the past year, they’ve also been working to build a tip dissemination tool using Collaborate, a customizable open-source system, that Tobin hopes her team can deploy soon.

In addition to streamlining the way the engagement team organizes and shares information with reporters, the custom system would also formalize a matchmaking service that Tobin and her colleagues currently perform themselves.

For example, Tobin said ProPublica received “an onslaught” of tips about medical debt after the publication of two investigations reported in Coffeyville, Kansas and Memphis, Tennessee. Her team collected those tips and then solicited contact information for journalists willing to follow up, eventually matching local reporters with submissions from their area.

Last year, we published investigations about patients sued for medical debt in Memphis and Kansas. But this is a problem across the country. People wrote in with stories from all kinds of places. Now, local reporters are following up. https://t.co/1Ld6LneL9o https://t.co/d4Ny0Gjp1l

— Ariana Tobin (@Ariana_Tobin) February 11, 2020

Of course, some reporters, even at ProPublica, remain hesitant to share what stories they’re chasing and plenty of reporting topics require discretion or even secrecy. “Not every story is an engagement story,” Tobin acknowledged.

Still, ProPublica looks for opportunities for engagement even after initial reporting has been published. Some articles lead to followups that become a series of investigations. Others lend themselves to service journalism, like a short piece on how to research your Tinder match that emerged after the reader response to an investigation that found the dating app allows known sex offenders use their platform.

The bigger ProPublica’s readership gets, the larger the crowd they get to source from, as Tobin wrote in a recent newsletter. By doubling down on the engagement reporting they’ve done since inception and formalizing some of the processes they use to organize and share tips, the publications hopes to keep growing both.

The Markup tested and rejected eight different email providers — including the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, Mailchimp — before finally turning to Revue, a small Dutch company that agreed to custom-build a newsletter with no user-tracking features. (No one had requested the option before, apparently.)

The process ended up being longer — and more expensive — than the outlet’s founders anticipated. But then again, not much about the road to The Markup’s long-awaited launch this week has been easy.

Originally slated to launch in early 2019, The Markup was dreamed up by a journalist-programmer pair — Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson — who brought on a third cofounder, Sue Gardner, who had previously led the Wikimedia Foundation. Anticipation grew for the nonprofit news organization that promised to build on the prize-winning investigations that Angwin and Larson had worked on together at ProPublica.

Just months from launch, however, chaos: Gardner and Larson forced out Angwin, the project’s most prominent public face, a move that prompted The Markup’s editorial team to resign en masse in protest. Craig Newmark, the Craigslist founder who had contributed most of the $23 million raised for The Markup’s launch, promised to look into the firing. What followed was an array of accusations and counteraccusations about management styles, techlash, and spreadsheets.

The editorial team of @team_markup has signed a statement of unequivocal support for our Editor in Chief, @JuliaAngwin: pic.twitter.com/aTRsmM6oeo

— The Real Team Markup (@MarkupReal) April 23, 2019

A few months later, the machine got rebooted, this time without Gardner and Larson. Angwin and her editorial team were reinstated and Nabiha Syed, former general counsel at BuzzFeed, was announced as president. (Angwin and Syed will both report to an independent board of directors.)

We are happy to announce that we are back at our desks and hard at work. Big thanks to everyone for your support. Please follow us all over at @team_markup to see what’s next: https://t.co/5Vv0OaMZce

— The Real Team Markup (@MarkupReal) August 6, 2019

The leadership dustup may have been a unique gift for a team-based newsroom that will pair data scientists and journalists together on collaborative investigations. The editorial team rallied behind the publication’s mission of impartial, investigative journalism — not anti-tech advocacy, as some accused Gardner of pushing for — and ended up spending a lot of time working out of Angwin’s living room as governance issues were sorted out.

“I never would have wished for those events to happen, but it was actually an excellent team-building exercise,” Angwin said. “It wasn’t about me and my vision, it was about us and our vision. We really pulled together and I think, even today, that we all feel a sense of ownership in it.”

That support made all the difference during these stressful past few months when the team was working (ok, and doing a lot of eating) at my kitchen table. We are back at the office now and so thrilled to be back to work. THANK YOU pic.twitter.com/EPd6i5pXxG

— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) August 6, 2019

“Like I said, I would not have chosen it,” Angwin added, laughing. “But I bet you a lot of companies would pay a lot of money for that amount of solidarity to be created amongst their crew.”

On opening day, The Markup crew led with an investigative feature on a previously undisclosed algorithm used by the insurance giant Allstate, two “Ask The Markup” features about DNA testing kits and online shopping, and letters from Angwin and Syed. Each article provides embed code to republish it via Creative Commons license.

That Allstate story is copublished with Consumer Reports. It’s in some ways the Platonic form of a Markup story: A large corporation (Allstate) makes important decisions (how much you pay for car insurance) using an algorithm that’s seemingly inscrutable to the people affected by it. The Markup — using its “unparalleled roster of quantitative journalists…committed to finding the true meaning in large amounts of data” — figures out that the algorithm isn’t making decisions the way it’s supposed to. That finding gets rendered confidently in prose:

…we found that, despite the purported complexity of Allstate’s price-adjustment algorithm, it was actually simple: It resulted in a suckers list of Maryland customers who were big spenders and would squeeze more money out of them than others.

…as well as in a deep technical explanation that goes far beyond what most data journalism offers: more than 5,000 words, 21 footnotes, three scatterplots, one decision tree, 10 other charts, and a “Confusion Matrix.”

The Allstate story also features an unusually detailed set of credits at the bottom of the story — an indication of the disparate sets of skills needed to do the sort of algorithm inquisition that The Markup aims for.

The site’s digital Page 1 also prominently promotes a tips page that encourages readers to share information, with a list of options also shows The Markup’s range: regular old email, encrypted messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp, snail mail (“the Post Office cannot open your mail without a search warrant”), or SecureDrop over Tor. Oh, and a signup form for that custom-built, privacy-first email newsletter.

A newsroom apart

Most of The Markup’s 19-person newsroom is based in New York. There are two staffers working from California, but they’re based in Los Angeles, not San Francisco or Silicon Valley. The distance is intentional, and it isn’t measured only in miles: While other tech publications sometimes face criticism for getting too close to the world they’re covering, The Markup is doing its own thing.

“We deliberately decided not to have a Silicon Valley bureau,” said Angwin. “We’re an investigative outlet, doing deep investigations and explanatory work that asks, ‘What does this all mean?’ And honestly, I feel like you get a better perspective for that type of work when you’re a little more removed from the industry.”

There are plenty of journalists in Silicon Valley reporting on “open secrets at industry parties” etc. We are focused on the impact of technology on society .. which means we are more likely to be reporting in Detroit or Houston or partnering with journalists in Myanmar.

— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) August 26, 2019

The site also plans to distinguish itself from tech-focused peers through what Angwin and Syed have dubbed “The Markup Method,” à la the scientific method.

It’s a three-step process:

Build. We ask questions and collect or build the datasets we need to test our hypotheses.

Bulletproof. We bulletproof our stories through a rigorous review process, inviting external experts and even the subjects of investigations to challenge our findings.

Show our work. We share our research methods by publishing our datasets and our code. And we explain our approach in detailed methodological write-ups.

Angwin, a Palo Alto native who studied math at the University of Chicago and pursued computer programming before she found journalism, said The Markup is inspired by that scientific approach of amassing evidence, sharing methods, and providing data for other researchers to challenge or build on their work. Building data sets themselves allows The Markup to do more than just “opportunistic” data journalism that makes “a pretty visual” out of existing data sets, Angwin said.

Using public records requests, web scraping, and other resource-intensive tools, The Markup hopes to tackle projects that other outlets don’t have the time or energy to complete. Don’t expect to read about product launches or earnings calls or today’s cybersecurity vulnerability — but the site does want to confront many-tentacled questions like “Is tech too big?” and “What impact are algorithms having on society?”

“We have some of the best data journalists and the most investigative firepower out there,” Angwin said. “We want to make sure we’re using it on the right problems.”

As part of “bulletproofing” their work, The Markup will present the targets of their investigations — typically technology companies and government agencies — with the data they’ve collected and the code they’ve used to analyze it before publication. “We offer them an opportunity to challenge our findings,” Angwin said. “Because the truth is that they have the most incentive to show us where we are wrong, and we want to find the flaws in our work.” (For today’s story, “Allstate declined to answer any of our detailed questions and did not raise any specific issues with our statistical analysis, which we provided to the company in November, including the code used to calculate our findings.”)

That “show your work” ethos will allow readers — whether academics, policymakers, or the general public — to see the data, code used to analyze it, methodological information, and explanatory videos to help them dig into things themselves, even if they don’t have experience in programming or data science. Angwin said she hopes other journalists, in particular, will be able to use the work to further the story and write about how the technology is affecting their own communities.

It’s not always advisable (or legal) to share original data and documents, however anonymized, and not every story will be accompanied by original data and documents. (Angwin mentioned Reality Winner, the NSA contractor currently serving a five-year sentence after the F.B.I. used clues on a printout shared by The Intercept to identify her as a reporter’s source.) But The Markup hopes to publish as much as it can; here’s the Allstate story’s data and code on GitHub.

Doing things differently

The Markup’s privacy policy is 2,771 words long, and each one of them is the result of considered thought. It promises readers they won’t be exposed to third-party tracking and that the site will not exploit or sell any of their information. Keeping this promise proved more challenging than the founder originally anticipated (as in its newsletter quest), but The Markup hopes that readers will appreciate the effort and support the nonprofit.

“If you feel grateful for the work and that we’re honoring your privacy, we hope that will encourage you to donate,” Angwin said. (Those millions from Newmark and other funders should help, too.)

Syed’s letter acknowledges the tradeoff. The Markup will have to do reader engagement and measure impact within the self-imposed limitations, which also preclude advertising, since digital ads almost always require reader-tracking elements.

Because we don’t track you, we won’t know if you like our work. We don’t know if you open our newsletter or if your cursor lingered over a particular story. We don’t have the metrics that let us approximate whether a story changed your worldview or, better yet, gave you the tools to change your world. All we have is…you. And so we will have to do things the analog way: We want to build a connection with you directly.

(As its donate page puts it: “We prefer doing things the hard way.”)

That kind of engagement approach means going back to the future. She says part of her efforts include reaching out to marketing professors and asking what audience engagement looked like in, say, 1985.

“I’ve heard that we are tying our hands behind our backs, but there must be a way to engage an audience without subjecting readers to a surveillance ecosystem,” Syed said. “The privacy policy creates tension with another trend in journalism, which is audience engagement, but I think it’s a fascinating opportunity to put our money where our mouth is and build the world we want to see.” Instead of user-tracking features, The Markup will rely on social media, direct feedback on the tools they build, event attendance, and participation in upcoming educational seminars.

Angwin said The Markup is also working on building privacy-protecting analytics tools, browser extensions, and custom forms that can structure the information readers and tipsters want to send along. (Structured data is a lot easier to analyze than responses to a callout for tips on Twitter.)

Its marketing is also distinctly analog. A striking street-art-style poster — by radical feminist film and digital studio Mala Forever — reading “Big Tech Is Watching You. Who’s Watching Big Tech? The Markup” went up last week in San Francisco. On Tuesday, New Yorkers will start seeing The Markup advertised on the subway. The publication also bought a billboard along a highway into Silicon Valley and will play videos on buildings in San Francisco this week.

“We want people to think about tech in the physical world, as they walk and live and breathe,” Syed said. The poster, she hears, is quite close to a bus stop for Google employees.

When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll come back. It’s cyclical.” No one tells me that anymore. The old business is plainly rotting away, even as I find myself still documenting the scavengers who turn detritus into gold.

The surviving — growing, even — national news business is now profoundly and proudly digital. All the wonders of the medium — extraordinary storytelling interactives and multimedia, unprecedented reader-journalist connection, infinitely searchable knowledge, manifold reader revenue — illuminate those companies’ business as much as digital disruption has darkened the wider news landscape.

What is this world we’ve created? That’s the big-picture view I’m aiming to offer here today.

Those of us who care about journalism were happy to see the 2010s go. We want a better decade ahead for a burning world, a frayed America, and a news business that many of us still believe should be at the root of solving those other crises.

I call what follows below my epiphanies — honed over time in conversations around the world, with everyone from seen-it-all execs to young reporters asking how things came to be the way they are in this business. These are principles that help me make sense of the booming, buzzing confusion that can appear to envelop us. Think of it as an update to my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, now a decade old.

Here I’ve distilled all my own concerns and my understandings. I’ve taken a big-picture, multiyear view, knowing that like it or not, we’re defining a new decade. You’ll see my optimism here — both as a longtime observer and as a later-stage entrepreneur trying to build out a new model for local news. (I wrote about that back in October.) I do believe that we can make the 2020s, if not quite the Soaring ’20s, something better than what we just went through. But I balance my optimism with my journalism-embued realism. In many ways, 2020 stands at the intersection of optimism and realism — a space that’s shrinking.

So much has gone off the rails in the news industry (and in the wider society) over the past decade. Amid all the fin-de-la-décennie thinking, I think Michiko Kakutani best described the country’s 10-year experience: “the indigenous American berserk,” a borrowing from Phillip Roth.

So much of what happened can be attributed to (if not too easily dismissed as) “unintended consequences.” Oops, we didn’t mean to turn over the 2016 election to Putin. Gosh, we didn’t mean to alter life on earth forever — we just really wanted that truck. We just wanted to connect up the whole world through the Internet — we didn’t mean to destroy the institutions that sort through the facts and fictions of civic life.

As billions have disappeared from the U.S. newspaper industry, the words “collateral damage” served to explain the revolution that led digital to become the leading medium for advertising. That damage is now reaching its endgame.

The Terrible Tens almost precisely match the period I’ve been writing here at Nieman Lab. In that time, I’ve written enough to fill several more books — 934,800 words before this piece. Almost a million words somehow accepted by our loyal readers, who still, remarkably, laugh and tell me: “Keep writing long.”

Let’s then start the 2020s off right. With one eye on the last decade and another on the one to come, let me put forward 20 understandings of where we are and how we build from here.

That felt like huge news — but what if it really only represents the beginning of a greater rollup? Last month, I sketched out how five of the largest chains could become two this year.

And yet there are even worse potential outcomes for those of us who care about a vibrant, independent press. What if a Sinclair, bent on regional domination and with a political agenda, were to buy a rollup, and keep rolling?

In a way, GateHouse’s builder Mike Reed has done a lot of the heavy lifting already. From a financial point of view, the CEO of New Gannett has already done a lot of rationalization. GateHouse bought up a motley collection of newspaper properties, many out of long-time family ownership, and brought some standard operating principles and efficiencies to them. We can ask whether his big gamble of borrowing $1.8 billion (at 11.5 percent interest) from Apollo Global Management will prove out over the next few years. Or we can think of that megamerger as just prologue.

After all, the same logic that drove the GateHouse/Gannett deal pervades the near-uniform thinking of executives at all of the chains. Job No. 1: Find large cost savings to maintain profitability in light of revenue declines, in the high single digits per year, that show no sign of stopping. And the easiest way to do that is merging. A merger can massively — if only once — cut out a lot of HQ and other “redundant” costs.

It buys some time. And newspaper operators are craving more time. “Ugly” is the simple description of the 2020 newspaper business offered to me by one high-ranking news executive. Revenue declines aren’t improving, so the logic remains. The only questions are: How much consolidation will there be, and how soon will it happen?

Heath Freeman, head of journalistic antihero Alden Global Capital, has already begun to answer that question. The hedge-fund barbarians aren’t just inside Tribune Publishing’s gates — they’re settled in around the corporate conference table. Alden’s cost-cutting influence drives the first drama of the year: Can Chicago Tribune employees fend off the bloodletting long enough to find a new buyer for their newspaper before it’s too late? They know that, despite a national upswell in public support for the gutted Denver Post in 2018, Alden was able to remain above the fray and stick to its oblivious-to-the-public-interest position.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is trying to thread a needle of financial reorganization. Then there’s Lee, operator of 46 largely smaller dailies. All of them are subject (and object) of the same financial logic.

While financing remains tough to get, at any price, there remains an undeniable financial propulsion to bring many more titles under fewer operations.

There’s no law preventing one company from owning half of the American daily press. And no law prevents a political player like a Sinclair — known for its noxious enforcement of company politics at its local broadcast properties — from buying or tomorrow’s MergedCo — or orchestrating the rollup itself.

After a decade where we’ve seen the rotten fruit of political fact-bending, what could be more effective than simply buying up the remaining sources of local news and shading or shilling their coverage? Purple states, beware! Further, the price would be relatively cheap: Only a couple billion dollars could buy a substantial swatch of the U.S.’s local press.

Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry.

It sometimes seems like we’ll run out of epithets — “the Thanos of the newspaper business,” “the face of bloodless strip-mining of American newspapers and their communities,” “industry vulture,” “the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain” — for Alden Global Capital. Then someone helps us out.

“Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry,” one very well-connected (and quite even-keeled) industry executive told me dispassionately. “It just destroys the story we try to tell of the great local journalism we need to preserve.”

Think about the big picture. The industry is flailing; behind closed doors, it’s throwing a Hail Mary, trying to win an antitrust exemption from Congress. It argues that in the public interest, it should be allowed to negotiate together (rather than as individual companies) with the platforms. It wants the big payoff they’ve dreamed of since the turn of the century: billions in licensing from Google, Facebook, and Co.

It pines for and makes comparison to the kinds of licensing revenue that both TV broadcasters and music publishers have been able to snag. But thus far, that’s been a heavy lift in terms of negotiation or public policy. But Alden adds more weight, letting governments or platforms say: “Wait, you want us to help them?”

Which leads to…

Can a duopoly licensing deal be the “retrans” savior of the local news business?

In 1992, local TV companies were in a bind. Cable and satellite companies had to pay the ESPNs and CNNs of the world to air their programming. But local TV stations — available for free on the public airwaves — got nothing for having their signal distributed to cable customers.

But that year, federal legislation allowed local TV stations to demand compensation from cable and satellite systems — retransmission fees. Essentially, distributors paid stations for the right to their programming, including local news — despite the fact that anyone with an antenna could get their signal for free.

What started out as a small supplemental revenue stream now amounts to about 40 percent of all local TV station revenue, according to Bob Papper, the TV industry’s keen observer and data/trend collector through his annual RTDNA survey. “Retrans money is skyrocketing, and that should continue until it levels off in 2023-24.” This year, it will likely add up to $12 billion or more.

Advertising revenue has been fairly flat for local TV companies (setting aside for a moment the two-year cycle in which election years pump them full of political cash). Digital revenue hasn’t been much better, accounting for only six or seven percent of station income, Papper says — way less than newspaper companies earn.

