Ellen has a Quick Take on a philanthropic gift from Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, that is designed to cover full tuition for many graduate students in journalism at City University of New York. That’s good news for students wondering whether to take on $50,000 or more in tuition debt to get a master’s degree in journalism at a private university. Craigslist destroyed the classified ad market, but Newmark continues to make his mark as a philanthropist.
Dan offers two cheers for billionaire newspaper ownership. With the news business dealing with a difficult round of layoffs, a number of media observers have jumped to the conclusion that billionaire owners are not the solution to what ails journalism. Well, of course it isn’t. No one ever said otherwise. But the record shows that civic-minded ownership by wealthy owners has proven to be a workable solution to the local news crisis in several cities.
Tracie Powell at the 2019 Knight Foundation Media Forum. Photo (cc) 2019 by the Knight Foundation.
By Ellen Clegg
Tracie Powell founded The Pivot Fund three years ago with a mission. Combining a deep background in philanthropy, journalism, law and racial equity, she launched her novel venture philanthropy organization that is “dedicated to investing $500 million into independent BIPOC-led community news.”
Now, she is drawing industry attention to the gaping inequities that BIPOC nonprofit newsroom founders encounter in the world of philanthropic giving. In a commentary this week for Poynter Online, she highlights an exchange on X between David Simon, the white journalist who became known for his work on the TV show “The Wire,” and Lisa Snowden, a Black woman who is editor and co-founder of the Baltimore Beat.
If you haven’t yet read it, the Beat describes itself as “a Black-led, Black-controlled nonprofit newspaper and media outlet. Our mission is to honor the tradition of the Black press and the spirit of alt-weekly journalism with reporting that focuses on community, questions power structures, and prioritizes thoughtful engagement with our readers.”
And in keeping with those storied traditions, the Beat is indeed a lively read, with stories as varied as a report on demonstrations calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, an examination of the movie “Origin,” and a calendar of government and community meetings. Snowden partnered with a community group called Open Works of Baltimore to build a special kind of news box for its biweekly print edition. Called “Beat Boxes,” the street-corner boxes house the newspaper but have compartments on the top that allow residents to stash items for people in need – think anything from canned goods to a pack of diapers.
But back to that exchange on X. When David Smith, chairman of the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcasting network, and conservative columnist Armstrong Williams bought The Baltimore Sun, the announcement provided a fund-raising opportunity for the two nonprofit newsrooms covering the city — The Baltimore Banner and the Beat — which stress independent coverage rather than hewing to a partisan line.
When Snowden wrote an anodyne tweet directed at Simon’s account and linked to the Beat’s donation page — a common practice for nonprofit fundraising appeals — Simon accused the Beat of, in his words, a racially based shakedown. Then he blocked the Beat.
As Powell astutely points out, this episode highlights the disparity in philanthropic support for emerging nonprofit newsrooms led by BIPOC founders, and those led by white founders who live in wealthier communities or have more robust networks to tap. Or both.
Earlier this month, The Pivot Fund invested $150,000 in the Beat. The Beat also raised $1 million in 2022. While this seems like a generous level of funding, Powell contrasts it with the Banner. The Banner also launched in 2022 with $50 million and the backing of hotel magnate Stewart Bainum, who has talked about giving the newsroom four or five years of on-ramp.
In my reporting for our book, “What Works in Community News,” Wendi C. Thomas, the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, talked about the dismissive and doubting culture that BIPOC founders can face when they approach philanthropic organizations. Thomas isn’t one to complain — she’s more apt to head to a local courtroom with a reporter’s notebook or simply put her head down and write. As she put it: “The evidence-based rigor we demand in other sectors doesn’t seem to apply here.”
When I traveled to Memphis to report on media enterprises in that city of 630,000, I encountered this firsthand, over drinks at a local restaurant. The man sitting across from me was voluble and highly confident. He was white, and he was sharing his observations about the rich media ecosystem that has sprouted amid the ruins of the once-robust legacy newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, which has been hollowed out by the Gannett chain. He ticked off an impressive list: The Daily Memphian, Chalkbeat, a string of business publications, public television, public radio, and broadcast TV newsrooms. In addition, The Institute for Public Service Reporting, at the University of Memphis, was breaking investigative stories.
It was an affable discussion, a quick overview. Then he asked me who else I was meeting with during my visit. I said I had been invited to a briefing at the offices of MLK50.
He looked surprised and said: “That advocacy site?”
But MLK50, a nonprofit, is not what I’d call an advocacy site. It doesn’t endorse candidates for election. There are guest essays, but the focus is on investigative reporting and explanatory journalism. Thomas and her executive editor, Adrienne Johnson Martin, focus their reporting team on issues like public health, workplace safety, affordable housing and the racial wealth gap. In a city that is 66% Black, Thomas noted, that makes some observers view MLK50 as a niche publication.
