On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I are talking with … each other. There’s lots happening in the local news space, and we want to hit some highlights.
We also have a programming note: This will be our final podcast this summer. We’re going to make like the French and take the rest of August off. Before signing off, though, we discuss the state of play for newsletters (who knew email is the killer app?); podcasts (we’re still free and we still do it for love, not money); and advertising (some newspapers are charging a fee if you’d like your digital feed served with no advertising.)
Ellen has a remembrance of Jack Connors, a legendary Boston advertising mogul and backer of local news who once tried to buy The Boston Globe. She also finds a refreshing stream of news about local people, businesses, and government on the home pages of hyperlocal outlets in swing states.
You can listen to our conversation here and access an AI-generated transcript. You can also subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
Mike Shapiro launched his first publication in New Providence, N.J., which is now the headquarters for TAPinto and the Hyperlocal News Network. 2012 public domain photo by Tomwsulcer.
If local news is going to thrive, we need a variety of business models, especially on the for-profit side. Yet, at least among news start-ups with robust reporting capacity, nonprofits are becoming more and more dominant. Indeed, three of the for-profits that Ellen Clegg and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News,” The Colorado Sun, The Mendocino Voice and Santa Clara Local, have converted to nonprofit status in the past year.
One unique exception is TAPinto, a New Jersey-based company with about 100 franchises. The way it works is that local entrepreneurs start a TAPinto in their community and are able to — well, tap into the mothership’s tech, advertising and training resources. It’s not bad for an out-of-the-box solution, but there are limitations.
Recently, though, TAPinto chief executive Mike Shapiro launched a related business called the Hyperlocal News Network. It’s similar to TAPinto except that publishers have more flexibility to establish their own identity. Sophie Culpepper writes about Shapiro’s new venture for Nieman Lab, reporting that Shapiro told her by email:
There are … hundreds, if not thousands, of existing publishers who are really struggling with their digital presence and would benefit from our technology and back office services, yet want to keep their own branding. Our license model enables them to do just that.
Shapiro spoke with Ellen and me on our “What Works” podcast in April 2022. You can listen to it and read an AI-generated transcript by clicking here. We also wrote about TAPinto in our book, and I’m providing an excerpt below.
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TAPinto is a network of nearly a hundred hyperlocal websites, most of them in New Jersey, that employs an innovative franchise model. The network was begun in 2009 by Michael Shapiro, who back then was a New York lawyer looking to spend more time with his young son after he underwent open-heart surgery (he made a full recovery). Shapiro started a website that he called The Alternative Press in New Providence, where he lived, because he was dissatisfied by the lack of coverage in the local newspaper. As Shapiro tells it, he soon heard from residents of other communities asking him to expand, and a network was born. (The “TAP” in TAPinto stands for “The Alternative Press.”)
Although Shapiro is not a journalist, he said in an interview and on the “What Works” podcast that he takes journalistic objectivity seriously and requires his franchisees to adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. The way it works is this. For a fee of $5,000, a franchisee can set up shop with what is essentially a turnkey operation: a website based on a ready-made template with backend and technical support, training, and everything else they might need to begin covering local news and selling advertising. Publishers keep 80 percent of whatever ad revenues they’re able to earn, with 20 percent going to TAPinto. Advertising can also be shared across sites, and some editorial content is shared as well. Publishers are required to produce at least one original piece of journalism each day; stories typically cover such topics as neighborhood development issues, feel-good features, and public-safety news. A common arrangement, Shapiro said, is for a businessperson to become a franchisee and employ a journalist either full- or part-time.
Access to TAPinto sites is free, and Shapiro said the $5,000 franchise fee is far lower than what it would cost for a local media entrepreneur to get started on their own. “I think we’ve been able to demonstrate that you can have profitable local news sites that are 100 percent advertising-based, and that, to me, is really important,” he said. “People who are economically distressed shouldn’t have to choose between putting food on the table or buying medicine and finding out what’s going on in their town. So that’s very fundamental to us. And it’s also fundamental on the ownership side. In a lot of these situations, you have to be wealthy to start an online local news site if you want to have the technology and the functionality and stuff we offer.”
