Local News – Page 25 – Media Nation

Gannett is (wait for it) bulking up on local even as union staffers stage a one-day strike

As you may have heard, union journalists at many Gannett newspapers staged a one-day strike Monday to protest chair Michael Reed’s brutal leadership style, which has resulted in devastating cuts and a sliding stock price even as he’s pulled down more than $11 million in compensation over the past two years.

I’ll get back to that. But first I want to discuss a less publicized development. Over the past several weeks, Gannett has made a couple of personnel moves aimed at — wait for it — reinvigorating local coverage at the country’s largest newspaper chain.

On May 19 came word that Michael Anastasi, vice president of The Tennessean of Nashville and editor of USA Today’s South Region, was being promoted to the newly created position of vice president of local, part of what the company is calling “a new nationwide Gannett effort to transform the growth trajectory for hundreds of local newspapers.”

In an article announcing the move, Anastasi was quoted as saying, “I can’t wait to help accelerate our transformation as I work with the thousands of local Gannett journalists across the country.” He’ll report to Kristin Roberts, Gannett’s chief content officer, who stated, “We are going to save local journalism, and we’re going to do it by working together with absolutely clear eyes about the challenge and tremendous speed toward the solution.”

Anastasi’s promotion is part of what Gannett is calling Project Breakthrough, which “focuses on key growth areas to increase nationwide audience, including opinion columns, newsletters, service journalism, breaking news and audience engagement.”

Less than two weeks later came word that Imtiaz Patel, chief executive officer of The Baltimore Banner, will leave July 7 in order to become a top executive at Gannett. According to the Banner’s story on that departure, Gannett has not yet announced what Patel’s new position will be. But it’s remarkable that the head of one of the most respected nonprofit digital news organizations in the country would jump onto what is widely regarded as a sinking ship.

Now, there were family considerations involved in Patel’s move. He told the staff that a change in his wife’s job made it impossible for her to move from New York City to Baltimore, as she had planned. Still, Patel has won nothing but plaudits for his management of the Banner, and presumably he could have written his own ticket. (Interesting wrinkle: former Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory, now chair of Boston University’s journalism department, will help lead the transition as the outlet searches for a new CEO.)

“I’m tremendously proud of what we have achieved to bring locally owned, not-for-profit news to Baltimore,” said Patel, who’ll remain on the Banner’s board of directors. Under his leadership, the news organization signed up about 70,000 paid subscribers.

For all of Gannett’s cuts, which have had a devastating effect on newsrooms as well as the communities they serve, the company has always had a story to tell about how brighter days are just around the corner. Back before the merger with GateHouse Media, GateHouse folks used to talk about developing revenues from ancillary businesses such as services and events in order to support their journalism. Not much ever came of that. More recently, Gannett has embraced sports betting and even NFTs — again, without an discernable positive impact on the bottom line. (Are NFTs even still a thing?)

All of this came to a head Monday, when hundreds of journalists went on strike at Gannett’s dailies, which employ about 1,000 union members in 50 newsrooms. The job action coincided with Gannett’s annual shareholder meeting, Angela Fu reports for Poynter Online.

Most of the strikes are one-day work stoppages and involve journalists at some of Gannett’s largest newsrooms: the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman and The Palm Beach Post. Workers at The Arizona Republic and The Desert Sun will stage multi-day strikes, and journalists at The Indianapolis Star are withholding their bylines in lieu of a work stoppage.

The NewsGuild-CWA had hoped to persuade shareholders to vote against Reed’s continued tenure as chair. Not surprisingly, according to Katie Robertson of The New York Times, that effort fell short.

So now we’ll get to see how the latest story Gannett is telling itself plays out. Anastasi and Patel are serious news leaders, and it seems unlikely they would have agreed to accept their new roles without promises of money, resources and time. And yet — really? Gannett is not going to bring back all the weekly newspapers that it closed in Massachusetts, or restore the local journalism it eliminated in favor of regional coverage. It’s almost certainly not going to repopulate daily papers like The Californian of Salinas, now operating with zero staff reporters.

