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A new study finds that Trump swamped Harris in news deserts

One of the most important animating principles in the work that Ellen Clegg and I have done on the future of local news is that civic engagement isn’t really possible in its absence. People naturally seek out news, and if there’s no local source, they’re more likely to spend too much time gorging on partisan talk shows on Fox News and MSNBC.

We are not especially concerned about how that might affect national elections because democracy needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that folks who are relearning the arts of community and cooperation will vote differently from those sit at home watching TV (if they’re older) or spending way too much time on social media.

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So I was intrigued that a new study from the Local News Initiative (LNI) at Northwestern’s Medill School showed Donald Trump ran up some of his biggest margins over Kamala Harris in news deserts. Medill defines a news desert as a county that lacks a professional news source. It turns out that even though Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the national popular vote by the slimmest of margins, just 1.5%, he beat her by 54% in the news-desert counties that he won. Harris won a few news-desert counties as well, but her margin was 18%. Moreover, Trump won 91% of the 193 news-desert counties that LNI tracked.

There is, needless to say, a chicken-and-egg problem here, and LNI’s Paul Farhi and John Volk acknowledge it. Did Trump run up such an overwhelming victory in those counties because its residents lack local news sources? Or are people who live in those counties paradigmatic Trump voters regardless of whether they have a local news outlet? Farhi and Volk write:

Trump’s dominance of news deserts doesn’t imply a cause and effect. That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news. Instead, a simpler and more obvious correlation may be at work: News deserts are concentrated in counties that tend to be rural and have populations that are less educated and poorer than the national average — exactly the kind of places that went strongly for Trump in 2024 and in 2020.

As Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, tells Farhi and Volk, “The wrong way to interpret this is ‘Oh, the rubes voted for Trump because they’re uninformed.’” Nevertheless, Waldman adds, the findings underscore the reality that Trump supporters are “some of the most common victims of the collapse of local news.”

The findings translate to Massachusetts as well. Despite beating Trump here 61% to 30%, Trump won a number of communities and performed better than he did against Joe Biden in 2020. If you take a look at the map, Harris was very strong in media-rich Eastern Massachusetts and weak in the southeast, central and southwest parts of the state.

Some of those Trump communities are well served by local news outlets, and here I want to give a shoutout to Nemasket Week, which was launched a few years ago and covers my hometown of Middleborough, where Trump won by 52% to 46%. Still, you see the same correlation that LNI found: big margins for Harris in affluent areas that are the home of quite a few independent local news projects; and smaller margins for Harris, or even Trump victories, in less affluent and more rural areas, which also tend to be less well covered.

To repeat what Waldman says, what we need isn’t to figure out how we can flip Trump voters to support Democrats. Rather, we need to foster a renewed sense of community life — and reliable sources of local news is an indispensable starting point.

Talking about the future of local news with Kimberly Atkins Stohr

Ellen Clegg and I were thrilled to have a chance to speak with Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr on her podcast, “Justice by Design.” We talked about our book, “What Works in Community News,” as well as the importance of community journalism and how it’s being revived in hundreds of places across the country. You can watch us on YouTube, listen here or subscribe using your favorite podcast app.

Lisa DeSisto resigns as CEO of the Maine Trust for Local News, which owns the Portland Press Herald

Big news from Down East as Lisa DeSisto, the CEO and publisher of the Maine Trust for Local News, has announced that she’s resigning. The Maine Trust is a nonprofit that owns the state’s largest daily paper, the Portland Press Herald, as well as three other daily papers and a number of weeklies. The papers themselves are for-profit entities.

According to Press Herald reporter Hannah LaClaire, DeSisto will leave by the end of the year. She’ll be replaced by Stefanie Manning, a Maine Trust executive who will assume the title of managing director. DeSisto said in a statement:

I have cherished my time leading this organization and working alongside such dedicated and talented colleagues. Serving our readers and supporting this incredible team has been a privilege. Representing the Maine Trust for Local News in the community has been an honor I will carry with me.

DeSisto leaves amid a time of transition at the Maine Trust. Longtime executive editor Steve Greenlee took a position at Boston University earlier this year and was replaced by Carolyn Fox, who had previously been managing editor of the Tampa Bay Times.

DeSisto hosted Ellen Clegg and me for a talk about our book, “What Works in Community News,” back in October. Ellen and I both have previous connections with Lisa — she and I were colleagues in the 1990s at The Boston Phoenix, where she was an executive in the advertising department, and Ellen worked with her after she moved to a top business-side position at The Boston Globe.

