On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Todd Landfried, co-founder and CEO of N2 Media Holdings. As consumers cut the cord on cable TV, he hopes to develop a sustainable model for local news production.
We know from our research that local television news is still highly trusted. His mission: to reinvent local news for the streaming era. Landfried’s idea, called The Local, is to develop statewide newscasts in Colorado, and eventually in all 50 states, that would be carried on the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube.
Ellen is back and fully bionic after a short hiatus for knee replacement surgery.
I’ve got a Quick Take about a finding in a recent report by LION Publishers that gets into how to think about raising money. LION, as most of our listeners know, stands for Local Independent Online News. Anyway, its latest sustainability report found that startup news organizations can’t just hope that revenues are something that are going to materialize. Fundraising takes dedicated employees, as I explain.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on an alt-weekly in Seattle called The Stranger that has become an influential political force, as The New York Times recently reported (sub. req.). This summer, 47 candidates for local office paid a call on the newsroom in order to seek an editorial endorsement. And they brought snacks!
The following is a press release from Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
Researchers and local journalism experts at Northeastern University, in partnership with industry-leading audience research firm SmithGeiger Group, have published a survival guide for local TV newsrooms that are struggling to reach a new generation of news consumers.
The Reinventing Local TV News Project recommends that news organizations hire a Digital Content Creator, a role researchers tested in three major market newsrooms for a year of experimentation on digital platforms. Reinvent: A Survival Guide for Local TV News offers guidance for news organizations and journalists on how to integrate that new role into the newsroom, the most effective ways for Digital Content Creators to tell stories, and ways to measure the reach of that work.
Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund responsible for hollowing out newspapers from coast to coast and at all points in between, is trying to have the last laugh at rival Hearst’s expense.
Earlier this week it was reported that The Dallas Morning News would lay off 26 employees, eliminating the entire copy desk and outsourcing print page production. Rachel Behrndt of WFAA-TV wrote that the paper’s union said the move violated the collective bargaining agreement.
But Behrndt also noted that the Morning News was adding 18 new positions.
The Hearst chain acquired the Morning News in September after a several-months-long bidding war with Alden that resulted in Hearst’s paying a higher price than it had originally offered — but less than Alden was prepared to pay.
Following the layoffs, Alden’s MediaNews Group, one of two newspaper chains that it owns, issued a statement saying that it was “unfortunate that Hearst duped Dallas Morning News controlling shareholder Robert Decherd into handing over control of this storied newspaper, his legacy now tarnished forever,” according to Bron Maher of A Media Operator.
“MediaNews Group was obviously the superior operator bidding to buy the newspaper,” the statement continued. “These newsroom cuts should be a stark warning to anyone who considers selling to Hearst and, even worse, at a massive discount.”
Current and former staff members at papers such as the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and the Boston Herald, all of which have been hollowed out under Alden’s ownership, might differ with that assertion.
Not to get all dewy-eyed about Hearst, a corporate chain with multiple media holdings, including 28 daily newspapers. But those papers are generally held in high regard. The Hearst approach is to form groups of newspapers within a state and to focus on statewide and regional coverage. Thus the chain has rolled up most of Texas’ papers, including the Houston Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman and the San Antonio Express-News — and now The Dallas Morning News.
Nor should the layoffs have come as a surprise. The Morning News’ public editor, Stephen Buckley, wrote more than a month ago:
We will be removing positions that are duplicated as a result of the merger, and those employees will be leaving the company over the next six months. In many cases, we will reinvest those dollars in positions we need to take advantage of the new digital capabilities.
Indeed, the whole point to forming regional groups is to eliminate redundancies, which leads to layoffs but also to the opportunity to add new positions, as Hearst is doing in Dallas.
There is no substitute for committed local ownership, and it’s a shame that the previous owners of the Morning News decided to sell. In both the short and the long term, though, its staff and its readers are far better off with Hearst than they would have been with Alden Global Capital.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Kade Krichko, the founder of Ori magazine, a beautifully crafted premium print publication devoted to grassroots storytelling across the globe. (Ellen Clegg is recovering from knee replacement surgery but is producing behind the scenes. She’ll return to the air soon.)
