Though it could expand his outlet’s reach — especially, in his words, as email becomes increasingly important “as a distribution channel with social media declining as a traffic source” — Brodbeck didn’t think creating an additional newsletter was an optimal use of reporter time in the zero-sum, resource-strapped reality of running a hyperlocal news outlet.

“As much as I would love to have a 25-person newsroom covering Northern Virginia, the reality is that we can only sustainably afford an editorial team of eight across our three sites: two reporters/editors per site, a staff [photographer], and an editor,” he said. In short, tapping a reporter to write a morning newsletter would limit ARLnow’s reporting bandwidth.

But with the exponential improvement of AI tools like GPT-4, Brodbeck saw an opportunity to have it both ways: He could generate a whole new newsletter without cutting into journalists’ reporting time. So last month, he began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and AI summaries of human-written stories. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention.

Since releasing the handbook, Amditis has heard that many publishers and reporters “seem to really appreciate the possibility and potential of using automation for routine tasks,” he told me in an email. Like Brodbeck and others, he believes “AI can save time, help small newsrooms scale up their operations, and even create personalized content for their readers and listeners,” though he raised the widely held concern about “the potential loss of that unique human touch,” not to mention the questions of accuracy, reliability and a hornets’ nest of ethical concerns.

Even when instructing AI to summarize content, Amditis described similar challenges to those Brodbeck has encountered. There’s “a tendency for the summaries and bullet points to sound repetitive if you don’t create variables in your prompts that allow you to adjust the tone/style of the responses based on the type of content you’re feeding to the bot,” he said.

But “the most frustrating part of the work I’ve been doing with publishers of all sizes over the last few months is the nearly ubiquitous assumption about using AI for journalism (newsletters or otherwise) is that we’re out here just asking the bots to write original content from scratch — which is by far one of the least useful applications, in my opinion,” Amditis added.

Brodbeck agrees. “AI is “not a replacement for original local reporting,” he said. “It’s a way to take what has already been reported and repackage it so as to reach more readers.”

Good news: Twitter is rolling out alt-text reminders that users can opt into.

Bad news: When sharing the news on Twitter, some outlets neglected to add it to their corresponding graphics.

The Objective recently spoke with Patrick Garvin about his Accessibility Awareness and Alt Text Awareness Twitter bots that provide information on web accessibility and encourage the use of alt text, respectively.

With more than a decade of experience in visual journalism, user experience, and front-end development, Garvin shares how prioritizing accessibility is possible for all newsroom employees, not just tech staff.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The first two conferences took place in Montclair, N.J.; last year’s Summit was in Philadelphia. This year our plan was to host the Summit in Charlotte, N.C. on May 14–15.

Thanks in large part to the efforts of our colleague, Denise Shannon, we had already completed 75 percent of the planning for the 2020 conference by early March. Two of our staffers had flown down to Charlotte to tour the Queens University campus and Myers Park Baptist Church, where our sessions would be hosted. We had enthusiastic sponsors lined up, the venue booked, the food completely selected (down to the type of salad we’d serve at lunch), student workers recruited, and at least half of the speakers confirmed.

Then mid-March hit, and state after state ordered lockdowns in response to the emerging coronavirus pandemic.

In a matter of days it became clear that an in-person event in May wasn’t going to happen. We read about other journalism conferences postponing or cancelling altogether, but we decided almost immediately to host our conference online.

Why? Collaborative journalism is important, especially now, and we felt strongly that we needed to hold space for our community of practitioners to gather, even if it was virtual. And the Center’s team is an optimistic, “we’ll figure it out” bunch of people. We felt confident we could pull it off.

Luckily, last week we did! And here’s how. We hope this postmortem of the 2020 Collaborative Journalism Summit will help others who are looking to host their own in-place events.

We alerted our sponsors, speakers and participants as soon as we could — then we made registration free

As soon as it looked like our plans to host the Summit in Charlotte would be cancelled, we began communicating with our sponsors, speakers and attendees.

We decided to make our tickets free given the crisis we were all facing. Our initial reaction was to automatically refund the 100 or so people who had already registered at $100 a ticket (we had planned to serve two plated meals this year.) After some thought, we decided to make refunds by request. We figured most would request their money back, but we wanted attendees to have the opportunity to support our efforts to bolster collaborative journalism across the nation and abroad. Amazingly, very few people requested a full refund.

And once we announced we would host in place instead of in person, registrations shot through the roof; we ended up with just under 750 registrations by the time the conference began. Typically, the Summit attracts 150 to 175 people.

