Jay Rosen. Photo (cc) 2017 by the Moody College of Communication.
Jay Rosen has been one of the major thinkers in journalism since the 1990s. Younger followers may think of him mainly as a media critic, and there’s no doubting his influence in that field. Through his blog, PressThink, and his social media presence (especially back in Twitter’s heyday), Rosen showed an uncanny ability to frame issues in a way that made a lot of us think about what we were doing.
The “production of innocence” was his phrase for “a public showing by professional journalists that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of — and here we enter the realm of dread — political bias.”
My What Works partner Ellen Clegg has written a new post on how the Memphis media are dealing with Trump’s troop deployment. She’s got updates from The Commercial Appeal, the Daily Memphian, the Tennessee Lookout, MLK50 and the Institute for Public Service Reporting and the Memphis Flyer.
In the Great Hall at the Massachusetts Statehouse for the Mass Book Awards.
I was thrilled to attend the Mass Book Awards ceremony at the Statehouse earlier today, when “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate,” which Ellen Clegg and I wrote about possible ways out of the local journalism crisis, was recognized as one of the top dozen nonfiction books in Massachusetts.
Our book was one of nine that were longlisted. In addition, the top nonfiction award went to “We Refuse: A History of Black Resistance,” by Kellie Carter Jackson, with honors going to “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit,” by Robin Bernstein, and “Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border,” by Ieva Jusionyte. The awards are sponsored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Unfortunately, Ellen wasn’t able to make it, but I was honored to attend and be recognized along with the other winners.
It was also great to reconnect with Gayatri Patnaik, the director of Beacon Press, who embraced our vision and helped bring it to fruition. Our immediate editor, Catherine Tung, has since moved on to a senior editing position at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but she provided crucial support when we lost a year during COVID. She also gave us good advice that we tried to follow in our reporting — to assess how well the local news projects we were writing about were covering arts and culture, a crucial part of civic life. That said, most of them weren’t, with the New Haven Independent and its affiliated low-power radio station, WNHH, standing as notable exceptions.
I’m also proud of the professional partnership Ellen and I have developed as we’ve built out the book into a wider project, What Works: The Future of Local News, based at Northeastern University in the School of Journalism and affiliated with the Center for Transformative Media. What Works comprises a frequently updated website on developments in local news; an every-other-week podcast featuring news entrepreneurs and thought leaders; conferences and webinars; and a database of independent local news organizations in Massachusetts.
On Friday, Memphis journalist Dan Conaway took to Facebook and leveled a sensational charge on his public feed: that the Daily Memphian, a high-profile nonprofit startup, had censored a column he’d written about Donald Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to the city.
“I have left the Daily Memphian,” Conaway posted on his public feed. “They refused to run my column this week. Too critical of Trump, they said. Trump is not local, they said. This week, of all weeks, Trump is not local? Enough, I said.”
My What Works colleague, Ellen Clegg, took a deep dive into what had happened — and discovered that the Memphian had actually edited out a racist trope that Conaway inserted into the original version of his column.
Photo by Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke via Pixabay
Nearly four years ago, Ellen Clegg and I began tracking solutions to the local news crisis with our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our first guest was Lori Ehrlich, at that time a state representative who was working to launch a commission to study the state of community journalism in Massachusetts and make some recommendations.
The commission has twice failed to achieve liftoff, but Ellen and I have built a multidimensional project. We wrote a well-received book, “What Works in Community News,” which was published by Beacon Press in 2024. And we are involved in other ways as well.
Today the What Works project, which is part of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and affiliated with the university’s Center for Transformative Media, comprises several different initiatives:
Our website, where we post updates to the projects that we write about in our book, new episodes of our podcast, and news and commentary about other developments in local news.
Our podcast, on which we interview enterpreneurs and thought leaders on an every-other-week basis. We’ll be back later this month with our 105th episode following a summer hiatus.
Our Bluesky feed, where we link to coverage and smaller items that don’t quite meet the criteria for a full blog post. If you’re not interested in joining Bluesky, you’ll find our news feed embedded on the website. If you’re reading What Works on your laptop, just cast your eyes to the right.
A database of independent local news organizations in Massachusetts. Although much of our work is national in scope, we also believe we can offer unique value to the grassroots journalism community right here at home. Look for links to “Mass. Indy News” in the upper right corner of this blog and at the What Works website. You can also bookmark it at tinyurl.com/mass-indy-news.
Speaking appearances at which we talk about our book and evangelize about the future of local news. We also engage in ad hoc consulting with the leaders of news projects that are either startups or moving in new directions.
Gatherings for local news leaders both in person and via webinar. We’re already planning our second in-person conference, which will be held next year on Friday, March 13.
Ellen and I are trying to build something of lasting value and to push back against the narrative that local news is dead. Through independent community control and innovative nonprofit and for-profit business models, we believe the local news crisis is being solved one community at a time.
The Bedford Citizen, which may be the oldest nonprofit local-news startup in Massachusetts, is back on track after losing its top two newsroom employees earlier this year.
