From student journalists who stayed with the story for nearly two years to national newsrooms parsing police interviews, Title IX records and court documents, coverage of the Cornell case offers lessons for reporters tackling sensitive, document-heavy investigations.
When a former Cornell University student filed a civil lawsuit in September alleging that she had been drugged and sexually assaulted by several fraternity members in 2024, the case quickly drew national attention.
But for reporters at student-run Cornell Daily Sun, the story wasn’t new.
Jon Keller analyzes the recent gubernatorial debate that he moderated. Photo via YouTube.
On the brand-new “What Works” podcast, Dan talks with Jon Keller, who has been explaining Massachusetts politics to Boston broadcast audiences for nearly half a century. Ellen couldn’t make it on air for this episode, but she handled the editing and will be back soon.
Jon returned to WBZ-TV just in time to cover a contentious governor’s election. He brought his trademark quick thinking and level-headed approach to the recent debate between Democratic incumbent Maura Healey and her Republican challenger, Mike Minogue. Jon was a colleague of Dan’s at The Boston Phoenix, where he wrote a political column. His “Keller @ Large” show remains one of the longest-running political franchises in local television.
Boston magazine twice named him “Best TV Political Analyst,” and he’s won a boatload of New England Emmys. In the Jurassic era, Jon wrote an opinion column for Ellen at The Boston Globe, and today he writes a column for the MASSterlist political newsletter.
Jon has also been caught in the Paramount media swirl as well. WBZ-TV laid him off in October 2025 as part of Paramount’s cuts, but WBZ brought him back as a special contributor in March of this year.
Dan’s got a Quick Take about turmoil at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. Executive editor Rob Curley, who’s leading an effort to take the paper nonprofit, was placed on administrative leave recently for unspecified inappropriate behavior. Now a deeply reported article by two nonprofit news outlets tells devastating story about what went wrong.
You can listen here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
Rob Curley, Michael McCarter and David Dunn-Rankin discuss the future of newspaper opinion content at the 2025 America’s Newspapers Mega-Conference in Orlando. Moderated by Editor & Publisher’s Mike Blinder, the panel is featured in Episode 281 of “E&P Reports.”
This report was produced in a collaboration between InvestigateWest and RANGE and republished by permission.
When The Spokesman-Review announced plans to transfer Spokane’s 143-year-old, family-owned newspaper to a nonprofit founded by Executive Editor Rob Curley, it took over the front page.
“The People’s Paper,” read the April 16, 2025, headline, saying ownership would transfer “to you, the community.”
Key to the plan was Curley, the folksy self-proclaimed “journalism nerd” who burst into Spokane a decade ago, declaring a love for Gonzaga University basketball rivaled only by his love for Disney. The transition to Comma Community Journalism Lab was cast in media industry publications not only as a way to save Spokane’s daily newspaper, but as part of a growing movement to resurrect dying papers by making them less dependent on ads and corporate ownership and more on philanthropy and community partnerships. As proof of concept, the paper had already added several so-called “community-funded” journalists to its staff.
But in The Spokesman-Review newsroom this summer, that hopeful vision ran into persistent concerns about Curley’s leadership. More than a dozen current and former employees, along with contemporaneous records reviewed by InvestigateWest and RANGE, reveal how the newsroom had raised concerns about Curley’s management for years, culminating in his suspension from the paper on Aug. 7 and a vote of no confidence from the union, the Spokane Editorial Society. He is currently on leave as the paper conducts an internal investigation.
Clay Wirestone ignores the cookies. Photo by Sherman Smith.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with Clay Wirestone, the opinion editor of the Kansas Reflector, a digital nonprofit that’s part of the States Newsroom network. His first book was published Sept. 29. It’s called, aptly enough, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now.” His second is scheduled for 2028.
Wirestone seems to be on a first-name basis with Kansas opinion journalists past and present, and he profiles a number of them. He knows the state well: he graduated from the University of Kansas and lives in Lawrence with his husband. He also edited news at The Topeka Capital-Journal and spent more than a decade at New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor, where he worked with Dan’s Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman, a past guest on this podcast.
Dan has a Quick Take about yet another new book — “Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America,” by Nick Mathews. Dan reviewed it recently for The Arts Fuse. Mathews offers some interesting insights into what happens to community life when there’s a shortage of reliable news and information.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on an excellent Substack post by media observer Richard J. Tofel on the recent massacre at the McClatchy newspaper chain, which is being gutted by its private-equity owner. It’s like a slasher movie, and the slasher has come for newspapers that were great in their heyday.
You can listen here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
For nonprofit news organizations, the most important time of the year is November and December, when the NewsMatch program goes live. An initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News, the program provides national funding as a percentage of money raised locally. It’s not a one-to-one match, but it provides crucial revenues to small (and large) projects as well as an incentive they can use in attracting donors.
Now INN is making a change. According to a new impact report, marking the 10th anniversary of the program, NewsMatch is moving to a year-round model. According to the report:
The next phase will focus on helping newsrooms build on that foundation with more advanced, flexible campaigns tailored to their goals and stage of growth. To support this evolution, NewsMatch is shifting from a single year-end campaign to a year-round model.
