Category: Local News

More news about our book

Photo (2012) by Dan Kennedy

I want to let you know about a couple of media hits this weekend for “What Works in Community News.”

First, Billy Baker of The Boston Globe quotes my co-author, Ellen Clegg, and mentions our book in a feature on The Local News, which covers Ipswich and Rowley and is one of a number of nonprofit startups founded to fill the gap left behind when Gannett abandoned its weekly papers in Eastern Massachusetts. “This is what the founders envisioned, which is a lot of little newspapers in all the little towns in New England,” Ellen told Baker. As Baker notes, Ellen doesn’t just write about it — she also does it, as she’s also the co-founder and co-chair of another startup, Brookline.News.

Second, Colorado College journalism professor Corey Hutchins writes about our book in his well-read newsletter, “Inside the News in Colorado.” I visited Colorado in September 2021, mainly to report on upstart Colorado Sun but also to learn more about how the Sun fits into the state’s larger journalistic community One afternoon I drove from Denver to Colorado Springs in order to interview Hutchins. “I don’t know of any other state where there’s such a focus and attention from folks here who want to support a thriving local news ecosystem matched with attention from funders, smart media thinkers from around the country,” he told me.

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Talking ‘What Works’ with Medill’s Mark Caro

Thanks to Mark Caro, editor of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School, for a great conversation with Ellen Clegg and me about our book, “What Works in Community News.” The interview has been picked up by Poynter Online as well.

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Eugene Weekly to resume print publication after raising $150,000

Eugene Weekly photo via The Oregonian

Eugene Weekly, which shut down in late December after an ex-employee was charged with embezzling tens of thousands of dollars, is back. Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be anything about it on the paper’s website, which continues to lead with a story that was posted a month ago about the crisis. But Livia Albeck-Ripka reports in The New York Times (free link) that the free print paper will resume publication on Feb. 8 after raising “at least $150,000” in donations.

“Every time I walk by one of our little red boxes, there’s no paper in it, it stabs me in the heart,” editor Camilla Mortensen is quoted as saying. The previous weekly press run had been 30,000, but she said that would be cut to 25,000 so that it can remain financially sustainable.

The alt-weekly, founded in 1982, is an important source of local news in Eugene. EW has continued to post stories on its website with what the Times describes as donated labor. The homepage currently includes new and recent articles about a school superintendent who’s being investigated on allegations of discriminating and retaliating against an employee; how animals were affected by a January ice storm; and a fundraising concert for EW starring “the self proclaimed scream queens of Eugene.”

If you’d like to donate to keep EW alive, just click here.

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Wendi Thomas talks about her work at MLK50, a nonprofit covering social justice in Memphis

Wendi C. Thomas. Photo (cc) 2022 by Ellen Clegg.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, we talk with Wendi C. Thomas, the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, which is based in Memphis, Tennessee. 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. Thomas 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 Clegg has a Quick Take on the situation at the Houston Landing, a highly anticipated and well-funded nonprofit newsroom that launched in 2023. The Landing is in turmoil after CEO Peter Bhatia fired the editor and the top investigative reporter for reasons that remain mysterious.

My 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 I explain.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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A nonprofit to cover Boston’s communities of color takes another step toward reality

Yawu Miller

A nonprofit news project covering race, social justice and related issues took another step toward becoming a reality on Thursday.

Yawu Miller, formerly the senior editor of The Bay State Banner, announced on Twitter that the nascent organization he’s launching with Claudio Martinez will be called the Greater Boston News Bureau “with the aim of supporting local news outlets that serve communities of color in and around Boston.” Martinez is the executive director of La Vida Scholars, “a community based organization that equips low-income, high-achieving Lynn students with the resources and preparation needed to enter great colleges.”

Miller has continued reporting for the Banner, which covers the Black community in Greater Boston, after his uncle Melvin Miller sold it to a local group a little less than a year ago. That arrangement will remain in place, Yawu Miller wrote, saying that his work “will continue to appear in the Banner as well as other news outlets and will now be credited to the Greater Boston News Bureau. All our articles will be free for other publications to re-publish and will be available in Spanish as well as English.”

Claudio Martinez

The official launch, he added, will come later this year.

Miller and Martinez comprise one of four teams that were awarded grants by the American Journalism Project last year as part of its local news incubator program. Each team was awarded a $400,000 grant. The other teams are based in Miami, Phoenix and Oregon. The Phoenix project is aimed at serving that area’s LGBTQ community. According to the AJP’s announcement from last July:

The local news incubator, launched by the American Journalism Project, with support from the Google News Initiative, aims to lower barriers to entry for prospective founders of local news organizations and diversify the field. By providing robust funding and council, this kind of program allows local news talent to go all-in on their ideas and draw on lessons learned from other nonprofit local news organizations across the country, with the runway that will provide them financial security to take an entrepreneur’s leap.

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Reasons for optimism amid a startling run of newsroom cuts

I spoke with CNN’s Jon Passantino via email today for a story in the Reliable Sources newsletter about some causes for hope amid a startling run of newsroom cuts. Here’s what I said:

“Billionaire newspaper ownership is coming under fire lately because of [Los Angeles Times owner Patrick] Soon-Shiong’s fecklessness and because Jeff Bezos has hit a few bumps with the [Washington] Post, although I think that will prove to be temporary,” Kennedy told CNN, pointing to recent successes at The Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Boston Globe newspapers.

“There are reasons to be optimistic given the hundreds of independent local news organizations that have sprouted up in recent years,” he said. “The challenge is that coverage at the hyperlocal level is hit or miss, as some communities are well-served and others — especially in rural areas and in urban communities of color — tend to be overlooked.”

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LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is a man without a plan

I said what I had to say about Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong two weeks ago, when he pushed out executive editor Kevin Merida. I don’t really have anything to add now that the Times has laid off 115 employees. Except this: You’d have to be naive to think that Soon-Shiong should simply use his billions to subsidize what he says are annual losses in the $30 million to $40 million range. The problem is that he doesn’t have a plan.

“We are not in turmoil. We have a real plan,” Soon-Shiong reportedly said Tuesday. The record says that he’s wrong on both counts.

The hope was that Soon-Shiong would take losses for a few years while figuring out a strategy that would return the Times to profitability and growth. Instead, he’s just flailing around.

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NJ Spotlight News adds a Washington reporter

NJ Spotlight News, one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I feature in our book, “What Works in Community News,” has hired a Washington correspondent. Benjamin Hulac will be the only full-time Washington reporter employed by a major New Jersey news outlet, according to an email to subscribers from Spotlight executive director John Mooney.

“Benjamin will cover New Jersey’s congressional delegation as well as the myriad ways in which decisions at the federal level affect our state and its people,” Mooney writes. “Currently, no other major New Jersey media outlet has a full-time reporter in D.C. We’re proud to fill this void.”

Hulac previously worked for CQ Roll Call and Climatewire.

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