Online Journalism Project

On our 100th podcast, Tom Breen tells us what’s next for the New Haven Independent

Tom Breen in downtown New Haven. Photos (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

For our 100th “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Tom Breen, the editor of the New Haven Independent. Tom joined the staff of the Independent in 2018 and then became managing editor. Last November, he stepped up to succeed founding editor Paul Bass, who launched the Independent in 2005 and is still very much involved.

Paul is executive director of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization he set up to oversee the Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel in New Haven’s northwest suburbs and WNHH, a low-power community radio station. He continues to report the news for the Independent and hosts a show on WNHH, and he started another nonprofit, Midbrow, which publishes arts reviews in New Haven and several other cities across the country.

We spoke with Tom about his own vision for the Independent and why he thinks it has been successful enough to still be going strong after 20 years. He also reminisces about a harrowing encounter he once had with a pitbull while he was out knocking on doors for a story on mortgage foreclosures. I interviewed Tom for our book, “What Works in Community News.”

New Haven Independent reporter Maya McFadden interviews Victor Joshua, director of a youth basketball program called RespeCT Hoops.

Listeners will also hear from Alexa Coultoff, a Northeastern student who wrote an in-depth report on the local news ecosystem in Fall River, Massachusetts, a blue-collar community south of Boston that flipped to Donald Trump in the last election after many decades of being a solidly Democratic city. We recently published Alexa’s story, so please give it a read.

Ellen has a Quick Take on two big moves on the local news front. The National Trust for Local News has named a new CEO to replace Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who resigned earlier this year. The new leader is Tom Wiley, who is now president and publisher of The Buffalo News. And in the heartland, The Minnesota Star Tribune has named a new editor to replace Suki Dardarian, who is retiring. The nod goes to Kathleen Hennessey, the deputy politics editor of the New York Times and a former Associated Press reporter.

My Quick Take examines a recent court decision ruling that Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the way it controls the technology for digital advertising. This was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and a number of states, but it’s also the subject of lawsuits brought by the news business, which argues that Google has destroyed the value of online ads. It’s potentially good news. It’s also complicated, and its effect may be way off in the future.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Greater Boston arts and local news get a boost from three new nonprofit projects

There’s good news about local news in Greater Boston today on three fronts. I’ll start with an attempt to revive arts reviews — at one time a staple of mainstream and alternative publications, but now relegated to niche outlets like The Arts Fuse, a high-quality website edited by Boston University professor and former Boston Phoenix arts writer Bill Marx.

Recently Paul Bass, the executive director of the nonprofit Online Journalism Project in New Haven, Connecticut, launched a grant-funded project called the Independent Review Crew (link now fixed). Freelancers in seven parts of the country are writing about music, theater and other in-person cultural events. Boston is among those seven, and freelance writer-photographer Sasha Patkin is weighing in with her take on everything from concerts to sand sculpture.

You can read Patkin’s work on the Review Crew’s website — and, this week, her reviews started running on Universal Hub as well, which gives her a much wider audience. Here’s her first contribution.

Bass is the founder of the New Haven Independent, started in 2005 as part of the first wave of nonprofit community websites. The Online Journalism Project is the nonprofit umbrella that publishes the Indy and a sister site in New Haven’s northwest suburbs; it also oversees a low-power radio station in New Haven, WNHH-LP. Before 2005, Bass was a fixture at the now-defunct New Haven Advocate, an alt-weekly that, like the Phoenix, led with local arts and was filled with reviews. The Review Crew is his bid to revive the long lost art, if you will, of arts reviewing.

Other places that are part of The Review Crew: New Haven; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Troy/Albany, New York; Oakland, California; Hartford, Connecticut; and Northwest Arkansas (the Fayetteville metro area is home to about 576,000 people).

I’ve got all kinds of disclosures I need to share here. I gave Bass some guidance before he launched The Review Crew — not that he needed any. The Indy was the main subject of my 2013 book “The Wired City,” and I’ve got a lengthy update in “What Works in Community News,” the forthcoming book that Ellen Clegg and I have written. I also suggested Universal Hub to Bass as an additional outlet for The Review Crew; I’ve known Gaffin for years, and at one time I made a little money through a blogging network he set up. Gaffin was a recent guest on the “What Works” podcast.

In other words, I would wish Paul the best of luck in any case, but this time I’ve got a bit more of a stake in it.

