Month: July 2021

By Ellen Clegg

MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, the award-winning Memphis nonprofit newsroom committed to reporting on “the intersection of poverty, power, and policy,” is staffing up. Wendi C. Thomas, the innovative and tireless founding editor and publisher, announced on July 29 that she has hired veteran journalist Adrienne Johnson Martin as executive editor.

“As we move from startup mode to sustainability, it’s essential that our leadership bench has depth and that’s what Adrienne brings,” Thomas said in a story posted on MLK50’s website. “I am elated that she’s joining the team and I look forward to building the organization together.”

The addition of top-level editing talent is a noteworthy pivot point for any news organization, but it’s especially significant for a four-year-old startup that is positioning itself for long-term growth and impact. When Johnson Martin starts in September, MLK50 will have six full-time and two part-time editorial employees. Thomas noted on Twitter that the MLK50 leadership team is all-women, and of the top five newsroom jobs, three are held by Black women, one by a Latina, and one by a white woman. As she tweeted: “It is so satisfying to build the newsroom I always wanted to work in.”

Johnson Martin brings a broad range of media experience. She was most recently managing editor of Duke Magazine, Duke University’s alumni publication, and was part of the Los Angeles Times team that won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for spot news for coverage of the Northridge earthquake. She covered radio, television, and film for The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and served as associate features editor there.

“I love that I’ll have the chance to be in community with a team that knows we don’t have to live in a zero-sum world and is committed to telling the stories of those on the losing side of that paradigm — these are journalists who use their talents in service of justice,” Johnson Martin told MLK50. “What’s better than that?”

Thomas, an editor and reporter at The Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer and the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, launched MLK50: Justice Through Journalism in 2017 as a one-year project focusing on economic inequality in Memphis 50 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Her initial fund-raising round: $3,000 from friends and family. “I started with nothing,” she told me in a recent phone interview. “I lived off of credit cards for the first year-and-a-half while we were launching.” 

As revenue from philanthropic donations grew, she paid that debt off, and set a path for growth. In 2020, Thomas won the prestigious Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for a series that exposed Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare’s rapacious debt collection policies. The MLK50 series, produced in partnership with ProPublica, got stunning results. Ultimately, the hospital erased almost $12 million in patient debt.

The Selden Ring prompted new interest from fund-raisers. But Thomas also speaks openly about the difficulty journalists of color face in raising philanthropic dollars. In fact, according to Borealis Philanthropy, which focuses on social justice and transformation, between 2009 and 2015 a scant 6% of the $1.2 billion in grants invested in journalism, news and information in the United States went to organizations serving specific racial and ethnic groups. Only 7 percent went toward projects that served economically disadvantaged populations.

“After our story published, funders that had told me ‘no’ called me,” Thomas said. “Now nothing had changed, they knew I was working with ProPublica when they told me we were risky, we weren’t big enough. This is part of why I’m so explicit and vocal about it, because people should not have to clear the bars that I’ve had to clear.”

I’ll share more of Thomas’ wide-ranging, wise interview in a future post.

By Dan Kennedy

From time to time I’ve taken note of rare instances when Gannett has sold some of its 1,000 or so papers to local ownership. In Massachusetts, for example, The Inquirer & Mirror of Nantucket was acquired last fall by a group headed by the editor and a local businessman.

Kristen Hare of Poynter asked Gannett for some numbers, it turns out that the chain has sold 24 papers to community interests. (Be sure not to miss the correction. As you’ll see, Gannett can’t even keep track of how many papers it owns.)

Not that there’s any benevolent motive at work here. Gannett is going to do what’s best for its bottom line, and a few isolated weeklies don’t fit with its strategy of regional groups, dailies and stories shared across papers regardless of whether they have any local interest.

Just recently, Gannett shut down two weeklies west of Boston — the Marlborough Enterprise and the Hudson Sun. Maybe there weren’t any local buyers available. But those towns are also covered by Gannett’s MetroWest Daily News, so there was an incentive not to empower any possible competitors.