It would be easier to read the tea leaves if Reed and his associates simply continued pillaging the company. The Anastasi and Patel moves suggest that they’ve got something else in mind. It will bear watching to find out exactly what that looks like.

Correction: Updated to fix Kristin Roberts’ name. That’s two this week. I’ll try to slow down and read more carefully.

Brant Houston talks about his new book, which chronicles two decades of disruption

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Brant Houston, who is hard to describe in one sentence: he’s an author, an educator, an investigative journalist, an expert in data-based reporting, and a co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

His new book, “Changing Models for Journalism,” chronicles the history of change, disruption and reinvention in our industry over the past two decades. These are themes we explore on this podcast, and in our own forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.” Brant takes us back to the early days of digital and recounts the early optimism, and the early misconceptions, about the promise and the peril of the internet.

I’ve got a Quick Take on Pink Slime Journalism 3.0. We’ve seen an explosion of websites that might be called Pink Slime 2.0 as political operatives have sought to take advantage of the decline in real local news. That followed Pink Slime 1.0 — an outbreak about a decade ago of local news being produced by low-paid workers in distant locales, including the Philippines. Now, NewsGuard reports that dubious online content powered by artificial intelligence is spreading.

Ellen looks at the numbers in the 2023 impact report on local news by the INN. And there’s some good news: As the nonprofit journalism field expands, the resources to sustain these newsrooms are expanding, too.

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

Something for the kitchen table: Why print makes sense for some local news startups

Local news board members Greg Bestick of the Harpswell Anchor, Fred Perry of Brookline.News and Virginia McIntyre of The Concord Bridge. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.

Residents looking to start news organizations in their communities usually look to digital first. Even at the local level, advertising revenues are not what they used to be, and the cost of offering a print newspaper — both in terms of money and complexity — often isn’t worth it.

Yet the traditional notion of publishing a weekly newspaper remains attractive on several levels. Readers like it. Advertisers prefer it. And in many states, public notices placed by governmental agencies, a lucrative source of revenue, are restricted to print papers.

So I was interested to learn that print is part of the discussion at three nonprofit local news startups that were featured at a panel discussion, “The Re-Emergence of the Community Newspaper,” held during the recent conference of the NorthEast Association of Communications Executives, held in Meredith, New Hampshire.

The Harpswell Anchor in Maine and The Concord Bridge in Massachusetts have offered print right from the beginning. Brookline.News in Massachusetts is digital-only but may offer a print edition in the future. (Disclosure: Ellen Clegg, my research, podcast and writing partner, is also a founder and co-chair of Brookline.News.)

Greg Bestick, president of the nonprofit board that publishes the Anchor, said print was not something he and his fellow founders especially wanted to offer. What changed their mind, he explained, was that a survey of the community revealed that 95% wanted something they could hold in their hands.

“We weren’t thrilled about that,” Bestick said, “but we did say we’d be much more robust online than the previous owner.”

Unlike The Concord Bridge and Brookline.News, which were both launched in response to massive budget cuts by the newspaper chain Gannett, The Harpswell Anchor had been a locally owned for-profit newspaper until several years ago. The paper ceased publication during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bestick said. The new iteration of the Anchor has had an operating surplus from the start, he added, and won 11 awards from the Maine Press Association during its first year.

Virginia McIntyre, a member of The Concord Bridge’s board, said the founders of that site were enthusiastic about print right from the start. “We wanted something people could have on the kitchen table,” she said, adding: “It’s nice to have something that the family can see as a whole. Our advertisers also like having an ad that hits every household.” The print edition of the Bridge, she explained, is mailed for free to each of Concord’s 8,700 households.

