Catherine Tumber in Buffalo, New York. Photo by Chris Hawley. Used with permission.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Catherine Tumber, who was a former colleague of mine at The Boston Phoenix, a longtime friend and a source for my 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.
Tumber is the author of “Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.” She holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree from the University of Rochester as well as a bachelor’s in social thought and political economy from UMass Amherst. Our conversation is about a recent report that she co-authored for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy called “Greening America’s Smaller Cities.” She, along with Joseph Schilling and Gabi Velasco, offer a wealth of suggestions about how industrial legacy cities can be part of the climate solution. Our question to Cathy: How does the lack of reliable news and information in many of these cities contribute to the challenges of turning that vision into a reality?
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. I’ve got a rave for a new effort to inject $500 million into local news over the next five years — 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.
You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
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