We let our sponsors know that several of their packages would have to change since we weren’t hosting in person. Every confirmed sponsor stuck with us, even our North Carolina-based sponsors — a testament to their commitment to collaborative journalism and knowledge sharing. The new sponsorship package included showing on-screen sponsor slides and messaging during the conference, and sharing links in the chat.

All of our speakers agreed to keep their spots, and we were able to add several speakers who initially declined participation because of the travel required.

We chose our platforms early and focused on getting to know them well

Zoom was the leading early contender for a platform choice, because it was the program most people were using for video conferencing and because it was the one the Center used.

But we also explored other options, including Twitch, Google Hangouts, and YouTube Live. We didn’t look too closely at Blue Jeans, GoToMeeting, Livestream, or Microsoft Teams, which are a few of the more popular options out there.

In the end, we decided to go with Zoom because it was the one we were most familiar with, and we felt confident that most of our attendees would already have at least a basic understanding of how to use it. Of course, just as we made that decision, Zoom’s reputation came into question as the “Zoombombing” phenomenon came to light. With investigation and the adoption of best practices (more on that below), we ultimately felt Zoom’s webinar function gave us a good amount of security and presentation controls.

In addition to Zoom, we used an app called ManyCam to dress up and augment the video output for each of our staff members who would be on camera during the Summit. This allowed us to add lower thirds, PIP video, scrolling marquees, and all kinds of useful elements to our individual Zoom videos.

We also bought an Otter for Teams subscription from Otter.ai and integrated it with our Zoom account to provide live, auto-generated transcriptions of all the main sessions during the Summit. Otter recently announced the live transcription integration with Zoom Meetings but, unbeknownst to us, they hadn’t set it up to work with Zoom Webinar yet. Luckily, we were able to get someone from Otter on the phone who agreed to get us set up as a test user for a beta version of the Zoom Webinar integration.

We took steps to prevent Zoombombing

To say we worried about Zoombombing would be a bit of an understatement. As our registration numbers began to climb, we started to get a tad obsessive about making sure our Summit would be free of malicious attacks, trolls and bad actors — especially after one of our smaller events was targeted by a group of racists.

In order to guard against attacks, we set up a series of digital roadblocks along the way from registration to presentation. First, we kept our EventBrite registration page private, which meant people could only find it if they got the link from one of our newsletters or social media posts, or if they visited collaborativejournalism.org directly.

We also set passwords for the Zoom sessions, albeit fairly simple ones, and made a point to only send out those links and passwords the day before the actual Summit began. The idea was to create enough virtual friction and make it annoying or inconvenient enough for people who simply wanted to mess with us, without going so far as to deter actual attendees from figuring out how to access the Summit.

The security features provided by Zoom Webinar — as opposed to Zoom Meetings — also helped in this area. Even with our usual attendee list of around 150 people, allowing everyone to share video and audio would have made the Summit nearly impossible to manage, let alone experience, without constant distractions and technical issues.

We used Zoom webinar as if it was a virtual stage

Zoom Webinar is also different from Zoom Meetings in two key ways (for our purposes) that sealed the deal for us in the end: it only displays the video and audio of the designated panelists (added or removed individually by the host and co-hosts), and it allows the host to choose which view (gallery or active speaker) attendees see at any given time.

Zoom’s webinar tool also allows for hosts and panelists to easily appear and disappear from the attendee’s view, which helped us move people on and off the “stage” simply by turning their video on and off. This was especially useful in cases where one of the panelists had video or connection issues.

We simply switched the attendee layout to “active speaker view” while we made adjustments behind the scenes in gallery view. Once the issues were resolved, we could switch the attendee layout back to gallery view and continue as if nothing happened. This also allowed us to display time-keeping cards and other visual-only information to active panelists (whose views were unaffected by the changes in attendee layout) without disrupting the flow of the panel or session.

We had all panelists join the webinar as attendees at least 15 minutes before the start of their respective sessions. When it was time to bring them on stage, Stefanie would publicly ask speakers for our next panel to “identify themselves.” This was their cue to use Zoom’s “raise hand” function so we could find them among the massive list of all the other attendees.

To help the Summit flow smoothly, we also ran practice sessions one week in advance with nearly every speaker. During those dress rehearsals, we discussed the importance of maintaining a solid internet connection, what it takes to set up decent audio and lighting, and what the flow of each session would feel like. We also had some speakers practice using the screen-sharing and audience Q+A features in Zoom Webinar.