Observers we spoke with gave Shapiro generally high marks but said the sites tend to be of uneven quality, which is not surprising given the inexperience of many of the franchisees. Nevertheless, TAPinto represents a genuinely new way of providing local news and bears watching — particularly if Shapiro is able to build out his network nationally or inspires imitators.
If we’ve learned anything about news publishing in recent years, it’s that the giant tech platforms are not our friends. Google is embracing artificial intelligence, which means that searching for something will soon provide you with robot-generated answers (right or wrong!), thus reducing the need to click through. Facebook is moving away from news. Twitter/X has deteriorated badly under the chaotic leadership of Elon Musk, although it still has enough clout that President Biden used it to announce he was ending his re-election campaign.
So what should publishers do instead? It’s no secret — they’re already doing it. They are using email newsletters to drive their audience to their journalism. A recent post by Andrew Rockway and Dylan Sanchez for LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers reports that 95% of member publishers are offering newsletters, up from 81% in 2022. “The decline in referral traffic,” they write, “will likely lead to more direct engagement by publishers with their audiences.”
Some observers worry about newsletter overload as our inboxes fill up with email we may never get around to reading. That’s potentially a problem, but I think it’s a more serious problem for larger outlets, many of which send out multiple newsletters throughout the day and risk reaching a point of diminishing returns. By contrast, users will value one daily newsletter from their hyperlocal news project with links to the latest stories.
By far the most common approach publishers use is to offer a free newsletter aimed at driving users to their website, which may be free or subscription-based. The Massachusetts-based Bedford Citizen, for instance, sends out a daily newsletter generated by its RSS feed and a weekly human-curated newsletter. The Citizen is a free nonprofit, but once they’ve enticed you with their top-of-the-funnel newsletter, they hope they can lure you into becoming a paying member. Ellen and I interviewed executive director Teri Morrow and editor Wayne Braverman on our podcast last February.
The Colorado Sun, a statewide nonprofit, offers a series of free and paid newsletters, while the website itself is free. The paid newsletters represent an unusual twist: Some of them feature deeper reporting than you can get from the website on topics such as politics, climate change and outdoor recreation. At $22 a month for a premium membership, users pay no more than they would for a digital subscription to a daily newspaper. Editor Larry Ryckman talked about that in our most recent podcast.
In some places, the newsletter is the publication. An example of that is Burlington Buzz, a daily newsletter that covers Burlington, Massachusetts. Founder, publisher and editor Nicci Kadilak recently switched her newsletter platform from Substack to Indiegraf, and her homepage looks a lot like a standard community website — which shows that it’s a mistake to get too caught up on categories when newsletters have websites and websites have newsletters. Ellen and I talked with Nicci last year.
What’s crucial is that news publishers have direct control of the tools that they use to connect with their audience. Gone are the days when we could rely on Facebook and Twitter to reliably deliver readers to us. We have to go find them — and give them a reason to keep coming back.
Correction: Burlington Buzz has moved to Indiegraf, not Ghost.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk to Larry Ryckman, editor and co-founder of The Colorado Sun, the subject of a chapter that I wrote for our book, “What Works in Community News.” The Sun was launched by journalists who worked at The Denver Post, which had been cut and cut and cut under the ownership of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that the Post staff called “vulture capitalists.”
The Sun was founded as a for-profit public benefit corporation. A PBC is a legal designation covering for-profit organizations that serve society in some way. Among other things, a PBC is under no fiduciary obligation to enrich its owners and may instead plow revenues back into the enterprise. And we’ve found that for-profit models are rare in the world of news startups. But that changed last year, when the Sun joined its nonprofit peers. Ryckman explains.
In our Quick Takes, I give a listen to a New York Times podcast with Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist who wrote “Bowling Alone” some years back. In a fascinating 40 minutes, Putnam talks about his work in trying to build social capital. He never once mentions local news, but there are important intersections between his ideas and what our podcast and book are focused on.