Writing for the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, Mark Jacob speculates that the hedge fund Alden Global Initiative might sell off some of the nine major-market dailies it acquired when it gobbled up Tribune Publishing earlier this year. I suppose anything is possible, but that seemed to fly out the window when Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum’s efforts to buy Tribune fell short. Bainum planned to break up the chain, starting with The Baltimore Sun, which he wanted to donate to a nonprofit. In the end, though, Alden’s offer prevailed, even though it was loaded with undisclosed debt.

Jacob also profiles The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, a rare instance of a newspaper that Alden was willing to sell to local interests, and The New Bedford Light, launched despite Gannett’s refusal to sell The Standard-Times.

And then there is this odd observation by Jacob:

In some ways, large chains can be beneficial for local news consumers. They often bring website expertise, technical support and consistent business practices. And they may have a greater ability to recruit talent.

No. Some chains are better than others, but all of them are dedicated to the proposition that newspapers exist mainly so that the owners can squeeze out profits that could otherwise be invested in news and technology. Even in terms of digital publishing, I have rarely encountered an independent news website that is as clunky and intrusive as a typical chain site.

As the old saying goes: Local doesn’t scale.

By Dan Kennedy

Previously published at GBH News.

Can government help solve the local news crisis? The notion sounds absurd, even dangerous. You get what you pay for, and if government officials are funneling money to media outlets, then it’s not unreasonable to expect that they’ll demand sticky-sweet favorable coverage in return.

Yet the situation is so dire that once-unthinkable ideas need to be on the table. Since 2004, some 2,100 newspapers have closed, leaving about 1,800 communities across the country bereft of coverage. About 30,000 newsroom jobs disappeared between 2008 and 2020. The consequences range from the potential for increased corruption to a decline in voter turnout for local elections.

Now federal legislation long in the making may finally be ready to move ahead. Believe it or not, the bill is bipartisan. It also manages to avoid the entangling alliances that would endanger journalistic independence. That’s because the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, introduced in the Senate last week and in the House a month earlier, relies on tax credits rather than direct government assistance.

“This clever, bipartisan bill would provide more help for local news than any time in about a century, yet it’s done in a very First-Amendment-friendly way,” writes Steven Waldman, the co-founder of the Rebuild Local News Coalition as well as the co-founder and president of Report for America. (Disclosure: Report for America, which places young reporters at news organizations around the country, is part of the GroundTruth Project, affiliated with GBH in Boston.)

So how would the bill work? Essentially, it would provide three tax credits that would expire after five years, giving media outlets some runway to move toward long-term sustainability. I am oversimplying, but here is the rough outline:

• News consumers would be able to write off $250 a year that they spend on subscriptions or on donations to nonprofit news organizations.

• News organizations would receive tax benefits for hiring or retaining journalists.

• Local small businesses would receive tax credits for advertising in local newspapers and news websites and on television and radio stations.

The benefits would be restricted to small news organizations, defined as those with 750 employees or fewer in the House bill or fewer than 1,000 in the Senate bill.

At a time when Congress seems incapable of doing anything, some version of the bill appears to stand a good chance of passing. After all, elected officials, regardless of party or ideology, like to be covered by the hometown press, and the bill would help ensure that there will continue to be a press. As of Tuesday, there were 32 co-sponsors in the House — 25 Democrats and 7 Republicans. Because the Senate version was just introduced, the only co-sponsors so far are the three Democrats who introduced it — Maria Cantwell of Washington state, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Kelly of Arizona.

Among the all-Democratic Massachusetts delegation, Sen. Ed Markey will support the bill and has asked to be a co-sponsor, says Markey spokeswoman Giselle Barry. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is studying the legislation and has not yet stated a position, according to Warren spokeswoman Nora Keefe. On the House side, Reps. Jim McGovern and Seth Moulton are co-sponsors, and Mary Rose Tarpey, a spokeswoman for Rep. Stephen Lynch, says that Lynch will also be a co-sponsor, as he was during the previous session.

