On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Katherine Ann Rowlands, who runs the Bay City News Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit that publishes journalism for the Greater San Francisco Bay Area at LocalNewsMatters.org and The Mendocino Voice. And by the way, this is our last podcast until September.
The Bay City News Foundation acquired The Mendocino Voice and took it nonprofit a little more than a year ago. I reported on the Voice for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and was visiting in March 2020 when … well, you know what happened next. At that time, co-founders Kate Maxwell and Adrian Fernandez Baumann were hoping to turn the nominally for-profit operation into a cooperatively owned venture, but COVID sidetracked those plans. Maxwell and Baumann have since moved on, and Rowlands has some pointed observations about why there have been no successful examples of local-news co-ops.
Rowlands also is owner and publisher of Bay City News, a regional news wire supplying original journalism for the whole media ecosystem in her area, from TV to start-up digital outlets.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the New England Muzzle Awards. Since 1998 I’ve been writing an annual Fourth of July roundup of outrages against free speech and freedom of expression in New England during the previous year, first for the late, lamented Boston Phoenix, later for GBH News and now for my blog, Media Nation. This is the 27th annual edition.
Ellen reports on the death of Nancy Cassutt, a newsroom leader at Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” Nancy was a driving force in helping Mukhtar Ibrahim get Sahan Journal off the ground.
You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.