On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan is flying solo because Ellen is recovering from knee-replacement surgery. But fear not — she was behind the scenes making sure this episode got recorded properly, and she edited what you are listening to. She’ll be back on the air soon.
Our guest is Rick Goldsmith, a veteran filmmaker who has taken a close look at the state of corporate journalism in America. His documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink” tells the story of Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund that has bought up many of our greatest newspapers and stripped them of their real estate and slashed their newsrooms.
Rick Goldsmith
He focuses on one of Alden’s papers, The Denver Post, and the rise of The Colorado Sun, a digital startup begun by former Post journalists. The story of what happened in Colorado is also one that we tell in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
The reason we’re having Rick on now is that you’ll be able to watch “Stripped for Parts” through Dec. 31 for free on the PBS app, which you can access through Apple TV, Roku, Google Play and most smart TVs. The various options for watching the film are explained here.
Dan has a Quick Take about Jay Rosen, who retired earlier this year from New York University and is now taking on a new challenge. Jay is probably best known to his younger followers as an incisive media critic. But his true passion, going back to the 1990s, is finding ways to involve members of the public in the production of journalism. Now he’s doing it again with a project called News Creator Corps — and it could have implications for local news.
Camden, Maine, home of the Midcoast Villager. Photo (cc) 2020 by Paul VanDerWerf.
By Dan Kennedy
The Midcoast Villager, an innovative weekly newspaper based in Camden, Maine, got The New York Times treatment last week. But though the Times lavished attention on the high-profile journalists who’ve been recruited to work there as well as the café it’s opened to extend public outreach, it missed entirely the Villager’s long history as a tech innovator — a history that extends all the way to the present.
The Times article and visuals, by Steven Kurutz and Cig Harvey, are certainly entertaining enough, starting with their portrayal of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald, who left a job covering Washington for NBC News to come to Maine. “I did an insane thing,” he tells the Times. “I left one of the last stable jobs in media and took a job in the worst sector of media — and possibly in the economy.”
Map via “The State of Local News 2025.” Click here for the interactive version.
By Dan Kennedy
Finding news in the annual State of Local News report from Northwestern University’ Medill School can be a challenge because, frankly, it’s always the same depressing thing: newspapers keep closing; digital startups are rising, but not by enough to fill the gap; and be sure to tune in again next year, when the situation is likely to be even worse.
Still, there are a few interesting nuggets in the latest update, which was released Monday. In particular, I was drawn to some observations in the report about rural areas, which is where news deserts tend to be concentrated. News deserts, as defined by the project’s now-retired founder, Penny Abernathy, are counties without any locally based news organizations.
As newspapers continue to close, independent startups are filling the gap. But it’s uneven at best, with most startups concentrated in urban and suburban areas. The report puts it this way:
Over the past five years, we have tracked more than 300 startups that have emerged across the country. Support for both these new startups, which have opened in almost every state, as well as existing legacy outlets has come from a surge in philanthropic investment as well as public policy initiatives. Over the past year, such efforts have boosted a wide variety of news outlets. Overall, however, philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.
The report also finds that fewer than 10% of digital-only news organizations are in rural counties, and that the demographics of counties that do support digital projects “tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Of course, internet connectivity tends to lag in rural areas as well.
It’s happened to all of us. You’re scrolling through your social media feed and see a link to what appears to be a news story, with a startling headline about something happening in your state or community. The text is formatted like a news article, and the website has the name of your town followed by some newspaper-y suffix — the “News” or “Post” or “Crier” or “Gazette.”
If you try to stay informed about what’s happening in your local community these days, you’re probably inundated with a flood of content, some of it more reliable than others.
In the world of independent local news startups, 10 years is an eon. That’s how long John and Kristen Muldoon published The Local News, a nonprofit print weekly that covers Ipswich, on Boston’s North Shore, as well as several surrounding communities.
Now they’re moving on. Fortunately, they’ve worked out a succession plan. Trevor Meek, who’s worked as a reporter for the paper since 2023, is the new editor, and Eric Gedstad, who has a background in communications, marketing and government, will be the executive director (that’s nonprofit-speak for publisher).
“Yes, they’ll still be contributing to the paper,” Meek writes of the Muldoons. “And no, they’ll never be able to escape my desperate texts and panicked emails. But their day-to-day presence — their gallows humor, sharp instincts, and steady hands — will be sorely missed.”