Government assistance for news is not new. During the early days of the republic, postal subsidies were the foundation upon which the distribution system for newspapers and magazines was built. Today, nonprofit news organizations ranging from hyperlocal websites to public broadcasters benefit from tax incentives that allow their donors to write off the money they give and that exempts the media outlets themselves from having to pay taxes.

Given the catastrophic state in which journalism finds itself, some activists and scholars are calling for more direct funding of news. For instance, Victor Pickard, a scholar at Penn’s Annenberg School, advocates much higher government spending on public media. Longtime media reformer Robert McChesney has talked about giving as much as $35 billion over five years to elected citizens councils that would fund local news and underwrite startups.

But there are dangers in such approaches. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Republican-dominated legislature cut off $750,000 to the state’s seven public radio and television stations after one of them, WITF Radio of Harrisburg, began calling out any elected official who continued to challenge the validity of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, while conceding there was no evidence of a direct cause-and-effect over what was admittedly a small amount of funding, wrote in his weekly newsletter that the action “shows the enormous peril of government dollars for journalism, even as a partial solution. In an era when a growing number of elected officials are waging war on the truth, from election results to coronavirus vaccines, would journalists be forced to choose between an important story or their survival?”

By contrast, the federal bill under consideration avoids those problems by putting as much distance as possible between elected officials and the aid that news organizations would receive.

My one reservation about the bill is that chain-owned newspapers would benefit along with independent projects. That said, the Rebuild Local News Coalition, whose members represent more than 3,000 newsrooms, includes some of the most public-spirited organizations that are working on these problems, such as LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, the Lenfest Institute and the Solutions Journalism Network.

Perhaps the problem of chain ownership could be addressed, as Waldman proposes, by giving tax breaks to the likes of Gannett and Alden Global Capital if they sell their papers to local nonprofits and public benefit corporations. I would also suggest tax penalties if they decline to do so. Corporate ownership is killing local news just as surely as technological change and the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, and we need to get the publicly traded corporations and hedge funds out.

At a time when political and cultural polarization at the national level is tearing us apart, local news can help encourage the kind of civic engagement we need to rebuild community. But that can’t happen if the newspaper has gone out of business or is on life support, and if nothing else has come along to take its place.

Fundamentally, what’s at issue is that the advertising model that paid for journalism until recent years has collapsed. Publishers need to find a way forward, whether through reader revenue, nonprofit funding, paid events or even starting a bar and wedding venue next to the newsroom, as The Big Bend Sentinel in West Texas did.

The Local Journalism Sustainability Act will help sustain local news while we search for a workable model that doesn’t rely on advertising. After 15 years of declining revenues and dying newspapers, it may be our last chance to get it right.

By Dan Kennedy

Axios has a story on “journalism’s two Americas” — the thriving national media and struggling local news outlets, mainly newspapers. “The disparate fortunes skew what gets covered,” write Sara Fischer and Nicholas Johnston, “elevating big national political stories at the expense of local, community-focused news.”

The data they present isn’t new, but it’s striking nevertheless. Local reporters earn an average annual salary of $49,000, compared to more than $65,000 for national reporters. Of course, many of those national jobs are in the ultra-high-cost New York era, which means the disparity may not be quite as great as those two numbers suggest. Still, the national media are growing and hiring, while local newspapers — most of them owned by corporate chains and hedge funds — continue to eliminate jobs.

Fischer and Johnston note that CNN is hiring 450 people for its new CNN+ streaming service. And Fischer reported just a little while ago that NBC is “adding hundreds of jobs to its digital organization,” mainly for news-oriented positions.

Not all news on the community journalism front is bad, though. The apocalyptic stories about what’s taking place at the grassroots invariably focus on chains owned by the likes of Gannett and Alden Global Capital. By contrast, entrepreneurs are launching for-profit and nonprofit digital startups at a dizzying rate. Chris Krewson, the executive director of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers writes:

Research shows new newsrooms are launching fast, 50 a year for the last five years. They’re for-profit, non-profit, public-benefit corporations, and LLCs; they’re a husband-and-wife team covering a small town; they’re a staff of dozens holding politicians to account at the statewide level….

