After months of extracting and analyzing information from parliamentary websites, documents, and other public records, Demócrata — a recently launched news outlet focused on Spanish government and public policy — published a series finding that in general Parliamentary sessions, the ones that get the most attention, men gave nearly two-thirds of the speeches. Women were underrepresented on congressional committees related to “state matters” like defense, economic affairs, and budgeting, but make up the majority of members on committees focused on equality, gender violence, and children’s rights.

Stories like these are what Demócrata aims to provide news consumers in Spain: Data-based journalism that helps to holds politicians accountable. That series, for example, included a methodology of how the journalists obtained the data, organized it, and decided what to include. (For instance: “Participations of less than one minute duration have also been left out. They mostly deal with oaths to take possession of seats, questions of order, requests to speak…They accounted for less than 1% of the total interventions collected.”)

“It brings a lot of transparency to the legislative process,” said Pilar Velasco, a veteran investigative journalist and Demócrata’s editorial director. “When the noise of politics occupies the entire news cycle, it generates a space for opacity that isn’t reported on.”

The site fills a gap in Spain, which will hold its general election in December. “It’s a good year to launch a news outlet with a focus on politics and policies,” said Eduardo Suárez, the head of editorial for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “[Demócrata’s] value proposition is to report on public policies and Parliamentary debates in much more detail than mainstream publications. Newspapers in Spain are much more focused on politics than on public policies, and this might provide an opening for a publication like Demócrata, whose goal is to cover those policy debates in a more nuanced and granular way.”

Demócrata is the country’s only news outlet that specifically covers Parliament and public policy from an accountability lens daily, according to the Iberian Digital Media Map by Iberifier, a European Commission–funded initiative. (Another initiative in Spain, Civio, was founded in 2012 and focuses on data-powered watchdog reporting on the environment, healthcare, and the justice system.)

Demócrata has a team of seven. It’s funded by an initial investment from its board of directors and from advertising, though Velasco wants to expand into sponsorships, paid events, and subscriptions. The site has multiple sections: Agenda (an archive of the weekly newsletter that summarizes what’s happening in Parliament in the coming week), Actualidad (updates and play-by-play of laws and amendments), Políticas (news on proposed and ongoing policies), Quieren Influir (economy stories), and an analysis and opinion section. The site’s initial target audience is political insiders and politics junkies, but Velasco said the stories are written so that general audiences will be able to understand them as well. The Agenda newsletter has around 2,000 subscribers.

Demócrata’s goal is to use its data expertise to tell stories that other outlets can’t. Leading up to the outlet’s launch, the data team spent months building the software it uses to scrape and analyze data that, while technically public, is disorganized and difficult to parse. When the country’s far-right party, Vox, called for a vote of no confidence against the current ruling socialist party this past March, Demócrata published an analysis of Vox’s legislative footprint in the current parliamentary session, finding that the party has so far failed to pass any laws.

Velasco, who was an investigative reporter for Spain’s largest radio network Cadena SER, where she investigated political corruption cases, experienced first-hand the challenges of telling data stories for radio, where it can be difficult to delve into numbers. As a 2018 Yale World Fellow and one of the co-founders of Spain’s Investigative Journalists Association, she also saw American sites like Politico cultivated audiences for in-depth political reporting. When Demócrata founder David Córdova (who is also the director of a public affairs consulting firm, Vinces) approached her for the project, she saw it as a chance to experiment and try something new. (Demócrata is editorially independent from Vinces.)

“The mission is permanent scrutiny of institutions,” Velasco said. “Through continuous supervision of the work of politicians and legislators, information transparency, we believe, can strengthen institutional credibility. [The news] that comes to us from Parliament is often the political discussion, statements, politicians fighting with each other, and press conferences. But the legislative branch is a pillar of the State where many things happen that regulate life in society. It is what orders us and regulates us. And all of that wasn’t being covered in Spain with the specialization it deserves.”

One of Velasco’s goals in the next few months is to continue the work on a platform, already in progress, that will monitor updates to every piece of legislation in Parliament in real time. Down the line, she hopes to launch a chatbot that can answer reader questions. Demócrata has also partnered with Political Watch (a group of academics who monitor Parliament), design studio Flat26, and the think tank Ethosfera, which is helping Demócrata with its own ethics and transparency policies.

“We sort of feel like a hub for people who already had innovative ideas about parliamentary information,” Velasco said. “We get a lot of pitches for [collaborations]. When that you’re a small outlet, to grow you have to put springboards in places to get to the next level, and you can’t get there on your own.”

Founded and funded by Politico founder Robert Allbritton, the Allbritton Journalism Institute (AJI) will launch a nonprofit news outlet that covers government and politics, with veteran journalists overseeing an inaugural fellowship class.

Breaking into journalism can be difficult; journalism school is expensive, and entry-level salaries tend to be low. AJI’s stated purpose is to be a training ground for “aspiring journalists from underrepresented backgrounds” to cut their teeth, according to Semafor, which first reported on the initiative.

“It takes time and repetition to get good at journalism — to build sources, to identify stories, to report them out and write them and present them in a way that actually serves the intended audience,” said Tim Grieve, the former Politico Pro and Protocol editor-in-chief who will lead the institute’s (as-yet unnamed) publication. “We want to give aspiring reporters that time, without asking them to take on student loans or find some other job to support themselves.”

The fellows will be paid $60,000 per year for two years, with benefits. AJI plans to hire 10 fellows to begin this September and add another 10 each year; by September 2004, 10 first-year fellows and 10 second-years will be working on a mix of assigned and self-created beats, Grieve said. The fellowship application (due May 31) asks questions like “Where and how do you get your news?” and “If you were going to change one thing about Washington journalism, what would it be, and why?”

“Fellows will have health insurance, paid time off, and an annual salary of $60,000 to report for the institute’s publication and learn from over 20 professional journalists, who will serve as mentors.”

Welcome, Allbritton Institute, new kind of J-school. https://t.co/Vy1UJXWOe7 — Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 2, 2023

This September, the selected fellows will take a four-week “immersion course in the practical application of journalism skills, from ethics and newsgathering to writing and distribution,” before they start reporting and writing. Throughout the two years, they’ll continue to attend seminars and workshops while also reporting. The teaching faculty so far includes Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta, Washington Post local enterprise reporter DeNeen L. Brown, and The Independent’s Washington correspondent Eric M. Garcia. The newsroom will be led by Grieve, former BuzzFeed News politics editor Matt Berman, former Washington Post Magazine editor Richard Just, and former Axios senior editor Kate Nocera.

Why a journalism institute with a stacked newsroom attached instead of a new newsroom with a robust fellowship program? Allbritton may have his hands tied after selling Politico off to Axel Springer for more than $1 billion in 2021. As Semafor’s Tani reported, “the Politico founder said that while he agreed to some restrictions about his own next business moves as part of the deal (primarily not turning around and starting a Politico competitor), the two sides also agreed to carve out space for Allbritton to pursue nonprofit opportunities.”

This is find and admirable and he’s welcome to do with his money as he pleases, but “not enough journalists in D.C.” doesn’t really feel like the main existential threat to this industry at this moment https://t.co/KtTBwwzODt

— Nick Manes (@nickrmanes) May 2, 2023

With trust in the news media at an all-time low, Grieve said he hopes the fellows will help readers understand “why people in power (or people who want power) think what they think and do what they do — which all helps to explain what Washington does (or doesn’t) do.”

In addition to Politico, Allbritton has launched other news outlets. In 2010, he launched the Washington, D.C. local news site TBD, which ran for six months before being shut down. The tech-focused Protocol had layoffs soon after launch in 2020, then was shut down in 2022 after Politico’s sale.

But the stated purpose of AJI’s associated publication is to develop journalists who will go on to work at other news organizations. According to the site’s FAQ, “By the end of the program, graduates will have the background necessary to cover the inner workings of Washington — and will be ready to take on reporting jobs at the country’s best outlets.”

“A handful of newsrooms have great training programs, and we’d love to learn from their successes. But many don’t, either because they have no one to train or not enough people to train them,” Grieve said. “On an individual level, all the editors I know wish they had more time to mentor their reporters, but they’re under so much pressure to produce that they just can’t do it. We’re turning that on its head: Our editors’ first job is teaching and training their reporters; the journalism they produce will be the result.”

Well, this looks like competition for journalism schools from Allbritton. In my experience students are uncomfortable writing in public until they feel they’ve learned enough. So I’ll bet his salaried “students” will be much farther along. https://t.co/Nier36WuPn

— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) May 2, 2023

With so many of the digital publications closing or struggling, this hopefully (on a small scale) will address one key thing the digital publications did in politics, which is really provide solid, entry level reporting jobs https://t.co/2cOECqPcX5

— Katherine Miller (@katherinemiller) May 2, 2023

This could be cool. Politico’s internship program has been a bfd for a lot of young journos. In recent years, it’s helped jumpstart some exceptional latino news talent, too. https://t.co/Tu47Sb48EB

— Pablo Manríquez (@PabloReports) May 2, 2023

Correction: A previous version of this story suggested that Robert Allbritton shut down Protocol. It was actually shut down after Allbritton sold it with Politico to Axel Springer.

El Salvador’s El Faro recently announced that it’s moved its business operations to Costa Rica after years of attacks from President Nayib Bukele. In Guatemala, journalist José Rubén Zamora is imprisoned for publishing an investigation into 144 corruption cases linked to President Alejandro Giammattei; the newspaper he founded, El Periódico, was raided and its bank accounts were frozen.

In Honduras — a country that according to Reporters Without Borders has been “slowly sinking into nightmarish disaster for more than a decade” — the government dismantled an agency designed to protect journalists.

In Nicaragua, press freedom has faced attacks from all sides and is only getting worse under president Daniel Ortega, now in his fourth consecutive term. The country now ranks 160 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index. At least 185 journalists have fled the country since 2018, with at least seven going into exile in the first three months of 2023, free press advocacy group Voces del Sur found. As of February, at least 22 journalists had been stripped of citizenship due to their reporting on Ortega’s regime.

Journalists who work through these precarious conditions emphasize that international coverage from mainstream media outlets can help pressure their countries’ governments to reverse course. Such coverage can also influence how humanitarian aid budgets are spent.

At the International Symposium of Online Journalism earlier this month, a panel in the Spanish-language Colloquium on Digital Journalism convened four of Nicaragua’s most prominent journalists, all of whom are living in exile, to discuss the harrowing conditions they’ve lived through — offices being burned down, embargoes on supplies like newsprint and ink, imprisonment for sharing information on social media — and how they’ve innovated to keep publishing.

Below is an excerpt of the discussion of how these Nicaraguan journalists pivoted after being forced into exile, and the challenges they face today. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity, but if you can, you should watch the entire recording of the session here.

The panel was moderated by Dagmar Thiel, the U.S. director of Fundamedios, a free press advocacy group that supports Hispanic journalists in the Americas.

The panelists:

• Anibal Toruño, the owner and director of Radio Darío, one of the country’s oldest radio stations. His citizenship was revoked.
• Juan Lorenzo Holmann, the publisher of Nicaragua’s leading newspaper La Prensa. His citizenship was revoked and he was exiled to the United States after being imprisoned for 18 months. Today, all of La Prensa’s staff operates in exile.
• Martha Irene Sánchez, the director of República 18 and the president of the Independent Journalists and Communicators of Nicaragua. She has lived in Costa Rica since 2021.
• Miguel Mendoza, a veteran sports journalist who was imprisoned for 18 months and exiled to the United States in February.

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

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

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

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

Bu Iroh is determined to see her grandchild and to get her husband to stop believing every WhatsApp forward over factual information. Dressed in a red trench coat and cap with a giant magnifying glass in hand, she takes her husband around town listening to people’s false ideas about the vaccine and debunking them.

This story — from a 22-minute sitcom-style video on YouTube — is one of the tools Mafindo (an acronym for the Indonesian Anti-Slander Society) is using to combat misinformation and elevate media literacy in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy.

Mafindo has a core team of nine people, with thousands of volunteers across Indonesia helping conduct trainings, fact-check, and get more members of the public connected with the organization’s work.

Mafindo offers lots of resources beyond video that aim to be conversational, relatable, and meet people where they are. Its Facebook group — more on that below — has 98,000 members; on TurnBackHoax.id, Mafindo keeps an archive of all of the debunked misinformation from that group. The organization runs trainings on the real-world dangers of election disinformation and incitement. It’s also created a WhatsApp chatbot to check dubious information and a hoax-busting app. It’s a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner and received Google News Initiative funding to run a media literacy program.

Indonesia’s media environment is complicated. Though independent news outlets are technically free to operate, the country’s laws on libel and defamation are vague, putting both journalists and uninformed citizens at risk. Last year, Indonesia’s parliament passed legislation that bans “insulting” state institutions, “regulates the criminal act of broadcasting or disseminating false news or notifications,” and “regulates criminal acts against anyone who broadcasts news that is uncertain, exaggerated, or incomplete.” The United Nations has warned that the law could suppress free speech and silence dissent, and Human Rights Watch called it “an unmitigated disaster for human rights in Indonesia.”

In 2022, 68% of Indonesians said they primarily got their news from social media, and only 39% said they trust the news media overall. In the country’s 2019 presidential election, nearly half of the false information shared about candidates originated on Facebook, the BBC found.

These laws make the stakes for sharing misinformation, even accidentally, incredibly high. (In 2019, Mafindo ran several fact-checking workshops for Indonesian housewives after a few women were arrested for sharing fake news.) They also don’t address the root problems, like platform algorithms that boost false content because it’s engaging, said Harry Sufehmi, Mafindo’s founder. Instead, they punish people who aren’t digitally savvy.

Most “hoax spreaders are not criminals,” Sufehmi said in an email. “They are actually victims. Don’t put them in jail, instead rehabilitate them, and make a better effort to educate the public. Target the hoax actors instead, especially their sponsors. Follow the money.”

That’s why Mafindo’s focus is on citizens. One of the group’s key tenets is that the spread of false information is a societal problem, not something that can be fixed top-down by government. At a World Health Organization event in 2021, Mafindo board member Santi Indra Astuti outlined the organization’s overarching belief that solutions to misinformation should “avoid government intervention as much as possible.” (Mafindo has partnered with the Indonesian government’s Covid-19 task force on fact-checking initiatives, but it doesn’t accept government funding.)

Mafindo was borne out of a misinformation-debunking Facebook group that Sufehmi created in 2014. After seeing family members and friends argue over the false information they were sharing about that year’s presidential election, he wanted to do something to help. The group, whose title translates to the Anti Defamation, Incitement, and Hoax Forum, grew by tens of thousands of members in its first two years, which led Sufehmi to found Mafindo as grassroots organization in 2016.

