What Works

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.

By Dan Kennedy

After reading Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s interview with Richard J. Tofel about her new report, “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: A Field-Level Analysis of Infrastructure Needs,” I was concerned that she was going to propose widespread consolidation in the local and hyperlocal news space. I was alarmed enough to write a blog post reminding my readers of the old slogan “Local Doesn’t Scale.”

So once the actual report came out, I set aside a couple of hours to read it carefully. It is more nuanced than her interview with Tofel suggested, and I found much of it to be both useful and thoughtful. A reminder: Hansen Shapiro is the co-founder and former chief executive of the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that purchased newspapers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia and ran them with rather mixed results. We interviewed her in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, and she was a guest on our podcast.

Oddly enough, Hansen Shapiro’s conversation with Tofel garnered more attention than the report itself. Tofel told Nieman Lab that it was his all-time most-viewed post. Well, I’m here to rectify that. It’s a dense report, but it’s well worth reading. I’ll guide you through some of the highlights.

Read the rest at Media Nation.

We have started a Facebook group for people who are interested in keeping up on our activities — especially our upcoming free, all-day webinar for local news publishers, which will be held on Thursday, May 21. The group will also help us with our outreach as we get closer to the event. Please join today!

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Barbara “Bob” Allen, a Los Angeles-based journalist, trainer and consultant who founded CollegeJournalism.org in 2025. The site provides resources and news for journalism educators and student media advisers across the country.

Allen is also the editor of the Student Press Report, a brand-new national news desk covering the state of the college press. The debut piece — “Cash-starved and censored, America’s student press is in crisis” — lays out the financial and free-press challenges facing campus newsrooms. Allen also writes the weekly College Journalism Newsletter.

Allen brings decades of experience mentoring student journalists. She was the adviser to the student newspaper at Oklahoma State University and most recently served as director of college programming at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Missouri, home to both a campus paper — The Maneater — and the Columbia Missourian, a lab newspaper covering the city of Columbia.

Allen has also led an ambitious project to map every college newspaper in the country, in collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News. That effort found more than 1,100 college newspapers, with 766 located in or adjacent to counties with little or no local news access.

Dan’s Quick Take stays close to home. The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper, just celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Ellen’s Quick Take is about a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Provincetown. The Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that partners with  The Provincetown Independent, raised money from more than 100 donors to buy the condo to house reporters. Ed Miller, editor and co-founder of the Indie, told Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher that housing was a major barrier to attracting staff to his well-regarded newspaper on the Outer Cape.

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

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 1,200-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.

Barbara “Bob” Allen, founder and director of CollegeJournalism.org, joined Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg on “What Works: The Future of Local News” to discuss the state of college journalism in the United States — its promise, its financial struggles, and its role in addressing the local news crisis.

Continue reading “Barbara ‘Bob’ Allen tells us about the nexus of student journalism and local news”

By Dan Kennedy

Folks who work at finding solutions to the local news crisis are understandably frustrated at what a difficult, frustrating slog it can be. Earlier this week, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the former executive director of the National Trust for Local News, gave Richard J. Tofel a preview of a report she’s written for Press Forward and said, “I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.”

I’m looking forward to reading Hansen Shapiro’s report. (She’s featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and has been on our podcast.) And yet there really is no substitute for solving this problem one community at a time. For all the talk you hear about scale, that’s really not the way to go unless you’re talking about obvious things like finding a common tech platform so that every local news publisher doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the content management system. In the early days of the hyperlocal news movement, a group of publishers got together and formed an organization called Authentically Local. Its spot-on message: “Local Doesn’t Scale.”

Read the rest at Media Nation.

We are excited to announce that our 2026 What Works webinar aimed at practical skills for local news publishers will be held on Thursday, May 21. The free all-day event will comprise three interactive workshops on event planning, audience development and AI skills as well as a keynote address. We’ll be sure to announce more details as they become available. And here is our conference page.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Dale Anglin, the inaugural executive director of Press Forward, a philanthropic effort that is dedicated to funding local news initiatives nationwide.

Before she was named as the leader of Press Forward, Anglin served as a vice president for grantmaking at the Cleveland Foundation. She also led the foundation’s journalism strategy. Then and now, she focuses on local news and information as a way to restore a sense of community.

