Month: April 2025

For our 100th “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with Tom Breen, the editor of the New Haven Independent. Tom joined the staff of the Independent in 2018 and then became managing editor. Last November, he stepped up to succeed founding editor Paul Bass, who launched the Independent in 2005 and is still very much involved.

Paul is executive director of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization he set up to oversee the Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel in New Haven’s northwest suburbs and WNHH, a low-power community radio station. He continues to report the news for the Independent and hosts a show on WNHH, and he started another nonprofit, Midbrow, which publishes arts reviews in New Haven and several other cities across the country.

We spoke with Tom about his own vision for the Independent and why he thinks it has been successful enough to still be going strong after 20 years. He also reminisces about a harrowing encounter he once had with a pitbull while he was out knocking on doors for a story on mortgage foreclosures. Dan interviewed Tom for our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Listeners will also hear from Alexa Coultoff, a Northeastern student who wrote an in-depth report on the local news ecosystem in Fall River, Massachusetts, a blue-collar community south of Boston that flipped to Donald Trump in the last election after many decades of being a solidly Democratic city. We recently published Alexa’s story, so please give it a read.

Ellen has a Quick Take on two big moves on the local news front. The National Trust for Local News has named a new CEO to replace Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who resigned earlier this year. The new leader is Tom Wiley, who is now president and publisher of The Buffalo News. And in the heartland, The Minnesota Star Tribune has named a new editor to replace Suki Dardarian, who is retiring. The nod goes to Kathleen Hennessey, the deputy politics editor of the New York Times and a former Associated Press reporter.

Dan’s Quick Take examines a recent court decision ruling that Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the way it controls the technology for digital advertising. This was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and a number of states, but it’s also the subject of lawsuits brought by the news business, which argues that Google has destroyed the value of online ads. It’s potentially good news. It’s also complicated, and its effect may be way off in the future.

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

By Dan Kennedy

Some big news today from The Bedford Citizen, one of the first digital nonprofit community news sites in Massachusetts and a project I’ve been tracking for the past dozen years: Wayne Braverman, the Citizen’s managing editor, is stepping down.

This follows the death of reporter Mike Rosenberg in late February, and it leaves the Citizen with vacancies in its two key news positions, at least for the moment. “We have a strong team still in place and a plan for coverage during this transition,” said board president Elizabeth Hacala in an email that was sent to email subscribers earlier today.

Hacala added that the Citizen is in the process of hiring a community reporter to replace Rosenberg, a legendary figure in Bedford who died at 72 while covering a high school basketball game. Mike was one of the people Ellen and I wrote about in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Braverman became managing editor in October 2022, replacing co-founder Julie McCay Turner. He and executive director Teri Morrow appeared on our podcast a little over a year ago. Hacala’s full message is as follows:

Thank you for being a part of The Bedford Citizen community. I wanted to let you know about a change in our team that will be announced later today.

Wayne Braverman is wrapping up his time with The Citizen. We are in the process of updating the Managing Editor role and beginning the search for a new editor.

We have had an exciting response to our Community Reporter posting and look forward to having someone on board soon. In the interim, many members of the community have stepped forward to help us keep the presses running so to speak. This takes us back to our roots when volunteer writers created most of our stories.

We have a strong team still in place and a plan for coverage during this transition. Since you are a loyal reader of The Citizen, I wanted to make sure you heard the news directly from me before it is published on the website and social media later today.

Thank you again for being a part of The Citizen. Your support is critical to all we do. We are, as always, committed to being your local, non-profit, independent news source.

Update: Braverman has written a heartfelt farewell, saying, “Leaving The Citizen at this time is a good thing while I am healthy and still have the energy to engage in meaningful opportunities in the remaining time that I have on this planet. I don’t want to leave this world feeling like I didn’t do all I could to help make this a better place, especially in the era we find ourselves today.”

Correction: This post has been revised to eliminate some confusing and incorrect language I had inserted.