Eight years into this work, Mafindo is going into the next presidential election in 2024, along with its current programs, focused on pre-bunking, meaning encouraging users to think critically about the information they’re receiving and consuming, especially before they share it.

“With debunking, it’s like the house is already on fire and we are doing the firefighting,” Sufehmi said. “But with pre-bunking, we are hoping to be able to actually prevent the fires.”

Mafindo’s goal is to be fair, neutral, and empathetic in its work and with its community, according to its code of ethics. That principle was reinforced in 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. During that time, Astuti said, Mafindo was equipped with frameworks and tools to debunk misinformation — but facts were not enough.

“People didn’t want to listen to us when we [just] warned them about misinformation,” Astuti told me in an email.

Instead, Mafindo representatives worked with communities to help meet their most immediate needs.

“We joined forces with [people] to collect donations, food, meals, medicine, and anything that could make them help them and suffer less,” Astuti recalled. “During these activities, windows of opportunity to talk about misinformation suddenly appeared. It was during a casual conversation in an informal setting, people would listen to us again.”

Working with communities in crisis on their most immediate needs also builds trust in Mafindo’s other work, the organization has found. People need basic supplies before they need fact-checks. But, Astuti said, “Without immersing in everyday life, I think we’ll lose opportunities to listen and to feel people’s emotions, perceptions, and why such perceptions did exist.”

El País closed out 2022 with more then 266,000 paying subscribers — 227,000 of whom opted for digital-only subscriptions, according to the paper’s parent company Prisa.

More and more news outlets continue to turn to their readers for support, and that often means diversifying offerings beyond just the news. With the intention of building community for its subscribers outside of journalism, last November El País launched its first reading club. In five months, the club has grown to more than 1,100 members scattered mostly throughout Spain and Latin America.

Any paying subscriber can join the reading club. They get added to the subscribers-only Facebook group where they can talk to El País journalists, the authors they’re reading, and each other.

According to Andrea Nogueira Calvar, the editor leading the Facebook group, staffers at the paper’s culture section and its weekly arts and literature supplement Babelia had been kicking around the idea of a reading club for several years. But the demands of the daily news cycle and the day-to-day needs of the newsroom always pushed the idea to the back burner.

Reading or book clubs are hardly a new concept, though who did it first is debatable depending on the parameters you use. Some of the first records of American reading groups date back to a ship heading to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. Today, reading groups exist in a variety of formats (hello, BookTok and Bookstagram) and can be organized by genre, location, or other shared values, identities, and interests. In the United States, having your book chosen by Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon’s book club is a near-guaranteed way to become a bestseller. National news outlets like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others all have their own book clubs and reading communities.

In Spain, reading clubs gained prominence in the 1980s amid a new investment in public libraries. Blanca Calvo, who was the director of the Library of Guadalajara in Spain at the time, launched a reading club as a way to attract new public library patrons and encourage reading.

When the pandemic first forced people to stay home in 2020, Nogueira said an overall trend emerged of people reading more in their newfound free time. El País had hosted events and gatherings for subscribers before, but launching the reading club in 2022 was an experiment that proved that not only had the reading habit stuck, but that people were also looking for a forum to slow down and to connect with others over literature.

“Two things came together,” Nogueira said. “We have a very active community that highly values the culture section and Babelia. And after the pandemic, the need to stop and dedicate time to oneself was reclaimed. It’s also about dedicating time to reading and to the analysis of reading, because in the end what the club gives you, as a reader, is support from other readers.”

About once a month, a team of El País editors, led by Babelia editor-in-chief Guillermo Altares, announces what the next book will be in the Facebook group. They take into account the members’ interests in certain genres, the themes of the book (so as not to repeat the same themes in different books), the availability of the author to participate in the Facebook group and the in-person events, and accessibility of the books in both Spain and Latin America.

For book club members in Spain, they can enter a raffle to attend an in-person, interactive event with the book’s author. Then, twenty raffle winners have three weeks to read the book before the event (finishing the book is heavily encouraged). Readers outside of Spain or anyone who didn’t win a raffle ticket can watch a livestream of the event in the Facebook group. Each event is held in a different Spanish city at a local FNAC, a European bookstore chain. El País also publishes its own story covering the event the following day.

Throughout the month, members of the group can post discussion points, questions, and their own thoughts about the readings, and talk to each other. The team announces the book and shares some supplemental articles, but Nogueira has noticed that the members do their own research and share it with the group. In five months, the club, despite its growth, has managed to foster a tight-knit community that encourages critical reading.

“We were reading a book that was a bit complex in terms of structure and plot,” Nogueira said. “Sometimes there were readers who got lost and then would share it in the group, and some readers would help others to follow. One would say to the other, for example, ‘Hold on a little longer, you’ll soon understand everything.’”

With the hunch that the reading club might take off, the team’s first pick to kick it off was a risk: poetry.

It’s not the most popular genre, Nogueira said, but the star power of the author may have helped reel people in and kept them reading. The first book the club read was Un año y tres meses (One Year and Three Months), a book of poems by Luis García Montero, a renowned Spanish writer and the president of the Cervantes Institutes, which promotes the study of Spanish language and literature. The book is based on the last few months of the life of his wife, writer Almudena Grandes, who passed away in 2021.

“Poetry gives us answers that we need beyond technology or science,” García Montero told the reading club in November. “That’s what I’ve been looking for in this book.”

The reading club is now on its fifth book, Roma soy yo (I Am Rome), a narrative biography of Julius Caesar by Santiago Posteguillo. The event with Posteguillo is slated for March 30 at an FNAC in Valencia.

Nogueira said one of the project’s challenges is keeping as many members happy as possible. With every book, she said, there have been readers who weren’t interested in the subject, found the reading too difficult, or gave up.

“I believe in not disappointing the readers and offering them what they expect from us,” Nogueira said. “When we [as people] decide to join a book club or a group or a community like the one at El País, we all go in with illusions. The difficult thing is to maintain that illusion over time so that we are not disappointed. That is the biggest challenge — to keep surprising them with the books and living up to what they expect to be offered.”

And like any other attentive, engaged readers, El País book club members are quick to point out grammatical errors, whether they’re in the readings, El País stories, or in the Facebook posts. But, it comes from a good place, Nogueira said.

“They are very demanding, which is fine, because I think that happens when you really feel that you are part of something, you feel you are in a position to make demands,” Nogueira said. “I think it’s great because we’ve managed to create a community that feels part of El País, which I think is the goal of any newspaper.”

According to the newly launched Prison Newspaper Directory by the Prison Journalism Project, there are 24 prison-based newspapers in 12 states. At least four of the papers were launched in the last year.

The directory is part of PJP’s larger Prison Newspaper Project, which provides a short overview of the history of the prison press and republishes stories from prison papers so that they can reach a wider audience. The Prison Journalism Project overall provides training and resources to incarcerated journalists who want to tell stories from inside their correctional facilities.

The idea for the directory came out of San Quentin News, one of the oldest and most established prison newspapers, at the San Quentin State Prison in Northern California. Kevin Sawyer, an incarcerated journalist and a contributing editor to PJP, had started doing his own research about other prison newspapers while he was the associate editor of the San Quentin News. Sawyer shared his findings with PJP, according to Kate McQueen, the project’s editor, and PJP was able to advance the research and put together a directory.

“I think a lot of people just don’t know that [prison newspapers are] out there,” McQueen said. “Just being made aware that there are people trying to do this work in a prison near where they are is a huge step forward. Knowing that they have potential partners on the inside that they could collaborate with, and not just use as a source of information, but could co-publish with? That would be an exciting thing that we’d love to see happen.”

The amount of information on each publication in the directory varies depending on the type of access to the publication that’s available. Some papers are just listed by name and correctional facility, while others have links to digitized archives, websites, and ways to subscribe or donate. Some newspapers have a strong, lengthy history of publishing while others are just getting started, McQueen said. How robust each operation is depends on what kind of support it gets from the correctional facility it’s operating out of and from local community members on the outside.

The Mule Creek Post at the Mule Creek State Prison outside of Sacramento has its own archives so readers can read the e-paper online. The San Quentin News has a website that publishes in both English and Spanish. The Inside Report, a publishing partnership between the Colorado Department of Corrections and the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative, uploads PDFs of every issue to its website. The University of North Texas keeps digital archives of The Echo that’s published out of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The stories each newspaper produces also vary. Many of them read like hyperlocal community newspapers (which they are) or college publications.

The most recent edition of the 16-page Mule Creek Post from January 2023 includes an update on a list of laws that went into effect on January 1, event coverage of the California Department of Corrections secretary’s visit to the facility, a creative writing section, a story on hate crimes against Asians, and a list of details and things to know ahead of being released from the facility. There are also sports, psychology, arts, and business and finance sections.

“From what we can see, the prison press is growing,” McQueen said. “There are a lot of currently incarcerated people who are interested in doing the work. I’m sure there’s more out there. We just haven’t found them yet.”

According to the Prison Newspaper Project, the state of the prison press has fluctuated since the founding of the The Prison Mirror in Minnesota in 1887 — the first newspaper produced solely by incarcerated people.

The first study on prison newspapers in 1935 found that there were at least 100 prison publications and nearly half of all U.S. correctional facilities published one. That number peaked at 250 publications in 1959 and then took a nosedive in the following decades. In 1998, James McGrath Morris’ book “Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars” only noted six active publications. Now that there are at least 24 known publications that are actively publishing and digital archives of others that have stopped publishing, McQueen said the directory can be a jumping-off point for journalists to get a better sense of what incarceration is like in their local facilities.

“It could be useful and interesting for local journalists because what a journalist inside has that an outside journalist doesn’t have is access,” McQueen said. “Prison journalists and newspapers are able to share what life is actually like inside in a way that a journalist on the outside could never do.”

In April 2020, VonKaenel had stopped printing the 31-year-old News & Review and laid off 34 staffers, including 14 from the newsroom. The employees who remained were still publishing online, and VonKaenel applied for a Paycheck Protection Program loan, but it wasn’t clear how long the paper would be able to stay in business.

Larry Lee grew up working for the Observer, Sacramento’s African-American weekly newspaper, under and with his late father, Dr. William Hanford Lee, who founded it in 1962. The Observer had become an established, award-winning institution in Sacramento’s Black community, and in the early pandemic it survived and even thrived, breaking ground on a new office building in August 2020.

Lee had been collaborating with other news outlets in the city since 2015, and when VonKaenel called him, he suggested collaborating and sharing stories with other newsrooms in the area. The two rallied seven Sacramento news organizations into a collaborative called Solving Sacramento, to report on the city’s biggest issues with a focus on solutions. The outlets in the collaborative include the Sacramento Observer, the Sacramento News & Review, the Sacramento Business Journal, Russian American Media (a three-publication media company serving Russians and Russian-Americans), Outword Magazine (an LGBTQ+ publication), Sacramento’s NPR station Capital Public Radio, and Univision Sacramento. It’s funded through donations and grants from the Solutions Journalism Network and the James Irvine Foundation with the Local Media Association acting as the fiscal sponsor.

Sacramento isn’t a news desert, but issues like the arts, communities of color, and housing can fall through the cracks. All of the collective’s audiences are impacted by the city’s housing crisis, but their needs and challenges are often unique. Instead of racing to compete, Lee said each publication’s audience would benefit from all of them working together.

“COVID was the moment where you say, ‘Whatever we were doing before, now’s a good chance to either fix it or find another solution,'” Lee said. “Anyone who’s in a collaborative knows it takes a long time to get it going, especially when you’re talking about a region where there are historical trust issues. Newsrooms fight for content and advertisers. We had to get to a point where regular meetings and conversations were happening.”

Solving Sacramento’s first project was reporting on the problems with and solutions to housing affordability in the city, using a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network. Since launching last June, the collaboration has published more than 80 stories on affordable housing, homelessness, and resources that explain what affordable housing is and Q&As with local housing experts. The next focus area will be the revival of the city’s arts scene.

The lead editors from each publication get together to discuss related housing issues that need coverage, and then decide which publication will take the lead on reporting. Once the story is published, all members of the collaborative have the option to re-publish it, and it’s also made available on the Solving Sacramento website.

For one story, the collaborative contracted local journalism students to go door-to-door to talk to Sacramento residents about how they experienced the city’s housing crisis. The story first ran in the News & Review and then was translated into Spanish and republished by Univision.

“Sacramento is changing,” Lee said. “It has historically been a political, bureaucratic town, and COVID exposed the weaknesses in the fabric and the structure of how people live in Sacramento. [Covering issues] from a lens of equity is really important. Trying to do that as a single newsroom is practically impossible.”

Collaboration between news outlets has become increasingly common all across California. VonKaenel said that if more grant money comes through, Solving Sacramento will be able to start reviving local arts coverage, alongside continuing its affordable housing reporting. The goal is to add multiple reporting subjects, but Lee said he also wants the collaborative expands into hosting community events, helping to ensure the future of existing local newsrooms, and even starting new ones to fill other reporting gaps.

“Ultimately we would like to get to a point that’s more than just story sharing, possibly with ways that can help with the sustainability of each of our individual newsrooms and help build the capacity,” Lee said. “We’re a better community if we have healthier newsrooms, and I think there’s enough resources in the region to help us [all] be sustainable.”

Kotch, who was an investigative reporter at the Center for Media and Democracy, noticed that just a few news outlets were repeatedly featured in the app, which he’d started using because it was pre-installed on his iPhone.

“I got tired of seeing the same kind of major media outlets’ coverage,” Kotch said. “I didn’t see some outlets that I happened to like more, or that I thought would add nuance.”

So Kotch talked through an idea for a new app with his colleague and friend Walker Bragman. They came up with OptOut News, an aggregation app that shares news, podcasts, and streaming video from “exclusively independent” news publishers.

Kotch and Bragman launched OptOut Media Foundation as a nonprofit in 2020 with a mission to “educate the public about current events and help sustain a diverse media ecosystem by promoting and assisting independent news outlets.” The foundation is funded through individual donations, grants, paid memberships, and events.

The app, which Kotch and Bragman announced as the foundation’s first product in 2020, launched a year ago this month. Besides Kotch and Bragman, there are 25 paid contractors and volunteers who help out with the operation, including three freelance editors who write their own newsletters and an additional four journalists who curate the stories that appear in the app.

OptOut, which is still in beta, has four tabs: Headlines (a curated feed of stories, refreshed by humans three or four times a day), Favorites (for saving stories), Your Feed (where users can select outlets they want to follow), and Livestreams (for watching or listening in real time). When you read stories in the Apple News app, the share links are Apple News links. In OptOut, you share the original link to the outlet.

