Month: September 2026

The “What Works” podcast is back after our summer hiatus. Ellen was feeling under the weather, so Dan is flying solo. But no worries — Ellen still handled editing and production, and she should be back for our next episode.

We’re pleased to have Margaret Sullivan as our guest. Sullivan has spent the last decade or so doing the toughest of jobs: telling the country’s most powerful newsrooms what they’re getting wrong. She was the fifth public editor at The New York Times, from 2012 to 2016. Somebody once called it the worst job in journalism, but she took it anyway. Then she went to The Washington Post as its media columnist, where she covered the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Trump years, and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. She left the Post in 2022, which, in hindsight, looks like excellent timing.

Sullivan writes a weekly column on media, politics and culture for The Guardian US, and she publishes a fearless newsletter on Substack called American Crisis, where she calls out lapses in how the media are covering Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.

But she also has deep roots in local journalism. She was a summer intern at her hometown paper, The Buffalo News, and worked her way up to become its first woman editor-in-chief. So she knows firsthand what happens to a community when its newspaper is gutted. In 2020, she published a book about the local news crisis called “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy” and, we’re pleased to say, she blurbed our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Dan has a Quick Take that Yogi Berra would have called déjà vu all over again. The Block family, which owns The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, says it will shut down the paper if they can’t find a buyer by the end of 2026. Now where have we heard that before? He also dives into the new impact report from the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organization that turns out to be one of the biggest funders of nonprofit news in the country. AJP makes the case that nonprofit news as a business model has moved past the experimental stage.

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

By Dan Kennedy

It’s time for a check-in on how digital outlets that rely partly or entirely on artificial intelligence are hollowing out the already-beleaguered news business. What better time than now, while we’re in the midst of a national freakout over AI? (The latest: Karen Weise and Mike Isaac report in The New York Times on concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI that AI scraping amounts to “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”)

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I’ll begin with what strikes me as the most well-intentioned of the projects that have caught my eye recently: Nanopress, which produces morning newsletters for more than 70 communities and neighborhoods in the Boston area by scraping information from local government, civic groups and news organizations.

Read the rest at Media Nation.

Local news is in crisis everywhere, but the challenge is more daunting in rural areas than it is in cities or affluent suburbs.

Consider the Storm Lake Times Pilot, which serves a farming community in Iowa. As co-founder Art Cullen explains in the 2021 documentary “Storm Lake,” the rise of agribusiness wiped out much of the local advertising that had once sustained the paper while the spreading tentacles of social media grabbed another large chunk. When Cullen appeared that same year on the podcast that Ellen Clegg and I host, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” he told us that both he and his brother, John Cullen, were living on Social Security rather than take a salary out of their precarious newspaper revenues.

The Storm Lake Times Pilot is emblematic of a national phenomenon. In 2025, the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School found that 213 U.S. counties lacked a local news outlet, and that nearly 80% of those counties were in rural areas.

This depressing state of affairs is the focus of Nick Mathews’ new book, “Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America.”

Read the rest at The Arts Fuse.

By Dan Kennedy

Earlier this year, it looked like California might be the place where government efforts to revive local news went to their grave. As I wrote for Poynter Online, a widely touted partnership between Google and the state that would have provided $250 million for community journalism over five years was scaled back drastically, the victim of budget pressures and political infighting.

But now California is on the verge of passing an ambitious bill to assist struggling news outlets. As Gretchen A. Peck reports for Editor & Publisher, the Community NEWS Act would provide significant tax credits for hiring and retaining journalists over a five-year period: $20,000 a year for retaining up to five full-time journalists; $15,000 for each additional full-timer; $7,500 for part-timers; and $15,000 for each full-timer hired to a new position.

Read the rest at Media Nation.