As Kris Olson, a co-founder and consulting editor at the Marblehead Current, put it in an email to me, “John is essentially being replaced by two people…. That gives you a sense of how much John was doing.”
John Muldoon has written that The Local News began to find its stride in 2019, when Bill Wasserman, a North Shore journalism legend, became a supporter by donating $100,000 and by helping the paper with advertising, which enabled the operation to have a regular print edition.
Wasserman had previously owned The Ipswich Chronicle and a string of other weeklies only to watch them wither under a series of corporate chain owners that culminated in their acquisition by GateHouse Media, now Gannett. (I worked briefly for North Shore Weeklies under one of those chain owners way back in 1990.) Wasserman died in 2021 at the age of 94.
Somewhere along the line, the Muldoons decided to turn their paper into a nonprofit, with John explaining, “The key reason there was to protect the paper for the public from the depredations of any future corporate owner.”
The Boston Globe’s Billy Baker wrote about The Local News in 2024, reporting that the print edition was being sent to 9,300 homes in Ipswich and neighboring Rowley without charge.
John and I have corresponded over the years, and I got to meet him and Kristen last November at a local-news panel at an Ipswich brewpub, where all such events ought to be held. The Muldoons have made an enormous contribution to the North Shore, bringing real news coverage back to places that had largely been ignored for years.
Best wishes to both of them on their well-deserved retirement.
Photo of Memphis skyline (cc) 2015 by Luca Sartoni.
By Ellen Clegg
Print, digital and broadcast media outlets in Memphis fanned out on Friday, Oct. 10, as Tennessee National Guard troops showed up in visible numbers for an operation dubbed the Memphis Safe Task Force. The mission for Memphis media was clear, but sorting out the local impact will likely pose a long-term challenge.
Dan and I reported on the state of the media landscape in Memphis in a chapter of our book, “What Works in Community News,” in 2024, and the ambitions of hyperlocal startups and nonprofit outlets have continued to grow since then.
Some of the most important reporting includes astory in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis and The Tennessean of Nashville by Tennessean reporter Angele Latham spotlighting a saber-rattling threat to the First Amendment. As Latham reports, a coalition of Republican state legislators wrote a letter to Fox13 (WHBQ-TV) blasting the station’s reporting, claiming it “undermined public safety and put officers’ lives at risk.” (The Commercial Appeal, the Gannett legacy paper, has suffered severe cutbacks and co-published Latham’s story from The Tennessean, a sister paper based in the capital city of Nashville that supplies state government news.)
Nonprofit local news is on the upswing, according to a new report from the Institute for Nonprofit News. An INN survey of nearly 400 digital-first nonprofit news organizations showed that the median outlet raised $532,000 in revenue in 2024, up from $477,000 the previous year. That’s an increase of 11.5%.
In addition, local news organizations now make up 51% of INN’s membership, up from 48% in 2023. The remainder of the projects are regional, statewide and national.
INN is a vitally important organization in the world of local nonprofit news. Through its NewsMatch program, news publishers are able to leverage local donations with matching funds — one-to-one in some cases. The program has raised more than $400 million since 2017. INN’s ethical guidelines have been widely adopted by the nonprofit journalism community. The organization also acts as a fiscal sponsor for fledgling nonprofits that have not yet received IRS approval for full 501(c)(3) recognition.
In the Great Hall at the Massachusetts Statehouse for the Mass Book Awards.
By Dan Kennedy
I was thrilled to attend the Mass Book Awards ceremony at the Statehouse earlier today, when “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate,” which Ellen and I wrote about possible ways out of the local journalism crisis, was recognized as one of the top dozen nonfiction books in Massachusetts.
Our book was one of nine that were longlisted. In addition, the top nonfiction award went to “We Refuse: A History of Black Resistance,” by Kellie Carter Jackson, with honors going to “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit,” by Robin Bernstein, and “Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border,” by Ieva Jusionyte. The awards are sponsored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Unfortunately, Ellen wasn’t able to make it, but I was honored to attend and be recognized along with the other winners.
It was also great to reconnect with Gayatri Patnaik, the director of Beacon Press, who embraced our vision and helped bring it to fruition. Our immediate editor, Catherine Tung, has since moved on to a senior editing position at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but she provided crucial support when we lost a year during COVID. She also gave us good advice that we tried to follow in our reporting — to assess how well the local news projects we were writing about were covering arts and culture, a crucial part of civic life. That said, most of them weren’t, with the New Haven Independent and its affiliated low-power radio station, WNHH, standing as notable exceptions.