The app includes 180 news outlets so far, including newspapers, magazines, digital publications, podcasts, video channels, and live streams from Twitch and YouTube. Many of the selections have a decidedly progressive bent; one App Store reviewer noted that “it feels a little like a left wing alternative to what we read about as the right wing media ecosystem.” (2024 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson loves the app!) National and subject-specific publishers include The Markup, The Appeal, Grist, the Prison Journalism Project, and The Nation. OptOut also includes content from local and regional news publishers like North Carolina Policy Watch, Ohio Capital Journal, Source New Mexico, and Minnesota Reformer.

“Having worked at several good, important newsrooms that were doing great work but didn’t really have the distribution down, I wanted to create a service that would help pull these newsrooms and audiences together,” Kotch said.

OptOut’s two main requirements for a news outlet to join its network is that it be financially independent and that it consistently produce reliable and accurate journalism. Outlets are also supposed to support fair labor practices (no “anti-union activities” allowed) and, if they’re “opinion- or interview-based publication[s]”, they shouldn’t promote or legitimize “conspiracy theories or other false content.”

Here’s what “financially independent” means, according to OptOut:

• Not owned by a commercial corporation or financial institution (ex. Comcast or Alden Global Capital).
• Not primarily funded by one or a handful of corporations or corporate foundations. (An outlet that runs ads is fine, but if it is mostly funded by, say, Google or Facebook grants, it does not qualify.)
• Not publicly traded.
• Free of financial conflicts of interest. (For example, an outlet that covers the energy industry that gets substantial funding from an energy company or its affiliated foundation does not qualify.)

“If there’s a publication that specializes in, let’s say, energy and climate reporting, and they’re sponsored by Chevron, that’s disqualifying for us, because that presents a conflict of interest,” Kotch said, mentioning recent events at Semafor. “Politico’s energy podcast has some good stuff, but they’re also sponsored by big oil and gas, and to us that’s just not trustworthy. Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low. We can’t risk having people not trust the news that we’re pushing out. And frankly, we don’t have faith in news that has financial conflicts of interest.”

On Thursday morning, the top stories on my Apple News included The Washington Post on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the G-20 Summit, USA Today on the Biden administration going after Covid relief scammers, ABC News on snow emergencies in California, CNN on a Pennsylvania man who allegedly tried to bring explosives onto a plane, and Reuters on scientists finding a hidden corridor in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo.

On OptOut News, meanwhile, the top stories were the season three finale episode of the A Matter of Degrees climate podcast, a Tennessee Lookout story on the Supreme Court’s skepticism of student loan forgiveness, a Sludge report on congressional leaders accepting dark money, the Minnesota Reformer on election workers being harassed in the state, and a Documented story about a New York City college that shut down.

“We’re a foundation and we have our own moral ethics, not just in terms of how one does journalism, but in terms of our society,” Kotch said. “We believe in equality for all people, we believe in acknowledging climate science, and trying to make the world a better place. We believe that diversity is incredibly important and that communities of color and other demographics have often been left out of the news and the mainstream news conversation. We want outlets that acknowledge these things, at least somewhat.”

OptOut is free to use and has been downloaded more than 13,000 times in the Apple Store. Users aren’t required to register or give OptOut any personal data, though they’re prompted to sign up for its four weekly newsletters — OptOut News, OptOut Climate, OptOut LGBTQ+, and OptOut New York. All are grounded in promoting relevant stories from the partner network and are also starting to run their own original reporting and analysis. Kotch said the newsletters have more than 6,000 subscribers and each averages an open rate of 40%.

OptOut is also experimenting with paid content for its recurring donors, like a podcast called Gilded Age about present-day inequality and one called OptOutCast that interviews journalists at independent news outlets and features their work. Members also get access to a private Discord to connect with OptOut’s team.

“The hope is that when people are reading, they have a healthier, more diverse diet of news on a daily basis,” Kotch said.

After graduating from the Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2014, Padilla Dalmau, who was born and raised in San Juan, landed a job as a metro reporter at El Diario, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States. The years on the job covering crime and the New York City Police Department were emotionally grueling. But Padilla Dalmau learned Puerto Rican history through the diaspora communities she was covering, which she had never learned about in school. She then went on to become an associate producer for NowThis en Español. But the longer she worked in the U.S., the more she started to feel news stories about Puerto Rico tended to focus on problems, without explaining how colonialism contributed to them.

“[The news media covers] Puerto Rico through this lens of ‘poor Puerto Ricans going through another hurricane,’” Padilla Dalmau said. “The problem is not [just] the hurricanes. We’ve been dealing with hurricanes for centuries. The problem is the slow response, because of the bureaucracy of the local, state, and federal governments. The biggest problem is that the [news media] shows breaking news without contextualizing the historical and socio-political reality that makes our lives here challenging.”

After seeing the coverage of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Padilla Dalmau decided to move back to the island in 2018. By 2019, she left NowThis to be a freelance video producer and take a break from journalism. Then, the pandemic hit.

In 2020, Padilla Dalmau noticed that Puerto Rican scientists all over the world were lending their expertise to help make sure the already vulnerable healthcare system in Puerto Rico wouldn’t collapse. Padilla Dalmau and fellow journalist Edmy Ayala started partnering with those scientists to publish a newsletter that delivered verified, factual information about the pandemic to Puerto Ricans in a calm, non-alarming way. They published under the name “9 Millones” (meaning “nine million”), which signifies the three million Puerto Ricans living on the island and the six million in the diaspora.

Padilla Dalmau and Ayala caught the attention of the weekly news podcast Latino USA by Futuro Media in June 2020, which then had the two produce an episode on how Puerto Rican scientists hacked the Covid-19 response on the island.

“A lot of the networks that organized during Hurricane Maria reorganized during the earthquakes that happened in 2019 in Puerto Rico, and then organized again during the pandemic,” Padilla Dalmau said. “These networks start happening, and then they become consistent and stronger.”

That episode led to a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network to cover elections in Puerto Rico, a spot in the Lion Publishers Startups Lab Bootcamp, and a grant from an accelerator program in Puerto Rico. Between those opportunities, the responses from a growing audience, and interest from other journalists, Padilla knew there was a market for new, constructive, and nuanced storytelling about Puerto Rico. Today, 9 Millones is both a publishing and crowdfunding platform for journalists looking to investigate stories about Puerto Rico that are going untold in mainstream news outlets.

With that initial support, Padilla Dalmau wanted to build a network of journalists to work with and figure out a way to nurture the communities they cover through their storytelling. One of the journalists she connected with was Bianca Graulau, an independent video journalist who left TV news in the U.S. to return to Puerto Rico and produce investigative journalism (she’s also the journalist who created the documentary portion of Bad Bunny’s docu-music video about Puerto Rico’s most pressing issues, El Apagón).

Padilla Dalmau said partnering with Graulau was a case study that proved that crowdfunding for specific stories by independent journalists works.

Graulau had already been using Patreon to fund her journalism. She currently has 384 patrons, over 75,000 YouTube subscribers, 179,000 Instagram followers, and 694,000 followers on TikTok. In the summer of 2021, Padilla Dalmau and Graulau launched 9 Millones’ crowdfunding platform with a call for donations to support a story Graulau wanted to produce about overdevelopment in Puerto Rico that was endangering natural resources. In 48 hours, they received $10,000.

“We are doing people-powered journalism. That people were paying us to do this was amazing,” Padilla Dalmau said. “Part of the reason [Graulau] was interested is because she did a story about [overdevelopment] and people were asking her how they could support her so she could keep doing that work. It came from a demand, and that’s why I think it was so successful.”

In the last three years, 9 Millones has crowdfunded $55,000 for independent journalism. It works with a mix of independent journalists who self-publish in their medium of choice and publications who want to publish the stories and front some of the costs. In 2022, 9 Millones worked with 31 people (from journalists to production crews) to develop stories. Some of those include a feature on the threats to Puerto Rico’s coral reefs, Graulau’s story on overdevelopment, and Padilla Dalmau’s own story on the landfill crisis in Puerto Rico.

In its first year, 9 Millones was funded mostly by grants and partnerships. In the second year, Padilla Dalmau offered content consulting, which she quickly found was time-consuming and took away from what she really wanted to do: work with journalists to tell stories on their own terms. In year three, 9 Millones started leading workshops for nonprofits on how to use media and storytelling to advocate for communities.

This year, with another grant from the Solutions Journalism Network, Padilla Dalmau will go into local communities in Puerto Rico to work with and develop community journalists who are already documenting their own stories. 9 Millones will offer them trainings based on their needs and then help distribute their stories to reach a larger audience.

“I always ask people, ‘What’s the dream story you want to do?'” Padilla Dalmau said. “And then I ask, ‘What do you need to make that happen?’”

Al Día, the Dallas Morning News’ Spanish-language sister newspaper, will be disbanded on March 1, according to an announcement by the Dallas News Guild last week.

Al Día’s five full-time staffers have been reassigned to roles within the DMN newsroom, where they’ll be required to produce content in English. The Dallas Morning News will continue to publish Al Día’s weekly print edition and update its website, but there will be no staff producing original journalism for Dallas’s Spanish-speaking community. Instead, the product will include translations of DMN stories that were written in English and pieces from Spanish-language wire services, according to Leah Waters, the unit chair of the Dallas News Guild and an equity reporter.

On February 6, DMN executive editor Katrice Hardy told Al Día staff about the change. When those staffers got their reassignments and reached out to their new editors, Waters told me, it turned out that they were breaking the news to the rest of the newsroom.

“Those editors had no idea. They had no plan for them,” Waters said. “It all just feels very haphazard. It’s like [management] is cutting up a car and using the pieces for parts.”

Dallas County’s population is 40% Hispanic/Latino (1.05 million people) and 34% of residents speak Spanish at home, according to 2020 census data (though Latinos were also heavily undercounted in that census).

: We have news of a major change at The Dallas Morning News’ Spanish-language newspaper, Al Día, which has been covering the Hispanic community in North Texas for 19 years. On Monday, Feb. 6, the staff of Al Día was notified that its team would be disbanded as of March 1. 1/5

— Dallas News Guild (@DallasNewsGuild) February 9, 2023

The Dallas Morning News did not respond to interview requests, but CEO and publisher Grant Moise sent the following statement via email:

The Dallas Morning News and Al Dia remain committed to reaching the growing Hispanic audience in North Texas.  We will continue to publish Al Dia every Wednesday in print and aldiadallas.com will continue to publish daily stories in Spanish. The Al Dia team is now reporting into the same content areas as reporters from The Dallas Morning News in an effort to better serve the growing Latino community in North Texas. This community is not only our future, but it is the present, and it deserves enhanced coverage from our newsroom.

The Society of Professional Journalists released a statement on February 10, including a quote from Hardy:

Katrice Hardy, Dallas Morning News managing editor, told SPJ via email that stories will “continue to be written and published in Spanish as they always have.” She said the move is to have Al Día staff integrate into other teams around the newsroom for two reasons: “So that all the DMN teams begin to learn how to write for this audience and so that Al Día has the chance to write more enterprising content. Al Día staff will still write content in Spanish. But in this new structure, other staff on their teams will also write stories with this lens and we will have other stories to augment the traditional Al Día content, which will remain mostly local and not wire.”

Hardy said the move will allow more English content to be translated into Spanish and the Al Día team will continue to write and produce in Spanish as they always have. “This integration will allow us to have stories for ALL in our Hispanic audience, those that are not bilingual and those who are, which we had not focused on the latter much at all before.”

Sources in the newsroom said they were concerned about the loss of a publication providing service journalism in Spanish — from how to renew your passport at the Mexican consulate to where to get vaccinated to changes in immigration and homelessness policies. Spanish-speaking communities have some specific information needs, these sources said, that are not the same as those of English-language readers.

Al Día staffers have been reassigned to desks where they will cover all of Dallas. Some have been moved onto beats that don’t align with their reporting expertise (one reporter built their career covering hard news on topics like drug trafficking and immigration but was reassigned to arts and entertainment). Community organizers have told staffers that they plan to protest the decision, and on Tuesday, Dallas News Guild protested the decision outside of the newsroom.

¿Qué queremos?

A FAIR CONTRACT

¿Cuándo lo queremos?

AHORA pic.twitter.com/vS7NJJfSX6

— Dallas News Guild (@DallasNewsGuild) February 14, 2023

Al Día launched in 2003 as the first Spanish-language newspaper in Dallas, publishing five days a week with a circulation of 40,000. Managing editor Alfredo Carbajal has led the paper since it started. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s La Estrella was once Al Día’s stiffest competition, but ceased printing its weekly newspaper in 2021.

While an estimated 2.16 million Hispanic people live in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, neither of the region’s major newspapers now provide original news in Spanish for Spanish-dominant audiences. There are eight Spanish-language news outlets in the region, according to the Latino Media Map by the Center for Community Media. Al Día and La Estrella are two of them, Telemundo and Univision each have a local television station, KMPX is a Tegna-owned channel affiliated with Estrella TV, and the remaining three websites — El Líder USA, Novedades News, and El Heraldo News — focus more on sports, entertainment, national immigration news, and advertising for local events.

“For our Spanish-speaking community here, this is a true loss,” Waters said.

The change follows a years-long trend of cuts to Spanish-language journalism by American media companies. In 2007, ImpreMedia — which owns Spanish-language newspapers El Diario in New York, La Opinión in Los Angeles, and La Raza in Chicago — bought Hoy New York from Tribune Company, only to shut it down in 2009. In 2019, Tribune Publishing shut down Hoy, the Spanish-language sister newspaper to the Chicago Tribune. In 2022, the Orlando Sentinel did the same with El Sentinel while ImpreMedia sold itself to an advertising startup.

National news outlets have also experimented with providing news in Spanish for a few years a time before ultimately deeming the projects not worth continuing. Examples include The New York Times en Español (2016–2019), The Washington Post’s El Post podcast and Opinion section (2019-2022), and Huffpost Mexico (2016-2019), which originally launched to cover the country in Spanish after former president Donald Trump’s racist comments about Mexicans on the campaign trail.

One of the ongoing issues the guild is negotiating with management is pay parity, particularly for Al Día staff. The median annual salary in Dallas is about $42,000. According to a pay disparity study the guild conducted and shared with Nieman Lab, an Al Día reporter with 15 years of experience makes $49,000 a year, while a Dallas Morning News reporter with the same amount of experience makes more than $70,000. An Al Día editor with 23 years of experience makes $53,000 a year while a Dallas Morning News editor with the same experience makes $75,000 or more. Management did not mention pay increases to Al Día staffers when they were told about their new assignments, Waters said.

The Dallas News Guild and the company are close to finalizing their first contract, Waters said. She called the changes a status quo violation, meaning the company changed employees’ conditions of employment without bargaining with the union while the parties were still negotiating a contract.