And yet these local TV businesses are stable, profitable, and facing nothing like what’s happened to newspaper newsrooms. Papper notes the wide variance across stations in the depth and breadth of their news products. While many still stick with the tried-and-tired formulas, his surveys of station managers list “investigative reporting” as their No. 1 priority. When it’s funded, it’s a differentiator in crowded TV markets.

It’s that retrans money that makes all the difference.

Clearly, the news industry is a major supplier of high-engagement material to the platforms — a supply that helps energizes their dominant ad businesses. While both Google and Facebook have deployed a motley fleet of news industry-supporting initiatives, they’ve steadfastly refused any large-scale “licensing” arrangements.

If there’s increased public pressures on the platforms as the society’s digital high turns part-bummer, and if the political environment were to change (a President Elizabeth Warren, for example), it’s not hard to imagine the tech giants ponying up a billion here or there for democracy-serving news, right? (Both Google and Apple count more than $100 billion in cash reserves, net of debt, with Facebook holding more than $50 billion.)

Google, when asked over the years why it doesn’t pay license fees, talks about the complexity of the news market, among other objections. Expect a new argument: You want us to pay an Alden, or a Fortress Investment Group?

The financialization of the press may indeed makes the daily newspaper “public service” argument more difficult to make. While still true — though now wildly uneven in its actual daily delivery — it might be an artifact of a bygone age. The question may turn from “Will platforms finally pay license fees?” to “Who can make a good argument that they deserve them?”

The first metric that matters is content capacity.

In our digital world, just about everything can be counted. So many numbers adding up to so few results for so many.

Look forward and we can see that content capacity is and will be among the biggest differentiators between the winners and losers of the news wars. In fact, I’d call it a gating factor. Publishers who can offer up a sufficient volume of unique, differentiated content can win, assuming they’ve figured out ways for their business to benefit from it.

People aren’t the problem, no matter what the headcount-chopping Aldens of the world have preached. People — the right journalists and the right digital-savvy business people — are the solution.

In models as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Athletic, The Information, the Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe, we see this truism play out.

Certainly, having more skilled journalists better serves the public’s news needs. But the logic here is fundamentally a business one. In businesses increasingly dependent on reader revenue, content capacity drives the value proposition itself.

Rather than reducing headcount — and thus spinning the downward spiral more swiftly — increasing headcount can lead to a magic word: growth.

The news business will only rebound when it seeks growth.

Across America’s widening expanse of news deserts, we don’t hear many whispers of that word, growth. The conversation among owners and executives is pretty consistent: Where do we cut? How do we hold on?

That’s meant more M&A. More cutting print days. More cutting of business operations. More cutting of newsrooms. All in an effort to preserve a diminishing business — whether the underlying mission is to maintain even a semblance of a news mission or just to milk the remaining profits of an obsolescent industry.

Of course, local news publishers poke at new revenue streams to try to make up for print ad revenues that will likely drop in the high single digits for the fourth year in a row. But the digital ad wars have been lost to Google and Facebook. Marketing services, a revenue stream pursued with much optimism a few years ago, has proven to be a tough, low-margin business. Digital subscription sales are stalled around the country, not least because of all that cutting’s impact on the product. Most see no path to a real “replacement” revenue stream. (Maybe CBD-infused newsprint?)

Cutting ain’t working. Decline feeds decline.

Only an orientation toward growth — with strategies that grab the future optimistically and are funded appropriately — can awaken us from this nightmare. Replace “replacement” strategies with growth strategies and these businesses look different.

Happily, we do have growth models to look at. Take, most essentially to the current republic, our two leading “newspapers.”

Today, The New York Times pays 1,700 journalists. That’s almost twice as many as a decade ago. The Washington Post pays 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013.

The result: More unique, high-quality content has driven both publishers to new heights of subscription success, the Times how with three times as many paying customers as it had at its print apex. Readers have rewarded the investment, and those rewards have in turn allowed further investment.

It’s a flywheel of growth — recognizable to anyone who’s ever built a business, large or small. What it requires is a long-term view and patience. And, of course, capital in some form — which shouldn’t be a problem in a rich country awash in cash. But what it also demands is a belief in the mission of the business, an in-part seemingly irrational belief that the future of the news business can, and must, be robust.

Some big numbers tell the big story.

• We may have underestimated the dominance of the New Gannett. According to Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, the leading newspaper broker, the new Gannett now owns:
  • 20.4 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers
  • 26.3 percent of all U.S. daily print circulation
  • 24.8 percent of all U.S. Sunday print circulation

  So in rough terms, it controls a quarter of our daily press. The chart below, produced by the brokerage, compares the megamerger to the industry’s previous big deals on the basis of percentage of newspapers owned and percentage of circulation controlled. It should send a chill down every American spine.



• There are probably fewer than 20,000 journalists working in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms. There’s not even a semi-official tally anymore, but that’s a good extrapolation from years past, given all the cutting since. That compares to 56,900 in 1990 — when the country had 77 million fewer people than today.
• The daily press still depends on the print newspaper for 70 percent or more of its revenue. That’s after 20 years of “digital transition.”
• The daily newspaper industry today takes in more than $30 billion less per year than it did at its height.
• $1 trillion: The market value reached by Alphabet (Google) last week.

The brain drain is real.

What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers?

Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.

It’s hard enough to take on all the issues of business and social disruption with a staff that can meet the challenge. Increasingly, though, it’s hard for news companies to attract and retain the talent they need, especially in the business, product, and technology areas that will determine their very survival.

Who wants to work in an industry on its deathbed? Especially in an already tight job market.

What do the people who could make a difference in the future of news want? Fair compensation, for sure, and local news companies often pay below-market wages, on the TV side as much as in newspapers. Perhaps more important, they want a sense of a positive future — one their bosses believe in and act on every day. That’s a commodity scarcer than money in this business.

No industry has a future without a pipeline of vital, young, diverse talent eager to shape the future. And that’s especially true in the live-or-die arts of digital business. As the just-released Reuters Institute for Journalism 2020 trends report notes, “Lack of diversity may also be a factor in bringing new talent into the industry. Publishers have very low confidence that they can attract and retain talent in technology (24%) and data science (24%) as well as product management (39%). There was more confidence in editorial areas (76%).”

At the same time, we’ll be watching the flow of experienced talent as it moves around the industry. As Atlantic Media continues to grow and morph under the Emerson Collective, a number of its top alumni are moving into new positions elsewhere. Longtime Atlantic president Bob Cohn now takes over as president of The Economist — an early digital subscription leader, the storied “newspaper” now seeks growth. Meanwhile, Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Atlantic Media’s innovative Quartz, has taken on a so-far-unannounced big project at The New York Times’ Opinion section, where the appetite for impact has grown appreciably.

Finally, as The Guardian ended the decade with happy reader revenue success, Annette Thomas becomes CEO. Thomas has earned accolades for her innovative work in science publishing. These three, plus numerous others moving into new jobs as 2020 begins, can now bring their decades of digital experience to the job of getting news right in the ’20s.

Print is a growing sore spot; expect more daycutting.

Just for a moment, forget the thinned-out newsrooms and consider a fundamental truth: The physical distribution system that long supported the daily business is falling apart.

The paperboys and papergirls of mid-20th-century America have faded into Norman Rockwell canvases. As Amazon’s distribution machine and Uber and Lyft suck up available delivery people across the country, publishers say it’s increasingly hard to find paper throwers. (And why not? Paper-throwing sounds like a sport from another age.)

Why not just throw in with the logistics geniuses of the day, and partner with them to deliver the papers? The newspaper industry has indeed had talks with Amazon, buyer of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks over the past two years. We’ll probably see some local efforts to converge delivery. But think about who still gets that package of increasingly day-old news delivered to their doorstep? Seniors — who want the paper bright and early, complicating delivery partnerships.

Not to mention that, with print subscribers declining in the high single digits every year, deliverers now need to cover a wider geography to deliver the same number of papers — and that problem will only get worse.

To add an almost comic complication to the challenge of dead-tree delivery: California’s AB5 just went into effect. Its admirable aim is to bring fairer benefits to those in the gig economy. But its many unintended consequences are now cascading throughout the state — spelling millions more in costs to daily publishers while wreaking havoc among freelancers.

Is seven-day home delivery now a luxury good? Or just a profit-squeezing artifact? Either way, it’s become clear that publishers’ years of price increases for seven-day aren’t sustainable. One of my trusty correspondents reported this last week that he’s now paying $900 a year for the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal. There are Alden-owned papers charging more than $600 a year for ghost titles, produced by a bare handful — sometimes two — journalists.

As print subscriptions have declined, publishers have continued to price up. That’s death-spiral pricing, with a clear end in sight and boatloads of money to be made on the way out the door.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “the end of seven-day print” and how publishers have been modeling and noodling its timeline. There’s been lots of trimming around the edges, mainly at smaller papers; McClatchy’s decision to fully end Saturday print is a harbinger of what’s to come. The company planned the end of Saturdays meticulously, with a keen eye toward customer communication, and proved to both itself and the industry that it can be done.

(Let’s allow time here for a brief chuckle by European publishers who have been successfully publishing “weekend” papers for decades.)

But cutting Saturday alone doesn’t save you a lot of money. Those twin pressures — on one hand, needing ever-larger cost savings, on the other, the collapsing distribution system — mean we’ll see more ambitious and adventurous cutting in the year to come. They’ll do while swallowing the existential fear one CEO shared: “They are scared to death this will end the habit.”

How big a deal is all this — the declining mechanics of print distribution? Very big.

Consider that The New York Times — the most successfully transitioned of newspaper companies — still only earns only 43 percent of its revenue from digital. Most regional dailies still rely on print for 75 to 90 percent of their overall revenue. If the physical distribution system starts failing faster, how much of that print-based revenue — circulation and advertising — can be converted to digital?

At a national level, the direct connection between readers and journalists has never been stronger.

Listen to the commercial breaks of The New York Times’ breakaway hit The Daily. A lot of them aren’t commercial spots, but what we used to call house ads in the print business. Maggie Haberman talking about Times’ reporting in the era of press vilification; Rukmini Callimachi sharing the danger and cost of reporting from terror-stricken parts of the world.

These ads aren’t about making the newsroom feel better — they work. The Times now has more than three times the total paying customers than it did at the height of print, with 3.9 million digital news subscribers paying the Times. Why? The journalists and the journalism.

In the halcyon days of print, advertising drove 75 percent of the Times’ revenue, a number that often hit 80 percent for local dailies. Now the digital world has forced — but also enabled — the Times to forge a very direct connection between its journalists and readers. Readers understand much more clearly that they are paying for high-quality news and analysis. They value expertise and increasingly get to know these journalists individually, whether through podcasts or other digital extensions.

Journalists believe more than ever that they are working for the reader, with the Times the trustworthy intermediary. The new more direct relationship between reader and journalist fosters growth. And the same is true similarly for The Washington Post, The Athletic, and The Information, in different forms.

If the local news world had followed suit, we’d say that the age of digital disruption has been a boon for journalism overall. Clearly, it hasn’t. This lesson is a guidepost for the decade ahead.

Advertising remains a vital — but secondary — source of revenue for news publishers.

The war’s over; the platforms won. With Google and Facebook maintaining a 60 percent share of the digital ad market (and 70 percent of local digital ads), publishers no longer expect to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The drama drawing the most attention: How much will Amazon eat into The Duopoly, as Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise summed up “the five trends that threaten the Google/Facebook duopoly” at AdAge.

Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom of the moment, that doesn’t mean advertising is no longer a part of publishers’ diversified revenue streams. Yes, reader revenue is clearly the driver for successful publishers of the ’20s, but advertising — best when sold and presented in ways that don’t compete directly with the platforms — will be in the passenger seat.

The evolving formula of the early ’20s is a mix of 65 to 70 percent reader revenue, 20 to 30 percent in advertising, and then an “other” that includes things like events. While this model may be more diversified, it’s not made of discrete parts. The better publishers get at profiling their reader-revenue-paying customers, with increasingly better-used first-party data, the better they can help advertisers sell. At this point, it’s a wobbly virtuous circle of money and data, and the successful publishers will find ways to round it.

A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension.

The word of the moment in almost every conversation about local news is “nonprofit.” At so many conferences and un-conferences about the news emergency, the notion that there’s a commercial answer to rebuilding the local business seems almost out of bounds.

What created this anti-profit sensibility? Acknowledging the power of the duopoly, to be sure. But that’s not the only rationale. For generations, many journalists considered themselves proudly unaware or uncaring about the business. Now the ascendance of Google and Facebook has given too many permission to eschew advertising as a significant, if secondary, support of reporting.

Secondly, the industry’s Heath Freemans and Michael Ferros, among too many others, have stained a local news business that was once both proudly profitable and mission-driven. Profiteering is now associated by many with local news.

Nonprofit news, too, though requires capital — just like any kind of growing service or product. Somebody has to actually pay journalists. So those advocating nonprofit news as the new future have turned to philanthropy. They look to foundations, national and local, to finance this vision. Nationally, more than $40 million has now flowed into the American Journalism Project, headed by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton. Most of that’s come from national foundations. The AJP announced its first grants in December, a down payment on what it envisions as a fund of up to $1 billion.

Now we’ll see if AJP can significantly move the needle on what is plainly needed: replacement journalism. As it tries to catalyze a movement, it hopes to multiply the philanthropic response to the news crisis. It’s a hope we can share. AJP’s pitch is straightforward: Communities should support news the same way they support public goods like the ballet and the opera, things that in many cities plainly couldn’t sustain themselves as creatures of the market.

That’s a worthy thought, but with two big issues attached.

One: There’s not much of a tradition of such support. Newspapers made so much money for so many years that they were the ones who started foundations, not the ones asking them for money. Relatively few communities’ foundations are oriented in that direction — and foundations don’t change direction or priorities speedily.

Two: Scale. So much local news coverage has been lost that it would take substantial and ongoing philanthropy to even begin to resupply community news. There’s not a lot of evidence yet of a readiness to do that.

To be sure, hundreds of dedicated journalists have build smaller operations in cities across the country. LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News are looking for new and better ways to support and nurture them. But the old world is disappearing far faster than a new one is being created.

Ace industry researchers Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb recently laid out their thinking, which should serve as a reality check for all who care about the next decade of local news.

Yet even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

But it was the concluding paragraph of their Nieman Lab prediction that really best summed up this epiphany looking ahead to the end of this decade.

A New(s) Deal for the 21st century: If all forms of philanthropic support for local news are truly not enough, we predict that by the end of 2030, we’ll be seeing large-scale policy changes to publicly support more sources of local news. It may not seem like we’re that close on this one, but trust us, it could happen.

I know Hansen and Holcomb are trying to spark a note of optimism, but their realistic reading of the landscape should strike terror: A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension. Imagine this struggling country 10 years from now if the news vacuum has become the new normal and our communities are democratically impoverished.

My own view: All good journalism is good. Support it by philanthropy, advertising, events, reader revenue, or by winning lottery ticket. Given the peril, we all need to look more widely for support, not more narrowly.

The free press needs to be a better advocate of free peoples in the 21st century.

The Wall Street Journal has long proclaimed itself the paper of free people and free markets. That formulation has made a lot of sense over time in the face of state-run economies of various flavors. But it’s insufficient to meet the demands of today.

Free peoples — those able to speak, write, assemble, vote, and retain some dignity of privacy — make up an uneasy minority of the world’s population. Now the twin dangers of growing strongman despotism and tech-based surveillance societies threaten us all.

Most recently, The New York Times’ investigative report on facial recognition painted a deeply disturbing dystopian portrait. The piece came on the heels of many beginning to describe China’s “surveillance state,” an ominous system intend to enable lifelong tracking and rewarding of state-approved citizen behavior.

We’re moving from a decade of cookies gone wild to what until recently seemed to be Orwellian fiction.

Combine the tech with the spreading rash of authoritarianism afflicting the globe. From Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to, yes, our current White House, the 2010s produced strongmen who we thought had been relegated to the history books.

Who best to represent free people in the coverage of would-be despots and in the tech-driven threats to several centuries of hard-earned Western rights? A free and strong press.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera memorably told us in his 1980 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (John Updike’s masterful review of it is here).

Memory. Our job as journalists is to remember. To connect yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Like the climate crisis, the threat of a surveillance society registers only haphazardly among the American populace, even as California’s government and others begin to take it on.

We’ve seen the beginnings of a backlash against tech run amok, with Facebook’s role in the 2016 election a seeming turning point. But here we are again, as Emily Bell points out, going into another election with the same issues — and huge questions that go well beyond the social behemoth.

If news companies are, at their base, advocates for the public good, news companies must lead in securing a free society in the face of technological adventurism. Media needs to get beyond its self-interest — ah, first-party data! — and focus on the bigger picture.

Who better to take that stand than those who’ve long advocated free peoples and free thinking? Who better to do that — and perhaps be rewarded for it in reader support — than mission-oriented news media?

The press’ business revival is part and parcel of its advocacy for the people it serves.

Australia is burning, and Murdoch’s newsprint provided the kindling.

For years, Australian press watchers have pointed to the dangerous slanting of environmental news by much of the nation’s press. A majority of that press is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And those papers, joined too often by other media, have long skewed the facts of climate change. The result is a society ill-prepared for the nightmare that’s befallen it.

While this month has seen more complaints about Murdoch publications’ coverage, they’re in line with what that coverage has looked like for years. Now even scion James Murdoch has spoken out, as have some of Murdoch’s employees, seeing the heartbreaking, country-changing toll the fires have taken on Australia.

History will record Rupert Murdoch’s three-continent toll on Western civilization. The Foxification of U.S. news, Brexit support, and Australia’s inferno serve as only three of the major impacts Murdoch’s press power has had around the world. It is a press power weaponized and then turned on the very societies it is supposed to serve.

And don’t let the whirl of events let you forget the odious phone hacking scandal. “The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn,” former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reminded us this week in discussing the British press’ tawdry history with the royals.

Disney, for one, has recognized the toxicity of Murdoch’s remaining brand. Fox Corporation now owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, and 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. But “Fox” is no longer part of Twentieth Century Fox, the storied studio, and related assets that Disney bought from Murdoch last year. Now it’s only out of sync when it comes to time: 20th Century Studios. (Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up a wonderful history of the Fox brand in the U.S., beginning with a third of a Brooklyn nickleodeon 115 years ago, on Twitter.)

The Murdoch empire has generated plenty of good entertainment outside of its own brands — witness the Emmy-winning “Succession” and last month’s Bombshell. But we haven’t yet come to grips with how his publications’ fact-slanting has literally changed the faces of free societies.

Expertise rises to the top.

The end of the print era is killing off the generalist. Every daily newsroom has its legend of the reporter who could cover anything. Wake him up from a drunken stupor, point him (almost always him) out the door, and you’d get your story.

Great stories there sometimes were, but the legend exceeded the truth: Too much news reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep.

Flash forward to today: Ruthless digital disruption — of both reading and advertising — means that inch-deep stories have less and less value. (Remember back at the start of the last decade, the content farms — Demand Media, Contently, Associated Content — that were going to revolutionize journalism?)