I’m also proud of the professional partnership Ellen and I have developed as we’ve built out the book into a wider project, What Works: The Future of Local News, based at Northeastern University in the School of Journalism and affiliated with the Center for Transformative Media. What Works comprises a frequently updated website on developments in local news; an every-other-week podcast featuring news entrepreneurs and thought leaders; conferences and webinars; and a database of independent local news organizations in Massachusetts.
Larry Ryckman, co-founder and publisher of The Colorado Sun. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
By Dan Kennedy
For at least 15 years, local-news visionaries have been thinking about ways to build a media organization owned and governed by its staff and members of the community. The idea is to create a news cooperative — that is, a co-op, similar to a food co-op or a credit union. Members might contribute money or labor, and in return they’d have a say in hiring and coverage.
I followed efforts to build such a co-op in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where longtime journalist Tom Stites wanted to test out a concept he called the Banyan Project with a site called Haverhill Matters. Unfortunately, years of anemic fundraising went nowhere, and in January 2020, the local organizers shut it down.
“What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, includes a chapter centered on The Mendocino Voice, in rural Northern California. What drew us there was that the founders, Kate Maxwell and Adrian Fernandez Baumann, were planning to convert their nominally for-profit site into a co-op. “We are going to be owned by our readers and our staff,” Maxwell told a crowd at an event that I attended at a brew pub in Ukiah in March 2020. “We think that’s the best way to be sustainable and locally owned.”
COVID, however, wrecked those plans. And though the Voice continued to provide crucial local coverage, Maxwell (Baumann left for personal reasons during the pandemic) started making plans to morph the site into a traditional nonprofit. The Voice was acquired by the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation in 2024. And when Ellen and I recently interviewed Bay City president Katherine Ann Rowlands on our podcast, she was less than enthusiastic about the co-op model.
But now there’s something that at least resembles a local-news co-op — The Colorado Sun, a digital startup whose ownership model has changed several times since it was founded by 10 refugees from Alden Global Capital’s Denver Post in 2018. The Sun is also among the projects we profiled in “What Works in Community News.” Before I get to what’s new, let me share some of the backstory.
When I visited Denver in September 2021, the Sun was operating as a public benefit corporation — that is, a for-profit company legally mandated to serve the community. The project was also working with a nonprofit organization so that individuals and foundations could make tax-exempt donations to support the Sun’s journalism.
At that time, the Sun’s founders were trying to manage a governance challenge. The organization was owned by the nine founders who had stayed (one had left), but it already had a staff more than twice that size. Co-founder Larry Ryckman, then the editor and now the publisher, told me, “We would like there to be a path to ownership for them.”
Ryckman began working out a solution two years later, when the Sun jettisoned its hybrid model and went fully nonprofit. Even then, he told me in an interview for Nieman Lab, he was making plans to involve the staff in the governance, transforming the Sun into a democratically run enterprise. He expanded on that idea when he appeared on our podcast in July 2024, telling Ellen and me that the Sun had brought in a consultant to help them become a “self-directed nonprofit” with a five-member governing board, three of them staff members and two from the community. He told us:
It’s really important to me that the employees and journalists of The Colorado Sun have a voice and a vote in how things are run. So it’s been exciting. I really don’t know of another large news outlet out there that has our structure. There might be a very good reason for that, I will tell you. Time will tell. But in all seriousness, journalism needs new models. We need to experiment with new models. Clearly, the old models are failing before our eyes.
So what’s new? Earlier this month, Tara Francis Chan of the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri reported that the Sun now has a fully functioning governing structure in place. It’s complicated. The staff votes on board members. The board, as I described above, comprises three non-executive staff members and two community members who set strategy and approve the budget. The executive operating committee is a four-member group that runs the organization on a daily basis. The board can remove Ryckman from the executive committee, but only the committee itself can fire him.
“The benefits of this are that our employees have a voice and a vote,” Ryckman told Chan. “And the downside is our employees have a voice and a vote, right? Democracy can be messy sometimes.”
