Month: January 2024

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with Norma Rodriguez-Reyes, the president of  La Voz Hispana de Connecticut. La Voz started circulating in New Haven in 1993, but fell on hard times. Norma helped take charge of the paper in 1998 when it verged on bankruptcy. Under her direction, the for-profit newspaper has grown into the state’s most-read free Spanish-language weekly. It reaches more than 125,000 Spanish speakers across Connecticut.

Norma is among the entrepreneurs highlighted in Dan and Ellen’s new book, “What Works in Community News,” which, at long last, will be out by the time you hear this podcast. In addition to her work at La Voz, Norma is the board chair of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit umbrella that includes the New Haven Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel, and WNHH community radio. The New Haven Indy and the radio station both work out of La Voz’s offices in downtown New Haven.

Dan will be in New Haven next Tuesday, Jan. 16 (details here), to talk about our book in a conversation with Paul Bass, the founder of the New Haven Indy and now the executive director of the Online Journalism Project. Paul is also in charge of yet another nonprofit media project, the Independent Review Crew, which produces arts and culture reviews in cities across the country, including Boston. He talked about the project on our podcast last September.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a surprising development in local news on Martha’s Vineyard. The ownership of the weekly Martha’s Vineyard Times has changed hands. Longtime publishers and owners Peter and Barbara Oberfest sold the Island news organization to Steve Bernier, a West Tisbury resident and longtime owner of Cronig’s Market.  And the acting publisher is Charles Sennott, a highly decorated journalist and founder and editor of The GroundTruth Project. He also helped launch Report for America.

Dan discusses a hard situation at Eugene Weekly, an alternative weekly in Oregon that’s been around for four decades. EW has shut down and laid off its 10-person staff after learning that the paper was the victim of embezzlement. Although the folks at EW are optimistic that a fundraising campaign will get them back on their feet, the closure has had a devastating effect on Eugene’s local news scene.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

By Ellen Clegg

When former Google executive Steve Grove was named CEO and publisher of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis last April, expectations were understandably high.

His predecessor, Michael Klingensmith, who retired in January 2023, led a remarkable turnaround during his 13 years in the job. Klingensmith, a Minnesota native who had a storied career at Time Inc., was named publisher of the year by Editor & Publisher and notched three Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure — including the 2021 prize for breaking news reporting for the paper’s “urgent, authoritative and nuanced coverage” of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020.

Grove initially faced some tough coverage from Racket, an alternative digital outlet. (Our interview with Racket editor and co-founder Em Cassel can be found here.) But he seems to be settling in and feeling Minnesota. After a summer spent shadowing reporters and traveling the state on a listening tour — including a stint at a booth at the renowned Minnesota State Fair — Grove announced his first big strategic move this month: the Star Tribune is expanding, staking a claim to news coverage in communities throughout the North Star State, from the Iron Range along Lake Superior in the north to Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic, in the southeast.

In a press release published in Editor & Publisher, Grove announced: “At a time when many news organizations are contracting, we are making significant resource investments to ensure the voices of communities around our great state are represented.”

The Star Tribune bills itself as the largest news organization in the Midwest, a bold claim that is likely true in an era of the Gannett-driven collapse of regional and local newsrooms. As we’ve written in our book, “What Works in Community News,” which was released Jan. 9, the Star Tribune newsroom stood at 235 journalists when we interviewed editor Suki Dardarian in June 2022. The Strib, as the paper is known locally, serves Minneapolis, a city of nearly 430,000 people, and a larger metropolitan area of nearly 3 million. While that staffing level represents a 37% decline from 2007, when the newsroom stood at 375, it is comparable in size to that of The Boston Globe, which serves a city of 675,000 and a metropolitan area of more than 4 million people.

During my reporting forays back to Minneapolis for the book (full disclosure: I grew up in a suburb near the city, was a summer intern at the morning Minneapolis Tribune and spent some quality time at the University of Minnesota), a source told me that the Strib remains bullish on print circulation because there are engaged readers in many of the state’s 87 counties who get a copy delivered.