Discussions about starting a community news outlet began after Gannett decided in early 2022 to eliminate nearly all local journalism from its Massachusetts weeklies. The Concord Journal is still published, but it’s filled with regional stories from throughout Gannett’s network. Because of that, McIntyre said, many residents had no idea about important developments such as the hiring of a town manager and a $110 million middle school project. Although the Bridge includes feature stories and coverage of school sports, she said that the goal is to inform the public about day-to-day goings-on.

“It’s not entertainment,” she said. “I always thought Concord was a boring place, and now I know it is.”

In contrast to Concord, Gannett shut down the Brookline Tab altogether, leaving a community of nearly 60,000 people just minutes from Boston without any local source of news. “The Tab was not good. But it was something,” said Fred Perry, a member of the Brookline.News board.

Brookline.News’ website didn’t go live until last week; a newsletter began covering the town just before the annual town meeting in April. Perry said he’s hoping that the project can start offering a print edition sometime this fall, praising “the wonderful examples on both sides of me,” a reference to Bestick and McIntyre. Several other board members, he added, are skeptical of print because of the cost, but he said he’s optimistic that print “can generate a significant surplus.”

The panel discussion was moderated by John Harrison, an executive with Wallit, a company that helps publishers manage digital subscriptions.

In many cases, digital-only makes sense. LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, an organization for digital news entrepreneurs, has more than 300 members. Many of the projects that Ellen and I are profiling in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News,” are digital-only, and they have no plans to add a print edition.

Yet print has persisted long past its anticipated expiration date. Perhaps the best way to think about it is that print is still worth doing — but only if it makes sense in terms of revenue, reader preferences and advertiser reach.

Correction: Updated with the proper spelling of Greg Bestick’s name.

John Widdison, a former top editor at the Telegram & Gazette, dies at 84

John Widdison, a former executive managing editor of the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester, died Tuesday at the age of 84. Mr. Widdison oversaw the merger of the morning Worcester Telegram and the Evening Gazette, later serving as director of public affairs for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, where he worked until retiring in 2001.

In 2019, Mr. Widdison was inducted into the New England Newspaper Hall of Fame, administered by the New England Newspaper and Press Association. According to the citation he received, “He led with compassion and intelligence thereby engendering a teamwork, we’re-all-in-this-together work atmosphere. John’s impact was felt not only in the newsroom but also in the community where he welcomed feedback from readers on everything from missed deliveries to spelling errors.”

Here is Mr. Widdison’s obituary, as published by the T&G.

How the for-profit/nonprofit model is bolstering coverage at The Berkshire Eagle

Fredric Rutberg. Berkshire Eagle photo by Ben Garver and used by permission.

One of the more interesting business models for local news that Ellen Clegg and I have encountered in our work is what you might call the hybrid for-profit/nonprofit. For-profit organizations such as The Mendocino Voice in Northern California, The Colorado Sun, the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Iowa and The Provincetown Independent have either set up nonprofit arms or are working with existing nonprofits to raise tax-exempt money that can be used to support certain types of public interest journalism.

This past Monday, Fredric Rutberg explained how that model is working at The Berkshire Eagle, the Pittsfield, Massachusetts-based paper that he and several other business leaders rescued from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital back in 2016. A retired judge, Rutberg is now publisher and president of the Eagle. He spoke at the spring conference of the NorthEast Association of Communication Executives, held in Meredith, New Hampshire.

After Rutberg and his partners acquired the Eagle, he said, they considered — and rejected — the nonprofit model. Among other things, they wanted to maintain the paper’s editorial voice, and nonprofits aren’t allowed to endorse political candidates or specific pieces of legislation.

“Our editorial page is very important to us,” he said. “We were very proud to be among the first five or six papers in the country nationally to endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.” And though he conceded the impact of that endorsement was “marginal,” the paper’s editorial voice really matters when it comes to candidates for local office. “We think we have something to say,” he said. “We don’t want to give that up.”