Ellen reports on an important transition at Sahan Journal in Minnesota, one of the projects we wrote about in our book. The founding CEO and publisher, Mukhtar Ibrahim, is moving on and a successor has been named. Starting in September, Vanan Murugesan will be leading Sahan. He has experience in the nonprofit sector and also has experience in public media.
Our Reinventing Local TV News project, which is part of Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is getting a lot of attention from the trade publication Editor & Publisher. Professor Mike Beaudet, who heads the project, is the subject of a feature story in E&P and is the guest on this week’s E&P vodcast.
Beaudet, who’s also an investigative reporter with WCVB-TV (Channel 5), tells E&P’s Gretchen Peck and Mike Blinder that the goal is to come up with new ways of storytelling to appeal to younger audiences — a demographic that gets its news almost entirely by smartphone rather than a traditional television screen. Here’s how Beaudet puts it in an interview with Peck:
People are cutting the cord, and the whole idea of having “appointment television” has gone out the window, especially for younger people. That’s the challenge: We can’t rely on this audience to find local TV like you could in years past, as they get older, because they’re not consuming content the same way.
Mike and his collaborator, Professor John Wihbey, presented at our What Works local news conference at Northeastern last March. Given that local television is in relatively good financial health compared to the newspaper business, it’s vitally important that people like Beaudet and Wihbey come up with solutions before the problems of an aging audience become acute.
Every reporter knows that the proper relationship between journalism and government is arm’s-length, even adversarial. Our job is to hold elected officials to account, not ask them for handouts.
So why were 10 publishers, journalists, academics, and advocates on Beacon Hill (in person and virtually) on Wednesday asking for the creation of a state commission that could propose ways of helping news organizations? The answer: The local news crisis has become so acute that it’s time to consider some unconventional approaches.
Well, this was fun. Ellen Clegg and I recently spoke about “What Works in Community News” with Charlotte Henry, the U.K.-based host of “The Addition,” a podcast about tech, media and politics. Charlotte turns out to be a sharp interviewer with a sense of humor, so we hope you’ll give it a listen. Here’s part one, and here’s part two. Of course, you can also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Peter Bhatia. Bhatia is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor who is now chief executive officer of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit, non-partisan, no-paywall local news site that launched in spring of 2023. He has also been editor and vice president at the Detroit Free Press, from 2017-2023, and served as a regional editor for Gannett, supervising newsrooms in Michigan and Ohio.
His résumé includes helping lead newsrooms that won 10 Pulitzer Prizes. He is the first journalist of South Asian heritage to lead a major daily newspaper in the U.S. He has also been involved in some recent controversies, and, as you’ll hear, he doesn’t shy away from talking about them.
In Quick Takes, I talk about an important press-freedom case in Mississippi. The former governor, Phil Bryant, is suing Mississippi Today over its Pulitzer Prize-winning series on a state welfare scandal that got national attention and even managed to touch former NFL quarterback Brett Favre. Bryant says he needs access to Today’s internal documents in order to prove his libel case, and a state judge has agreed. Mississippi Today has decided to take the case to the state Supreme Court. It’s a risk, because it will set a precedent in the Magnolia State — for better or worse.
Ellen highlights an interview with Alicia Bell, the director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. Bell talked to Editor & Publisher about her upcoming report on what it will take to build a thriving local news ecosystem for BIPOC communities across the country. Her estimate: it will take somewhere between $380 million to $7.1 billion annually to truly fund BIPOC journalism across the U.S. That’s a big number, but Borealis is a pioneer in this space, and it’s important research as national efforts like Press Forward roll out.
As I noted previously, the Massachusetts legislature is taking another crack at forming a local news commission after its first attempt disappeared into the ether several years ago. On Wednesday, I was one of 10 academics, publishers and advocates who testified in favor of such a commission before the Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Businesses. If you want to catch up on what happened, two reporters were there as well.
