Tag: NewsMatch

We need a renewal of civic life — and that has to start by supporting local journalism

Photo (cc) 2008 by personthingmanuser

Following Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday night, I’ve seen calls on social media to support independent news organizations like ProPublica and The Guardian rather than traditional outlets. It’s a good idea, though I value the work done by mainstream journalism as well.

But let me suggest a different approach to funding media: using your subscription money or tax-deductible donations to support news at the local level. I’ve been writing about the local news crisis for a decade and a half, and during that time I’ve come to believe that one of the reasons we’re so polarized is that low-quality national news has moved in to fill the vacuum created by the decline of community journalism.

Civic life depends on reliable news and information. Without it, you have people showing up at school committee meetings to complain about phony, Fox News-driven issues like transgender sports and critical race theory rather than test scores and the cost of funding a new teachers’ contract.

Academic studies have shown that a lack of local news leads to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization and what my research partner, Ellen Clegg, and I like to call the “corruption tax” — that is, lenders demanding a higher rate of return when municipalities in news deserts seek to borrow money for such worthy causes as a new middle school or fire station. The lenders, it seems, want a premium if no one is going to keep an eye on how their money is being spent.

Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.

The news desert problem is serious and getting worse. According to the latest State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School, some 3,200 print newspapers have disappeared since 2005. Most of them were weekly papers that provided exactly the sort of coverage needed to build and maintain a sense of community.

At the same time, though, hundreds of independent news projects have launched in recent years. Most but not all are digital-only; many are nonprofit, some are for-profit.

As it happens, this is the time of year when it makes the most sense to support local news, especially nonprofits. Every year, the Institute for Nonprofit News, through its NewsMatch program, provides funds to nonprofits to match some of what they are able to raise within their communities. This year’s campaign began Nov. 1. As INN explains:

Eighteen national and regional funders have pledged $7.5 million to NewsMatch, the largest grassroots fundraising campaign to support nonprofit news in the U.S. Since 2017, participating news organizations in the INN Network have leveraged $31 million in NewsMatch funding to help generate nearly $300 million in support from their communities. All of these newsrooms have met INN’s membership standards for financial transparency, editorial independence, and original public service reporting. Not every nonprofit news outlet meets those standards and is able to become an INN member.

Ellen and I wrote our book, “What Works in Community News,” to profile independent local and regional news organizations that are finding ways to serve the public despite the ongoing financial challenge of paying for journalism. We also talk with news entrepreneurs and thought leaders on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our hope is that the people and projects we highlight will inspire others to fill the information gap in their own communities.

Philanthropy will remain an important source of funding for some time to come. We should assume that long-stalled federal efforts to provide tax credits for local news aren’t suddenly going to start moving forward during the Age of Trump II. Efforts in states that include New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California are worthwhile but limited.

Ultimately the news desert problem will be solved, or not, without government assistance. If your community has an independent news outlet, please support it. And if it doesn’t, I suggest you look into what it would take to get involved in starting one.

Karen Rundlet to succeed Sue Cross as CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News

Karen Rundlet

The Institute for Nonprofit News, or INN, has a new CEO. Karen Rundlet will succeed Sue Cross, who announced earlier this year that she was leaving the post. Rundlet, who is currently senior director of the Journalism Program at the Knight Foundation, has worked with grant recipients such as City Bureau/ Documenters in Chicago, INN’s NewsMatch program, Sahan Journal (based in Minneapolis and one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I report on in our book “What Works in Community News”), Solutions Journalism Network and Military Veterans in Journalism.

Rundlet has also worked as a journalist and manager at the Miami Herald as well as the public radio program “Marketplace.”

INN is an important player in the world of local news startups. NewsMatch, which allows community journalism organizations to leverage local donations with matching national money, has been transformative. The organization also acts as a fiscal sponsor for nonprofits that have not yet obtained 501(c)(3) federal tax status — donors can make a tax-deductible gift that is administered by INN and is then passed along to the local media outlet. Its model code of ethics is used by local news organizations across the country; see, for instance, the “Ethics & Practices Policies” at The New Bedford Light.