By Dan Kennedy

To the extent that news organizations have been able to overcome the collapse of advertising caused by the rise of giant tech platforms, it’s through two imperfect methods.

• For-profits, especially larger newspapers, charge for digital subscriptions and try to maintain a baseline level of print advertising, which has maintained at least some of its value.
• Nonprofits, many of them digital-only, pursue large gifts and grants while attempting to induce their audience to pay for voluntary memberships, often for goodies like premium newsletters.

At the same time, though, news publishers have continued to look longingly at what might have been. When journalism started moving online 30 years ago, the assumption was that news outlets would continue to control much of that advertising.

Those hopes were cut short. And in large measure, that’s because Google — according to publishers — established a monopoly over digital advertising that news organizations couldn’t crack. Now we’re getting a glimpse of a possible alternative universe, because last week a federal district-court judge agreed, at least in part.

I’ve read several accounts of Judge Leonie Brinkema’s 115-page ruling on an antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department and eight states (but not Massachusetts). It’s confusing, but I thought this account by David McCabe in The New York Times (gift link) was clearer than some, so I’m relying on it here. I’ll begin with this:

The government argued in its case that Google had a monopoly over three parts of the online advertising market: the tools used by online publishers, like news sites, to host open ad space; the tools advertisers use to buy that ad space; and the software that facilitates those transactions.

In other words, the suit claimed that Google controlled both ends of the market as well as the middleman software that makes it happen. Judge Brinkema agreed with the first two propositions but disagreed with the third, saying, in McCabe’s words, that “the government had failed to prove that it constituted a real and defined market.”

Brinkema put it this way: “In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.”

Lee-Anne Mulholland, a Google vice president, said in response, “We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half.” I’m pretty sure that losing two out of three is two-thirds, but whatever.

Brinkema will now consider the government’s demand that Google’s ad business be broken up. But given that the company has already said it will appeal, it could be a long time — like, on the order of years — before anything comes of this. Same with an earlier ruling in a different courtroom that Google’s search constitutes an illegal monopoly, which is also the subject of hearings this week.

The News/Media Alliance, a lobbying group for the news business, praised Brinkema’s ruling, saying:

The News/Media Alliance has spent years advocating on behalf of news media publishers against Google’s unlawfully anticompetitive actions. We are strongly supportive of a similar lawsuit in Texas that will follow, as well as the Gannett lawsuit currently being litigated on the same issues. Much of this was prompted in the House Report that documented Google’s abuse in the ad tech ecosystem, the scope of which is wide-reaching.

As the organization observes, Google’s ad tech has been the subject of several suits by the newspaper business. One of them names Facebook as a co-defendant, claiming that the Zuckerborg chose to collude with Google rather than compete directly. Gannett’s suit, on the other hand, only names Google.

The News/Media Alliance also continues to push for passage of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a pet project of Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana.

The proposal, which never gained much traction and is surely all but dead with Donald Trump back in the White House, would force Google and Facebook to pay for the journalism they repurpose. The legislation is problematic for many reasons, not least that Facebook has made it clear it would rather remove news from its various platforms, as it has done in Canada, than pay for it.

Punishing Google for clearly defined legal violations is a much cleaner solution. Let’s hope Judge Brinkema’s ruling survives the appeals process — not to mention whatever idea starts rattling around Trump’s head to reward Google as a favor for CEO Sundar Pichai’s $1 million kiss. Perhaps this can be the start of making advertising great again.

On our new “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with John Mooney, the founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, a digital nonprofit that’s part of NJ PBS, the state’s public broadcasting network. Mooney, who covered education for The Star-Ledger in Newark, took a buyout in 2008, put together a business plan, and launched NJ Spotlight in 2010 under the auspices of the nonprofit Community Foundation of New Jersey.

