Provincetown Independent

On this Giving Tuesday, please support local news in your community

Provincetown, Mass. Photo (2008) by Andrew Malone.

Today is Giving Tuesday, and what better time to support your local news organization?

I just gave to two different outlets whose advisory boards I serve on — CommonWealth Beacon, a nonprofit digital project that covers statewide politics and public policy, and the Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that helps pay for public-interest journalism at The Provincetown Independent. The Independent is a print weekly with a strong digital presence that’s organized as a for-profit public benefit corporation.

These days there are very few examples of independent local news organizations that are pure for-profits and that can support themselves solely through advertising and subscriptions. The rise of nonprofits like CommonWealth and hybrids like the Independent has filled some of the gap created by the implosion of corporate-owned newspapers. But they need our support.

The Colorado Sun, a pioneering for-profit/ nonprofit hybrid, moves toward a fully nonprofit model

Larry Ryckman. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

The Colorado Sun is going nonprofit. The five-year-old digital news organization, launched by journalists who’d left The Denver Post following round after round of cuts by the paper’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital, had operated as a rare for-profit exception in the universe of local news startups. Now the Sun is joining its tax-exempt peers.

“Whether I agree with it or not, whether I even like it or not, the reality is that many individuals, many institutions and philanthropic groups, have concluded that journalism should be nonprofit,” editor Larry Ryckman said in a phone interview on Monday. “I have my own thoughts on that, but that is reality.”

The move was not entirely unexpected. The Sun is one of the projects highlighted in a forthcoming book by Ellen Clegg and me, “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate,” which will be published by Beacon Press in early 2024.

Read the rest at Nieman Lab.

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Public notices are a crucial source of revenue — and of government accountability

Mathewson Farm in Johnston, R.I. Photo (cc) by John Phelan.

When we think about revenue sources for local news, we tend to focus on the obvious — ads, subscriptions, events and, for nonprofits, voluntary memberships and grants. What we often overlook are public notices, also known as legal ads, taken out by government entities to inform the public that a job is being put out to bid or a meeting is being held. Mandatory public notices also include foreclosures, the disposition of public property and other business.

Public notices represent a significant source of revenue for community news organizations — and they can be weaponized. The Boston Globe recently reported on one such example in Rhode Island. Amanda Milkovits wrote that the city of Johnston has removed public notices from the weekly Johnston Sun Rise and moved them instead to the daily Providence Journal, even though the Journal charges much higher fees and is read by few people in Johnston.

The mayor, Joseph Polisena Jr., told Milkovits that he wanted public notices to reach a broader audience, especially to let construction companies know about bids. But the city has also been at odds with the Sun Rise and its editor/reporter, Rory Schuler. Publisher John Howell was quoted as saying that Polisena once told him, “I’m not going to support somebody who is working against me,” and that the mayor said he wouldn’t advertise as long as Schuler was with the paper. (Polisena denied the charges.)

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The loss of city public notices is costing the Sun Rise some $12,000 a year. Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told the Globe that the city might be violating the First Amendment if it could be shown that Polisena’s actions were retaliation for negative coverage.

What’s happening in Rhode Island is hardly unusual. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed a bill through the legislature that allows local governments simply to post public notices on their own websites — a cost-saving measure that also has the effect of making legal ads less visible. DeSantis’ disdain for the news media is well-known.

Colorado College journalism professor Corey Hutchins often tracks fights over public notices in his newsletter, Inside the News in Colorado. Recently he reported on a move by city officials in Aspen to designate the Aspen Daily News, which is locally owned, as the city’s “newspaper of record” over The Aspen Times, a daily owned by the Ogden chain, based in Wheeling, West Virginia. That peculiarity of Colorado law carries with it some major implications. Hutchins writes:

Newspapers that earn a city’s “of record” stamp means they are the ones a city pays to place legal notices and advertising. State law requires governments to publish certain things in local newspapers in order to keep residents abreast of public business. Being a city’s paper of record also can give a newspaper a sense of gravitas in a community.

