Month: March 2024

On our latest podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Kyle Munson, president of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation. The foundation was launched in August 2020, during the heart of the pandemic. It was a challenging time for newspapers. As Dan and Ellen write in their book, “What Works in Community News,” the Storm Lake Times Pilot saw a real collapse in local advertising. Art Cullen, the editor, was worried about survival.

The foundation is set up as a nonprofit, so it can receive tax-free donations and philanthropic grants. In turn, it has doled out grants to small papers in western Iowa, including the Carroll Times Herald, La Prensa and the Times Pilot. These grants were critical because the crisis in local news has hit rural areas hard.

Dan has a Quick Take on The Associated Press, which is the principal source of international and national news for local newspapers around the country — and in many cases for state coverage as well. Two major newspaper chains, Gannett and McClatchy, have announced that they are going to use the AP a lot less than they used to, which will result in less money for the AP — and either higher fees, less coverage or both for their remaining clients.

Ellen looks at Outlier Media, a woman-led team of local journalists in Detroit. They formed a network called the Collaborative Detroit Newsrooms network to produce and share news for underserved populations. They’ve won a major international award from the Association of Media Information and Communication. Executive editor Candice Fortman traveled to Barcelona to pick up the juried prize.

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

Ellen Clegg — a retired Boston Globe editor, the co-author of our book, the co-host and producer of our podcast, and the co-chair of the nonprofit Brookline.News — was one of five journalists who received the prestigious Yankee Quill Award this past Saturday. Read about all five here.

The Yankee Quill recognizes great journalists who have also contributed to the betterment of our profession. As the Academy of New England Journalists puts it, “Selection for the award is not based on any single achievement, or for doing your job each day, but rather on the broad influence for good over the course of a career.” Her prepared remarks follow.

Thank you for this honor. Thanks to friends and colleagues, and thank you to my family for your support over many years when I worked nights and weekends, or got a ping from a boss at 5 a.m.

The Yankee Quill award recognizes past achievements over the long arc of a career. It’s about history and tradition.

But today’s honorees are also about the future. We’re innovating and experimenting, using digital tools that, 25 years ago, we never imagined would exist. We’re connecting with communities and readers in novel ways — deploying multimedia and measuring and nurturing audiences. Storytelling is as old as the Bronze Age and as new as TikTok.

The business of fact-based reporting that holds power to account, faces existential challenges. You know them well: digital disruption, the collapse of print advertising, the rise of platforms built on algorithms of anger.

As Professor Penny Abernathy has written, these forces have resulted in news deserts across the country — entire counties where there is no newspaper left at all. Some 2,900 newspapers have closed down since 2005 — nearly one-third of the nation’s total. About 43,000 journalism jobs have disappeared.

And, for sure, we didn’t always help ourselves. Legacy newsrooms were sometimes slow to recognize the promise — and, frankly, some of the perils — of digital publication. We were slow to change our business models. We were slow to put up paywalls that enabled us to assign a fair value to the work of our journalists. We were slow to adapt to a more frenzied pace, slow to restructure traditional newsrooms so they were digital-first.

But these same challenges have also prompted a wave of innovation and experimentation like never before. Steven Waldman, the cofounder of Report for America, calls it a replanting of local news.

Dan Kennedy and I began reporting on this phenomenon in 2019, for a book called “What Works in Community News.” We profiled nine media startups, and interviewed scores of enterprising journalists who are in the process of reinventing our business. We found an emerging movement that is nothing short of inspiring. It’s also sometimes a hard journey, fraught with uncertainty.

This wave of innovation isn’t temporary. It’s part of our future. I’m proud to be here today with journalists who are sustaining local news and providing the essential information that is so necessary to participatory democracy.

Thank you.

We’re thrilled to let you know that Nieman Lab has published an excerpt from “What Works in Community News” based on Ellen’s reporting from Minneapolis on Sahan Journal, a nonprofit digital project that covers the state’s burgeoning immigrant communities. Thanks to Nieman Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen for her interest in getting our work out before a wider audience.

Read the excerpt at Nieman Lab.

Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins reports that the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that works to keep newspapers alive and out of the hands of corporate chain owners, has purchased a used printing press that will serve the two dozen papers it owns in the Denver suburbs as well as papers owned by other publishers. The trust bought those papers, known collectively as Colorado Community Media, back in 2021.

We interviewed National Trust CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro and CCM publisher Linda Shapley for our book, “What Works in Community News.” They have both appeared on our podcast as well. When Dan met Shapley in her newsroom in the fall of 2021, she was in the midst of trying to pivot her papers to digital — but she acknowledged that print remained an important part of the mix for readers and, especially, for advertisers.

“I totally get that there are advertisers out there who don’t necessarily see digital as a way forward,” Shapley said. “But they recognize the fact that this is going to be how people find you. So I don’t see them as playing against each other but as something that can work in tandem.”

Now those papers — as well as papers owned by other publishers who’ve been hurt by the disappearance of Colorado’s printing presses — can continue to be offered in print as well as online.

By Dan Kennedy

Just when Gannett was making some good news for itself by going on something of a modest hiring spree, splat! Investigative reporter Steven Monacelli has found that our largest newspaper chain, with about 200 daily newspapers, is working with Advantage Informatics, a well-known purveyor of so-called pink slime news sites.

Pink slime is the name given to websites that masquerade as legitimate local news projects but that are actually produced from distant locales. The meaning has morphed over the years. What I call Pink Slime 1.0 arose about a dozen years ago in the form of sites whose writers appeared to be based in local communities but were actually some distance away — in some cases, as far away as the Philippines. Pink Slime 2.0 has an ideological cast, mainly but not exclusively on the right. Pink Slime 3.0 adds artificial intelligence to the mix.

What most of these sites have in common is Brian Timpone, a Chicago-based conservative businessperson who is the founder of something called Metric Media, a network of some 1,200 right-wing sites. These projects tend to be pretty inept; my favorite covers the imaginary community of North Boston.

The Gannett-Timpone connection was exposed last week in a major report for Nieman Lab written by Monacelli on Advantage Informatics, a Timpone venture that produces advertorial content. Monacelli found that, in years past, newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle (owned by Hearst since 1987) and The San Diego Union-Tribune (recently acquired by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital) have taken advantage of Timpone’s services. (The Chronicle told Monacelli that it has no record of such a  relationship.) Gannett is the one newspaper company he found that has a current, ongoing relationship with Advantage. He writes:

A Gannett spokesperson told me that the company works with Advantage Informatics on “advertorial” content. When asked about Advantage Informatics’ relationship with the broader Metric Media network, the spokesperson said, “Ethics and our values are priority for us.”

Monacelli has written quite a tale that includes a Tennessee journalism professor who used to work for Advantage and Advantage’s ambition to offer “dedicated beat reporting” of local sports, governmental meetings and “keeping a close eye” on statehouses and Congress.

On the one hand, I’m not sure it’s that big a deal who produces advertorial content. On the other, the fact is that Gannett is working with the pink slimiest company in the country. Despite Gannett’s recent good news on the hiring front, it would hardly be surprising if company executives played around with having Advantage try its hand at community coverage as well. After all, it was just a few months ago that Gannett was caught using AI to write local sports stories, to hilarious effect.

A final note: If you’d like to learn more about pink slime, we interviewed Pri Bengani, an expert based at Columbia University who’s quoted in Monacelli’s article, on the “What Works” podcast last fall.

A couple of notes about our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Larry Gennari has a review in the Boston Business Journal, writing: “Clegg and Kennedy present an impressive number of media business startup models in such places as California, Iowa, New Jersey, Minnesota and Tennessee, all centered on quality local news, which they argue enhances community, transparency and, ultimately, self-governance.”

And Dorothy Bergin, The Bedford Citizen’s 90-something copy editor, who we interviewed for the book, has featured it in her regular column, “Dot’s Reading Room.” She writes: “As the authors say, they are optimistic about the future of hyperlocal journalism. This is the spirit that has kept and still keeps The Bedford Citizen’s paid employees and volunteers from writers and reporters on the job!”