Lisa has been in Portland for 12 years and has been through several ownership changes. I visited the Press Herald in late 2015 to talk with her and others about a failed attempt by Boston-area entrepreneur Aaron Kushner to buy the paper in 2012; Kushner, who later bought the Orange County Register in Southern California, was one of the wealthy newspaper owners I profiled in “The Return of the Moguls.”

After Kushner’s bid in Maine fell apart, the paper was acquired by a wealthy Maine businessman named Donald Sussman, who in turn sold it to Reade Brower, a printer, in 2015. Brower sold the Press Herald and other papers he had accumulated to the nonprofit National Trust for Local News in 2023. The Maine Trust is a subsidiary of the National Trust.

Through it all, Lisa has been a source of stability and continuity. There’s no question that she’ll be deeply missed.

On this Giving Tuesday, please support local news in your community

Provincetown, Mass. Photo (2008) by Andrew Malone.

Today is Giving Tuesday, and what better time to support your local news organization?

I just gave to two different outlets whose advisory boards I serve on — CommonWealth Beacon, a nonprofit digital project that covers statewide politics and public policy, and the Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that helps pay for public-interest journalism at The Provincetown Independent. The Independent is a print weekly with a strong digital presence that’s organized as a for-profit public benefit corporation.

These days there are very few examples of independent local news organizations that are pure for-profits and that can support themselves solely through advertising and subscriptions. The rise of nonprofits like CommonWealth and hybrids like the Independent has filled some of the gap created by the implosion of corporate-owned newspapers. But they need our support.

There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth

Ginia Bellafante’s friend has a very odd definition of what it means to tune out the news. In a recent New York Times article on liberals who have decided their mental health would be better if they stopped paying attention to the news (gift link) in the Age of Trump II, Bellafante writes:

When I spoke with a friend in Brooklyn a day or two after Donald Trump won, he told me he had committed to reading only the print paper — and just in the morning, forgoing any possible all-consuming afternoon digression into whatever might be up with Tulsi Gabbard. When I checked with him earlier this week, he was still maintaining the ritual and it felt good, he said.

Someone who reads a newspaper every day, whether in print or in digital, is actually at the high end when it comes to news consumption. Compared to most people, he is extraordinarily well-informed. Although Bellafante doesn’t tell us what he cut out of his news diet, if he’s decided to forego cable news and politically oriented social media, he may be even better informed than he was when he was jacked in to the national conversation for many of his waking hours. As I like to say, friends don’t let friends watch cable news.

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When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 while losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, it set off a frenzy of news consumption and the rise of the #Resistance — hyper-well-informed liberals and progressives who devoted much of their time and emotional energy to opposing Trump through actions such as the 2017 Women’s March. News consumption soared. You can’t stay it didn’t matter; Trump did, after all, lose to Joe Biden in 2020. Continue reading “There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth”

How Scott Brodbeck built Local News Now in the DC suburbs into a for-profit powerhouse

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Scott Brodbeck, founder and CEO of Local News Now.

Many of the news entrepreneurs on our 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. He also provides technical and back-office support to three other news outlets.

I’ve got 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.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

A collaboration in NJ foretold the GOP’s gains; plus, Linda McMahon, and more on public radio

Stefanie Murray. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.

A collaborative effort among local ethnic news outlets in New Jersey picked up signs of a shift to Republicans in advance of the Nov. 5 election at a time when it seemed unlikely that Black and Latino voters would abandon their traditionally strong support for Democrats.

The collaboration was overseen by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Some of the stories were published in NJ Spotlight News, a statewide nonprofit that combines in-depth digital reporting and a daily newscast on public television. Ellen Clegg and I reported on both the center and Spotlight in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

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The effort was highlighted recently by LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers in its newsletter. Stefanie Murray, who directs the center, told Chris Krewson, LION’s executive director, that “a few of the stories came out to be focused on how a Trump presidency was quite appealing to different ethnic groups in the state.”

For instance, a story co-bylined by reporters for Spotlight and Atlantic City Focus, a Black news organization, reported on Black Republicans “who said the Democratic Party has focused too much on social programs and government intervention without empowering individuals to achieve success on their own.”

Another Spotlight collaboration, with New Jersey Hispano, found that some Latinos were voting for Donald Trump because of the brutally high cost of housing, with one Peruvian immigrant, Gloria Candioti, saying she had not been able to buy after renting the same place for 20 years.