If commodity journalism and sheer volume are out, one the most refreshing trends into the 2020s is single-subject journalism. It needs a better name, but the results have been profound. In topic after topic, the focus on expertise — in reporting, writing and increasingly presentation and storytelling — have produced their own revolution.

In health, we see Kaiser Health News excelling and expanding. In education, Chalkbeat (with its new five-year plan) and the Hechinger Report drill into the real issues of the field. They’re now being joined by the university/college-focused OpenCampus.org, seeking to bring the same level of experienced, knowledgeable journalism to the often-cloistered academy.

The Marshall Project squarely meets the many mushrooming questions around criminal justice in our society. InsideClimate News is growing to try to meet the interest, and panic, around a warming earth. More-than-single-subject-oriented ProPublica’s investigations, often done with partners, have done what great work is supposed to do: set and reset agendas. There are many more, including at the regional and state level, led by The Texas Tribune and CALmatters.

All together, they may add up to fewer than a thousand journalists at this point. But their impact is great, and I believe it will become greater as awareness and distribution increase.

As Google and Facebook have won the ad wars, pageview-thirsty commodity journalism has largely (and thankfully) met its demise. Now we’ll see how much the market — not just those foundations — will support real expertise in reporting.

Free media has better tech skills than state media.

While Iran’s state media was spending days denying any possibility its military had shot down the Ukranian airliner, The New York Times found the likely truth early on. It assembled its own small group of experts. It used the best tech available. And it could report (under an increasingly common four-person byline) that an Iranian missile had in fact likely done the deed.

It wasn’t about suspicions, guesses, or bombast. It was about finding a truth in plain sight — given the human and technological resources to do it.

At first, Iranians believed their own media, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported from Tehran, that the downing was U.S. propaganda. But then, amazingly and overnight, Iranian citizens responded to the American-driven truth. They piled into the streets, seeing the mistake and its coverup for what it was: another sign that their government, without its own checks and balances, couldn’t be trusted.

Watch what privately owned newspapers do.

By necessity, we pay a lot of attention to the industry’s M&A mating games. These largely involve the dwindling number of publicly owned newspaper companies, which struggle both with operating realities and the need to convince shareholders to hang on through short-term earnings and dividends. They’re the biggest players, the most riddled by financialization, and the ones who have to report numbers publicly.

But given today’s realities, the stock market really isn’t the place for newspaper companies to be. Only long-term, strategic, capital-backed, and for the most part private or family-controlled businesses can make it successfully to 2030.

In the middle part of the 2010s, those papers got more focus. John Henry with The Boston Globe. The Taylor family with the Star Tribune. Frank Blethen, fighting the long fight in Seattle. And then they were joined by Patrick Soon-Shiong with the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

For the most part, we don’t hear much news out of these enterprises. They don’t have to report to markets quarterly, and they’ve taken more of a no-drama-Obama approach to the tough business. They are also, not incidentally, the leaders in digital subscription among local dailies. They remain important to watch.

Just as importantly, consider two newspaper chains that keep their heads down: Hearst and Advance. In the early 2010s, Advance made lots of news by cutting print days at its papers in New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It will likely soon get a fresher look: Long-time Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel announced last week that he’s stepping down. No successor has yet been named.

Hearst also remains intriguing. A very private company — and one now that now generates less than 10 percent of its revenue from newspapers — its very name bespeaks a long commitment. But the top two executives of what now is a profoundly diversified media company both grew outside of the news trade. Will it stand pat in its markets? Will it look for acquisitions? (The old GateHouse was its nemesis outbidding Hearst for the Austin and Palm Beach papers in 2018, but the Gannett deal should keep it out of the buying game for a while.) With antitrust enforcement apparently on the wane, will it try to build a cluster in the Bay Area around its San Francisco Chronicle? Or complete a Texas big-city triangle by adding The Dallas Morning News to its Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News?

Bankruptcy is nothing new in the newspaper industry.

McClatchy’s pension-led financial crisis in November surprised many. The words “potential bankruptcy” tend to focus the mind.

But consider this: By one close observer’s account, more than 20 daily newspaper companies have visited the bankruptcy courts since the Great Recession a decade ago.

Ironically, two of the ones that emerged became acquisitive consolidators. Today’s MNG Enterprises, driven by Alden’s in-court and out-of-court strategy, in fact declared bankruptcy twice in its various corporate iterations. GateHouse, re-birthed by Fortress Investment Group in 2013, was able to restructure debt totalling $1.4 billion — double what McClatchy now owes — and has gone to become the biggest newspaper company in the land, even able to buy the better-known Gannett name in the process.

So if McClatchy does indeed go into a pre-pack bankruptcy, the news won’t be that filing. It’ll be what the company does — as a business and journalistically — afterward.

We have to find a way to keep trillion-dollar stories in the public eye.

Through a year full of remarkable stories, perhaps the most remarkable was one that’s gotten little continuing attention.

In December, The Washington Post published “At War With The Truth.” It took the paper three years to pry loose the trove of documents through Freedom of Information requests. It is remarkable reporting, and one that put a price tag on our ignorance.

Here’s the lede: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The eerie parallels to the Pentagon Papers — a previous generation’s documentation of enormous waste, financial and human — were obvious. And yet it seems to have caused only small ripples in public discourse.

Politicians drive the daily news cycle, wielding wedge attacks on those — disabled, immigrant, poor — already falling through the now-purposely cut safety net. They say they do this in the name of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet this literal waste of $1 trillion pops in and out of the news in a politician’s second. This isn’t a question of politics; it’s a question of the public purse, and performing that watchdog role is our birthright as journalists.

As we reform and rebuild the journalism of the 2020s, we need to use the digital and moral tools of the day to hold power accountable and keep big stories alive over time. So far, we’ve barely touched the surface in connecting the latest happening to its deep historical context, making readers realize how a story connects to a larger issue or narrative, in ways both intuitive and knowledge-building.

I have confidence we’ll figure out how to do that in the 2020s.

“Mediatech” may be the new “convergence.”

There’s a new word taking hold out there: “mediatech”.

That’s how German behemoth Axel Springer is rebranding itself. CEO Mathias Dopfner and his team have rigorously pursued a transition away from print for more than a decade. “Mediatech” tells us both what they’ve learned and where they are going. In August, Dopfner’s new partner KKR bought out a minority interest in the company, taking it private and preparing it to be a bigger player this decade.

Springer, like its sometime partner Schibsted, will be one the big survivors in the brutal media game. Both have learned that modern journalism is now driven by both journalists and by technology. It’s the melding of the two — in audience definition, targeting, and service, and in product creation and delivery — that will determine the winners ahead.

Springer’s question for the ’20s: How much will the company keep investing in journalism itself, as it also pursues other digital business byways? Dopfner laid out the strategy, in friendly but direct sparring with Mark Zuckerberg, here.

Ah, life remains better in Perugia!

Travel coincidentally brought me to the doorstep of the most you-gotta-go-there journalism conference a couple of years ago. The name says most of it: the Perugia International Journalism Festival. Not a conference, or even an un- one, but a festival, inviting, of course, allusions to Nero fiddling. The truffled pasta and the views can’t be beat. The Sagrantino was magnificent.

The conference’s agenda and its exhibitor halls said it all. Walk into the main hall and Google and Facebook offered dueling expanses, with many enthusiastic company-clad representatives touting their latest and greatest. And half the agenda seemed to be, in apparently unintentional self-parody, sessions on how to work with…Facebook and Google. It’s the very best setting for platformitis.

In the time since, we’ve seen an even greater proliferation of news-aiding initiatives out of both companies. The new Reuters Institute study corroborates my own reporting, among publishers, of how that work is going and how it’s seen:

Google’s higher score [in the Institute’s own surveying] reflects the large number of publishers in our survey who are current or past recipients of Google’s innovation funds (DNI or GNI), and who collaborate with the company on various news-related products. Facebook’s lower score may reflect historic distrust from publishers after a series of changes of product strategy which left some publishers financially exposed.

The overall sense from our survey, however, is that publishers do not want hand-outs from platforms but would prefer a level playing field where they can compete fairly and get proper compensation for the value their content brings.

Short of that business-changing historic payout — see above — it’s unlikely that platform aid to publishers will itself significantly alter any of the trendlines in place.

There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscriptions.

Imagine if Reed Hastings has gone with advice of management consultants in the early 2000s, who might have “sized” the market for “on-demand” video and likely found it negligible. Netflix, nurtured on red envelopes, instead created a whole new category of customer demand — and willingness to pay.

As the company has grown, analysts have consistently undershot its growth potential, in the U.S. and globally. The company that was once asked “Will people really subscribe to on-demand movies?” reported on Tuesday that it now counts 167.1 million subscribers, and added 8.8 million in Q4 2019.

Upstart Disney (two words that don’t seem to pair) has already had its Disney+ app downloaded 40 million times. Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, Peacock, and more are all opening wallets.

What’s instructive to the future of the news business here? There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscription, though media reporters love to ask me that question. Create a value proposition that works and consumers will pay. Obviously, national and global scale — what the Internet provides — are hugely helpful. It is though the product proposition that drives payment.

For a moment, consider all the digital subscription success stories in news: The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and more. What if this is just prologue? Could better products — with more and more useful content, priced, sliced, and diced smartly — reproduce some of the scale success of streaming?

In a word, yes. And that’s our best hope for the decade ahead. Into the 2020s, bravely!

An enormous thank you to @dicktofel and @SteveEngelberg, who humored me when I emailed and said “I have a totally crazy idea…”

And to @evanasmith who immediately did what he always does: HE FOUND THE MONEY.

So. Damn. Excited. https://t.co/m21EfB983x

— Emily Ramshaw (@eramshaw) October 16, 2019

“ProPublica exists for the entire purpose of doing big-swinging investigations. They’re better at it than anybody else, but they’ve got kind of a national footprint,” said Evan Smith, CEO and co-founder of The Texas Tribune. “Their ability to tap into statehouse investigations has been limited because they have an entire country to cover, but they’ve got designs on figuring out where they can do the most good a level down from their national investigative journalism.

“This is not ProPublica Texas,” he continued. “This is a very different entity — a cobranded, co-managed operation that brings together the natural strengths of two different but compatible organizations.”

ICYMI: The Aaron Judge of investigative journalism and the Jose Altuve of statehouse watchdogging are teaming up to hold Texas accountable for the next five years https://t.co/dTp5ZFhoNb pic.twitter.com/SDyyyPppj0

— Evan Smith (@evanasmith) October 16, 2019

The new investigative unit will not have its own distinct brand or separate web presence. It will have 11 employees — 10 at the Tribune in Austin, one at ProPublica in New York — who’ll be managed jointly. (Some will be on ProPublica’s payroll despite being located in Austin. ProPublica explained in its announcement that the new hires will be “a senior editor, five reporters, a research reporter and a producer on the staff of ProPublica and a data visuals reporter, engagement reporter and development associate on the staff of the Tribune.”)

All the content that the unit produces will run jointly on ProPublica and the Texas Tribune’s sites, and it’ll be free for everyone to read and for other publications to run. “We said to ProPublica at the beginning that we want to able to continue to give the content that we produce away free to anybody who wants to run it,” Smith said. “In the past, when we’ve published and produced significant collaborations with ProPublica, pretty much every newspaper in the state has run it. We expect that’s probably going to be the case with most of the stuff we publish here.”

The unit will launch with $5.75 million in funding from the Houston-based Arnold Ventures, with other funders contributing to bring that total to an eventual $8 million over the first five years ($1.6 million/year). “Ideally, as is always the case in these situations,” said ProPublica CEO Richard Tofel, “it will catch on, the content will prove itself out, and we’ll be able to grow it over time.”

This partnership brings together arguably the most successful national and regional news nonprofits. At its launch in 2007, ProPublica planned to have about 36 employees; today, its staff page lists an astounding 126 people. In 2009, when The Texas Tribune debuted, it had a staff of 19; today, that’s 70. Each has served as a model for dozens of other news nonprofits seeking to reach their level of sustainability and editorial impact. Now they can model the sort of national/local collaboration that will likely become more important as the fortunes of the commercial local news business continue to wane.

some @propublica news: we're partnering with @TexasTribune to do a new, awesome investigative project in the Lone Start State.

also, this means i'll be looking for a research reporter to join my team (but be based in Austin)! hmu. https://t.co/ocnLIl9VJr

— Katie Zavadski (@katiezavadski) October 15, 2019

Such great news for anyone who cares about making Texas a better place. An 11-person investigative team! Resources! Great journalism! Breakfast tacos! A fun office (where the Trib has been kind enough to give me an office for two years now)! Come work with me!! https://t.co/NYsQSLuYAo

— Pamela Colloff (@pamelacolloff) October 15, 2019

The tool is a small piece of software that users can add to their web browser (Chrome). When users log into Facebook, the tool will collect the ads displayed on the user’s news feed and guess which ones are political based on an algorithm built by ProPublica.

One benefit for interested users is that the tool will show them Facebook political ads that weren’t aimed at their demographic group, and that they wouldn’t ordinarily see.

ProPublica used to the tool to supplement reporting around the German federal elections and the U.S. midterms. Facebook didn’t like the tool, urged ProPublica to shut it down, and then earlier this year made a change that broke the Political Ad Collector and some other tools like it.

Now, however, the tool is up and running again and under the ownership of the Globe and Mail, which says it will make it available to any legitimate news organization that wants to use it. (The Globe and Mail was also one of ProPublica’s partners using the tool last year.)

“We’re thrilled to give the project such a good home,” said Scott Klein, ProPublica’s deputy managing editor. “Existing users around the world can expect their add-on to continue working and shouldn’t notice much of a change.” The Globe has also added support for collection of ads in over 100 languages.

“Canada’s in an interesting place right now. Our Parliament recently passed a set of new election rules that start to define how political ads online have to be logged — one of the first laws of its kind in the world,” said Tom Cardoso, the data journalist at the Globe and Mail who is overseeing the project. “It’s going to be interesting to see the practical implications of this stuff play out: What is issue advertising? When does something become political? Anyone who says they can tell you what a political ad is with 100-percent accuracy is probably wrong…Our effort here is to understand what political speech looks like in Canada, when it comes to advertising.”

Cardoso said that it wasn’t particularly hard to get the tool to work again after Facebook first blocked it, but “it’s totally possible that the tool will once again be broken.” He noted, too, that Facebook’s ad markup changes frequently, partly as a way to try to trick ad blockers. Regardless, the tool is at least up and running for now, and the Globe and Mail will use it to bolster its coverage of the Canadian federal elections this fall.

“Obviously, you’re never going to capture all of the ads that are actually being put on Facebook. You have to find a representative sample,” Cardoso said. “I think the Globe is lucky in some ways in that it attends to attract people from different audiences and walks of life across Canada — but we’re aware that if we just advertise [the tool] on our site and Twitter, we’re not going to get the volume necessary, we’re not going to get a diverse-enough audience. If we get one person in Yukon, it’s not enough; we need multiple people.

“We’re looking at partnerships, hoping that other Canadian media organizations will promote the tool. We’re also looking at buying Facebook ads because Facebook is a great way to target people. Yes, it’s kind of hilarious that we’d be using Facebook to help keep ads transparent on Facebook.”

The extension is desktop-only and you can download it for Firefox here and for Chrome here.

“It’s useful to have reach across mediums because they have very different audiences. I think for a project of this size, where we have 160 national and local newsrooms around the country, I think the big thing we want is geographic coverage,” said Rachel Glickhouse, Documenting Hate’s partner manager. She helps recruit partners at the beginning, onboard new ones joining along the way, and flag tips from ProPublica’s incident database for geographically appropriate partners — along with a host of other things she’s detailed for us before. But they don’t necessarily look (or not look) for local TV partners: “We would approach places that look like they are working on these issues,” she said.

Tara Rosenblum, a senior investigative reporter at the New York-area cable news station News 12, heard about Documenting Hate after meeting Glickhouse at a conference a year and a half or so ago. “We had noticed anecdotally, in our local markets, just a stunning rise of hate crimes, especially against some of the Jewish populations here in New York,” she said. News 12’s management “tasked me with putting a microscope on the problem.”

News 12 aired a story about its first steps with Documenting Hate, asking viewers to submit tips through a ProPublica form on the News 12 website — directing them where to find the form online, a crucial step. “Getting things on air will reach the audience you’re looking to reach. Getting things online is important so people can find the work later,” Glickhouse said.

TV news stations are known for ruthless competition — and ProPublica embraces collaboration. All the tips from all partners’ forms go into a central database and Documenting Hate operates through a first-come, first-serve basis to preserve story originality. (The risk of overlap is low — it’s unlikely News 12 would need a tip that an outlet from, say, Arizona took first.) But Rosenblum said one of the strongest tips that led to good visual storytelling actually came from someone who had heard about Documenting Hate from PBS, so getting the word out more broadly can actually increase the odds that the collaborators will get the tips they need.

Beyond the tips, Rosenblum finds ProPublica’s free data training and weekly email update contextualizing the project in other regions particularly useful. She said those bonuses, the list of other notable news organizations participating, and a face-to-face meeting in ProPublica’s New York City office, easily secured News 12 leadership’s support for its first collaboration of this kind.

Rosenblum is crafting a story from her yearlong reporting process to air in the spring, illustrating shifts in hate crimes locally. She’s built up a database of more than 400 incidents using ProPublica’s tips and FOIA requests from seven counties. Now comes the tough part for many TV stories: finding the visual angle that works.

“With the new landscape in American media, to do really substantive worthwhile journalism, partnerships like this are the wave of the future,” Rosenblum said. “We’re all on the same team.”

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

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

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

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

Other local news initiatives receiving funding:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can find out more here.

Now, Facebook has shut part of that extension down, limiting it to just collect the ad content, not the “Why am I seeing this?” information that we all definitely click on. (Mozilla and Who Targets Me developed similar tools that were also affected.)

Here’s ProPublica’s layout of the situation:

Facebook has made minor tweaks before that broke our tool. But this time, Facebook blocked the ability to automatically pull ad targeting information.

The latest move comes a few months after Facebook executives urged ProPublica to shut down its ad transparency project. In August, Facebook ads product management director Rob Leathern acknowledged ProPublica’s project “serves an important purpose.” But he said, “We’re going to start enforcing on the existing terms of service that we have.” He said Facebook would soon “transition” ProPublica away from its tool.

Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the company says is an alternative to ProPublica’s tool. However, Facebook’s ad archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important targeting data and doesn’t even include all political ads run in the U.S.

“It’s still important and useful to collect the ad content, but in order to understand that ad content more fully you need to know who it was targeted to,” said Jeremy Merrill, a recent news apps developer at ProPublica (now at Quartz) who helped build the tool. This fall, he used its findings to report on how a petroleum lobbying group and a deceptive group using Bernie Sanders pictures to push Green Party candidates skirted Facebook’s ad transparency rules.