We relied on some tried-and-true broadcast rules

Although we didn’t want to make the Summit a one-way broadcast, we did use a few broadcast journalism tricks to make everything run more smoothly.

Among those:

• We had a consistent host. Much like a news anchor, Stefanie Murray, the Center’s director, hosted the entire Summit, cutting in between panels and speakers to transition and make introductions.
• We planned some chatter to fill dead air. To allow our producer, Joe, to move speakers on and off stage, Stefanie prepped some language reminding people nearly every hour that they were at the 2020 Collaborative Journalism Summit — as we expected many participants to pop in and out as their work allowed, or to see specific sessions that interested them — and to promote the various ways that we hoped attendees would engage with each other. (More on that below.)
• We stayed on time — to the minute. We started nearly every session exactly on time and wrapped up on time; a few sessions ended slightly early. This was easier to do in a virtual setting than an in-person setting, where we normally have to keep signaling to speakers that their time is up before resorting to joining them on-stage and attempting to reclaim the mic.
• We used music and transition slides with a live ticker showing when we’d be back “on air” during all the breaks. (More on the music below.)

We obsessed about audio, video and internet connectivity

Internet connectivity was the true wild card for the entire Summit. If the internet were to go out for either Joe or Stefanie especially, everything could come to a screeching halt.

We did everything we possibly could to guard against that, including purchasing ethernet cables to plug directly into our home internet connections rather than use our home WiFi. But we were still at the mercy of the internet gods. And all of our speakers were, too.

We used external cameras instead of our laptop cameras, and requested that all of our speakers use external mics whenever possible. A simple mic/earbud combo was sufficient in most cases.

We thought deeply about engagement in a virtual setting

We were really worried the networking and engagement that typically happens at our Summit would fade away if we did nothing but “present” for a day and a half. And how boring would that be? (So boring.)

So here’s what we did to promote engagement:

• We used Zoom Meetings instead of Zoom Webinar for our two smaller, pre-conference events, since those were more intimate gatherings.
• We moderated a live chat through Zoom the entire time, posting relevant links and information on a recurring basis throughout each session — and bringing some well-known attendees into the conversation, sometimes by name.
• We ran a live Q+A through Zoom the entire time.
• We ran a live note-taking document for day one and day two of the Summit, using Google Docs.
• We hosted four separate networking sessions, including one with live animation and one that included a discussion about mindfulness and breathing techniques.
• We employed a graphic illustrator to draw during each session. That illustrator, Derrick Dent, was featured as a silent-but-busy “panelist” in Zoom webinar the entire time, so at various times our attendees could get an up-close look at his drawings.
• We hosted an “Asks + Offers” board using Padlet, which was password-protected. This was a place where people could post job opportunities, hype new projects, discuss their skills-for-hire, or anything else.
• We created three Zoom bingo cards customized specifically for collaborative journalism.
• We used Zapier to automatically add attendees to a public Twitter list.
• We created a unique playlist of music and used ManyCam to display a slide with a ticker showing what time we’d be back, all of which ran during each intermission. That unique playlist turned out to be a huge hit. Using BandLab, Joe created a few lo-fi hip-hop tracks and overlaid the voices of speakers giving their talks at previous Summits, including Sarah Stonbely, Darryl Holliday and Heather Bryant. Not only did this allow us to play music we owned outright, but it also helped to create a buzz that made people more likely to keep the webinar window open throughout the day.
• We used calendar invitations to keep all speaker details in one place. In the past, we primarily communicated with speakers via email. But this year our self-titled “speaker wrangler,” Ned Berke, also used Google Calendar to enter every last detail and stage direction into customized invitations for each speaker and session. This small change was incredibly important, as it meant our speakers didn’t need to wade through their email inboxes to find links, passwords, or review the flow of their session. The run of show for each session was spelled out in painstaking detail within the notes of each calendar invitation, which Ned updated several times leading up to the event. “If you look at your calendar invitation…” became one of Ned’s favorite things to say.

We created a visual dashboard to help our staff keep track of things

Between the Zoom links, the Summit website links, the Padlet board, the live notes, and all the other links and documents we used to put the Summit together this year, it was clear we needed some kind of central dashboard to keep track of everything — so Joe made us one.

Canva lets you attach links to individual objects in the design and then export the design as a functioning website. We also created a forwarding link via WordPress to make it easier for us to get back to the dashboard when necessary.