The Star Tribune was one of the original newsrooms selected to be part of the Table Stakes program, an initiative underwritten by the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund and the Knight Foundation that guides newsrooms in thinking strategically about digital transformation and audience engagement.

In an interview for the book, editor and senior vice president Suki Dardarian told me, “That program has continued to serve us in all its iterations. We even have a few people who are doing another Table Stakes project now. It really helped unite us around the company — and in the industry — with others who were trying to innovate and change and find ways to move forward.”

She said that working across news platforms collaboratively remains a crucial goal, but so does adapting for a diverse readership and engaging with the audience, which will entail better hiring, diversity audits and attention to hiring pipelines. In the end, she observed, “It’s all audience-driven. It’s where we have been headed, and where we are headed.”

And the expansion plans are nothing if not ambitious. The newsroom has posted jobs for reporters in north central and southwest Minnesota and is expanding existing teams in communities outside the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Back in the downtown Minneapolis office, the Strib is launching a “Today Desk” to track breaking news online and beefing up that reporting team. Grove is also in the market for a greater Minnesota columnist to roam the state’s rural communities and report on trends — the kind of coverage that has been harder for small nonprofit media startups to sustain.

Decades back, roving Strib columnist Jim Klobuchar, who hailed from the Iron Range, captured the life and times of Minnesota with vivid writing and reporting, making him something of a local legend. Klobuchar’s career sparked an appreciation for the travails of the ink-stained wretch in his daughter, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Klobuchar sponsored the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which, although far from perfect, would allow news organizations both large and samll to band together to negotiate terms with platforms like Google and Facebook.

I’m sure she’ll be watching the Strib’s bold expansion —and reading — with interest.

A little over five years ago, at a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square, Ellen and Dan sketched out a rough outline for the book that would become “What Works in Community News.” Today is our book’s official publication date. We owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people, including our publisher, Beacon Press; the news entrepreneurs and thought leaders who we interviewed for the book as well as for our podcast; and our families for putting up with us.

Our launch party is today at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, and it looks like we’re going to have a full house. If you haven’t registered but would like to tune in, you can do so here. In addition, on Thursday, Jan. 11, from 7 to 8 p.m., Dan will be giving a presentation on our book via Zoom. It’s being sponsored by the Tewksbury Public Library, but we know a number of other libraries are taking part as well. You can register here. Dan will be solo; we’re pursuing a divide-and-conquer strategy, handling some events together and some with one or the other.

We are really looking forward to tonight in Brookline, and we hope to see you on the other end of the screen this Thursday.

By Dan Kennedy

Is there a silver lining hiding somewhere inside the rise of newspaper ownership by private equity? Brant Houston says yes. In a recent essay for the Gateway Journalism Review, Houston argues that what he calls the “Alden effect” has provided a significant boost to startup news projects as communities fight back against the destruction of their legacy newspapers. Alden is a reference to Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that owns two newspaper chains, MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which between them control about 100 papers. Houston writes:

Alden Global is a call to arms for the creation or expansion of alternative, and often nonprofit newsrooms. A call to arms that should have been sounded years ago.

Call it the Alden effect.

Alden’s brazen and brutal harvesting of a disrupted and distressed news industry has made clear the long death spiral of newspapers and legacy media. And it has made clear how a new business model for journalism (usually a nonprofit model or a public benefit corporation) is needed and how independent digital newsrooms need to form deeper alliances.

Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois. He talked about his new book, “Changing Models for Journalism,” in an appearance last June on the “What Works” podcast. And a personal note: He was my first editor at The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, Massachusetts, way back in 1979.

In his Gateway article, Houston traces such Alden-driven moves as a closer relationship between two existing nonprofits, Voice of San Diego and inewsource, in response to Alden’s acquisition of The San Diego Union-Tribune; the merger of WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times following Alden’s takeover of the Chicago Tribune; the founding of The Colorado Sun by 10 Denver Post journalists who’d had enough of Alden’s cuts; and the wealthy hotel magnate Stewart Bainum’s decision to found a high-profile nonprofit, The Baltimore Banner, after he lost out to Alden in a bid to purchase Tribune Publishing, whose holdings include The Baltimore Sun.