We talked to newsrooms about what they were looking for from this opportunity, and they emphasized the value of flexibility, experimentation, and shared learning. In 2027, we’re excited to pilot NewsMatch Catalyst Campaigns, supporting a select group of INN members as they test new fundraising strategies, deepen donor engagement, and build toward long-term sustainability.
According to the report, NewsMatch has raised more than $477 million for local news over the past 10 years, with INN itself growing from 27 investigative news organizations in 2009 to some 500 member outlets today. (INN was originally known as the Investigative News Network.)
Karen Rundlet, INN’s CEO and executive director, calls NewsMatch “the people-powered engine of the nonprofit news field, democratizing donations from a public that wants good, accurate information that helps them with daily decision making. People from all corners of the country donate to newsrooms via NewsMatch.”
Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a good overview of the impact report.
Margaret Sullivan. Photo (cc) 2016 by Michaelbenabib.
The “What Works” podcast is back after our summer hiatus. Ellen was feeling under the weather, so Dan is flying solo. But no worries — Ellen still handled editing and production, and she should be back for our next episode.
We’re pleased to have Margaret Sullivan as our guest. Sullivan has spent the last decade or so doing the toughest of jobs: telling the country’s most powerful newsrooms what they’re getting wrong. She was the fifth public editor at The New York Times, from 2012 to 2016. Somebody once called it the worst job in journalism, but she took it anyway. Then she went to The Washington Post as its media columnist, where she covered the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Trump years, and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. She left the Post in 2022, which, in hindsight, looks like excellent timing.
Sullivan writes a weekly column on media, politics and culture for The Guardian US, and she publishes a fearless newsletter on Substack called American Crisis, where she calls out lapses in how the media are covering Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.
But she also has deep roots in local journalism. She was a summer intern at her hometown paper, The Buffalo News, and worked her way up to become its first woman editor-in-chief. So she knows firsthand what happens to a community when its newspaper is gutted. In 2020, she published a book about the local news crisis called “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy” and, we’re pleased to say, she blurbed our book, “What Works in Community News.”
Dan has a Quick Take that Yogi Berra would have called déjà vu all over again. The Block family, which owns The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, says it will shut down the paper if they can’t find a buyer by the end of 2026. Now where have we heard that before? He also dives into the new impact report from the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organization that turns out to be one of the biggest funders of nonprofit news in the country. AJP makes the case that nonprofit news as a business model has moved past the experimental stage.
You can listen here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
It’s time for a check-in on how digital outlets that rely partly or entirely on artificial intelligence are hollowing out the already-beleaguered news business. What better time than now, while we’re in the midst of a national freakout over AI? (The latest: Karen Weise and Mike Isaac report in The New York Times on concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI that AI scraping amounts to “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”)
I’ll begin with what strikes me as the most well-intentioned of the projects that have caught my eye recently: Nanopress, which produces morning newsletters for more than 70 communities and neighborhoods in the Boston area by scraping information from local government, civic groups and news organizations.
Old store in Nelson County, Va., a focus on Nick Mathews’ new book, “Deserted.” Photo (cc) 2010 by Ted Hodges.
Local news is in crisis everywhere, but the challenge is more daunting in rural areas than it is in cities or affluent suburbs.
Consider the Storm Lake Times Pilot, which serves a farming community in Iowa. As co-founder Art Cullen explains in the 2021 documentary “Storm Lake,” the rise of agribusiness wiped out much of the local advertising that had once sustained the paper while the spreading tentacles of social media grabbed another large chunk. When Cullen appeared that same year on the podcast that Ellen Clegg and I host, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” he told us that both he and his brother, John Cullen, were living on Social Security rather than take a salary out of their precarious newspaper revenues.
The Storm Lake Times Pilot is emblematic of a national phenomenon. In 2025, the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School found that 213 U.S. counties lacked a local news outlet, and that nearly 80% of those counties were in rural areas.
The California Statehouse in Sacramento. Photo (cc) 2008 by Tszeiler1.
By Dan Kennedy
Earlier this year, it looked like California might be the place where government efforts to revive local news went to their grave. As I wrote for Poynter Online, a widely touted partnership between Google and the state that would have provided $250 million for community journalism over five years was scaled back drastically, the victim of budget pressures and political infighting.
But now California is on the verge of passing an ambitious bill to assist struggling news outlets. As Gretchen A. Peck reports for Editor & Publisher, the Community NEWS Act would provide significant tax credits for hiring and retaining journalists over a five-year period: $20,000 a year for retaining up to five full-time journalists; $15,000 for each additional full-timer; $7,500 for part-timers; and $15,000 for each full-timer hired to a new position.
The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.
By Dan Kennedy
There’s good news to report about the future of NJ Spotlight News, a 16-year-old website that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey. We learned in June that NJ PBS, the public television network that partners with Spotlight, would be moving to Montclair State University because of federal and state budget cuts totaling some $2.25 million a year. Previously NJ PBS had been a subsidiary of WNET, the New York public media giant. (You can find a lot more details here.)
At the time, it seemed likely that Spotlight would wind up at Montclair State as well, but the details had not been worked out. Finally, last Friday, Montclair State announced that an agreement had been reached with WNET, which had owned Spotlight since 2019.
