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What The New York Times is saying about ‘What Works in Community News’

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On November 27, 2023

In Local News

A little more than a month from now, “What Works in Community News” will be released by Beacon Press — and it’s already receiving significant advance buzz. In addition to pre-publication endorsements from the likes of Margaret Sullivan, Steven Waldman and Penelope Muse Abernathy, The New York Times on Sunday published an opinion essay about the local news crisis in which our book is prominently featured. Times editorial writer Serge Schmemann interviewed Ellen Clegg and me, writing (free link):

[T]here are signs that things are looking up. 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.’”

In addition, Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association, recently gave our book a starred review. The reviewer, Alan Moores, said: “For readers who despair at the collapse of traditional media nationwide, this survey is a bolster; for journalists looking to create such viable news sources in their own communities, its a highly useful road map.”

Ellen and I are thrilled that our book is receiving such a strong reception. We hope it will serve as an inspiration to spark the rise of still more local and regional news projects across the country. In the meantime, you can keep up on developments in local news as well as our podcast at our website, What Works: The Future of Local News.

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

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On November 16, 2023

In Local News

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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Journalism, public goods and the free rider problem

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On August 9, 2023

In Local News

Watchdog journalism at its finest. Photo via Needpix.

One of the arguments that often comes up in discussions about how to pay for news is that journalism is a “public good.” I was thinking about this last night when I read Rebuild Local News president Steve Waldman’s latest piece in The Atlantic, in which he observes that journalism often saves more money than it costs. He cites some notable examples, including a ProPublica investigation that led to $435 million in fines and reporting by MLK50 in Memphis, Tennessee, that resulted in the cancellation of about $12 million in debt owed by hospital patients.

This is the very definition of a “public good.” When economists talk about a public good, they mean something similar, but not identical, to what we lay people mean. You and I might simply mean that a public good is good for the public, as tough, ethical journalism surely is. But what economists mean is that it’s also something that benefits the public whether they pay for it or not. Here’s how Investopedia puts it: “The two main criteria that distinguish a public good are that it must be non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Non-rivalrous means that the goods do not dwindle in supply as more people consume them; non-excludability means that the good is available to all citizens.” Thus, a public good carries with it a free rider problem.

This is what I wrote about public goods in my 2013 book “The Wired City”:

In economic terms, a public good is something that benefits everyone, whether each of us pays for it or not — which, perversely, creates incentives for us not to pay. That is why we must pay taxes rather than make voluntary contributions to fund national defense. “Public good” is a phrase that also comes up a lot in discussions of why it is so difficult to fix the news business. For example, the local newspaper reports that members of the school committee are taking bribes from a bus company with a record of safety violations. As a result of that reporting, those committee members are removed and prosecuted. Schoolchildren are safer. Yet people who don’t buy or even read the paper benefit just as much as those who do. Thus, there needs to be a way to pay or such journalism outside the for-profit, advertiser-based context that worked reasonably well until a few years ago. Seen in this light, community journalism is a public good that deserves funding beyond what the market is willing to pay.

The problem is that when tax money is used to fund journalism, it can create a conflict that interferes with the independence needed for a news organization to fulfill its role as a monitor of power. Watchdog reporting is difficult when the institutions you’re holding to account are also providing you with the money you need to operate. That makes journalism very different from the fire department, schools or public works, all of which may accept public money without any such conflicts.

In his Atlantic piece, Waldman advocates for tax credits for local publishers and advertisers, a variation of an idea that he’s been promoting for several years that was recently revived in the form of the Community News and Small Business Support Act, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Now, tax credits are sufficiently arm’s-length that they don’t present much of a threat to journalistic independence. But the very fact that such indirect government assistance is being talked about helps illustrate why news isn’t just good for the public — it’s also a public good in every sense of the term.

At one time there was so much advertising money supporting journalism that we didn’t need to think about such things. These days, news has morphed from a highly profitable enterprise into a classic public good. It makes sense for us to find ways to fund that public good as long as we can do so without undermining the very qualities that make it a public good in the first place.

A new bill would boost local news with tax credits for advertisers and publishers

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On July 21, 2023

In Local News

The U.S. Capitol. Photo (cc) 2013 by Mark Fischer.

I’ve written quite a bit here about the possibility of government assistance for local news. Though it’s not an idea I’m enthusiastic about, I think the indirect assistance laid out in the Local Journalism Sustainability Act is worth trying. The LJSA, which would provide tax credits for subscribers (or donors), advertisers and publishers, died at the end of the last congressional session despite having some bipartisan support.

