If you’re in the Boston area, Ellen Clegg and I want to let you know about a book event we’ll be hosting on Monday, Feb. 26. We’ll be talking about “What Works in Community News” at the Harvard Book Store, right outside of Harvard Square, at 7 p.m. Our presentation will be followed by a book signing. The event is free, and registration is not required. More information here.
“[T]here are signs that things are looking up,” writes Serge Schmemann in The New York Times. “In their book, Ms. Clegg and Mr. Kennedy chronicle various ways in which local and regional news organizations — whether paper, digital or radio — are trying to restore local coverage. Most are nonprofits, often assisted by a number of foundations that assist news start-ups. It’s not a flood, but what is certain, they write, ‘is that the bottom-up growth of locally based news organizations has already provided communities with news that would otherwise go unreported.’”
Many thanks to old friend Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) for featuring the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” on his Sunday “Keller at Large” program. You can watch our two-part conversation here.
Ellen has a Quick Take on a philanthropic gift from Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, that is designed to cover full tuition for many graduate students in journalism at City University of New York. That’s good news for students wondering whether to take on $50,000 or more in tuition debt to get a master’s degree in journalism at a private university. Craigslist destroyed the classified ad market, but Newmark continues to make his mark as a philanthropist.
I offer two cheers for billionaire newspaper ownership. With the news business dealing with a difficult round of layoffs, a number of media observers have jumped to the conclusion that billionaire owners are not the solution to what ails journalism. Well, of course they aren’t. No one ever said otherwise. But the record shows that civic-minded ownership by wealthy owners has proven to be a workable solution to the local news crisis in several cities.
Tracie Powell at the 2019 Knight Foundation Media Forum. Photo (cc) 2019 by the Knight Foundation.
My reporting and podcast partner Ellen Clegg has published a first-rate analysis for our What Works website about a dispute over nonprofit news funding in Baltimore, relating it to her work in Memphis, where she wrote about MLK50, a small project with Black leadership, and the Daily Memphian, a large, well-funded, mostly white website.
In Baltimore, there’s a similar dispute taking place between the Beat and the Banner, the latter a digital publication launched by hotel mogul Stewart Bainum and intended as a comprehensive replacement for the venerable Baltimore Sun, which has fallen on hard times. Ellen takes note of a piece written for Poynter Online by Tracie Powell of the Pivot Fund about a huffy tweet posted by David Simon, best known for his work on “The Wire,” in which he accused the Beat of a racially based shakedown when a Beat collaborator tagged him in a fundraising tweet.
It’s complicated, so read Ellen’s post, in which she also recounts an eye-opening (and jaw-dropping) conversation she had with a white media type in Memphis.
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.
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.
At What Works, my colleague Ellen Clegg offers some analysis on news that the staff of The Texas Tribune has announced plans to unionize. The Tribune is one of the projects that we profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
In the course of our reporting for “What Works in Community News,” Ellen Clegg and I were confronted with a reality that cuts against our usual optimism: that though news startups across the country are helping to fill the gap created by the decline of legacy newspapers, the new media landscape is unevenly distributed.
Large regional and statewide nonprofits like The Texas Tribune and NJ Spotlight News are doing reasonably well, though the Tribune has recently hit a few bumps and Spotlight has never been a fundraising behemoth. Smaller projects serving affluent suburbs, like a number of startups in Eastern Massachusetts, are doing well. But there are few independent news outlets serving low-population rural areas and urban communities of color, and those that do exist are often overlooked by the larger philanthropic organizations.
Corinne Colbert writes about that reality for a newsletter called Local News Blues, which I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of until my friend and teacher Howard Owens of The Batavian pointed me to it a few days ago. Colbert is cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Athens County Independent, a nonprofit digital startup that in southeastern Ohio. Late last week she wrote a commentary headlined “Does big philanthropy really care about our smaller news markets?” Now, you know the rule about question headlines: the answer is almost always “no.” She observes:
Nearly 60% of foundation grants go to national and global nonprofit outlets, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News. Local outlets — which INN defines as those serving audiences at the county, city or town level or having a specific focus — represent almost one-fourth of nonprofit news jobs, but we get less than 20% of foundation funding. That gap represents millions and millions of dollars.
Recently the Houston Landing, a well-funded nonprofit with strong backing from the American Journalism Project, imploded when the publisher fired the highly regarded editor and the top investigative reporter without offering any logical explanation. The Landing may recover, but there’s been a serious lack of transparency. Meanwhile, projects that Ellen and I have written about such as MLK50 in Memphis and the New Haven Independent have never been able to attract much in the way of national funding, even though both are performing vitally important work.
Nonprofits are bringing news and information to communities in ways that for-profits often no longer can. But it’s time for major foundations — including Press Forward, a $500 million effort comprising 22 philanthropies — to bring renewed efforts to helping not just large, sexy projects but more quotidian efforts as well. Fortunately there are signs that Press Forward gets it.
“Small markets … present business challenges that corporations are often unwilling to face,” writes Colbert, “and those challenges make launching or growing a local news operation especially difficult. National funders could ease those burdens, but first they have to acknowledge our existence — and our importance.”
Amid the evisceration of large regional newspapers at the hands of corporate and hedge-fund owners stand a few notable exceptions. The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and several others are among the major metros with committed local ownership that have managed to survive and even thrive. So, too, with the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, which under billionaire owner Glen Taylor has undergone a renaissance, transforming itself into a profitable business and a Pulitzer factory.
Now the Strib is growing. As Ellen Clegg writes at What Works, new CEO and publisher Steve Grove is expanding the paper’s reach into the more rural parts of the state, where the lack of reliable news and information is especially acute. Ellen writes:
The expansion plans are nothing if not ambitious. The newsroom has posted jobs for reporters in north central and southwest Minnesota and is expanding existing teams in communities outside the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Back in the downtown Minneapolis office, the Strib is launching a “Today Desk” to track breaking news online and beefing up that reporting team. Grove is also in the market for a greater Minnesota columnist to roam the state’s rural communities and report on trends — the kind of coverage that has been harder for small nonprofit media startups to sustain.
The Star Tribune is one of the projects that Ellen and I write about in our book “What Works in Community News,” which was published today by Beacon Press.
A little over five years ago, at a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square, Ellen Clegg and I sketched out a rough outline for the book that would become “What Works in Community News.” Today is our book’s official publication date. We owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people, including our publisher, Beacon Press; the news entrepreneurs and thought leaders who we interviewed for the book as well as for our podcast; and our families for putting up with us.
Our launch party is today at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, and it looks like we’re going to have a full house. If you haven’t registered but would like to tune in, you can do so here. In addition, on Thursday, Jan. 11, from 7 to 8 p.m., I’ll be giving a presentation on our book via Zoom. It’s being sponsored by the Tewksbury Public Library, but I know a number of other libraries are taking part as well. You can register here. I’ll be solo; Ellen and I are pursuing a divide-and-conquer strategy, handling some events together and some with one or the other.
We are really looking forward to tonight in Brookline, and I hope to see you on the other end of the screen this Thursday.
A little over five years ago, at a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square, Ellen Clegg and I sketched out a rough outline for the book that would become 