“Our whole project is creating a database that already exists in Menlo Park. If Facebook really thought ad transparency was important and that our tool was useful … then they could publish the whole database next week,” he said.

Facebook, for its part, told ProPublica this was part of a routine update “applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plugins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.” A Facebook spokesperson told me they’re trying to tighten loopholes in its API and won’t make an exception, but said the company is considering ways to allow for privacy-conscious research on the platform. Here’s Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product:

This isn’t about stopping publications from holding us accountable or making ads less transparent. This is about preventing people’s data from being misused – our top priority. Plugins that scrape ads can expose people’s info if misused.

— Rob Leathern (@robleathern) January 28, 2019

We know we have more to do on the transparency front – but we also want to make sure that providing more transparency doesn't come at the cost of exposing people's private information.

— Rob Leathern (@robleathern) January 28, 2019

And Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer now at Stanford:

4) This is another example of the press saying "FB needs to stop this bad activity" and later "we didn't mean by us!"

The media outlets that sold Cambridge Analytica as "The Worst Thing Ever have helped lay the groundwork that is making life hard for researchers.

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) January 29, 2019

ProPublica, surprise, sees it differently: “It’s clear that Facebook is seeking to disable tools that provide greater transparency on political advertising than they wish to permit,” Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s president, told Mashable. “They claim this is because of potential abuse of or problems with such tools, but they have cited no evidence any such problems have resulted with our Political Ad Collector — and we know of none.”

Didn’t Facebook just commit $300 million to journalism — okay, “news partnerships and programming” — over the next three years? Yes, but they’ve framed it as $300 million to wean news organizations off the platform. Is anyone surprised at the company’s response in this situation? Not really, but it’s still a weird look.

One solution to this problem would be to establish a safe harbor to whitelist ProPublica’s tool and others related to “news-gathering and research projects.” In fact, that’s exactly what the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University suggested back in August, which was right around the same time Leathern and Facebook executives warned ProPublica that they would start enforcing their terms of service. The safe harbor proposal authors wrote:

We are unaware of any case in which Facebook has brought legal action against a journalist or researcher for a violation of its terms of service. In multiple instances, however, Facebook has instructed journalists or researchers to discontinue important investigative projects, claiming that the projects violate Facebook’s terms of service. As you undoubtedly appreciate, the mere possibility of legal action has a significant chilling effect. We have spoken to a number of journalists and researchers who have modified their investigations to avoid violating Facebook’s terms of service, even though doing so made their work less valuable to the public. In some cases, the fear of liability led them to abandon projects altogether.

Granting some projects safe harbor and not others could be dicey, and Facebook hasn’t exactly been excited to have humans make that sort of editorial judgment call. Jameel Jaffer, the Knight First Amendment Institute director, told me back in August “we think Facebook exercising this judgment is preferable by far to the current state of affairs, under which Facebook categorically prohibits the use of digital investigative tools that are crucial to the study of the platform.”

Negotiations are apparently still ongoing. Here’s Alex Abdo, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute:

That’s why we (@knightcolumbia) proposed that Facebook adopt a “safe harbor” for journalism and research on the platform that complies with safeguards against abuse.

We’re still in negotiations with FB, but so far they’ve resisted our proposal. /7 https://t.co/BWudoKsMt5

— Alex Abdo (@AlexanderAbdo) January 29, 2019

How significant is that commercial interest? How many ad blockers actually took advantage of the capability FB just disabled? Was it a real problem?

The answers to these questions would help explain how much Facebook values the journalism it just obstructed. /15

— Alex Abdo (@AlexanderAbdo) January 29, 2019

ProPublica is looking for the answers to those questions. Merrill said the team is still working on preparing a way around this roadblock. “We live in a democracy. People have the right to know what politicians are saying in public,” he said. “The fact that Facebook wants to be the ones who determine what kind of journalism gets done about Facebook is just not happening.”

It’s okay to shudder. We’re rapidly approaching the first major election since American media largely flopped (The New York Times’ election-night needle included) in adequately reporting on the 2016 race and forecasting a Trump presidency.

National elections are, alongside the Olympics, the premier staging ground for American media experiments with technology and formats. (Both are really big events, scheduled years ahead of time, that produce a ton of real-time data to crunch and present.) The midterms are an opportunity to test what works — and what flops — halfway through Trump’s first term, with (hopefully) a substantial swath of America heading to the polls November 6 to vote for governors, senators, congresspeople, and various other local officials.

Innovative coverage of the 2016 election featured Slack tools, podcasts, and even a quasi-time capsule. But those are so 2016.

In this election cycle, news organizations are leaning on email newsletters to explain the first nationwide Election Day since “President Trump” became a reality, as well as on text-in-your-question experiments and collaborative efforts like Electionland 2.0.

Here are some of the approaches news organizations are using to push smart info on the campaigns and Election Day this time around, with some local ideas sprinkled in for good measure. (We’re not perfect and didn’t get everything — but we’re also not going to include everything. If you think your project merits inclusion, email me at christine@niemanlab.org.)

At the Times, Lisa Lerer (disclosure: a 2018 Nieman Fellow) is “hosting” On Politics, a new morning briefing and evening sit-down email billed as “a spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.” Those are a lot of promises, but it’s in line with the we-are-your-guide mode the Times has been in. It’s a little more touchy-feely than your typical political newsletter: Following some analysis in the intro, Lerer often has Q&As or reflections with Times political reporters, and she opened the newsletter’s inaugural issue with politicians’ personal tales of starting something new, from Newt Gingrich to Elizabeth Warren. Lerer’s email will be sticking around after the campaigns formally wrap up (there’s always another race just around the corner), but the Times has also launched a limited-run newsletter — more below.

The Times has spent the past half-decade or so pushing for an expanded international readership, including its new bureau in Australia. So of course one of its newsletters includes an explainer on America’s political system for the uninitiated. Abroad in America is a limited run twice-a-week newsletter from former London correspondent/native New Yorker writer-at-large Sarah Lyall, sharing dispatches from gubernatorial races and Trump’s rallies and also breaking down funky American concepts like gerrymandering. (Declan Walsh, the Times’ Cairo bureau chief, did something similar two years ago: “reporting on the 2016 American presidential campaign for a global audience in much the same way he would cover an event overseas.”)

Get chatty

Since your email inbox is already swimming in midterms coverage, you might as well add to your messages inbox. (Reminder: Editorial emails can generate low-to-middling open rates, but nearly all SMS messages are opened. Another reminder: SMS messages are not/should not be treated the same as emails! Sacred space, intimate communications, etc.)

The Lenfest Local Lab and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s innovation desk, respectively spearheaded by the now-sunset Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab‘s co-leader Sarah Schmalbach and Inquirer audience and innovation managing editor Kim Fox, built a texting product via GroundSource for The Inquirer’s Jonathan Lai to break down campaign issues with residents. Participants opt in for daily texts related to New Jersey or Pennsylvania elections (since Philly rides the Pennsylvania border) that share context about an issue like gun control in the New Jersey Senate race and link to an article with more details.

The New York Times is also inviting readers to message with a reporter following the campaign, though via its app instead of SMS itself. The Times tried that with the 2016 Summer Olympics but ran into scaling-SMS costs, so it just stuck the messaging experiment into its app for the 2018 Winter Olympics and is continuing it in the same space this fall. National political correspondent Alex Burns is the face of the messages, with some Times guest hosts.

USA Today also recently introduced an elections chatbot on its apps and desktop, leveraging its national network of local outlets.

Get chatty, but the listening version

Hot Pod chief Nick Quah rounded up the podcasts to keep an ear out for these midterms, from The New York Times to Vox Media to how Crooked Media’s Pod Save America used podcast adtech to target listeners with voter registration information specific to their state.

In brief (edited/condensed by me):

• The Times’ audio team isn’t producing a special standalone series for the elections again — hat tip to The Run Up — opting instead to funnel its midterm coverage purely through The Daily.
• NPR’s politics podcast team is tentatively planning to drop several special episodes in the lead-up to the midterms, particularly in the week of the elections itself. That team is already well engaged in a broadcast crossover called The Politics Show from NPR. Meanwhile, expect election-themed episodes from Hidden Brain and It’s Been a Minute, along with a timely investigation from Embedded on a ballot initiative that could restore voting rights for 1.5 million felons in the state of Florida.
• StoryCorps will kick off an initiative called “One Small Step,” which “seeks to help people with opposing political views who don’t know each other have civil, personal conversations.”
• Slate “see[s] the midterms as a play for audience development,” senior producer T.J. Raphael said, with special projects ranging from a partnership with Glamour magazine, Slate Political Gabfest hosting David Axelrod in a special episode, its tech podcast producing an episode focused on what social media companies have been doing in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, and a live show staged in Brooklyn on the Friday after the midterms.
• Vox Media’s Podcast Network is featuring special guests on its podcasts like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti on Recode Decode and Rebecca Traister and Nate Silver on The Ezra Klein Show, and Today, Explained and The Weeds producing special episodes on electoral strategies and midterm policies.

Guide me

Voter guides — find your polling place, judges to vote for, etc. — and endorsements are as bread and butter as Cracker Barrel for local outlets. See KPCC/LAist’s Human Voter Guide for a FAQ with some real homo sapiens and using Hearken to add followers’ wonders as well.

Just how curious is the @KPCC @LAist audience?

Through #DearLAist, #HumanVoterGuide, and questions straight to our reporters' @wearehearken embeds, you've sent us 13 questions in the last day, 118 in the last week, and 1,909 in the last year! pic.twitter.com/dComDGuENZ

— Ashley Alvarado (@AshleyAlvarado) October 23, 2018

The Human Voter Guide generated “at least 157 questions since August 2 (half through Hearken, the other half through GroundSource, social media, and in person),” Alvarado tells me.

The Washington Post set up a guide for the most important deadline before Election Day itself: how to register to vote in each state, serving double duty as info about voter suppression and a service about what you need to vote in your state. The New York Times has a ballot-style FAQ interactive about the midterms in general (“Does my vote matter?”).

But other media organizations are thinking outside the ballot box: ProPublica and The Skimm are both pushing go-participate-in-your-democracy-goshdarnit efforts.

ProPublica created a User’s Guide to Democracy, an eight-part series sent out to 6,615 newsletter subscribers starting in September with a 30-40 percent open rate. 69 percent of the subscribers were totally new to ProPublica’s database, ProPublica’s PR head Minhee Cho told me, and it’s reaching voters in 433 out of the U.S.’s 435 electoral districts.

The first installment to our User's Guide to Democracy is now live!

Learn how data brokers and social networks use your data to target you for political ads — and sign up for more personalized lessons on how to participate in our democracy: https://t.co/d4IVDMxgCo

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) September 13, 2018

In the 2016 cycle, The Skimm said it registered 95,000 women to vote in its No Excuses non-partisan campaign. (Remember: That race was decided by 80,000-ish voters in swing states.) This year’s revamp comes with a target number of 100,000 people signed up — and actively voting. The Skimm is devoting more resources to this platform this cycle, with a flashy website to see sample ballots and learn about the issues, celebrity partnerships, its first swag for purchase (instead of swag awarded for newsletter referrals) and delegated GOTV captainships among its Skimmbassadors. (Yes, that’s still a word.) At least 40,000 people have committed to voting through the No Excuses platform, and 55,000 people viewed their own sample ballot within 24 hours.

Teamwork, dreamwork, etc.

One of the biggest splashes in the 2016 cycle was Electionland, a thousand-person effort spearheaded by ProPublica and carried out by teams of journalists across the U.S. to monitor and verify reports of Election Day voting problems. The army of Electionlanders sorted through nearly 1,000 tips on its phone line and more than 3,000 SMS messages, in addition to some 800 from social media platforms. The 2018 version is similarly recruiting journalists to participate in day-of election integrity issues, in an environment where some gubernatorial candidates oversee voter registration in their own tight races.

Santa Monica’s KCRW and West Virginia Public Broadcasting teamed up for weekly conversations among its politically variant listeners (they’re not the first nor the last!) in a series called Red State, Blue State. “‘Red state’ host of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s podcast Us & Them, Trey Kay, spoke with his cousin Hollis Jones, a mechanic, about his take on the Golden State. And ‘blue state’ host Chery Glaser talked with Connie Hoy, who grew up in the Mountain State but left years ago, and lived in Northern California for quite some time,” West Virginia Public Broadcasting explained the series to its listeners.

Automation, sausage, and automated sausage

The Post’s Heliograf can formulate stories based on simple data points in repeated story circumstances — like Olympic medal tallies or Mad Libs, one might say. It’s back for the 2018 election “to help tell election stories at the district level, such as details about current office-holders, their challengers, key voter information and the district’s voting history,” according to the Post’s announcement.

We conclude with the aforementioned needle. We’ve written about The New York Times’ decision to show its polling results in real time, phone call by phone call. Maybe the transparency will help ease needle anxiety…maybe not.

ProPublica regularly collects large amounts of information that we can’t process by ourselves, including documents gathered in our reporting, tips solicited by our engagement journalists, and data published in our news applications.

Since the beginning, we’ve seen collaboration as a key way to make sure that all of this reporting material can be used to fulfill our mission: to make an impact in the real world. Collaboration has been a fundamental part of ProPublica’s journalism model. We make our stories available to republish for free through Creative Commons and usually co-publish or co-report stories with other news outlets. When it comes to large data sets, we often offer up our findings to journalists or the public to enable new reporting. It’s a way of spreading the wealth, so to speak. Collaborations are typically a core responsibility of each editor in the newsroom, but some of our projects have large-scale collaborations at their center, and they require dedicated and sustained attention.

My role emerged after Electionland 2016, one of the largest-ever journalism collaborations, which many ProPublica staff members pitched in to organize. While the project was a journalistic success, its editors learned a key lesson about the need for somebody to own the relationship with partner newsrooms. In short, we came to think that the collaboration itself was something that needed editing, including recruiting partners, making sure they saw the reporting tips they needed to see, and tracking what partners were publishing. It also reinforced the need for a more strategic tip-sharing approach after the success of large engagement projects, like Lost Mothers and Agent Orange, which garnered thousands of leads — and more stories than we had time to tell.

That’s how my role was born. Soon after the 2016 election, ProPublica launched Documenting Hate. Hiring a partner manager was the first priority. (We also hired a partner manager to work on Electionland 2018, which will cover this year’s midterm elections.)

Our newsroom isn’t alone in dedicating resources to this type of role. Other investigative organizations, such as Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, staffed up to support their collaborations. Heather Bryant — who founded Project Facet, which helps newsrooms work together — told me there are at least 10 others who manage long-term collaborations at newsrooms across the country, from Alaska to Texas to Pennsylvania.

What I do

My job is a hybrid of roles: reporter, editor, researcher, social media producer, recruiter, trainer, and project manager.

I recruited our coalition of newsrooms, and I vet and onboard partners. To date, we have more than 150 national and local newsrooms signed on to the project, plus nearly 20 college newspapers. I speak to a contact at each newsroom before they join, and then I provide them with the materials they need to work on the project. I’ve written training materials and conduct online training sessions so new partners can get started more quickly.

The core of this project is a shared database of tips about hate incidents that we source from the public. For large collaborations like Documenting Hate and Electionland, our developer Ken Schwencke builds these private central repositories, which are connected directly to our tip submission form. We use Screendoor, a form-building service, to host the tip form.

In large-scale collaborations, we invite media organizations to be part of the newsgathering process. For Documenting Hate, we ask partners to embed this tip submission form to help us gather story leads. That way, we can harness the power of different audiences around the country, from Los Angeles Times readers, to Minnesota Public Radio listeners, to Univision viewers. At ProPublica, we try to talk about the project as much as we can in the media and at conferences to spread the word to both potential tipsters and partners.

The tips we gather are available to participating journalists — helping them to do their job and produce stories they might otherwise not have found. ProPublica and our partners have reported more than 160 stories, including pieces about hate in schools, on public transportation and on the road, in the workplace, and at places of worship, and incidents involving the president’s name and policies, to name just a few. Plus, each authenticated tip acts as a stepping stone for other partners to build on their reporting.

At ProPublica, we’ve been gathering lots of public records from police on hate crimes to do our own reporting and sharing those records with partners, too. Any time we produce an investigation in-house, I share the information we have available so reporters can republish or localize the story.

As partner manager, I’m a human resource to share knowledge. I’ve built expertise in the hate beat and serve as a kind of research desk for our network, pointing reporters to sources and experts. I host a webinar or training once a month to help reporters understand the project or to build this beat, and I send out a weekly internal newsletter.

Another part of my job is being an air-traffic controller, sending out incoming tips to reporters who might be interested and making sure that multiple people aren’t working on the same tip at the same time. This is especially important in a project like ours; given the sensitivity of the subject, we don’t want to scare off tipsters by having multiple reporters reach out at once. I pitch story ideas based on patterns I’ve identified to journalists who might want to dig further. I’m constantly researching leads to share with our network and with specific journalists working on relevant stories.

And I’m also a signal booster: When partners publish reporting on hate, we share their work on our social channels to make sure these stories get as big an audience as possible. We keep track of all of the stories that were reported with sourcing from the project to make them available in one place.

The challenges

While the Documenting Hate project has produced some incredible work, this is not an easy job.

Many journalists are eager to work with ProPublica, but not always with each other; it can be a process to get buy-in from editors to collaborate with a network of newsrooms, especially at large ones where there are layers of hierarchy. Some reporters agree to join but don’t make it all the way through onboarding, which involves several steps that may require help from others in their newsrooms. Some explore the database and don’t see anything they want to follow up on right away, and then lose interest. And occasionally journalists are so overwhelmed with their day-to-day work that I rarely hear back from them after they’ve joined.

Turnover and layoffs, which are depressingly common in our industry, mean having to find and onboard new contacts in partner newsrooms, or relying on bounce-back emails to figure out who’s left. It also means that sometimes engaged reporters move into positions at new companies where they don’t cover hate, leaving a gap in their old newsrooms. A relentless news cycle doesn’t help, either. For example, after the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, caused a renewed surge in interest in the hate beat, a series of deadly hurricanes hit, drawing a number of reporters onto the natural disaster beat for a time.

And because of the sensitivity of the incidents, tipsters sometimes refuse to talk after they’ve written in, which can be discouraging for reporters. Getting a story may mean following up on a dozen tips rather than just one or two. Luckily, since we’ve received thousands of tips and hundreds of records, active participants in our coalition have found plenty of material to work on.

The future of partnerships

While collaborations aren’t always easy, I believe projects like Documenting Hate are likely to be an important part of the future of journalism. Pooling resources and dividing and conquering on reporting can help save time and money, which are in increasingly short supply.

