Month: September 2025

By Dan Kennedy

The MAGA right’s war on public broadcasting has come for an innovative statewide news collaboration in New Jersey, leaving its ultimate fate uncertain.

NJ PBS, the state’s public television outlet, may shut down in June 2026 following massive budget cuts at both the federal and state levels. The Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated $1.1 billion in funding for public television and radio over the next two years — including about $1.5 million for New Jersey’s TV station, according to Daniel Han of Politico. Meanwhile, the New Jersey state legislature, facing its own pressure from Trump cuts, reduced funding to NJ PBS by $750,000, reports Victoria Gladstone of NJ.com.

The upshot is that WNET of New York, the nonprofit umbrella organization for NJ PBS, was unable to reach an agreement with the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority to continue operating the station beyond June 2026. WNET says it will look for a new partner to keep NJ PBS on the air.

For news consumers, the effect could be considerable. NJ PBS is one of a tiny handful of public television stations that offers a daily evening newscast. Since 2019, that newscast has been produced in conjunction with NJ Spotlight News, a 15-year-old digital news outlet covering state politics and public policy. It’s a true collaboration, with the newscast and video clips posted on the website and with Spotlight reporters frequently popping up on the air. The story of how Spotlight and NJ PBS merged is told in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote.

John Mooney, the co-founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, declined to comment when I contacted him this morning. We interviewed John last spring on our “What Works” podcast.

Lucas Frau of NorthJersey.com reports that two Democratic state senators, John Burzichelli and Andrew Zwicker, are hoping to find a solution to save NJ PBS. According to their statement:

The shutdown of public TV in New Jersey will have real-life consequences, depriving the state’s residents of invaluable news and educational programming. The television network has played a pivotal role in New Jersey, bridging the divide between New York and Philadelphia with trusted information relevant to the lives and civic activities of the state’s residents.

Even if WNET is unable to find a partner, it will continue to offer the daily Spotlight newscast on Thirteen, its New York-based television station, which reaches a large segment of New Jersey viewers, and on a variety of digital platforms. Anchor Brianna Vannozzi shared all this with viewers on Tuesday.

In other words, coverage will continue, both on the newscast and on the website. The question is whether NJ Spotlight News will be able to continue offering the same in-depth reporting that has been its hallmark. As is too often the case these days, the answer is probably “no” — unless wealthy benefactors step up.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen are back from summer break and talk with Bill Marx, the editor-in-chief and founder of the The Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast and online outlets, most notably at The Boston Phoenix. He has regularly reviewed theater for public radio station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He is a co-founder of Viva la Book Review, a new organization that aims to foster thoughtful, well-crafted book criticism in community news media across the country.

Bill also created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. Until recently, he taught a class on writing arts criticism at Boston University.

Dan has a Quick Take about the funding crisis in public media and how that relates to the need to fund reliable sources of local news and information. It’s not just a matter of your local public television and radio station needing more support from its audience than ever before. It’s also a matter of the limits of philanthropy. Can we find the money to support hyperlocal nonprofits too? He wrote more about this dilemma recently for CommonWealth Beacon.

Ellen dives into a recent update from Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab on The Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the MassLive website, which has become a web traffic powerhouse as it expands. A previous podcast discussion we had with MassLive’s president, Joshua Macht, and editor Ronnie Ramos can be found here.

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

The nonprofit Cambridge Day is beefing up, hiring veteran journalist Michael Fitzgerald as its editor. Founding editor Marc Levy will remain on board as well.

For many years the Day operated as pretty much a one-person shop, but now it’s got a board of directors and regular contributors. It also offers a weekly print edition and offers some coverage of Somerville as well as Cambridge.

This is yet another example of a community stepping up to fill the gap left by the newspaper chain Gannett’s abandonment of its weekly newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts. Gannett shut down the venerable Cambridge Chronicle in 2022, ending its print edition and replacing local news on its Wicked Local website with irrelevant filler from around the region.

The full announcement of Fitzgerald’s hiring follows.

Continue reading “The nonprofit Cambridge Day names a veteran journalist as its new editor”

By Dan Kennedy

A new grant-supported project tracks LGBTQ media projects across the country.

According to News Is Out, the LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project “offers the first in-depth look at the scope, impact and urgent needs of local LGBTQ+ media across the United States. The report shows how these vital outlets, from one-person operations to established multimedia platforms, face shrinking advertising revenue, little foundation support and growing external threats, even as their audiences surge.”

