Half full or half empty? Photo (cc) 2014 by bradhoc
Among the projects that almost made it into “What Works in Community News” was the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Public Media, which merged two years ago. It struck Ellen Clegg and me as a leading example of how public media could step up to preserve local and regional news, especially after the city’s leading paper, the Chicago Tribune, fell into the hands of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
Now the combined enterprise is laying people off. Dave McKinney of WBEZ, which is part of Chicago Public Media, reports that about 15% of 62 union content creators at the radio station are losing their jobs, and that four positions on the business side at the Sun-Times would be cut. In all, 14 jobs will be eliminated.
McKinney notes acidly:
The job cuts coincide with the debut of a $6.4 million, state-of-the-art studio at WBEZ’s Navy Pier office and follows a double-digit-percentage pay increase for Chicago Public Media’s top executive. Additionally, other high-level executives departed the not-for-profit news organization in December.
The announcement follows cuts and threats of cuts at a number of public media outlets around the country, including WAMU in Washington, Colorado Public Radio and, in Boston, WBUR and GBH, neither of which has announced layoffs but have pointedly said cuts may be coming.
WBUR’s CitySpace. Photo (cc) 2023 by Todd Van Hoosear
Before social media, when blogging was everything, a lot of us wrote what were known as “link blogs” — that is, a running list of links with little in the way of commentary. Now that social media is (are?) falling apart as a way for distributing journalism, I’m trying to get back to that, mixing in some short posts with longer pieces.
But there’s a problem. I have a sizable contingent of readers who receive new posts by email and, at least at the moment, I don’t have a way of giving them the option of receiving one daily email with the day’s posts. I’d like to do something about that once the semester ends and I have some time. No one wants to receive multiple emails with short posts throughout the day. So here are three media stories I don’t want you to miss, pulled together in one post.
• Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan follows up the paper’s recent stories on struggles at the city’s two news-oriented public radio stations, GBH (89.7 FM) and WBUR (90.9 FM), with a closer look at whether both of them can survive in their current form. As someone who was a paid contributor to GBH News from 1998 to 2022, I have to say a lot of us were puzzled in 2009 when GBH announced it would turn its classical- and jazz-oriented radio station into a direct competitor with WBUR. You might say that it worked until it didn’t, and now there are some serious questions. The most provocative: Could the two radio stations merge? The answer: Probably not, but who knows?
• The local news crisis has led a number of college and university journalism programs to step up with their own solutions. At Northeastern, for instance, we publish The Scope, a grant-supported digital publication that covers social-justice issues in Greater Boston. Well, The Daily Iowan, an independent nonprofit newspaper that covers the University of Iowa, is going several steps further than that, acquiring two struggling weekly community newspapers. “It’s a really great way to help the problem of news deserts in rural areas,” the paper’s executive editor, Sabine Martin, told The Associated Press.
I contacted the paper to ask whether students who report for the weeklies will be paid. Publisher Jason Drummond responded that the details are still being worked out, but that students will be paid for work they produce exclusively for the weeklies, which are also in the process of hiring paid student interns. The weeklies will be able to pick up stories from The Daily Iowan for free, but the Iowan’s staff members are already paid.
• Four years ago I visited The Mendocino Voice, which covers a rural area in Northern California; it was my first reporting trip for “What Works in Community News.” The Voice, I learned, has to devote a lot of its resources to covering the state’s extreme weather, especially wildfires. Now the Voice’s publisher and co-founder, Kate Maxwell, is putting together a Local News Go Bag Toolkit so that local news organizations can prepare for emergencies. “The emphasis is on preparing before a disaster — it’s the most important step that journalists, newsrooms, and communities can take. This project is designed to be useful for local newsrooms and journalists at any stage of a disaster,” writes Maxwell, who’s currently a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. The toolkit is a work in progress, and she’s asking for ideas from other journalists.
It’s that time of the year when Gannett has to report how much it’s paying Mike Reed, the CEO of Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the U.S. and the publisher of USA Today. Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal looked up the company’s annual proxy filing for 2023 and found that the answer to that question is $3.9 million, an increase of 14% (but still down from the $7.7 million he received in 2021).
A couple of other notable tidbits in Seiffert’s story:
“Median employee compensation fell last year by $179, a fraction of a percent, as inflation rose 3.4% over the same period.”
Although Gannett has been touting an upsurge of hiring, including some 500 newsroom positions, the company reported employing 3,200 journalists at the beginning of January 2024, down 100 from a year earlier.
Meanwhile, Gannett’s $3.9 million man has been blasting the NewsGuild, the union that represents many of his underpaid, overworked employees. “I think the Guild, unfortunately, plays dirty and lies to our employees,” Reed told Axios last week. And check this out: “Reed also accused the Guild of lying about the company cutting jobs ‘to increase profitability.’ He said that’s not true — ‘they’re designed to keep a newsroom in the market itself,’ he said.” Huh?
In response, Axios quoted from a statement by NewsGuild-CWA president Jon Schleuss, who said in part: “It’s a shame that Mike Reed is attacking journalists again instead of listening to them. If he did, he’d understand that the only sustainable future is to invest in the talented reporters, photographers and others who drive the company’s success — not enriching corporate executives and shareholders.”
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.
I’ve got 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, Gannett and McClatchy, 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.
