What Works

The Boston Globe has just published a fascinating story (sub. req.) about The Lexington Observer, a hyperlocal digital nonprofit through which flows a surprising amount of money. Media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that the Observer isn’t just covering its affluent community of 34,000. It also serves as a conduit for other news operations across the country.

As Ryan puts it: “The news organization has handled millions of dollars in donations in recent years, something many small nonprofit newsrooms could only fantasize about. Only a small share of the Observer’s operational revenue comes from local donors and ads. The outlet instead survives largely on fees it collects by helping other news organizations across the country raise money.”

Between 2023 and 2024, the Observer reported in tax filings that its expenses rose from $640,000 to nearly $5 million — most of which ended up in the hands of other local news outlets.

“You see other nonprofit or local newsrooms do other weird things to make money. This just happens to be ours,” Co-founder and board chair Nicco Mele is quoted as saying. Mele is a former executive director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Also involved in the Observer’s fundraising effort, known as the Local News Hub, is Lauren Feeney, a journalist who is executive editor of both the Observer and the Hub, and Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, an Observer board member who’s the co-founder and former chief executive of the National Trust for Local News.

The Lexington Observer — like a number of startups in Greater Boston — was launched in 2021 in response to the Gannett chain’s hollowing out of the town’s longtime weekly newspaper. In this case it was the Lexington Minuteman, whose history I wrote about here.

The Trust is a nonprofit that owns and operates newspapers in Maine (including the Portland Press Herald), Colorado and Georgia. We interviewed Hansen Shapiro for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and our podcast.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at our all-day free webinar next Thursday, May 21. If you’re a local news publisher, journalist or volunteer, our hands-on workshops will help you hone your skills. Just click here or on the image to register.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan talks with Joe Kriesberg, the publisher of CommonWealth Beacon, and Laura Colarusso, the editor. Ellen is off the air this week but edited this episode behind the scenes.

CommonWealth Beacon is a digital nonprofit that’s part of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, better known as MassINC, and Joe is the CEO. CommonWealth Beacon covers politics and public policy at the state level and has increasingly been branching out into local coverage as well. And it happens to be celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

Joe has been with MassINC since 2023 and has overseen the expansion of CommonWealth Beacon’s staff and mission. Before that, he was president and CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, where he was a leading advocate for affordable housing. He brings decades of nonprofit management experience and an extensive background of working with news organizations. He has raised millions of dollars for mission-driven organizations.

Laura is an award-winning editor and reporter who combines digital media expertise with a commitment to old-school reporting. Before coming to CommonWealth Beacon, she was the editor of Nieman Reports, a magazine and website published by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation that covers issues related to journalism. She has also worked as the digital managing editor at GBH News and the digital opinion editor at The Boston Globe, and is a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly.

Some disclosures: Dan is a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory board and writes occasional opinion pieces for the publication. He also worked with Laura at both GBH News and Nieman Reports.

Dan has a Quick Take on the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, published recently by the international organization Reporters Without Borders. It shows that the United States has fallen to 64th, coming in just behind Botswana and just ahead of Panama.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Also, an important announcement: Our annual What Works webinar will take place on Thursday, May 21. It’s a free, all-day event aimed at enhancing skills in audience development, ethical and effective uses for AI, and how to plan a successful event. You can register here.

A summary of our conversation

We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 600-word summary, which was then read by us for accuracy. The results are below. Do you find this useful? Please tell us what you think by using the Contact form linked from the top of our website.

Continue reading “Joe Kriesberg and Laura Colarusso tell us about the present and future of CommonWealth Beacon”

By Dan Kennedy

Last Thursday I had an opportunity to take part in a panel on the state of community journalism. I was struck by the nostalgia for print expressed by two editors who are many decades younger than I am, which is why I’m revisiting this still-relevant issue.