As she told an audience at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, in 2022: “When I worked at the daily paper in Memphis, if you made a list of people who were quoted on the front page, maybe 95% would be white. Maybe 85% were men.” Invoking the ghost of Walter Lippmann, she continued: “Objectivity, as a lot of journalists have said, just meant cis, hetero, American-born, able-bodied, likely Protestant white men. That demographic is not the majority of Memphis. So, if we were to reflect that position, we would be a niche publication.”
The 2023 report called “The State of Local News,” issued by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, warns that this divide is growing wider in underserved urban communities and in rural areas. That, in turn, creates an information vacuum that opens the door for disinformation and conspiracy theories to sashay in via platforms. As the Medill authors write: “This partitioning of our citizenry poses a far-reaching crisis for our democracy as it simultaneously struggles with political polarization, a lack of civic engagement and the proliferation of misinformation and information online.”
Equity in the world of philanthropic funding is part of the answer.
Dan will be taking part in a webinar on “Saving Local News” on Wednesday, Feb. 14, from 3 to 4 p.m., sponsored by the Boston University Alumni Association.
The Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison. Photo (cc) 2012 by Teemu008.
By Dan Kennedy
Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin are considering three pieces of legislation to bolster local news that are borrowed from California, New Jersey and a federal proposal that hit a dead end several years ago. Erin McGroarty of The Cap Times breaks down the Local Journalism Package:
• One bill would fund 25 journalists to be placed in local newsrooms across the state. The reporting fellows would be chosen by University of Wisconsin journalism professors and outside experts, and would be paid a $40,000 salary for a year. This bears some resemblance to a program at UC Berkeley, where a $25 million appropriation is paying for reporting fellows to work at news organizations that cover underserved communities for five years.
• A proposed Wisconsin Civic Information Consortium would award grants aimed at “addressing communities’ information needs, bolstering media literacy and civic engagement, and supporting access to high-quality, consistent local journalism, especially among underserved communities.” The bill appears to be based on the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, which has awarded some $5.5 million to support 81 news and information projects over the past several years.
• Wisconsin residents would be able to claim a tax credit for up to $250 in annual subscription fees to local news outlets. Several years ago such a provision was part of a federal bill that also included tax credits for local advertisers and for publishers who hired and retained journalists. That bill went nowhere, but Congress is currently considering a new version that includes the advertiser and publishers credits but not the subscriber credits.
All in all, the Wisconsin measures are modest steps that could help ease the local news crisis, although they are no substitute for the hard work of news entrepreneurs on the ground. With Congress seemingly unable to do much of anything constructive, it’s encouraging to see some leadership at the state level.
Near Davis Square in Somerville. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.
By Dan Kennedy
Nearly two years ago, Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and the Somerville Journal into one weekly paper called The Transcript & Journal. Even worse, nearly all local news was removed from the new paper, replaced with regional news from elsewhere in the chain.
In Medford, where I live, we now have nothing, although I’m optimistic that will change in the near future. In Somerville, though, there were several alternatives, foremost among them the weekly Somerville Times and a digital outlet called the Somerville Wire. Unfortunately, the Wire is shutting down. Jason Pramas, the editor, writes that the Wire got to be too much of a financial burden as well as a drain on his other work with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) and HorizonMass. (Pramas talked about both of those projects in a recent appearance on the “What Works” podcast.)
Besides, Pramas notes that Somerville has been getting more coverage lately, as the Cambridge Day has expanded into the city and The Boston Globe has begun a weekly “Camberville & beyond” newsletter. Pramas writes that “while Somerville is still in danger of becoming a ‘news desert’ (a community that no longer has a professionally-produced news outlet covering it), it’s now getting more news coverage than it was in 2021,” when the Wire launched.
Pramas and his colleagues Chris Faraone and John Loftus continue to do good and important work, and I wish them all the best.
First, Billy Baker of The Boston Globe quotes Ellen and mentions our book in a feature on The Local News, which covers Ipswich and Rowley and is one of a number of nonprofit startups founded to fill the gap left behind when Gannett abandoned its weekly papers in Eastern Massachusetts. “This is what the founders envisioned, which is a lot of little newspapers in all the little towns in New England,” Ellen told Baker. As Baker notes, Ellen doesn’t just write about it — she also does it, as she’s also the co-founder and co-chair of another startup, Brookline.News.
Second, Colorado College journalism professor Corey Hutchins writes about our book in his well-read newsletter, “Inside the News in Colorado.” Dan visited Colorado in September 2021, mainly to report on upstart Colorado Sun but also to learn more about how the Sun fits into the state’s larger journalistic community One afternoon Dan drove from Denver to Colorado Springs in order to interview Hutchins. “I don’t know of any other state where there’s such a focus and attention from folks here who want to support a thriving local news ecosystem matched with attention from funders, smart media thinkers from around the country,” Hutchins said.
