It’s not just nostalgia: How print enhances advertising and visibility for local-news projects

Photo (cc) 2026 by Dan Kennedy

By Dan Kennedy

Last Thursday I had an opportunity to take part in a panel on the state of community journalism. I was struck by the nostalgia for print expressed by two editors who are many decades younger than I am, which is why I’m revisiting this still-relevant issue.

The event, titled “Peril and Promise,” was a fundraiser for The Local News, a print-and-digital nonprofit founded a decade ago in Ipswich, Massachusetts. (Its print edition, as you can see, has a slightly different name: the Ipswich Local News.) The panel comprised Local News editor Trevor Meek; Taylor Ann Bradford, the editor of the H-W News, a fairly new nonprofit covering Hamilton and Wenham that offers print with a minimal digital presence (here is its Instagram page); Joel Barrett, news editor of The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, a chain-owned daily; and me. Moderating was retired editor Richard Lodge.

Read the rest at Media Nation.

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Author: Dan Kennedy

I am a professor of journalism at Northeastern University specializing in the future of local journalism at whatworks.news. My blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net.

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