What Works: The Future of Local News (Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg)

Jaida Grey Eagle is a photojournalist working for the Sahan Journal in Minneapolis through Report For America. She is Oglala Lakota and was born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and raised in Minneapolis. Her photography has been published in a wide range of publications, and featured on a billboard on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. She is also a co-producer of "Sisters Rising," a documentary film about six Native American women reclaiming person and tribal sovereignty in the face of sexual violence. Dan and Ellen offer quick takes on paywalls and media companies that target well-heeled readers, and on Evan Smith's announcement that he's stepping down from the Texas Tribune.

Dan and Ellen talk with Howard Owens, the publisher of The Batavian, a digital news organization in Genesee County, New York, way out near Buffalo. When Dan first met Howard, he was the director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media, which later morphed into Gannett. Howard launched The Batavian for GateHouse in 2008. In 2009, GateHouse eliminated Howard’s job, but they let him take The Batavian with him, and he’s been at it ever since.

The Batavian’s website is loaded with well over 100 ads, reflecting his belief that ads should be put right in front of the reader, not rotated in and out. He’s also got an innovative idea to raise money from his readers while keeping The Batavian free, which we’ll ask him about during our conversation with him.

Dan and Ellen are also joined by Sebastian Grace, who just received his degree in journalism and political science from Northeastern. Everyone in journalism is freaking out about ChatGPT and other players in the new generation of artificial intelligence. Seb wrote a really smart piece, which is up on the What Works website, assuring us all that we shouldn’t worry — that AI is a tool that can allow journalists to work smarter. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on Mississippi Today, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for stories that revealed how a former Mississippi governor used his office to steer millions of state welfare dollars to benefit family and friends. Including NFL quarterback Brett Favre! We interviewed Mary Margaret White, the CEO of Mississippi today, on this podcast in November 2022. And reporter Anna Wolfe has a great podcast about her prize-winning series. 

Dan observes that journalism these days is often depicted as deep blue — something that liberals and progressives may pay attention to, but that conservatives and especially Trump supporters dismiss as fake news. But Steve Waldman, the head of the Rebuild Local News Coalition, says it’s not that simple, and that the local news crisis is harming conservatives even more than it is liberals.

Ellen and Dan talk with Walter Robinson, a longtime investigative journalist and editor of The Boston Globe's Spotlight Team. Robby, as he is known, was instrumental in uncovering the clergy sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in Boston and beyond. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. The team's work was captured onscreen in the movie "Spotlight," where Robby was played by the actor Michael Keaton. 

Robby is a former colleague – he was a distinguished professor of journalism here at Northeastern. He was also a 1974 graduate of Northeastern's journalism program, and participated in the co-op program.

He reported and edited local news at The Globe. But he ranged wide. He reported from 48 states and 33 countries. He covered the White House during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. He was also the Globe's Middle East Bureau Chief, and covered the first Persian Gulf War.  

In recent years, Robby has been focused on the local news crisis in a big way. He has been deeply involved in the New Bedford Light, an impressive nonprofit digital news outlet. He lives in Plymouth, so it's perhaps no surprise that he is a key advisor to the board of directors at the new Plymouth Independent.

Dan has a Quick Take on developments in the junkyard known as Twitter. Ellen reports on a new podcast out of Memphis called "Civil Wrongs." It's produced by a Report for America corps member that examines a racist massacre in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Dan and Ellen talk with Bill and Linda Forry, co-publishers of the award-winning Reporter Newspapers in Boston. Bill serves as editor, and Linda focuses on business development and strategic partnerships.

The Reporter Newspapers include the weekly Dorchester Reporter as well as Boston Irish and BostonHaitian.com. The publications and their websites are part of a media business owned and operated by the Forry family since 1973.

The Forrys were recently in the news. The Reporter is one of 205 news organizations in the U.S. to win an inaugural Press Forward grant to expand coverage of Boston’s underserved communities. Dan has a Quick Take on public radio. Put bluntly, public radio is in trouble, and not just NPR, which may be our leading source of reliable free news, but also public radio stations across the country. An important recent essay in Nieman Reports argues that the way forward for public radio stations may be to double down on local news. 

Ellen's Quick Take is on the NiemanLab predictions for the media industry in 2025. Every year, NiemanLab asks a select group of people what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Sam Mintz, the editor of Brookline.News, a digital outlet Ellen helped launch, is one of the prognosticators.

Dan talks with Jason Pramas, executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and editor-in-chief of a new project called HorizonMass. (Ellen expects to return for the next episode.) Jason is a co-founder of BINJ, which partners with community publications on investigative stories and civic engagement initiatives, and offers training programs to promising young journalists. 

Now Jason is making a bold bet on the future of news by training a new generation of journalists. He's launching HorizonMass, a statewide digital news publication with a focus on public interest journalism. At HorizonMass, college interns work as reporters, designers, marketers, and editors. They work alongside more experienced professional freelance writers. 

Later on, in Quick Takes, Dan looks at some data about news referrals from social media giants, specifically Facebook and X, or Twitter, or whatever it is this week. Large news organizations had become reliant on both of those platforms while the sort of local news outlets that we track here at What Works were more dependent on Facebook alone. In any case, those days are drawing to a close, and it’s long past time for community journalists to be asking themselves: What’s next?

Dan and Ellen talk with Brant Houston, who is hard to describe in one sentence: he's an author, an educator, an investigative journalist, an expert in data-based reporting, and a co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

His new book, "Changing Models for Journalism," chronicles the history of change, disruption, and reinvention in our industry over the past two decades. These are themes we explore on this podcast, and in our own forthcoming book. Brant takes us back to the early days of digital, and recounts the early optimism, and the early misconceptions, about the promise and the peril of the internet.

Dan has a quick take on Pink Slime Journalism 3.0. We’ve seen an explosion of such websites as political operatives have sought to take advantage of the decline in real local news. Now, NewsGuard reports that dubious online content powered by artificial intelligence is spreading. 

Ellen looks at the numbers in the 2023 impact report on local news by the INN. And there's some good news: As the nonprofit journalism field expands, the resources to sustain these newsrooms are expanding, too. 

Dan and Ellen talk to Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos. Both are leading an expansion by the MassLive Media Group, which operates MassLive.com.

Macht, the president, previously led the digital transformation of the Harvard Business Review.

Ramos is the vice president of content and executive editor of MassLive. Ramos comes to Massachusetts after leading newsrooms in Miami, Indiana, Memphis, and Chicago.

In Quick Takes, Dan discusses an announcement Google made last week that could prove to be pretty harmful to local news publishers. Essentially Google is going to merge its search engine with Gemini, its artificial-intelligence tool, which is similar to ChatGPT. Soon, anything you search for on Google will give you not just links but an AI-generated answer. Most people aren’t going to bother with those links, thus depriving news outlets of much-needed traffic.

Ellen reviews the findings from a recent Pew Research Center poll that studied local news habits. It's perhaps no surprise to see that the US adults surveyed increasingly turn to websites and social media for their news.

Dan and Ellen talk with Anne Larner, a civic leader in Newton, Massachusetts, a city of nearly 90,000 people on the border of Boston. Anne is on the Board of Directors of The Newton Beacon, an independent nonprofit news outlet covering Newton. Anne has a long track record of civic engagement in Newton and in Massachusetts. She moved to Newton in 1973, and has served on the School Committee, the Newton League of Women Voters, and has been a PTO president, among many roles. She also served 15 years at the MBTA Advisory Board, a public watchdog agency.

Newton is a microcosm of what's happening in local news all over the country. Years ago, Newton had four local newspapers: The Newton Times, the Graphic, the Tribune and the TAB. But Gannett shut down a number of Massachusetts newspapers last year, including the print weekly, the Newton Tab. The Gannett digital site, Wicked Local, is still up and running. But content is regional. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on MLK50, the award-winning Memphis newsroom that focuses on poverty, power, and justice. They've received two major philanthropic grants that allow them to build for the future. And speaking of MLK50, executive editor Adrienne Johnson Martin was here at Northeastern ahead of Martin Luther King Day to give a talk on their work in Memphis. We'll feature some interviews from that by our colleague Dakotah Kennedy.

Dan has news about Rebuild Local News, a new nonprofit organization that’s advocating for solutions to the local news crisis. But wait. It’s not new. And the solutions that it’s proposing aren’t new, either. Still, this is good news, which he explains.

In their first episode of the What Works podcast, Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University and veteran journalist Ellen Clegg discuss the crisis in community journalism, as well as promising initiatives aimed at solving it. Kennedy interviews Massachusetts Representative Lori Ehrlich, a Marblehead Democrat who has co-sponsored legislation to create a commission to assess the state of local journalism in the Commonwealth. As Ehrlich has said, the "lack of local news coverage is a fundamental threat to our democracy and civic society."

Joshua Darr, a professor at Louisiana State University, is right in the What Works sweet spot: His research delves into the divisive partisan rhetoric that infuses our national political debate and whether communities with a vibrant local news source experience less polarization. Dan and Ellen talk with Joshua about his research, as well as the Trusting News project report on how local and regional news organizations can do a better job of connecting with conservative audiences. Dan offers a quick take on plans by Axios to expand local news sites into 25 cities in 2022, and Ellen looks at a promising network of nonprofit newsrooms planned across Ohio. (This episode has been corrected to add material on the Trusting News project and efforts to publish a diversity of voices on opinion pages.)

Ellen and Dan talk with Meg Heckman, a colleague of ours at Northeastern University's school of journalism. Meg is an associate professor and author. She had a long career as a journalist. She spent more than a decade as a reporter and, later, the digital editor at the Concord (NH) Monitor, where she developed a fascination with presidential politics, a passion for local news and an appreciation for cars with four-wheel drive.

Her book, “Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party,” documents the lasting impact of New Hampshire publisher and conservative activist Nackey Loeb. 

In Quick Takes, Ellen calls attention to a piece in ProPublica by journalist Dan Golden about his history working for the local daily in Springfield, Massachusetts. Turns out the good-old-days in newspapering weren't all good. Golden cautions against recreating them.

Dan takes a look back at an example of how diligent local news reporting can have an enormous impact nearly 45 years after the fact. Recently the EPA proposed a ban on trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent that’s been linked to leukemia, birth defects and other health problems. The road to that ban began in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1979, with a super-smart young reporter Dan had the honor of working with. Dan wrote about it here. 

Dan and Ellen talk with David Dahl, editor of The Maine Monitor.  David was most recently a deputy managing editor at The Boston Globe. Among his jobs at The Globe: directing hyperlocal Your Town coverage. The pull of Maine was strong, however. He and his wife, Kathy, have a home in Friendship, Maine. When he decided that he was ready to turn the page, he looked Down East.