But with advertising on the wane, the paper faced a dilemma — especially when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, wiping out the Eagle’s nascent events business. Just before COVID, the paper raised four times the $10,000 it asked for in order to hire a Report for America corps member to cover the Statehouse. With that in mind as “proof of concept,” the Eagle set about looking for a more comprehensive way of seeking donations to bolster its news coverage.

What it hit upon was the Berkshire Eagle Local Journalism Fund, in partnership with the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. The nonprofit foundation, Rutberg explained, accepts donations to help the Eagle pay for coverage of education, health, economic development, and arts and culture. The Eagle held back from a public campaign during COVID, with Rutberg saying he thought that would be “impolitic” given that the pandemic had forced the paper to cut back the number of days it appears in print (from seven to five).

Last November, though, the Eagle launched its first public drive, raising nearly $80,000 from the community as well as a major gift of $150,000. The Eagle is planning a second public drive this October and has established an endowment fund, as well, although Rutberg said that’s gotten off to a slow start.

Following several cutbacks during COVID, the Eagle is expanding, Rutberg said. Though print circulation continues to shrink, paid digital circulation has risen from 2,700 pre-COVID to about 7,200 today. An arts reporter was hired recently, and the Eagle has started a quarterly magazine — The B.

Some of the largest for-profit papers in the country, including The New York Times and The Boston Globe, accept grant money to cover certain beats or publish journalism produced by nonprofits like ProPublica. The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit, is owned by a nonprofit, the Lenfest Institute, which helps pay for coverage at the Inquirer and other news outlets.

What makes smaller for-profits like the Eagle unique is that they’re making use of nonprofit money to help pay for their journalism on an ongoing basis and not just for a few narrowly defined beats. After all, the four areas Rutberg identified comprise a substantial part of his paper’s coverage.

Nonprofit journalism has emerged as a leading solution to the local news crisis. But it’s important for there to be a viable for-profit alternative as well — even if they are bolstered in part by nonprofit funding.

A new report finds that content farms are loading up on AI. Will local news be next?

Meet your new reporting staff. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.

A recent report by NewsGuard, a project that evaluates news organizations for reliability and transparency, found that clickbait generated by artificial intelligence is on the rise. McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis write:

NewsGuard has identified 49 news and information sites that appear to be almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software. A new generation of content farms is on the way.

The report didn’t specifically identify any local news websites that are using AI to write low-quality stories aimed at getting clicks and programmatic advertising. Perhaps non-local stories about health, entertainment and tech, to name three of the topics for which content farms are using AI, more readily fly under the radar. If you’re going to use AI to produce articles about the local tax rate or the women’s track team, you’re going to get caught pretty quickly when the results prove to be wrong. Still, the use of AI to produce some forms of local news, such as routine articles about real-estate transactions, is not new.

According to the NewsGuard report, there doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort yet to use AI in order to produce deliberately false stories, although there have been a few examples, including a celebrity death site that claimed President Biden had “passed away peacefully in his sleep.”

Call this Pink Slime 3.0. Version 1.0 was low-tech compared to what’s available today. Back in 2012, the public radio program “This American Life” found that a company called Journatic (pronounced “joor-NAT-ik,” though I always thought it should be “JOOR-nuh-tik”) was producing local content for newspapers using grossly underpaid, out-of-town reporters — including cheap Filipino workers who wrote articles under fake bylines.

Pink Slime 2.0, of more recent vintage, consists of hundreds of websites launched to exploit the decline of local news. Under such banners as “North Boston News” (!), these sites purport to offer community journalism but are actually a cover for political propaganda. Nearly all of them serve right-wing interests, thought there were a few on the left as well.

Pink Slime 3.0 threatens to become more insidious as AI continues to improve. As Seth Smalley wrote for Poynter Online, this is “pink slime on steroids.”

Of course, AI could prove to be a boon for local news, as Sebastian Grace wrote last week for What Works, our Northeastern journalism project tracking developments in community journalism. By eliminating repetitive drudge work, AI can free journalists to produce high-value stories that really matter.