The event, titled “Peril and Promise,” was a fundraiser for The Local News, a print-and-digital nonprofit founded a decade ago in Ipswich, Massachusetts. (Its print edition, as you can see, has a slightly different name: the Ipswich Local News.) The panel comprised Local News editor Trevor Meek; Taylor Ann Bradford, the editor of the H-W News, a fairly new nonprofit covering Hamilton and Wenham that offers print with a minimal digital presence (here is its Instagram page); Joel Barrett, news editor of The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, a chain-owned daily; and me. Moderating was retired editor Richard Lodge.

Read the rest at Media Nation.

We’re excited to announce an all-star lineup for our 2026 What Works webinar, “Audience, AI and Events,” aimed at practical skills for local news publishers. This free, all-day teleconference will be held on Thursday, May 21. You’ll be able to sign up for interactive workshops facilitated by leaders in their fields. Please register today!

By Dan Kennedy

When the owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced earlier this year that the paper would shut down in May, it was widely noted that such a move would leave Pittsburgh as the largest city in the country without a daily newspaper. That said, it seemed unlikely. The very fact that the Block family decided to keep operating the paper until May all but guaranteed that some new ownership possibilities would emerge.

And today, that’s exactly what happened. The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which owns the nonprofit Baltimore Banner, will buy the Post-Gazette and operate the paper as a nonprofit. If I’m not mistaken, that will make the Post-Gazette the second metro daily to go the nonprofit route, following The Salt Lake Tribune. A few other large regional dailies, most notably The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Tampa Bay Times, are for-profits owned by nonprofits.

Read the rest at Media Nation.

By Dan Kennedy

Today is Local News Day — the first of what we can hope will become an annual reminder of the importance of community journalism. Organized by the nonprofit Montana Free Press, the event “is a national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news. Our mission is simple: reconnect people to trusted local outlets, empower newsrooms to grow, and spark a national movement that sustains local news for generations.”

We gave Local News Day a plug on the latest episode of “What Works,” our podcast about local news that I host with Ellen Clegg. The day is sponsored by a number of heavy hitters, including Press Forward, a major philanthropic effort that supports community journalism; and The New York Times; the American Journalism Project, another large philanthropy.

You may be seeing messages in your inbox and on social media asking you to support your local news organization. You should.

Poynter media columnist Tom Jones reports that MS NOW, newly freed from NBC, is investing in local news in a big way, lending support to investigative and local reporting by partnering with the Pulitzer Center, States Newsroom and The Marshall Project. “Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the announcement comes today, which is Local News Day,” Jones writes.

On Wednesday evening, I showed my students a documentary I never tire of watching — “Storm Lake,” about the Storm Lake Times’ struggle to stay afloat in rural Iowa despite the demise of local businesses at the hands of corporate agriculture. (The paper is now known as the Storm Lake Times-Pilot following a 2022 merger.) We follow Pulitzer Prize-winning publisher-editor Art Cullen and his family as they report on everything from the precarious corn crop to a member of the Latino community who’s competing in a Spanish-language talent competition on television; from the 2020 Iowa caucuses (do we know who won yet?) and into the early months of the COVID pandemic, which is where the film concludes.

Local news is the lifeblood of democracy. Not to sound defeatest, but there’s not much we can do about Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime, enabled by a supine Republican Congress, other than to vote. But we can work with our neighbors to support each other and solve problems in our own communities. We need reliable news in order for that to happen.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Rachel White, CEO of the Associated Press Fund for Journalism. Rachel joined the nonprofit AP Fund for Journalism in 2024, after a 10-year run with The Guardian, the one-time print newspaper in the U.K. that has become a global digital powerhouse.

In 2016, White became president of  theguardian.org, a nonprofit organization she helped create that raises tax-deductible funds to support The Guardian’s journalism. The AP Foundation has a similar mission but is laser-focused on state and local news outlets all over the U.S. The AP Fund is expanding. Fifty news organizations have just joined, for a total of 100 newsrooms. The foundation aims to increase that number to 150 by the end of 2026. News outlets get help with reach and strategy to achieve financial stability.