Dan has a Quick Take on Bulletin, a feature developed by Facebook to compete with Substack. Sarah Scire has the scoop: Bulletin is shutting down. Ellen has a Quick Take is on a new kind of media audit by the Alliance for Audited Media, which has been verifying newspaper circulation for 108 years. The organization says it's branching out, to audit standards of ethics in journalism. Ellen asks: Why?

Dakotah Kennedy, a graduate student at Northeastern University, contributes on-the-ground interviews from attendees at the recent Radically Rural conference in New Hampshire. Our podcast with Terry Williams, creator of the conference, can be found here.

Kara Meyberg Guzman is CEO and co-founder of Santa Cruz Local in California. Before the Local, she was managing editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel. She left her job at the Sentinel, which is owned by Alden Global Capital's Media News Group, in 2018, citing differences with the company's management. Kara connected with another former Sentinel reporter, Stephen Baxter, and the two of them hatched a plan for the Local. They focus on public policy issues that affect the whole county, like housing, development and public health. The Local is a private company, owned by the co-founders. The revenue model is a mix of memberships, business sponsorships, grants, and advertising. But the mission is simple. As the website puts it:  We strive to understand Santa Cruz in all of its complexity. 

Dan has a Quick Take on a new report by LION Publishers that has some really positive findings about funding and sustainability for local news startups. Anyone who’s thinking about starting a community news project ought to take a look at it. Ellen highlights the work of Katherine Massey, a columnist who was killed in the racist massacre at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo.

Dan tips the hat to Anne Galloway, the founder and executive editor of VTDigger, who has announced that she’s giving up the editor’s position and is returning to the reporting ranks. She’ll be an editor-at-large focusing on investigative reporting. Anne started Digger 13 years ago as a one-woman operation after she was laid off by the Rutland Herald. Today, Digger has 32 full-time employees and is regarded as one of the leading digital sources of regional news in the country.

Dan and Ellen talk with Matt DeRienzo, the new director of SciLine. SciLine was founded seven years ago to make it easier for reporters to get in touch with scientists on deadline and to dig into research. And facts. The program is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a 150-year-old organization that publishes the widely respected journal Science.

Most recently, Matt has been serving as temporary executive editor of Lookout Santa Cruz, the digital daily that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2024.

He joins SciLine at an important time. The Trump Administration has suspended communications by government agencies that oversee science. Yet many newsrooms aren't equipped to cover this because they have cut back on science coverage, if they do any at all. SciLine helps reporters find expert sources and gives them the tools to interpret cutting-edge research. Matt has a staff of 14 and the organization seems poised for growth.

Dab has a Quick Take that hits close to home. By the time this podcast is up, a brand-new digital-only for-profit news outlet called Gotta Know Medford should be publishing. It’s the first time the city of 60,000 has had a dedicated local news outlet in three years, after it was abandoned by Gannett.

Ellen's Quick Take involves big changes in Maine. In Bangor, the Daily News, a family-owned paper, is cutting back on staff-written editorials and opening the pages up to new voices. Separately, at the National Trust for Local News, which acquired a slew of Maine papers in 2023, the CEO, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, is stepping down. 

Today we're talking to ... ourselves. There's lots happening in the local news space, and we want to hit some highlights. We also have a programming note: This will be our final podcast this summer. We're going to make like the French and take August off. Before signing off, we discuss the state of play for newsletters (who knew email is the killer app); podcasts (we're still free and we still do it for love, not money); and advertising (some newspapers are charging a fee if you'd like your digital feed served with no advertising.) Ellen has a remembrance of Jack Connors, a legendary Boston advertising mogul and backer of local news who once tried to buy The Boston Globe. She also finds a refreshing stream of news about local people, businesses, and government on the home pages of hyperlocal outlets in swing states. 

Lex Weaver is editor-in-chief of The Scope at Northeastern University. The Scope is a  digital magazine focused on telling stories of justice, hope and resilience in Greater Boston, with an emphasis on communities of color. Their mission: practicing journalism as an act of service. They work to amplify the voices of those overlooked by traditional media.

Dan looks at The Boston Globe as it turns 150, and Ellen reports on a California bill aimed at funding local public interest journalism.

Ellen talks with Laura Pappano, an award-winning journalist who has written about education for more than 30 years. Laura has a new book out from Beacon Press. The title is "School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education." By the way, Beacon also published our book, “What Works in Community News.”  Dan and Ellen are recording their segments separately, because Ellen was travelling. So, don't worry, they're not breaking up.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a philanthropic gift from Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, that is designed to cover full tuition for many graduate students in journalism at the City University of New York. That's good news for students wondering whether to take on $50,000 or more in tuition debt to get a master's degree in journalism at a private university. Craigslist destroyed the classified ad market, but Newmark continues to make his mark as a philanthropist. 

 Dan offers two cheers for billionaire newspaper ownership. With the news business dealing with a difficult round of layoffs, a number of media observers have jumped to the conclusion that billionaire owners are not the solution to what ails journalism. Well, of course it isn’t. No one ever said otherwise. But the record shows that civic-minded ownership by wealthy owners has proven to be a workable solution in several cities. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Terrence Williams, president and COO of The Keene Sentinel in Keene, New Hampshire, one of the oldest newspapers in the country. Terry and The Keene Sentinel are the creators of the Radically Rural conference, now in its fifth year, which will be held later in September. The conference looks at issues such as housing, farming, the environment and — most important to us — community journalism. Dan has a Quick Take on The Salt Lake Tribune's new venture, called Mormon Land. Ellen highlights a podcast called Shevotes, which recounts the battle for suffrage and recounts historic efforts at voter suppression. Award-winning journalists Ellen Goodman and Lynn Sherr cohost, and actress Christine Baranski makes a contribution, too.

Linda Shapley, the publisher of Colorado Community Media, describes herself as a longtime denizen of the state's media ecosystem. Indeed, she was at Colorado Politics and worked for 21 years for The Denver Post. “I’ve been a lieutenant for a lot of really great generals," she once said. "This is my opportunity to be a general.”

CCM is a group of about two dozen weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. They were saved from chain ownership two years ago when they were purchased through a deal led by the National Trust for Local News. Last August we spoke with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the trust.

Shapley has talked about the power of representation as a visible Latina leader in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by white men. She says she hopes to use her position to encourage more diversity in journalism. Her mentor at the Post, Greg Moore, was a previous guest on What Works. You can listen to his episode here.

Shapley grew up in northeastern Colorado, in a rural county. Her father had a dairy farm. When Dan was in Colorado doing research for our book, she told him that dairy farming is a lot like newspapers, because cows don't know it's Christmas.

Also this week, we talk with Madison Xagoraris, a graduate student in the Media Advocacy Program at Northeastern University's School of Journalism. Xagoraris recently reported on KefiFM, a Boston-based Greek music outlet dedicated to serving the Greek and Greek American communities in the Boston area and throughout New England.

Ellen has a Quick Take about retired journalists who are busy launching startup newsrooms. Nieman Reports has a piece by Jon Marcus that looks at the Asheville Watchdog in North Carolina, and the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts. These journalists say they want to help bolster the profession they gave their lives to by setting up nonprofit community news sites and mentoring younger reporters and editors. They aren't playing pickleball.

Dan is in a Colorado state of mind: His Quick Take is on the fifth anniversary of the Denver Rebellion, when the staff of The Denver Post rose up against further newsroom cuts being imposed by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. That rebellion sparked a revolution in Denver journalism.

Ellen and Dan talk with Sue Cross, the veteran journalist who will step down as executive director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) by the end of 2023. Sue has led INN since 2015, and has overseen a period of tremendous growth. There were 117 nonprofit newsroom members listed in the INN's 2015 annual report. This year, INN has 425 member newsrooms. She has also been a driving force in the NewsMatch program, a collaborative fund-raising project that has helped raise more than $270 million for emerging newsrooms since its launch in 2016. Before joining INN, Cross was a journalist and executive at the Associated Press. Cross says we are in a golden age of news innovation, and hopes to continue to lend her support. She also says she hopes to spend time on personal projects.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the launch of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit digital site serving greater Houston. Dan provides an update on efforts to extract money out of Google and Facebook in order to pay for news. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on the abysmal results for the News Leaders Association newsroom diversity survey.   

Dan reports on a startup newspaper in Queen Creek, Arizona, that will be called the Queen Creek Tribune and will make its debut on Sunday, April 24. It will be a total-market penetration print paper with a 20,000 press run. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Teri Morrow and Wayne Braverman of The Bedford Citizen in the Boston suburb of Bedford, Massachusetts. Wayne is a longtime journalist who is now serving as the managing editor of the Citizen. Teri, the executive director, has lived in Bedford since 1996, and has been active in local government. Dan wrote the chapter on this homegrown, grass-roots news site in "What Works in Community News." In the book, he tells the story about how the free digital site grew out of co-founder Julie McCay Turner's desire to find a home for information on a church plant sale.

Dan has a Quick Take on an unlikely good news story. The media industry is in the midst of another painful downturn, with news organizations from The Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times to CNN cutting their newsrooms and with The Messenger, a high-profile national startup that never seemed to make sense, shutting down after less than a year. But there's one news organization that’s hiring journalists and that says it’s succeeding at the very tough job of selling ads. You won’t believe who he's talking about, so stay tuned. 

Ellen talks about the robots that may come to steal our jobs. Or at least help us compile real estate listings and police blotters. It's all part of an initiative undertaken by that venerable journalistic organization, the Associated Press. 

This week, co-hosts Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy run down a number of news stories, including a major deal in New Jersey: The nonprofit Corporation for New Jersey Local Media (CNJLM) acquired 14 weekly newspapers serving some 50 municipalities. The papers are owned by the New Jersey Hills Media Group.

The deal is similar to one announced last year when Colorado Community Media sold its 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in a complex deal involving several nonprofit organizations. The difference is that management of the Colorado papers was turned over to The Colorado Sun, a digital start-up that was awarded an ownership share and could eventually become the majority owner. In New Jersey, the sellers, Liz and Steve Parker, will remain in charge.

Ellen unpacks the story behind a glaring omission in the award-winning documentary film, "Storm Lake," and Dan and Ellen both try to grapple with the blockchain and how Web3 might affect local newsrooms. 

Jonathan Dotan is founding director of The Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford University. The lab focuses on tools to help historians, legal experts and journalists protect images, text and other data from bad actors who want to manipulate that data to create deep fakes or expunge it altogether. 