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The Phoenix was not the city’s last alt-weekly. For nearly a decade after the Phoenix shut down in 2013, DigBoston continued on with a mix of news and arts coverage. Unfortunately, the Dig, which struggled mightily during COVID, finally ended its run earlier this year. But Dig editors Chris Faraone and Jason Pramas are now morphing the paper into something else — HorizonMass, a statewide online news outlet. Pramas will serve as editor-in-chief and Faraone as editor-at-large, with a host of contributors.

HorizonMass will publish as part of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, founded by Faraone and Pramas some years back to funnel long-form investigative coverage to a number of media outlets, including the Dig. HorizonMass will also have a significant student presence, Pramas writes, noting that the project’s tagline is “Independent, student-driven journalism in the public interest.” Pramas adds:

With interns working with us as reporters, designers, marketers, and (for the first time) editors, together with our ever-growing crew of professional freelance writers, we can continue to do our part to train the next generation of journalists while covering more Bay State happenings than ever before. We hope you enjoy our initial offerings and support our efforts with whatever donations you can afford.

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Mark Pothier, a top editor at The Boston Globe, is leaving the paper to become the editor and CEO of the Plymouth Independent, a well-funded fledgling nonprofit. Pothier, a longtime Plymouth resident and former musician with the band Ministry, is already listed on the Independent’s masthead. Among the project’s advisers is Boston Globe journalist (and my former Northeastern colleague) Walter Robinson, also a Plymouth resident, who was instrumental in the launch of the New Bedford Light. Robby talked about the Plymouth Independent and other topics in a recent appearance on the “What Works” podcast.

Pothier started working at the Globe in 2001, but before that he was the executive editor of a group of papers that included the Old Colony Memorial, now part of the Gannett chain. When Gannett shifted its Eastern Massachusetts weeklies to regional coverage in the spring of 2022, the Memorial was one of just three that was allowed to continue covering local news — so it looks like Plymouth resident are about to be treated to something of a news war.

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Seismic change comes to the New Haven Independent as Tom Breen moves up

Tom Breen. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

There is huge news today in the world of independent community journalism. Paul Bass, the founder of the New Haven Independent, is stepping aside as editor while Tom Breen, currently the managing editor, moves up to the top position. Bass has been talking about making this change for a while, and on Tuesday he made it official.

Bass, 62, isn’t going anywhere. He’ll continue as executive director of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization he set up to oversee the Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel in New Haven’s northwest suburbs, and WNHH Radio, a low-power FM station that specializes in community programming. He’ll also continue to report the news for the Independent and host a show on WNHH.

Paul Bass. Photo (cc) 2021 by Maaisha Osman.

Breen, 34, joined the staff of the Independent as a reporter in 2018 and later became managing editor. Breen is a dogged journalist; last November, I accompanied him as he knocked on the doors of houses that had been foreclosed on, a regular practice of his that has yielded important stories.

The Independent is one of the oldest and still among the best nonprofit local news startups in the country. It was the primary subject of my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” and it will also be featured in “What Works: The Future of Local News,” a book-in-progress by Ellen Clegg and me.

Congratulations to Paul and Tom. This is a big change for a news organization that has been remarkably stable over the course of its 17-year existence.

New Haven Independent celebrates its first decade

Arts writer David Sepulveda with a vintage copy of the first incarnation of the New Haven Independent, which was co-founded by Paul Bass and was published for several years in the late 1980s.

Congratulations to Paul Bass and the staff and friends of the New Haven Independent, who are celebrating the community website’s 10th anniversary.

On Wednesday evening a couple of dozen people gathered at the offices of La Voz Hispana, the Independent’s partner and landlord, to toast 10 years of nonprofit online journalism. It was a lower-key affair than the fifth anniversary — Bass and crew have been so busy launching the Independent’s low-power FM radio station, WNHH, that they didn’t have time to plan a proper celebration. (The Independent is the subject of my book “The Wired City.” I wrote about WNHH recently for the Nieman Journalism Lab, and was later a guest.)

The party was emceed by Norma Rodriguez-Reyes, the president of La Voz and chair of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Independent and its affiliated projects — WNHH, the Valley Independent Sentinel and the Branford Eagle.