“Moves like this, right before we finish our contract, [are] completely destructive to a workforce,” Waters said. “It’s disruptive to the operation and it is destructive to the spirit of our newsroom.”

The @AlDiaDallas team saw potential in me before I saw it in myself. I’m so grateful to everyone there because I wouldn’t be where I am without their support. It’s devastating to see this. Every time I see this happen to Spanish-language news media, it truly hurts. https://t.co/eBWRzCGgAl

— Elvia Limón (@elvialimon) February 9, 2023

Any time legitimate Spanish-language outlets are dissolved — typically from lack of investment/promotion — it frees room for disinfo to fill the void.

Latines/Spanish speakers make up a larger audience than ever, and we risk our communities being pawns in a broader info war. https://t.co/9JA0hgvmNK

— Cristóbal Reyes (he/él) (@chreyesrios) February 10, 2023

If my parents were alive today, they’d be deeply sad & disappointed by this decision. My parents first language was Spanish & subscribed to Al Día for years. In fact, they read, watched & listened to the news in both Spanish & English. https://t.co/qEkuISg00X

— Stella M. Chávez (@stellamchavez) February 10, 2023

cannot emphasize enough how important @AlDiaDallas is to dallas, where nearly 40% of residents speak spanish at home.

how a company responsible for informing and listening to that very community can justify this move is beyond me https://t.co/HrcNSnmZBL

— mallorie sullivan (@malloriesullivn) February 9, 2023

It is impossible not to feel sad. My solidarity always with my colleagues from Al Día. I know we will shine in the face of adversity. It pains me that their voices will no longer share the stories of the DFW community as they have been doing for 19 years. https://t.co/XvPC2Mf8OB

— Lorena Flores (@loreeflores) February 10, 2023

This. Is. Heartbreaking.

I’ve always been blown away by the creative and community-centered coverage that the Al Día team produces. They connect with and respect a group of people (40% of our city!!!) that gets overlooked time and time again.

Shameful decision by DMN execs. https://t.co/tiHxBowA0X

— Lynda M. González (@lyndamgonzalez) February 10, 2023

Note to my followers: Beginning March my “original content” immigration law column will no longer appear in Al Dia Dallas. For the latest guidance on immigration law, read my column @NYDailyNews and use Google translate if u need it in Spanish. https://t.co/y5WWQE3P8Y

— Allan Wernick (@awernick) February 10, 2023

“I see people getting into the news business in ways that they couldn’t before,” Baquet said. “I had coffee a couple of months ago with the editors at New York Focus, which is a small newsroom in New York that’s examining the state government and the prison system. They do great stuff.”

“The Dean Baquet shoutout … we nearly fell out of our seats,” Akash Mehta, the editor-in-chief of New York Focus, told me recently.

Mehta co-founded New York Focus with editor-at-large Lee Harris in 2020 after months of freelance reporting on the state budget negotiations and its impacts at the start of the pandemic as a freelancer. Before that, Mehta had worked in local and state politics — serving on his local community board, interning for local legislators and for electoral campaigns. He considered himself civically engaged, and it wasn’t until he started working as a journalist that he fully realized how confusing state politics could be.

“With each of these stories, I encountered these ‘What the fuck’ moments: How is it possible that my state, that I’ve lived in all my life, is run like this?” Mehta recalled. “I thought of myself as a pretty well-informed New Yorker, but I had no idea of the insanity, for instance, [of how] the state budget is crafted each year. We decided that if there was no [existing] home for that kind of accountability journalism, then it fell to us to create it.” Upon its launch in October 2020, New York Focus became the first nonprofit newsroom covering New York State politics.

New York has the third-largest economy in the United States, after Texas and California, but it’s losing more residents than any other state. The number of newspapers operating in the state declined by 40% between 2004 and 2019, according to the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media’s News Deserts project, and coverage is often centered around New York City.

“The way that Albany works is incredibly opaque,” Mehta said. “There’s a lot of opportunity for accountability reporting to help citizens participate in government and [help] people in power to make more informed decisions. Even on a really scrappy budget, and in just two years, we’ve seen that this type of reporting can lead to real impact and policy consequences.”

Last spring, the New York State Board of Elections started enforcing campaign finance transparency laws after New York Focus reported on violations. In 2021, after Focus investigated, the state’s health department released data on drug overdose deaths.

More recent stories have covered police surveillance, the New York City Housing Authority’s failure to comply with federal hiring laws, and the state senate’s rejection of Governor Kathy Hochul’s nominee for chief judge of the state’s highest court. A “Perspectives” section also runs occasional opinion pieces. Focus stories have been picked up by publications like Politico, Vox, and the Albany Times Union.

I’m very skeptical that Governor Hochul’s nominee would have been rejected this week, had it not been for @nysfocus‘s in-depth reporting last year on the direction of the state judiciary & its highest court. (1/)

— Taniel (@Taniel) January 19, 2023

New York Focus is currently funded through grants from the Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Vital Projects Funds, and others; it also receives donations from individual donors and revenue from some publishing partnerships. (The site has co-published with local outlets like the Albany Times Union, City & State, and The City, and with national outlets like The Intercept, The Nation, and Fast Company. So far, it’s only asked national partners for payment, so that revenue stream has only provided a few thousand dollars a year.) Readers can opt to become members and make monthly recurring donations, starting at $1. Focus has a full-time staff of six and is planning to expand in the coming year. Most of the team is based in New York City, though they “criss-cross the state on Amtrak,” Mehta said.

Rebecca Klein, the general manager and publisher of New York Focus, said Focus averages 30,000 unique website visitors per month, with a newsletter open rate over 50%. Its audience is so far “New York political insiders” mostly based in Albany and New York City.

Moving forward, New York Focus plans to build out its co-publishing network, letting hyperlocal publications run its work for free. A statewide listening tour is also in the works.

“We’re trying to take this group of New York political insiders who really care about our work and continue to serve them — and also expand what it means to be a New York political insider,” Klein said.

As a student at Morgan State University in the early 2000s, Carter wanted to be a sports writer. But one professor, Frank Dexter Brown, encouraged him to experiment with reporting on different beats.

Carter was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper The MSU Spokesman, and after graduating in 2003, he went on to work for the university in a public relations role. By 2009, he knew firsthand that HBCUs weren’t covered the same way as predominantly white institutions.

“I started thinking about why HBCUs don’t get more coverage institutionally,” Carter said. “The goal with HBCU Digest was to tell the HBCU story in a different way. I never knew that I would fall in love with higher education and, particularly, the ways in which [institutions] can transform lives.”

After 11 years of running HBCU Digest, Carter left to work for Howard University as a director of operations, strategy, and communications in 2021. But his work on the Digest caught the attention of Sara Hebel and Scott Smallwood, the co-founders of Open Campus Media, a nonprofit investigative news outlet covering higher education.

It led Hebel and Smallwood to the idea for the HBCU Student Reporting Network, a paid reporting fellowship for student journalists to cover the HBCUs they attend for broader audiences around the country. The program, with an inaugural class of six, launched this week, with Carter serving as editor and Wesley Wright as assistant editor. It’s funded through grants from the Knight Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Scripps Howard Fund. The fellows will be paid a $1,200 stipend per month for the semester-long fellowship.

The first class of fellows: Auzzy Byrdsell of Morehouse College; Brittany Patterson of Southern University and A&M College; Jasper Smith of Howard University; Skylar Stephens of Xavier University of Louisiana; Alivia Welch of Jackson State University; and Tyuanna Williams of Claflin University.

The fellowship is modeled on the CalMatters College Journalism Network, which launched in 2020 to increase news coverage of California’s public universities. Fellows in the HBCU Student Journalism Network will spend 10 to 15 hours per week during the semester working on a range of stories with guidance and mentoring from Carter and Wright. They’re most looking forward to covering “funding and enrollment trends, campus arts and sports cultures, and students’ and colleges’ roles in social justice,” according to the Open Campus news release.

Carter said part of the reason that HBCUs have gone undercovered is dwindling resources in the local newsrooms in the same communities as the HBCUs. Story budgets are often dictated by what assigning editors are most interested in. Reporters have limited bandwidths and education reporting has traditionally meant covering the local school boards and the largest college or university in town, which are hefty beats on their own. (One bright spot: The Plug, which covers Black and brown tech companies, has an entire newsletter devoted to covering tech and innovation out of HBCUs.)

“Typically, coverage has been about struggles and financial issues at HBCUs,” Carter said — and less about “faculty excellence, student workforce development, political mobilization, or even the impact of HBCUs on agriculture, secondary education, medicine, and law. [But] news operations are starting to connect the dots of what diversity means and how you get there in terms of workforce development, and HBCUs are a central part of that.”

The Student Journalism Network comes at a particularly important time for HBCUs. Three years into a global pandemic and after the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, HBCUs have received millions of dollars in philanthropic donations and nationwide attention. Author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated over half a billion dollars to nearly two dozen HBCUs between July and December 2020. The recipients put the donations toward funding their endowments, hiring faculty, upgrading technology and facilities, and more, according to The Plug. In 2021, the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation together committed $20 million to Howard University to open the Center for Journalism and Democracy, which is now led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Nikole-Hannah Jones.

Enrollment at HBCUs has increased over the last three years (even as college enrollment nationwide has declined) as students look for safe and inclusive environments to study. At the same time, corporations and major companies are pushing to diversify their workforces; some have started investing in HBCUs to do so.

But none of those are enough to fix major institutional issues like historic underfunding and discrimination, Carter said. (”$50 million helps, but it doesn’t address a $250 million problem.”)

Wright, who works as the student media advisor at Florida Atlantic University, said that as with other beats, when there are fewer or no reporters covering institutions, both local communities and the institution suffer. The student network fellows have the advantage of already knowing their campus communities best.

“People who work at HBCUs [often] feel like [journalists] parachute in after a tragedy or after some phenomenon, and then they leave,” Wright said. “This fellowship has a different tenor. We’re not sending somebody from another part of the country to parachute in and interview a football coach and that person has no local context. We’re working with [students]. There’s no [better] way to be close to an institution than through somebody who lives in a dorm.”

The fellowship will help students build their portfolios, network with professional journalists, and have their stories republished by Open Campus Media’s reporting partners, creating a pipeline of emerging Black journalists when they graduate.

“It is literally a dream come true for me,” Carter said. “I always wanted to see young reporters take an interest in higher education, specifically HBCUs. I didn’t want to do this work by myself forever.”

The conversation was spurred by questions Sahan Journal’s innovation editor Aala Abdullahi got in response to a new weekly newsletter, called Tani waa su’aashayda, which means “This is my question” in Somali.

Minnesota is home to the largest Somali population in the United States. Sahan Journal was founded in 2019 founded by CEO and publisher Mukhtar Ibrahim to serves the news needs of immigrant communities and communities of color in Minneapolis and throughout the state.

Sahan Journal developed Tani waa su’aashayda after a year of listening sessions with immigrant, refugee, and non-English-speaking communities across Minnesota. (The listening sessions were funded via a grant from the Google News Initiative and conducted in partnership with the media outlets that serve Minneapolis’s large Spanish, Hmong, and Somali-speaking communities: La Raza 95.7 FM, 3HmongTV, and Somali TV Minnesota.) They chose the title “Tani waa su’aashayda” because “we wanted the questions and feedback and the insights of Somalis to be at the center,” Abdullahi said.

Tani waa su’aashayda challenges the traditional newsletter format. Co-produced by Abdullahi and Somali TV’s Diis, it is audio-only. Abdullahi and Diis use the platform GroundSource to send audio files to subscribers via SMS.

Sending the voice notes in this way helps Sahan Journal and Somali TV reach its audience directly instead of relying on social media, and gives them a head start on reporting future stories that affect the community.

When subscribers first sign up, they get a welcoming voice note from Diis explaining what the newsletter is, what users can expect to hear, and how Sahan Journal and Somali TV will incorporate their feedback to grow the newsletter. Every week, Diis records an audio summary of three or four local news stories. When relevant, he also sometimes includes news from Somalia. He then tells subscribers about upcoming local events that Somalis can attend or get involved in.

In the last section, Diis asks subscribers what they did and didn’t enjoy about the week’s newsletter and why. He also asks them to share their questions for journalists. Those question serve as tips and ideas for future Sahan Journal stories, newsletter call-outs, and community discussion. Abdullahi hopes that an increasingly large percentage of Tani waa su’aashayda content’s will come from user feedback and questions.

The sections of the newsletter are recorded in separate voice notes and sent out throughout the week. Abdullahi says she sends out a maximum of six voice notes per week. Then, she compiles all of the audio files and layers on photos and graphics to produce a video to upload to YouTube. That way, people can listen to all of the voice notes in one place with a visual component instead to subscribing to the text message service. Abdullahi also uploads the voice notes to Sahan Journal’s website.

Other than some necessary text to help people navigate the newsletter’s archive page, the newsletter contains no written portions or stories. “The Somali language itself is not one where everyone agrees on the grammar,” Abdullahi, who is Somali herself, said. “There are a lot of dialect differences. We didn’t want to get bogged down by that. It’s a lot more seamless to just make it an audio.”

Sahan Journal had heard in its listening sessions, too, that Somalis living in Minnesota said they preferred to consume news via video or audio rather than reading it. (Sahan Journal has another newsletter called New Home that serves Afghan refugees, but is written and published in Pashto and Dari in a pamphlet format and distributed through PDFs via SMS.)

Breaking away from a traditional newsletter format also means defining new metrics for success. GroundSource doesn’t provide subscriber data or open rates, so Abdullahi instead looks at week-to-week subscriber growth. Today, the newsletter has 211 subscribers, and Abudallahi has received more than 400 texts from 151 users.

By March, Sahan Journal will take its learnings from Tani waa su’aashayda to decide how to best launch similar newsletters for Hmong and Spanish-speaking communities in Minnesota.

“We want to keep it bare bones,” Abdullahi said. “A lot of newsrooms that are similar in size to Sahan Journal are actively thinking about how to incorporate community engagement and feedback into their journalism, and are thinking about distribution models. We want to focus on a model that people could replicate.”

Over the course of two years, one of the researchers, Annsar Shahhoud, played “Anna.” Shahhoud learned that these officials were easy to find on Facebook, had relatively public profiles, and were members of active, intelligence-related Facebook groups. She sent them friend requests, told them about the alleged research she was doing, made them feel comfortable, and conducted lengthy interviews. In 2019, when a new military recruit leaked a harrowing video of a mass civilian execution to the researchers, they already had the network to track down the responsible officers.

Published in New Lines Magazine, the details of this investigation — about how Shahhoud and her co-author Uğur Ümit Üngör conducted the covert research, what they found, and the toll the process took on them — are chilling. Shahhoud and Üngör were interviewed on the New Lines podcast, and recently, the magazine published an illustrated video using details from the story and audio from the podcast to create a visual experience.