Kade describes himself as a world wanderer with a knack for misadventure. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, ESPN, Vice and Outside, among other publications. He admits to loving a good story, and writes, “If the tale has a pulse, I’m listening.” Kade is a Northeastern University graduate and a part-time lecturer in the School of Journalism. He created and taught a course in Sports, Media and Digital Storytelling.
Jon Keller. Photo via WBZ-TV.
I also check in with longtime political journalist Jon Keller. Jon was recently laid off by WBZ-TV (Channel 4) after a 20-year career there. He was one of five staff members who lost their jobs as part of what appears to be a deep corporate purge by David Ellison, whose Skydance Media company bought Paramount earlier this fall. CBS is part of Paramount, and WBZ is part of CBS.
Jon is not going away, fortunately, and is still writing for MASSterList and Boston magazine. He has some sharp observations on the role of local TV news in covering state and city politics.
Later on in the podcast, I’ve got a Quick Take about the latest bad news from our tech overlords. The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the new AI-powered web browsers designed to replace Chrome and Safari are able to circumvent a news organization’s digital paywall. Not always — it depends on the technology that was used to build the paywall. But at a time when publishers are already losing traffic because of AI, this is a direct assault on the business model for journalism in the digital age.
David Kidwell. Photo via the Plymouth Independent.
The Plymouth Independent, a digital startup that ranks among the larger such projects in Eastern Massachusetts, has named a new executive editor. David Kidwell, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from Chicago, will assume the Independent’s top editorial position in January. He succeeds founding editor Mark Pothier, who will remain as a staff reporter.
Kidwell has had an outstanding career in journalism, spanning nearly 40 years. He started as a beat reporter for small town newspapers, going on to become an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald for 15 years and then the Chicago Tribune for 12 years. More recently, he worked as an editor at two nonprofit investigative groups in Chicago, the Better Government Assn. (BGA) and Injustice Watch.
Kidwell has won two Pulitzer Prizes, most recently at the BGA, where he conceived, oversaw and edited a series of stories about dozens of fire deaths that occurred because of lax enforcement of fire and building codes by local officials. In 2001, he was a member of the Miami Herald team that covered the story of the exiled Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez.
“I am very excited to start this new adventure in Plymouth, and to be working with such a team of seasoned journalists,” Kidwell said. “I believe what you have been building is not only important to the people of Plymouth, but to the future of journalism. I can’t wait to get started.”
Pothier, a Boston Globe alumnus, announced in August that he was planning to step aside. That the Independent was able to attract someone of Kidwell’s stature to take his place is a testament to how attractive a stable nonprofit news organization is at a time when good journalism jobs are scarce.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, I’m flying solo because co-host Ellen Clegg is recovering from knee-replacement surgery. But fear not — she was behind the scenes making sure this episode got recorded properly, and she edited what you are listening to. She’ll be back on the air soon.
Our guest is Rick Goldsmith, a veteran filmmaker who has taken a close look at the state of corporate journalism in America. His documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink” tells the story of Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund that has bought up many of our greatest newspapers and stripped them of their real estate and slashed their newsrooms.
Rick Goldsmith
He focuses on one of Alden’s papers, The Denver Post, and the rise of The Colorado Sun, a digital startup begun by former Post journalists. The story of what happened in Colorado is also one that we tell in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
The reason we’re having Rick on now is that you’ll be able to watch “Stripped for Parts” through Dec. 31 for free on the PBS app, which you can access through Apple TV, Roku, Google Play and most smart TVs. The various options for watching the film are explained here.
I’ve got a Quick Take about Jay Rosen, who retired earlier this year from New York University and is now taking on a new challenge. Jay is probably best known to his younger followers as an incisive media critic. But his true passion, going back to the 1990s, is finding ways to involve members of the public in the production of journalism. Now he’s doing it again with a project called News Creator Corps — and it could have implications for local news.
Camden, Maine, home of the Midcoast Villager. Photo (cc) 2020 by Paul VanDerWerf.
The Midcoast Villager, an innovative weekly newspaper based in Camden, Maine, got The New York Times treatment last week. But though the Times lavished attention on the high-profile journalists who’ve been recruited to work there as well as the café it’s opened to extend public outreach, it missed entirely the Villager’s long history as a tech innovator — a history that extends all the way to the present.