In other words, more money for the Daily News, less for the Times, which became embroiled earlier this year in a dispute with county officials who were unhappy with the Times’ coverage of a billionaire’s development plans. (Hutchins does not claim there is a link between the county and city actions.)

According to Susan Chandler, writing for the Local News Initiative, such battles are under way across the country, with increasing pressure to move public notices from news outlets to government websites. Richard Karpel, executive director of the Public Notice Resource Center, told Chandler that these initiatives are part of Republican attacks on journalism, saying:

I don’t think the concept of legal notices is controversial. There needs to be a nonpartisan way to officially announce what the government is doing. What’s controversial is how it happens. We’ve seen it become more of a partisan issue in the last five or 10 years. In some states, there are Republicans who are in battle with the media as part of their political strategy. To that extent, it has become partisan.

In Massachusetts, change may be afoot as well. Currently, state law requires that public notices be placed in print newspapers, which has become increasingly difficult as the Gannett chain has closed and merged many of its weekly papers. A number of communities are being well served by nonprofit startups, but those tend to be digital-only. State legislators are considering ways to amend the law to allow public notices to be placed in web publications, especially in communities where there is no viable print paper.

I’ve consulted with state Rep. Ken Gordon, whose district includes Bedford, the home of a vibrant digital publication, The Bedford Citizen, but no print newspaper since Gannett closed the Bedford Minuteman about a year and a half ago. The town now publishes its public notices in The Sun of Lowell, which has virtually no presence in Bedford. Also of note: On the “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Ed Miller, editor of the startup Provincetown Independent, a print and digital publication. Miller argues that the print requirement for public notices is essential, at least in places that still have a print newspaper.

Public notices aren’t sexy. It’s much more satisfying to talk about a local news outlet that has built a successful events business or has found a way to boost digital subscriptions. But they are essential. Not only do they provide as much as 20% to 25% of a small local newspaper’s revenues, but they an important part of accountability. Public notices on a government website can be hidden away or even changed. Since Colonial times, public notices have helped local journalism thrive and have kept citizens informed. The laws governing public notices need to be updated — but not overturned.

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Are you a news publisher? A budding enterpreneur? Please come to Medford.

Are you an independent newspaper publisher? A budding entrepreneur? I’d like to point you to a great opportunity. Medford, a city of about 62,000 just a few miles north of Boston, has been without any reliable news coverage since March 2022, when the giant chain newspaper owner Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and the Somerville Journal. The new paper, the Transcript & Journal, is devoted almost entirely to regional news, with little in the way of what’s taking place in local government, public safety, schools or youth sports.

Medford is a relatively affluent community. We’re not as well off as Marblehead, Concord, Lexington, Newton or Brookline, where nonprofit startups have been launched or are in the process of being launched in response to Gannett’s cuts. But we have a lot going for us. Medford’s median household income of nearly $108,000 is higher than the state’s ($89,000). We have five business districts with restaurants and retail establishments. We are also at least somewhat diverse — although nearly 71% of Medford residents are white, there also are Black (8.4%), Asian (10.6%) and Hispanic/Latino (8.4%) residents as well. (Income and demographic data come from the U.S. Census Bureau.)

In 2020 I wrote about some ideas for how to bring reliable news to Medford — anything from a for-profit newspaper to a nonprofit website. There are conversations taking place about attempting to start a nonprofit, but I can’t help but think that Medford would be a great place for a for-profit venture.

One for-profit model I especially like is a free weekly print newspaper, distributed at high-traffic locations throughout the city, with a free website. Anne Eisenmenger has had great success with that model with four papers in Southeastern Massachusetts.

Another model is a subscription-based venture combining online and print. There are a number of examples, but one particularly vibrant outlet is The Provincetown Independent, begun several years ago by the husband-and-wife team of Ed Miller and Teresa Parker. The Independent also has a nonprofit arm that funds certain types of public interest journalism.

If you have any interest in setting up shop in Medford, I would be happy to connect you with people in the city and with people like Anne, Ed and Teresa. Feel free share this widely. Medford is a wonderful community with a lot of news, most of which isn’t being covered. And it’s got the economic base needed to build a news business. Please come to Medford.