This particular case, while dark, heavy, and troubling, embodies New Lines’ mission to serve audiences that want to read longform, narrative journalism with all of its complicated, messy, and tangled threads.

In one segment of the podcast, Shahhoud and Üngör talked about what it was like to move on from the imaginary person they’d created in Anna, New Lines managing editor Ola Salem said. “The details of not only what the story is, but what goes on behind the story: That is the stuff we love to run.”

Founder and editor-in-chief Hassan Hassan, along with Salem, launched New Lines Magazine in October 2020. It’s published and funded by the nonpartisan think tank New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, which was founded and is led by Iraqi American entrepreneur Ahmed Alwani. (Alwani is also the founder of Fairfax University of America, a private, non-profit university in Fairfax, Virginia.)

At first, Alwani was skeptical about the Institute publishing a magazine, Hassan said. But Hassan kept re-pitching the idea and, in 2019, wrote a first-person essay for The Atlantic that described how different the Syria he grew up in was from the Syria overtaken by the Islamic State that he covered as a journalist.

“As many readers pointed out publicly and privately, the personal was much more illuminating than the work I’d done before,” Hassan later wrote for New Lines about that essay. “About how wars dismantle societies and how their effects carry on long after the gunshots go silent and the headlines shift.”

There needed to be a home for more of these types of stories that humanized these difficult subjects, Hassan thought. The idea of a magazine showcasing and educating people about complex issues eventually appealed to Alwani and he agreed to the launch. The magazine’s name plays on the idea of creating space for new narratives.

“Often when an editor declines or dilutes a good story, it’s to say it’s too in the weeds. I always joke, ‘What’s wrong with weeds?’” Hassan said, adding, “Readers do have the bandwidth to read complex stories as long as you make them readable and accessible, but at the same time, deep and nuanced and thoughtful.”

New Lines started out solely covering the Middle East, which was Hassan and Salem’s expertise as career journalists in the region. Over the last year, with a remote staff of 25 scattered around the globe, New Lines has grown into its tagline: “A local magazine for the world.” It now publishes stories from all over the world, with an emphasis on local reporting from journalists and experts.

The magazine, which has been online-only since its launch but will sell print quarterly editions starting this month, publishes one or two stories every weekday that fall into its five categories: reportage (deeply reported enterprise dispatches from the ground), arguments (arguments based in facts, data, and the writer’s professional experience), anchored in history (essays that use historical context to explain the present), first person (writers use personal experience to tell a story larger than themselves), and review (essays about books, films, and other media).

A sampling of recent stories: Reporting on the origins of a cholera epidemic in Syria, lessons about the coexistence of Indian Hindus and Muslims from the oldest mosque in South Asia, a photoessay on the “vanishing craft” of handmade Sudanese caps, and an essay on how immigrants in America infuses their own culture into Thanksgiving. Above each headline is an indication of how many minutes the story takes to read. The byline includes a one-line biography about the writer so the reader has a sense of whose work they’re about to consume. (I originally found New Lines through its reporting on Pakistan and stayed for its gorgeous World Cup coverage, including “Bisht, Please”).

New Lines also has two podcasts. The Lede, published weekly, mostly interviews reporters about their New Lines stories, their reporting processes, and their sources. Wider Angle, launched in November of this year, hosts conversations on global politics and culture.

Everything New Lines publishes is long. Most stories are supposed to take 10 to 35 minutes to read. Podcast episodes range from 20 to 85 minutes long. New Lines has found an audience for it, with hundreds of thousands of website visitors per month, Salem said. New Lines reached one million monthly views for the first time in 2022 and boasts monthly reader activity in every country in the world, according to Salem. (“Some months we miss out on getting readers from Greenland, but still from all other countries,” she said.)

That’s a lot of screen time. With that in mind, New Lines decided to launch not only a print magazine but also a coffee table book of 50 essays from its first year of publication. New Lines’ art director, Joanna Andreasson, often paints illustrations to accompany stories, which led to the idea for print products. (These will also be New Lines’ first efforts at establishing revenue streams outside of the Institute).

“You can carry it with you and you don’t have to be distracted by the internet,” Salem said.

Hassan described New Lines’ pillars as “the granular, the personal, and historical” stories that help readers understand why things are the way they are. The news cycle doesn’t dictate the publishing schedule, he said. The staff has daily meetings about the day’s news and from there, they decide whether or not they have something meaningful and insightful to contribute to the conversation. If the answer is yes, they get to work on finding the right story. If the answer is no, they get to work on other stories. (”We’re getting away from Twitter and the legacy media temptation and pressure to say something just to say something,” Hassan said.)

“Our essays can take us to small rural towns, the peripheries away from the big cities and the urban centers,” Hassan said. “We forget that much of the world is actually more on the periphery and in the smaller cities. This is quite useful and it draws in an audience that really gets excited about what we are doing. There’s a certain circle of people who like stories that offer them depth, nuance, and treat them as sophisticated readers rather than dumb readers who can’t read beyond 400 words.”

On Wednesday, the Washington Post launched its own personalized annual review that shows subscribers insights about the journalism they consumed in 2022 in a similar visual format. It’s technically called “Newsprint,” but almost everyone who shared their stats so far called it some variation of “Washington Post Wrapped.”

For anyone who doesn’t know: Spotify Wrapped is an annual, personalized summary that shows users interesting data points about their listening habits, like their most listened to songs and podcasts and their top genres and artists. (Unsurprisingly, my top artist has been Bad Bunny for multiple years in a row.) It’s packaged vertically like an Instagram story and designed for sharing on social media.

wapo wrapped just dropped pic.twitter.com/i0qJBZKltk

— angel (@angelmendoza___) November 30, 2022

The Washington Post’s version tells readers how many stories they read, how many topics they engaged with, their most read sections of the paper, how many different authors they’ve read, and which writers they read most often. Newsprint also makes suggestions for stories the reader may have missed, newsletters to subscribe to, and other authors to follow. The summary slide shows the factoids as ridges on a fingerprint.

The Post declined to share specific audience numbers, but said it emailed “some” of its subscribers on Wednesday to let them know about the feature. More subscribers will be notified about the feature in mid-December, a spokesperson for the Post said in an email.

Jessica Gilbert, head of product at the Washington Post, said in an email that Newsprint offers a way to further personalize the reader experience.

“We developed Newsprint iteratively throughout 2022, responding to user research and internal feedback,” Gilbert said. “We initially built a ‘look-back’ experience but pivoted when we learned that our readers are more interested in insights that center on their reading ‘personality’ and content discovery rather than revisiting news from the past.”

Annual summary and review products like Spotify Wrapped can be both fun and useful to companies and users. They drum up excitement and can resurface some of the content that prompted people to subscribe in the first place. The Post’s version reminds subscribers of all the journalism they’ve enjoyed, highlights specific reporters that keep the reader coming back for more, and compliments their taste in news.

In both cases, the companies get a pulse on what resonates with users. Subscribers get to learn something (potentially) new about themselves and see what they’re getting by paying for a subscription.

Here’s what’s unique about my @WashingtonPost reading this year. You can get your 2022 Newsprint at https://t.co/l8Vd1ONP4v. #PostNewsprint pic.twitter.com/zFLTTThsYD

— Ryan Osborn (@rozzy) November 30, 2022

Sharing on social media lets people compare their insights with others, creating engagement between users and between the artists (or journalists) and their audiences. People share screenshots online, creating a stream of content while roasting themselves or doing a little humble bragging. There are always memes.

wapo wrapped calling me out for reading my own articles https://t.co/nKjC7V8n3Q pic.twitter.com/HhKwDCQ0gH

— Nathan Grayson (@Vahn16) November 30, 2022

In 2021, Spotify Wrapped was mentioned in 1.2 million posts on Twitter and its cards were shared nearly 60 million times across multiple social media platforms. Last year, the streaming company’s mobile app downloads increased 21% the week the campaign launched.

Michael Ribero, chief subscriptions officer at the Washington Post, said the Post wants to build on Newsprint and use it as a feature to help “attract new subscribers and increase brand awareness through social sharing” in future years.

If you have a Washington Post subscription, you don’t have to wait for an email. You can generate your personalized Newsprint summary here.

At the end of October, Honolulu Civil Beat announced that it would host pop-up newsrooms at public libraries across the state, bringing groups of staffers to work work from the libraries. The hope was that it would give Hawaii residents a chance to learn about how Civil Beat works, and let Civil Beat staffers learn about issues important to communities around the state.

Hosting office hours or meet-and-greets with journalists and the communities they cover isn’t a new idea, Patti Epler, the editor and general manager of Civil Beat, said. In 2018, Dallas Morning News held community office hours at multiple North Texas libraries for residents to meet DMN’s journalists and ask them questions. In 2019, The City organized the Open Newsroom for people to talk to its engagement team about what neighborhood issues mattered most to them.

Before the pandemic, Civil Beat hosted in-person events at venues near its office in Honolulu. In 2018, the newsroom purchased a Civil Beat-branded van so its team could drive around and meet residents throughout Oahu, the most populous of Hawaii’s eight islands.

“During the pandemic, we started doing a lot more online meetings and discussions, and we got people from all over the state,” Epler said. “We learned that people have an interest if they can get to us. So now, going out to these more rural areas, it’s definitely a different crowd. They’re older, more worker-oriented. They’re not the same kind of political movers and shakers that come to our events.”

In the first few library sessions, Epler said that people didn’t talk much about Civil Beat itself. There were a couple of people who wanted to know how comment moderation worked, and Epler pulled out her laptop and walked them through it. But mostly, people wanted to talk to Civil Beat journalists about local issues in their communities, because they’d had a hard time getting ahold of their elected officials. At one session, Epler said Civil Beat’s transportation reporter Marcel Honore got a lot of attention from visitors because they were concerned about rail construction projects in their area. (These sessions also work best at libraries that have a separate room or space for Civil Beat so that the chatter doesn’t disturb library patrons who aren’t interested, she said.)

“These folks see themselves as very rural and feel there’s like a Honolulu-centric power at play, and that they’re not included in it,” Epler said. “They feel very left out of the discussions. They were super appreciative that we took the time to come out to them and listen to them, because they do feel shut out and it is very hard for them to get into the main part of Honolulu where most of the government meetings take place.”

The first pop-up newsroom was at the Kahuku Public and School Library in Oahu. There, the staff heard from residents that they wanted to learn more about using social media for news. A few weeks later, Civil Beat returned to Kahuku with social media and engagement manager Ku’u Kauanoe, who led a workshop for interested community members. Things like that are mutually beneficial to both residents and the libraries: attendees get to learn something new and the libraries get to welcome new patrons who might not have otherwise visited.

Civil Beat has a pop-up newsroom schedule on the website and Epler writes a post a few days before the next session to let readers know who they can expect to meet and what Civil Beat learned from the last one. While the main priority isn’t to generate content from these visits, Epler said, they’ve started to produce videos from each session with visitors telling Civil Beat what they love about where they live. Epler noticed that the people that come to talk to Civil Beat are proud of where they come from and have no plans to move. They see raising awareness or getting news coverage of issues in their communities as a way to improve them. News coverage often only reflects what’s bad or wrong in their communities, so Civil Beat sees these short videos as a small step to balance that out.

“I’ve been doing this journalism thing now for 40 years,” Epler said. “In the old days, I don’t think we would have even given a second thought to getting out of the office in this way and taking the staff out on a regular basis. This really helps people in our community get to understand what we do and and see the possibilities.”

On Wednesday, the constitutional court of Berlin invalidated the state’s September 2021 election due to “election errors.” Those errors included long lines, polling place glitches, shortages of paper ballots, voters receiving incorrect ballots, and other issues. The state must now hold another election in the next 90 days.

In the aftermath of that somewhat chaotic election, one news publisher in Berlin partnered with a game design agency and public libraries to show the city’s residents there are ways to get involved in politics beyond voting. Der Tagesspiegel, one of the most popular German daily newspapers, has built an immersive, in-person game with the hopes that players walk away with an understanding of how their local governments work (and possibly pique their interest in participating in the real thing).

Tagesspiegel developed BVV-Planspiel, which translates to “experimental game,”  in partnership with the German game design agency Planpolitik. The project is managed and funded by the city’s public libraries and, after an initial pilot phase, the partners plan to fully launch the game in the spring of 2023.

1/2 Welcher #BVV-Typ sind Sie? Bei einem neuen Planspiel können Interessierte in die Rolle von Bezirksverordneten schlüpfen und bei einem Online-Quiz mehr über die BVV erfahren: https://t.co/aGXMMmizWs pic.twitter.com/RyEMJ2Dwtg

— Corinna von Bodisco (@cora_vb) October 14, 2022

In Berlin, each district has its own local government known as the district council. Like local politics in many cities, the councils can be complicated and difficult to navigate even as they make consequential decisions on behalf of citizens. Monthly council meetings are open to the public, but can be jarring or confusing to first-time attendees if they don’t know how to participate.

As part of its local news coverage, Tagesspiegel has 12 daily newsletters; one per district in Berlin. In a city with roughly 3.5 million residents, Tagesspiegel has between 300,000 and 400,000 subscribers across the dozen newsletters. Tagesspiegel editor and newsletter reporter Corinna von Bodisco sees the game as a complement to that local reporting.

“On the one hand, [the newsletters] are very well read, and there are many active readers who know local politics,” von Bodisco said. “But the idea was to reach other people and also to create something where they can maybe develop their own ideas of how to participate in politics.”

Planspiel centers around the made-up Berlin district of Biberfelde. The game requires at least 10 players to serve as members of the district’s assembly and discuss a range of local issues. Each player is assigned to a fictional political party that’s loosely based on a real one. They get a short description of who they are, what kind of values and ideas they hold, and who their character represents.

At the end of 90 minutes, the players have to come to a resolution on the issue that serves the interest of the district’s residents. Hosting the game at public libraries — there’s one in each of the 12 districts — makes it accessible to all residents for free.

Some examples from the website include:

• Whether or not the district should implement bike lanes on a major road
• If the district should allow a private investor to build a reptile house on a plot of fallow land, or allocate the land to a project that makes for sense for the district [A hard no from me – HT]
• Installing lights in a park to reduce mugging and other incidents at night time, despite concerns from environmentalists

Judith Langowski, who was chief editor of newsletters for Tagesspiegel until October (she’s now a newsletters editor for Reuters), originally developed the idea with von Bodisco. Langowski was a 2019 grantee in the now-defunct Engaging Communities program at the University of Oregon’s Agora Journalism Center.