Some partnerships are the fruit of necessity, linking small newsrooms in the same region or state, like Coast Alaska, or creating stronger ties between affiliates within a large network, like NPR. I think there’s huge potential for more local collaborations, especially with shrinking budgets and personnel. Other partnerships emerge out of opportunity, like the Panama Papers investigation, which was made possible by a massive document leak. If more newsrooms resisted the urge for exclusivity — a concept that matters far more to journalists than to the public — more partnerships could be built around data troves and leaks.

Another area of potential is to band together to request and share public records or to pool funding for more expensive requests; these costs can prevent smaller newsrooms from doing larger investigations. I also think there’s a ton of opportunity to collaborate on specific topics and beats to share knowledge, best practices and reporting.

With new partnerships comes the need for someone at the helm, navigating the ship. While many newsrooms’ finances are shrinking, any collaborative project can have a coordinator role baked into the budget. An ideal collaborations manager is a journalist who understands the day-to-day challenges of newsrooms, is fanatical about project management, is capable of sourcing and shaping stories, and can track the reach and impact of work that’s produced.

We all benefit when we work together — helping us reach wider audiences, do deeper reporting and better serve the public with our journalism.

Hypothesis: Their recently unveiled organization, The Markup, is setting up a new model for newsrooms to report on the societal effects of technology, using the scientific method (as seen, well, here in this lede).

Data/evaluation/findings: TK.

Angwin and Larsen, a journalist-programmer team at ProPublica, had uncovered how Facebook let users target ads at “Jew haters” and enabled advertisers to exclude certain races and ages from housing and job ads, among other investigations into how algorithms are biased. The work even earned Angwin a public shoutout from Facebook:

Thanks @JuliaAngwin. You've done a lot to uncover issues in our ads systems, which we've worked hard to fix. This new API is an important step towards greater transparency + other changes we're making like view ads and the archive going back 7 years for all political & issue ads. https://t.co/z7wagLZRyV

— Facebook (@facebook) May 11, 2018

They split from ProPublica in April — bringing a couple staffers with them on their way out, and roping in cofounder and executive director Sue Gardner, formerly of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — and now are ramping up said crazy adventure:

The Markup is a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom. We produce meaningful data-centered journalism that reveals the societal harms of technology. We hold the powerful to account, raise the cost of bad behavior and spur reforms. Our journalism is guided by the scientific method; we develop hypotheses and collect data to test those hypotheses.

Funded by $20 million from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, $2 million from the Knight Foundation (which, disclosure, has supported Nieman Lab in the past), and $1 million from a collection of other journalism philanthropy organizations, The Markup kicks off in early 2019. I spoke with Angwin (with a short interlude on the financial details from Gardner) about the organization’s plans, its distinction from ProPublica, and how others can get involved going forward. Our chat has been edited and condensed for clarity.

[Here’s that interlude with Sue Gardner, The Markup’s cofounder and executive director, with more on the finances.]

[Okay, back to Julia.]

Last night, an attempt to promote our recent story was blocked by @Facebook's algorithm. This newsworthy piece of impartial and well-documented #reporting about #politics was confused with political content. /1 pic.twitter.com/Q0HjqMwIN8

— Orb Media (@OrbTweet) September 6, 2018

We know that Facebook is a private platform, and we understand that Facebook is trying to prevent misinformation campaigns. However, we have newsworthy, impartial journalism that is being blocked from further dissemination due to an act of #censorship. /3

— Orb Media (@OrbTweet) September 6, 2018

The piece in question? “Generation activist: Young people choose protest over traditional politics.”

#GenerationActivist (https://t.co/AmqgoU2AO8) reports a growing global gap in political participation based on nearly a million data points in 128 countries. By blocking the post's promotion, Facebook Ads hindered our launch & hurt both our business and public service purpose. /2

— Orb Media (@OrbTweet) September 6, 2018

“Any human being that would put an eye on it would be able to say this is not political propaganda. This is really fair and well-documented journalism. It should not be confused,” said Naja Nielsen, the chief journalism officer of Orb Media, a nonprofit journalism organization that works with local and regional publishers to share stories of global importance. “The problem of course is that these platforms are so important in the ways we get information, and if the algorithms are not good enough to show the difference between propaganda and a piece of well-made journalism, then we as a community have problems.”

(Nielsen said Facebook’s algorithm has also rejected this photo of a boy walking through mountains of plastic waste in the Philippines. Perhaps most famously, Facebook blocked, and then relented on, a newspaper’s posting of the Pulitzer-winning Vietnam War napalm girl photo in 2016, though that was for alleged sexual content rather than politics.)

Facebook says that the Orb article would be fine to be promoted — but only if Orb first registers as a political advertiser through its system, which can take 10 days. (They snail mail a secret code to your home to confirm you’re on U.S. soil.) Still facing criticism for its role in Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, Facebook’s position has shifted toward “better safe than sorry” with a blanket registration ask to anyone wanting to promote content dealing with certain national issues.

Orb Media is not the only publisher to have its attempt to advertise blocked by Facebook’s system interpreting it as political content (the additional registration, you know, comes after that whole U.S. presidential election thing.) Earlier this summer, ProPublica reported how The Hechinger Report, Voices of Monterey Bay, BirminghamWatch, and other publishers had had certain stories blocked by Facebook’s advertising filter, while other truly political content slipped through. Facebook said it would work on it — but it keeps happening.

Hi there, @facebook. This is not political content. This is journalistic content that deals with policy. There's a difference.

Didn't you go over this with @ProPublica recently? https://t.co/kMCOzWanAY pic.twitter.com/3mSViK3sdv

— Reveal (@reveal) June 20, 2018

We've had to deal with this too at @statnews. Super frustrating.

— Megha Satyanarayana (@meghas) June 20, 2018

We recently went through this @topicstories / @firstlookmedia. An account admin has to be personally verified first to get the page whitelisted, then each ad is taken on a case by case basis w/r/t to it being 'political' or not.

— Man Bartlett (@man) June 20, 2018

Facebook has tried to make some amends, creating a separate news archive from the political archive. But news organizations’ representatives are still required to register through the authentication process involving submitting a home address and photo ID if the organization wants to run ads related to 20 specific national issues like “values,” “immigration,” or “abortion.” Over the past few months, Facebook has also introduced the ad archive API (admission by application only).

We reached out to Facebook for comment on the Orb case, and a spokesperson directed us to this summer blog post by Facebook’s news partnerships head Campbell Brown. “We don’t want to be in a position where a bad actor obfuscates its identity by claiming to be a news publisher, and what’s more, we know there can be editorial content from news organizations that takes political positions. For these reasons, we’re focused on the separate archive treatment, without exemptions,” she wrote.

The one thing that — mostly — everyone can agree on is that it’s important for Facebook to have these filters, but it’s also important to get them right.

Orb publishes six investigations a year and coordinates heavily with publishing partners from dozens of countries to push the stories at the same to drive dialogue. “Timing is everything. When it’s been more than 24 hours that our story is on our partners’ sites and we’re held back from promoting it, that is not good for a small business like ours,” Nielsen said.

Some outlets, like New York Magazine, stopped buying ads for particular articles that could be misconstrued by Facebook as political content. Some have stopped buying Facebook ads altogether.

“Like many other newsrooms, we opted to not hand over anyone’s personal information to Facebook — even if it meant being able to run ads that contain content the company deems ‘political’ based on its listed criteria. As a result, our ability to boost this sort of content remains limited,” Reveal’s engagement reporter Byard Duncan said.

Nielsen said Orb would have to think about paying Facebook to promote articles again. But when you’re trying to have a global impact, it kind of helps to make sure you’re putting it in the line of sight of people who care.

“I completely acknowledge that Facebook is a private company. They have the rules they want to have. We as users have to listen to whatever decisions they’re making,” Nielsen said. “But, as we all know, in the age of the internet publishing an article is not the same as the article being seen by people interested in it.”

ProPublica’s staff is no stranger to collaboration with news organizations of all sizes (see: its project with nine other newsrooms to track the missing immigrant children). In this case, they appear to have mitigated the risk of parachute-partnering with the local newsrooms in their network, instead using its resources to strengthen and amplify local reporting. My conversations with reporters participating in the network confirmed that they see this as a hand-up, not a handout. It’s not a charity case, but a true collaboration.

“It’s nice when you’re in a small newspaper in a little place like Charleston to feel like you’ve got a literal army of people at ProPublica that are on your side, trying to help you take these stories to the next level,” Ken Ward, Jr., environmental writer at the Gazette-Mail in West Virginia, told me.

“We’re really proud of our work at the Southern Illinoisan, but we have a flashlight, not a lighthouse,” said Molly Parker, a reporter at the paper in Carbondale, Ill. “Giving some of these issues that we’ve been seeing a national spotlight or introducing them to a national audience might help change the nature of the conversation.”

Those were two of the 239 applicants — with only seven newsrooms selected — for the first round of the network. In its second round next year, the local reporting network will include a special focus on state government accountability reporting through seven additional newsroom partners, ProPublica announced last week.

(Examples of applicable state-level investigations, according to the network’s senior editor, Charlie Ornstein: The Dallas Morning News’ “Pain and Profit” investigation into the state of Texas’s Medicaid management and the Houston Chronicle’s “Denied” Pulitzer finalist work examining, again, the state of Texas for restricting special education services.)

This expansion comes through a $1.4 million grant over two years, added to the initial $1 million grant over three years, thanks to an anonymous donor who agreed with ProPublica’s concern about the squeezing of state-level investigations, ProPublica’s president Dick Tofel said. (Reminder: Applications are due September 14, and anyone except national news organizations are eligible to apply.)

“There are some very serious problems in society that you can’t solve by throwing money at them. This one, at the moment, is one you can address by throwing money at it,” Tofel said. “The whole point of it is that these are stories that otherwise would not have been written. I hope that also strengthens the position of our partner news organizations in their communities generally.”

Happy Sunday! My reporters’ stories are on the front pages of @wvgazettemail and @thesouthern today. Read them:https://t.co/RpbsoYbXx9https://t.co/D72efEmUHV@Kenwardjr @MollyParkerSI pic.twitter.com/Znyr7CRyCy

— Charles Ornstein (@charlesornstein) August 12, 2018

In addition to funding each reporter’s salary for the year, ProPublica’s support comes in the form of senior editor Ornstein — “what this has convinced me of is that there’s a lot of amazing ideas in the notebooks and heads of reporters around the country,” he said — and access to Beena Raghavendran, the network’s dedicated engagement fellow, and ProPublica researchers.

“It’s not just that I can ask the researcher to pull cases for me. It’s that the researcher is showing me how to do it and they’re willing to share their process with me as well,” WMFE Orlando reporter Abe Aboraya said. “They are really creating more investigative journalists across the country with this.”

Aboraya also leaned on Raghavendran to help design and distribute an in-depth survey gathering the experiences first responders across the U.S. have had in diagnosing and addressing post-traumatic stress disorder. The form asks participants to detail their relationship to PTSD (is it affecting them or a loved one?), how their employing department has addressed it, if they’ve had to file lawsuits or go into workers’ compensation because of it, etc. But Aboraya also had to develop relationships with first responders’ associations to even convince them to send out his survey in the first place.

On their own, “we could’ve done Google Forms but that would’ve been rudimentary,” he said. He has received nearly 400 responses so far, which has led to stories like this and community events like this.

Parker, in Illinois, leveraged ProPublica’s resources to continue her blockbuster coverage of HUD policies in the southern Illinois area, especially after HUD secretary Ben Carson visited a neighboring town and declared mission accomplished. (Side note: why do politicians keep DOING that.) Her interview requests were treated a little differently after word got around that she was working with ProPublica, which also has had a branch in Illinois since 2017.

The Southern Illinoisan and ProPublica Illinois had developed a relationship before the local reporting network opened. (As part of its continued expansion in the state, ProPublica has said it’s fair to assume one member of the next iteration of the network will also be in Illinois.) Parker has also had to balance the good-natured ribbing of her overworked colleagues as she’s taken a step back from the daily reporting in a four-person newsroom — “When are you going to write this, 2020?” she said they jest — but Ornstein and other ProPublica editors have been holding newsroom-wide brown-bag sessions about the art of the investigative interview and finding stories on social media to include others.

“A local paper is able to do these stories but also maybe open other local reporters’ eyes as to what is available,” Parker said. “You can empower other local journalists to make a lot of noise too. Sometimes it takes a lot of noise in a lot of places to move the government’s policies.”

Over in West Virginia, Ward has been tackling reporting on the coal crisis for the past 27 years at the Gazette-Mail, which had been owned by the same family for over 100 years — until January. The family’s company filed for bankruptcy, putting the paper at risk of acquisition by potentially unsavory characters. Though a different group ended up victorious in the bankruptcy sale, you might have heard about the layoffs that pushed longtime Gazette-Mailers from the newsroom (and the coal executive who celebrated their departures). One of those exiters was the editor who helped Ward brainstorm the ProPublica proposal in the first place, Rob Byers.

“Every day I’m working on this, I’m thinking about Rob and wishing he was here with me,” Ward said.

The other reporters and their projects (some of the wording is from the announcement in December:

• Christian Sheckler, a criminal justice reporter at the South Bend Tribune in northern Indiana. His hard-pressed approach with police officers “hasn’t gotten me invited to any barbecues,” he wrote in his application, “but I believe I’ve better served my readers with aggressive reporting on issues such as excessive force, the imperfect protective order system for domestic battery victims and policies on deadly high-speed police chases.”

  His work so far has focused on wrongful convictions under former Indiana governor — and now U.S. Vice President — Mike Pence.

• Rebekah Allen, a reporter at The Advocate, based in Baton Rouge, La. She is a member of the paper’s small team of reporters focused on investigative projects and enterprise stories. She produced a three-part series highlighting how the state’s powerful nursing home lobby fought off efforts to make it easier for the elderly and disabled to receive care in their homes. “As a result, nursing homes, ranked last in the nation in quality, have seen their budgets soar in a punishing financial climate where everyone from higher education to hospitals has seen dramatic reductions,” the paper said in introducing the series online.

  Allen recently announced her departure from The Advocate to join The Dallas Morning News, but Ornstein said the network will stay with the newsroom in Louisiana. She’s reported on how legislators promote bills that help their relatives and clients.

• Jayme Fraser, a reporter who will be working with the Malheur Enterprise, a weekly newspaper in Vale, Ore. Fraser has been an education and statewide projects reporter at the Missoulian in Missoula, Montana, and before that, at the Houston Chronicle. She has written about how the Indian Health Service isn’t meeting the needs of Native American patients, and about questionable science presented in a local “shaken baby” case. Fraser has also helped lead a first-time collaboration between the Missoulian and the University of Montana School of Journalism to investigate an issue at the intersection of health and criminal justice.

  Through her reporting, Fraser has raised questions on how states manage violent offenders with mental illnesses.

• Rebecca Moss, a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican. Moss covers energy and environmental issues, focusing on Los Alamos National Laboratory and nuclear waste. She co-wrote about how a company that processes and distributes fertilizers and other agricultural products had found a friendlier regulatory climate under the state’s Republican governor than under her predecessor. In 2017, she wrote about how a New Mexico town had stepped up to be part of a nuclear waste disposal experiment, even as other states and towns had balked.

  With ProPublica, Moss has investigated worker health and safety violations of U.S. Department of Defense contractors with ties to New Mexico.

That means, of course, that plenty of newsrooms don’t have a data journalist around. But even for those that do, “Data journalism takes many forms, and it’s not always clear from the headline that there is potentially useful data within that document or story,” Simon Rogers, Google News Lab’s data editor, wrote this week. “The way that data is presented can vary as well, and though data tables are often the most useful format for data journalists, it isn’t always easy for Google Search to detect and understand tables of data to surface the most relevant results.”

Google, in partnership with ProPublica, announced that it will be including more data in search results. (Disclosure: I’m on a summer fellowship at Nieman Lab, paid for by the Google News Initiative.) “[T]here is no reason why searching for datasets shouldn’t be as easy as searching for recipes, or jobs, or movies,” Google said in an Google AI blog post last year.

Awesome @GoogleNewsInit collaboration facilitating discovery of public datasets by integrating data journalism—like @ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer's 990 tax return database—directly into @Google search results https://t.co/ua7hTQQWYJ pic.twitter.com/lWZyDJCIO4

— Anna Massoglia (@annalecta) August 1, 2018

From the post:

Based on feedback from 30 of the top data journalists in the world, we identified an opportunity to improve how tabular data appears in Google Search and in doing so make it easier for all people to find the data they’re looking for. It works like this: news organizations that publish data in the form of tables can add additional structured data to make the dataset parts of the page easier to identify for use in relevant Search features. One of the participants, ProPublica has been testing the structured data on its interactive databases (for example, on its Nonprofit Explorer).

News organizations that publish data in the form of tables can now add structured data to the existing html of their pages to make datasets easier to identify and surface in Google Search.

Check out our our developer documentation at https://t.co/4O251Pyfea pic.twitter.com/71CpevnM0M

— Google News Initiative (@GoogleNewsInit) July 31, 2018

The feature joins Google’s other data-accessibility projects, including Google’s Public Data Explorer, Google Trends, the Election DataBot. If you’re a newsroom interested in adding it to your site, you can check out more details here.

2. From omnibus to niche

Niche media’s ability to create relevance for users — and to mobilize both interest and willingness to pay — is far greater than the ability of the omnibus media. And apart from a very few media with global reach (e.g. The Guardian, BBC, CNN), all news media can be considered niche operations. However, many broad-reaching legacy media hesitate to openly show and communicate which niche audience they seek to engage. Maybe because the democratic value of niche media is somewhat controversial: creating strong bonds among a homogenous audience instead of bridging different communities. Nonetheless, targeted niche media like the Seattle-based tech site GeekWire, Berlin-based youth site Ze.tt and the intellectual daily Information in Copenhagen show that is possible to create both quality journalism of high public value and cater to targeted audiences at the same time.

3. From flock to club

Gathering people around the news media, in clearly defined communities — clubs — is a strategy gaining momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. This implies transforming what were formerly known as subscribers, users, or readers into members, that must either register or pay to join the inner circles of the crowd around the news media. Spanish El Diario and French Mediapart have put membership models at the heart of their identities and their journalistic operations. Many American media companies — from legacy players like The New York Times and the Gannett group to online startups organized in the News Revenue Hub — follow the same path.

4. From ink to sweat

Many media companies are pursuing new ways to create physical journalism in the form of public meetings, festivals, events, and stage plays. Live and engaging. And yes, they consider it journalism. French daily Le Monde has made physical live events an important way to engage with citizens and to generate new revenue. The same strategy is used by The Texas Tribune, which carries out a variety of small and big events yearround. Danish startup Zetland regularly sets up journalistic shows around the prominent theaters in Copenhagen.