How a Chicago civic organization became home to a Pulitzer-winning newsroom

David Greising

On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with David Greising, the president and chief executive of the Better Government Association, a century-old civic nonprofit organization that is also home to a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom as part of a new collaboration with the Illinois Solutions Partnership.

The new partnership is funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. The BGA separates its investigations team and policy team in order to wall off its journalism from its advocacy work. In May 2022, Madison Hopkins of the BGA and Cecilia Reyes of the Chicago Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for an investigation of the city’s history of failed building and fire-safety code enforcement, which proved lethal many times over.

I’ve got a Quick Take on a new development at The Provincetown Independent. Co-founder and editor Ed Miller was a guest on the “What Works” podcast earlier this year. The Indie is trying something really interesting: A direct public offering, or DPO.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the INNYs — the Institute for Nonprofit News Awards. A reporter named Sally Kestin won for best investigative journalism in a small newsroom. We’re talking really small: She works for the Asheville Watchdog, a nonprofit news outlet in North Carolina with only one paid employee. The rest are retired journalists, many of them quite well-known. Kestin won the 2013 Pulitzer for Public Service at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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

Ed Miller of the startup Provincetown Independent on competing with Gannett

Provincetown Independent co-founders Ed Miller, the editor, and Teresa Parker, the publisher. Photo by Sophie Ruehr; used with permission.

Ed Miller is co-founder and editor of The Provincetown Independent. Founded in October 2019, the weekly competes with Gannett’s Provincetown Banner. The Independent covers Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet and Eastham, and Miller explains why he believes that a print-centric strategy is essential on the tip of the Cape.

The Independent is a hybrid organization — a for-profit public benefit corporation that works in tandem with a nonprofit that Ed and co-founder and publisher Teresa Parker have also created. Up until now, the nonprofit, the Local Journalism Project, has operated under the fiscal sponsorship of the Center for the Study of Public Policy. But they have now created their own independent nonprofit and applied for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. (Disclosure: Dan is an unpaid adviser to the Independent.)

As we learned from Ed in planning this podcast, the first meeting of the new LJP board was happening the very day the episode was taped.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the abysmal results for the News Leaders Association newsroom diversity survey.

Dan reports on a startup newspaper in Queen Creek, Arizona, that will be called the Queen Creek Tribune and will make its debut on Sunday, April 24. It will be a total-market penetration print paper with a 20,000 press run.

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

Your thoughts on the future of legal ads in the digital era

I got some really thoughtful responses here and on Facebook to my post arguing that Massachusetts law should be changed so that government entities can take out legal advertising in digital-only news organizations and not just in print newspapers.

There’s no question that such a change would create unintended consequences, but change is necessary at a time when fewer and fewer local news outlets have a print component. Anyway, let me take on three issues raised by readers.

• Print newspapers are the only proper outlet for legals. Honestly, there just isn’t a good case for this, and for a very simple reason: print newspapers are disappearing. I suppose you could make an argument that legals ought to be restricted to print in communities where that is still an option, but that’s becoming increasingly unrealistic.

Ethan Forman, a reporter for the Gloucester Daily Times, worries that if digital is an option, local officials will choose one of the websites owned by the Gannett chain, which has been shutting down many of its weekly newspapers. “If we lose legal ads to digital, which I guess is inevitable,” Ethan says, “then these zombie Gannett websites will benefit and it will strip newspapers of this ad revenue…. If digital legal ads are allowed, I’m sure it will go to this zombie website instead of us because rates will be cheaper.”

Ethan makes a good point, and perhaps the legislative fix that state Reps. Ken Gordon and Alice Hanlon Peisch are working on could include a provision requiring that legals can only be placed in a news outlet — print or digital — that has a certain level of presence in the community. You don’t want to base it on paid circulation, because many digital outlets are free. So perhaps web traffic or newsletter subscriptions could be used as a proxy. You might also come up with some sort of objective requirement for publishing a certain amount of local news in order to be eligible for legals.