Bill Fonda is joining the Citizen as its new managing editor, replacing Wayne Braverman, who retired this past spring. Fonda, who worked nearly four years as editor of the award-winning Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in New Hampshire, is the citizen’s third managing editor; Braverman succeeded co-founder Julie McCay Turner in 2022.
Fonda’s hiring was announced Thursday in an email from Elizabeth Hacala, the Citizen’s board president and publisher.
The Citizen also recently hired a community reporter to replace the legendary Mike Rosenberg, who died while on the job last February. Rosenberg’s replacement, Piper Pavelich, had previously worked for The Lincoln County News, based in Newcastle, Maine.
The Citizen, which was founded in 2012, is among the projects that Ellen Clegg and I feature in our book, “What Works in Community News.” It began as an all-volunteer project and gradually added paid professional journalism, though it still has a significant volunteer component.
What follows is an article that will be published in the Citizen later today:
Bill Fonda is The Bedford Citizen’s New Managing Editor
Please join us in welcoming Bill Fonda as The Bedford Citizen’s Managing Editor.
Bill most recently spent nearly four years as the editor of the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, a twice-weekly newspaper published by Newspapers of New England that covered 16 towns in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire.
During his time at the Ledger-Transcript, the paper won two first-place awards and one second-place award for General Excellence from the New Hampshire Press Association, was named a Distinguished Newspaper/Small Circulation Weekly by the New England Newspaper and Press Association and received second place in General Excellence for weeklies over 5,000 circulation from the New England Newspaper and Press Association.
Bill also spent 16 years with the former GateHouse Media (now part of Gannett) after beginning his career with Spotlight Newspapers outside of Albany in his native New York. Joining The Bedford Citizen is a return of sorts, as his time at GateHouse included serving as managing editor for newspapers in and around Concord, including Bedford.
It is that experience which makes him appreciative of what The Citizen has accomplished and continues to achieve.
“To see the work that has been done to build and rebuild local news coverage in Bedford is inspiring, and something I want to be a part of,” he said. “I hope that I’ll be able to help advance the good work that is already going on here.”
For the past 16 years I’ve been reporting on the decline of local news and on efforts to offset it. But though it’s simple enough to spout anecdotes, it can be more challenging to come up with hard numbers, though some have tried.
The latest attempt dropped last week: a comprehensive study by Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack, the latter a platform that connects journalists and public relations professionals. I’ve been looking over some of the findings this week, and what’s interesting is that it’s based entirely on data from millions of articles published during the first three months of this year. That means it’s not dependent on the vagaries of counting news outlets by hand, but it also means the researchers had to pile assumption upon assumption and then hope they got it right. I think they did for the most part.
My What Works partner Ellen Clegg has written a must-read piece on how local newsrooms in Minnesota are responding to the assassination of Melissa Hortman, a member and former speaker of the Minnesota House.
Hortman and her husband, Mark, were fatally shot while another public official, state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, suffered serious but non-fatal gunshot wounds. The gunman, identified as Vance Boelter, remains at large as of 5:10 p.m.
While a larger news outlet like The Minnesota Star Tribune has the reporting capacity to cover a big breaking-news story like this, Ellen writes that smaller outlets, often launched with a handful of journalists, now find themselves scrambling to keep up.
She puts it this way: “An all-hands national news story like this poses a core question for hyperlocal newsrooms, which typically launch with smaller staffs and a tightly focused mission of covering neighborhood people, politics and policies.”
Ellen Clegg and I are thrilled to announce that our book, “What Works in Community News,” has been longlisted for a Mass Book Award by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. We’re one of 12 in the nonfiction category. Winners will be announced this fall.
On our new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with John Mooney, the founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, a digital nonprofit that’s part of NJ PBS, the state’s public broadcasting network. Mooney, who covered education for The Star-Ledger in Newark, took a buyout in 2008, put together a business plan, and launched NJ Spotlight in 2010 under the auspices of the nonprofit Community Foundation of New Jersey.
While Spotlight was making a mark journalistically, it wasn’t breaking even, and its sponsor, the Community Foundation of New Jersey, was getting impatient. After extensive talks, Mooney affiliated with NJ PBS. The name changed to NJ Spotlight News, and the merger means true collaboration between the newsrooms. Both the broadcast and digital sides take part in news meetings, and there are considerable synergies between the website and the daily half-hour newscast. (In a previous podcast, Northeastern University professor and TV journalist Mike Beaudet discussed his initiative aimed at reinventing TV news for a vertical video age.)
As we wrote in “What Works in Community News,” the story of NJ PBS and NJ Spotlight News suggests that public broadcasting can play a role in bolstering coverage of regional and statewide news. It’s a question of bringing together two different newsroom cultures. There’s also a Yo-Yo Ma angle to our conversation, so you won’t want to miss that.
Ellen has a Quick Take about the death of John Thornton, a venture capitalist who helped launch The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Austin, in 2009. He also was a founder of the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country. Thornton, who had struggled with mental health issues, took his own life. He was 59.
I’ve got a Quick Take about our webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News,” which was held the evening of April 3. Panelists gave great advice about what board members and donors need to know. You can watch the video and read a summary generated by Northeastern’s AI tool, Claude, on our website.