Last week Bass marked the 10th anniversary with a special hour-long conversation on WNHH about the state of independent journalism with Rodriguez-Reyes; Christine Stuart, the editor and co-owner of CT News Junkie, a for-profit website covering politics and public policy in Connecticut; and Babz Rawls-Ivy, managing editor of The Inner-City News, an African-American newspaper based in New Haven, as well as a talk-show host on WNHH.

Among other things, Bass compares legacy media’s coverage of the decline of journalism to someone who spends all his time hanging out at a funeral home and concludes that everyone must be dead. Well worth a listen.

Mubarakah Ibrahim (left), host of “Mornings with Mubarakah” on WNHH, with her children.

Paul Bass (right) and me. Photo by Independent alumnus and current Wall Street Journal reporter Thomas MacMillan.

The New Haven Independent prepares to reboot

Previously published at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Not too many months ago, Paul Bass gave serious thought to shutting down the New Haven Independent, the online-only nonprofit news site he founded in 2005.

“A while back, I considered whether I still had the energy to keep going,” Bass said. “I was burnt.”

He decided to keep it alive. And now he’s getting ready to relaunch with two new full-time staff reporters — one who will start the day after Labor Day, the other who has yet to be hired.

For a small community news organization, the Independent has been remarkably stable. Last week, Bass threw a going-away party for managing editor Melissa Bailey, who will be a Nieman Fellow starting this fall, and staff writer Thomas MacMillan, who is moving to New York to seek his fame and fortune. Both began working at the site as it was ramping up, Bailey in 2006 and MacMillan the following year. (The fourth staff member, Allan Appel, recently cut back to a part-time position.)

Several hundred people gathered in and outside the Woodland Café, near the New Haven Green, to say goodbye to Bailey and MacMillan. Their photography was on display, accompanied by QR codes that smartphone users could access to take them to the stories where those photos first appeared. Copies of Bailey’s just-published book on education reform in New Haven, “School Reform City: Voices from an American Experiment,” were on sale, along with Appel’s novel “The Midland Kid: Tales of the Presidential Ghostwriter.” Mayors past (John DeStefano) and present (Toni Harp) were on hand, as were a number of other community leaders.

“It’s really hard for me to imagine leaving New Haven for more than a few days, let alone a whole year,” Bailey told the crowd. MacMillan defined the privilege of being a journalist: “You ask questions and people just open up to you and give you these amazing stories.”

When I met with Bass afterwards, he talked about how difficult it would be to replace the two. “They’re community journalists. They love the work. They grew so much,” he said. “They both learned so many things, and they really ran the operation with me.”

Yet their departure will allow him to solve a longstanding problem: having an all-white staff cover a city where African-Americans and Latinos are in the majority. “The people I’m hiring will diversify the staff racially,” Bass told me. The Independent has used minority freelancers and interns, but all of its full-time staff journalists have been white.

The reboot of the Independent comes at a crucial time. The regional daily paper, the New Haven Register, has gone through several rounds of cuts in recent months — including one announced just last week — as its owner, Digital First Media, prepares for a widely predicted sell-off. In a few years, Digital First has gone from a closely watched experiment in reinvention to just another sad tale of chain journalism gone wrong.

Thus the Independent’s mix of political and neighborhood news, education reporting, and, increasingly, a focus on the arts fills a real need.

Despite the challenges of keeping a nonprofit going, Bass has had quite a bit of success with fundraising. Currently, he said, he has pledges through 2015 to cover the $420,000 budget for the Independent and a satellite two-person site in the northwest suburbs called the Valley Independent Sentinel. In recent years, he added, his fundraising base has shifted from about 75 percent foundation grants to about 25 percent. Most of the money comes from high-net-worth donors in the New Haven area. About $15,000 to $20,000 comes from small donors.

Late in 2013, Bass applied for a low-power FM license to operate a nonprofit community radio station in New Haven. He has yet to hear from the FCC, but he continues to hope it will come through. “I think we’d engage the readership in a new way,” he said.

For now, though, he’s planning to do something he’s never done before: ramp down the Independent for a few weeks. Posting will be minimal this week and next. And he’s going to stop posting completely during the last two weeks of August — a first since the Independent began publication in late August of 2005. Then comes the new Independent.

“I’m not going to have the same experience level I have now, so it’s going to be different,” Bass said. “I don’t think I can replace Thomas and Melissa.”