• Nonprofit news outlets should not be a forum for legals. This argument comes from Ed Miller, the co-founder and editor of The Provincetown Independent, a for-profit print and digital news organization. Ed writes:

You point out, correctly, that one powerful argument for the publication requirement is that legal notices be published in a forum independent of the government, as an anti-corruption measure. But virtually all of the new online-only publications are organized as nonprofits, which are not independent of the government. They are dependent on being approved as legitimate by the IRS and the state.

I think Ed exaggerates a bit — there are many for-profit digital news organizations, and some of them are quite successful. But he’s right that most of them are nonprofits. Where I really disagree is with his notion that nonprofits are not sufficiently independent to carry legal ads.

Nonprofit news organizations large and small are doing excellent work in holding government to account. I don’t think the idea that they are insufficiently independent to run legal ads holds up. I honestly can’t see what problems might arise — that they might be intimidated into changing the wording of an ad after it’s been published online lest they lose their nonprofit status?

Government threats to pull legal ads pertain to for-profits and nonprofits alike. Last year, for instance, Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins reported that a newspaper owner in the Denver area abjectly apologized for a racist April Fools Day joke in the hopes of retaining $10,000 in legal ads. It failed, as the city council voted to take its business elsewhere.

Ed himself told a Northeastern University audience last year that the Independent has been unable to attract legal ads, which he attributed to his newspaper’s tough coverage of local officials. Good for him for not giving in — but it shows that officials do, in fact, have leverage over community news outlets regardless of whether they are for-profit or nonprofit. (Disclosure: I’m on the Independent’s informal advisory board.)

Ed also argues that digital-only legal ads exclude readers who aren’t online. True enough. But again, you can’t will a print newspaper into existence in a community that doesn’t have one.

• Digital is a flawed format for creating a permanent archive. This is a real concern, not just for legal ads but for the very digital news organizations that would carry them. “This has to be addressed in the law to force news websites to take archiving seriously, but the law has to be flexible to enough to adapt to changing technology,” says Aaron Read, an engineer with The Public’s Radio in Providence, Rhode Island. “That’s not a trivial task.”

I guess the question here is for how long legal ads must be “preserved and secure in a tangible record that is archived,” as the law requires. A hundred years? Five hundred? Or long enough that it’s fulfilled its purpose, which in most cases would be for a much shorter period of time.

Legals could be printed out and stored at public libraries. Or PDFs could be created and uploaded to a separate repository. That’s probably not a forever solution, but I suspect that we’ll still be able to read PDFs 50 years from now. As I noted on Saturday, the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association keeps an online repository of legal ads, and if the MNPA ceased to exist (perish the thought!), presumably someone else could take it over.

Preserving websites is a real challenge, though. Print newspapers, at least, can be microfilmed and viewed in their original format indefinitely. Too much of the web, by contrast, just seems to go away.

As Ethan notes, it’s inevitable that legal ads are going to move to digital-only news sites — that is, if we can keep them on news sites and not just have them move to government platforms. Now’s the time to think these issues through in order to serve the public as effectively as possible.

The Salt Lake Tribune, now a nonprofit, reports that it’s healthy and growing

Salt Lake City. Photo (cc) 2011 by Jazz Spain.

You sometimes hear that nonprofit status is not a solution to the local news crisis. After all, just because a media outlet is a nonprofit doesn’t mean it’s exempt from having to bring in revenue and balance its books.

True. But nonprofit ownership also means local ownership invested in the community. Which is why the latest news from The Salt Lake Tribune, the largest daily paper in Utah, is so heartening.

According to a recent update from Lauren Gustus, the executive editor, the Tribune is growing. The newsroom, she writes, is 23% larger than it was a year ago, with the paper adding a three-member Innovation Lab reporting team and beefing up its reporting, digital and editing operations. After cutting back to just one print edition each week, it’s adding a second. The Tribune is also taking care of its employees, she says, providing much-needed equipment to its photographers as well as a 401(k) match and parental leave.