They’re not replacing the newspaper. They don’t need to. This nascent industry has the potential to grow beyond the limitations of newspapers, to truly reflect and serve communities large and small, rural, urban, Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer… and on and on. We just have to stop thinking about saving the unsaveable and build businesses that serve the needs of communities first. In fact, what these publications are starting to offer is just as good, if not better, than the legacies they’re increasingly supplanting.

I’ve been tracking such projects since the late ’00s. From New Haven to San Diego, from Burlington, Vermont, to Batavia, New York, community journalists step up when there’s a market failure on the part of the local legacy newspaper. Ellen Clegg and I are following similar projects across the country.

There’s no question that these are tough times for local news. But there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic as well.

By Dan Kennedy

Six local news projects will launch or expand after winning a competition held by the Tiny News Collective — a joint venture of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers and News Catalyst, based at Temple University. News Catalyst receives funding from the Knight Foundation and the Lenfest Institute. According to the announcement:

Thanks to a partnership with the Google News Initiative, each organization in the first cohort will receive a $15,000 stipend to help create the capacity for the founders to get started. In addition, the GNI has funded their first year of membership dues in the Collective and LION Publishers.

The projects range from an organization covering education news in part of Orange County, California, to an outlet with the wonderful name Black by God, which seeks “to share perspectives that cultivate, curate, and elevate Black voices from West Virginia.”

Forty organizations applied. Among the judges were Kate Maxwell, co-founder and publisher of The Mendocino Voice, a news co-op that is one of the local news projects we’re tracking at What Works.

The Tiny News Collective strikes me as a more interesting approach to dealing with the local news crisis than initiatives unveiled recently by Substack and Facebook. Those require you to set up shop on their platforms. By contrast, the Tiny News Collective is aimed at helping community journalism entrepreneurs to achieve sustainability on their own rather than become cogs in someone else’s machine.

By Ellen Clegg

Google and Facebook are the epitome of sheer American chutzpah — as American as, say, Mark Zuckerberg wakeboarding across a lake on the Fourth of July, waving the Stars and Stripes in an irony-free display of patriotism. But both tech giants also have a global reach — and ambitions that seem to extend at least as far as the Kármán Line. 

So it’s no surprise to learn that both companies recently signed deals with a slew of Canadian publishers, including digital startups as well as storied newsrooms like The Globe and Mail in Toronto. David Skok, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Logic, a digital news site that covers Canada’s innovation economy, provides a cogent explanation in his latest “Letter from the Editor” — and explains why he’s skeptical that Big Tech will ever truly have the public’s interest at heart.

(Skok founded the for-profit business, tech, and politics site three years ago, after stints at the Toronto Star and the Boston Globe, where he was managing editor and vice president of digital. Before landing at the Globe, Skok was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he co-authored a noteworthy white paper on disruption in the news industry with Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor. Entitled “Breaking News,” it’s still worthy of a read.) 

Eight Canadian publishers signed up to partner with Google News Showcase starting in the fall. Google will pay the publishers for content, and in return, the media sites will be able to sell online advertising and sign up new subscribers. Google Canada is doing its best to sound like an advocate of robust and unfettered coverage of community news. Or even like a friendly neighbor you might want to have a Labatt’s with. “We’ve never relied on high-quality, community-based journalism more than we have during the Covid crisis,” Sabrina Geremia, an official at Google Canada, told The Globe and Mail (subscription required). But neither Google or the publishers would comment on the value of the agreement, or the duration of the license. Facebook is launching a similar initiative, signing up 14 Canadian partners for its News Innovation Test. 

Skok talked to a half-dozen publishers who were not part of the Google News Showcase deal. They asked to remain anonymous, but didn’t mince words: all told Skok they were angry that “the Big Tech platforms were applying restrictive and opaque criteria to privilege select publishers and employing a divide-and-conquer approach in a race to get ahead of the threat of legislation.” Skok points to a tantalizing initiative in Denmark, where a change in European Union copyright law has prompted publishers to join forces in order to bargain collectively with Google and Facebook. Google, Facebook, and now Amazon continue to rake in a significant portion of digital advertising dollars, leaving low-rent programmatic scraps for news sites. (Google’s share of the U.S. digital advertising market last year was 28.9%, and Facebook accounted for 25.2%, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon rose to 10.3% from 7.8% in 2019.)