While Spotlight was making a mark journalistically, it wasn’t breaking even, and its sponsor, the Community Foundation of New Jersey, was getting impatient. After extensive talks, Mooney affiliated with NJ PBS. The name changed to NJ Spotlight News, and the merger means true collaboration between the newsrooms. Both the broadcast and digital sides take part in news meetings, and there are considerable synergies between the website and the daily half-hour newscast. (In a previous podcast, Northeastern University professor and TV journalist Mike Beaudet discussed his initiative aimed at reinventing TV news for a vertical video age.)

As we wrote in “What Works in Community News,” the story of NJ PBS and NJ Spotlight News suggests that public broadcasting can play a role in bolstering coverage of regional and statewide news. It’s a question of bringing together two different newsroom cultures. There’s also a Yo-Yo Ma angle to our conversation, so you won’t want to miss that.

Ellen has a Quick Take about the death of John Thornton, a venture capitalist who helped launch The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Austin, in 2009. He also was a founder of the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country. Thornton, who had struggled with mental health issues, took his own life. He was 59.

Dan has a Quick Take about our webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News,” which was held the evening of April 3. Panelists gave great advice about what board members and donors need to know. You can watch the video and read a summary generated by Northeastern’s AI tool, Claude, on our website.

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

By Dan Kennedy

There was something about Houston Landing that never quite made sense.

It was a large digital startup in a city already served by the Houston Chronicle, whose corporate owner, Hearst, enjoys a reputation for strong journalism. It attracted a stunning amount of philanthropic funding — $20 million — before its launch two years ago, and somehow managed to burn through much of it. It was beset by tumult after its second CEO, veteran journalist Peter Bhatia, fired the Landing’s editor-in-chief, its top investigative reporter and, later, another top editor for reasons that have never been fully explained.

And on Tuesday, the Landing reached the end of the line, announcing that it would close because, despite “significant seed funding, it has been unable to build additional revenue streams to support ongoing operations.” The site will shut down in May, and 43 employees will lose their jobs.

Bhatia agreed to come on our “What Works” podcast last June after he emailed me to complain about something I’d written. Ellen and I found him to be charming, as candid as he could be when talking about internal personnel matters, and dedicated to creating a first-rate news outlet.

When I asked him about competing with the Chronicle, he emphasized that he didn’t see that as the Landing’s mission.

“There is so much opportunity to do journalism here,” he said. “And the people who founded Houston Landing and who ultimately recruited me here wanted more journalism for this vast community. They wanted journalism that was hard-hitting and performed traditional watchdog and accountability roles, but also to create a new kind of journalism, if you will, that is accessible to traditionally undercovered communities, which make up such a huge percentage of the population here.”

As for the firings of editor-in-chief Mizanur Rahman, investigative reporter Alex Stuckey and editor John Tedesco, Bhatia said: “I came in here after things were established and in place, and I gave things a year to develop and go in the right direction. I have nothing but respect for the people that you mentioned. They are good human beings and fantastic journalists, but we were on a path that was not sustainable, and as the leader, I felt I had to make changes in order to get us in a position to be successful for the long term.”

In any case, the people Bhatia brought in, editor-in-chief Manny García and managing editor Angel Rodriguez, are well-regarded journalists. Unfortunately, they’re also now out of work.

Columbia Journalism Review editor Sewell Chan, who had an opportunity to watch Houston Landing up close during his own stint as editor of The Texas Tribune, has written a nuanced and perceptive take on what went wrong. “In hindsight, money was both a blessing and a curse for the Landing,” Chan writes, observing that the leadership team may have been tempted by that early bonanza to spend beyond its means.

“The Landing also suffered from a lack of focus,” Chan adds, explaining that it was never clear whether its mission was to cover the city or the broader region; whether it saw itself as a traditional news outlet holding the powerful to account or if, instead, it sought to empower the community by providing them with the tools to be their own storytellers, like Documenters or Outlier. Chan also delivers this verdict on Bhatia:

I’ve known Bhatia for close to thirty years. The son of an Indian father, he has been a pioneering Asian American newsroom leader and has the utmost integrity. However, Bhatia had not run a digital-only operation, hadn’t worked extensively in nonprofit fundraising, and didn’t know Houston well.