“We celebrate 150 years this year and we are healthy,” she writes. “We are sustainable in 2021, and we have no plans to return to a previously precarious position.”

The Tribune was acquired from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016 by Paul Huntsman, part of a politically connected Utah family. As I wrote for GBH News in 2019, Huntsman, like many civic-minded publishers before him, discovered that owning a newspaper isn’t as easy as he might have imagined. He was forced to cut the staff in order to make ends meet before hitting on the idea of transforming the Tribune into the first large nonprofit newspaper in the country.

Nonprofit ownership makes it easier to raise tax-deductible grant money from foundations, and it transforms the subscription model into a membership model. Done right, the audience feels invested in the news organization in a way that it generally doesn’t with a for-profit newspaper.

One disadvantage is that nonprofit news organizations are constrained from some traditional newspaper functions, including having a robust editorial page that endorses political candidates. On the latest episode of our podcast, “What Works,” Storm Lake Times editor Art Cullen told Ellen Clegg and me that’s why he and his older brother, John, the publisher, have kept their paper for-profit.

What the Cullens have done instead is set up a nonprofit organization called the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation that can receive tax-deductible donations to support the Times and several other papers. It’s a model similar to that used by news outlets as large as The Philadelphia Inquirer and as small as The Colorado Sun and The Provincetown Independent.

The local news crisis will not be solved by a single model, and there’s plenty of room for nonprofits, for-profits and hybrids. What’s taking place in Salt Lake is important, and is sure to be watched by other news executives.

“The Tribune will welcome more journalists in 2022,” writes Gustus, “because you’ve told us many times over that this is what you want and because if we are not holding those in public office to account, there are few others who will.”

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In the rural heartland, indie newspapers survive with a back-to-basics approach

It’s something I’ve seen over and over in tracking the state of local news for the past dozen years. Despite the very real challenges community journalism faces from technological and cultural change, news organizations that are not burdened by corporate chain ownership can continue to serve as vital, financially sustainable operations.

A new report by Tony Baranowski, director of local media for Times Citizen Communications in Iowa Falls, Iowa, makes the point. While he was a fellow at the West Virginia University Reed College of Media and the West Virginia Press Association’s NewStart Program, he studied several newspapers in the Upper Midwest in depth and surveyed more than 50 small newspaper publishers across the country.

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What he found was that, despite the narrative that local newspapers are dying, these independent papers were keeping their heads above water. Baranowski writes:

The strongest community news outlets are locally owned and managed by families or individuals with local ties that stretch back decades. That’s not an easy circumstance to replicate for a would-be publisher looking to buy or launch a news organization in a rural town, but it’s not a prerequisite, either. In fact, the common denominator is less longevity than fostering community spirit and pride within both staff-generated content and advertising in a traditional newspaper’s pages.

Among the people interviewed in Baranowski’s report is Jim Slonoff, the co-founder and publisher of The Hinsdalean, a free paper launched in suburban Chicago in 2006. I wrote about The Hinsdalean a couple of months ago to highlight its practice of signing up members of the community to write essays on a variety of topics. Although running unpaid columns is hardly new territory for local newspapers, The Hinsdalean actively recruits writers and limits them to a two-year term, ensuring a steady stream of fresh voices.

Like many of the people Baranowski spoke with, Slonoff said The Hinsdalean’s emphasis remains on print rather than digital. Slonoff said:

That’s the thing I don’t get about newspapers in general, because so many of them put so much money and resources into their websites with no return. We took the 180 degrees approach and said our money is coming from display advertising and real estate advertising. Why would we not focus on that? Facebook doesn’t bring us any money, Twitter and Instagram don’t. There’s nothing I get out of it that I know of, except we’re there. And we get a lot of likes and things and get a lot of this and comments and that feels good.

That might seem like a retrograde approach, but it’s one I’ve heard from a number of publishers who have to figure out how to break even.

The Provincetown Independent actually charges more for digital subscriptions than for a print-plus-digital combination, telling readers that “if we were to go online only, the savings in not having to print and mail the paper would not be anywhere near enough to make up for the loss of print advertising revenue.”