According to the announcement of Rundlet’s appointment, more than 425 news organizations now make up the INN Network, supporting more than 5,000 people who work in nonprofit news in North America.

“Karen is uniquely positioned as a visionary, passionate and experienced journalist and philanthropist to propel the nonprofit news movement,” Marcia Parker, the chair of INN’s board of directors, said in a statement.  “As a leader of our field, she already is driving the national advances to redesign news media that is inclusive for communities of color and can bring trusted information to everyone.”

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How NJ Spotlight News is leveraging its journalism to enhance its bottom line

NJ PBS in Newark, New Jersey, the headquarters of NJ Spotlight News. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.

It’s NewsMatch time — that annual holiday tradition when local and regional news nonprofits ramp up their fundraising efforts so that donations can be matched by the Institute for Nonprofit News.

This morning I received an email with the intriguing subject line “This was our favorite story of 2023!” from NJ Spotlight News, one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I are profiling in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Local News.” The top of the email reads:

Dear Dan,

Last week we kicked off our year-end campaign, and we couldn’t be more excited to share how your support made a big impact in 2023, plus give a glimpse into the exciting plans we have for 2024.

As a reader of NJ Spotlight News, you know you can depend on our nonprofit journalism day in and day out. But do you know what goes into producing just one story, from start to finish? Take, for example, our story last week on youth voting, which investigated college age voters in New Jersey and their attitudes towards politics. Here’s a look, by the numbers, of what went into it:

    • phone calls made: 6
    • internal meetings at NJ Spotlight News to plan/discuss: 3
    • days it took to produce: 10
    • people involved in its production: 7
    • cups of coffee consumed: 8
    • emails sent about it: 31
    • hours of transcription logged: 2 hours

We put everything we’ve got into all of our stories because we value in-depth, comprehensive reporting. These New Jersey stories need to be told and we believe sourcing our information from a variety of voices and perspectives is the best way to do so. And because of our hard work, we’re making a real difference in our New Jersey community.

The email did not link to the story, but here it is. Reported by Hannah Gross, Spotlight’s education and child welfare reporter, the story takes a deep dive into whether college students would vote in the following week’s state and local elections — a tough sell for younger voters given that there’s no presidential race on the ballot.

“People don’t realize how much change actually comes from the local standpoint,” Rowan University student Jamie Ivan told Gross. “Everyone thinks: ‘Oh, it’s not presidential, it doesn’t matter.’ Presidential elections matter a lot, but so do local ones. It affects your everyday life. It directly impacts you.”

Acting on a hunch, I checked to see if Gross is affiliated with Report for America, a project that places young journalists at local news organizations across the country. Indeed she is. Report for America is also featured in “What Works in Community News” — we interviewed RFA corps members at news projects such as The Colorado Sun and the New Haven Independent, and we also include a featured conversation with RFA co-founder Steven Waldman, edited down from our podcast interview with him.

NJ Spotlight News began life about a decade ago as a website covering statewide public policy and politics. Several years ago it merged with NJ PBS, and today comprises the original website plus a daily half-hour newscast, with a lot of cross-pollination between both sides of the enterprise. It’s an example of how public broadcasters can step up and help solve the local and regional news crisis — one of a number of business models that Ellen and I explored in our reporting on how to build a sustainable future for community journalism.

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Sue Cross of INN tells us why this is a golden age of news innovation

Sue Cross at the recent INN Days gathering in Washington. Photo by Will Allen-DuPraw and used with permission.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sue Cross, the veteran journalist who will step down as executive director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) by the end of 2023. Sue has led INN since 2015, and has overseen a period of tremendous growth. There were 117 nonprofit newsroom members listed in the INN’s 2015 annual report. This year, INN has 425 member newsrooms.

She has also been a driving force in the NewsMatch program, a collaborative fundraising project that has helped raise more than $270 million for emerging newsrooms since its launch in 2016. Before joining INN, Cross was a journalist and executive at The Associated Press. Cross says we are in a golden age of news innovation, and she hopes to continue to lend her support. She also says she hopes to spend time on personal projects.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the launch of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit digital site serving Greater Houston. I provide an update on efforts to extract money out of Google and Facebook in order to pay for news.