“Big Tech’s sheer wealth, scale and influence mean these decisions will profoundly shape what you read, distorting the marketplace of ideas,” Skok writes. “This is not simply private-market players paying fair-market value in exchange for products — it’s private companies using their trillion-dollar market caps and immense bargaining power to steamroll an entire sector in pursuit of their own self-interest.”

By Dan Kennedy

As scholars from Paul Starr to Victor Pickard have observed, newspapers in the United States have benefited mightily from postal subsidies since the earliest days of the republic.

Starting in the Reagan era, though, the U.S. Postal Service has been run under the misguided notion that it should break even or turn a profit rather than be operated as a public service. As a result, postal rates for periodicals have been rising for more than a generation, putting additional pressure on newspaper and magazine publishers who are already straining under the economic challenges posed by technology, cultural shifts — and, now, the post-pandemic recovery.

The latest bad news comes in the form of a report from The Associated Press that rates on periodicals are scheduled to rise by more than 8% on Aug. 29. The AP story, by David Bauder and Anthony Izaguirre, says the increase is “part of a broad plan pushed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to overhaul mail operations.”

DeJoy, you may recall, is the ethically challenged Trump appointee who slowed down mail service last year, thus imperiling vote-by-mail efforts in the midst of the pandemic. For some reason, he appears to have more job security than Vladimir Putin.

Now, you might think that rising postal rates would simply push publishers to hasten their transition to digital. But it’s a simple matter of reality that print advertising continues to play an important role in keeping newspapers and magazines afloat. For instance, earlier this year, Ed Miller, the co-founder and editor of start-up Provincetown Independent, explained that he offers a print edition alongside a robust website because otherwise it would be just too difficult to make money.

Northwestern University Professor Penelope Muse Abernathy tells the AP that the effect of higher postal rates could be devastating for small local news projects that are already struggling. “It is one of several nicks and slashes that can damage the bottom line, especially if you are an independent publisher who is operating at break even or in the low single digits of profitability,” she says. “And most are.”

Ironically, a section of the Postal Service’s website sings the glories of how subsidies helped foster robust journalism, quoting George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The essay starts like this:

From the beginning of the American republic, the Founding Fathers recognized that the widespread dissemination of information was central to national unity. They realized that to succeed, a democratic government required an informed electorate, which in turn depended upon a healthy exchange of news, ideas, and opinions.

At a time when the idea of government funding for journalism is being debated in the public square, postal subsidies stand out as a particularly benign way to go about doing that. As with tax benefits for nonprofit news organizations, postal subsidies are indirect. That makes it difficult for the government to punish individual media outlets for tough coverage — as is happening right now in Western Pennsylvania, where the Republican-dominated state legislature has eliminated funding for public broadcasters even as one station has persisted in calling out the Republicans for touting the “big lie” about the 2020 election. (Republican officials deny there’s a connection.)

It’s long past time for Louis DeJoy to hit the bricks and for the post office to be reorganized as a public service. Foremost among those services should be helping to provide the public with reliable, affordable journalism.

By Ellen Clegg

You’ve no doubt heard of “pink slime.” To put it in polite terms, it’s the pastel-hued meat paste used in some processed hamburger meat. (I’m not linking to a photo: You can thank me later.)

Thanks to an episode of “This American Life,” it’s also a term that was used to describe Journatic, a company that outsourced hyperlocal “news” written by poorly paid offshore reporters — and marketed to mainstream newspapers. Ultimately, the fake bylines assigned to writers in the Philippines were a bridge too far for newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, so Journatic lost traction.