The Times article and visuals, by Steven Kurutz and Cig Harvey, are certainly entertaining enough, starting with their portrayal of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald, who left a job covering Washington for NBC News to come to Maine. “I did an insane thing,” he tells the Times. “I left one of the last stable jobs in media and took a job in the worst sector of media — and possibly in the economy.”
Map via “The State of Local News 2025.” Click here for the interactive version.
Finding news in the annual State of Local News report from Northwestern University’ Medill School can be a challenge because, frankly, it’s always the same depressing thing: newspapers keep closing; digital startups are rising, but not by enough to fill the gap; and be sure to tune in again next year, when the situation is likely to be even worse.
Still, there are a few interesting nuggets in the latest update, which was released Monday. In particular, I was drawn to some observations in the report about rural areas, which is where news deserts tend to be concentrated. News deserts, as defined by the project’s now-retired founder, Penny Abernathy, are counties without any locally based news organizations.
As newspapers continue to close, independent startups are filling the gap. But it’s uneven at best, with most startups concentrated in urban and suburban areas. The report puts it this way:
Over the past five years, we have tracked more than 300 startups that have emerged across the country. Support for both these new startups, which have opened in almost every state, as well as existing legacy outlets has come from a surge in philanthropic investment as well as public policy initiatives. Over the past year, such efforts have boosted a wide variety of news outlets. Overall, however, philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.
The report also finds that fewer than 10% of digital-only news organizations are in rural counties, and that the demographics of counties that do support digital projects “tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Of course, internet connectivity tends to lag in rural areas as well.
Photo taken from the George Santos for Congress Facebook page via Talking Points Memo.
Weeks after the 2022 congressional elections, The New York Times exposed George Santos as a world-class fraudster, documenting a trail of deceit that eventually led to prison. The Times is still bragging about it today, and the Santos saga is sometimes held up as an example of the rot that can fester when local journalism fails.
But as I wrote in December 2022, it was the Times that failed — and, to an even greater extent, Newsday, a daily newspaper that purportedly covers Long Island, including Santos’ district. Both papers ignored reporting by a local news outlet, The North Shore Leader, showing that there were massive plumes of smoke emanating from Santos’ campaign headquarters and that maybe someone ought to take a look and see if there were any flames coming out as well.
In the world of independent local news startups, 10 years is an eon. That’s how long John and Kristen Muldoon published The Local News, a nonprofit print weekly that covers Ipswich, on Boston’s North Shore, as well as several surrounding communities.
Now they’re moving on. Fortunately, they’ve worked out a succession plan. Trevor Meek, who’s worked as a reporter for the paper since 2023, is the new editor, and Eric Gedstad, who has a background in communications, marketing and government, will be the executive director (that’s nonprofit-speak for publisher).
“Yes, they’ll still be contributing to the paper,” Meek writes of the Muldoons. “And no, they’ll never be able to escape my desperate texts and panicked emails. But their day-to-day presence — their gallows humor, sharp instincts, and steady hands — will be sorely missed.”
As Kris Olson, a co-founder and consulting editor at the Marblehead Current, put it in an email to me, “John is essentially being replaced by two people…. That gives you a sense of how much John was doing.”
John Muldoon has written that The Local News began to find its stride in 2019, when Bill Wasserman, a North Shore journalism legend, became a supporter by donating $100,000 and by helping the paper with advertising, which enabled the operation to have a regular print edition.
Wasserman had previously owned The Ipswich Chronicle and a string of other weeklies only to watch them wither under a series of corporate chain owners that culminated in their acquisition by GateHouse Media, now Gannett. (I worked briefly for North Shore Weeklies under one of those chain owners way back in 1990.) Wasserman died in 2021 at the age of 94.
Somewhere along the line, the Muldoons decided to turn their paper into a nonprofit, with John explaining, “The key reason there was to protect the paper for the public from the depredations of any future corporate owner.”
The Boston Globe’s Billy Baker wrote about The Local News in 2024, reporting that the print edition was being sent to 9,300 homes in Ipswich and neighboring Rowley without charge.
John and I have corresponded over the years, and I got to meet him and Kristen last November at a local-news panel at an Ipswich brewpub, where all such events ought to be held. The Muldoons have made an enormous contribution to the North Shore, bringing real news coverage back to places that had largely been ignored for years.
Best wishes to both of them on their well-deserved retirement.