Chris Lisinsky of State House News Service writes:
Tax credits for local publishers, grant funding for news organizations, and state-covered wages for recently graduated reporters who cover underserved communities are all on the table as Massachusetts lawmakers consider how best to support the ailing local journalism industry.
The crisis facing local news is ravaging civic life everywhere — even in Massachusetts — a parade of journalists told legislators on Wednesday, as they called on state government to take steps, including considering tax breaks, to support struggling local newsrooms.
Kate Maxwell working out of borrowed space in March 2020. Photo (cc) 2020 by Dan Kennedy.
There’s big news in the world of hyperlocal journalism this week: Kate Maxwell, the co-founder and publisher of The Mendocino Voice in Northern California, is moving on. The Voice, which is nominally a for-profit, is becoming part of the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation, which, according to an announcement on Tuesday, “will allow both organizations to expand the geographic reach and depth of their public service reporting.”
In a message to readers, Maxwell writes that “as part of this new chapter, I’ve chosen to move on from my role as publisher.” No word as to what she’ll do next. She adds:
Thanks to your support, we’ve published nearly 5,000 articles, reached millions of readers, created living wage jobs for experienced local reporters, held government officials accountable, received national funding and awards, and shared important Mendocino stories with readers around the state and country. Most importantly, we’ve been able to provide the diverse communities in Mendocino with news that’s been useful to you, our friends and neighbors.
Although the Voice will continue as a standalone free website, it will do so without either of the co-founders. The site’s first editor, Adrian Fernandez Baumann, left several years ago. Here’s part of an FAQ explaining what the change will mean for readers:
This partnership will give The Mendocino Voice the stability to maintain its news operation and support its journalists. It’ll create a regional network all along the coast as well as the inland areas and give reporters the opportunity to grow. It’s a promise of long-term sustainability. Joining with Bay City News Foundation means that we’ll have the capacity for deeper coverage of environmental issues, plus more resources for bringing you that news, including more photographers, data journalists and round-the-clock editors.
The Mendo Voice was the first project I visited in my reporting for “What Works in Community News.” I was on the ground during the first week of March in 2020, and we all know what happened that week. I covered an event the Voice hosted at a local brewpub on Super Tuesday, which I reported on for GBH News. Two days later, I was on hand as Maxwell and Baumann reported on a news conference to announce the first measures being taken in response to what was then called the “novel coronavirus.” The nationwide shutdown loomed.
The reason I wanted to include The Mendo Voice in the book that Ellen Clegg and I were writing was that Maxwell and Baumann were planning to convert the project they had founded in 2016 to a cooperative form of ownership. “We are going to be owned by our readers and our staff,” Maxwell told the Super Tuesday gathering. “We think that’s the best way to be sustainable and locally owned.”
After years of following a nascent news co-op in Haverhill, Massachusetts, which ultimately failed to launch, I was intrigued. Unfortunately, the co-op that Maxwell and Baumann envisioned did not come to pass, either. COVID-19 wreaked havoc with their plans, though the Voice continued to publish and provide “useful news for all of Mendocino.” Baumann took a personal leave that ended up becoming permanent. And Maxwell was unable to move ahead with the community meetings she had envisioned to make the co-op a reality. “I think we basically had a year’s worth of events that we were planning,” she told me in 2022.
By then, the Voice was essentially operating as a hybrid — a for-profit that had a relationship with a nonprofit organization that allowed for tax-deductible donations to support the Voice’s reporting. Eventually, she said, the site was likely to move toward a more traditional nonprofit model.
The co-op idea is an interesting one, but to this day I’m not aware of a successful example at the local level. The Defector has made it work, but that’s a national project. In Akron, Ohio, The Devil Strip, an arts-focused magazine and website, tried for a while but then collapsed in an ugly fashion.
Maxwell and Baumann, two young journalists who launched The Mendocino Voice after leaving jobs at Mendo County newspapers being destroyed by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, built something of lasting value. Best wishes to both of them.