After all these years, we still don’t have any examples of a true local-news co-op. And as I learned in reporting on the Banyan Project, they are wickedly difficult to set up. But shared governing responsibility by the staff and, in the case of the Sun, members of the community is becoming a reality — and that’s at the heart of what the co-op model is all about.
The news was posted on Facebook, and it provoked immediate ire. Which, to be fair, is on brand for Facebook. Dan Conaway, a columnist for the Daily Memphian, reported that he had quit the prominent digital news outlet because his column blasting Donald Trump had been censored.
“I have left the Daily Memphian,” Conaway posted on his public feed. “They refused to run my column this week. Too critical of Trump, they said. Trump is not local, they said. This week, of all weeks, Trump is not local? Enough, I said.”
The subject seemed like fair game. In September, President Trump announced that the National Guard would be deployed to Memphis and told Fox News that the city is “deeply troubled.” He added: “And by the way, we’ll bring in the military, too, if we need it.” Which, to be fair, is also on brand for the 47th president.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, welcomed the move. Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, didn’t support the deployment but told a news conference, “It’s not the mayor’s call,” according to The Washington Post.
The local deployment of troops demands scrutiny by hard-charging independent news outlets, and Memphis is lucky to have a journalistic ecosystem that has evolved and deepened significantly in recent years. Although the legacy daily newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, has shrunk under Gannett’s cost-cutting ownership, three nonprofit digital outlets are covering the city: the Memphian, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis. Dan Kennedy and I featured Memphis in a chapter in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and interviewed MLK50 founder Wendi Thomas as well as Memphian columnist and academic Otis Sanford on our “What Works” podcast. I interviewed Memphian editor Eric Barnes during a trip to the city and sat in on a briefing at MLK50.
So what in the name of John Peter Zenger was going on, I wondered? Then the Memphian clapped back with a sharp editor’s note. It reads in part:
Dan Conaway’s column this week was left in limbo after Dan quit The Daily Memphian. This disruption led some readers to believe we had bowed to pressure to not run a column critical of President Donald Trump. But this is false.
We had asked Dan to make a number of minor edits before publication — specifically to cite his sources and to remove a reference to Uptown that we thought diminished the column’s strength — but during our discussions, Dan instead finally said, “I’ll just quit.”
The note cites other columns in the Memphian that have been critical of Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard — including two written by Conaway. Other articles and an opinion column quote city residents who support the deployment. The Memphian editor’s note goes on to say: “As we have been from the beginning, The Daily Memphian remains committed to publishing all points of view.”
In a commendable act of candor, The Memphian published Conaway’s column as submitted. It’s essentially a personal reflection on why his father joined the Navy the week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which drew the United States into World War II. Conaway compares then and now: The valor of U.S. troops fighting fascism in Europe and the Pacific Theater to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordering generals to diet and shave; the diversion of our military from protecting the nation from threats abroad to attacking Trump’s political enemies in American cities.
Fine so far. But then came Conaway’s stunner of a kicker, a trashy turn of racist juvenalia that must unfortunately be quoted here to be believed:
One man has put 340 million people at risk of losing this democracy. Just as surely as he’s made the Oval Office look like an Uptown whorehouse waiting room…
The Uptown neighborhood in Memphis grew out of a federal redevelopment project aimed at pulling people out of poverty by providing affordable housing. But efforts to upgrade the housing haven’t necessarily been easy, and in 2022 the Institute for Public Service Reporting dug into issues that led to displacement of residents who had few resources to fall back on.
Memphian editors made a prudent decision to ask Conaway to strike his line about the whorehouse. That’s called editing, not censorship. They also had a valid point in asking for a tighter local focus, which is central to the Memphian’s mission. There are countless other digital corners in which to find hot takes on Trump, albeit probably without the whorehouse waiting room.
But ultimately, Conaway’s self-righteous Facebook paean against censorship is misleading. The version of his column that he posted is in fact edited to leave out his outrageous language about the whorehouse and substitutes the glitzy French palace of Versailles:
One man has put 340 million people at risk of losing this democracy. Just as surely as he’s made the Oval Office look like a bad imitation of royal chambers at Versailles…
Editors typically toil behind the scenes. The public rarely sees their work, even as the best editors work in tandem with reporters to the benefit of readers. So pour one out for the Memphian editors who showed their work and were transparent about two perfectly understandable and professional requests: tighten up the local focus — and jettison the blatantly racist trope.