He has founded and led a number of digital startups, he worked at the Motion Picture Association of America, and he was a writer and producer for the HBO series "Silicon Valley."  While he was working on "Silicon Valley," a character invented a new technology that got him thinking: What if everyday users could keep hold of their own data without having to store it in a cloud, where it is open to hackers or the government or other bad actors?

Dotan also shares a link to a valuable resource for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of Web3.

Dan has a rare rave for Gannett's effort to rework its police beat. And Ellen unpacks a recent survey about violent attacks against broadcast reporters. 

Both Steve and Linda had long and productive careers at The Boston Globe. Steve worked for 15 years as a staff writer and columnist, writing about cities and towns north of Boston. He was also editor of the Jewish Advocate.

Linda worked at the Globe for 36 years. During her extensive career, she did a little bit of everything, from  investigative reporting to feature writing to spot news.

Dan shares a Quick Take on the Uvalde Leader-News, a twice-weekly paper that not only had the difficult task of covering the school shootings that claimed the lives of 21 people but that was also a victim of those shootings. Here's a link to Rachel Monroe's riveting New Yorker story on Uvalde and its aftermath, as well as the emotional remarks by US Senator Amy Klobuchar and others at a memorial in Washington for victims of gun violence. 

Ellen discusses the ethical dilemma posed by the Online News Association's new "3M Truth in Science Award." (Teresa Carr broke the story in Undark and NiemanLab.) Ellen reached out to longtime science journalist Judy Foreman to get her perspective.

Dan and Ellen talk with Hermione Malone, vice president of strategy and startups for the American Journalism Project. The AJP describes itself as a nonprofit venture philanthropy organization that focuses on supporting the future of local news.  The AJP makes grants to nonprofit news organizations, partners with communities to launch new organizations, and coaches leaders as they grow and sustain their newsrooms. 

Hermione oversees local philanthropy partnerships. In that role, she helps nonprofit news startups get started, and nurtures coalitions of community stakeholders and local philanthropies. Her career has included work in diversity and inclusion and in community outreach. As executive director of Go.Be, a New Orleans-based nonprofit, she coached businesses owned by people of color and women, helping them figure out how to grow. 

Dan has a Quick Take on new research by Josh Stearns, senior director of the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund. Josh has fresh evidence that shows that local news is vital for democracy. Ellen's Quick Take is on Permian Proud, a pink-slime site put up by Chevron that provides a gusher of one-sided PR spin.

Finally, don't miss the Masterman Lecture at Suffolk University on September 29. Dan is on the panel, discussing "The Decline of Local News and the Rise of Polarization." 

Penelope (Penny) Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, arguably launched a movement with her path-breaking research on "news deserts" and the forces undermining community newspapers across the nation. Abernathy, a former executive with The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, was also Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina from 2008 to 2020. She talks about why this is a pivotal moment for community journalism, about her forthcoming research and about why her journalism students are still bullish on speaking truth to power at the local level. 

Ellen and Dan talk with Nicci Kadilak, an educator, author, mom, and founder of the Burlington Buzz. The Buzz is a hyperlocal online news site serving Burlington, Massachusetts, a town of 26,000 people north and west of Boston. Kadilak created the Buzz in early 2022, when a town election was on the horizon and the local Gannett weekly, the Burlington Union, switched to regional coverage. In the 1980s, Burlington was covered by two weekly papers and The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, where Dan worked for quite a few years.  

Nicci uses the Substack platform, and charges a range of subscription fees. She offers news stories about town government, cultural events, sports, and has a section that provides a platform for audio interviews of newsmakers. She allows reader comments, too. Nicci also writes essays at Nicci's Notes, and her debut novel, "When We Were Mothers," is available wherever you buy books online. (Nicci and Ellen met in a Zoom discussion of local news led by Simon Owens for his informative Media Newsletter.)

Dan reports on another effort to leverage tax credits for local journalism, and Ellen has a Quick Take on the decline and apparent death of The Santa Barbara News-Press.

Dan and Ellen talk with Scott Brodbeck, founder and CEO of Local News Now.

Many of the news entrepreneurs on this podcast lead nonprofits. Local News Now is a for-profit. Scott owns and operates local news websites in three big Northern Virginia suburbs: Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax County.

Dan has a Quick Take about a corporate newspaper owner that is making a big bet on growth at a major metropolitan newspaper. In Georgia, Cox Enterprises is making a $150 million bet that it can transform The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If Cox is successful, it might serve as a model for other corporate newspaper owners.

Ellen has a Quick Take about a piece in the New Yorker by a writer named Nathan Heller. At first glance, it doesn't seem to relate to local news. In fact, the title is pretty wonky: The Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information. But Heller has some smart observations about how information travels in a viral age.

Phil Balboni is a legendary figure in broadcast journalism, as well as the founder, president and CEO of GlobalPost, a highly acclaimed international news site. His list of awards is lengthy, and includes the Peabody, Murrow and Emmy. His latest venture is DailyChatter, a nonpartisan newsletter that covers international news. The Columbia School of Journalism recently announced that it was creating an endowed professorship in his honor. In this podcast, Phil talks about his passion for local news and what he hopes this professorship will accomplish. 

Dan talks with Lara Salahi, a professor of journalism at Endicott College, where she teaches a range of courses, from feature writing to digital journalism. She has also been a digital producer for NBC Universal, and a field producer for ABC News. 

Salahi has also done some consulting and writing on science and health projects. She was executive producer on a podcast called Track the Vax, which ran during the height of the pandemic. And she collaborated with Pardis Sabeti, a systems biologist and Harvard professor who researches infectious diseases like Ebola and Lassa virus. They wrote a book together in 2018 that is still relevant: It's called "Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic." They updated the paperback with a new preface and epilogue in 2021 to reflect on the Covid19 outbreak, and the lessons learned from past epidemics. 

In Quick Takes, there’s so much going on that Dan discusses three developments. One involves the future ownership of the Portland Press Herald in Maine as well as its sister papers. The other is about a dramatic, unexpected development in hyperlocal news in New Jersey. The third involves some very good news for a daily paper in central Pennsylvania.

Dan and his Northeastern University colleague, Meg Heckman, pay tribute to a legendary journalist — Mike Pride, the retired editor of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire and the former administrator of the Pulitzer Prize. Mike died on April 24 in Florida of a blood disorder. He was 76, and left his imprint on journalism in many ways. Meg worked at the Concord Monitor for more than 10 years.

Ellen was out of pocket for this podcast episode but did the sound editing and post-production. She'll return next week. 

Art Cullen, editor of the twice-weekly Storm Lake Times in rural Buena Vista County, Iowa, tells the story of his fight for survival at a time when local papers across the country are cutting back and shutting down. The paper is the subject of a vivid documentary, "Storm Lake," that will be broadcast on most PBS stations on Monday, Nov. 15, at 10 p.m., including GBH-2 in Boston. 

Jody Brannon, director of the Center for Journalism & Liberty at the Open Markets Institute, started her career in print in her native Seattle. Never one to shy from a challenge (she's an avid skiier and beamed in from the snowy mountains of Idaho), she transitioned to digital relatively early on in the revolution. She has had leadership or consulting roles at washingtonpost.com, usatoday.com, msn.com, as well as the tech universe.

She served on the board of the Online News Association for 10 years and holds a PhD in mass communication from the University of Maryland. The Center for Journalism & Liberty is part of the Open Markets Institute, which has a pretty bold mission statement: To shine a light on monopoly power and its dangers to democracy. They also say they work to engage in grassroots coalitions, such as Freedom from Facebook and 4Competition. 

Dan's Quick Take is on an arcane subject — the future of legal ads. Those notices from city and county government may seem pretty dull, but newspapers have depended on them as a vital source of revenue since the invention of the printing press. Now they’re under attack.

Ellen weighs in on a mass exodus at the venerable Texas Observer magazine, once a progressive voice to be reckoned with and home to the late great columnist Molly Ivins.

Dan and Ellen talk with Mike Deehan, a savvy Boston journalist who is part of the new Axios Boston newsletter. Mike's colleague at Axios Boston, Steph Solis, was scheduled to join the discussion but was out reporting on reaction to the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Deehan and Solis have been reporting on Massachusetts news and politics for a number of years. Mike was formerly digital content editor for State House News Service, editor of Massterlist, and worked for the Dorchester Reporter. Steph worked for Masslive, and was an immigration reporter for the USA Today Network. The Axios Boston debut was newsy and a perfect smart-phone scroll, whether the MBTA is running or not.

Dan has a Quick Take on the soaring cost of newsprint. Print is still important to the bottom line at most newspapers, and this turns out to be one more blow to local news. Ellen looks at a new rural news network being set up through the Institute of Nonprofit News. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Emily Rooney, the longtime host of the award-winning show on WGBH-TV, "Beat The Press." Dan was a panelist on "Beat the Press," which had a 22-year run but was canceled in 2021 by GBH. The show, which is much missed by many former viewers, had a brief second life as a podcast.

Emily has got serious television news cred. She arrived at WGBH from the Fox Network in New York, where she oversaw political coverage, including the 1996 presidential primaries, national conventions, and presidential election. Before that, she was executive producer of ABC’s "World News Tonight" with Peter Jennings. She also worked at WCVB-TV in Boston for 15 years, from 1979–'93, as news director and as assistant news director.

There's a revival of interest in responsible media criticism. Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr recently wrote an op-ed calling for the restoration of a public editor position at The New York Times, The Globe and other news outlets. 

Dan has an update on one of our favorite topics — pink slime. Wired magazine has a wild story out of rural Iowa involving a Linux server in Germany, a Polish website and a Chinese operation called “the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” Ellen recounts a legal saga in Southeastern Minnesota involving the sale of a newspaper group and allegations of intellectual property theft. It's all about a single used computer and its role in creating a media startup.

Babz Rawls Ivy is host and co-producer of LoveBabz LoveTALK on WNHH LP radio in New Haven. But that doesn't begin to describe her. So let's add a few more words: Force of nature. Wise presence. Storyteller. WNHH is a low-power FM community station launched seven years ago by the New Haven Independent, a pioneering online nonprofit news site. Paul Bass, founder and editor of the Independent, wanted to bring powerful local voices onto the airwaves. Babz Rawls Ivy brings truth-telling to a whole new level. Dan shares the latest on Gannett's downgrading of local coverage, and Ellen asks whether retired journalists are the new seed capital for startup digital sites. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Jeff Jacoby, longtime columnist for The Boston Globe Opinion Pages. Jeff also writes the weekly "Arguable" newsletter.

Jeff holds degrees from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School, and before entering journalism, he briefly practiced law. He was also an assistant to Dr. John Silber, the prickly president of Boston University. 