The project was created in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Media Foundation, News Is Out and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

What strikes me in looking at the map is how few local LGBTQ media outlets are in operation — just 107, including 80 that responded to the survey used to create the map and 27 that did not. The database comprises both projects that cover a city or region and those that are statewide in focus. According to the accompanying report, some 1.5 million LGBTQ folks live in one of 18 states where there is no original LGBTQ news.

Continue reading “Mapping LGBTQ media; plus, news behind bars, going mobile and some well-deserved recognition”

By Dan Kennedy

The town of Marblehead, an affluent community of about 20,000 residents on Boston’s North Shore, is proving to be a hotbed for hyperlocal journalism.

Just a few years ago, its only newspaper was the Gannett-owned Marblehead Reporter. Then, after the chain dumped virtually all of its weeklies’ local coverage in favor of regional content, three different independent news projects moved in to fill the void. One eventually ceased operations, leaving the town with two. Soon, though, the count will return to three.

What’s fueling the latest startup is the departure last month of Will Dowd from the Marblehead Current. Dowd, the community editor as well as a co-founder, had been with the Current from its launch in 2022. But the Current, a nonprofit print weekly with a robust website, is dealing with some financial challenges, which led to the elimination of Dowd’s full-time job.

Now Dowd is starting The Marblehead Independent, built on the increasingly popular Ghost newsletter platform. He expects to debut later this month. Dowd told me by email that he decided to go solo rather than accept the Current’s offer to continue as a paid freelancer for much less money. “I don’t hold any animosity over it; the board had to do what it had to do,” he said.

The Current recently published an editorial thanking Dowd for his work but adding that its nonprofit status “does not relieve the Current of its obligation to balance its books.” An uncertain financial environment, the editorial said, led it to impose “drastic temporary measures, like 25% across-the-board pay cuts,” adding: “We, of course, will continue to work for brighter days, as we turn over every rock in search of funding.”

The town is also served by the Marblehead Weekly News, a for-profit print weekly mailed to every home in town and owned by The Daily Item of nearby Lynn. For a time, a for-profit digital project known as the Marblehead Beacon operated as well. The Beacon suspended publication in late 2023, although its website is still live.

At a time when many communities don’t have a single reliable local news source, Marblehead is served by a plethora of outlets, the Current’s challenges notwithstanding. The median household income in Marblehead is about $166,000, which is about 64% higher than the statewide median of $101,000.

But that only proves a point that Ellen and I often make. Affluent suburban communities are finding ways to overcome the local news crisis while rural areas and urban communities of color are often being left behind.

Meanwhile, I hope both the Current and the Independent — and, yes, the Weekly News, too — are able to survive and thrive.

Nearly four years ago, Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy began tracking solutions to the local news crisis with our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our first guest was Lori Ehrlich, at that time a state representative who was working to launch a commission to study the state of community journalism in Massachusetts and make some recommendations.

The commission has twice failed to achieve liftoff, but we’ve built a multidimensional project. We wrote a well-received book, “What Works in Community News,” which was published by Beacon Press in 2024. And we are involved in other ways as well.

Today the What Works project, which is part of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and affiliated with the university’s Center for Transformative Media, comprises several different initiatives:

• • Our website, where we post updates to the projects that we write about in our book, new episodes of our podcast, and news and commentary about other developments in local news.
  • Our podcast, on which we interview enterpreneurs and thought leaders on an every-other-week basis. We’ll be back later this month with our 105th episode following a summer hiatus.
  • Our Bluesky feed, where we link to coverage and smaller items that don’t quite meet the criteria for a full blog post. If you’re not interested in joining Bluesky, you’ll find our news feed embedded on the website. If you’re reading What Works on your laptop, just cast your eyes to the right.
  • A database of independent local news organizations in Massachusetts. Although much of our work is national in scope, we also believe we can offer unique value to the grassroots journalism community right here at home. Look for links to “Mass. Indy News” in the upper right corner of this website. You can also bookmark it at tinyurl.com/mass-indy-news.
  • Speaking appearances at which we talk about our book and evangelize about the future of local news. We also engage in ad hoc consulting with the leaders of news projects that are either startups or moving in new directions.
  • Gatherings for local news leaders both in person and via webinar. We’re already planning our second in-person conference, which will be held next year on Friday, March 13.

Ellen and Dan are trying to build something of lasting value and to push back against the narrative that local news is dead. Through independent community control and innovative nonprofit and for-profit business models, we believe the local news crisis is being solved one community at a time.