“I have thought about buying a property, but I have not been able to yet,” she said. “There is a lot of demand now, interest rates have gone up, house prices have been higher.”

Murray said Spotlight’s executive director, John Mooney, was concerned that reporting showing a shift toward Trump and other Republicans would not be borne out on Election Day. In fact, “they were spot on,” she observed, as Trump lost to Kamala Harris in New Jersey by just five points after trailing by double digits in 2016 and 2020.

Of course, forecasting the outcome of presidential elections is not the role of local news. What happened in New Jersey matters because what ethnic media and Spotlight found stemmed directly from dogged reporting on the concerns of Black and Latino voters. It turned out that was worth more than a bushel full of poll results.

An early Linda McMahon sighting

Paul Bass, right, and Linda McMahon in New Haven in 2010. Photo (cc) 2010 by Dan Kennedy.

Way back in September 2010, I attended the fifth-anniversary party for the New Haven Independent, one of the original digital nonprofits. I wrote about the Independent in my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” and revisited it in “What Works in Community News.”

“It’s a powerful idea, which is that out-of-town corporations that could care less about us no longer own our news,” Independent founder Paul Bass told the crowd that night. “They no longer control our news. We the people control the news.”

The party was held in the offices of La Voz Hispana de Connecticut, the Spanish-language newspaper that is the Independent’s partner and landlord. Standing off to one side was Connecticut’s Republican Senate candidate in 2010 — Linda McMahon, the wife of professional wrestling mogul Vince McMahon and now Trump’s choice as secretary of education.

McMahon said very little. I was using a really crappy camera that night, but I did get one picture of her behind Bass that is sort of OK.

McMahon was handily defeated that November and then lost again two years later. Now, despite no obvious credentials, she will be joining the Cabinet, assuming she’s confirmed by the Senate.

More thoughts on public radio

Last week I flagged an article in Nieman Reports on the economic crisis facing public radio. In a response both to me and to Gabe Bullard, who wrote the Nieman story, Andrew Ramsammy argues that our prescription for reviving public radio — a renewed focus on local journalism — is not enough.

Ramsammy, the interim president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, writes on LinkedIn:

The reality is this: it’s not about what’s delivering the news—it’s about who’s delivering it, and whether the audience connects with them. Public radio’s future depends on abandoning outdated models of institutional authority, embracing the personality-driven dynamics of today’s media landscape, and empowering the next generation of creators — not just as contributors, but as co-owners and collaborators in a shared vision of success. The days of legacy gatekeepers are over. It’s time to rethink everything.

Ramsammy’s essay is well worth reading in full.

The grim reaper comes for public radio. One possible solution? Doubling down on local journalism.

1946 photo by the Department of the Interior

Something has gone wrong with public radio. After years of standing as the shining exception to an otherwise shrinking news landscape, multiple stations over the past year have implemented budget cuts and lowered their ambitions.

Locally, both WBUR and GBH News have laid off employees (most of GBH’s cuts were in its local TV programs). Elsewhere, operations such as WAMU in Washington, WNYC in New York and Colorado Public Radio have all been hit by a rapidly changing economic environment.

Pulling it all together is Gabe Bullard, a veteran of public media who has written an in-depth story for Nieman Reports arguing that the problem with public radio is that, well, it’s on the radio. The internet destroyed the distribution channels for newspapers. Radio seemed immune. But now, COVID-induced changes in commuting patterns plus the rise of podcasts mean that dramatically fewer people are listening to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” while they’re in the cars. Bullard writes:

When COVID restrictions lifted, many listeners continued commuting, but they did it less — two days a week instead of five, for example. Others had grown used to new routines built around podcasts, and many were driving cars that defaulted to Bluetooth connections instead of FM radio. By 2023, the number of people listening to radio had dropped 21 percent from 2018. In 2024, Edison Research found that listeners spent more time with their phones than with the radio, and more time with on-demand audio (podcasts, audiobooks, playlists, YouTube) than linear (streaming or broadcast radio).

I am atypical, but when you put enough atypical cases together they can add up to a trend. I used to be a heavy public radio listener, spending long hours driving back and forth to Boston. After we moved closer to the city in 2015, I started taking public transportation and spent my commutes reading news on my phone rather than listening to the radio. We no longer even have a radio at home, although I do listen to GBH and WBUR (as well as podcasts and books) on my phone — but not nearly as much as I did when I was stuck in my car.