Prompted by a column Jeff wrote in June, and spurred on by the impending midterm elections, the podcast features a free-form discussion of whether newspaper editorial pages should endorse candidates in presidential races. 

Dan has a Quick Take on a big story out of Woburn, a suburb north of Boston. Woburn has an independent newspaper and is covered by The Globe and other outlets. But this story wasn't broken by any of the usual suspects. Ellen's Quick Take is on an opinion column in The Washington Post by Perry Bacon, who calls for $10 billion in government funding to support a news outlet in every congressional district in the country.

Today Dan and Ellen talk to Peter Bhatia.  Bhatia is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor who is now chief executive officer of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit, non-partisan, no-paywall local news site that launched in spring of 2023. He has also been editor and vice president at the Detroit Free Press, from 2017-2023, and served as a regional editor for Gannett, supervising newsrooms in Michigan and Ohio.

His resume includes helping lead newsrooms that won 10 Pulitzer Prizes. He is the first journalist of South Asian heritage to lead a major daily newspaper in the U.S. He has also been involved in some recent controversies. There's much to talk about.

In Quick Takes, Dan talks about an important press-freedom case in Mississippi. The former governor, Phil Bryant, is suing Mississippi Today over its Pulitzer Prize-winning series on a state welfare scandal that got national attention and even managed to touch former NFL quarterback Brett Favre. Bryant says he needs access to Today’s internal documents in order to prove his libel case, and a state judge has agreed. Mississippi Today has decided to take the case to the state Supreme Court. It’s a risk, because it will set a precedent in the Magnolia State — for better or worse.

Ellen highlights an interview with Alicia Bell, the director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. Bell talked to Editor & Publisher about her upcoming report on what it will take to build a thriving local news ecosystem for BIPOC communities across the country. Her estimate: it will take somewhere between $380 million to $7.1 billion annually to truly fund BIPOC journalism across the U.S. That's a big number, but Borealis is a pioneer in this space, and it's important research as national efforts like Press Forward roll out.

Chris Krewson is the executive director of Local Independent Online News Publishers, better known as LION Publishers. The national nonprofit aims at supporting local journalism entrepreneurs and has some 400 members. LION tapped Chris as its leader in 2019, and he brings significant digital experience to the job. In fact, he's had many prior lives. He was the top editor at Billy Penn, a mobile-first local start-up in Philadelphia launched by the legendary Jim Brady that’s now part of public radio station WHYY. He’s also the former top digital editor for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania. 

Dan has a Quick Take on a Poynter Online essay by Kathleen McElroy, director of the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. Ellen discusses the new Harvey World Herald online site, which fills a need in a news desert just outside of Chicago. And Chris clears up a crewcut pop culture mystery for Ellen.

Dan and Ellen dive into their reporter's notebooks, catching up with NJ Spotlight News, the Lexington Observer, the transition at The Texas Tribune, and the turmoil at the Iowa Graphic-Advocate (both of them). Dan recaps Gannett's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, and Ellen has a rave for Emily Rooney's Beat The Press podcast and her interview with legendary WCVB-TV news anchor Natalie Jacobson.

Dan and Ellen talk with David Cicilline, who represents the First District of Rhode Island in Congress. Cicilline, who is a Democrat, is part of a bipartisan group of US representatives and senators sponsoring the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. Co-sponsors include Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota; Republican Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana; Republican congressman Ken Buck from Colorado; and Senate and House Judiciary Committee Chairs Dick Durbin , an Illinois Democrat, and Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat. 

The JCPA removes legal obstacles to news organizations’ ability to negotiate collectively and secure fair terms from gatekeeper platforms that use news content without paying for it. The legislation also allows news publishers to demand arbitration if they reach an impasse in those negotiations. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on new research being done by the Institute for Nonprofit News. The INN just released 2022 fact sheets on three types of nonprofit newsrooms: local news, state and regional news, and national and global news. While each group shares some similarities, INN found that geography matters in terms of revenue models and audience development. 

Dan takes a few more whacks at Gannett, because the stock is skidding, and newsrooms are being hit with unpaid furloughs, buyouts, and the threat of layoffs. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Andy and Dee Hall, co-founders of Wisconsin Watch. Wisconsin Watch was launched in 2009 as the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. It's nonprofit and nonpartisan, and it has grown a lot over the last 14 years. Andy is retiring on December 31 of this year, and is helping the new CEO, George Stanley, with the transition. 

Dee Hall, co-founder and former managing editor of Wisconsin Watch, is also moving  on, and is now editor-in-chief of Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom with a clear mission: Floodlight investigates "the powerful interests stalling climate action." Floodlight partners with local and national journalists to co-publish collaborative investigations. 

The What Works podcast will resume after the holidays, and Dan fills listeners in on events surrounding the launch of our book, “What Works in Community News,” which is coming out on January 9. We'll be talking about the book that night at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner in Brookline, MA. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on Signal Ohio, a well-funded nonprofit news startup in Ohio. It's expanding into Akron. We've worked with a Northeastern graduate student, Dakotah Kennedy (no relation to Dan), on this podcast. She is now a service journalism reporter for Signal Cleveland. For more reporting on the media meltdown of Akron's Devil Strip, check out Dan's story here and a NiemanLab story here. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of the National Trust for Local News. She is also a senior research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School in New York. At the Tow Center, Dr. Hansen Shapiro’s work focuses on the future of local journalism and the policies needed to assure that future. Her research involves audience engagement and revenue strategies, as well as the relationship between news and social platforms. She holds a PhD in organizational behavior from Harvard Business School.

The National Trust for Local News is a nonprofit that is dedicated to "keeping local news in local hands." The Trust works with local news publishers, philanthropists, and socially conscious investors, and as Dan has reported, worked with other collaborators to buy 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in Colorado, perhaps saving them from hedge fund ownership.

Dan has a Quick Take on local media people who are starting to fight back against the abuse they’re receiving from some of the more sociopathic members of their audience. Ellen weighs in on the death of Tim Giago, the founder of the first independently owned Native American newspaper in the United States, and dives back in to the Dumpster fire in the newsroom of the Aspen Times in Colorado. 

Chris Lovett, longtime news director and anchor of the Boston Neighborhood Network News local cable access show, reflects on his career in community journalism, on camera and off. A Dorchester native, he's interviewed local activists, politicos and neighborhood stalwarts. And he's not done with journalism yet, so stay tuned.

Dan and Ellen talk with Professor Otis Sanford, who is something of a journalistic legend in Memphis. As a general assignment reporter at The Commercial Appeal in 1977, Sanford covered the death of Elvis Presley. He also covered courts, county government and politics before being promoted into management. After stints at the Pittsburgh Press and Detroit Free Press, Sanford returned to The Commercial Appeal. In 2002 he was named managing editor and in 2007 he became editorial page editor. 

As opinion editor in Memphis, Sanford launched a Citizen's Editorial Board. While that was a number of years ago, Sanford was ahead of the curve in terms of community engagement.

In 2011, Sanford joined the University of Memphis Department of Journalism faculty. He holds the Hardin Chair of Excellence in Economic and Managerial Journalism. He still writes a column on politics and events in Memphis. It's published in The Daily Memphian, a thriving startup founded by journalists and business people who were disappointed by the rounds of layoffs at The Commercial Appeal. The Daily Memphian is one of two digital newsrooms launched by journalists who left the Commercial Appeal. The other newsroom is the award-winning MLK50, started by Wendi C. Thomas, another Commercial Appeal veteran, to cover income inequality, race and justice issues. 

Dan has a quick take on the latest from The Baltimore Banner, a digital start-up that will be competing with the Baltimore Sun, acquired last year by the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

Ellen looks at the new Votebeat site, a Chalkbeat spinoff that just might help election integrity. 

Today Dan and Ellen talk to Anne Eisenmenger, who is president of Beaver Dam Partners and publisher of several weekly newspapers in southeast Massachusetts, including Wareham Week and Sippican Week. Anne has a laser focus on developing and operating hyperlocal for-profit newspapers.

Anne lives in Wareham, and she founded her community news company there in 2010 with the launch of Wareham Week. And, yes, it's an actual print newspaper, with a for-profit business model, and it's packed with ads. 

Dan dives into one of the best newspaper stories in the country, which is right here in our backyard, or at least in the western sector of our backyard. It involves the Berkshire Eagle, a daily based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that was once regarded as one of the best small papers in the country. Then it fell into the hands of Alden Global Capital, so we all know what happened next. This story, though, has a happy ending, at least so far, and I’ll talk about it in our Quick Takes.

Ellen talked recently with Paul Hammel, a reporter doing a story on the loss of small-town newspapers across Nebraska. He focused on a couple who sold their paper, in a town of 1,000, but had to come back after retirement when the new owner quit in the middle of the night.

Ellen and Dan talk with Paul Bass, the founder and former editor of the New Haven Independent. Bass is originally from White Plains, New York, but he arrived in New Haven in the late 1970s to attend Yale, and he has been reporting on all the quirks and glory of his adopted home town ever since.

Bass was the main subject of Dan's 2013 book, "The Wired City," and is one of the news entrepreneurs featured in our forthcoming book, "What Works in Community News."

Bass launched the New Haven Independent in 2005 as an online-only nonprofit. Last fall, Bass announced he was stepping aside as editor, handing the top job over to managing editor Tom Breen.

But he's continuing to play a role at the Independent and its multimedia arms, and he has just launched another venture: The Independent Review Crew, which features arts and culture reviews from all over, including right here in Boston.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the Texas Tribune, the much-admired nonprofit news outlet started by Evan Smith and others in Austin. The Tribune has been a model for other startups, so it rocked the world of local news last month when CEO Sonal Shah announced that 11 staffers had been laid off. Dan reports on another acquisition by Alden Global Capital, the New York-based hedge fund that has earned scorn for the way it manages its newspapers. Alden acquired four family-owned newspapers in Pennsylvania. Worse, the family members who actually ran the papers wanted to keep them, but they were outvoted by the rest of the family.

Dan and Ellen talk to Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher Magazine, which is now much, much more than a magazine. It's a cutting-edge multimedia source of information on innovation in our industry. Mike hosts E&P's weekly Vodcast series, "E&P Reports." And much more. He’s been a guest on this podcast previously, and today’s he’s back to talk about a new venture.

Blinder has a new vertical on public media, called Public Pulse. It's newsy and filled with insider information. It aggregates the latest on stories like conflict ignited by Uri Berliner at NPR, and features reporting on trends like the collaboration of universities and public radio stations. There’s already an excellent publication in this space called Current, and Public Pulse is a welcome addition to that.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a big award going to MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. The nonprofit Memphis news outlet, which we profile in our book, “What Works in Community News,” will receive the Lorraine Branham IDEA Award from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. We discuss other media criticism up for awards, as well. 