5. From speaking to listening

The legacy media business often has the character of a walled fortress more than of an open and accessible house. But both in the U.S. and Europe, news organizations are increasingly opening up — physically and mentally — in order to be more accessible to the citizens they serve. More than anything, this means listening to citizens and creating more transparency in editorial matters. This can be done through direct personal dialogue, through physical presence in communities, or through the systematic use of small and big data. The listening solutions developed by Chicago-based Hearken are now used by public radio and TV stations in the U.S. The regional German newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung, which brands itself Bürgerzeitung — the newspaper of the citizens — listens through extensive use of physical meetings in local communities and by each day dedicating editorial resources and columns in the paper to cover questions asked by readers.

6. From arm’s length to cooperation

In order to maintain independence and neutrality, modern journalism has kept its distance, holding everyone outside the newsroom at arm’s length: citizens, interest groups, public institutions, private corporations, decision makers. However, this pattern is clearly changing. More and more newsrooms are involving citizens directly throughout the journalistic process: from ideation to research to delivery of independent content to the subsequent debate of published stories. The Dutch online site De Correspondent, German Correctiv, and ProPublica in New York are prime examples of organizations that have refined this co-creation process — without giving up editorial gatekeeping. They have all also pioneered cooperation with grassroots, NGOs, and public institutions — as well as with other media companies — as a way to create a both substantially deeper and more engaging journalism.

7. From own to other platforms

It weakens business opportunities of the news media and their journalistic control when they put their content on social media. That seems to be the common consensus in the news industry. Using social media is a double-edged sword, but handled in the right way — maybe more as a way to cooperate than distribute — social network technologies have big potential to enhance and deepen engagement, while at the same time creating stronger journalism. David Fahrenthold’s Twitter-based research on Donald Trump’s charitable giving, earning him and The Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize, is the golden example. The Wall Street Journal’s use of Snapchat Discover to cover the lives of Americans hit by the opioid crisis in the U.S. is another.

8. From problem to solution

Even the most hardcore investigative journalists have discovered they gain greater impact if they add a solution-oriented level to their work. Constructive journalism simply creates more engagement among readers, users, viewers. They read more, they are more likely to share content, and they express more interest in knowing more about the issue when the piece has a constructive angle. The Danish public broadcaster DR has refined this type of journalism over several years, thus improving ratings and reach of its TV news. In the U.S., the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting integrates a solution-oriented element in many of its investigative projects — even arranging solution summits for the stakeholders around some of the problems its deep-digging journalists have uncovered.

9. From observers to activists

Several news outlets — established as well as new ones — are testing whether they can create a new relevance to their readers, users, and viewers through activist campaigns or journalistic advocacy. This move is particularly controversial for many journalists — and clearly not a strategy suitable for all types of media operations. However, a campaign-oriented approach to journalism has successfully been used as a way to engage and create action among citizens for European news media such as The Guardian, Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, and the Danish regional newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende.

Our book describes and analyzes all these examples and many, many more, in depth and detail. If there’s a common denominator for the 50-plus news organizations we’ve met and studied — apart, of course, from striving to connect with citizens in new ways — it’s their focus on innovation and experiments.

All the new digital publishers we’ve met seem founded on the courage and ambition of radical innovation. But also, in the legacy media institutions we visited, there seems to be a new understanding of the need for dramatic change and open-ended experiments.

This is why we find no reason to preach one particular model of journalism for the future. All the experiments and ideas unfolding in the current media landscape on both sides of the Atlantic indicate that there will be dozens, if not hundreds, of different models, all of which carry a hope for journalism in the future.

Eight — make that nine, and now ten— news organizations are working together across four countries, trying to determine where these children have been taken and, exactly, how many there are. “Help us make sure that every single child is accounted for,” The Intercept’s explanation of the project to readers says.

ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, Univision News, The Intercept, Frontline, the Texas Tribune, Animal Político (in Mexico), El Faro (in El Salvador), and Plaza Pública and El Periódico (both in Guatemala) are involved in the major initiative. They’re seeking information from their readers on the facilities where these children are housed — with check boxes for “I was held there,” “I worked or currently work here,” and more — and who the children are — “What is the child or children’s name (s)? What age(s)?” — in forms available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

This particular project began with ProPublica publishing a map of all known facilities housing immigrant children — children separated from their parents at the border, and minors who crossed the bordered unaccompanied — to help readers understand their actual proximity to the issue and to hold accountable the government agencies that are involved.

“It was one of those quintessential ProPublica moments. We came together [a week ago] and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to refocus what we’re doing and continue to chase this story of zero tolerance,'” said Adriana Gallardo, engagement reporter at ProPublica.

This is the most quickly that ProPublica has spun up a major collaborative project like this; while the organization has done international collaborations before, this is also the first time it’s embedded a map and engagement questionnaires simultaneously in multiple countries.

Gallardo said ProPublica is maintaining the data and sharing relevant tips with the partners, who are free to pursue stories at their will and are committed to sharing the map and the forms with their audiences. A dozen people from the ProPublica newsroom, among the news apps, research, and engagement teams, are focusing on this project. “As we get more tips, there will be more reporters involved to produce journalism from this, which is the ultimate goal,” Gallardo said.

News organizations have been covering the crisis, which has echoes in the Obama administration and has worsened and gained public attention since the Trump administration began separating children from their parents at the border. ProPublica’s obtained recording of crying young children in one of the shelters drew even more attention. The Texas Tribune added 78 tweets over nine days to its thread tracking the situation started the afternoon of that same day. With that has come critiques of the media coverage, from Time magazine’s cover photo of Trump and the Honduran girl (who wasn’t actually separated from her mother) to the diversity of weekend political talk show guests — leaving out the voices of the people actually involved. Meanwhile, a Facebook fundraiser to raise money to help separated immigrant families went viral and has now surpassed $20 million (from an original $1,500 goal).

Now, these news organizations are digging in to do something more about it.

We found and mapped 97 shelters holding immigrant children.

We did it to:
-show readers where these facilities are
-increase transparency & accountability
-ask for more tips about themhttps://t.co/vSZw1jtoE1

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) June 27, 2018

Gallardo said that most of the tips coming in so far (in the one day that the forms and the map have been live) are related to the facilities rather than the children themselves, but she’s optimistic the international collaborators and other partners will help spread the word. “This is the beginning of the reporting on this for our newsroom,” she said. “We are being transparent about what we know and what we don’t know and what we need help with.”

“Our readers are very enthusiastic about the possibility of helping spread the reach of the map, particularly because our government’s reaction to the crisis has been very shy, clumsy and yielding toward the U.S. government,” said Enrique Naveda, the editor at Plaza Pública, which has partnered before with international coalitions like ICIJ. “Our highest expectation regarding this alliance is to offer a service to migrants above all, and secondly, to have a direct political impact that gives way to more humane policy in the U.S. and Central America.”

ProPublica spearheaded another major collaborative project during 2016’s Election Day, called Electionland, though they obviously had more time to prepare for that newsy situation. Then, 450 journalists from about 250 news outlets in 47 states (and the District of Columbia) monitored voting aberrations, but they had months to prepare for it. ProPublica is also working on Documenting Hate, a nationwide effort to track hate crimes, with partners like Univision, the New York Times’ opinion section, Meedan, PBS NewsHour, and many more, including local outlets.

At Poynter, David Beard pointed out that other news orgs like the Texas Tribune and the Washington Post are trying to crowdsource information on the issue, too, as well as a group of researchers using library science.

We are partnering with other news organizations, including @propublica, @BuzzFeedNews, and @univisionnews, to gather vital information about the children in immigration detention facilities and shelters. Help us find them. https://t.co/Bp0a1kZ1jK

— The Intercept (@theintercept) June 27, 2018

| Mapa interactivo |
¿Dónde están los niños separados de sus padres? https://t.co/NvOCdr1vWU

— Plaza Pública (@PlazaPublicaGT) June 28, 2018

El medio estadounidense @ProPublica encontró 97 instalaciones con niños migrantes, incluidos refugios y centros de acogida. Medios latinoamericanos nos hemos asociado para recopilar información vital de los menores separados de sus padres https://t.co/tiNMWsrget

— elfaro.net (@_ElFaro_) June 28, 2018

.@ProPublica, @BuzzFeedNews, @theintercept, @UnivisionNews, @_ElFaro_, @PlazaPublicaGT y @Pajaropolitico se asocian para recopilar información sobre los niños inmigrantes separados de sus padres https://t.co/pgkOBM67zX

— AnimalPolitico.com (@Pajaropolitico) June 28, 2018

Do you know a family separated at the border? We're looking for information about the children held by the US government https://t.co/ZYhDqkjudP

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) June 28, 2018

FRONTLINE is investigating family separations at the U.S. border – and you can help. https://t.co/SbFDyav7uI pic.twitter.com/uYEr7oY8j2

— FRONTLINE (@frontlinepbs) June 28, 2018

If you have direct knowledge about a separated immigrant family or a facility where children are being held, we want to hear from you.

Information can be submitted anonymously or with names. It will not be made public without permission. More here: https://t.co/supAYPFc3R

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) June 28, 2018

¿Conoces a un menor que fue separado de su familia en la frontera de Estados Unidos? Cuéntanos si sabes dónde está detenido. Si estás buscando un niño/a pero no conoces su ubicación, puedes decirnos cuándo fue la última vez que lo viste o se comunicaron https://t.co/Z9l3LVNPqr

— elPeriódico (@el_Periodico) June 30, 2018

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

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

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

The study’s main findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The need to find sustainable business practices in nonprofit organizations is just as important as it is for everyone else in journalism. INN began as a group of 27 journalists working at nonprofits in 2009, who formed a network of shared knowledge on how news publishers can make smart business decisions and improve on public service journalism.

This conference was funded by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the Knight Foundation (which is also a funder of Nieman Lab). It brought in speakers from WordPress, ProPublica, The Trace, and Mother Jones (and two speakers from my alma mater the University of Missouri). Topics over the two-day sprint covered everything from fundraising to storytelling techniques, big ideas and little tips. Much of it was shared online via the hashtag #INNDays2018.

Your email copy should focus on the value in your organization's work, mentioning quality content costs and reinforce that funding comes from readers/member. Make sure you add "independent media." #INNDays2018

— INN (@INN) June 13, 2018

Speaking at #INNDays2018, @kinseywilson describes @TheDailyNYT as "a profound disruption of public radio." Because media habits have change, "people have an appetite to listen to one audio story, rather than the 18 one might hear in @MorningEdition."

— Current (@currentpubmedia) June 13, 2018

Thanks for attending the Four Ps of Sponsorship Sales at #INNDays2018. It was great to participate! Sharing my presentation: https://t.co/Nt9jNfGPbZ @INN @RJIFuturesLab

— Ebony Reed (@EbonyReed) June 13, 2018

55% of nonprofit newsrooms get majority of funding from foundations. Single topic sites more dependent with 62% of revenue coming from foundations. Foundation funding remains important. #INNDays2018

— INN (@INN) June 14, 2018

Sponsorships, of course, can only carry a publisher so far. Relating this back to content and producing a product that people will eventually pay for themselves is also important. Speakers discussed how to make human connections with stories that might otherwise seem too big of a sales pitch.

Kicking off #INNDays2018, keynoter @kinseywilson: if you want people to pay you have to shift from reach & frequency to building relationship w/audience.

— Pam Maples (@pamaples) June 13, 2018

Story 1 reaction: Oh dear
Story 2 reaction: Teddy’s hair didn’t fall about because… #takemymoney#IRE18 #INNDays2018 pic.twitter.com/iG1hyxsalo

— Lucia A. Walinchus (@SoSaysLucia) June 13, 2018

Four things readers will pay for in terms of news: Business Content, Niche Content, Premium Content (e.g. NYT) and Bundled Content (both high value and lower value). @kinseywilson #AIRMedia #INNDays2018

— Daniel Lathrop (@lathropd) June 13, 2018

What news orgs have to do to build audiences, says @kinseywilson – Become essential daily habit. Have emotional attachment. Convey their support is a down payment of future value. #INNDays2018

— Lisa Gibbs (@lisagibbs954) June 13, 2018

Journalists and managers came away with some know-how on reaching, and keeping, audiences. INN will still be active over the weekend, working with investigative journalists to sharpen their skills at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference for 2018.

Major INN Index report coming this fall. Stay tuned for that. #INNDays2018

— INN (@INN) June 14, 2018

In the past few years, local journalism — especially the traditional models of TV news and newspapers — has struggled to adapt to the challenges of digital advertising and platforms, as national-level organizations have greater scale to soak up subscription dollars and chase heavy-hitting stories. It’s not a new tale, but as the media landscape (and the Facebook landscape, the political landscape, the news group ownership landscape, etc.) continues to shift and everyone remembers the importance of quality local news to democracy, there are a number of rising initiatives focused on (and with funding for) local news. There’s also a solid group of organizations that have already been working on amplifying local news voices. But the network of brains and bank accounts dedicated to local news can get confusing.

A few weeks ago, we put together a guide to the different projects that have recently entered the trust-in-journalism arena. Here’s our attempt at detangling some of the different projects and groups working in the local space — from Localore for public media to Table Stakes to Report for America to the Local Media Association, and more. Did we miss any? Let me know!

Since January, seven journalists in those newsrooms have been guided by senior editor Charles Ornstein, though the local editors still maintain some editorial control. ProPublica also offers support with funding for the reporters’ salaries and benefits for 2018 in this first round of the network. Applicants were limited to those from areas with less than 1 million people.

In our previous coverage of the network, we noted that ProPublica’s effort was in part inspired by Localore: Finding America, a project from the Association of Independents in Radio that pairs producers with public radio stations in underserved areas. What’s that? Funny you should ask…

Localore: Finding America

Team: Sue Schardt, the Association of Independents in Radio, and a network of more than 1,100 producers in 47 states and 30 countries, according to the project’s website

Funders: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Wyncote Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts

Participants: Numerous. A recent round of Localore included projects with WAMU in Washington, D.C.; WEAA in Baltimore, Md.; KCPT in Kansas City, Mo.; KUAZ in Tucson, Ariz.; WHYY in Philadelphia, Pa.; WBHM in Birmingham, Ala.; KNBA in Anchorage, Alaska; NCPR in Canton, New York; KOSU in Tulsa, Okla.; WUWM in Milwaukee, Wisc.; WUNC in Durham, NC.; WUOT in Knoxville, Tenn.; WVTF in Richmond, Va.; WWNO in New Orleans, La.; and KBCS in Bellevue, Wash. The list of the producers they worked with and the projects they developed is here.

Since launching in 2010, AIR’s Localore initiative has helped create public media projects for covering diverse communities across the United States. Independent producers have been paired with public media stations and supplied with funding to tell stories with and about underserved communities. AIR has helped lead three iterations of Localore, including one in 2016 that sought to “create sustainable projects that will enable continued engagement with communities who might not typically consume public media.”

“We’re at a point in the history of this industry where those stations, radio and television…are at full tilt just doing the day-to-day,” AIR CEO Sue Schardt told Nieman Lab in 2011. “They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the money — and, in many ways, even though the heart may be there, there’s not a mindset that allows them to experiment, to try new things, and to really have the space and the means to reinvent themselves.”

We’ve covered Localore’s origins, growth, and findings. This month, Localore began accepting applications (deadline May 6!) for #LocaloreLive, a new program awarding microgrants to individuals for planning in-person community engagement events. Details are here.

Reveal Local Labs

Team: The Center for Investigative Reporting, senior editor Ziva Branstetter; they’re hiring a collaborations editor and engagement specialist for the project

Funders: The Knight Foundation (Disclosure: Knight also provides funding to Nieman Lab.)

Participants: To be announced, but they hint at four locations “where local media outlets show either a history of partnership or willingness to collaborate, where top managers see the value of sharing resources with other news outlets and where reporters and producers are eager to be part of the team.”

This isn’t The Center for Investigative Reporting’s first swing at collaborating for local innovation: in 2016 they launched the Reveal Labs (Reveal is their digital platform/podcast) with funding from Google to power local investigative reporting and community engagement. They embarked on projects with local partner outlets in regions across the United States and in Europe, too, from a virtual reality storytelling tool to an exploration of social justice issues through an interactive campaign.

Now, CIR just announced a new version of Reveal’s local outreach, called — don’t hold your breath — Reveal Local Labs. This new initiative is supported with $500,000 from the Knight Foundation and is building on the lessons learned during the “piloting phase,” according to CIR editor-in-chief Amy Pyle. She clarified the difference between the two in an email:

Building on the success of Reveal Labs work, we are moving to this next phase in four cities, which we are calling Reveal Local Labs. At the center of each of these new communities will be an investigative project, alongside the kind of creative community engagement work we helped pioneer.

What’s also new is the nurturing of local collaborations — something we have learned a lot about through our own work with outside partners both through Reveal Labs and Reveal the radio program/podcast. The goal is to leave behind new relationships and trust on which future investigations can be built.

Local News Lab

Team: Josh Stearns, Teresa Gorman, Democracy Fund

Funders: Originally launched by the Dodge Foundation and focused on New Jersey initiatives, the Lab is now housed at eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, with additional support from the Knight Foundation.

Participants: The Lab works with several local news sites, especially those in New Jersey and North Carolina, but generally serves as a resource for the local news community as a whole.

Kicked off in 2014 to study and support the evolution of local news concentrated in New Jersey, the Local News Lab has shifted homes (Dodge Foundation to Democracy Fund) and focuses in its four years.

According to its website now, “the Local News Lab is a testing ground for the future of local journalism that supports people and their efforts to experiment with new ways of reporting, engaging communities, and sustaining news organizations of all sizes.” That now includes local journalism in New Jersey and North Carolina through its special funds announced earlier this year.

The Local News Lab also provides support for those testing grounds with plentiful guides for local newsrooms on everything from newsletters to events and a hearty weekly newsletter called the Local Fix highlighting “key debates in journalism sustainability and community engagement through the lens of local news.”

Local News Initative

Team: Northwestern University, Tim Franklin, Medill’s Spiegel Research Center, the Northwestern Knight Lab

Funders: The Lilly Endowment, John Mutz, Myrta Pulliam, and others

Participants: The Indianapolis Star, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune

This month, it was announced that Franklin — former president of the Poynter Institute — will lead Northwestern’s new initiative for helping the three newsrooms closely examine their audience bases and behaviors and develop financial streams to strengthen their operations. As I noted in a previous article, “over the course of two years, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications (no ‘and’) will help the news organizations — owned by the post-Michael Ferro Tronc, Hearst, and Gannett respectively — dig into reader behavior across devices and platforms and news needs and expectations in each market before launching a product development and experimentation phase next year.”

The initiative is calling those newsrooms its Learning Labs, and Medill will be reporting back on the lessons from those labs to share its findings and experimentation.

Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media

Team: Craig Anderson, Penny Abernathy, Steven King, JoAnn Sciarrino, Ryan Thornburg, and more at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Funders: The Knight Foundation and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Participants: The Center works with several North Carolina local newsrooms on best practices, and it is also working with a cohort of newsrooms from the state as well as Arkansas, Virginia, George, South Carolina, and West Virginia as part of the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative (more on that later on).