But the drive to try to automate local news — eliminating skilled reporters, assignment editors, copy editors, designers, photographers, product specialists, and engineers — hasn’t gone away, unfortunately. During the run-up to the 2020 presidential campaign, “pink slime” journalism came oozing back in the form of Metric Media, a vast network of “news” sites that aspire to a kind of quick-scan faux legitimacy. As Priyanjana Bengani reported in the Columbia Journalism Review, the number of Metric Media sites tripled over the course of 2020, constituting a shadowy network of supposedly hyperlocal outlets that were in fact funded by political operations and agenda-driven agencies and “designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data.” Metric Media is run by Brian Timpone, and “is rooted in deception, eschewing hallmarks of news reporting like fairness and transparency,” according to an investigation by The New York Times. 

So how bad is Metric Media? Where’s the beef? Two professors at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University have applied some actual metrics to Metric in a new study released this month, and the results are deeply troubling — especially against a backdrop of greed-fueled corporate media consolidation that has created ghost newspapers and news deserts across the country. Duke researchers Asa Royal and Philip M. Napoli scraped the front pages of 999 Metric Media outlets every day for more than two months to assess whether the content was serving communities or meeting an audience. The results of their study, “Local Journalism’s Possible Future: Metric Media and its Approach to Community Information Needs,” show glaring gaps in coverage and toxic levels of contempt for local readers. Some of their top-line findings:

• Most Metric Media sites lack any original content, and, in general, old content is not regularly updated. An overwhelming majority of stories appear to be automatically generated.
• In one 78-day observation period, nearly two-thirds of outlets did not publish a single article written by a human being.
• Stories about state and national politics are shown much more often than local news.
• Instead of democratizing local news for individual towns, Metric Media operates hubs in each state; on an average day, those hubs generate around 45% of the content shown across the network, despite only making up 5% of the network’s population.
• Metric Media dedicated an outsized amount of coverage to stories about electoral fraud in states where Donald Trump was contesting the vote during the 2020 general election.

Their conclusion: “Though the financial prospects for local newspapers are suffering, automated large-scale national operations appear, in this case, to be a poor substitute for the capital-intensive inputs of traditional local news.”

Royal and Napoli bring bracing gusts of data and fact to the ongoing effort to define what constitutes local news. And a reality check about the resource demands. When I was an editor at The Boston Globe, I was part of an effort to ramp up hyperlocal coverage in scores of cities and towns by creating twice-weekly print sections that were replated to zone in on targeted slices of the Globe’s coverage map: Globe West, Globe North, Globe NorthWest, Globe South. We hired reporters, editors, copy editors and advertising executives.

I spent a good part of a summer in the mezzanine-level production offices, the mailroom, and even on the loading dock on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester learning about the complex logistics of distribution and the timing of press runs. (Drivers knew the dimensions of their truck interior and calculated how many bundles of zoned sections would fit as they timed out their delivery route.) We experimented with different labels for the bundles and tested which were the most readable coming down the chute from the press. We leased office space in each region, bought scanners and copiers and computers.

Reporters attended town meetings and zoning board hearings and wrote everything from news stories to profiles to arts and entertainment features. Certainly, local government, schools, and police forces generated data that could be automated — data that readers wanted. And with a modern digital strategy, that data can be scraped and turned into news bites that are readily consumable, even welcome. But local doesn’t really scale — even if the cost structure of the rumbling, industrial print production cycle is stripped away for digital. Journalism that matters still means sustained investment in on-the-ground observation, in humans who can produce sustained beat reporting, painstaking investigations, pinpoint editing, and memorable visuals and design. Add in live events that allow for a robust exchange of ideas, even if only on Zoom, and advertising and marketing. “Pink slime” sites neglect a signal fact of human history, much in evidence during pandemic isolation: Connection and community are enduring. Storytelling is a timeless craft, which strengthens those bonds. In the end, that seems unlikely to be hijacked by an algorithm or a reporter-bot.

By Dan Kennedy

It seems like a story from a world we left behind. In late February 2020, I wrote a column about The Big Bend Sentinel, a tiny newspaper in West Texas that was supporting its journalism — and boosting the community’s connection with the paper — by operating a café next to the newsroom.