Still, bottom-feeders like CNET — not exactly a content farm, but not much better than that, either — have already been caught publishing error-laden stories with AI. You can only imagine what sort of advice these content farms are going to give people about dealing with their medical problems.

OpenAI, which likes to portray itself as a responsible player in discussions about the future of AI, would not respond to NewsGuard’s inquiries. Neither would Facebook, which is amplifying AI-generated content.

The only thing we can be sure of is that a new, more insidious version of pink slime is coming to a website near you — if it hasn’t already.

Pioneering digital publisher Howard Owens tells us about a new idea for raising revenues

Howard Owens. Photo by Don Walker and used by permission.

On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Howard Owens, the publisher of The Batavian, a digital news organization in Genesee County, New York, way out near Buffalo. When I first met Howard, he was the director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media, which later morphed into Gannett. Howard launched The Batavian for GateHouse in 2008. In 2009, GateHouse eliminated Howard’s job, but they let him take The Batavian with him, and he’s been at it ever since.

The Batavian’s website is loaded with well over 100 ads, reflecting his belief that ads should be put right in front of the reader, not rotated in and out. He’s also got an innovative idea to raise money from his readers while keeping The Batavian free, which we ask him about during our conversation with him.

We’re also joined by Sebastian Grace, who just received his degree in journalism and political science from Northeastern. Everyone in journalism is freaking out about ChatGPT and other players in the new generation of artificial intelligence. Seb wrote a really smart piece, which is up on the What Works website, assuring us all that we shouldn’t worry — that AI is a tool that can allow journalists to work smarter.

Ellen has a Quick Take on Mississippi Today, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for stories that revealed how a former Mississippi governor used his office to steer millions of state welfare dollars to benefit family and friends. Including NFL quarterback Brett Favre! We interviewed Mary Margaret White, the CEO of Mississippi today, on the podcast in November 2022. And reporter Anna Wolfe has a great podcast about her prize-winning series.

I observe that journalism these days is often depicted as deep blue — something that liberals and progressives may pay attention to, but that conservatives and especially Trump supporters dismiss as fake news. But Steve Waldman, the head of the Rebuild Local News coalition, says it’s not that simple, and that the local news crisis is harming conservatives even more than it is liberals.

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

At The Batavian, an innovative paywall gives subscribers a four-hour head start

Now, here’s an interesting idea. The Batavian, a for-profit digital news outlet located in Genesee County, in western New York, has begun charging readers who want to see stories as soon as they’re posted. Others have to wait four hours.

In a press release posted by the trade publication Editor & Publisher, Howard Owens, who has led The Batavian since its founding nearly 15 years ago, explained that the website has begun charging $8 a month, or $80 a year, for subscribers who don’t want to put up with the four-hour delay. He calls it an “Early Access Pass,” and he writes:

I’m not aware of any other news publication using a similar reader-revenue model. For 15 years, our news site has been supported by more than 150 locally owned businesses, and we had an obligation to our fellow small business owners to ensure The Batavian remains the first stop in our community for local news. A paywall like many newspaper sites erect would kill site traffic, but with this model, we anticipate our program will keep our market-dominating traffic numbers high.

In a post at The Batavian, Owens says that the Early Access Pass is off to a fast start. He quotes one couple who told him: “We believe that being connected to local news is important for a healthy community. Knowing what’s happening in our own backyards helps raise awareness of events that we can have an effect on. We appreciate having an unbiased news source, and that is still free for our neighbors who may frequently face difficult financial choices.”

The Batavian has been an innovative project since its founding, and I reported on it for my 2013 book “The Wired City.” Owens launched the site as a pilot project for GateHouse Media in 2008, when he was the chain’s head of digital publishing. After GateHouse eliminated his position the following year, he took The Batavian with him and has been at it ever since. (GateHouse, as you know, merged with Gannett in 2019 and took its name.)

You’ll be able to hear Owens talk about The Batavian on an upcoming episode of the “What Works” podcast.