Bhatia, in his farewell message, writes:

We are immensely proud of the work we’ve done and the impact we’ve made. Houston Landing has shown what’s possible when a news team commits itself to truth and transparency. Our stories highlighted voices that too often go unheard, sparked conversations that matter and helped inspire positive change throughout the city we love.

It’s a shame. Houston may not have been a news desert before the Landing landed, but more coverage is always better, and the focus on underrepresented communities that Bhatia talked about with Ellen and me will not be easy to replace.

It’s important, too, to recognize that what happened at the Landing says little about the nonprofit news movement in general. Chan quotes Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer of the American Journalism Project (one of the Landing’s funders), as saying that the closing is “not part of a broader trend,” and that nonprofit local news outlets remain on a growth trajectory.

Indeed, many of the nonprofits that we track at What Works have proved to be remarkably resilient, with a few about to embark on their third decade. Unfortunately, Houston Landing will not join that charmed circle, and will instead close just a little more than two years after it was launched amid a wave of optimism.

By Ellen Clegg

Sonal Shah, the CEO of The Texas Tribune, announced last Friday that she will step down in December after just under three years in the nonprofit’s top job. In a post on the Tribune website, she wrote: “This decision is deeply personal: As the primary caretaker for my parents, I need to be closer to them and will be moving back to Houston.”

Her announcement is heartfelt, but her impending departure marks yet another jolting transition for a news outlet that launched in November 2009 with a sweeping ambition: to prop up democracy by transforming news coverage throughout the Lone Star State. But nonprofit news sites, which are usually supported by a mix of revenue streams, are not immune to challenging market forces and workplace issues like layoffs and union drives.

The Tribune is no exception. Fiscal reports filed with the Internal Revenue Service for 2021, 2022 and 2023 show net income losses for 2021 and 2023, according to 990 forms filed on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. The latest report available, for 2023, illustrates the scope. The revenue line is impressive, showing slightly more than $15 million — the envy of many news operations, whether for-profit or nonprofit.

More than 89% of that — $13.5 million — is from charitable contributions, a sign of considerable fund-raising prowess and robust community engagement. Program services brought in more than $1 million at an outlet known for its nationally recognized Texas Tribune Festival. In addition, the Tribune reports that it has 12,000 members who pay a set amount in order to receive a special newsletter and other perks. But the Tribune’s expenses outstripped revenue by more than $600,000, and though executive compensation was trimmed during the lean years, in 2023 the seven top executives took home six-figure salaries, according to the 990.

In January 2024, after enduring a first-ever wave of layoffs, the staff of the Tribune announced a move to unionize. As Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab reported at the time, 90% of eligible staffers signed union authorization cards, and 86% signed a mission statement that asked Sewell Chan, then the editor-in-chief, and Shah to voluntarily recognize the NewsGuild-CWA. Shah wrote at the time that the Tribune would respect their right to representation, and in February Tribune employees became members of Media Guild of the West, TNG-CWA.

“We went from sí se puede to sí se pudo,” El Paso-based reporter Uriel García said at the time. “Now we can negotiate a contract that can provide some worker protections so the employees of the Tribune can continue to provide quality journalism to Texans.”

Chan, a well-regarded journalist at The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, left the Tribune in June 2024 to return to his home base in New York City, becoming the top editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. Chan’s successor as editor-in-chief, Matthew Watkins, has been with the Tribune since 2015. (In unrelated news, the Tribune and other media recently reported that another founder, financier John Thornton, died late last month.)

In our book, “What Works in Community News,” I profiled the Tribune and interviewed both Chan and then-CEO Evan Smith, who is now a senior adviser to Emerson Collective, a nonprofit founded by Laurene Powell Jobs that is working to buttress local news outlets across the country. Dan and I also interviewed Shah last year on our “What Works” podcast.