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The upshot, Bullard writes, is that local stations and NPR have eliminated more than 400 jobs in the past two years, and sometimes they’ve gotten rid of digital ventures that seemed like the key to the future — such as WAMU’s decision to close down the DCist local website.

Fortunately, WAMU’s decision was something of an anomaly. Colorado Public Radio continues to operate Denverite, WHYY in Philadelphia still operates the mobile-first local website Billy Penn and Chicago Public Media’s acquisition of the Chicago Sun-Times has kept that city’s second daily newspaper alive. Which is a good thing, because, as Bullard argues, the key for public radio may be in offering more local journalism: “What stations can offer that’s different from podcasts is reporting from a listener’s own community.”

Not too many years ago, the economic outlook for public radio was so bright relative to newspapers that station operators were urged to look at their stations as though they were the No. 2 paper in their city — or, in some cases, the dominant news outlet. In 2023, Thomas Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote an essay titled “Can Local Public Radio Help Fill the News Gap Created by the Decline of Local Newspapers?” His answer: Yes, although new funding sources would need to be identified. (I wrote a response to Patterson for our What Works site.)

Now public radio is fighting for its economic life, and the return of Donald Trump to the White House may make the situation even worse. So what is the way forward? Truly local coverage is a non-starter because of the need to appeal to a wide audience. But doubling down on regional news (which is really what Bullard and Patterson are talking about) is a possible way out of its dilemma.

With journalism at major metropolitan newspapers disappearing behind paywalls, public radio’s advantage is that it’s freely available to everyone. Of course, it’s also heavily dependent on donations from foundations and ordinary listeners, and you should support your local station if you’re able. But as Bullard argues, the days of flipping the switch to national programming from NPR and watching the money roll in are over.

Independent news outlets track the latest ‘atmospheric river’ in Mendocino County

In drier times: Ukiah, Calif., the Mendocino County seat. Photo (cc) 2020 by Dan Kennedy.

When Kate Maxwell and Adrian Fernandez Baumann launched The Mendocino Voice in 2016, they were hoping to bring some in-depth journalism to a county that was undercovered due to deep cuts at newspapers owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Indeed, both Maxwell and Baumann had left jobs at Alden papers before launching the Voice.

And yes, they were able to do some enterprising reporting. But they also found that they had to devote a considerable amount of attention to Northern California’s increasingly weird weather. When I visited in March 2020, they were keeping an eye on a wildfire that Baumann told me had sprung up five months before what was typically wildfire season because of the unusually dry conditions.

Well, now the Voice and other news outlets in Mendo County are keeping tabs on an atmospheric river that has dumped heavy rain on the region and that threatens to create yet another weather-related crisis. (Ellen Clegg and I wrote about the Voice in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Maxwell and Baumann have moved on, and this past June the nominally for-profit site was acquired by the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation.)

The Voice this morning is dominated by stories about flooding. The lead article reports that sand for sandbags is available for residents and businesses seeking to protect their property from rising waters. “Residents and businesses must bring their own bags and shovels, unless noted otherwise,” reporter Sarah Stierch writes.

Below that is a brief story about power being restored along the coast, and that’s followed by a lengthier update headlined “Storm expected to bring ‘life-threatening’ floods to Mendocino County.” All those stories, by the way, were written by Stierch, which shows how hard folks at hyperlocal news projects have to work.

The Voice is not the only independent news organization in Mendo County. MendoFever, started in 2020 by a local resident named Matt LaFever, leads with a story published on Wednesday headlined “First atmospheric river of the season set to soak Mendocino County.” The article offers some nuts-and-bolts guidance on how residents should prepare. Public radio station KZYX offers an in-depth story by Emily Cox and updates on road conditions and power outages.

Finally, Alden’s Ukiah Daily Journal leads with — yes — the ongoing count in the presidential election. The most recent story listed under “Latest Headlines” is a five-day-old article about an art exhibit. Scroll down, though, and you’ll find a story published Wednesday morning reporting that the National Weather Service was predicting floods emanating from the atmospheric river. It is behind a paywall.

Whenever there is a breaking story of national interest, it’s smart to check out what local news organizations are reporting. Like much of the country, Mendocino County has been all but abandoned by corporate journalism. Fortunately, independent outlets are doing a good job of keeping residents informed with “useful news,” as the Voice puts it.

In Atlanta, a corporate owner bets on growth; plus, lying about lying, and a social-media meltdown

Martin Luther King Jr. House in Atlanta. Photo (cc) 2019 by Warren LeMay.