We’re thrilled to let you know that Nieman Lab has published an excerpt from “What Works in Community News” based on Ellen Clegg’s reporting from Minneapolis on Sahan Journal, a nonprofit digital project that covers the state’s burgeoning immigrant communities. Thanks to Nieman Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen for her help in getting our work out before a wider audience.
Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins reports that the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that works to keep newspapers alive and out of the hands of corporate chain owners, has purchased a used printing press that will serve the two dozen papers it owns in the Denver suburbs as well as papers owned by other publishers. The trust bought those papers, known collectively as Colorado Community Media, back in 2021.
Ellen Clegg and I interviewed National Trust CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro and CCM publisher Linda Shapley for our book, “What Works in Community News.” They have both appeared on our podcast as well. When I met Shapley in her newsroom in the fall of 2021, she was in the midst of trying to pivot her papers to digital — but she acknowledged that print remained an important part of the mix for readers and, especially, for advertisers.
“I totally get that there are advertisers out there who don’t necessarily see digital as a way forward,” Shapley said. “But they recognize the fact that this is going to be how people find you. So I don’t see them as playing against each other but as something that can work in tandem.”
Now those papers — as well as papers owned by other publishers who’ve been hurt by the disappearance of Colorado’s printing presses — can continue to be offered in print as well as online.
Just when Gannett was making some good news for itself by going on something of a modest hiring spree, splat! Investigative reporter Steven Monacelli has found that our largest newspaper chain, with about 200 daily newspapers, is working with Advantage Informatics, a well-known purveyor of so-called pink slime news sites.
Pink slime is the name given to websites that masquerade as legitimate local news projects but that are actually produced from distant locales. The meaning has morphed over the years. What I call Pink Slime 1.0 arose about a dozen years ago in the form of sites whose writers appeared to be based in local communities but were actually some distance away — in some cases, as far away as the Philippines. Pink Slime 2.0 has an ideological cast, mainly but not exclusively on the right. Pink Slime 3.0 adds artificial intelligence to the mix.
What most of these sites have in common is Brian Timpone, a Chicago-based conservative businessperson who is the founder of something called Metric Media, a network of some 1,200 right-wing sites. These projects tend to be pretty inept; my favorite covers the imaginary community of North Boston.
The Gannett-Timpone connection was exposed last week in a major report for Nieman Lab written by Monacelli on Advantage Informatics, a Timpone venture that produces advertorial content. Monacelli found that, in years past, newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle (owned by Hearst since 1987) and The San Diego Union-Tribune (recently acquired by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital) have taken advantage of Timpone’s services. (The Chronicle told Monacelli that it has no record of such a relationship.) Gannett is the one newspaper company he found that has a current, ongoing relationship with Advantage. He writes:
A Gannett spokesperson told me that the company works with Advantage Informatics on “advertorial” content. When asked about Advantage Informatics’ relationship with the broader Metric Media network, the spokesperson said, “Ethics and our values are priority for us.”
Monacelli has written quite a tale that includes a Tennessee journalism professor who used to work for Advantage and Advantage’s ambition to offer “dedicated beat reporting” of local sports, governmental meetings and “keeping a close eye” on statehouses and Congress.
On the one hand, I’m not sure it’s that big a deal who produces advertorial content. On the other, the fact is that Gannett is working with the pink slimiest company in the country. Despite Gannett’s recent good news on the hiring front, it would hardly be surprising if company executives played around with having Advantage try its hand at community coverage as well. After all, it was just a few months ago that Gannett was caught using AI to write local sports stories, to hilarious effect.
A final note: If you’d like to learn more about pink slime, Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Pri Bengani, an expert based at Columbia University who’s quoted in Monacelli’s article, on the “What Works” podcast last fall.
Larry Gennari has a review in the Boston Business Journal, writing: “Clegg and Kennedy present an impressive number of media business startup models in such places as California, Iowa, New Jersey, Minnesota and Tennessee, all centered on quality local news, which they argue enhances community, transparency and, ultimately, self-governance.”
And Dorothy Bergin, The Bedford Citizen’s 90-something copy editor, who we interviewed for the book, has featured it in her regular column, “Dot’s Reading Room.” She writes: “As the authors say, they are optimistic about the future of hyperlocal journalism. This is the spirit that has kept and still keeps The Bedford Citizen’s paid employees and volunteers from writers and reporters on the job!”
Thanks to everyone who attended our Northeastern University conference Friday on “What Works: The Future of Local News.” We’ll be posting more in the days ahead, but we wanted to begin by sharing some information from Professors Mike Beaudet and John Wihbey on the Reinventing Local TV News Project. They weren’t able to show videos, so we’re sharing them here.
Above is their “Meet the Fellows!” video, an introduction to the content producers for the third phase of their project. And here’s a piece that was published by Storybench, our School of Journalism digital publication covering media innovation. It links to links the first three underreported stories produced by project fellows in New York, Chicago and Boston.
The project’s video library is available for your perusal as well. And there are written reports for anyone who wants to dig deeper.
A final reminder about our conference on the future of local news — a free, all-day event that will be held tomorrow (March 15) at Northeastern University. We’ll have sessions on topics ranging from data visualization to university-community partnerships, as well as a book talk by Ellen Clegg and me. We hope you can attend. Registration and more information is online here.