Now a new, similar measure has surfaced. The Community News and Small Business Support Act would create five years’ worth of tax credits for advertisers and publishers, but not for subscribers. The bill is being sponsored by Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., and co-sponsored by Suzan DelBene, D-Wash. The trade publication Editor & Publisher has gone all out in covering the story, and I emailed a few of my thoughts to E&P’s Gretchen Peck.

As I told Peck, the new bill, like the LJSA, is worth supporting for two reasons: the tax credits are indirect enough not to interfere with the independence that news organizations need to hold government to account; and the publishers’ tax credit for hiring and retaining journalists gives even the giant chain owners like Gannett and Alden Global Capital some incentive to do the right thing.

That said, it’s hard to imagine the bill emerging intact from a House that just this week featured Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene waving around revenge porn starring Hunter Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., indulged by the Republican leadership, denying that he made the antisemitic and racist comments we had all heard him make.

Steven Waldman, president of the Rebuild Local News coalition, has written an op-ed for E&P endorsing the Tenney-DelBene bill and hailing its emphasis on local news outlets and advertisers. “This will directly help the small businesses, many of which had to cut back on their marketing spending because of COVID and then inflation, to get customers in the doors,” Waldman writes. “It makes sense because saving local news should not be about saving journalism jobs per se. It should be about strengthening communities.”

The bill is also far better than the misguided Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would extract revenues from Google and Facebook as compensation for the news content they repurpose.

There is no substitute for news entrepreneurs on the ground, for-profit and nonprofit, doing the hard work of building sustainable local news organizations. But a little bit of indirect assistance from the government wouldn’t hurt.

Pioneering digital publisher Howard Owens tells us about a new idea for raising revenues

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On May 18, 2023

In Local News

Howard Owens. Photo by Don Walker and used by permission.

On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Howard Owens, the publisher of The Batavian, a digital news organization in Genesee County, New York, way out near Buffalo. When I first met Howard, he was the director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media, which later morphed into Gannett. Howard launched The Batavian for GateHouse in 2008. In 2009, GateHouse eliminated Howard’s job, but they let him take The Batavian with him, and he’s been at it ever since.

The Batavian’s website is loaded with well over 100 ads, reflecting his belief that ads should be put right in front of the reader, not rotated in and out. He’s also got an innovative idea to raise money from his readers while keeping The Batavian free, which we ask him about during our conversation with him.

We’re also joined by Sebastian Grace, who just received his degree in journalism and political science from Northeastern. Everyone in journalism is freaking out about ChatGPT and other players in the new generation of artificial intelligence. Seb wrote a really smart piece, which is up on the What Works website, assuring us all that we shouldn’t worry — that AI is a tool that can allow journalists to work smarter.

Ellen has a Quick Take on Mississippi Today, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for stories that revealed how a former Mississippi governor used his office to steer millions of state welfare dollars to benefit family and friends. Including NFL quarterback Brett Favre! We interviewed Mary Margaret White, the CEO of Mississippi today, on the podcast in November 2022. And reporter Anna Wolfe has a great podcast about her prize-winning series.

I observe that journalism these days is often depicted as deep blue — something that liberals and progressives may pay attention to, but that conservatives and especially Trump supporters dismiss as fake news. But Steve Waldman, the head of the Rebuild Local News coalition, says it’s not that simple, and that the local news crisis is harming conservatives even more than it is liberals.

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

Slashing and burning local news outlets proves profitable for Gannett

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On February 24, 2023

In Local News

Photo (cc) 2008 by Patrickneil

Back before GateHouse Media morphed into Gannett in 2019 and assumed its corporate identity, I believed the company was in it for the long haul. Don’t get me wrong — GateHouse was always obsessed with cost-cutting and was a fairly awful steward of the papers it acquired. But its executives seemed to have convinced themselves that ugly was the only way to win, and that winning meant surviving.

No longer. I couldn’t possibly tell you what Gannett is up to anymore other than squeezing its properties for every last drop of revenue. On Thursday, the company released its latest financial results. They were terrible for journalists and the communities they serve. For investors, though, they were pretty good.

Don Seiffert reports in the Boston Business Journal that Gannett slashed the number of journalists at its 200 or so newspapers (including the flagship USA Today) by 20% over the past year — no surprise to those of us who were following those cuts throughout the year. Seiffert paged through the annual report and found that Gannett employed 3,900 journalists at the end of 2022 (3,300 in the U.S. and 600 at a U.K.-based subsidiary), down from 4,846 a year earlier. At the same time, though, the company had achieved profitability, which sent the stock price soaring by 22%

Incredibly, some of those investors think Gannett has been too slow to cut. For instance, Seiffert said on Mastodon that, during Thursday’s earnings call, Leon Cooperman, CEO of the hedge fund Omega Advisors, which is among Gannett’s larger investors, told Gannett chair Michael Reed, the $7.7 million man: “I think it’s fair to say you couldn’t understand the impact of Covid and the recession on the company. Having said that, I think it’s a fair criticism to say we have been too slow in reducing costs.” As Seiffert noted: “This, despite the company reducing total headcount by more than half since 2019.”

