Month: March 2025

By Dan Kennedy

At a time when public trust in every major institution except local public libraries is below 50%, local television news has some advantages that other forms of media lack.

That was the message from Seth Geiger, president and co-founder of SmithGeiger Group, a consulting firm that works with media organizations. Geiger spoke Friday at “Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit” at Northeastern University.

According to survey data that Geiger presented, local television news is trusted by about 41% of the public — lower than in previous years, but far ahead of the 29% who say they trust national television news. Ironically, he added that social media is the most used platform for news even though it is the least trusted.

“Usually if you don’t trust something, you don’t use it. But that’s not how this functions. That may feel like a woe-the-republic moment for you,” he said, observing that social media is the top go-to for news among every age group except those between 55 and 64. (Presumably that would hold true for those older than 64 as well, but that demographic was not included in his charts.)

“The path back to trust is going to happen at the local level,” Geiger said, adding that local television news is “the most important news institution in the country.”

Geiger was joined by Keren Henderson, an associate professor at Syracuse University, who presented some highlights from the latest “State of Local TV News” survey from the Radio Television Digital News Association, better known as RTDNA.

At a time when goals such as diversity in the work force are under fire from the Trump administration, Henderson’s data showed local TV news continues to lag. Currently, she said, about 42% of the U.S. population comprises minorities, which far exceeds the 28% minority percentage working for local television news. Some 77% of stations reported employing staffers who are LGBTQ, but when they were specifically asked about transgender staff, that percentage fell to about 18% — a decline from about 23% in 2024.

Currently there are 1,117 stations across the country airing local TV news, of which 695 are producing original programming with the rest being repeaters. That figure is essentially unchanged from 2024. In addition, she said threats to news workers were up 50%, leading to a decline in the use of solo multimedia journalists being assigned to go out and report stories.

Interestingly, the digital platforms that local TV newscasts have embraced the most are Instagram (91%) and YouTube (85%), with the much-hyped TikTok app lagging at 39%. Bluesky and Threads barely registered.

The average starting salary in local TV news was just a little more than $39,000. Not surprisingly, Henderson said, 80% of those leaving the field reported low pay as the main reason. Another 64% cited work-life balance and 52% cited burnout.

Overall, it was a rather dispiriting presentation, which led graduate student Lisa Thalhamer, who moderated the session, to end by asking Geiger and Henderson what makes them hopeful.

Henderson cited her teenage children, who are engaged and paying attention to the news — what she referred to as “that level of energy of caring about the world.”

Geiger said he’s hopeful that engaging more with the audience and helping them to understand how journalism works could offset the overall decline, with “facts being the building blocks.” He added: “There is a mechanism to do that.”

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan talks with Marta Hill, an extraordinary young journalist who he got to know during her time at Northeastern.

Marta is currently a graduate student in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program at New York University, where she’s also the editor-in-chief of Scienceline. In that role, she works with her peers at NYU to produce what she describes as “an accessible, down-to-earth science publication.” Marta is originally from Minneapolis, which makes it almost a tragedy that Ellen, a fellow transplant from the Twin Cities, couldn’t be here. (Ellen will be back for our next podcast).

At Northeastern, Marta served in various capacities at The Huntington News, an independent student newspaper, including a one-year stint as editor-in-chief. She was also in Dan’s media ethics and diversity class in the fall of 2023. Whenever Dan teaches ethics, a week gets devoted to talking about the harassment that journalists face both online and in real life. It’s a problem that’s been getting worse in recent years, and it’s something that young reporters in particular really have to think about before deciding whether to go into journalism full-time.

Marta decided she wanted to explore the issue of harassment and student journalism more deeply in the form of an honors project, and Dan was her adviser. She wrote a wide-ranging reported article, and a shorter version of that article was recently published by Nieman Reports, part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Her article, titled “J-schools Must Better Prepare Students for Handling Harassment,” lays out some concrete steps that journalism educators can take so that their students are not caught off guard when they encounter harassment at their student news outlet or on the job.