What we would do differently, and thoughts for future conferences

• Keep an in-place component for future conferences. We were able to include so many more people this year by hosting in place that we’re now thinking about making a live, interactive virtual conference a permanent part of the Summit for as long as the Summit exists.
• Completely recreate sponsor packages. We mostly focused on converting the in-person components of our sponsor packages into virtual components this year. Next time, we’ll focus on fundamentally reimagining what sponsorship looks like in a 100-percent-virtual setting.
• We’d like to find ways for attendees to directly support or donate to speakers and their projects during the Summit. This came up during our discussions about which streaming platform to use, especially since Twitch has this kind of creator support mechanism built into the platform. Still plenty of discussion to be had on this topic.
• If we had the time and money (and a global pandemic wasn’t fueling widespread shortages and shipping delays) we would have liked to provide a standard microphone, webcam, and pair of headphones for all speakers and panelists. This would have helped to standardize the video and (most importantly) audio quality for our speakers and provide a cleaner experience for attendees.
• We would have planned our networking rooms slightly differently. Two of our sessions had specific themes and two were more open-networking oriented with breakouts. We found that people didn’t want to join the networking rooms to talk more about collaborative journalism; they wanted to focus on something else while meeting each other.
• Reimagine the post-conference survey using live feedback tools. We had to balance how many new things we were introducing into our process, so we didn’t give too much attention to how we could change the feedback process. But now that the event is over, it’s clear we could’ve used in-call polling between sessions to gather immediate reactions to the conference materials. What else could we dream up to better gauge attendee sentiment?

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

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

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

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

Localore: Finding America

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reveal Local Labs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local News Lab

Team: Josh Stearns, Teresa Gorman, Democracy Fund

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

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

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

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

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

Local News Initative

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

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

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

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

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

Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media

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

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

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

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

Local Online Independent Online News (LION) Publishers

Team: Executive director Matt DeRienzo and a board of directors

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

Participants: LION has about 225 members.

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

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

Center for Cooperative Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table Stakes/Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative

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

Funders: Knight Foundation, Lenfest Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community Listening and Engagement Fund

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

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

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

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

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

Report for America

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

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

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

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

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

Local News Subscription Accelerator

Team: Facebook, Tim Griggs

Funders: Uh, Facebook.

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

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

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

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

Local Media Consortium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local Media Association

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

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

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

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

“The how-to of all of this exists. We know how to make community, we know how to do great journalism, we know how to provide for local news and information needs. The one thing we don’t have is the funding model to make that happen,” said Simon Galperin, a media consultant with experience at GroundSource and Opinary who is spearheading the Community Information Cooperative behind the info district idea.

Galperin first sketched out the idea while a student in CUNY’s social journalism master’s program. He had attended Rutgers University for his undergraduate degree, which funded its student newspaper through a $10.75 per-student, per-semester fee. “I got thinking about how that can be a really effective funding mechanism. How can we apply that to local communities, where the structure of a university just isn’t there?” Galperin said.

To be clear: This wouldn’t be an opt-in situation. The mindset of the Community Information Cooperative is to provide the tools to communities (of any size or definition) to develop a district in their own local government area by democratically lobbying for its creation. The model is set up so that a fee levied on residents — analogous to regular fees for public services such as fire protection, water, sanitation, or business improvement districts in local areas today — within a certain area would allow the community to essentially self-fund their own local reporters, in a more direct way than funding public media like PBS or NPR, for example. (There are more than 33,000 service districts across the U.S., and the bureaucracy of such districts has been lampooned in a Last Week Tonight segment.) A community info district is a multi-faceted idea, and we’ll dig into some of the concerns and aspirations for it. But first: the funding.

After many thoughts, conversations, and design processes, Galperin officially launched the Kickstarter on February 15. It recently reached the $2,000 goal for seed funding with 42 donors, essentially enough to register the organization as a nonprofit and get the legal details of setting up an info district underway. (“Before I can raise $1 million, I need to raise $2,000,” he said.) Now with the Kickstarter bar raised to $7,000, the next goal is funding market research with the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, Sustainable Jersey, and Free Press News Voices and potentially launching the first info district in New Jersey in 2019. (They’ve attended community forums there and Galperin was raised in Fair Lawn, N.J., in addition to having the research partners based there.)

So, what would a community information district look like in action? Galperin says that is fully up to the community the district would cover; he just wants to do the legwork to give communities the option for it. He wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review last summer:

My hometown of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, has a population of 32,000 people. An annual $40 contribution per household could deliver a $500,000 operating budget to a newsroom devoted to understanding and serving the local news and information needs of its community.