So what’s ahead? You will not be surprised to learn that CFO Doug Horne told investors that Gannett’s going big-time into artificial intelligence to perform some of the work that used to be done by journalists. Just feed the audio from the planning board meeting into ChatGPT and see what happens, I suppose.

Over at Poynter Online, Angela Fu reports that Reed is wicked psyched about 2023, writing:

Reed said the company is entering 2023 with “a lot of optimism.” Inflation seems to have peaked, he said, and newsprint and distribution costs have largely stabilized. In response to a shareholder question about a possible recession, Reed said the company had not seen anything in the first quarter to indicate the country was moving in that direction.

Unless it proves otherwise, though, Gannett should be regarded as nothing but a financial play at this point. The best thing it could do is offload its community papers to local owners who actually care about journalism, as it has done with a few weeklies Central Massachusetts as well as the Inquirer and Mirror of Nantucket, which I wrote about recently in an op-ed piece for The Boston Globe. Gannett has sold some of its papers nationally as well.

In many other cases, vibrant startups from The Provincetown Independent to several projects in the Boston suburbs are competing with vestigial Gannett papers, but more are needed. As Steven Waldman, president of the Rebuild Local News Coalition, has proposed, we need tax incentives aimed at persuading Gannett and other chains to get out of town — and to give committed local ownership a chance to revive grassroots news coverage.

Local news startups are overcoming the evils of corporate chain ownership

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On February 10, 2023

In Local News

The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield is overcoming the devastating cuts imposed by hedge-fund ownership. 1899 map via Snapshots of the Past.

By now it is widely understood that local news is in crisis. The United States has lost a fourth of its newspapers since 2005, and the loss has led to such ills as lower voter turnout in local elections, more political corruption, and the rise of ideologically driven “pink slime” websites that are designed to look like legitimate sources of community journalism.

Even in the face of this decline, though, hundreds of local news projects have been launched in recent years, from Denver, where The Colorado Sun was launched by 10 journalists who’d left The Denver Post in the face of devastating cuts, to MLK50, which focuses on social justice issues in Memphis. Some are nonprofit; some are for-profit. Most are new digital outlets; some are legacy newspapers. All of them are independent alternatives to the corporate chains that are stripping newsrooms and bleeding revenues in order to enrich their owners and pay down debt.

Read the rest at The Boston Globe.

Meet Anne Larner, one of a rising tide of local news entrepreneurs in the Boston suburbs

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On January 31, 2023

In Local News

Anne Larner

On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen and I talk with Anne Larner, a civic leader in Newton, Massachusetts, a city of nearly 90,000 people on the border of Boston. Anne is on the board of directors of The Newton Beacon, an independent nonprofit news outlet covering Newton.

Anne has a long track record of civic engagement in Newton and in Massachusetts. She moved to Newton in 1973 and has served on the School Committee, the Newton League of Women Voters, and has been a PTO president, among many roles. She also served 15 years at the MBTA Advisory Board, a public watchdog agency.

Newton is a microcosm of what’s happening in local news all over the country. Years ago, Newton had four local newspapers: The Newton Times, the Graphic, the Tribune and the Tab. But Gannett shut down a number of Massachusetts newspapers last year, including the print weekly, the Newton Tab. The Gannett digital site, Wicked Local, is still up and running. But content is regional.

Ellen has a Quick Take on MLK50, the award-winning Memphis newsroom that focuses on poverty, power and justice. They’ve received two major philanthropic grants that allow them to build for the future. And speaking of MLK50, executive editor Adrienne Johnson Martin was here at Northeastern ahead of Martin Luther King Day to give a talk on their work in Memphis. We’ll feature some interviews from that by our colleague Dakotah Kennedy.

I’ve got news about the Rebuild Local News Coalition, a new nonprofit organization that’s advocating for solutions to the local news crisis. But wait. It’s not new. And the solutions that it’s proposing aren’t new, either. We talked with the co-founder of the coalition, Steven Waldman, last summer, and our conversation is worth a listen if you missed it earler. Still, this is good news, which I explain.

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

The (re)launch of Rebuild Local News is nothing new. It’s welcome nevertheless.

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On January 25, 2023

In Local News

Steven Waldman

Tuesday’s announcement about a new organization aimed at helping to ease the local news crisis was a bit of a head-scratcher. Here’s the lead of Sara Fischer’s story at Axios:

Local journalism groups representing more than 3,000 local newsrooms have come together to create a new nonprofit that aims to save local news through bipartisan public policy initiatives.

