University Herald newspaper office, Seattle, 1919. Photo in the public domain.
By Dan Kennedy
After reading Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s interview with Richard J. Tofel about her new report, “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: A Field-Level Analysis of Infrastructure Needs,” I was concerned that she was going to propose widespread consolidation in the local and hyperlocal news space. I was alarmed enough to write a blog post reminding my readers of the old slogan “Local Doesn’t Scale.”
So once the actual report came out, I set aside a couple of hours to read it carefully. It is more nuanced than her interview with Tofel suggested, and I found much of it to be both useful and thoughtful. A reminder: Hansen Shapiro is the co-founder and former chief executive of the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that purchased newspapers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia and ran them with rather mixed results. We interviewed her in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, and she was a guest on our podcast.
Oddly enough, Hansen Shapiro’s conversation with Tofel garnered more attention than the report itself. Tofel told Nieman Lab that it was his all-time most-viewed post. Well, I’m here to rectify that. It’s a dense report, but it’s well worth reading. I’ll guide you through some of the highlights.
We have started a Facebook group for people who are interested in keeping up on our activities — especially our upcoming free, all-day webinar for local news publishers, which will be held on Thursday, May 21. The group will also help us with our outreach as we get closer to the event. Please join today!
Barbara “Bob” Allen with Penn State student Sarah Grosch. Photo by Al Tompkins is used with permission.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Barbara “Bob” Allen, a Los Angeles-based journalist, trainer and consultant who founded CollegeJournalism.org in 2025. The site provides resources and news for journalism educators and student media advisers across the country.
Allen brings decades of experience mentoring student journalists. She was the adviser to the student newspaper at Oklahoma State University and most recently served as director of college programming at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Missouri, home to both a campus paper — The Maneater — and the Columbia Missourian, a lab newspaper covering the city of Columbia.
Allen has also led an ambitious project to map every college newspaper in the country, in collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News. That effort found more than 1,100 college newspapers, with 766 located in or adjacent to counties with little or no local news access.
Ellen’s Quick Take is about a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Provincetown. The Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that partners with The Provincetown Independent, raised money from more than 100 donors to buy the condo to house reporters. Ed Miller, editor and co-founder of the Indie, told Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher that housing was a major barrier to attracting staff to his well-regarded newspaper on the Outer Cape.
We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 1,200-word summary, which was then read by us for accuracy. The results are below. Do you find this useful? Please tell us what you think by using the Contact form linked from the top of our website.
Barbara “Bob” Allen, founder and director of CollegeJournalism.org, joined Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg on “What Works: The Future of Local News” to discuss the state of college journalism in the United States — its promise, its financial struggles, and its role in addressing the local news crisis.
The New Haven Independent newsroom. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
By Dan Kennedy
Folks who work at finding solutions to the local news crisis are understandably frustrated at what a difficult, frustrating slog it can be. Earlier this week, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the former executive director of the National Trust for Local News, gave Richard J. Tofel a preview of a report she’s written for Press Forward and said, “I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.”
I’m looking forward to reading Hansen Shapiro’s report. (She’s featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and has been on our podcast.) And yet there really is no substitute for solving this problem one community at a time. For all the talk you hear about scale, that’s really not the way to go unless you’re talking about obvious things like finding a common tech platform so that every local news publisher doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the content management system. In the early days of the hyperlocal news movement, a group of publishers got together and formed an organization called Authentically Local. Its spot-on message: “Local Doesn’t Scale.”
We are excited to announce that our 2026 What Works webinar aimed at practical skills for local news publishers will be held on Thursday, May 21. The free all-day event will comprise three interactive workshops on event planning, audience development and AI skills as well as a keynote address. We’ll be sure to announce more details as they become available. And here is our conference page.