Dan gives a shoutout to a New Hampshire news project previously featured on the podcast. InDepthNH recently revealed some pretty disturbing details about a state representative — and it came only after a four-year quest to obtain public records. It demonstrates why journalists need to be persistent. 

Dan and Ellen talk to Larry Ryckman. Ryckman is editor of The Colorado Sun, the subject of a chapter that Dan wrote for our book, "What Works in Community News." The Sun was founded by journalists who worked at The Denver Post, which had been cut and cut and cut under the ownership of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that the Post staff called "vulture capitalists."

The Sun was founded as a for-profit public benefit corporation. A PBC is a legal designation covering for-profit organizations that serve society in some way. Among other things, a PBC is under no fiduciary obligation to enrich its owners and may instead plow revenues back into the enterprise. And we've found that for-profit models are rare in the world of news startups. But that changed last year, when The Sun joined its nonprofit peers. Ryckman explains.

Dan gives a listen to a New York Times podcast with Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist who wrote “Bowling Alone” some years back. In a fascinating 40 minutes, Putnam talks about his work in trying to build social capital. He never once mentions local news, but there are important intersections between his ideas and what this podcast is focused on.

Ellen reports on an important transition at Sahan Journal in Minnesota, one of the projects we wrote about in our book. The founding CEO and publisher, Mukhtar Ibrahim, is moving on and a successor has been named. Starting in September, Vanan Murugesan will be leading Sahan. He has experience in the nonprofit sector and also has experience in public media.

In this Encore Edition of What Works, freelance investigative journalist Julie Reynolds talks about her singular pursuit of the truth about Alden Global Capital, the secretive New York hedge fund that has gobbled up newspapers across the country, stripping assets and firing reporters. Reynolds connects the dots from Alden to Cerberus Capital Management, the "shadow bank" that backed Alden's recent takeover of Tribune Publishing. Dan explores pink slime news sites, and Ellen reports on some good news for newspaper readers in the town that inspired Frostbite Falls, home to Rocky and Bullwinkle. 

Dan and Ellen interviewed Julie in October 2021 but her research is still valid today, an unfortunate circumstance for the future of independent local journalism.

Dan and Ellen talk with April Alonso, co-founder and digital editor of Cicero Independiente outside of Chicago.

Cicero Independiente and MuckRock won the 2024 Victor McElheny Award for Local Science Journalism, awarded by MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program, for an investigation of air quality called "The Air We Breathe." 

April has an extensive background as a multimedia content creator. She was a multimedia fellow for the Chicago Reporter, and served as a multimedia content creator for La Verdad, a bilingual podcast. 

Dan has a Quick Take about a town north of Vancouver, in British Columbia, that has learned a bitter lesson about Canada’s law forcing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to pay for news. The law has led to a rise in disinformation with fewer effective ways to combat it. Meta’s greed is at the heart of this, of course. But so, too, is the failure of government officials to realize that their proposed solution to help local news outlets would backfire in an ugly way.

Ellen's Quick Take is on a new philanthropic fund created by the Minnesota Star Tribune. It's called the Local News Fund, and it is soliciting donations supporting statewide journalism that will be matched by a $500,000 grant from a Minnesota foundation.

Lincoln Millstein played a critical role in launching The Boston Globe's free digital site, boston.com. Boston.com began as a portal, and carried Globe journalism but also curated other news sites and community blogs. It had a separate staff, and the office was in downtown Boston, not in the old Dorchester plant. Lincoln went on to be executive vice president at New York Times Digital, then moved on to the Hearst Corporation, where he held a number of different roles. 

When Lincoln retired as senior assistant to CEO Steven Swartz of Hearst in 2018, he wondered what was next. He found the answer by returning to his roots as a local reporter, recalling the days when he started out in the Middletown bureau of the Hartford Courant in the mid-1970s. 

He and his wife, Irene Driscoll, also a longtime journalist, had upgraded their summer place in Maine in anticipation of spending more time there in retirement. Then the pandemic hit, and they moved in. He started picking up lots of local scoops on how the pandemic was affecting businesses. Not to mention the occasional deer collision. That's how The Quietside Journal got its start.

Dan has a Quick Take on the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, which recently won a big public-records victory over the city of Worcester, which has been stonewalling them for years, and Ellen looks at newsroom layoffs and transparency.

Dan and Ellen talk with Anne Galloway, the founder and editor-at-large of VTDigger in Vermont. Like many journalists, she was laid off in 2009 from her job as Sunday editor of the Rutland Herald and Times Argus. VTDigger, which is a nonprofit, started with a $16,000 budget with no employees. As she put it in a recent letter to readers, it has grown beyond her wildest dreams. It's the largest newsroom in Vermont. It has dozens of employees and more than 550,000 monthly readers. Galloway not only built the organization, she also wrote notable investigative pieces. Among other issues, she broke open a fraudulent scheme that involve developers at Jay Peak. Dan visited Galloway and wrote about the newsroom in his book, "The Return of the Moguls."

Ellen has a quick take on a study about the state of U.S. democracy from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The study says it's critical to fight disinformation, and advocates rebuilding trusted local news sources. Dan reports on a promising merger between public radio station KERA and the Denton Record-Chronicle, a daily newspaper that covers the suburbs north of Dallas. This move was facilitated by the National Trust for Local News, which raises money and connects legacy newspaper owners with possible buyers in order to keep them from either shutting down or falling into the hands of corporate chain owners. Our podcast with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of the trust, can be found here.

Dan and Ellen talk with Mike Beaudet, longtime investigative reporter for WCVB-TV and a multimedia professor at Northeastern's school of journalism. Mike has won many awards for his hard-hitting investigations and leads a project aimed at reinventing television news. On March 21 - 22, he'll lead a conference at Northeastern called "Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit." 

Mike's students are producing content for everything from Instagram, YouTube to TikTok.

Dan has a Quick Take about the National Trust for Local News. Co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro exited the nonprofit suddenly last month. That came amid reports that the Portland Press Herald and other papers that the Trust owns in the state of Maine might soon announce budget cuts. Now comes more bad news. Colorado Community Media, a group of 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs, is closing two papers and is losing money. Those papers were the National Trust’s first acquisition. The Trust’s mission was to buy papers that were in danger of falling into the clutches of corporate chain ownership. It’s a worthy goal, but the Trust has obviously hit some significant obstacles.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the fact that Harvard University is shutting down Harvard Public Health, the digital home to stellar longform journalism about public health. At a time when the very facts of science are challenged on social media every day, this is disheartening news.

Damon Kiesow is a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he holds the Knight Chair in Digital Editing and Producing. But Dan and Ellen first met Damon about 10 years ago when he was at The Boston Globe, developing mobile products for Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com.

He focuses on something called human-centered design: how readers interact with a print newspaper versus a digital site. Dan and Ellen also look at a collaborative effort to fight corruption in South Carolina, and the vibrant Boston Phoenix archives that have been digitized by Northeastern University. 

We talk with Wendi C. Thomas, the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Thomas founded MLK50 in 2017 as a one-year project designed to focus on the antipoverty work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Dr. King had traveled to Memphis in April of 1968 to support striking sanitation workers who were fighting for safer working conditions and a living wage.

But MLK50 became much more than a one-year project. She and her staff have gone on to produce journalism that has changed the dialogue, and changed lives, in Memphis. Her work has garnered numerous awards. In 2020, she was the winner of the Selden Ring Award for her groundbreaking investigative series, "Profiting from the Poor," an investigation of a nonprofit hospital that sued poor patients over medical debt. The series, co-published with ProPublica, had major impact: the hospital erased $11.9 million in medical debt. MLK50 is one of the projects that we profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Ellen has a Quick Take on the situation at Houston Landing, a highly anticipated and well-funded nonprofit newsroom that launched in 2023. Dan's Quick Take is on The Baltimore Sun, the venerable 186-year-old daily newspaper that at one time was home to the infamously caustic writer H.L. Mencken. Earlier this month, Alden Global Capital sold the Sun to a right-wing television executive who hates newspapers. But not to fear — public interest journalism is alive and well in Baltimore, as Dan will explain.

Pam Johnston, general manager for news with GBH, has a deep background in local television in Boston at WLVI, and earlier at local stations in Raleigh, North Carolina and Portland, Maine. At GBH, which is a public media company, she has a broad portfolio. She is responsible for news operations across all platforms, including radio, television and digital. She also supervises two NPR programs, GBH's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Pam joined GBH in 2012 as director of audience development for Frontline, the investigative series, where she is credited with diversifying the audience and connecting it with long-form documentaries, virtual reality experiences and podcasts. Dan has a Quick Take on a multimillion-dollar glitch in ad tech by Gannett, and Ellen reports on a union survey of Tribune Publishing workers that reveals big gaps in pay equity.

Freelance investigative journalist Julie Reynolds talks about her singular pursuit of the truth about Alden Global Capital, the secretive New York hedge fund that has gobbled up newspapers across the country, stripping assets and firing reporters. Reynolds connects the dots from Alden to Cerberus Capital Management, the "shadow bank" that backed Alden's recent takeover of Tribune Publishing. Dan explores pink slime news sites, and Ellen reports on some good news for newspaper readers in the town that inspired Frostbite Falls, home to Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Dan and Ellen talk with Steve Waldman, the president and co-founder of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered communities. Steve came up with the concept in 2014 and joined forces with The Ground Truth Project to launch RFA in 2017. In the projects we're reporting on for this podcast and for our book, "What Works: The Future of Local News," we've run across a number of RFA corps members. They usually have a couple of years of experience but are relatively new to the business, although there are a few near retirement age, too.

Steve has a deep background in magazine journalism. He was national editor of U.S. News & World Report, and national correspondent for Newsweek. He went on to co-found a multi-faith religion website, Beliefnet.com, which won a National Magazine Award. He is also founder and coordinator of the Rebuild Local News Coalition, and he's crafted some interesting proposals for how government can help revitalize local journalism while preserving editorial independence. 

Dan has a Quick Take on the happy conclusion to a bizarre situation involving a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Last fall, Josh Renaud reported that a flaw in a database maintained by the state of Missouri allowed for public access to thousands of Social Security numbers. Incredibly, the state’s governor, Mike Parson, denounced Renaud as a “hacker,” and a criminal investigation was begun. It was absolutely outrageous, and now Renaud has been recognized with a national freedom-of-the-press award. And Ellen takes it all back about Ogden Newspapers, which purchased The Aspen Times late last year but has surpressed coverage and prompted a number of staff resignations.