That budget could support print or online newspapers, or livestreaming town council meetings. A special service district for local journalism could convene community forums or media literacy classes, launch a text message and email alert system, or pay for chatbots that answer locally relevant questions, like “Is alternate side parking in effect?”

Each community could shape its own information district through a needs assessment or a targeted engagement campaign. To prevent political interference, a board of trustees made up of residents and community stakeholders, could oversee their local CiD. Communities could allocate funding through a participatory budgeting process, and hold regular referendums to determine whether or not it should reauthorize the CiD.

“As much of the editorial process and agenda that could be driven by the community should be,” Galperin said. A more specific example: “With a half a million operating budget, that’s three to four reporters with an events budget and a community engagement budget. I always imagined that it would be an approach of we have a reporter always canvassing, going around and knocking on doors, saying, ‘Hey, I’m your local reporter, what do you guys need, what are your info needs?'” He emphasized transparency, accountability, and creativity in journalism as main principles.

“These are all things that people know and want and can create themselves. These aren’t new ideas. The new idea is the funding model,” he added.

But the new idea also brings up some old issues. Even if every community were interested in such a district, low-income areas would be far less able to fund local journalism than wealthier areas. There’s the obvious question of potential government interference in the collection and distribution of the funds and information. (Who’d hire those reporters?) And existing local news publications who have built their revenue models off of other resources, such as advertising or philanthropy, might raise reasonable objections to this new competitor.

Galperin reinforced that a community info district is not for everyone and is not intended to be built on a community that doesn’t want it. But for lower income areas, he said, maybe they could band together with neighboring communities to pool their resources — the Cooperative isn’t defining “community” by any particular geography, so it could be a neighborhood or a county, for example. (Then you might hit problems of scale, though…but that’s why this idea is a work in progress.) “An info district can exist in a place that ultimately has enough of a tax base to support it. The question of population is so important,” he said. Alternatively, with residents’ fees powering journalism in some areas, foundations could hypothetically refocus their efforts within the communities of greatest need.

For the government question, the special service districts could be set up with an independent nonprofit board of directors overseeing the funds, meaning that the money collected for the district is not required to pass through the governing body’s general fund — and perhaps a reporter working for the district would be able to uncover potential political abuse of that structure, Galperin said. “The community runs this thing, rather than the government running this thing,” he added. “The benefit of the process is that we get to design to solve those questions.” And for existing local news organizations?

“Do you serve the local news and information needs of your community? That question means two things for existing providers,” Galperin said. “If you are serving the local info needs of your community effectively and you also have a commercial enterprise to do that, then one could argue that in this case the market works. People’s news and info needs are being met by your journalism business and an information district might not be necessary. Or, it might be necessary, if your local news and information services are not meeting the needs of your community. You can reform, you can adapt and begin to let your community drive your editorial agenda, become hyper-transparent…about prioritizing trust over profit…We want to create frameworks that communities [can] follow but not follow to the letter for different needs in different places.”

Galperin is working with Center for Cooperative Media associate director Joe Amditis and media and civic engagement consultant Chris Satullo, formerly of WHYY and The Philadelphia Inquirer to develop the idea.

Galperin could be considered an idealist, especially when it comes to journalism and democracy. (“The point of an info district it to create more civically engaged communities. It’s about bridging the gap between democracy and journalism,” he said. “If they moved to cut funding or close down the special service district, the idea is, at least, that that is a moment in which people’s democratic opportunities are being taken away and they will rise up against that.”) But he has received a pledge of $2,000 from an anonymous donor if Galperin crowdfunds $3,000 more, and he has several creative journalism thinkers on his advisory board helping him to refine the idea, such as Jennifer Brandel, Heather Bryant, and André Natta.

The goal for the project at the Center for Cooperative Media is “to help test the idea of community information district out in a few New Jersey communities,” said Stefanie Murray, the center’s director and a former business reporter who has covered special service districts before. “I am very familiar with all the politics involved in setting one up, and how complicated they can get. My initial reaction was that it was a fantastic idea, but one that will likely take root only in certain communities in the U.S. that are open to the idea of adding this cost, open to the idea of creating an entity to manage it, and open to the idea of directly supporting an independent press via tax dollars.”

Still, Murray sees opportunity: “I think, done well, a community information district could really help improve trust between journalists and community members in the cities where such districts are set up, because I think these districts will require absolute transparency and a lot of engagement from residents in order to be successful,” she added.