With the grant, Langowski and von Bodisco created a monthly newsletter focused on volunteering and community initiatives. They also developed a framework for what eventually became the Planspiel game. From there, Planpolitik worked with Tagesspiegel’s newsletter writers to develop the story lines, characters, and conflicts, all based on the journalists’ expertise covering their respective districts.

“It gives you a much better view on what politics on a local level is, instead of just reading about it or going to a meeting yourself and sitting in as a guest,” Langowski said. “When they have this rule [in the game] that they have to defend certain arguments, even though it might be the complete opposite [of your politics], they immediately fell into the structures that also existed in local politics.”

Langowski said that having this understanding of how local government works is essential and should be free to any Berlin resident who wants it.

“At this September 2021 election, I was in line to vote and a man behind me looked at the ballot for this district and he asked me ‘What is this?’” Langowski recalled.

“I said, ‘Oh, did you just move here?’ and he said no, that he had been living here for four years. It makes you realize how important this information is and how much is still missing,” she said.

Tagesspiegel piloted the game at one library last month. After that first simulation, von Bodisco said the players told her they wanted more time for discussion and a more diverse group to play with. The team behind Planspiel said they’ll make changes to address that feedback before the game launches to the rest of the library locations in 2023.

Futuro Media, a nonprofit media outlet founded in 2010 by veteran journalist Maria Hinojosa, aims to tell stories that are often overlooked by mainstream media outlets. The company has more than 30 full-time employees across four media properties: The national Latino news and culture public radio show Latino USA, weekly politics podcast In The Thick, online news site Latino Rebels, and podcasting outlet Futuro Studios. (Futoro recently won its first Pulitzer Prize for Suave, its podcast on the juvenile criminal justice system.)

“We view political polling as a service. It’s something to inform readership,” Futuro president Julio Ricardo Varela said. “We’ve been openly critical over the years about political polling when it comes to the Latino community.” But they thought they could do better as an organization with a national, Latino-leaning scope. Latino USA, as an example, had more than half a million weekly listeners in 2021 and four million downloads, according to the annual report.

Futuro and the Chicago-based political strategy and research firm IZQ surveyed 1,089 voters across Georgia, Florida, and Pennsylvania from October to to October 11, 2022. The data was weighted to ”be representative of likely Latino voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history” in each state, and surveys — on the web and via SMS — were available in both English and Spanish. Among the poll‘s key findings:

• Latino voters will contribute significantly to victories of both Republican and Democratic candidates in November. They remain a large group of voters who can be won by either party, depending on the current state of their economic well-being, and how much effort candidates put into courting them.
• There are large gaps in terms of candidate awareness, indicating that a large portion of the prospective Latino electorate has not been sufficiently contacted by candidates in either party.
• Both parties have left certain issues on the table which could have boosted their support among Latino voters. Most notably, reducing energy costs, increasing access to bilingual education, and expressing support for decolonization of the remaining U.S. territories.

In addition to asking about cultural matters like their views of the term “Latinx,” the poll also asked respondents who they voted for in the last election, whether they’d voted in an election in their country of origin, and how often they think a U.S. political candidate wins an election due to cheating or fraud.

“We found pretty consistently that Latinos are pretty skeptical of the validity of the U.S. voting system — which is highly problematic, especially if both parties are trying to engage them more,” IZQ’s Gustavo Sanchez told Futuro’s Varela on Latino Rebels Radio. “It may also be that a lot of folks are coming from countries where elections are stolen or where elections are not as transparent. They’re seeing politicians in the U.S. question elections more and more. For them, it’s like, ‘I’ve seen this play before. This isn’t surprising. This is what I expect from government.'”

As part of the poll, respondents were asked if they would be open to being contacted by a journalist from Futuro. About 5% said yes, according to Varela. Reporters for Latino Rebels were then able to talk to poll respondents to produce more in-depth stories about Latino voters in Georgia and Florida.

Futuro used grant funding from the Walton Family Foundation to pay for the poll, which Varela said cost “in the mid-five figures.” It isn’t the type of news outlet we typically see conducting political polling, which is why it wanted to dip its toes in.

While Varela said he’s not sure that Futuro will continue to poll because it is expensive to do, he encourages other independent news outlets to try out polling for themselves as a way to get a pulse on voters in their coverage areas.

“I wouldn’t say the stake is 100% in the sand permanently,” Varela said. “But we wanted to try to do something to add to the conversation … now that we were able to start with a small step, we have a case study.”

“Let’s be honest: Crime coverage is terrible,” Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli wrote in their Nieman Lab prediction for 2021. “It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism.”

In April, the Toronto Star began using data from the Toronto Police Service to publish stories about break-and-enters across the city, using data from the Toronto Police Service. Since then, it’s published around six stories a week that round up the break-and-enter reports from each of Toronto’s six districts.

The stories all follow pretty much the same format. They don’t include personal information, like names or specific addresses. The headlines report the number of break-and-enters in a specific district from the last week. The first few paragraphs of the total number of break-and-enters in the entire city for that week, followed by the total number since the start of the year. It then notes whether break-and-enters have increased or decreased and by what percentage in the same period from the prior year. It then lists each break-and-enter report, categorized by district neighborhood in alphabetical order.

The final paragraph of each story notes that it was was automatically generated from open data that’s collected and maintained by the Toronto Police Service. It notes that “recent crime data is preliminary and subject to change upon further police investigation.”

The practice of automatically generating some news coverage isn’t new. The Los Angeles Times’ Quakebot, launched in 2014, generates stories about earthquakes. Reuters experimented with a tool that helps reporters find interesting anomalies in data. The Toronto Star itself has published other automated series on local highway closures, election results, home prices, and restaurant inspections.

But its automated reporting on break-and-enters attracted some extra attention. Over the summer, Jordan Heath-Rawlings, the host of the Big Story Podcast in Canada, posed questions about the Star’s automated reports in a Twitter thread. “I’m not saying THIS particular series of articles (which seems to be writing a piece based on reported break-ins for each Toronto neighbourhood) is bad,” he wrote. “But I think streamlining the process that goes from police through the media even further is … a choice.”

Cody Gault, the product manager for content at the Toronto Star, told me that strategically using automation on some stories has helped free up reporters to cover deeper stories.

“The best example of automated content out-and-out ‘replacing’ newsroom-produced content is our automated DineSafe series, where we report the results of health inspections for local restaurants, bars, cafes, bakeries and grocery stores,” Gault said. “Reporters were producing stories like this by hand because readers really want this information. But I don’t think any reporter or editor misses writing or editing this series before we automated it — and the readership has only increased since we did.”

Another example: The Star had already been covering the rise in auto thefts in the city, so having automated weekly reports of the number of auto thefts complemented those investigations. Break-and-enter stories, however, weren’t previously being covered manually by Star reporters.

Jean-Hugues Roy, a journalism professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, likened The Star’s practice to when newspapers used to send a reporter to a police precinct to report for the police blotter. Back then, he said, you had to trust that the reporter and the police chief didn’t leave any information out. Now, you have to trust that all the data is there.

“I am wondering what needs it answers,” Roy said. “The local newspaper’s job is to talk about relevant things. Whereas here, everything’s published. So what’s relevant? We are missing the human to make sense of this deluge of data and articles.”

In the case of the break-and-enter stories, “everybody recognized that a poor execution of the idea would be a problem,” Gault told me in an email. The series was reviewed and approved by the paper’s editor-in-chief, managing editor of news, managing editor of digital, and public editor, as well as by editorial leaders in other parts of the company, before publishing began, he told me.

Within the paper, initial concerns fell into a few different buckets: What was the source of the data and how reliable was it? Would the Star be violating the privacy of victims or suspects? And would the series stigmatize some communities?

The Toronto Police Service is subject to Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which requires public institutions to make public information available and also establishes standards for safeguarding personal information. The data comes from Toronto Police Service’s open data portal, which is the same place Star reporters get other crime stats.

The third concern required more discussion. “Some editors wondered if the series would reveal that break-and-centers occur more frequently in neighborhoods that are less wealthy and less white,” Gault told me. They “were concerned that exhaustively reporting those incidents without additional context could contribute to the stigmatization of these communities.”

As it turned out, that wasn’t what the data showed. “The impression the series gives is that there tend to be somewhere between 35 and 55 break-and-enters reported in Toronto each week [and that] it’s relatively uncommon for there to be more than two break-and-enters reported in any particular neighborhood in any given week,” Gault said. They tend to be reported more frequently in neighborhoods with large populations. And they’re down in 2022, compared to the previous year.

“If we had instead discovered that a glaring disparity existed, it would have been up to the newsroom to decide whether or not to run the series — as it always is,” Gault said. “But I hope we would have found a responsible way to report it, because I share the Toronto Star’s commitment to social reform, and because I don’t know how we can hope to address inequality in our city except by reporting it when we find it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-founders Ana Ormachea, Luis Quevedo, Pablo Juanarena, and Angel Jimenez launched Cuonda, a podcasting platform to help Spanish-language podcasts get standardized metrics for their shows to secure sponsorship and cross-promotion deals.

Seven years later, Ormachea is the chief digital officer for Prisa Radio, in charge of the audio-first strategy for the world’s biggest Spanish-language audio production company. Prisa Radio is one wing of Prisa, a Spanish media conglomerate that also owns daily newspaper El País, sports daily AS, news radio station Cadena SER, El HuffPost, and Podium, a platform that, like Cuonda, supports podcasts by helping them find advertising deals and revenue.

These investments in Spanish-language audio are starting to pay off. Daily news podcasts in Spain are gaining momentum, according to a new analysis of the country’s audio landscape.

Researchers from Spain’s Miguel Hernández University of Elche in Spain looked at the 14 top daily original news podcasts on the Spanish podcast discovery platform iVoox and on Apple Podcasts. Of the 14, 10 are produced by Spanish news outlets like El País, El Mundo, El Diario, and Cadena SER. The remaining four are produced by independent podcasters.

In Spain, 41% of the population reported listening to a podcast at least once a month in 2021. Spanish media companies first started getting into daily news podcasts in 2018, releasing short news bulletins for smart speakers, the report’s authors — Miguel Carvajal, Cristian-Ramón Marín-Sanchiz, and Carlos J. Navas — write. Over the last couple of years, the country’s legacy news outlets have launched more in-depth news podcasts, following in the footsteps of shows like The New York Times’ The Daily and The Guardian’s Today in Focus. The researchers interviewed the founders, creators, or hosts for each podcast and asked them about their business models.

“Finding the product/market fit is more important than creating a big production in terms of sound design and script,” Marín Sanchiz told me in an email, adding, “When trying to make users build a habit, it is vital to intertwine the podcast with their routines…it’s a format that rewards a bit of journalistic intuition, as it’s almost impossible to build podcasts to just fit searches and platform algorithms.”

The report doesn’t formally compare Spanish news podcasts to those from other countries, but Carvajal said that half of the podcasts — including ones produced by legacy news organizations — had just one person working on them. El País’ podcast team is the largest and an outlier in the sample, with 10 people working on its daily podcast Hoy en El País. Eight of the 14 podcasts in the study launched between 2021 and 2022, mostly from mainstream outlets that were either launching or revamping their subscription businesses.

“The podcast sphere in Spain has been [historically] characterized by pioneers from outside the media industry, mostly entrepreneurs focused on niches, and monetization was always [an afterthought],” Carvajal told me in an email. “On the distribution side, Apple Podcasts never had the weight that it did in places like the United States due to low usage of Apple products…It wasn’t until Podium and Cuonda launched that there was an explosion of journalistic, narrative podcasts. The Serial phenomenon, the [success of] daily news podcasts in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the increase in podcast consumption in Spain woke up journalistic producers.”

Listenership varies widely among the 14 podcasts, and the researchers noted that the survey respondents had a “negative view” of the tools and data available to understand podcast audiences (though this isn’t a problem unique to Spain). The producers of the independent podcasts, however, reported their listenership as being largely on par with that of the podcasts from major news outlets.

“The daily news podcasts in international media tend to deal with immediate, current events, but they also delve into long-term or evergreen issues,” Carvajal said. “In that sense, they are similar to the niche podcasts we chose that deal with topics relevant to their communities.”

Marketing Online, a niche podcast about the marketing industry launched in 2014 by Joan Boluda, reported 65,000 listens per episode, while Hoy en El País by El País (launched in 2022) and La ContraCrónica by independent journalist and creator Fernando Díaz Villanueva (launched in 2016) each reported 50,000 listens per episode.

The study shows that podcasters have different goals in getting into the audio industry: major media outlets are focused on building trust and personal relationships with listeners and reaching new audiences, while independent creators tend to focus on carving out space for themselves in their niche in a sustainable way.

All are interested and focused on audience and business growth and sustainability, though revenue data was not included in the study. So far, podcasts have been helpful to national newspapers as they bolster their subscription offerings and create new revenue streams, mainly through sponsorship and advertising. Independent podcasts have more diversified revenue streams, which include sponsorships, programmatic advertising, corporate services, among others. Mixx.io, a daily newsletter and podcast about tech that works with Cuonda, for example, reported €45,000 in annual revenue from sponsorships, while La ContraCrónica has 3,000 patrons on Patreon in addition to revenue from advertising, affiliate linking, and selling merchandise.

You can read the full study here.

It wasn’t just ill-timed career advice. It was a targeted harassment campaign against media workers that was organized on 4chan by people on the right who hate the mainstream media.

Memes have been used to target marginalized groups for at least a decade now. A new book by researchers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy documents how memes and the online communities that produce them sow disinformation and erode trust in the government and the mainstream media. Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America explains how the “Stop the Steal” movement — the false idea that the 2020 election was “stolen” from former president Donald Trump — started online and resulted in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and used examples from Gamergate, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency to develop its playbook.

Meme wars are culture wars, the authors write — “accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flatten the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words.”

In April 2020, co-authors Joan Donovan, the research director at Shorenstein, and Brian Friedberg, a Harvard ethnographer studying online fringe communities, launched a newsletter, “Meme War Weekly,” “that got really grim very quickly,” they told me. It was impossible to write about the political impact of memes on a week-by-week basis without noticing their significant social and political impacts over time. Their Media Manipulation Casebook, a series of case studies published in October 2020, was a precursor to their new book.

I caught up with Donovan, Friedberg, and Emily Dreyfuss, a technology journalist and 2018 Nieman Fellow, to talk about their book and what journalists can learn from the last 10 years of memes to inform their future coverage of American democracy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Richland Source had been charging $50 per obituary, which is relatively low (costs at larger papers rise into the hundreds of dollars). The obituaries section was one of the most-visited parts of the website, and, in 2021, it brought in over $12,000. But platform director Zac Hiser didn’t want to charge more. He had heard from readers that payment was a hurdle. And so instead of optimizing for revenue, Hiser, Yoder, and Longstreth — who all grew up and went to high school in the area — decided to make obituaries free to publish.

