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.
Congratulations to The Bay State Banner, which is embarking on its 60th year of publication. The Banner, founded by Melvin Miller, covers the Black community in Greater Boston and beyond. It was acquired in 2023 by two Black journalists, Ron Mitchell and André Stark, and it continues to provide strong coverage through a weekly print edition and a robust website.
In an editorial marking the Banner’s milestone, Mitchell, now the publisher and editor, writes that Donald Trump represents a dangerous threat to Black and brown communities, observing that even Trump’s seemingly positive actions carry within them the whiff of segregation:
This Trump administration is the first one to have increased funding for historically Black universities and colleges. That is a good thing for HBCUs, which have historically been underfunded. But those increases, coupled with the attacks on DEI on historically white campuses and the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded ban on considering race in their admissions, contain dangerous echoes of the “separate but equal” doctrine that a prior Supreme Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional.
Mitchell also quotes W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote, “There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.” And he pointedly signs the editorial with his full name, Ronald Du Bois Mitchell.
This week’s edition also contains a reprint of the commemorative section that the Banner put together in celebration of its 50th anniversary. You can access the print edition online.
The Banner is a great example of how an independent local media outlet can serve a community not just by covering it, but by giving it a voice.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with Tracy Baim, a Chicago-based journalist who directed the recently published LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project, which tracks LGBTQ news outlets across the country.
The LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project was created in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Media Foundation, News Is Out and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. The project surfaced 107 LGBTQ media outlets in total, 80 of which responded to the survey.
According to the accompanying report: “While they may have few similarities, there are several common denominators: Most are in need of additional resources to better cover their communities, and most are facing strong headwinds as advertising and sponsors reverse course, pulling back from diverse marketing efforts.”
Baim interviewing Chicago Mayor Harold Washington in his City Hall office in 1987. Photo by William Burks / Windy City Times. Used with permission.
Baim is also the executive director of Press Forward Chicago, the local arm of a national philanthropic effort to address the community news crisis.
Dan has a Quick Take about the state of Kansas, where authorities have banned print newspapers in prisons, a ban that affects some 9,000 inmates in 20 correctional facilities. Weirdly enough, officials have not banned digital newspapers, although, as media commentator Bo Sacks observes, “Most Kansas inmates have limited or no meaningful internet access.”
Ellen’s Quick Take is on a column in The Minnesota Star Tribune written by Steve Grove, the CEO and publisher. He writes about the “stabilizing power of quality journalism” and announces a new team in the newsroom devoted to investigative reporting. But he also announces the outsourcing of the Strib’s print product, which means job losses.
The MAGA right’s war on public broadcasting has come for an innovative statewide news collaboration in New Jersey, leaving its ultimate fate uncertain.
NJ PBS, the state’s public television outlet, may shut down in June 2026 following massive budget cuts at both the federal and state levels. The Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated $1.1 billion in funding for public television and radio over the next two years — including about $1.5 million for New Jersey’s TV station, according to Daniel Han of Politico. Meanwhile, the New Jersey state legislature, facing its own pressure from Trump cuts, reduced funding to NJ PBS by $750,000, reports Victoria Gladstone of NJ.com.
The upshot is that WNET of New York, the nonprofit umbrella organization for NJ PBS, was unable to reach an agreement with the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority to continue operating the station beyond June 2026. WNET says it will look for a new partner to keep NJ PBS on the air.
For news consumers, the effect could be considerable. NJ PBS is one of a tiny handful of public television stations that offers a daily evening newscast. Since 2019, that newscast has been produced in conjunction with NJ Spotlight News, a 15-year-old digital news outlet covering state politics and public policy. It’s a true collaboration, with the newscast and video clips posted on the website and with Spotlight reporters frequently popping up on the air. The story of how Spotlight and NJ PBS merged is told in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote.
John Mooney, the co-founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, declined to comment when I contacted him this morning. We interviewed John last spring on our “What Works” podcast.
Lucas Frau of NorthJersey.com reports that two Democratic state senators, John Burzichelli and Andrew Zwicker, are hoping to find a solution to save NJ PBS. According to their statement:
The shutdown of public TV in New Jersey will have real-life consequences, depriving the state’s residents of invaluable news and educational programming. The television network has played a pivotal role in New Jersey, bridging the divide between New York and Philadelphia with trusted information relevant to the lives and civic activities of the state’s residents.
Even if WNET is unable to find a partner, it will continue to offer the daily Spotlight newscast on Thirteen, its New York-based television station, which reaches a large segment of New Jersey viewers, and on a variety of digital platforms. Anchor Brianna Vannozzi shared all this with viewers on Tuesday.
In other words, coverage will continue, both on the newscast and on the website. The question is whether NJ Spotlight News will be able to continue offering the same in-depth reporting that has been its hallmark. As is too often the case these days, the answer is probably “no” — unless wealthy benefactors step up.
Bill Marx at the Climate Crisis Cabaret, reading the Ted Hughes poem “How Water Began to Play.” The artwork is by Phyllis Ewen.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen are back from summer break and talk with Bill Marx, the editor-in-chief and founder of the The Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast and online outlets, most notably at The Boston Phoenix. He has regularly reviewed theater for public radio station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He is a co-founder of Viva la Book Review, a new organization that aims to foster thoughtful, well-crafted book criticism in community news media across the country.
Bill also created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. Until recently, he taught a class on writing arts criticism at Boston University.
Dan has a Quick Take about the funding crisis in public media and how that relates to the need to fund reliable sources of local news and information. It’s not just a matter of your local public television and radio station needing more support from its audience than ever before. It’s also a matter of the limits of philanthropy. Can we find the money to support hyperlocal nonprofits too? He wrote more about this dilemma recently for CommonWealth Beacon.
Ellen dives into a recent update from Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab on The Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the MassLive website, which has become a web traffic powerhouse as it expands. A previous podcast discussion we had with MassLive’s president, Joshua Macht, and editor Ronnie Ramos can be found here.
