Month: May 2025

It’s an all-Northeastern podcast this week as Dan and Ellen talk with Rahul Bhargava, a colleague at Northeastern University. Rahul is a professor who crosses boundaries: the boundaries of storytelling and data, the boundaries of deep dives into collaborative research and interactive museum exhibits and plays.

He holds a master’s degree in media arts and science from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. But he also minored in multimedia production. He brings the power of big data research to the masses, through newsroom workshops, interactive museum exhibits and more.

Bhargava has collaborated with groups in Brazil, in Minnesota and at the World Food Program. He helps local communities use data to understand their world, and as a tool for change. There’s more to data than just bar charts. Sometimes it involves forks! His recently published book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information,” unlocks all sorts of secrets.

Keeping with our all-Huskies theme, Dan and Ellen also talk with Lisa Thalhamer, a longtime TV journalist who is now a graduate student at Northeastern. Lisa realized that like many fields, journalism suffers from a gap between academic research and its implementation in workplaces. She is finding ways to bridge that gap, and urges an Avenger’s-style team to lift up the work of a free press.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a recent visit to Santa Barbara, California, and the efforts to revive a legacy paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press.

Dan’s Quick Take is about the latest developments from the National Trust for Local News. It involves a chain of weekly papers in Colorado — their very first acquisition dating back to 2021. And it’s not good news at all for the journalists who work at those papers and the communities they serve.

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

By Lisa Thalhamer

I don’t know exactly which story was my tipping point. By 2018, I had spent 10 years writing about car crashes, fires, murders, child abuse, natural disasters and many other forms of violence and death. The weight of all these tragedies had become more than I wanted to carry.

I knew that interacting with stories like these was part of the job for nearly all journalists, including my role as a local television news producer. What I didn’t know then was that there was a growing body of research about the way journalists were affected by covering trauma. Caroline M. Pyevich, Elana Newman, and Eric Daleiden created a scale for measuring how many traumatic stories journalists covered. Gretchen Dworznik-Hoak looked at the connection between the stories that TV journalists covered and their symptoms of post-traumatic stress and compassion fatigue. Marla Buchanan and Patrice Keats wrote about how journalists used strategies like avoidance and black humor to deal with the trauma they were exposed to.

Discovering that research when I enrolled in grad school at Northeastern University in Boston last fall felt like making new friends. Here were the people thinking about the same issues I was. It showed me I wasn’t alone in struggling with the subject matter of the stories I covered. It gave me language to explain the way I had been feeling for years.

But I was also disappointed to realize how much knowledge existed yet didn’t seem to be reaching working journalists. There were so many smart people thinking about ways to strengthen journalism, but so few of those ideas seemed to make it off the page and into practice. Like many fields, journalism suffers from a gap between academic research in the subject and its implementation in workplaces.

Journalism is at a precarious moment and needs every champion it can get. While academics and industry folks might have different approaches to fighting for journalism, everyone is invested in the field’s success. Now is the time for an Avengers-style team-up between all the forces that believe a free press is essential.

Continue reading “The new Avengers: Working journalists and the researchers who study their industry”

By Dan Kennedy

There are two problems with direct government funding of journalism. The first is that it opens the door to government interference. The second is that, even if safeguards are built in to protect independence, the money can be reduced or cut off in the event of a crisis.

That is exactly what is happening in New Jersey and California. In the former, that state’s Civic Information Consortium, a pioneering effort to distribute taxpayer funds for journalism and other types of storytelling, is in danger of being zeroed out after receiving $3 million this past year. In the latter, a deal that California officials had reached with Google to pay for news is starting to come apart.

New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, has proposed getting rid of the funding in his budget for fiscal year 2026. The consortium calls it “a potentially devastating blow to local media and civic information access across the state. Without this funding, NJCIC’s critical work could cease.”

Since it was launched in 2021, the consortium has granted some $9 million to 56 organizations. It’s administered by an independent board appointed by the governor and run out of Montclair State University. Ellen Clegg and I wrote about it in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Murphy declined to comment on the cut when contacted by Terrence T. McDonald of the New Jersey Monitor, but McDonald noted that the governor’s office had said earlier this year that his budget proposal would include “some belt-tightening.” Even so, McDonald observed that next year’s budget was on track to be larger than the current year’s.

The California situation stems from a much-criticized deal that the state cut with Google last year. According to Jeanne Kuang of CalMatters, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has reduced a $30 million allocation to help pay for local news to just $10 million for the coming year as he wrestles with a $12 billion deficit.

