Month: October 2026

On the brand-new “What Works” podcast, Dan talks with Jon Keller, who has been explaining Massachusetts politics to Boston broadcast audiences for nearly half a century. Ellen couldn’t make it on air for this episode, but she handled the editing and will be back soon.

Jon returned to WBZ-TV just in time to cover a contentious governor’s election. He brought his trademark quick thinking and level-headed approach to the recent debate between Democratic incumbent Maura Healey and her Republican challenger, Mike Minogue. Jon was a colleague of Dan’s at The Boston Phoenix, where he wrote a political column. His “Keller @ Large” show remains one of the longest-running political franchises in local television.

Boston magazine twice named him “Best TV Political Analyst,” and he’s won a boatload of New England Emmys. In the Jurassic era, Jon wrote an opinion column for Ellen at The Boston Globe, and today he writes a column for the MASSterlist political newsletter.

Jon has also been caught in the Paramount media swirl as well. WBZ-TV laid him off in October 2025 as part of Paramount’s cuts, but WBZ brought him back as a special contributor in March of this year.

Dan’s got a Quick Take about turmoil at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. Executive editor Rob Curley, who’s leading an effort to take the paper nonprofit, was placed on administrative leave recently for unspecified inappropriate behavior. Now a deeply reported article by two nonprofit news outlets tells devastating story about what went wrong.

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By Wilson Criscione and Daisy Zavala Magaña

This report was produced in a collaboration between InvestigateWest and RANGE and republished by permission.

When The Spokesman-Review announced plans to transfer Spokane’s 143-year-old, family-owned newspaper to a nonprofit founded by Executive Editor Rob Curley, it took over the front page.

“The People’s Paper,” read the April 16, 2025, headline, saying ownership would transfer “to you, the community.”

Key to the plan was Curley, the folksy self-proclaimed “journalism nerd” who burst into Spokane a decade ago, declaring a love for Gonzaga University basketball rivaled only by his love for Disney. The transition to Comma Community Journalism Lab was cast in media industry publications not only as a way to save Spokane’s daily newspaper, but as part of a growing movement to resurrect dying papers by making them less dependent on ads and corporate ownership and more on philanthropy and community partnerships. As proof of concept, the paper had already added several so-called “community-funded” journalists to its staff.

But in The Spokesman-Review newsroom this summer, that hopeful vision ran into persistent concerns about Curley’s leadership. More than a dozen current and former employees, along with contemporaneous records reviewed by InvestigateWest and RANGE, reveal how the newsroom had raised concerns about Curley’s management for years, culminating in his suspension from the paper on Aug. 7 and a vote of no confidence from the union, the Spokane Editorial Society. He is currently on leave as the paper conducts an internal investigation.

Continue reading “How Rob Curley’s plan to take The Spokesman-Review nonprofit ended in a newsroom revolt”

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with Clay Wirestone, the opinion editor of the Kansas Reflector, a digital nonprofit that’s part of the States Newsroom network. His first book was published Sept. 29. It’s called, aptly enough, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now.” His second is scheduled for 2028.

Wirestone seems to be on a first-name basis with Kansas opinion journalists past and present, and he profiles a number of them. He knows the state well: he graduated from the University of Kansas and lives in Lawrence with his husband. He also edited news at The Topeka Capital-Journal and spent more than a decade at New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor,  where he worked with Dan’s Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman, a past guest on this podcast.

Dan has a Quick Take about yet another new book — “Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America,” by Nick Mathews. Dan reviewed it recently for The Arts Fuse. Mathews offers some interesting insights into what happens to community life when there’s a shortage of reliable news and information.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on an excellent Substack post by media observer Richard J. Tofel on the recent massacre at the McClatchy newspaper chain, which is being gutted by its private-equity owner. It’s like a slasher movie, and the slasher has come for newspapers that were great in their heyday.

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

For nonprofit news organizations, the most important time of the year is November and December, when the NewsMatch program goes live. An initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News, the program provides national funding as a percentage of money raised locally. It’s not a one-to-one match, but it provides crucial revenues to small (and large) projects as well as an incentive they can use in attracting donors.

Now INN is making a change. According to a new impact report, marking the 10th anniversary of the program, NewsMatch is moving to a year-round model. According to the report:

The next phase will focus on helping newsrooms build on that foundation with more advanced, flexible campaigns tailored to their goals and stage of growth. To support this evolution, NewsMatch is shifting from a single year-end campaign to a year-round model.

We talked to newsrooms about what they were looking for from this opportunity, and they emphasized the value of flexibility, experimentation, and shared learning. In 2027, we’re excited to pilot NewsMatch Catalyst Campaigns, supporting a select group of INN members as they test new fundraising strategies, deepen donor engagement, and build toward long-term sustainability.

According to the report, NewsMatch has raised more than $477 million for local news over the past 10 years, with INN itself growing from 27 investigative news organizations in 2009 to some 500 member outlets today. (INN was originally known as the Investigative News Network.)

Karen Rundlet, INN’s CEO and executive director, calls NewsMatch “the people-powered engine of the nonprofit news field, democratizing donations from a public that wants good, accurate information that helps them with daily decision making. People from all corners of the country donate to newsrooms via NewsMatch.”

Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a good overview of the impact report.