“Effective Aug. 1, funeral homes and readers alike will be able to directly publish an obituary to Richland Source, Ashland Source, and Knox Pages for free using a short web form,” Source told readers in an announcement in July. “Changes in the local media landscape in recent years have resulted in a clear message from local readers: They want a convenient and inviting space where they can find all the recent obituaries.”

Source Media includes the Richland Source, Ashland Source, and Knox Pages, which cover their respective counties in northern central Ohio. They all receive funding through a mixture of individual and corporate memberships, advertising, in-house marketing, and grants. (The Richland Source also developed LedeAI, a system to automate high school sports stories.)

The reaction to making obituaries free was immediate and positive, Yoder said. The post on Facebook, for example, had 178 reactions and 25 shares (Richland Source’s Facebook page has a total of 34,000 likes). Yoder believes that in rural communities like Richland County — where 20% of the population is 65 or older — people want to know what’s going on in other people’s lives and to be able to support each other.

“The payoff of this work is when we do it right,” Yoder said. “When somebody writes a thoughtful obituary, it’s a reminder that our publication is a platform for people to grieve in a healthy way, and to say something meaningful to the larger community about somebody they love very much.”

On the website, one reader wrote:

“Thank you!! This is so much more than a small gesture. This says that your readers and the communities in which you serve, DO matter to you. When grieving the loss of a loved one, the last thing someone wants to do is worry about the cost of a public announcement. Unfortunately, I have first hand experience and we chose not to spend thousands of dollars to publish in the news sources in the larger cities, where he once lived. I felt bad that we couldn’t possibly reach more people, but we could not justify the expense for just a picture and one sentence. So, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for making life a little easier, for those going through a very difficult time.”

Yoder said Richland Source published 38 obituaries. That number jumped to 105 in August when publishing them became free. Knox Pages, which is for a smaller county and is a newer publication, published eight obituaries in July and 22 in August. Ashland Source published five in July and three in August.

Because the new obituaries system now publishes automatically, the staffer who previously worked on obits daily can now check in and make updates or corrections as needed and move on to other tasks. So far, no major issues have come up. (“The risk of auto-publish is something we’re willing to live with,” Yoder said.)

There was also a 40% increase in pageviews of the obituaries pages across the three properties, Yoder said, boosting overall traffic while freeing up an employee’s schedule.

It’s too soon to say, though, whether free obituaries and the resulting traffic have led to an uptick in memberships on the site. The three publications have a total of 1,185 paying members. Around 45% of those pay $70 a year, the lowest tier (the highest is $1,000 per year).

Yoder said the sites plan to add include direct membership asks in the obituaries sections to encourage people to support the publications. For now, though, he’s glad to see that people have responded to the change.

“Paying to place obituaries is a proven revenue model,” Yoder said. “We gave up very real dollars…The faucet turned off and the revenue ceased from that particular line. But 30 days later, when we see 40% growth [in obituary pageviews], we believe our hunch is proving correct.”

The founders wanted me to manage your expectations. They can’t afford to pay rent.

“It’s actually an old Capital One bank branch on Avenue C that’s been vacant for some time,” co-publisher, editor, and writer Christopher Robbins said. “We are in it by the grace of the landlord and the Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, who has somehow finagled it a way [for us] to be in that space. I wouldn’t want any readers to get the impression that we have, like, millions of dollars in venture capital that we’re [spending on] sushi Thursdays.”

Hell Gate — named after the steel arch bridge over the East River that connects Queens and Randalls and Wards Islands — first started publishing in May 2022. Frustrated by the instability and cycles of layoffs in New York City media, Robbins and founding members Max Rivlin-Nadler, Esther Wang, Nick Pinto, and Sydney Pereira gathered 50 freelance journalists in January 2022 (outdoors, in 15-degree weather, with the promise of pizza and beer) to brainstorm what a worker-owned local news outlet could look like.

“Every journalist-slash-blogger talks about starting something themselves. The thing that we wanted to start was something that centered the journalists and the writers,” Robbins said. “We wanted to see if we could start from scratch and have the journalists control the stories, the business model, and the brand. The thing that’s most important to us is making good journalism that people want to read.”

Though NYC has more journalists than anywhere else in the U.S. — 12% of all newsroom employees in the country live in the city, Pew found in 2019 — some feel the five boroughs themselves are under covered. The New York Times long refocused on national and international news as it set its sights on selling subscriptions to “every curious, English-speaking person” on the planet. There are many local newsrooms, including The City, WNYC/Gothamist, and City Limits, hyperlocal neighborhood publications, along with a rich ecosystem of community media.

But Hell Gate sees an opportunity for a publication, as the About page puts it, that’s “trenchant, playful, outraged, irreverent, and useful to readers.” (“And never a chore to read.”)

Esther Wang — who covers state politics and fishing in the city’s polluted waters, among other topics, for Hell Gate — was previously the senior politics reporter at Jezebel and was working at the Gawker Media sister site when the newsroom came under the new ownership of G/O Media in 2019. The ordeal made her interested in trying something new.

“It was exciting to [look at] all these new kinds of independent newsrooms that are opening up, and think we could do it for New York City. It’s a place where there’s a lot of news and there’s a lot of outlets, but something felt missing — something that was critical and fun,” Wang said. “I think that’s what we’re trying to do with Hell Gate.”

Hell Gate reads a little like a local news version of Defector, the worker-owned sports and culture publication founded by former Deadspin staffers. (Hell Gate and Defector use the same company to manage their websites, and Hell Gate lists Defector, along with Discourse Blog, Racket, and the Colorado Sun, as inspiration.)

The site’s overall voice and tone are reminiscent of the heyday of Gothamist, where Robbins, Rivlin-Nadler, Pinto, and Pereira all previously worked. In the early- to mid-2010s, it ran stories like “Soda Ban Has Burped Its Last: NYC Loses Final Appeal,” “The NY Times Is ON IT (Pubic Hair),“The MTA’s Making Up For Lost Time With Changes On The 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, A, C, E, F, J, L, M, N, Q & R Trains This Weekend,” and “Why Emma Watson Should Skip Buying, Go Straight To Living With Me & My Parents In Queens” alongside more straightforward stories on crime and local politics. But writers were allegedly underpaid and overworked. Billionaire Joe Ricketts, who also owned DNAinfo, bought the site in 2016, and in 2017, Gothamist and DNAinfo were both abruptly shut down a week after the staffs announced plans to unionize, effectively laying off all of their employees. In 2018, WNYC acquired Gothamist and relaunched it, and the pubic hair headlines of yesteryear are gone. (In the straightforward Gothamist of 2022, recent headlines included “Hudson River tunnel project will cost $2 billion more, take longer to complete, following further delay,” “NYC leaders will use pension funds to push Mastercard, AmEx to help flag gun sales.”)

“[We’re] writing from a perspective where certain things are givens, like [that] housing and health care are human rights,” Robbins said. “The Village Voice used to be full of columns with a perspective and a sense of righteousness and also a sense of wonder about New York City. That sort of writing and reporting had bite and perspective and was compelling. We felt that was being crowded out by a lot of the important work being done by nonprofits across New York City. But it’s not the same thing. They can’t write the same way.”

Hell Gate initially launched with $25,000 and $50,000 from The Harnisch Foundation and the Vital Projects Fund respectively, two New York-based organizations that support the arts. In July, Hell Gate launched a paywall with tiered subscriptions and recently gave readers a “peek behind the curtain” to explain that it’s counting on subscriber support. In the update, the co-owners told readers that their operating costs are about $20,000 per month and that they’re aiming to pay the staff of five $4,000 per month per person. (“And since we live in a corner of the world where health care is not a right but a prohibitively priced privilege, we would also like — if it’s possible, no worries if not! — to have a little health insurance,” they wrote.)

“Our target audience is people who really care about the city,” Wang said. “A lot of our current readers are city employees, teachers, public defenders, people who are already very much enmeshed in the functioning of the city in their day-to-day lives. Our broader audience is really people who just love New York City — people who know it can be much better than it is now and care very much about that future, and care very much about maintaining the animating spirit of the city.”

A basic annual subscription to Hell Gate is $70 and provides access to all published stories. The Supporter tier ($100 for one year) comes with the ability to comment on stories and a sticker. For $200 a year, readers get all of the above along with entry to “exclusive events” and “swag,” like a Hell Gate baseball cap. (For comparison, The City NY’s lowest membership tier is $120 annually while the highest costs $1,250 per year. Gothamist and WNYC’s Monthly Sustainers donation program starts at $10 per month and goes up to $100 per month. All three publications are free to read and don’t have paywalls.)

Roughly a month after launching the paywall, Hell Gate has around 1,000 paying subscribers, Rivlin-Nadler said. About 10,000 people subscribe to the newsletter. Given that not-insignificant email list, they’re looking into adding advertising as a revenue stream down the line.

To serve the most populous and diverse city in the country is a tall order. When asked about how Hell Gate thinks about diversity, Robbins and Wang said they knew firsthand that inclusion efforts in other newsrooms can be a form of lip service. As worker-owners at the helm, they’re in a unique position to define what Hell Gate’s values are and how those play into coverage. Robbins said that means they’ve spent hours deliberating decisions that often slow down Hell Gate’s production process, but knowing that in this growth stage, each choice can influence the next.

“There has been a growing awareness at a lot of media outlets that we can’t just cover the same old shit,” Wang said. “We have to broaden our perspectives and cover the entire city and all of its residents. Just to give an example, one of my fishing columns focused on the question of whether the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation is unfairly targeting Chinese-American fishers in this city. For me it’s about what is an unexpected way to do this kind of coverage. I think it’s hard because we are a very small newsroom, but that’s how I’m trying to think about it.”

As worker-owners, they’re wearing “different hats every hour,” Rivlin-Nadler said. For the first time, they’re the reporters, editors, human resources, accounting, sales, and customer service, all at once. Their decisions are colored and informed by the often traumatic reality of working in New York media.

“One ‘luxury’ we have is that when venture capital or large investments or even large institutional partners enter into local news reporting, there’s a real pressure on return on investment in a place that is not very profitable,” Rivlin-Nadler said. “We are building it one brick at a time. We are working on getting this to be sustainable for a small newsroom, and we have the time to do that. So now we’ve got to figure out what is a good mix of stories for the amount of subscribers we have and the people that want to read the site and then the people who want to subscribe, as opposed to how can we grow the fastest and the quickest and monetize this as quickly as possible.”

The News Product Alliance — which officially launched in September 2020 — believes product thinkers are “the missing link to creating sustainable journalism in the digital age.” On its site, the group defines product roles as those “with the ability to strategically align business, audience and technology goals while integrating journalism ethics.” About a third of news product workers have titles or departments with “product” in them. The rest are doing news product work in less obvious “bridge” roles, under titles like audience editor, news applications developer, or head of analytics.

“Some of our community members were actually doing product work without knowing they were doing product work,” said executive director Feli Carrique. “A lot of our community members have told us that NPA helped them put a name to what they were doing and helped them gain confidence in that.”

According to a 2021 report, product teams are still relatively new, with 40% of responding news organizations saying they’d formed a product team in the past four years. But research suggests merely establishing a product team isn’t enough. The Reuters Institute’s 2022 Journalism, Media, and Trends report found that 41% of surveyed news publishers find a lack of alignment between different departments — editorial, marketing, commercial, and technology — to be a major roadblock to innovation.

“We have previously highlighted how the vertically siloed nature of many media companies makes it particularly difficult to deliver innovation that needs cross-functional teams to work in a common process,” the Reuters report noted. Even publishers with “mature” product departments are still working to “find the right balance between the rigor of product methodologies and processes and the specific editorial expertise” of their newsroom, according to the report.

Carrique said product teams in media organizations can vary wildly in how they function, what skills are considered standard, and where they sit within the company’s structure. For people looking to get into news product work for the first time, the lack of consensus can make the process more difficult.

With the state of news product work seeming to range across the industry, the News Product Alliance helps identify what product work even is and get it named as such in participating newsrooms. In short? They help product people realize they’re product people.

Going into its third year, NPA is a mostly, if not fully, virtual community that mainly operates in its own growing Slack channel, with more than 1,400 members. (NPA membership has just about tripled since launch, Carrique said.) Roughly half of its members are based in North America while 16% are in Europe and 15% are in Central and South America. Outside the United States, countries with the most members include Brazil, Argentina, Germany, the United Kingdom, and India. NPA members are news product managers, journalists, developers, technologists, data scientists, and other media and tech professionals.

NPA’s Slack is free to join and the resources on its website are publicly available. Its Product Kit, as one example, has been translated by NPA volunteers into Spanish and Portuguese with additional editions in Italian and Arabic on the way. The resources and programming address what Carrique identified as some of the common challenges news product workers face, from implementing new strategies to transitioning into a product-focused role to developing workflows and planning projects.

The organization has held two annual, virtual summits where ticket costs ranged from $150 to $450. (The NPA is sponsored by the nonprofit Miami Foundation and has received funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Google News Initiative, The University of Missouri School of Journalism, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and News Catalyst.) The 2022 summit drew 482 attendees, including 169 first-time participants. Sponsorship from the Google News Initiative allowed NPA to award 120 scholarships to attendees. According to Carrique, more than 50% of scholarship recipients are people of color and 60% live outside the U.S.

The NPA has touted its work helping people move into product and product-adjacent roles in news organizations. Members have shared more than 500 job postings in the Slack’s jobs channel in the last 18 months, Carrique said. Of the nearly 200 summit attendees who reported a job title or job change toward product work in the past year, about 70% said joining and participating in NPA had “some level of direct impact” on their career shifts.

NPA has moved to get product thinking into more newsrooms by partnering with the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY to co-host the Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms program, a crash course in news product development, and the Product Expansion program, a followup for alumni of the immersion program. NPA’s creative director Tony Elkins also hosts a newsletter-turned-live-event series called “How I” where he interviews news product people about their career paths.

Still, many members report that the community’s biggest benefit has been access to other product thinkers and workers through the Slack’s public channels and the direct messaging feature. They’ve been able to find mentors in other newsrooms, get help on job applications and interviews, ask for advice on projects, and more.

Some of the most active channels are #intros (for new members to introduce themselves), #ask-and-give (to ask and give help), #shop-talk (to discuss best practices in news product management), and #show-and-tell (for sharing guides, trainings, and other resources). According to Carrique, roughly 40% of members participate at least weekly in the Slack with additional spikes of activity around events like the News Product Summit.

Khalil Cassimally is the audience project manager for The Conversation and based in Mauritius. He joined NPA’s Slack in 2021 and felt he’d finally found his “people.” Through Donut, a Slack app that pairs members up and nudges them to get to know each other one-on-one, Cassimally said he met “some really smart people” he’s gone on to contact when he needed feedback or work-related advice.