That, in turn, trigged a cut by Google from $15 million to $10 million. The money — now just $20 million instead of $45 million — will be administered by a newly formed California Civic Media Fund, which Kuang writes will comprise “a board of publisher representatives to determine how to distribute it.”

California’s five-year deal with Google was reached after the state abandoned efforts to pass legislation that would have taxed Google for the news that it repurposes. One version of the tax would have brought in $500 million a year.

There are all kinds of problems with what essentially amounts to a link tax, started with the reality that news publishers benefit when Google links to their content. Users who click through encounter those publishers’ advertising, or may even be induced to subscribe if they have a paywall.

Now publishers are facing a much deeper threat from Google, as the search giant is going all-in on artificial intelligence, thus eliminating the need to click through.

“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” Danielle Coffey, the CEO and president of News/Media Alliance, said in a statement reported by The Verge. “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.”

“DOJ remedies” is a reference to recommendations by the Department of Justice after Google recently lost two separate antitrust cases.

By Dan Kennedy

When I wrote last week that the nonprofit National Trust for Local News had sold 21 of its Colorado newspapers to a corporate chain called Times Media Group, I observed: “I honestly don’t know what kind of reputation the company has. But it’s ironic that a nonprofit founded as an alternative to chain ownership has found it necessary to cut a deal with one of those chains.”

Well, now. According to Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab, the chain, which owned some 60 papers in California and Arizona before the Colorado deal, has reputation for “gutting” its properties. Scire writes:

The Times Media Group is, to put it mildly, an odd choice of buyer for the mission-driven National Trust for Local News. The Trust is a nonprofit that has emphasized the importance of local control for local newspapers and describes community newspapers as “vital civic assets.” The Times Media Group is an out-of-state, for-profit media company with a history of reducing local newsrooms.

Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins calls Scire’s article “the Nieman Lab story heard ’round Colorado.”

The papers that the Trust sold off are in the Denver suburbs; the nonprofit is retaining seven other papers in more rural areas, where it says the news desert problem is more acute. Among those laid off was Linda Shapley, the editorial director of Colorado Community Media (CCM), the umbrella group for the Trust’s papers before the selloff. I interviewed Shapley for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and she’s been a guest on our podcast.

Last week I tried unsuccessfully to connect with Jerry and Ann Healey, who sold CCM to the Trust in 2021. Jerry Healey did talk with Hutchins, telling him that he “kind of bought into their [the Trust’s] vision,” adding, “But after a while, I realized that it wasn’t working.”

In September 2021, I interviewed the Healeys at a coffee shop just outside of Hartford, Connecticut. They were there to visit their daughter, who worked for ESPN. They had sold their papers to the National Trust just a few months earlier, and at that time they were hopeful they had left their legacy in good hands. I interviewed Shapley at CCM’s headquarters in Englewood, Colorado, the following week.

What follows is an except from “What Works in Community News,” which I co-wrote with Ellen Clegg.

***

David Gilbert, a reporter with Colorado Community Media (CCM), was summoned into publisher and co-owner Jerry Healey’s office one day in the spring of 2021. “I’ve got news for you,” Healey told him. “I’ve sold the papers.” Healey wanted Gilbert to write the story about the transaction. CCM published 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in Denver’s suburbs. Gilbert, who’d been on staff for four years, imagined the worst — namely, a corporate chain owner was coming in that would slash costs and eliminate jobs. His first thought, he said, was “Oh, crap, time to pack up my things. I wonder if I can get my job back driving a truck.”

Continue reading “At Colorado Community Media, the optimism of 2021 has given way to bitter reality”

We’d like to let you know about a couple of enhancements to our digital presence.

First, due to the mysterious vagaries of WordPress, our blogroll disappeared at some point. We’ve restored it. If you’re reading this website on a computer or tablet, you’ll find “Links” in the right-hand rail. If you’re reading it on your phone, you should find them at the bottom.

“Links” are divided into “Resources” and “Northeastern.” That should be pretty self-explanatory. “Resources” are organizations and publications that are devoted to local news, but not to local news organizations themselves. After all, there are hundreds of independent community journalism outlets.

Second, we believe that the post-Twitter social media fiasco has settled down enough that it’s worth setting up a Bluesky account. Here you’ll find some items that are also on our website but even more that aren’t. We can’t write full articles about everything, and Bluesky is a way of expanding the conversation. You’ll find us on Bluesky at @whatworks-nu.bsky.social.

We are working on developing a full Bluesky newsfeed that we can post on the What Works homepage, similar to what we were able to offer at one time with Twitter. Our hope is to have that online sometime during the summer.