Ellen and Dan talk with Andy Thibault, editor and publisher of the Winsted Citizen in Connecticut. The Citizen is a monthly print newspaper serving Litchfield County and the surrounding area. The only digital presence is the Winsted Citizen Blog. But that's about to change, Thibault says. He's going digital. 

Starting a news organization is never easy, but the Citizen hit a brief speed bump. A speed bump named Ralph Nader. But according to Andy, everything is moving ahead just fine.

Jack Walsh, a graduate student in Northeastern University's journalism program, joins Dan and Ellen to talk about his recent profile of the Chelsea Record,  a 150-year-old weekly paper in the small city of Chelsea, Massachusetts. You can find Jack’s story on our website, whatworks.news.

Dan has a Quick Take on Gannett. Recently, many union journalists at Gannett staged a one-day strike. Yet there are some interesting moves being made at the top of the company as well. Ellen discusses a recent poll about local news and accountability journalism. Surprisingly few  Americans believe that local news media hold public officials accountable, according to a national poll commissioned by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. This shows the devastating impact of the hollowing out of community news. And it calls into question whether local journalism is fulfilling  one of its primary missions. 

Dan and Ellen talk with their colleague at Northeastern University, Dr. Meredith Clark. Dr. Clark is an associate professor in the School of Journalism & the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern. Before arriving at Northeastern, she was a faculty fellow at Data & Society, an independent nonprofit research organization based in New York that examines some of the questions being raised by the massive increase in the use of data in all aspects of society.

Dr. Clark's research is on the intersections of race, media, and power, and she's studied everything from newsroom hiring and reporting practices to social media communities. Her media diet is wide-ranging and eclectic. Our interview touches on many cultural icons, including poet Audre Lorde
and Captain Olivia Benson, the fictional "Law & Order SVU" crime solver.

In Quick Takes, Dan discusses Gannett's recent move to dismantle some of the chain's regional editorial pages and Ellen tips the hat to two of the 2022 recipients of the prestigious Freedom of the Press Award, Wendi C. Thomas, founding editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and Mukhtar Ibrahim, founding publisher and CEO of Sahan Journal.

Rhema Bland is the first permanent director of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting at the University of North Carolina school of journalism. She's a veteran journalist who has reported and produced for CBS, the Florida Times-Union, WJCT and the New York Daily News. The society's mission is essential to the future of the industry: to "increase the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of color in the field of investigative reporting."

Dan and Ellen talk with Kyle Munson, president of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation. The foundation was launched in August 2020, during the heart of the pandemic. It was a challenging time for newspapers. As Dan and Ellen wrote in their book, "What Works in Community News," the Storm Lake Times Pilot saw a real collapse in local advertising. Art Cullen, the editor, was worried about survival.

The foundation is set up as a nonprofit, so it can receive tax-free donations and philanthropic grants. In turn, it has doled out grants to small papers in western Iowa, including the Carroll Times Herald, La Prensa, and the Times Pilot. These grants were critical because the crisis in local news has hit rural areas hard. 

Dan has a Quick Take on The Associated Press, which is the principal source of international and national news for local newspapers around the country — and in many cases for state coverage as well. Two major newspaper chains have announced that they are going to use the AP a lot less than they used to, which will result in less money for the AP — and either higher fees, less coverage or both for their remaining clients.

Ellen looks at Outlier Media, a woman-led team of local journalists in Detroit. They formed a network called the Collaborative Detroit Newsrooms network to produce and share news for underserved populations. They've won a major international award from the Association of Media Information and Communication. Executive editor Candice Fortman traveled to Barcelona to pick up the juried prize. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Sophie Culpepper, a staff writer at NiemanLab who focuses on covering local news. She co-founded The Lexington Observer, a digital local news site covering Lexington, a town of 35,000 outside Boston. For two years, she was the nonprofit news outlet's only full-time journalist. She covered public schools, local government, economic development and public safety, among other subjects.

Ellen has a Quick Take on Sewell Chan, the former editor of The Texas Tribune who has just started his new job as executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Ellen interviewed Sewell in Austin for the Texas chapter in "What Works in Community News." 

Dan discusses the recent Nonprofit News Awards bestowed by the Institute Nonprofit News. The Service to Nonprofit News Award went to Andy and Dee Hall, the retired founders of Wisconsin Watch, who were guests on this podcast last December. VTDigger won a community champion award. And an INNovator Award for a sold-out event featuring live stories from the stage went to  Brookline.News. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, communication and information at UMass-Amherst. He's also founder of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, which is studying how to build alternatives to the commercial internet. And Ethan co-founded a local news initiative with global reach, a blogging community called Global Voices.

An alum of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and the MIT Media Lab, he is the author of two books. The latest is titled “Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.” It's a powerful look at the rise of mistrust in institutions, especially media, and how that mistrust is provoking a crisis for representative democracy. 

Dan has a Quick Take on Brian McGrory's announcement that he will step down as editor of The Boston Globe to become director of the journalism program at Boston University. Ellen checks out The Daily Catch, a hyperlocal news outlook covering Red Hook, New York. 

Dan and Ellen talk to Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher, the once and future bible of the publishing industry. Mike also hosts E&P's weekly vodcast series, "E&P Reports." Blinder has interviewed everyone from Richard Tofel, founding GM of ProPublica, to Jennifer Kho, the new executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, to professor and media critic Jeff Jarvis. Blinder probes important issues like government support for community journalism, the role of platforms, and the impact of chain consolidation.

Dan has a Quick Take on the failure of two bills in Congress that would have provided some government support to newspaper companies. It's fair to say that the federal government is not going to be riding to the rescue of local news, and that communities had better get about the business of providing coverage on their own. Ellen reports on the City Paper in Pittsburgh, an alternative weekly, which has just been acquired by a subsidiary of Block Communications. The Block family has achieved some notoriety for its mismanagement of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Media observer Margaret Sullivan called the Post-Gazette a tragic mess under the Blocks.

Ellen and Dan talk with Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Before he was at Penn, he taught media studies at NYU. He is the author of "Democracy Without Journalism," among other books.

Pickard has contributed to the debate about the local news crisis in many different settings. He worked on media policy in Washington at the New America Foundation, and he served as a policy fellow for former US Congresswoman Diane Watson. 

Dan has a Quick Take on two pieces of federal legislation that might have helped ease the local news crisis died at the end of the last Congress, and there’s not much chance of them getting revived any time soon — not with the Republicans now in control of the House. But one of those ideas has made it into a bill that’s now being considered in Massachusetts.

Ellen's Quick Take is on something close to home. She's joined a group of Brookline residents who are launching an independent nonprofit news site called Brookline.News. The Steering Committee has been raising funds, and is recruiting for a founding editor-in-chief.

Ellen and Dan talk with Jeffrey Schwaner, executive editor of Cardinal News, a nonprofit digital news outlet covering Southwest Virginia. It also covers something called Southside Virginia, which is an area south of the James River, near Richmond. Since we're taping this in Boston, we'll ask him to explain their coverage area in more detail.

Jeff joined Cardinal News in September after nine years as a storytelling and watchdog coach — including five years as editor — of Gannett’s two Virginia newsrooms, the News Leader in Staunton and The Progress-Index in Petersburg. 

Dan has a Quick Take that explores a key question: Does a lack of local news correlate with support for Donald Trump? A new study by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School finds that it does, although the writers caution that correlation is not causation. 

Ellen's Quick Take is on a mysterious website that popped up in Oregon after a 147-year-old paper called the Ashland Tidings folded. Called the Daily Tidings, it recently published story after story by a reporter named Joe Minihane, who supposedly skiied, hiked and ate his way through Southern Oregon. Except Minihane is based in the UK and doesn't know how his byline got hijacked. The stories are made up, perhaps by AI.

Ken Doctor, a former Knight Ridder executive and longtime media analyst, recently rejoined the ranks of working journalists. He's the founder and CEO of Lookout Local, a digital local news site in Santa Cruz, California. Ken hopes that Lookout Local can provide a model of what works in the local news ecosystem. He says he wants to change the conversation. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Nancy West, executive editor of InDepthNH.org. 

Nancy was an investigative reporter during her 30-year career at the New Hampshire Union Leader. Nancy founded the nonprofit New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism in 2015. She has also taught investigative reporting at a summer program for students at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a recent article by Dan Froomkin in Washington Monthly. Froomkin, who is now editor of Press Watch, used to work for The Washington Post. He has been critical of owner Jeff Bezos. Froomkin is taking aim at the content management system developed by The Post under Bezos. The Post licenses this system to other news outlets around the country. That kind of market power worries Froomkin.

Dan's Quick Take is on the state of journalism in Vermont, a subject we've talked about on a recent podcast. And about a good piece of media criticism. Bill Schubart, a journalist who writes a column for VTDigger, wrote a column critiquing a recent New Yorker piece by Bill McKibben on Vermont journalism. But Schubart also looked inward and wrote that Digger itself is having problems.

Dan and Ellen talk with Sonal Shah, the CEO of the Texas Tribune, a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Shah, a Houston native and first-generation immigrant, took over as CEO in January 2023 after co-founder Evan Smith decided to move on.

Shah is part of a major transition at the Tribune, and brings broad experience in government, the private sector, and philanthropy. She is a trained economist who worked on the Obama presidential transition team, she worked in philanthropy for Google, and she was national policy director for Pete Buttigieg's run for president.

Dan has a Quick Take about Advance Local, a local news chain in New Jersey that is ending print editions and going fully digital. 

Ellen's Quick Take is on the Minnesota Star Tribune's editorial non-endorsement in the presidential race and an alternative endorsement of Kamala Harris written on a blog by former Strib staffers.

Ellen and Dan talk with Margaret Low, the CEO of WBUR, one of Boston's two public radio stations. Margaret started as CEO in January 2020. She has had a 40-plus-year career with NPR, and started as an overnight production assistant at Morning Edition. At NPR, Low rose through the ranks and ended up in the top editorial job, where she oversaw 400 journalists worldwide, covering events like the Arab Spring, the re-election of Barack Obama, and the Boston Marathon bombing. She led a digital transformation of her newsroom. She turned Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, the Saturday morning quiz show, into a live production. She came to WBUR from The Atlantic, where she was president of AtlanticLIVE, and produced more than 100 live events a year.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the launch of Signal Cleveland. It's well-funded, with $7.5 million to start with, and Rick Edmonds of Poynter Online writes that the news outlet has big goals: It wants to expand throughout Ohio within a few years. 