Note: We asked White about financial pressures facing the AP following decisions in 2024 by the Gannett and McClatchy newspaper chains to drop their membership in order to save money. And earlier this week, after this podcast was recorded, the AP announced that it would seek buyouts as it pivots away from newspaper journalism to visual journalism, new revenue sources and AI.

Dan has a Quick Take on Local News Day, which is this Thursday, April 9, and billed as “a national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news.”

Ellen’s Quick Take is on an opinion column apocalypse in Fargo, North Dakota. The Fargo Forum, a locally owned news outlet, has forced out three long-running columnists. Why? Take a wild guess. Here’s one headline on a recent column by journalist Jim Shaw: “Our local leaders oppose free and fair elections.” He’s now an ex-columnist.

And a big hat-tip to Alex Ip, a Gen Z publisher and editor at thexylom.com, which explores how communities are influenced and shaped by science. Alex broke the news about Fargo on social media.

A summary of our conversation

We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 600-word summary, which was then read by us for accuracy. The results are below. Do you find this useful? Please tell us what you think by using the Contact form linked from the top of our website.

Continue reading “Rachel White tells us how an AP initiative is helping state and local news outlets”

By Dan Kennedy

On Monday, Joshua Benton reported for Nieman Lab that VTDigger was the 17th-most-trafficked nonprofit news website in the U.S., with about 800,000 visits in January, the most recent month for which figures were available. That’s quite an accomplishment for a media outlet operating in a state where, as legend has it, there are more cows than people. (Not actually true.)

On Wednesday, Digger itself reported that its current fundraising campaign was proving to be a roaring success. The headline: “Donations tripled during final days of VTDigger Spring Drive.”

But all is not well at Digger, founded in 2009 by Anne Galloway after she was laid off by the Rutland Herald. Galloway left Digger in 2022 under circumstances that have long been understood not to be entirely happy. And now Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has checked in with a detailed story (sub. req.) of turmoil at the widely admired project. “I knew we weren’t doing everything perfectly,” Galloway told Ryan, “but I had tried to do what I could.”

Continue reading “Trouble in nonprofit paradise: Low pay, AI worries and a restive union lead to turmoil at VTDigger”

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Zuri Berry, the executive editor of The Banner in Montgomery County, Maryland. He’s also a Boston Globe colleague of Ellen’s from days of yore. The Banner is a nearly 4-year-old nonprofit digital startup founded in Baltimore that has been expanding into the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., even as The Washington Post has been cutting back on local coverage.

Zuri is one of those journalists who’s done a little bit of everything. We’re talking reporter, columnist, video producer, digital editor, radio host, audio editor over more than two decades in this business. And he’s got an MBA from the McColl School of Business at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, which is a combination you don’t always see in a newsroom leader.

Berry was deputy managing editor at the Boston Herald and managing editor of two NPR member stations. The accolades speak for themselves — he was part of the Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team for breaking news coverage of the 2013 Marathon bombings. At The Banner, he supported last year’s Pulitzer-winning series on Baltimore’s overdose crisis.

Dan has a Quick Take for later on in the podcast about a journalist who’s run afoul of ICE and who faces deportation to Colombia. Estefany Rodríguez, a reporter for a Spanish-language newspaper called Nashville Noticias in Tennessee, was arrested by ICE even though her lawyers say she entered the U.S. legally. It may be a case of retaliation, as Rodríguez has reported on ICE activities in the Nashville area. After we recorded this podcast, Rodríguez was released on $10,000 bond, but she is still fighting to remain in the U.S.

Ellen has a Quick Take is about a small newspaper in Wyoming that ditched its police blotter — and almost nobody misses it. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle made the change after taking a course at the Poynter Institute on deepening crime coverage. Dropping the blotter gave the staff more time to do actual reporting.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.