Ellen Clegg and I encountered the Alden effect over and over in our reporting for our book, “What Works in Community News.” We might call it the “Alden and Gannett effect,” since we also examined communities whose newspapers had been shredded by Gannett, our largest newspaper chain with about 200 papers. In addition to Denver, the projects we write about that have their origins in cuts by Alden and Gannett include:

• Memphis, Tennessee, where nonprofits such as MLK50 and the Daily Memphian are filling some of the gaps created by cuts at Gannett’s Commercial Appeal.
• The Bedford Citizen, a small nonprofit in the Boston suburbs launched about a dozen years ago as Gannett’s predecessor company, GateHouse Media, hacked away at the local weekly and ultimately closed it.
• Mendocino County, California, where two refugees from Alden papers started a digital site called The Mendocino Voice.
• Santa Cruz, California, where two former employees of Alden’s Santa Cruz Sentinel founded a nonprofit called Santa Cruz Local and where a larger for-profit, Lookout Santa Cruz, is operating as well.

Starting a news project is grindingly hard work, and Ellen and I came away with enormous respect for the news entrepreneurs we interviewed. It would be easier if legacy newspapers had remained in the hands of local interests. But, as Houston argues, the rise of Alden, Gannett and other chain owners has provided a jolt to efforts aimed at reviving community-based journalism.

By Dan Kennedy

I had hoped there would be good news this morning about Eugene Weekly, a free alternative paper in Oregon that abruptly shut down last week and announced that a former employee had embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, we’re still waiting to see if EW, as it’s called, will be able to raise enough money from its readers to get back on its feet.

The story began to unfold when people encountered a poster inside the bright red boxes that normally hold copies of the paper. The message: “Where’s the Damn Paper? Eugene Weekly is fighting to come back after a massive financial blow.” According to a letter to readers posted online, EW said it had been victimized by someone inside the company. Some $70,000 in printing bills hadn’t been paid. Money that was supposed to have been transferred into employees’ retirement accounts wasn’t. And on and on. The paper stopped print production and laid off its entire 10-employee staff.

EW, founded in 1982, distributes about 30,000 free copies of the paper each week, and is a vital source of news and information. Like most alt-weeklies, it offers a mix of arts and culture, investigative reporting, and entertainment listings. The homepage currently highlights a story about the local performing arts center, which is leasing security scanners for $170,000 a year from a company that is under investigation for letting weapons slip by at schools. Now all of that is in danger. Here’s part of the letter to readers:

Shortly before Christmas, we discovered that EW had been the victim of embezzlement at the hands of someone we once trusted. We are still counting up the damage, but it’s thousands upon thousands. The theft of EW’s funds remained hidden for years and has left our finances in shambles. A team of private forensic accountants is analyzing our books and accounts. We’ve reported the thefts to the Eugene Police Department, which is conducting an investigation.

The Associated Press interviewed Brent Walth, a journalism professor at the University of Oregon, who said EW has had “an outsized impact in filling the widening gaps in news coverage.” Among other things, Walth said the paper runs obituaries of homeless people, a real service at a time when many papers have gotten rid of free obits and instead charge high fees to bereaved families. EW has also played an important role in launching the careers of young journalists, Walth said.

The paper is in the midst of a fundraising campaign, and, according to The New York Times, had received $42,000 in donations as of Monday. Camilla Mortensen, the editor, said the paper needs about $150,000, so it sounds like they’re on their way. If you’d like to help, just click here. My suggestion is that you give directly to the paper rather than to its affiliated nonprofit, which supports public interest reporting. EW itself is for-profit, so your donation will not be tax-deductible. But this is an emergency.

We hope you’ll join us for the launch of our book, “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate.” The event will take place on Tuesday, Jan. 9, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith. It’s free, but Booksmith asks that you register in advance. Ellen and Dan visited nine parts of the country to report on independent local and regional news projects, most of them startups, most of them digital. We came away with profound respect for the news entrepreneurs we met and with optimism for what the future holds.