Thanks to everyone who attended our Northeastern University conference Friday on “What Works: The Future of Local News.” We’ll be posting more in the days ahead, but we wanted to begin by sharing some information from Professors Mike Beaudet and John Wihbey on the Reinventing Local TV News Project. They weren’t able to show videos, so we’re sharing them here.

Above is their “Meet the Fellows!” video, an introduction to the content producers for the third phase of their project. And here’s a piece that was published by Storybench, our School of Journalism digital publication covering media innovation. It links to links the first three underreported stories produced by project fellows in New York, Chicago and Boston.

The project’s video library is available for your perusal as well. And there are written reports for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

A final reminder about our conference on the future of local news — a free, all-day event that will be held tomorrow (March 15) at Northeastern University. We’ll have sessions on topics ranging from data visualization to university-community partnerships, as well as a book talk by Ellen and Dan. We hope you can attend. Registration and more information is online here.

By Dan Kennedy

I’ll be part of a panel tomorrow discussing job opportunities for new and recent journalism graduates. My role will be to talk about opportunities at the rising generation of local and regional news startups. I am not quite sure what to tell them, but more than anything I want them to know that they need to be resourceful.

About a dozen years ago, Thomas MacMillan told me how he got hired at the New Haven Independent, one of the original nonprofit digital-only local news sites. He was working at a non-journalism job and started doing some interning. He asked the editor, Paul Bass, how he could turn that into a staff job, and Bass’ unconventional answer was that MacMillan should write a grant to fund his position. MacMillan did it, got hired and, in my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” talked about the rewards.

“It’s really fun for me to feel like we’re on a rising star rather than a sinking ship,” MacMillan said. “There’s just something exciting about feeling like you’re working on the new paradigm, where you can experiment and try different things and people will occasionally take notice of what you’re doing.”

What I will tell students is that jobs at these startups are few and far between, but if you can land one, they come with great mentoring and, in some cases, surprisingly good pay. From my conversations with people, I’ve found that nonprofit boards and independent operators take their obligation to provide a living wage and benefits seriously. At the very least, journalists at these organizations are often making more than they would at a chain-owned newspaper.

Students can’t just expect jobs to open up, because that doesn’t happen all that often. Identify two, three or five that you’d like to work at. Get in touch and stay in touch. Cover some news for them — not for free, of course, but in most cases they’re not going to hire someone they don’t have a prior relationship with.

To prepare for the panel, I contacted an array of startup news folks to see what advice they would give to students. I present their lightly edited answers in full. Continue reading “Startup news leaders tell journalism students how to get that first job”

By Dan Kennedy

This one comes in via former WBZ Radio (AM 1030) news director Peter Casey, who’s now a communications consultant and part of the team at the local startup Winchester News. Saga Communications, a Michigan-based company that owns radio stations in 27 secondary markets, is launching digital newspapers in 18 markets by the end of the second quarter, according to the website Inside Radio. Another story says that the outlets will be unveiled “across its entire footprint.” Despite the lack of clarity, it sounds like Saga’s eventual goal is to have an online newspaper anywhere it has radio stations.

Those stations include a number of New England markets: Brattleboro, Vermont; Greenfield, Northampton and Springfield, Massachusetts; Keene and Manchester, New Hampshire; and Portland, Maine. A quick scan of the stations shows that they mostly broadcast music, with formats including country, oldies and adult contemporary. I found a few news-and-talk stations in the mix as well, but they appear to be focused on local issues.

The stations will be based on a pilot that Saga is already publishing in Tennessee called Clarksville Now. A quick glance shows the site is newsy and community-oriented. Katie Gambill, who developed the site and who will be in charge of the rollout, is quoted as saying:

I am excited for the opportunity to spearhead this local online news and community connection site launch in other Saga markets. I honestly believe these local online news sites will help us to better serve and connect with our communities, especially when partnered with the power of radio. I am passionate about this endeavor and dedicated to the success of these sites, in fact, the Brand message for these sites is, “your community connection.”

Saga is a publicly traded company with annual revenues of about $114 million. Although there’s no substitute for local ownership, I think its Clarksville Now-modeled sites will be welcome in most communities. It’s also a great example of how a company that’s successful in one type of media can leverage that success and use it connect with its audience via news and information.