Galperin calculates that in four to seven years (or after 20 info districts are established), the Cooperative will be self-sustaining and philanthropic/crowdfunded support will no longer be needed. “The idea here is as info districts grow and develop, they have the ability to pay into the Community Information Cooperative,” he said. “It would serve the same role as a parent news organization, so we’d provide accounting, fiscal sponsorship…[and] provide the support to maintain a really effective, targeted local newsroom.”

That is, of course, if all the what-ifs pan out — and if there actually are any communities with a critical mass of residents willing to see that extra charge on their tax bills. But here’s an optimistic closing thought from Galperin:

“I think this is the next step. I think about localizing funding this way — saying that it’s small towns and districts in large cities who come together to say: ‘We need this thing, let’s fund this thing’ — I think that will be a very meaningful change in fabric of our society.”

Christopher Guess can’t say if developing a news app is always the right call, but he wants to make doing so within reach for any news organization that opts to invest in one. Guess is the developer behind Push, an open source iOS and Android app designed to cut down on the time and effort it takes for news organizations to develop news apps. It’s aimed at small-and mid-sized teams that lack the developer resources and capital to create their own apps from scratch.

By Guess’s estimation, the typical news app can take at least six months and cost $50,000 to develop. Using Push, though, a single developer can develop an app within a few days. “With the current financial situation for newsrooms, the economics are impossible,” said Guess, who developed the app during a two-year ICFJ Knight fellowship. “If you want a mobile app as a small newsroom, you’re pretty much completely out of luck unless you’re owned by one of the big newspaper companies.”

News apps built on Push look and function as you would expect, with features that include caching for offline reading, built-in search functionality, video support, and as its name suggests, support for push notifications. The app also lets news organizations integrate donation features.

Since its launch in late 2015, Push has gained the bulk of its traction in Eastern Europe, where 10 publishers are in some stage of using the software to develop their own apps. For news organizations such as Serbia’s Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK) and Azerbaijan’s Meydan TV, Push’s features — particularly its Push notification support — opened up a new way to keep readers engaged. The early Push users, all of which are affiliated with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, have embraced push notifications because they offer a way to notify readers when new pieces are published. That’s important for investigative news outlets, which don’t publish as frequently as the typical site.

“When people visit a site, they want to see brand new things every single time. If you can’t supply that because of resource constraints, you fall off the radar. With push notifications, you stick right there,” Guess said. “Even if users haven’t opened the app for a month, you can still get their phone buzzing. That’s a really big deal for these small publications that need that attention.”

Of course, just because you develop an app doesn’t mean that people will use it. U.S. smartphone users spend nearly three quarters of their time within just three apps, according to comScore. Still, the app remains a powerful distribution channel, particularly for news organizations looking to develop direct relationships with readers. Big platforms’ interests often diverge from those of news organizations. Organic reach on Facebook, long a vital traffic source for publishers, continues to shrink: MarketingLand, citing a report from social publishing tool SocialFlow, said that organic reach declined 52 percent from January to June of 2016.

The ever-shifting reality of news organization-platform relations means that many news orgs are hungry for ways to interact directly with their readers. “This is all about staying in touch with users without those intermediaries,” Guess aid.

It’s an idea that appeals to local news organizations as well. Last month, the Center for Cooperative Media announced plans to help five New Jersey news organizations (Banana Tree News, Delaware Currents, Hudson County View, Route 40, and Planet Princeton) develop their own apps using Push’s software. The project is part of NJ Mobile News Lab, which the Center for Cooperative Media started in an effort to “bridge the innovation gap” between large and small publishers, said Joe Amditis, the associate director of the Center for Cooperative Media.

“Large publishers have the ability and flexibility to play around with different tools, try new things, fund exciting new innovative projects. Their reserves of capital and audience loyalty allow them to do so without much fear of the consequences,” he said. “We want to help the smaller publishers compete by helping everyone recognize the value of collective input.”

The project is still in its early stages, but Amditis said that the goal is to collect data on the publishers’ Push apps to evaluate what works and what can be tried elsewhere. The Center for Cooperative Media is particularly interested in the revenue impact of the efforts. “Hopefully we can try to replicate some of the sustainability we see in some of the larger organizations at the local level,” Amditis said.

Guess, who this week was awarded a Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship at the University of Missouri, has other plans for Push as well. He aims to use the fellowship to build more features into the app, including support for more content management systems, increased anti-censorship tools, and increased automation and stability.

“The ultimate goal here is to help news sites make apps that feel essential to their readers,” said Guess.