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

The Bedford Citizen’s ad-rich annual guide gets a shoutout from Editor & Publisher

Over the past few years, revenues at The Bedford Citizen, a nonprofit community website in the Boston suburbs, have ramped up from zero to more than $100,000 a year. The Citizen has done it through voluntary memberships, sponsors, grants, the NewsMatch program and — perhaps most significant — an annual glossy publication called The Bedford Guide.

The Guide is a 64-page magazine that serves as an introduction to the town. It is loaded with ads, and from what I can tell, all of them are local, from life sciences giant Millipore Sigma, which has a facility in Bedford, to the Cat Doctor. According to the Citizen’s executive director, Teri Morrow, the 2022 Guide (the third) which came out in December, will produce about $40,000 in revenues.

Now Gene Kalb, a Citizen board member who’s the main force behind the Guide, has been recognized by the trade magazine Editor & Publisher as one of its “Sales Supernovas.” He told E&P’s Robin Blinder that flexibility is a key to the Guide’s success, explaining:

The pandemic hit us just as we started our second annual Bedford Guide. The initial strategy was to approach retail establishments in town. During 2020 with almost all restaurants and retail establishments closed, we shifted our focus to larger corporate industries in town. Our publication is all about supporting our community, and the corporate neighbors in town stepped up to help us. With the retail landscape improving this year, we had a nice combination of retail and corporate advertisers.

Such revenues have allowed the Citizen to grow from an all-volunteer project to a news organization with paid employees — a managing editor, a part-time reporter and a part-time operations manager — as well as freelance fees for contributors.

Founded in 2012, the Citizen continues to grow in other ways as well. According to Google Analytics, the site had more than a million page views in 2021. Those of us who follow such things know that’s a statistic of limited value, but here’s another that’s rock-solid: about 2,200 people have subscribed to the Citizen’s free daily newsletter in a town with fewer than 5,400 households, for a penetration rate of more than 40%. (Caveat: Email being what it is, no doubt there are a number of families with more than one subscription.)

The Citizen is one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I are tracking for our “What Works” book project. It’s encouraging to see how people in the community have come together to create a vibrant and sustainable source of local news.

In our latest podcast, Chris Lovett talks about his career as a hyperlocal TV journalist

Chris Lovett

In our latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I speak with Chris Lovett, the just-retired anchor of Boston’s Neighborhood Network News. Topics we discuss include highlights from Lovett’s long career and his views on whether local access cable could help solve the community journalism crisis.

A Dorchester native, he’s interviewed local activists, politicos (including Tom Menino when he was a district city councilor) and neighborhood stalwarts. Lovett had a front-row seat as the changing media landscape shaped Boston, and he connects the dots between Menino’s early days as a frequent broadcast guest and Michelle Wu’s strategic use of social media. He has also shared his expertise with any number of Boston University students. And he’s not done with journalism yet, so stay tuned.

We also kick around the latest on the Local Journalism Sustainability Act and the NewsMatch program, introduced by the Institute for Nonprofit News, which matches donations to nonprofit news organizations and has proved to be an important source of revenue.

Please give us a listen — and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever fine podcasts are found.

Poynter shines a light on GBH News series about minority businesses and state spending

Gov. Charlie Baker. Photo (cc) 2020 by Josh Qualls / Governor’s Press office.

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Poynter has rounded up some of the highest impact local stories of 2020 — and among them is “The Color of Public Money,” a series produced by my friends at GBH. Paul Singer, investigations editor for the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting, recounts his work revealing that the state had failed to live up to its promises in helping minority-owned businesses. Singer writes:

We first established that the value of state spending with minority-owned businesses has DECLINED over the past 20 years (adjusted for inflation). We then established that during Baker’s administration, the state began padding those numbers, taking credit for a bunch of stuff that is not actually “spending” by state agencies.

As a result of Singer’s work, Gov. Charlie Baker created a new state agency and has promised improvements.