Dan's Quick Take is on a case in New Hampshire that is of interest to those of us who ascribe to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As Dan puts it, we’d like to think that if the First Amendment means anything, it means that you may not be punished criminally for criticizing the government. But that’s not what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit decided recently. In that case, the court ruled that New Hampshire’s criminal libel law passes constitutional muster. The case was especially pernicious because the defendant, Robert Frese, was charged with claiming, among other things, that the police chief in his town of Exeter was a coward who had “covered up for a dirty cop.” That statement may be entirely false; but the idea that someone could be charged with a misdemeanor for criticizing the police is pretty chilling. InDepthNH has a story here. The case even garnered a Muzzle Award in 2019.

Ellen and Dan talk with Hanna Raskin, founder and editor of The Food Section, a Substack newsletter devoted to covering restaurants and trends in food across the South. Before starting her Substack last year, Hanna was food editor and critic for eight years at the family-owned Charleston Post & Courier in South Carolina.

Hanna also covered food for alternative weeklies, including the Mountain XPress in Asheville, North Carolina, and Seattle Weekly. 

Dan offers a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit news project that finally made its long-awaited debut. He wishes them all good luck but has some issues with their business model, which includes a hard paywall.

Ellen's Quick Take is on a Pew Research Center study on trends in digital circulation at locally focused publications. The bottom line: digital is trending up, print circulation continues to tank, and readers are spending less time on site. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Mary Margaret White, the CEO of Mississippi Today, a nonprofit digital news outlet that has been covering the state for more than six years. The staff has a robust presence at the statehouse in Jackson, and provides cultural and sports coverage, as well. 

Mary Margaret is a Mississippi native. She has a bachelor’s in English and journalism and a master’s in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi. She also spent almost 10 years working for the state, with jobs in arts and tourism. Her work has appeared in The Listening Post Collective, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and on Mississippi Public Broadcasting radio.

Dan has a Quick Take on a major transition at the New Haven Independent. Last week the indefatigable founder, Paul Bass, announced he was stepping aside as editor of the Independent. The new editor will be Tom Breen, currently the managing editor. Luckily, Bass isn't going anywhere but will continue to play a role. Ellen's Quick Take is on another big transition at the Texas Tribune. Economist Sonal Shah is becoming CEO at the Tribune in January. Shah, who has had leadership roles at Google, the White House, and other high-impact nonprofits, replaces co-founder Evan Smith, who is taking a role as senior adviser to the Emerson Collective. It's a big transition at a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Smith says he'll continue to spread the local news gospel in his new role. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Johanna Dunaway, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. She is also research director of the university's Institute for Democracy, Journalism, and Citizenship in Washington D.C.

Dan got to know Johanna when they were both Joan Shorenstein Fellows at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2016. Dan wrote part of his book about a new breed of wealthy newspaper owners, “The Return of the Moguls.” Johanna wrote a paper that examined how mobile technology was actually contributing to the digital divide between rich and poor. 

She recently received a $200,000 grant from the Carnegie Fellows Program to further her work on local news. Among other things, she plans on building out an expansive database that lists local news outlets throughout the United States. She also plans to examine whether the nationalizing of news contributes to the toxic quality of public discourse. 

Dan has a Quick Take on what has been a bad year so far for public broadcasting operations, with cuts being imposed from Washington, D.C., to Denver and elsewhere. In Boston, where “What Works” is based. GBH News, the local news arm of the public media powerhouse GBH, has imposed some devastating cuts. But they’ve also brought in new leadership that could lead to a brighter future. Ellen looks at a new use of print by the all-digital Texas Tribune, the nonprofit news outlet based in Austin. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Mark Histed, a researcher at the Democracy Policy Network. DPN is a network of policy organizers who have a simple mission: Sustaining democracy. That work takes place largely at the local level. Mark and others at DPN do research and provide deep-dive policy kits that help local citizens and legislators champion big ideas. Mark leads the Local News Dollars effort and recently wrote a report on how states can establish a system where residents are issued vouchers they can use to subscribe or donate to the local journalism outlet of their choice. 

Dan discusses Ralph Nader — remember him? The consumer advocate-turned-presidential political spoiler got a lot of favorable attention late last month when it was learned that he would help launch a nonprofit newspaper in his hometown of Winsted, Connecticut. The paper, the Winsted Citizen, was the town’s first in a couple of years, although the daily Republican-American covers the area, too. But now people are wondering what exactly is going on — and if Nader is really going to come through with enough money for the Citizen to achieve liftoff.

Ellen tunes in to the new "Boston Strangler" movie on Hulu. In the movie, Keira Knightley portrays the late, great Loretta McLaughlin, who paired up with reporter Jean Cole at the Boston Record American to write a series of stories about the murders of women in Boston in the 1960s. Loretta moved on to The Boston Globe where she did groundbreaking work on the AIDS crisis and became editorial page editor. She was a mentor to many, and an especially fierce advocate for the advancement of women in journalism. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Crystal Good, the founder of Black by God, the West Virginian. She's a sixth-generation West Virginian, and she's a storyteller and poet. She has also been a model and an advocate. She describes Black by God as an "emerging news and storytelling organization centering Black voices from the Mountain State." She wants to provide a more nuanced portrayal of Black residents in the Appalachian region.

Dan and Northeastern graduate student Dakotah Kennedy first heard Crystal Good speak in September at the Radically Rural conference in Keene, New Hampshire — not from the stage but from the audience. Dan and Dakotah wished she had been onstage, invited her onto the podcast, and she graciously agreed. Black by God has a lively website, and publishes periodic print editions. Which Crystal seems to deliver herself.

Dan has a Quick Take on social media. It's in free fall. Is that good for local news? Bad? Or does it just mean a changed environment that they’re all going to have to navigate? Ellen's Quick Take is on a hyperlocal mogul named Mark Adams. He's expanding his empire into Montana.

Dan and Ellen talk with John Garrett, who, along with his wife, Jennifer, started the monthly Community Impact Newspaper in 2005 in Texas. They had three full-time employees and covered two towns in Texas, Round Rock and Pflugerville.

Community Impact expanded into Arizona and Tennessee, and by 2018, Forbes reported, the Garretts had 220 employees and annual revenue of $27 million. They have an online presence, of course, but they also believe in print: their newspapers are distributed by mail every month. They even opened their own printing plant to handle their newspaper and other jobs. They have a sign out front that says: "Print Ain't Dead." But as we prepared for this podcast, John told us they've just made some tough decisions. They sold their Phoenix operations and closed their small Nashville outlet. They've decided to focus on Texas, where their business is doing well, and they have fresh plans for the future there. 

Dan and Ellen devote the entire Quick Takes segment of the podcast to the Muzzle Awards, a Fourth of July roundup of outrages against freedom of speech and of the press in the six New England states. The awards were conceived of by Dan's friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate, the noted Boston civil liberties lawyer. For many years, they were published by the late, lamented Boston Phoenix. They've been hosted by GBH News since 2013, and this year marks the 25th anniversary.

Dan and Ellen talk with Adam Gaffin, founder of the Universal Hub and inventor of the French Toast Alert System). Dan wrote a profile of Adam for CommonWealth Magazine in 2008. Adam has been a local connector since the earliest days of digital self-publishing — well before blogging, putting he put together a directory of websites called New England Online in the early ’90s and then morphing that into Boston Online.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a young journalist who lost her job at West Virginia Public Broadcasting after she reported on alleged government abuses in the state's foster care and psychiatric system. The journalist, Amelia Ferrell Knisely, alleges that there was political interference with the station, WVPB, which receives state funding. 

Dan examines an important First Amendment case involving a citizen journalist in Texas. Roxanna Asgarian of The Texas Tribune broke the story. Many of the local news projects that we’re interested in here at What Works are just a few steps beyond citizen journalism, and we are firmly of the belief that the First Amendment protections enjoyed by large news outlets should be applied to small outlets and citizen journalists as well. It remains to be seen whether a federal appeals court in Texas agrees.

Today we're talking with Alison Bethel, chief content officer and editor-in-chief for State Affairs. State Affairs is a digital-first media company that is focused on covering state governments throughout the country. 

She was vice president of corps excellence at Report for America. She was also executive director of the Society of Professional Journalists, where she was only the second woman and the first person of color to serve in that capacity in 110 years.

Dan has a Quick Take on a harrowing situation in Grand Junction, Colorado. A young Colorado television reporter was reportedly chased by a taxi driver who then attempted to choke him. The driver also reportedly yelled “This is Trump’s America now!”

Ellen has a Quick Take on an app called WatchDuty that is providing lifesaving information to people in Los Angeles who are threatened by wildfires.

Em Cassel is editor and co-owner of The Racket, a reader-funded website covering politics, music, arts and culture in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. (She was also a student in Dan's digital journalism course at Northeastern University.) 

Em made a name for herself as food editor, managing editor, and editor-in-chief of City Pages in the Twin Cities. She was the first woman editor in the 41-year history of that publication. City Pages, which was bought by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2015, was shut down in late 2020. The company said it wasn't economically viable, citing the pandemic. Em provides some inside scoop about that, and talks about the founding of The Racket, which proudly claims on its website that it has "no bosses, some biases."

Dan has a Quick Take on the Montclair Local, a nonprofit weekly newspaper launched several years ago in New Jersey. And Ellen reports on an effort to shut down an entire town that was uncovered by the Tennessee Lookout, part of the rapidly expanding nonprofit network called States Newsroom. The Lookout's scoop was highlighted in the newsletter of The Emancipator, a re-imagined update on the nation's first abolitionist newspaper for the digital age that is being launched soon. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Bob Sprague, a pioneer in hyperlocal journalism and the founder of yourArlington. Bob, who has lived in Arlington since 1989, was not only the founder: he was the editor of the website until July 1 of this year, when he retired. The new editor is Judith Pfeffer. 

Bob was an Arlington Town Meeting member in 1994, and was also a journalist. He has been a reporter and an editor at The Boston Globe and Boston Herald, among other publications. He founded the town's website in 1998, but also recognized a need for an independent, nonpartisan source of information. In 2006, he launched yourArlington. 

Dan has a Quick Take on the latest report on the state of local news by Penelope Muse Abernathy, who’s now at the Medill School at Northwestern University. The report has a lot of bad news, some good news, and some interesting information from The Boston Globe and from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is one of the news outlets that we profile in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.”

Ellen talks about another local startup, The Belmont Voice. The Voice has an impressive roster of advisers from the print and digital world.