UNC’s local media group conducts research and develops potential solutions for existing and newcomer news organizations in the digital age through its Reese News Lab, Carolina Data Desk, and more. The Center is also working with Knight, Lenfest, Poynter, and the American Press Institute on the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, previously know as Table Stakes.

Local Online Independent Online News (LION) Publishers

Team: Executive director Matt DeRienzo and a board of directors

Funders: LION members pay dues, but the group also receives support from the Knight Foundation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Democracy Fund, and others.

Participants: LION has about 225 members.

Started in 2012 as the indie news site movement was gaining steam, LION Publishers is an advocacy (and sort of support) group for scrappy local news sites getting their bearings and thriving in the media world. Many of the sites have risen from the ashes of previous newsrooms or digital news ventures and have grown to become significant news outlets in their communities.

LION members can get help with advertising revenue and investigative reporting. The group also hosts events like a reader revenue summit with the Center for Cooperative Media and its annual conference.

Center for Cooperative Media

Team: Stefanie Murray, Joe Amditis, Sarah Stonbely, Carla Baranauckas

Funders: Montclair State University, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and more listed here

Participants: One of the Center’s arms, the NJ News Commons, is a network of news organizations, freelancers, and others across the state, who agree to “work on reporting projects together, share content through our story exchange, share best practices, attend trainings and seminars, and help keep each other informed as the news industry changes.” Find the full list of participants here. Many of the resources they develop, however, can be used in newsrooms beyond New Jersey and their events can bring participants from across the country.

“What was going to happen to news coverage once Gov. Chris Christie spun off the state-owned New Jersey Network (NJN) of radio and television stations?”

That question planted the seed for the Center for Cooperative Media, housed at Montclair State University, during a 2011 meeting in which a local co-op news model was suggested.

The Center for Cooperative Media strives for collaboration across all levels of news organizations but through its NJ News Commons and other initiatives has a special spot for local projects, too. It’s hosted events like a recent reader revenue summit with LION Publishers, studied models of collaborative journalism that local news outlets could adapt for themselves, orchestrated team projects like Voting Block to report on upcoming elections, welcomed research for ideas like community information districts, and developed a Facebook Fundamentals program (funded by the Knight Foundation) to support members of LION and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Need some inspiration for your collaborations? The team has compiled a database of 99 (and counting!) collaborative journalism projects to feed your imagination.

Table Stakes/Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative

Team: Douglas Smith, Arlene Morgan, Burt Herman, Ken Herts, Quentin Hope, Charles Baum, Tom Rosenstiel, Jeff Sonderman, Amy Kovac-Ashley, and more

Funders: Knight Foundation, Lenfest Institute

Participants: The Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Philadelphia Media Network, Houston Chronicle, Milwaukee Journal, San Jose Mercury News, and Seattle Times, and more

Inspired by the New York Times’ innovation report, the Knight Foundation helped spur digital transformation in four local newsrooms and expanded the cohort in 2017 with increased funding and support from the Lenfest Institute. “We’re already heading down this path,” said Robyn Tomlin, then the managing editor of The Dallas Morning News, in 2015. “This is going to be adding some jet fuel to help us rocket faster.”

The project is now known as the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative. Ken Doctor explained its circumstances and potential last year:

“The work is about journalism, about innovation, and ultimately about democracy,” says Jim Friedlich, the executive director and CEO of the newly renamed Lenfest Institute for Journalism…Metro newspapers don’t have to invent the tools of the digital trade; they just have to apply them, decisively. Most of the tools — from core-to-the-business applied analytics to reader revenue propensity modeling to social audience maximization to mobile news products that meet reader expectations — are available and market tested. What this project aims to do: take what the best of what national/global news companies now use to drive their businesses and apply it — quickly — at the nation’s major metro newspapers.

The initiative aims to add four more newspaper partners in 2018 and four more in 2019. In all, this will be 16 mostly major American metro papers linking their chances for survival, and new prosperity, to this project.

The funding also allows Poynter to offer teaching and coaching for dozens of local news organizations and the American Press Institute to develop the Better News resource guide to share lessons and evidence from the cohort. The University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media is also working with local newsrooms in the state and across the Southeast region to implement best practices through the initiative.

Community Listening and Engagement Fund

Team: Cheryl Thompson-Morton at the Lenfest Institute, Paul Waters at Democracy Fund, Molly de Aguiar at the News Integrity Initiative, Jennifer Preston at the Knight Foundation, Jennifer Brandel at Hearken, and Andrew Haeg at GroundSource

Funders: Knight Foundation, Lenfest Institute, News Integrity Initiative, Democracy Fund

Participants: 18 local newsrooms, 14 other newsrooms, and two universities (See who they all are here.)

Newer than Table Stakes but a similar multi-partner effort, this fund is drawn together by different players in the journalism philanthropy world to help newsrooms bring tools like Hearken and GroundSource to their journalists and audiences. CLEF was mentioned in our guide to the various trust initiatives, as well, and it’s not exclusively focused on local newsrooms. But as an effort to offset the costs associated with implementing engagement tools like those two, it selected many local news organizations in its first round earlier this year.

They are running three cycles in 2018 and note that subsidies are limited — when the fund is out, it’s out. Applications for the second cohort will be accepted starting May 1.

Report for America

Team: Cofounders Charles Sennott and Steven Waldman, The GroundTruth Project; Kevin Douglas Grant, Maggie Messitt, Joanne Heyman

Funders: Google News Initiative, Lenfest, Knight, Galloway Family Foundation,, Select Equity Group Foundation and “numerous generous individuals”

Participants: West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Lexington Herald-Leader and Charleston Gazette-Mail in the first wave; the Chicago Sun-Times, The Dallas Morning News, KRWG at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, Billy Penn and The Incline, The Telegraph in Macon, Georgia, Mississippi Public Broadcasting, Mississippi Today, and the Victoria Advocate in Texas have been announced in the next batch.

Inspired by programs like Teach for America and the Peace Corps, Report for America puts early-stage journalists into newsrooms across the U.S. for two-year stints. The goal is 1,000 journalists by 2022, and so far they have three in the Appalachia region with more newsrooms eagerly awaiting their corps member’s arrival this June. The money comes from supporters of RFA and from and local organizations in the communities the journalists will be living in.

Sennott, who has reported extensively in bureaus overseas and launched GroundTruth for training foreign correspondents, and Waldman, who authored the FCC’s “Information Needs of Communities” mega-report, teamed up after the 2016 election. This Q&A with my colleague Laura Hazard Owen and Sennott sheds light on many of the initial questions RFA is facing — Teach for America has not always been sunshine and rainbows — like how it actually works, how it balances being an outsider with working with local groups, what training it will provide to the newcomers, and what sort of newsrooms can apply for corps members.

Local News Subscription Accelerator

Team: Facebook, Tim Griggs

Funders: Uh, Facebook.

Participants: Fourteen metropolitan newsrooms: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Miami Herald, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Omaha World-Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Tennessean, Newsday, and Advance.

The platform’s three-month olive branch to the industry launched in late March, inviting representatives from the aforementioned news organizations to design projects with funding from Facebook to bolster their digital subscriptions. Facebook has also included local news organizations in its test for subscriptions within Instant Articles.

Facebook says this accelerator will help local news publishers in “unlock[ing] strategies that help…build digital customer acquisitions on and off our platform.” The Lenfest Institute is helping to coordinate the grant from the Facebook Journalism Project with workshops by Griggs (of former New York Times/Texas Tribune fame) and regular reports on best practices.

As described in a previous Nieman Lab article: “These publishers will gather in person once a month, complete weekly trainings on digital subscription marketing, and design their own project for putting the trainings in action (supported by grant funding). But additional newsrooms across the country will also get access to some of the strategies through the Lenfest Institute, the Local Media Consortium (1,600 individual publications), Local Media Association (3,000 newspapers, TV stations, digital news sites, and radio stations), and the News Media Alliance (2,000 news organizations).” What are those groups, you ask? Keep reading…

Local Media Consortium

Team: Tom Sly, chief revenue officer at Scripps, is the interim CEO and Christian Hendricks, after a 25-year run at McClatchy, is the president; the board is comprised of execs like Chris Loretto, Digital First Media’s chief digital officer, and James Green, vice president of digital at Lee.

Funders: Members pay dues, and additional revenue comes from a programmatic ad exchange. As of October 2017, the LMC is a non-stock for-profit company, though previously it operated as a “contractual agreement.”

Participants: Here’s a list of the Consortium’s members, ranging from A.H. Belo to WRAL (Capitol Broadcasting). Partner service providers include Monster.com, Google, and a suite of ad-tech services.

The Local Media Consortium represents 1,700 individual news outlets across 75 members. The group was started in 2006 and had some rocky moments alongside the rest of the industry before Rusty Coats led its rebirth in 2013. We wrote about the changes in 2014:

In 2006, 176 newspapers came together in a partnership with Yahoo to found The Newspaper Consortium. The idea, a simple one now, was an important step forward for the development and growth of ad networks. Yahoo had the reach — 400 million users worldwide at the time, according to The New York Times — but the newspaper companies (which included the MediaNews Group, Hearst, Belo, Scripps, Journal Register, Lee, and Cox) — had the experienced ad sales teams. Together, they sought to increase revenues all around — so that a newspaper could sell local ads to local businesses that ran when local readers went to Yahoo, splitting the proceeds along the way….

Today, the Consortium is taking a step towards fulfilling its promise of increased revenue through a new partnership with Google. The deal is supposed to strengthen Google’s relationship with local publishers by ‘turbocharging’ the online news business via “growing budgets” for programmatic buying…The real draw of the Google partnership for consortium members is a new private ad exchange that sells publisher inventory programatically.”

Coats recently left the Consortium, pointing to tensions with the board over the group’s mission, and Sly is in as interim CEO. Members of both the Consortium and the Local Media Association (see below!) will have access to the strategies discussed in the Facebook Local News Subscriptions Accelerator (see above).

Local Media Association

Team: The staff includes Nancy Lane as president and Jed Williams as chief innovation officer; the board includes folks from audience engagement platform Second Street, digital marketing and newspaper publishing company Swift Communications, Gatehouse Media, Spirited Media, Sinclair, Nexstar, Scripps, and more. (Tom Sly, interim CEO of the Local Media Consortium, is on the board here too; the Consortium’s president, Chris Hendricks, is on the board of the association’s foundation.)

Funders: The association offers advertising to its members and a subscription-based industry intel service with research papers and webinars; its affiliated Local Media Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable trust. The association’s financials on Guidestar show a combination of funding from contributions, program services, and events.

Participants: The association has 3,000 members including McClatchy, Scripps, Nexstar, Gatehouse, Sinclair, Meredith, and more: “newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, directories, pure plays and research & development partners, are active members,” their website says. Here’s a list of the media company members and their partner list is here.

This industry trade organization focuses on sustainable business models and has a plethora of webinars, conferences, training, and other resources. The association will share access to the Facebook Local News Subscription Accelerator strategies with its members, as mentioned above, and is participating in an anti-misinformation/pro-media literacy effort with Poynter, the Stanford University Education Group, and some YouTubers, funded by Google.

After almost a decade, I’m leaving @ProPublica to start a new thing with @JuliaAngwin. I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done, and in awe of the great work @ProPublica does.

We plan to scale up our investigations into technology and algorithms. Wish us luck y’all!

— Jeff Larson (@thejefflarson) April 9, 2018

Some personal news: today is my last day at ProPublica. I’ve loved my time here, but I’m starting a crazy adventure. I want to see if I can scale up my style of tech-driven investigations by building a newsroom around it. /1

— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) April 9, 2018

If ever there was a time when journalists needed to work harder to analyze the impacts of technology on society, this is it. So @thejefflarson and I are going to give it a try. /2

— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) April 9, 2018

As Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress this week about Facebook’s failure to protect user data, the timing of this new venture seems particularly good — but, Angwin told me, it’s been a long time coming. She was at The Wall Street Journal for 13 years, and in 2010 she built an investigative team there that paired programmers and journalists and produced a three-year series called “What They Know,” looking at the rise of the surveillance economy. Her book Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance was published in 2014.

In 2014, she joined ProPublica and built a similar team pairing programmers and journalists. That team produced a series called “Machine Bias,” which explores algorithmic injustice.

“I’ve long wanted to build a newsroom around this concept of pairing technical experts with journalists,” Angwin told me in an email. “So that is what this newsroom will be about.” Her cofounder, Jeff Larson, has been at ProPublica for over 10 years as a web developer and data scientist and has been on the programming side of much of the work Angwin’s done there.

The new venture, which will be a nonprofit funded by donations and philanthropy, will be based in New York City, with a presence in the Bay Area. “We will cover the impact of technology on society,” Angwin told me. “That includes covering the big platform companies, but also the tech that is used in other aspects of life — hopefully through investigations like the ones we did of the racial bias in software used in criminal justice and the algorithms that generate unjustifiably higher car insurance prices in minority neighborhoods. We also plan to build tools, similar to the Facebook Political Ad Collector that we built at ProPublica, that allow the public to understand technological issues.”

Angwin and Larson hope to start hiring in the fall, with a launch in early 2019.”We hope to build a substantial newsroom that aims to publish daily,” Angwin said.

• The choice to target the evening commute is a really, really smart one. I’ve argued this before, but I think it’s safe to assume that there might be considerable overlap between the audiences of The New York Times and Vox.com. As such, a move to complement The Daily is significantly more prudent than engaging it as a direct competitor. In any case, even if the overlap was small, the evening commute remains untapped by the daily news podcast to begin with — aside from Mike Pesca’s The Gist, of course, which isn’t really playing the same game anyway. It’s a safer, and therefore more reliable, base to build from, and besides, Today, Explained could always expand with an a.m. version at some point in the future. (Same goes with The Daily and a p.m. version, a prospect that it has previously explored with breaking news specials.)
• In case it fully doesn’t come across in the writeup: I think Today, Explained’s success will mostly hinge on Sean Rameswaram’s personality — more so, I’d argue, than how Michael Barbaro fits into The Daily as a presence. Which is, I suppose, kind of the point when you bring in someone with a specific sense of showmanship like Rameswaram to headline a project.

And two more things I’d like to add to the preview:

• Here’s Vox.com general manager Andrew Golis, responding to an inquiry about how the podcast fits into the company’s overall business goals: “It gives us an opportunity to have an audio daily presence in our audience’s life in the way our website does in text and our YouTube channel does in video. That persistent relationship and trust is a powerful platform for building our business…we believe ‘Today, Explained’ will give us a new way to introduce audiences to a growing network of Vox podcasts as we continue to expand our ambitions and programming.”
• I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss Midroll Media’s involvement in the production. The Scripps-owned podcast company serves as the exclusive advertising partner for Today, Explained, but I’m also told that they provided upfront investment to help assemble the team and build out the production. Chris Bannon, Midroll’s chief content officer, was also involved in the development of the show. “Creatively speaking, I spent a day in D.C. with the Vox team, and together we started sourcing host and staff candidates,” explained Bannon over email. “Right now we’re in the fun part, listening to show drafts and sharing notes. They’re alarmingly well-organized, cheerful, and efficient.” Bannon, by the way, worked with Rameswaram back when he was still at WNYC. (He left for Midroll in early 2015.)

When asked about his perspective on the potential of Today, Explained, Bannon offered an analogy. “I think we want Today, Explained to be All Things Considered to the The Daily’s Morning Edition,” he said. “Except that we will be more like All Things Considered’s smart, funny, well-informed, and streetwise uncle.”

“Streetwise uncle” sounds about right.

On a related note: I heard there’s some big news coming later today on The Daily. Keep your eyes peeled.

What comes next for the Fusion Media Group. Last week, The Onion binge-dropped A Very Fatal Murder, the satirical news site’s first stab at a long-form audio project. The show was designed to parody the wildly popular — and eminently bankable! — true-crime podcast genre, which is an appealing premise right off the bat: indeed, there’s no team I’d love to see interpret the phenomenon more than the brains behind The Onion. A Very Fatal Murder turned out to be enjoyable enough, no more and no less, though I did end up thinking it didn’t come anywhere close to realizing its promise as podcast satire.

But there’s a thing, and then there’s everything around the thing. And despite the minor swing and miss of A Very Fatal Murder, I was nonetheless left quite excited about the prospect of future projects from The Onion, and curious about what’s going on with the audio team at The Onion’s parent company, Fusion Media Group (FMG).

So I checked in with Mandana Mofidi, FMG’s executive director of audio. In case you’re unfamiliar, FMG is the sprawling, multi-tentacled corporation best known in some circles — mine, namely — for absorbing the remains of the Gawker empire post-Terry Bollea lawsuit in the form of the Gizmodo Media Group that spans Gizmodo, io9, Jezebel, and others. A television arm factors in somewhere, as does the city of Miami.

Anyway, Mofidi tells me that since her team kicked off operations about a year ago, they’ve been playing around with a couple of ideas and formats to see what would stick. Weekly interview and chat shows made up the early experiments, which apparently ended up working well for Lifehacker (The Upgrade), Kotaku (Splitscreen), and Deadspin (Deadcast). But following the reception they received for A Very Fatal Murder as well as Containers, Alexis Madrigal’s audio documentary about the sexy, sexy world of international shipping from last year, more plans have to been put in place to build out further narrative projects.

Mofidi’s overarching goal this year, it seems, is to ensure that each of FMG’s properties gets a solid podcast of their own. To that end, they have several projects in various stages of development, including:

• A six-part narrative series from Gizmodo about “a controversial and charismatic spiritual guru who uses the internet to build her obsessive following.” That show is being developed with Pineapple Street Media, which appears to be really carving out a niche around themes of obsession, charismatic leaders, and the followings they spawn, following Missing Richard Simmons and Heaven’s Gate.
• A show for Jalopnik called Tempest, which will examine “the funny and at times tragic intersectionality of people and cars.”
• A series that “explores the connectivity of our DNA” — which evokes memories of Gimlet’s Twice Removed — featuring Grammy Award-winning artist René Pérez, a.k.a. Residente. Gretta Cohn’s Transmitter Media is assisting with this project.
• A collaboration with The California Endowment that’ll produce stories on young activists “who are using their platforms to promote solidarity between different communities and causes.”

Mofidi also talked about an intent to dig deeper into events. “We recently did a live taping of Deadspin’s Deadcast in St. Paul before the Super Bowl. We were expecting to sell about 200 tickets, but ended up with over 360 people,” she said. The smart speaker category is also of interest, along with figuring out ways to collaborate with FMG’s aforementioned television arm.

I asked Mofidi if she had any dream projects that she’d love to produce in her role. “A daily show,” she wrote back. “It would be ambitious, but with so many passionate voices across our sites it feels like something we could do in a way that was distinct.”

Related reading: Publishers with TV ambitions are pursuing Netflix.

We’re back with this nonsense: “Public media again in bull’s-eye in president’s FY19 plans.” Re-upping my column from the last time we were in this mess, on why it’s bad in ways you already know and in more ways you don’t.