The list of major metropolitan daily newspapers that are doing reasonably well is short and dominated by independent owners. There are The Boston Globe, The Minnesota Star Tribune and The Seattle Times, all under family ownership. Next up: The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit paper owned by a nonprofit foundation. (The Tampa Bay Times has a similar arrangement but is struggling.) And there’s The Salt Lake Tribune, which has gone fully nonprofit.

What generally doesn’t come to mind are chain-owned newspapers. One exception, though, is The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is in the midst of a buildup overseen by its corporate owner, Cox Enterprises. David Folkenflik of NPR reports that Cox is spending $150 million over the next several years in the hopes that publisher and president Andrew Morse can figure it out.

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Cox isn’t Gannett or Alden Global Capital. At one time it owned a fairly significant newspaper empire, these days it’s down to the AJC, as the Atlanta paper is known, and a handful of papers in Ohio anchored by the Dayton Daily News. Nevertheless, the privately held conglomerate has major holdings in cable television and broadband services, claiming more than $13 billion in revenues in its communications division. In other words, it would seem to be the sort of bottom line-oriented company whose leadership holds few romantic views about the struggling newspaper business.

But Morse, a former top executive at CNN, is pushing ahead. According to Folkenflik, Morse hopes to build the AJC’s paid print and digital circulation from about 100,000 to 500,000 by doubling down on political coverage and reaching out to the city’s Black community, among other initiatives. A downtown newsroom is opening this week after years of being stranded in the suburbs. The AJC is expanding its staff, too.

“Instead of reading story after story about the futility of this, why don’t we grasp onto notions of, ‘How do we build for the future?'” Morse told Folkenflik, adding: “Our mission is to be the most essential and engaging source of news for the people of Atlanta, Georgia, in the South.”

As Folkenflik observes, Georgia is home to several papers owned by the cost-cutting Gannett and McClatchy chains. If Cox can show that there’s another way to do business, maybe the executives at those chains will realize that there’s more money to be made by offering quality than through endless rounds of downsizing. But probably not.

Pants on fire

Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, is on something of an apology tour as he promotes his book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”

The problem is that neither PolitiFact nor other prominent fact-checking projects, including FactCheck.org or The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, have been especially willing over the years to admit that Republicans lie more than Democrats. Donald Trump’s gusher of lies has changed that equation to some degree, although anyone who reads those sites knows that Trump is often treated as a particularly noxious exception to their otherwise both-sides-lie orientation.

Adair spoke with public radio’s “On the Media” over the weekend, telling co-host Brooke Gladstone that, well, he lied about lying. Here’s part of what he said:

In 2012, I was on C-SPAN, national television, live, taking calls. And Brian from Michigan calls in. And Brian says, Mr. Adair, I read in The Nation that when you add up the fact checks, that Republicans lie more and they lie worse. And I answer Brian and I lie. You know, I can honestly say I don’t keep score.

Well, we did keep score. We kept score by person. We didn’t reveal the party total. But I knew that Brian was right. And instead, I gave him this dodge that I always gave people when they asked this. I said, asking me that question is sort of like asking an umpire who’s out at home more, you know, the Yankees or the Red Sox.

I don’t know. I look at every play independently. And I think it’s important that we do that. I want to find Brian so that I can apologize to him because Brian was right then and Brian is even more right now. But I was trying to show that I was impartial.

Adair is now teaching at Duke University and is no longer involved in PolitiFact. But I find it interesting that he’s making this admission just a few months after the fact-checkers strained so hard at the two national political conventions to be “impartial” that they nearly gave themselves a hernia.

PolitiFact is perhaps best known for its “Pants on Fire!” rating for especially egregious lies. Well, Adair may not be able to sit down again for quite some time. He owes an apology not just to Brian but to all of us.

Career on fire

Add Laura Helmuth to the long list of journalists who’ve blown up their career for the sake of a momentary cheap thrill on social media. Helmuth, the editor — make that the former editor — of Scientific American, resigned last week after posting a series of F-bomb-laden posts on Bluesky in which she expressed her outrage at Donald Trump’s election.

Among her posts, according to Maya Yang at The Guardian: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” She later deleted the offending posts and offered up the proverbial boilerplate that they “do not reflect my beliefs.” Apparently it wasn’t enough.

Now, you might think this wasn’t a big deal, but Scientific American is a pretty buttoned-down institution as well as an important part of the scientific establishment, which has been targeted by Trump and the people around him.

As I tell my students, your social-media posts should stay within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do in your day job. Helmuth clearly went well beyond that.