Dan and Ellen talk with Norma Rodriguez-Reyes, the president of  La Voz Hispana de Connecticut. La Voz started circulating in New Haven in 1993, but fell on hard times. Norma helped take charge of the paper in 1998 when it verged on bankruptcy. Under her direction, the newspaper has grown into the state’s largest-circulation Spanish-language weekly. It reaches more than 125,000 Spanish speakers across Connecticut.

Norma is among the folks highlighted in Dan and Ellen's new book, “What Works in Community News,” which, at long last, will be out by the time you hear this podcast. In addition to her work at La Voz, Norma is the board chair of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit umbrella that includes the New Haven Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel, and WNHH community radio. The Independent and the radio station both work out of La Voz’s offices in downtown New Haven.  

Ellen has a Quick Take on a surprising development in local news on Martha's Vineyard.The ownership of the weekly Martha’s Vineyard Times has changed hands. Longtime publishers and owners Peter and Barbara Oberfest sold the Island news organization to Steve Bernier, a West Tisbury resident and longtime owner of Cronig’s Market.  And the acting publisher is Charles Sennott, a highly decorated journalist and founder and editor of The GroundTruth Project. He also helped launch Report for America.

Dan discusses a hard situation at Eugene Weekly, an alternative weekly in Oregon that’s been around for four decades. EW has shut down and laid off its 10-person staff after learning that the paper was the victim of embezzlement.

Dan and Ellen talk with Erica Heilman, who produces a podcast called Rumble Strip. Heilman's shows air monthly on Vermont Public and other NPR stations, as well as the BBC. Rumble Strip can also be found on all the usual podcast platforms.

Her episodes range in length from a few minutes to, well, as long as they need to be! As Chelsea Edgar wrote in a profile in Seven Days Vermont, "She wants to make meandering, kaleidoscopic stories about the stuff of ordinary Vermont life."

In 2020, Heilman produced a memorable pandemic miniseries, "Our Show." It featured listener-submitted recordings of life in lockdown, and it was the Atlantic's No. 1 podcast of the year. In November 2021 she produced "Finn and the Bell," the textured story of a Walden teenager who died by suicide. It won a Peabody, the highest award in broadcasting.

Dan has a Quick Take about tools for local news organizations dealing with various forms of harassment. The Institute for Nonprofit News, a leading organization for hyperlocal journalism, has put together some resources. Ellen has an update on Suki Dardarian, the retiring editor and senior vice president of the Minnesota Star Tribune. She has been named the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year by the National Press Club.

His core idea is relatively simple. Would-be editors and publishers are actually franchisees. They pay a fee to buy into a turnkey operation that gives them access to technology and marketing resources. Shapiro's team provides training and maintains the infrastructure, but these publishers are responsible for maintaining and growing their readership. Some have journalism backgrounds, but some join because they love their communities and want to become small business owners. There are now more than 90 franchises all over New Jersey, New York and Florida. The name was changed as the network grew: Shapiro no longer sees it as an alternative to just one newspaper, but as a way to TAPinto any community. 

Dan has a Quick Take on a new survey by the Medill school of journalism at Northwestern University that finds that readers in Chicago aren't willing to pay for local news, and Ellen nerds out on a recent NiemanLab report on the importance of local coverage of science.

Dan and Ellen talk with Tim Coco, president and general manager of Public Media of New England. Coco is known for his work as a journalist and advertising executive. He oversees day-to-day operations at the low-power FM station WHAV, which can be found at 97.9 on the radio dial if you happen to be in the Haverhill area. The station also streams at WHAV.net.

WHAV was launched in 1947 by the Haverhill Gazette newspaper under the auspices of a publisher who was distantly related to the Taylor family, which then owned The Boston Globe. Coco revived the station about 15 years ago and converted it to a nonprofit, low-power FM station in 2014. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on $2 million in grants awarded to seven nonpartisan news outlets in Georgia. All are led by people of color, and all serve diverse audiences. The money, which comes from The Pivot Fund, could be transformational. 

Dan's Quick Take is on The Herald-Tribune. No, not that Herald-Tribune. This is the Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, Florida, which had to apologize after publishing a guest op-ed in praise of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that was part of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. It's a doozy.

Ellen and Dan talk with Greg Moore, former managing editor at The Boston Globe and longtime editor of The Denver Post. During his 14 years at the Post, the paper won four consecutive Pulitzer Prizes. He's led coverage of major stories, including the Aurora movie theater shooting in Colorado and the case of Charles Stuart in Boston. Greg is now editor-in-chief of the Expert Press, which helps connect specialists with media. He's still in Denver. 

As one of the most senior Black journalists in the country, Greg has been at the forefront of advocating for more diversity in the media and for a new path forward for local and regional news. In fact, Greg resigned his position at The Denver Post in 2016 after he decided he couldn’t tolerate any more cuts to his newsroom at the hands of the Post’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. As he put it in an essay for the Pulitzer Prize board, of which he is the former chair: “Local journalism is where accountability journalism matters most. It is focused on how dollars are spent and how priorities are set on the local level. It is often that base level reporting that becomes the seed corn for bigger national stories with datelines from the heartland and the tiniest suburbs.” 

In the Quick Takes portion of the podcast, Dan has some bad news. People don’t like us. There’s been yet another survey showing that public trust in the news media is at an all-time low. But there are some problems with the survey, as there usually are. And those problems underline why the trust issue isn’t quite the steaming pile of toxic waste that it might seem, especially for local news. Ellen has some good news for folks in Akron, Ohio. A local news startup called the Akron Signal has launched with a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Priyanjana Bengani, a fellow in computational journalism at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia. Her work focuses on using computational techniques to research issues in digital media.

Her most recent project, published in the Columbia Journalism Review, focused on uncovering networks of “pink slime” local news outlets. There have been several iterations of pink slime sites over the years, such as the North Boston News. (There's no such place as "North Boston," by the way.) They get their name from the pinkish beef paste that is added to hamburger meat.

In Quick Takes, Dan revisits Press Forward, the $500 million philanthropic effort aimed at revitalizing local news. When Press Forward was announced a few months ago, many observers were worried that a national, top-down effort might clash with local needs and local concerns. Fortunately, Press Forward is now getting involved in the grassroots in an attempt to leverage its funding and help a wide range of local and regional news projects.

Ellen delves into a piece in Racket, an alternative news site in Minneapolis. (The What Works podcast with editor and co-owner Em Cassel can be found here.) Racket takes a steely-eyed look at Steve Grove, the new CEO and publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Just before taking the journalism job, Grove settled a lawsuit alleging he withheld public records from the press when he was a state government official.

Dan talks with Josh Stearns, the senior director of the Public Square Program at Democracy Fund. The Democracy Fund is an independent foundation that works for something very basic and increasingly important: to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges. Josh leads the foundation's work rebuilding local news. The Democracy Fund supports media leaders, defends press freedom, and holds social media platforms accountable. (Ellen was stuck in traffic somewhere on the Zakim Bridge in Boston for the duration of this show, but she'll return next episode!)

In our Quick Takes, Dan poaches in Ellen's territory and reports on a development in Iowa, the Hawkeye State.   When two local weekly newspapers near Iowa City recently got into trouble, their owner found an unusual buyer: The Daily Iowan, the independent nonprofit student newspaper. Now there are plans to supplement local coverage with contributions from student journalists. It’s not something Dan would like to see everywhere — after all, we want to make sure there are jobs for student journalists after they graduate. But at least in this case, it sounds like the Iowa solution is going to be good for the weekly papers, good for the students and good for the communities they serve.

Dan and Ellen talk with Catherine Tumber, who was a former colleague of Dan's at The Boston Phoenix, a longtime friend, and a source for his 2013 book, "The Wired City." These days she’s an independent scholar and journalist who’s affiliated with the Penn Institute for Urban Research. She’s also a fellow at the MassINC Gateway Cities Innovation Institute and a contributing editor for The Baffler. 

She is the author of "Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World." She holds a PhD and a master's degree from the University of Rochester. She also has a bachelor's in social thought and political economy from UMass-Amherst. 

In our Quick Takes, Ellen is back on the Midwestern beat with good news about a startup weekly paper called the Denison Free Press in Iowa. It's scrappy as hell. Or heck, as they might say in Iowa. Dan has a rave for a new effort to inject $500 million into local news over the next five years. But that rave comes with a caveat. The initiative, known as Press Forward, brings together 22 different foundations in an effort to provide a significant amount of funding for community journalism. But there may be less to that effort than meets the eye.

Dan and Ellen fall into their third season of What Works with an interview with Mark Henderson, an old friend of the pod and a pioneer in online media. Mark is a journalist and technologist with decades of experience in news. He is the founder and CEO of The 016, a first-of-its-kind news publisher and distributor focused on Worcester, Massachusetts.

Mark worked at the Telegram & Gazette from 1990 to 2014. He spent 19 years in the newsroom, rising to the position of assistant sports editor before being named deputy managing editor for technology in 2005. In 2009, he was named digital director, where he launched the first paywall at a New York Times Company newspaper. He founded the Worcester Sun, a subscription news site that launched in August 2015 and suspended publication in February 2018.

Mark was also one of the very first people Dan and Ellen interviewed for their book, “What Works in Community News.” Although Mark is not in the book, Dan did write up his conversation for Nieman Lab, which can be found here.

Dan has a Quick Take on a report from the Poynter Institute, a leading journalism education organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that offers a clear-eyed assessment of why there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism despite the very real challenges that we still face.

Ellen recounts a Knight Science Journalism Program panel and awards ceremony last week at MIT. The program honored Cicero Independiente, a nonprofit newsroom in the Chicago area. The staff won for an innovative project that examined toxic air. 

Dan and Ellen talk with David Greising, the president and chief executive of the Better Government Association, a century-old civic nonprofit organization that is also home to a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom as part of a new collaboration with the Illinois Solution Partnership.

The new partnership is funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. The BGA separates its investigations team and policy team, in order to wall off its journalism from its advocacy work. In May of 2022, Madison Hopkins of the BGA and Cecilia Reyes of the Chicago Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for an investigation of the city's history of failed building and fire-safety code enforcement, which proved lethal many times over. 

Dan has a Quick Take on a new development at the Provincetown Independent. Co-founder and editor Ed Miller was a guest on the What Works podcast earlier this year. The Indie is trying something really interesting: A direct public offering, or DPO. 

Ellen has a Quick Take on the INNY's -- the Institute of Nonprofit News Awards. A reporter named Sally Kestin won for best investigative journalism in a small newsroom. We're talking really small: She works for the Asheville Watchdog, a nonprofit news outlet in North Carolina with only one paid employee. The rest are retired journalists, many of them quite well-known. Kestin won the 2013 Pulitzer for Public Service at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.