“E-meeting people from different parts of the world, though mostly from the U.S., generates a lot of ideas and can also provide affirmation about tactics or strategies I’ve been contemplating,” he said. “Since joining the NPA Slack community, I’ve been able to come up with more ideas and have become more confident proposing those ideas to leadership as well. I’ve also been able to fill gaps in knowledge by actively reaching out to certain people in the community.”

For Sydney Lewis, a student at the University of Missouri, joining NPA filled a gap in her education that she didn’t know she had.

“Through NPA, I was able to meet news product allies at my own university which led me to fantastic mentors and programs that I never would’ve found otherwise,” Lewis said. “NPA’s connections and mentorship have exposed me to a side of journalism I didn’t know existed a year ago, and to a new way of thinking that I’ve now introduced into the student newsrooms I oversee at the University of Missouri.”

NPA wants to practice what it preaches and tries to apply product thinking to the way it runs its own community, Carrique said. NPA asks members what they want, the members tell them, NPA tries to provide it, and the feedback loop continues. Given widespread interest in mentorship, NPA has focused its resources on building the Mentor Network Program, which will launch on September 12. Its goal is to provide guidance and support to emerging news product thinkers in their professional development. So far, 50 mentors from around the world have agreed to participate, Carrique said.

“What we’ve learned is that there’s a lot of people who would want more formal mentorship and coaching spaces so we are working towards creating this product-mentorship structure,” Carrique said. “We are also creating resources about product and we’re starting to aggregate news product resources that can help professionals evangelize in their own newsrooms, but also that can help educators to share and start planting the seed of product thinking for the leaders of tomorrow.”

That’s why the Law & Justice Journalism Project is launching: to provide journalists with tools, skills, and resources to improve their coverage of crime, public safety, and the United States legal system.

“The media can contribute to misperceptions about crime and its solutions, or it can help people have a more sophisticated, nuanced understanding of these issues,” Jessica Brand, founder of the advising firm Wren Collective and an LJJP board member, told me in an email. “The media plays perhaps the most important role in determining whether the public believes crime rates are high or low, whether they believe their communities are safe or dangerous, and how they understand the possible roots of and solutions to crime. For journalists, covering these issues is difficult, especially for those trying to cover crime and safety in a breaking news format.”

LJJP has two main offerings. The first is virtual panel discussions with journalists, researchers, legal experts, and community members who are most impacted by the criminal legal system. Promised panelists include Astead Herndon, Robert Greene, Jessica Pishko, Dwayne Betts, Josie Duffy Rice, and Maurice Chammah.

The Law & Justice Journalism Project launches today! @ljjproject brings together veteran journalists, producers, editors, and criminal legal system experts to transform reporting on issues related to justice and public safety. (1/6)https://t.co/smdtxPcuEF

— Law & Justice Journalism Project (@LJJProject) August 3, 2022

The second program is a year-long fellowship that will partner 15 early-career journalists with more experienced journalists. The mentors will provide “regular advising on story development, investigating cases, finding sources, and navigating a complex topic on often tight reporting schedules.” The first class of fellows will be announced in October 2022. Mentors include: Keri Blakinger (The Marshall Project), J. Brian Charles (Baltimore Beat and The Trace), Linda Coombs (CBS), Mensah Dean (Philadelphia Inquirer), Shaila Dewan (The New York Times), Chris Halsne (American University), and Jeff Pegues (CBS).

Reporters, editors and producers face the pressures of short deadlines, resource constraints, and difficulty quickly finding a range of good sources, Brand said. At the same time, issues around crime and safety are usually complicated, which is hard to capture and convey in traditional breaking news formats. LJJP’s focus is on helping journalists understand the reasons and circumstances in which crime occurs. That often means understanding divestment from communities, disparate policing, intergenerational trauma, and mental health, Brand said.

LJJP is funded by Building a Stronger Future, a family-run foundation run by Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange, and Gabe Bankman-Fried, director of Guarding Against Pandemics. Building a Stronger Future also donated $5 million to ProPublica earlier this year to support investigations related to the pandemic. (You can read about the Bankman-Fried brothers’ political activity in NBC and Politico.)

You can visit LJJP’s website here and apply to the fellowship here.

The Markup launched in 2020 (after some hiccups) to explore the societal impacts of technology and algorithms. It makes all its data and code public and has found interesting ways to report on what platforms won’t make public, through initiatives like the Citizen Browser project.

Wei, the co-executive director of OpenNews, succeeds founder Julia Angwin who is currently the Markup’s editor-at-large. Her first day is Monday, August 22.

1/ It’s official: I’m joining @TheMarkup as its new editor-in-chief! The Markup’s mission to hold powerful institutions to account — for how their technology shapes our society — is so critical, and I’m excited to bring all I’ve learned @opennews to that critical work. https://t.co/ug49qNAYgF

— Sisi Wei (@sisiwei) August 2, 2022

I caught up with Wei about how her experiences at ProPublica and OpenNews and founding the DEI Coalition Slack led her to The Markup. Questions and answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

“Chilango” is a term used to refer to people from the capital. As a masculine singular noun, it can also mean a man from Mexico City. “Chilangos,” as a masculine plural noun, can mean either a group of men of Mexico City or a group of people of any gender. That’s what’s called the generic masculine, where the masculine form of a word is employed when more than one gender is involved.

In 2021, the magazine changed its logo to “Chilanga” for the March edition as a way to recognize and honor the city’s women and explore issues related to feminism, motherhood, gender inequality, and femicide.

Gina Jaramillo, the editorial director of the magazine, said that conversations about feminism led to conversations about marginalization and inclusivity. So in 2022, Chilango wanted to serve people of all gender identities by adopting inclusive, nonbinary language.

Todo cambia y nosotres también. En marzo, Chilango cambia a lenguaje inclusivo no binario, un cambio y transformación en la manera de expresarnos que redefine nuestra forma de entender el mundo.

¡Conoce más del #LenguajeINB aquí! https://t.co/SpLDcZjeNy pic.twitter.com/ZLZz5gtV6V

— Chilango (@ChilangoCom) March 2, 2022

The first few pages of “Chilango para todes” debunk common misconceptions and excuses about not using gender-inclusive language and commits to using it in all of the magazine’s content going forward.

“When it comes to gender, our language has two ways of expressing it: feminine and masculine,” Jaramillo wrote in an editorial in that issue. “But far from being two fixed points, the expression of human identity offers various possibilities that deserve to be named, recognized, and that also enrich those aforementioned conversations and discussions in every way. Between ‘her’ and ‘him,’ there is a spectrum of realities that the forms of binary language fail to express. The movement for inclusive language seeks to enable these multiple existences to manifest and feel represented in the use of language.”

Adopting inclusive language proved to be a learning experience, but also an editorial and linguistic challenge for the newsroom. Jaramillo organized workshops and trainings for the staff with local experts. They put together a style guide, which serves as a practical guide but also includes Chilango’s editorial position on using inclusive language, and defines different things like nondiscriminatory language, nonsexist language, and neutral language. They started introducing it in stories prior to the March edition but made it official policy with “Chilango para todes.”

“There are situations that still elude us,” Jaramillo said. “With this manual, it definitely helped us to generate certain concepts. For example, instead of saying ‘el hombre’ [mankind], an inclusive possibility would be ‘la humanidad’ [humanity]. Instead of saying ‘los ciudadanos’ [citizens], we could use ‘la ciudadanía’ [population]. Instead of saying ‘los investigadores’ [researchers], ‘el equipo de investigación’ [research team]. Instead of ‘los empleados’ [employees], ‘el personal’ [staff].”

Jaramillo recruited Paulina Chavira, founding editor of The New York Times en Español and Mexico City’s grammar queen, to co-author the editorial and explain to readers why adopting inclusive language was necessary.

“When I’m talking to people who openly and explicitly tell me that they don’t identify with the male or female gender, it seems so basic,” Chavira said. “To the point where it seems a little illogical to explain it, but it’s about respect…Words are for expressing reality. And our reality is changing. For those of us that work in journalism, it’s a matter of our commitment to the truth.”

Chavira has always had an interest in grammar and developed the Times’ first style guide in Spanish. She’s done freelance copyediting since 2011 and has been offering grammar and editing classes since 2014. In 2017, her piece in the Times led Mexico’s Soccer Federation to add the correct accents to every player’s jersey for the first time for the 2018 World Cup.

She told me that for the last few years, she’s been talking about using inclusive language more broadly. Her interest began when she had to translate a story for NYT en Español and one of the people mentioned in the story was nonbinary. The pronoun “elle” (they) wasn’t as widely used then, and she could have skirted around it in the translation, but then decided if now wasn’t the time to learn, then when?

“We explain our reality thanks to the words we have,” she said. “Reality is there. We need to name it and we need certain structures, which are not so foreign to what we already know. It’s just a little tweaking and adjusting.”

Inclusive language has been met with resistance and ignorance in Mexican journalism, Chavira said. Lots of people, in media and society in general, argue against it because the Royal Spanish Academy, one of 23 official Spanish language institutions but the most commonly cited, doesn’t recognize it. But that hasn’t stopped people from using new words like “Omicron” or “Covid,” she pointed out. Life and language are always changing. Only dead languages stay the same.

In 2021, when pop star Demi Lovato announced that they are nonbinary, Chavira recalled that leading national news outlets in the country said Lovato used “ellos” (the plural masculine of they) and “ellas” (the plural feminine of they) as their pronouns, when both are incorrect. That showed how ill-equipped journalists were to describe reality and tell the truth with precision, she said.

En un capítulo más de «Los medios se rehúsan al cambio»:

ELLE ES DEMI LOVATO

Gracias a @apchavira por hablar del tema con toda la autoridad que le respalda como asesora lingüística y periodista pic.twitter.com/T7gQIScfMs

— Láurel Miranda (@laurelyeye) May 20, 2021

With that and other examples in mind, Jaramillo was pleasantly surprised with the public’s response to the March issue. Chilango lost some followers, she said, but also gained followers and readers who understand that the future must be collective and inclusive.

“The use of non-discriminatory language can become a tool to make diversity visible,” Jaramillo said. “It can also combat stereotypes and promote a greater sense of inclusion, which is [Chilango’s] main objective. These are processes that will take us a long time, and there are going to be many opinions against us, but there will be others in our favor.”

Read the full issue here.

But the Rarámuri people — a large Indigenous population in the Sierra Tarahumara mountain region of Chihuahua — received little official information about the pandemic. Many were hesitant about the Covid-19 vaccines when they became available, Jaime Armendáriz, the editor of Raíchali Noticias, said.

That led Raíchali’s reporting team to produce a bilingual podcast — one in Spanish and one in Rarámuri — that detailed how Indigenous people in the Sierra Tarahumara, mostly of the Rarámuri tribe, experienced the pandemic.

“At first, we were going to produce a video and a text story translated [into Rarámuri],” Armendáriz said. “But later when we were in these communities, they told us and we realized that wouldn’t be possible. Everything is over audio. They use WhatsApp audio messages a lot, and even though there are areas with no internet, there are others where they can easily access WhatsApp. That’s why we decided to do a podcast.”

Raíchali, which means “word” in Rarámuri, was founded as an independent online news outlet in 2018 to cover the Indigenous populations of Chihuahua, rural communities, corruption, and the human rights violations in the state. Armendáriz launched Raíchali after more than 10 years covering former president Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs and its human toll. The years between 2008 and 2010 were particularly violent in Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez, a border city next to El Paso, Texas.

“It got to the point where [local journalists] were war correspondents [at home]. [It wasn’t as if] we had been sent somewhere else,” Armendáriz said. “Aside from high rates of violence in Chihuahua, there was also a lot of self-censorship in local news outlets because they received funding from government advertising. I worked at a news outlet like that and when you start covering the victims of war, you see that Indigenous communities are the ones that most suffered from displacement and extreme violence. From there, other journalists and I wanted to cover that, but the working conditions at the time wouldn’t allow for it.”

Around 2013, Armendáriz and other local journalists in Chihuahua formed the Red Libre Periodismo, a network of journalists committed to defending freedom of expression and promoting independent journalism in the state. Armendáriz spent the next few years learning how to thoughtfully cover Indigenous communities and victims of violence and corruption. By 2016, he was set on launching an independent news outlet that would become Raíchali. He joined Periodistas de a Pie, an organization that provides workshops, tools, and resources to news outlets covering human rights and social issues in Mexico.

Raíchali launched in 2018 and employs four full-time journalists and one part-time. It’s funded through grants and awards from the Open Society Foundation, the International Center for Journalists, SembraMedia, and the Deutsche Welle International Foundation. Today it averages about 15,000 pageviews per month and its social media reach between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram averages around 200,000, according to Armendáriz, with the highest reach on Facebook. Its audience is geographically diverse, with readers in the mountain regions, in Chihuahua’s larger cities, and in other states.

Raíchali focuses on collaborative journalism. It’s a member of La Alianza de Medios, a media alliance between 11 local news outlets across Mexico, that’s led by Periodistas de a Pie. When the alliance launched in 2018, it shared stories and resources to cover migrant caravans moving through every state where an alliance news outlet was located.

Raíchali’s journalists focus on providing correct context in all their stories. That means spending time in Rarámuri and other communities for days, sometimes weeks, surveying people about their news intake and what they want to know, and showing them what Raíchali is about before starting the formal reporting process.

“We work by doing more listening before reporting,” Armendáriz said. “You have to understand the context that these communities live in, especially in the mountain regions, before you go in with a recorder, extract information, and leave, which is what the majority of news outlets do…Obviously, it takes longer to publish stories, but we do so with a different context. Most of the Raíchali team isn’t Rarámuri so sometimes we arrive in communities with preconceived notions, and it’s really important to give as much context as possible when reporting on these communities.”

Raíchali has been particularly focused on reporting on displacement due to drug trafficking and violence. The team decided to go into the communities to get a better understanding about how people wanted to talk about displacement and what they understood the impact to be. They spent weeks in conversation and community members decided that they wanted an explainer with maps to show where they are. Raíchali then organized workshops in the communities with cartographers to produce maps that show how displacement has led to a decline in Indigenous languages.

Now, Armendáriz is working on sustaining Raíchali financially and exploring events and memberships as additional revenue streams. The podcast about the pandemic offered the opportunity to experiment with events.

“[In April] we held an exhibition with photos, graphics, and a computer with headphones so people could listen to the podcast in Spanish and in Rarámuri,” Armendáriz said. “We put out some grills and had carne asada and we were there with our audience cooking. It was an informal chat, but we charged an entrance fee. It was interesting and I think it’s one of the steps we’ll be taking to create this Raíchali community to be able to sustain this project.”