Last week I interviewed Jerry and Ann Healey, who sold their Colorado Community Media newspaper group earlier this year to The Colorado Sun, a start-up digital news organization, in a deal put together by the National Trust for Local News. They told me that, in many cases, when they offered a package combining digital and print, their advertisers weren’t interested — they wanted to be seen in the print newspaper. “In the community newspaper space, print is still a viable thing,” Jerry Healey said, “and the advertisers know that too.”

Then there’s Kris O’Leary of Central Wisconsin Newspapers, who told Baranowski that her readership includes Amish and Mennonite communities. Not much digital potential there.

Another of Baranowski’s findings is that newspapers with offices in the communities they cover tend to be healthier than those that have consolidated operations far from the people they serve.

If this sounds like Baranowski is recommending a back-to-the-future approach, it may be because he’s surveying local journalism in the rural heartland. A digital-first approach makes sense in affluent urban and suburban areas where readers can be persuaded to sign up for online-only subscriptions.

But in some parts of the country, technological advances have not changed the media all that much over the past several decades. It is in such places that journalism can do well by following a model that would have been familiar to our grandparents — independently owned newspapers, rooted in the community and supported by local businesses.

Trump’s postmaster general targets journalism with a devastating rate hike

Painting by J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951). Uploaded (cc) 2020 by Halloween HJB.

As scholars from Paul Starr to Victor Pickard have observed, newspapers in the United States have benefited mightily from postal subsidies since the earliest days of the republic.

Starting in the Reagan era, though, the U.S. Postal Service has been run under the misguided notion that it should break even or turn a profit rather than be operated as a public service. As a result, postal rates for periodicals have been rising for more than a generation, putting additional pressure on newspaper and magazine publishers who are already straining under the economic challenges posed by technology, cultural shifts — and, now, the post-pandemic recovery.

The latest bad news comes in the form of a report from The Associated Press that rates on periodicals are scheduled to rise by more than 8% on Aug. 29. The AP story, by David Bauder and Anthony Izaguirre, says the increase is “part of a broad plan pushed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to overhaul mail operations.”

DeJoy, you may recall, is the ethically challenged Trump appointee who slowed down mail service last year, thus imperiling vote-by-mail efforts in the midst of the pandemic. For some reason, he appears to have more job security than Vladimir Putin.

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Now, you might think that rising postal rates would simply push publishers to hasten their transition to digital. But it’s a simple matter of reality that print advertising continues to play an important role in keeping newspapers and magazines afloat. For instance, earlier this year, Ed Miller, the co-founder and editor of start-up Provincetown Independent, explained that he offers a print edition alongside a robust website because otherwise it would be just too difficult to make money.

Northwestern University Professor Penelope Muse Abernathy tells the AP that the effect of higher postal rates could be devastating for small local news projects that are already struggling. “It is one of several nicks and slashes that can damage the bottom line, especially if you are an independent publisher who is operating at break even or in the low single digits of profitability,” she says. “And most are.”

Ironically, a section of the Postal Service’s website sings the glories of how subsidies helped foster robust journalism, quoting George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The essay starts like this:

From the beginning of the American republic, the Founding Fathers recognized that the widespread dissemination of information was central to national unity. They realized that to succeed, a democratic government required an informed electorate, which in turn depended upon a healthy exchange of news, ideas, and opinions.

At a time when the idea of government funding for journalism is being debated in the public square, postal subsidies stand out as a particularly benign way to go about doing that. As with tax benefits for nonprofit news organizations, postal subsidies are indirect. That makes it difficult for the government to punish individual media outlets for tough coverage — as is happening right now in Western Pennsylvania, where the Republican-dominated state legislature has eliminated funding for public broadcasters even as one station has persisted in calling out the Republicans for touting the “big lie” about the 2020 election. (Republican officials deny there’s a connection.)

It’s long past time for Louis DeJoy to hit the bricks and for the post office to be reorganized as a public service. Foremost among those services should be helping to provide the public with reliable, affordable journalism.