Dan has a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, one of the most prominent nonprofit digital startups. It looks like readers of The Washington Post who live in the DC area may not be deprived of local news and sports after all despite the recent deep cuts ordered by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. The Banner is expanding, and it’s part of executive editor Audrey Cooper’s mission to build civic engagement through community journalism.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on a bill in New York state that attempts to put some guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Among other things, it would require disclosures and mandate supervision and fact-checking by actual human editors. It received a hearty endorsement from journalism industry unions. But there’s a lot of catching up to do to rein in the robots.

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

A summary of our conversation

We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation with Anglin, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 1,200-word summary. 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.

Dale Anglin, the first executive director of Press Forward, joined Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy to discuss the philanthropic initiative’s mission, its growing network of local chapters, the crisis in public media, and the language and strategies that can help sustain local journalism for the long term.

Continue reading “Dale Anglin tells us how Press Forward is leveraging local news to build community”

The gutting of The Washington Post may prove to be an opportunity for The Baltimore Banner. According to an announcement, the Banner, a digital nonprofit startup, will cover Washington teams, including beat coverage of the Nationals baseball team and the Commanders football team. The Banner’s editor-in-chief, Audrey Cooper, is quoted as saying:

This decision is part of our unwavering commitment to serve Maryland with honest, independent journalism. It builds on last week’s announcement that we are expanding our news coverage into Prince George’s County and represents another step in strengthening our statewide reach.

At a time when so much pulls communities apart, sports bring us together. The Washington Post’s decision to eliminate its sports section creates an opportunity for us to serve more Marylanders with The Banner’s distinctive mix of fearless accountability reporting, engaging storytelling and sharp analysis.

Read the rest at Media Nation.

By Dan Kennedy

If The Washington Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, ever decides he wants to take journalism seriously again, then he might take a look at a handful of large regional papers that have charted a route to sustainability against the strong headwinds that continue to buffet the news business.

Perhaps the most important difference between these papers and the Post — and the hundreds of other shrinking media outlets owned by corporate chains and hedge funds — is that they are rooted in the communities they cover. Whether owned by wealthy people or run by nonprofits, they place service to their city and region above extracting the last smidgen of revenue they can squeeze out.

Although I could add a few to this list, I am mentioning five large regional newspapers as examples of how it’s possible to succeed despite the long-term decline in the economics of journalism.

Read the rest at The Conversation.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Charles Sennott, a former foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe who left in 2008 to become a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded GlobalPost and The GroundTruth Project. GroundTruth, a nonprofit, was a partner to GBH News, PBS’s “Frontline,” public radio’s “The World,” and the “PBS NewsHour.” It focused on partnerships to amplify international and national news projects.

Now Charlie has turned his attention to local news. He teamed up with Steven Waldman to launch Report for America as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Dan and Ellen talked with Waldman on an earlier podcast.

Sennott’s newest creation is GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he leads a small staff and publishes and writes the GroundTruth newsletter on Substack. The nonprofit that was called The GroundTruth Project has recently rebranded to call itself Report Local, with Report for America and Report for the World as its flagship initiatives. Report Local and the University of Missouri School of Journalism did groundbreaking work on water issues in the Mississippi River Basin.

In a recent post on Substack, Sennott writes about this new branding. He also writes about why he officially stepped aside from the program but remains proud of the movement it has created.

As his own act of community service, Sennott is also serving as the publisher and editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Times. He and his wife, Julie, who has an extended family on the Island, now live there year-round.

Dan and Ellen are also joined by Alexis Algazy, a Northeastern journalism and political science student who has written a compelling story about why politicians need to engage in storytelling on social media.  

Dan has a Quick Take about public support for local news. Politico recently published an in-depth story on what’s gone wrong with a program in California that was supposed to provide $250 million to help fund local news over a five-year period, with the money to come from the state and from Google. The deal seems to be coming apart. And yet there are reasons to be optimistic — as you will hear.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the role of video in recording the violent acts of ICE agents in Minneapolis and the protests all over the Twin Cities. Video by bystanders has played an important role in exposing what’s happening on the ground. But video and social media in general also pose a challenge for reporters covering the story for The Minnesota Star Tribune. Editor Kathleen Hennessey spoke about it in a brief interview with Semafor.

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