The Tribune hasn’t trimmed its sails in terms of ambition. It has bureaus beyond Austin, in communities like Lubbock, Lufkin and Odessa, and just announced that five Texas media outlets will join a years-old Tribune-ProPublica collaboration to bring more investigative journalism to Texas. But at a time when gyrations in national and international financial markets could challenge nonprofit giving at all levels, let’s hope that the Tribune can find a solid path forward.

By Alexa Coultoff

FALL RIVER, Mass. — Keith Thibault likes to say he “runs a news department of one” out of the TV production studio at Bristol Community College.

When Thibault was growing up in this southeastern Massachusetts city, known for its collection of World War II naval vessels and 19th-century textile mills, he would frequently turn on the television to watch a daily regional news program that informed the communities of Fall River and New Bedford about what was happening in their neighborhoods. People came to cherish the newscast, called “Local Cable News 13,” which aired for more than 20 years before shuttering in 2006.

René Kochman, who worked as the program’s director and helped steer local coverage, recalled that “it was quite well watched, and although we were never able to track the viewership, we knew by the community’s response that it was successful and valuable.” Kochman’s tasks included knocking on doors and helping produce a “Pet of the Week” segment with a local dog, cat or hamster.

Thibault and Kochman said the presence of a strong local news source after “Local Cable News 13” stopped airing was — well — absent.

After graduating from Fitchburg State University in 1987 with a degree in communications, Thibault worked at New Bedford radio station WNBH for six years and managed the public access television station in New Bedford for another six before deciding to try his hand at revitalizing local news in Fall River. That venture, Fall River Community Media, or FRCMedia, operates out of Bristol Community College and is supported by a cable television license with Comcast.

Continue reading “In blue-collar Fall River, Mass., a lack of reliable news coincides with the rise of Trump”

What ethical minefields do the leaders of nonprofit news organizations need to watch for? What guidelines should board members and donors be aware of? Where are the bright lines — and where are the gray areas?

Three experts weighed in on those issues last Thursday evening at our What Works webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News: What Board Members and Donors Need to Know.” What Works is part of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and is affiliated with the Center for Transformative Media.

More than 50 people logged on to the event, which was moderated by Dan Kennedy, a professor in the journalism program. Questions from the audience were fielded by Ellen Clegg, a faculty associate and the co-founder of Brookline.News. Ellen and Dan are the co-leaders of What Works, a project about the future of local news.

Continue reading “Nonprofit experts tell us what board members and funders in local news need to know”

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Neil Brown, a longtime journalist who is the president of the Poynter Institute. For listeners who might not know, Poynter is a nonprofit based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that is devoted to teaching best practices in journalism. It is named for Nelson Poynter, the bow-tie-wearing legend who led the St. Petersburg Times to national recognition. The paper is now known as the Tampa Bay Times.

Poynter is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

Last September, Poynter issued a report called “OnPoynt,” which attempted to place journalism’s ongoing economic crisis in context and give some hope for optimism. The goal was to offer “a forward-minded look at the state of journalism and the news industry that propels the story by considering trends related to creative product ideas, audience growth strategies and traction around revenue, artificial intelligence and innovation.” We talked with Neil about that report along with other topics.

Later on in the podcast, Dan has a Quick Take on President Trump’s bouncing tariffs. They’re on, they’re off, they’re on, they’re off. But his gyrations are having real consequences. In central New York State, Trump’s threats have killed a daily newspaper — and not just any paper. The Cortland Standard, one of the oldest family-owned papers in the country, folded in mid-March, as Trump’s proposed 25% tariff on Canadian newsprint proved to be the last straw.

(Since we recorded this podcast, Trump has imposed tariffs that were far deeper and more damaging than many observers had expected. Newsprint, though, remains exempt.)

Ellen’s Quick Take comes from a tip from Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times who is now a distinguished professor of the practice here at Northeastern.

Jeff Morrison, a journalist who is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, has compiled an incredible timeline of the decline of newspapers in Iowa. A highlight: The Storm Lake Times Pilot, a twice-weekly print paper featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” is dropping a print edition and going weekly.

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