Dan has a Quick Take on a nonprofit initiative to bring more and better news to Tulsa, Oklahoma, a thriving metro area with nearly 700,000 people in the city and surrounding county. The area is currently served by the Tulsa World, a daily paper that’s part of the Lee Enterprises chain, which, like most corporate newspaper owners, has a reputation for aggressive cost-cutting. The new nonprofit, the Tulsa News Initiative, is built around a venerable Black newspaper, but there’s more to it than that.

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

While Trump’s chaotic on-again, off-again tariffs are wreaking havoc with our retirement accounts, they’ve also resulted in the end for a daily newspaper in New York State.

The Cortland Standard, a family-owned daily, is shutting down in part because of Trump’s 25% tariff on goods from Canada, including newsprint, according to a story posted on the paper’s website. The 157-year-old paper was one of the five oldest family-owned newspapers in the U.S.

The Cortland Standard Printing Co. will file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Seventeen employees have lost their jobs.

“I hoped this day would never come,” publisher and editor Evan C. Geibel was quoted as saying. “I’m so very grateful to my colleagues and the community for what they’ve done for me, my family and each other.”

Cortland, a city of about 17,000, is located in central New York, about halfway between Syracuse to the north and Binghamton to the south. It is also served by a digital news outlet called the Cortland Voice, which was founded in 2015.

By Dan Kennedy

Those of us who live in Greater Boston have benefitted from the rise of independent local news outlets to replace weekly newspapers either shut down or gutted by the Gannett chain. These projects, both print and digital, are mostly nonprofit, though there are a few for-profits as well. Ellen is the co-founder of one, Brookline.News, and I’m cheering on the recently launched Gotta Know Medford.

Last week Gretchen A. Peck of Editor & Publisher profiled another one of those projects — The Belmont Voice, a print weekly with a robust website that debuted in January 2024. The nonprofit Voice is on the larger end of such projects, launching with $500,000 in grants and donations and operating with a $200,000 annual budget. It’s also got a staff of four editorial and business-side people, headed by editor Jesse Floyd, a Gannett refugee.

“We are trying to make it feel like what a community newspaper felt like in the 1970s when you knew the editor, you knew the reporter, and these people were at all the town events,” Floyd told Peck. That presence in the community is exactly how local journalism can rebuild civic engagement, and it’s what’s missing from the AI-powered projects that have gotten (too much) attention recently.

I was especially impressed to learn that the Voice has signed up 2,100 subscribers for its weekly newsletter. There are about 10,400 households in Belmont, giving the Voice’s newsletter a 21% penetration rate, even though the print edition is also mailed for free to every home.

Not getting a mention in Peck’s article is The Belmontian, an older, much smaller news outlet.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Mike Beaudet, longtime investigative reporter for WCVB-TV (Channel 5) in Boston and a multimedia professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

Mike has won many awards for his hard-hitting investigations and runs a project aimed at reinventing television news. On March 21-22, he’ll lead a conference at Northeastern called “Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit.” Mike’s students are producing content for everything from Instagram and YouTube to TikTok. As he explains, local television news, still among the most trusted and popular forms of journalism, must transition from linear TV in order to reach younger audiences who’d prefer to watch video on their phones.

Dan has a Quick Take about the National Trust for Local News. Co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro exited the nonprofit suddenly last month. That came amid reports that the Portland Press Herald and other papers that the Trust owns in the state of Maine might soon announce budget cuts.

(Cuts were announced at the Maine papers after this podcast was recorded. Although the newsrooms were spared, Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe reports that 49 employees will lose their jobs and that print will be cut back significantly in favor of digital.)

Now comes more bad news. Colorado Community Media, a group of 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs, is closing two papers and is losing money, writes Corey Hutchins in his newsletter, Inside the News in Colorado. Those papers were the National Trust’s first acquisitions in 2021. The Trust’s mission is to buy papers that are in danger of falling into the clutches of corporate chain ownership. It’s a worthy goal, but the Trust has obviously hit some significant obstacles.

Ellen has a Quick Take noting that Harvard University is shutting down Harvard Public Health, the digital home to stellar longform journalism about public health. At a time when the very facts of science are challenged on social media every day, this is disheartening news.

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