And while I’m linking Current, the public media publication just announced the new host for its podcast, The Pub: Annie Russell, currently an editor at WBEZ.

Pod Save America heads to HBO. Surprise, surprise. Crooked Media’s flagship podcast is heading to the premium cable network with a series of hour-long specials that will follow the Obama bros — that’s former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Lovett, in case you’re unfamiliar with the deep-blue podcast phenomenon — as they host live tapings on the campaign trail for what will most definitely be a spicy midterm election season this fall. This is the latest addition to the newly buzzy trend of podcasts being adapted for film and television, and the deal for this adaptation in particular was handled by WME.

Over at Vulture, I tried to turn a series of dots into a squiggly shape linking this development, the recent debut of 2 Dope Queens’ HBO specials, and HBO’s relationship with Bill Simmons to say something about the premium cable network’s potential strategic opportunities with podcasting. Put simply: Traditional standup comedy programming is getting more expensive due to the pressure of Netflix’s infinitely large war chest, and one could argue that certain types of conversational podcast programming offer HBO an alternative resource to adapt and develop content that can potentially hit the same kind of experience and pleasure beats you’d get from conventional standup TV specials.

But sometimes dots are just dots, and those aren’t really constellations in the sky — just random, meaningless arrangements of stars that are indifferent to your experience of them.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Meanwhile, in the nonprofit world. This one’s pretty interesting: Tiny Spark, the Amy Costello-led independent nonprofit news outfit that covers the world of philanthropy and nonprofits, has been acquired by Nonprofit Quarterly, which is…well, a much larger independent nonprofit news organization that covers the world of philanthropy and nonprofits. “Amy…has done an exceptional job building the audience for her podcast. We are excited not only to add this new media channel to our organization, but also to collaborate with Amy to expand our reach into public radio,” said Joel Toner, NPQ’s president and chief operating officer.

As part of this arrangement, NPQ owns Tiny Spark’s intellectual property and Amy Costello is brought on as a senior correspondent to lead the organization’s investigative journalism work, podcast development, and public radio outreach. “Tiny Spark’s work fits very well into the topics we cover at NPQ,” said Toner, when asked about the strategic thinking behind the acquisition. “Additionally, our 2017 annual audience survey confirmed that our readers had a significant interest in having us develop a podcast channel.”

I’d like to point out just how much this arrangement reminds me of the one that was struck between USA Today and Robin Amer, which I profiled last week. Speaking of which…

A quick update to last week’s item on The City. In the piece, I talked a little bit about the USA Today Network’s podcast plans for 2018, chiefly drawing information from a summer 2017 press release the organization circulated when they first announced the acquisition of The City. The plans mostly involve launching more podcasts across its properties.

The company reached out to let me know that their thinking has since evolved. “The network already produces dozens of podcasts across its 109-plus sites, but is now focusing on a handful of those shows to support with resources and marketing à la The City,” wrote Liz Nelson, the USA Today Network’s vice president of strategic content development. “At the time [the press release] was written, we did have 60-plus podcasts — most of which bubbled up organically at the local level. We’re closer to 40 now. That number will continue to ebb and flow and we encourage experimentation at the local level, which gives our journalists the space they need to experiment in the medium.”

Nelson added: “But from a network level, we are not putting the same amount of resources we’ve put into The City into every single show. We’re concentrating on a smaller set of shows we believe can have national impact.”

Hold this thought. We’re going to talk about other stuff for a bit, but we’ll get back to this notion of resource focus.

“It amuses me,” wrote Traug Keller, ESPN’s senior vice president of audio, in a corporate blog post touting the sport media giant’s podcasting business, “when I read about podcasting in the media with references to it being ‘new’ or ’emerging.'”

Keller continued:

As ESPN has done with other technologies — be it cable TV in 1979, the Internet in the ’90s, HD television or mobile initiatives more recently — we embraced podcasting as soon as we could and ran with it — even if we didn’t always know where we would end up! We launched our first podcast way back in 2005. A head start is often critical in a competitive business environment.

I also chuckle when people refer to podcasting as some mysterious new format to figure out. I’ve spent a career in audio, and I can tell you the key ingredients for compelling audio are constant…

Yeah, I don’t know, dude.

The borderline condescending tone of the post isn’t exactly something I’d want to hear from a company whose public narrative is one of crisis on multiple fronts — from the disruption of its cable-bundle–reliant business model to layoffs to its uneven handling of social media policies to the uncertain future of a gamble on OTT distribution — let alone a podcast publisher whose Podtrac ranking placement (as always, disclaimers of that service here and here) is powered by what is still largely a spray-and-pray strategy, in which 82 shows are deployed to bring in 35 million global unique monthly downloads. For reference, the infinitely smaller PRX team gets 4 million more with less than half that number of shows (34 podcasts), while NPR bags three times more downloads with just 42 podcasts that don’t at all traffic in naturally addictive sports content.

To be clear, I am, very generally speaking, more appreciative of a world with a strong (and better) ESPN in it than one without. And let me also just say that I really like some of its recent moves in on-demand audio, namely the creation of the 30 for 30 Podcast and having Katie Nolan launch her own show.

But I just don’t think very highly of this whole “oh we’ve been doing this for a long time/we were doing this first therefore we are super wise” mindset that either mistakes early sandbox dabblings for meaningful first-mover value creation or simply being first for being noteworthy. To be fair, this isn’t a knock that exclusively applies to Keller’s blog post; that thinking governs an alarming share of press releases and huffy emails that hit my inbox. But here’s the thing: I really don’t think it matters whether you did first. What mostly matters is if you did it right. Which is to say: If you invented Facebook, dammit, you’d have invented Facebook. Furthermore, as it stands, if there’s anything I’m acutely aware of writing this newsletter every week, it’s that, much like everywhere else, nobody really knows anything. It’s just a bunch of people working really hard, trying to figure this whole podcast thing out.

Anyway. I normally try not to be too worked up about anything, but this stuff really bugs me, and goodness, there’s nothing I would love more than to take this mindset, strap it onto the next Falcon Heavy rocket, and launch it straight into the dying sun.

Still, credit should be given where’s credit due: The post goes on to discuss what I think is a really positive development for ESPN’s podcast business:

To get there, we pared our lineup — once numbering in triple digits — to about 35, focusing on the most popular offerings (NFL, MLB, and NBA) and other niche topics where we can “own” the category. It’s a “less is more” strategy, where we can better produce and promote a smaller lineup.

Which reminds me of something…

After spray-and-pray. ESPN’s move to pare down and focus its overflowing podcast portfolio reminds me of another podcast publisher that’s been pretty active since the first podcast boom: NPR.

NPR’s podcast inventory, too, once numbered in the triple digits. In August 2005, its directory housed around 174 programs, 17 of which were NPR originals while others were shows from member stations that the public radio mothership were distributing on their behalf. (That practice has since been terminated.) The show number peaked around 2009, when the directory supported about 390 podcasts.

“Back in those days, podcasts were hard to access and only the really digitally savvy listeners could find and download them,” an NPR spokesperson told me. “We were experimenting and we were excited with the possibility of putting out NPR content on-demand, repackaging content that had aired about specific topics, seeing what the audience would like…It also allowed for additional creativity in programming, podcasts could be a sandbox for piloting new ideas.” Some of those ideas eventually grew into segments and radio shows of their own, but these podcasts mostly ended up being an unruly system of small, quiet, under-the-radar projects.

All that changed with this most recent podcasting boom, which started in the latter half of 2014. Around that time, a focused effort was made to identify and retain shows that fit a certain set of criteria that included having a native podcast experience (and not just recycled segments from existing shows), strong listener communities, an alignment with the organization’s business needs, and so on. The rest were culled. By the end, NPR was left with 25 shows. “Our thinking was that by having a smaller portfolio, we could draw more attention to them, serve them better, cross-promote, bring sponsorship support, create significant reach,” the spokesperson said.

The move felt like a gamble at the time, but it paid off. “While everyone expected our downloads to go down, within two months, downloads were somewhere near 50 million a month,” remembered Audible’s Eric Nuzum, then vice president of programming at NPR. “Within a year, it was over 80.”

That number is now 110 million. The point of this little parable is…well, I don’t think I have to spell it out. You get the picture.

Call Your 2018. There are few teams I admire more than the trio behind Call Your Girlfriend, the podcast for long-distance besties everywhere: journalist Ann Friedman, international woman of mystery Aminatou Sow, and radio producer Gina Delvac. The show has, over its nearly four years of existence, evolved from a fun side project to stay connected into something so much more than that. It is, in equal parts, a platform, a community, and an ever-growing resource. And if the enthusiasm of some friends of mine who consider themselves devout CYG fans are any indicator, Call Your Girlfriend is also damn close to being a full-fledged movement.

Last year was a difficult one for the team, given the political environment, but it was also a call to arms to which they responded with vigor. “Despite the trash-fire that was 2017 in America,” they wrote me, “Better yet, because of it, we wanted CYG to function as a place of refuge for our listeners, and for ourselves.” This translated into an interview schedule that was dense with guests that spoke directly to the moment — including but not limited to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Margaret Atwood, and Ellen Pao — as well as a multipart series on women running for office that featured sit-downs with first-time candidates and organizations that support women seeking political office. The team also worked to push the show creatively, producing a special episode on pelvic pain and trauma and occasionally handing the mic over to other podcasting teams, like Who? Weekly’s Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger along with Good Muslim Bad Muslim’s Tanzila Ahmed and Zahra Noorkbakhsh.

The year was also fruitful for Call Your Girlfriend’s business. Though specific numbers were not disclosed, I’m told that the show’s revenues — which come from a combination of ad sales, live events, and a healthy merchandising arm — far exceeded their original targets. More ambitious goals were set for the new year.

We’re neck-deep into the second month of 2018, so I thought it was a good a time as any to check in with the team about their plans for the coming months, their thoughts on how the industry has changed, and their commitment to being independent. They were kind enough to oblige:

We’re thinking of it as an “open investigation.” We’ll be laying out what we know and what we don’t. And we’re inviting everyone — our journalism colleagues elsewhere, experts, tipsters and anyone else interested — to join us in the quest for answers….

You can contact us via Signal, WhatsApp or voicemail at 347-244-2134. Here’s more about how you can contact us securely.

You can always email us at tips@trumpincpodcast.org.

And finally, you can use the postal service:

Trump Inc at ProPublica
155 Ave of the Americas, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10013

Trump Inc. builds on a previous collaboration between ProPublica, WNYC, and The New Yorker that investigated Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump.

“We’re going to figure it out as we go, and be open to lots of options,” Umansky told me. When ProPublica began planning the podcast, he said, “We were thinking about how, ultimately, our show is not about ProPublica in particular. It’s not about getting the largest audience. It’s not about having a hit show. It’s about doing accountability journalism that matters.” One goal is simply to bear witness to the moment — to pay attention to the fact that “the President remains the owner of a sprawling, active, and opaque business…and, fundamentally, we have no way of knowing if he is ever putting the interests of his company above those of the country. What we want to do is document that reality.”

Planning future episodes of the show right now means accepting uncertainty: “We don’t know what’s going to come up or what people might turn up,” Umansky said. Of course the team is hoping for reader tips, but this is “not all predicated on having the insider who’s going to send us the manila envelope of whatevers. We would welcome that, but success isn’t predicated on that.” One role of the audience, instead, will simply be to help ask questions and center thinking.

“It’s a whole range of help and thought that we want to avail ourselves of,” Umansky said. “The audience becomes another collaborator in the process of creating it with us.”

Started on Chicago’s South Side in 2015, the civic media lab — distinct from the fondly remembered Chicago City News Bureau — has been forging a new model in engagement and local journalism. Now they’re piloting their first outreach to a new city with WDET, Detroit’s public radio station, by introducing their Documenters program to get regular residents to pay attention to public information in the Motor City, supported by a $50,000 grant from the Detroit Journalism Engagement Fund.

“There are hundreds of public government meetings, from the police board to local school councils, the education board, it goes on. A lot of these meetings are not reported on, and some of that’s through lack of [local reporters] — for example, DNAinfo,” said Darryl Holliday, City Bureau’s co-founder/editorial director and a former DNAinfo Chicago reporter, in explaining the existing setup in Chicago. “A lot of those meetings are not attended by the public. There will be meetings that go on where there’s literally no one there from the public present for these really big decisions that affect us in a lot of different ways. Documenters can be trained, and in our case paid, to go out and document these public meetings for the public.”

Documenters is one of three linchpins to City Bureau’s model, in addition to its reporting fellowships for youth, pre-professional journalists, and mentor journalists and its regular Public Newsroom discussions and trainings on various topics open to anyone. (City Bureau gets funding from a mix of foundational grants, publishing revenue from the reporting fellows’ work — the fellows receive a stipend — and its membership program, of which I as a Chicago native am a monthly supporter.) Documenters emerged in April 2016 as a collaboration between City Bureau and civic tech organization Smart Chicago to sort through hefty documents, such as the city’s police accountability task force report, and other projects that tallied 700 hours of Documenters’ time. But now Holliday and his team are refocusing Documenters toward recording public meetings, offering training and even some payment per hour for Documenters assigned to particular meetings or departments. In documentation of the meetings, they note details such as topics discussed, the amount and affiliations of people present, and the atmosphere of the meeting room.

But don’t expect these attendees to be “citizen journalists.” “Documenters are not journalists. Maybe they want to be journalists, maybe they are journalists, but that’s not why we choose them. They’re going to come in with their own experiences,” Holliday said, explaining why he distances the program from the characterization. “We don’t need to qualify what people do as civic participants with the word ‘journalists.’ We want to support the people acting, engaging, leveraging power on their own terms without having to be journalists if they don’t want to.”

The Chicago Documenters program has 300 participants, aged 16 to 73, with a racial representation close to the city itself — though they’ve only recorded three dozen meetings in two years. Holliday said the past year has been an experimentation phase and they plan to build it out more robustly in 2018 while simultaneously designing and testing the concept in Detroit. Detroit trainings should begin in mid-2018. Also, City Bureau’s collaboration with ProPublica Illinois on an aggregator of public meeting logistics and information has been in the works since mid-2017 and should be open to the public by June, Holliday said. Data from both Chicago and Detroit public meetings will be scraped and hosted on the site, and future locations could be added to the tool in the spirit of bringing the bureau’s model to a city.

Despite the low Documenter/meeting ratio so far, the approach’s low overhead makes it easily adaptable to other cities. “We can begin it with ten Documenters and see how it goes, or we can launch a full Documenters program and see how it grows,” Holliday said, emphasizing that they are not “coming in with something prescriptive.”

“From WDET’s perspective, we are always looking for ways to engage our community and increase our capacity for relevant and impactful local reporting. CityBureau has a proven approach to doing this that is equitable,” said Michelle Srbinovich, WDET’s general manager. “We think it can scale.”

The pilot project will begin with one-on-one interviews with community organizers, community reporters, and other Detroiters already involved in public meetings and/or advocates for public access to information. WDET will also host Public Newsrooms later this year and work with community events and gatherings to spread its impact. “It’s important to us that we are not duplicating efforts and are able to reach people on a neighborhood level who feel underserved, ignored or misrepresented by local media,” Srbinovich added.

We’ve covered WDET’s approach before; the station has had greater success than most other NPR stations attracting younger audiences. (NPR’s median listener age is 54; 30 percent of WDET’s broadcast audience is under 35 and the majority under 45, Srbinovich said in 2016.) She told us then:

I think there’s some perceptions of public radio programming where you just have to pick one: Well, you’re a news station, so you just do news. But how do you get people interested in those stories? In a region like Detroit, that’s been divided economically and racially — and this is historic division, it’s not something new — and now you have new people coming in, people who weren’t living in the city becoming interested in the city.

What’s going to unify those people? A lot of time it’s not the news. The news can be pretty divisive, especially in an election year like the one we’re having now. So how do you create spaces where people can find some common ground? There’s certainly a way to do that with news programming by being conversational and including different perspectives, presenting news in a way that humanizes different people as opposed to just talking about the issue in a traditional way with newsmakers and the powers that be. But even before that, I feel like cultural experiences create more of a social cohesion that makes people realize and have context for who lives here and other people’s realities and finding common ground around music, art, or film and then suddenly paying attention to the issues that you hear about in different ways.

Holliday said that Detroit was the “logical” place for City Bureau’s first growth outside of Chicago, though they’re not ready to fully scale an HQ2. He cited the city’s nearby Midwestern location, segregational strife, and absence of a civic media lab in the urban media environment. “Our mission and our work and our approach fits with the work being done in Detroit,” he said. “There is room for City Bureau to have a good impact and work closely with groups who are already having an impact…[WDET] wants to see us in Detroit and were willing to put in the work.”

The money for the partnership comes from a fund created in March 2017 by the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, focusing on the inclusion of all voices in telling the story of Detroit’s recovery after bankruptcy. WDET is part of the Detroit Journalism Collective, supported by the Knight and Ford foundations, that was formed in 2013 to cover aftermath of the the city’s bankruptcy. Its members also include Detroit Public Television, Chalkbeat Detroit, and a handful of local ethnic publications from the Detroit Jewish News to Michigan Korean Weekly, making about 2.7 million unique connections with audiences in a metropolitan area with a population of approximately 4.3 million. That’s in addition to the two thrice-weekly-published main newspapers in the city, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. (Debra Adams Simmons, a 2016 Nieman Fellow, put together a comprehensive executive summary of the area’s journalism landscape for the Detroit Journalism Engagement Fund.)

But the city, recovering from the crash of the auto industry that was the cornerstone of the Motor City for decades, is encountering “meeting fatigue” among its residents, according to Holliday and Srbinovich, as group after group has pledged to study and support the deflated metropolis.

So how can City Bureau and WDET convince Detroiters to become Documenters?

“Over the years, residents have told us that they are frustrated by the number of community meetings and listening sessions that are set up to be extractive, meaning the organizers are getting information from residents but not intentional about giving something of value back,” Srbinovich said. “We believe that public meetings should play a role in a healthy democracy, but we don’t assume to know what Detroiters want to see improved on this front. Is there a lack of awareness about public meetings that are happening, a lack of meaningful reporting about what takes place at these meetings, or even a general feeling that the meetings don’t matter? Why? These are the type of questions we’re starting off with.”

“People there are a bit more tired of attending meetings and not seeing anything done,” Holliday said. “But I don’t think anyone’s tried in the way and the direction we’re coming from,” with providing financial and training incentives. “This is important work and it deserves to be compensated accordingly.”

In an era of slowly shrinking public information and disagreements on facts, Holliday is emphatic that showing up to public meetings is as crucial as ever.

“We built the aggregator because we were already seeing hits of that [shrinking accessibility to public information] locally,” he said. “Public meetings are really at the nexus of a lot of issues we talk about as journalists. There’s a place where you as an individual in a society can go and hold your officials accountable face to face.”