Lara Salahi tells us how student journalists can help ease the local news crisis

On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Lara Salahi, an associate professor of journalism at Endicott College, where she teaches a range of courses, from feature writing to digital journalism. She has also been a digital producer for NBC Universal and a field producer for ABC News. The main topic of our conversation is about how students journalists can help ease the local news crisis — and a project she’s run with her students at Endicott.

Salahi has also done some consulting and writing on science and health projects. She was executive producer on a podcast called Track the Vax, which ran during the height of the pandemic. And she collaborated with Pardis Sabeti, a systems biologist and Harvard professor who researches infectious diseases like Ebola and Lassa virus. They wrote a book together in 2018 that is still relevant called “Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic.” They updated the paperback with a new preface and epilogue in 2021 to reflect on the COVID-19 outbreak, and the lessons learned from past epidemics.

In Quick Takes, there’s a lot going on in community journalism. One development involves the future ownership of the Portland Press Herald in Maine as well as its sister papers. The other is about a dramatic, unexpected development in hyperlocal news in New Jersey. The third involves some very good news for a daily paper in central Pennsylvania.

My Northeastern University colleague Meg Heckman pays tribute to a legendary journalist — Mike Pride, the retired editor of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire and the former administrator of the Pulitzer Prize. Mike died on April 24 in Florida of a blood disorder. He was 76, and left his imprint on journalism in many ways. Meg worked at the Concord Monitor for more than 10 years.

Ellen Clegg was out of pocket for this podcast episode but did the sound editing and post-production. She’ll return next week.

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

Correction: An earlier version of this post misspelled Salahi’s first name.

A family-owned newspaper in Pennsylvania will be donated to a public broadcaster

Lancaster, Pa. Photo (cc) 2016 by Steam Pipe Distribution Venue.

Some very good news on the community journalism front: The family who owns the daily newspaper LNP of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is donating it to the local public broadcasting outlet. WITF will acquire LNP, Lancaster Online and several other media properties, known collectively as LNP Media. LNP reporter Chad Umble writes:

The Steinman family’s 158-year ownership of a daily newspaper in Lancaster will end in June with a gift meant to safeguard the future of its flagship publication.

Steinman Communications leadership on Tuesday announced to staff their plans to give LNP Media Group, publisher of LNP | LancasterOnline, at no cost to WITF, the Harrisburg-based public broadcasting station operator. WITF will oversee the Lancaster media company, which will be converted to a public benefit corporation and become a subsidiary of WITF.

Robby Brod of WITF covers the story as well.

Significantly, the deal will be accompanied by a major donation from the Steinman family, which will provide LNP with five years of runway to achieve long-term sustainability. Now, that’s stepping up. You may also recall that WITF was absolutely fierce in calling out elected officials in Pennsylvania who lied about the 2020 election results.

Not too many parallels come to mind. Probably the closest took place in 2022, when WBEZ acquired the Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid that was traditionally that city’s No. 2 daily. The Sun-Times was converted to a nonprofit, whereas the LNP properties will be run as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit whose governance structure imposes certain requirements for serving the public interest. Both deals, though, show that public broadcasters can help save regional news coverage.

I’ve reported pretty extensively on yet another situation that involved not a major regional newspaper but, rather, a medium-size digital-and-broadcast operation: NJ Spotlight News, created in 2019 by the merger of NJ Spotlight and NJ PBS. The combined operation includes a website that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey as well as a half-hour television newscast. The website and the newscast both incorporate quite a bit of journalism in common. The story of the merger and its aftermath will be told in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I are working on.

Recently my friend and mentor Thomas Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School wrote a paper on how public radio stations could do more to help solve the local news crisis; I wrote a response. The merger taking place in Pennsylvania isn’t quite what Patterson and I have in mind, but it’s adjacent. And it’s a great example of public media filling the gap at a time when traditional for-profit newspapers are fading.