Imagine that you run a local news site and a protest breaks out in your community. You cover it, but you’d like to place it within a broader context. How many other protests are taking place near your city and town? What are they about?

Our Northeastern colleague Rahul Bhargava, a professor in the School of Journalism, has come up with a way of tracking demonstrations. He’s developed a map that can be embedded so community news outlets can show their readers what’s taking place nearby. You can set the map so that it depicts protests anywhere from within five to 100 miles. Rahul writes for Storybench, our media-innovation publication:

[I]t appears that local reporters are covering protests in their area, but not often connecting them to larger movements. That might be because coalitions like #50501 aren’t as well known as unions and long-standing activist groups; they don’t have communications people with long-standing relationships to journalists.

One approach to help reporters make those links for readers, and put individual events in a broader context, is to use data about local protests. Connecting this weekend’s rally to events over the last few weeks might connect dots for audiences that are seeing public displays of resistance. I wondered if I could quickly map protests in my area based on existing data sources.

The map is based on data compiled by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), a nonprofit, and the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), part of the Harvard Ash Center.

The map is free, so give it a try.

By Dan Kennedy

The National Trust for Local News is shedding papers in Colorado, while in Maine a former top executive with the Trust is taking on a new role. The Trust, a nonprofit that buys newspapers to save them from falling into the hands of corporate ownership, has some 50 titles in Colorado, Maine and Georgia.

I’ll deal with Colorado first. The Trust made its debut in the spring of 2021 when it purchased Colorado Community Media, a chain of 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver area. The Colorado Sun, a digital startup based in Denver, was brought in to help run the papers and was given an ownership stake. Ellen Clegg and I wrote about all that in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

A lot has happened since then, including the Sun’s decision to unwind its relationship with the papers. Now CCM is breaking up, with 21 publications in the Denver metropolitan area being transfered to Times Media Group, a Tempe, Arizona-based chain whose owner has ties to Colorado. Seven other papers will be retained by the National Trust.

Continue reading “The National Trust for Local News sheds papers in Colorado, while a former Maine Trust exec re-emerges”

On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Carlene Hempel and Harrison Zuritsky. Carlene, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, recently led a reporting trip to Flint, Michigan. Harrison and other students produced a stunning internet magazine called Flint Unfiltered that takes a deep dive into the causes and effects of Flint’s economic downturn and toxic water crisis.

Since 2009, Carlene has been leading students on reporting trips, where they work as part of a traveling press corps. She has taken groups to many countries, including Egypt, Syria, Cuba and Panama. Harrison, a second-year student with concentrations in journalism and data science, joined her on the Flint trip.

Like so many at Northeastern, Carlene has a background that includes academic achievement as well as wide-ranging professional experience. She has been a professor for 20 years and holds a Ph.D. from Northeastern. She started her career reporting for The Middlesex News in Framingham, Massachusetts, now the MetroWest Daily News, and The Boston Globe. She then moved to North Carolina, where she worked for MSNBC and The News & Observer of Raleigh.

Dan has Quick Take from Maine. Reade Brower, the former owner of the Portland Press Herald, is going to have three of his weekly papers printed at the Press Herald’s facility in South Portland, giving a boost to the National Trust for Local News, the nonprofit that now owns the Press Herald and several other Maine papers. Brower’s also followed through on a plan to open a café at one of his weeklies, the Midcoast Villager, in a unique effort to boost civic engagement.

Ellen weighs in on a new study of local news by Professor Joshua Darr of Syracuse University, a friend of the pod. Darr teamed up with three other researchers to do a meta analysis of surveys on media trust. They made a number of findings, but the headline is that Americans trust local newsrooms more than national news outlets. This is especially true if the local news outlet has the actual name of the community in its title. But there’s a downside: that automatic trust also allows pink slime sites to take hold.

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

By Dan Kennedy

The National Trust for Local News, which is dealing with a leadership transition (see the last item) and business woes, got some good news recently. Three weekly papers in Maine have reached an agreement to be printed at the Trust’s presses in South Portland.

According to a story by Cyndi Wood in The Ellsworth American, whose presses will cease operations, the papers will include not just the American but also the Mount Desert Islander and the  Midcoast Villager, which is based in Camden. All three papers are owned by Reade Brower, and therein lies an interesting tale.

Continue reading “A printing deal in Maine boosts the National Trust; plus, updates on fake news and nonprofit news”

We are thrilled to announce that our book, “What Works in Community News,” has been longlisted for a Mass Book Award by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. We’re one of 12 in the nonfiction category. Winners will be announced this fall.