“Can drinks, community events and the occasional wedding subsidize small-town journalism?,” asked The New York Times.

Well, we all know what happened next. So I was pleasantly surprised last month when Max Kabat, the co-owner of the Sentinel, popped up on the podcast “E&P Reports” and announced that the Sentinel is alive and well.

To my frustration the host, Editor & Publisher owner Mike Blinder, didn’t really press Kabat on how the Sentinel’s café made it through the pandemic. But obviously it did. The Sentinel is based in Marfa, Texas, about halfway between Albuquerque to the west and San Antonio to the east. Kabat and his wife, Maisie Crow, are not your typical rural newspaper publishers — they’re refugees from Brooklyn, where Kabat worked in advertising and Crow was a photojournalist and documentarian. They still pursue those careers, even as Kabat serves as publisher of the Sentinel and a smaller sister paper, the Presidio International, and Crow acts as editor-in-chief.

As for whether the café is helping to support the Sentinel’s journalism, Kabat said the answer is yes:

By Dan Kennedy

Now here’s an interesting idea for engaging the community in local news. The Hinsdalean, a free weekly paper in Chicago’s suburbs, has a stable of 10 local opinion writers who take on such weighty topics as Christmas memories, moving back to town after living abroad, and thoughts about the meaning of regret. And here’s the best part: they’re term-limited.

I learned about this recently in a conversation with Julie McCay Turner, managing editor of The Bedford Citizen, a nonprofit website northwest of Boston. Julie is from Hinsdale, and she keeps up with her hometown through the paper’s lively website. She discovered this unique exercise in civic involvement through a column by the paper’s editor, Pamela Lannom, who was soliciting new writers to replace the five who were cycling out. One slot will be reserved for a high school senior. No politicians, please. And writers are not allowed to use these unpaid positions to tout their businesses or nonprofit organizations.

“Over the years I’ve come to think of many of these writers as my friends,” Lannom wrote. “I might not see most of them more than once a year, but the stories they share create a connection. Reading their columns each week is one of my favorite parts of my job.”

Local opinion can help drive interest in community news and help to overcome the polarization that characterizes national culture these days.

Several months ago I wrote a piece for GBH News about a study conducted by three scholars on what happened after The Desert Sun of Palm Springs, California, dropped from its opinion pages all syndicated columns and references to national politics for one month.

The researchers compared The Desert Sun’s readers to those of a control paper and found that polarization was less than what might otherwise have been expected. The numbers were small and didn’t really prove anything one way or the other. But, as the three observed, the effect was salutary regardless of the actual numbers since the experiment pushed the paper to pay more attention to what was taking place in its own backyard.

“Local newspapers are uniquely positioned to unite communities around shared local identities, cultivated and emphasized through a distinctive home style, and provide a civil and regulated forum for debating solutions to local problems,” they wrote. “In Palm Springs, those local issues were architectural restoration, traffic patterns and environmental conservation. The issues will differ across communities, but a localized opinion page is more beneficial for newspapers and citizens than letters and op-eds speckled with national political vitriol.”

The Hinsdalean itself is a great story, and characteristic of what happens when the legacy news outlet falls victim to market failure. Hinsdale once had a paper called The Doings, which ended up getting absorbed by the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune was subjected to years of downsizing and bad ownership under Tribune Publishing — a situation that only grew worse recently when Tribune was sold to the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

The Hinsdalean, meanwhile, was founded nearly five years ago and has established itself as an award-winning news source. Here’s how its About page begins:

The first issue of The Hinsdalean was published Sept. 28, 2006. This weekly newspaper is dedicated to covering Hinsdale, focusing on the people who live and work here. The founders built the newspaper around the philosophy of community journalism the way it was meant to be. That philosophy recalls simpler times when one newspaper covered one town. The Hinsdalean, which is delivered free each Thursday morning, is the only newspaper that delivers every issue to every home in Hinsdale.

Independent local news is succeeding in hundreds of communities across the country. We need more.