The organization, Fischer continued, is being called the Rebuild Local News Coalition.

Well … OK. Except that the organization has been around for a few years. Way back in July 2021 I quoted Steven Waldman and noted that he was the co-founder of the coalition. Its main policy goals — tax credits aimed at boosting subscriptions and advertising as well as giving publishers incentives to hire and retain journalists — are also nothing new. That’s the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, or LJSA, a federal bill that kicked around for several years before dying at the end of the last Congress. With the House now controlled by press-hating right-wing Republicans, we are not likely to see it resurrected anytime soon.

But if the coalition wants to relaunch and call new attention to its work, so be it. According to this announcement, Waldman is taking a more prominent position — he’ll now be the full-time president, and he’s cutting back on his work at Report for America, which he also cofounded. The coalition has also reorganized as an independent nonprofit.

Ellen Clegg and I talked with Waldman about the Rebuild Local News Coalition and the LJSA on the “What Works” podcast in mid-2022. You can listen to it here, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

A bill to force Google and Facebook to pay for news moves closer to passage

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On December 6, 2022

In Local News

Photo (cc) 2008 by Nick Ares

A controversial measure that could force Google and Facebook to pay for the news they repurpose has suddenly been revived in the last days of the lame-duck Congress. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, or JCPA, would allow news organizations to skirt antitrust law and band together so they can negotiate with the two giant platforms over compensation. If negotiations fail, an outside arbitrator would be brought in to impose a settlement.

On the “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I recently interviewed U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., one of the co-sponsors of the JCPA. Cicilline spoke of the measure in terms of breaking up Google and Facebook’s monopoly on digital advertising, which is certainly real enough. According to Statista, the two tech titans control 52% of the market.

I last wrote about the JCPA in August. And though I described the bill as having lurched back to life, there hadn’t been many signs since then that it was going anywhere. That is, until this week, when the measure was added to a “must pass” defense-funding bill. House Republicans oppose the JCPA, and with Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on the verge of taking the speaker’s gavel, right now is the last chance. Sara Fischer and Ashley Gold have the details at Axios.

In August, I expressed some reservations about the JCPA but thought it was worth passing to see what would come out of it, especially since it was time-limited to four years (since doubled to eight). You often hear simplistic claims by proponents that Google and Facebook are republishing journalistic content without compensation. In fact, they’re not republishing anything. There’s no stealing and no copyright violation taking place. But there’s also no question that Google is far more valuable and useful because users are able to search for news content, and that some not-insignificant portion of Facebook’s traffic comes from users linking to and commenting on news stories. It does not strike me as unfair to insist that the platforms pay something for that value.

And yet the JCPA carries with it the possibility of some real downsides. Greedy corporate owners like Gannett and Alden Global Capital would benefit without any obligation to invest more in journalism. And though the legislation excludes larger news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post, a similar law in Australia has served mainly to line the pockets of the press baron Rupert Murdoch.

A better bill, in my view, is the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, or LJSA, which would provide for three tax credits: one for consumers who pay for a local news subscription; one for advertisers; and one for publishers that hire or retain journalists. As Steve Waldman of the Rebuild Local News Coalition told Ellen and me on “What Works,” that last provision, at least, would only benefit the corporate chains if they actually invest in journalism. But the LJSA has been seemingly stuck in congressional limbo for several years. If the JCPA passes, I can’t imagine that the LJSA will do anything other than disappear.

Facebook is threatening to eliminate all news content if the JCPA becomes law, a threat similar to one that it made and backed away from in Australia. The company, formally known as Meta, also ended its program of supporting local journalism recently, which will remove millions of dollars from what is an already shaky revenue stream.

I have to say that I was struck by a letter of opposition to the JCPA issued Monday by a coalition of 26 public-interest and trade organizations including the ACLU, the Internet Archive, LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, Common Cause, the Wikimedia Foundation and the United Church of Christ Ministry (!). Among other things, the letter claims that the money will mainly benefit media conglomerates and large broadcasters without setting aside anything for journalists. The coalition puts it this way: “The JCPA will cement and stimulate consolidation in the industry and create new barriers to entry for new and innovative models of truly independent, local journalism.”

We’ll see how it works out. There’s no question that many local news organizations are in difficult straits, and that a guaranteed source of income from Google and Facebook may be the difference between thriving and just barely getting by. If the JCPA is approved, I just hope it doesn’t become one of those government programs that become a permanent part of the landscape. If it works, fine. If there are problems, fix them. And if it’s a disaster, get rid of it.

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