Other stories in the Poynter roundup include secrecy over inmate deaths in Montana, a foundation in Miami that provides bloodhounds to law-enforcement agencies, a motorcycle gang that incited violence at a Black Lives Matter rally in Ohio, child hunger in West Virginia, and fake news about a bus in Columbus, Ohio, that was falsely claimed to have been used by rioters.

The Poynter roundup underscores the importance of local and regional journlism. National news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are doing well, but community news is shrinking. During these final two days of 2020, I hope you’ll consider a donation to NewsMatch, which will double what you give to support nonprofit news. I gave earlier this week.

This year, NewsMatch added a new feature — rather than trying to figure out which nonprofits you want to support, you can just give to NewsMatch and let them figure out where your dollars can be put to the best use.

Northeastern journalism faculty supports creation of a state news commission

Photo (cc) 2017 by Ted McGrath.

We’re down to the wire with a legislative proposal to create a special commission that would study the condition of local news in Massachusetts. You can learn more about it here. Currently a conference committee is hashing out the details of an economic bond bill; the commission has been included as an amendment to the House version.

My colleagues in Northeastern University’s School of Journalism have signed a letter to the six members of the conference committee urging them to support the amendment creating the news commission. If you are so inclined, I hope you’ll add your voice. Some disclosures: I was involved in proposing the commission; I testified in favor of it last year; and I would be a member if the measure is adopted as written.

There’s never been a more crucial time for local news. Gannett, a national corporate chain that owns dozens of daily and weekly papers and websites in Greater Boston and environs, is staggering under debt and continues to cut, as Don Seiffert reports in the Boston Business Journal. This is also the time of year when you can donate to a local nonprofit news organization through NewsMatch and have your contribution doubled. And don’t forget that today is #GivingTuesday.

Our letter to the conference committee follows:

***

November 30, 2020

To the members of the conference committee:

  • Senator Eric Lesser, Co-Chair
  • Representative Ann-Margaret Ferrante, Co-Chair
  • Senator Michael Rodrigues
  • Senator Patrick O’Connor
  • Representative Aaron Michlewitz
  • Representative Donald Wong

Community life and civic engagement are not possible without reliable, verified news and information. Unfortunately, local journalism is in the midst of a crisis. According to one widely cited study, more than 2,100 American newspapers have closed their doors over the past 15 years as Craigslist, Google, and Facebook have scooped up most of the advertising revenues that once paid for journalism. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation worse. And newspaper chains owned by Wall Street speculators and hedge funds have robbed local news executives of the revenues they need to invest in the future.

Which is why we faculty members at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism urge you to approve an amendment sponsored by Representative Lori Ehrlich — part of the House version of the Economic Bond Bill — that would create a special commission to study local news in Massachusetts and recommend some possible courses of action. The commission would comprise legislators, academics, journalists, and news-industry experts.

Massachusetts remains well-served by regional sources of news, including a robust daily newspaper, public media companies, and multiple television newscasts. At the local level, though, the picture is grim. Corporate ownership has resulted in the hollowing-out of dozens of newspapers across the Commonwealth. In all too many cases, these news outlets are failing to meet the information needs of the communities they ostensibly serve.

A commission could, among other things, shine a light on a number of independent news projects that are doing well in the hopes that they might inspire residents of other communities to undertake similar projects. A commission could also identify best practices and recommend legislation and policies to encourage local ownership or make it easier to start a nonprofit news organization.

Such efforts are urgently needed. Please approve the amendment and allow the commission to be formed and to begin its important work.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kaufman, Director
Belle Adler, Emeritus
Mike Beaudet
Rahul Bhargava
Matt Carroll
Myojung Chung
Joanne Ciccarello
Nicholas Daniloff, Emeritus
Charles Fountain
Michelle Hagopian
Meg Heckman
Carlene Hempel
Jeff Howe
Dan Kennedy
William Kirtz, Emeritus
Laurel Leff
Dan Lothian
Peter Mancusi
Meredith O’Brien
Walter V. Robinson, Emeritus
Jim Ross
Jody Santos
Alan Schroeder, Emeritus
Jeb Sharp
John Wihbey
Dan Zedek

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