On our new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with John Mooney, the founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, a digital nonprofit that’s part of NJ PBS, the state’s public broadcasting network. Mooney, who covered education for The Star-Ledger in Newark, took a buyout in 2008, put together a business plan, and launched NJ Spotlight in 2010 under the auspices of the nonprofit Community Foundation of New Jersey.
While Spotlight was making a mark journalistically, it wasn’t breaking even, and its sponsor, the Community Foundation of New Jersey, was getting impatient. After extensive talks, Mooney affiliated with NJ PBS. The name changed to NJ Spotlight News, and the merger means true collaboration between the newsrooms. Both the broadcast and digital sides take part in news meetings, and there are considerable synergies between the website and the daily half-hour newscast. (In a previous podcast, Northeastern University professor and TV journalist Mike Beaudet discussed his initiative aimed at reinventing TV news for a vertical video age.)
As we wrote in “What Works in Community News,” the story of NJ PBS and NJ Spotlight News suggests that public broadcasting can play a role in bolstering coverage of regional and statewide news. It’s a question of bringing together two different newsroom cultures. There’s also a Yo-Yo Ma angle to our conversation, so you won’t want to miss that.
Ellen has a Quick Take about the death of John Thornton, a venture capitalist who helped launch The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Austin, in 2009. He also was a founder of the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country. Thornton, who had struggled with mental health issues, took his own life. He was 59.
I’ve got a Quick Take about our webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News,” which was held the evening of April 3. Panelists gave great advice about what board members and donors need to know. You can watch the video and read a summary generated by Northeastern’s AI tool, Claude, on our website.
There was something about Houston Landing that never quite made sense.
It was a large digital startup in a city already served by the Houston Chronicle, whose corporate owner, Hearst, enjoys a reputation for strong journalism. It attracted a stunning amount of philanthropic funding — $20 million — before its launch two years ago, and somehow managed to burn through much of it. It was beset by tumult after its second CEO, veteran journalist Peter Bhatia, fired the Landing’s editor-in-chief, its top investigative reporter and, later, another top editor for reasons that have never been fully explained.
And on Tuesday, the Landing reached the end of the line, announcing that it would close because, despite “significant seed funding, it has been unable to build additional revenue streams to support ongoing operations.” The site will shut down in May, and 43 employees will lose their jobs.
Peter Bhatia
Bhatia agreed to come on our “What Works” podcast last June after he emailed me to complain about something I’d written. My co-host, Ellen Clegg, and I found him to be charming, as candid as he could be when talking about internal personnel matters, and dedicated to creating a first-rate news outlet.
When I asked him about competing with the Chronicle, he emphasized that he didn’t see that as the Landing’s mission.
“There is so much opportunity to do journalism here,” he said. “And the people who founded Houston Landing and who ultimately recruited me here wanted more journalism for this vast community. They wanted journalism that was hard-hitting and performed traditional watchdog and accountability roles, but also to create a new kind of journalism, if you will, that is accessible to traditionally undercovered communities, which make up such a huge percentage of the population here.”
As for the firings of editor-in-chief Mizanur Rahman, investigative reporter Alex Stuckey and editor John Tedesco, Bhatia said: “I came in here after things were established and in place, and I gave things a year to develop and go in the right direction. I have nothing but respect for the people that you mentioned. They are good human beings and fantastic journalists, but we were on a path that was not sustainable, and as the leader, I felt I had to make changes in order to get us in a position to be successful for the long term.”
In any case, the people Bhatia brought in, editor-in-chief Manny García and managing editor Angel Rodriguez, are well-regarded journalists. Unfortunately, they’re also now out of work.
Columbia Journalism Review editor Sewell Chan, who had an opportunity to watch Houston Landing up close during his own stint as editor of The Texas Tribune, has written a nuanced and perceptive take on what went wrong. “In hindsight, money was both a blessing and a curse for the Landing,” Chan writes, observing that the leadership team may have been tempted by that early bonanza to spend beyond its means.
“The Landing also suffered from a lack of focus,” Chan adds, explaining that it was never clear whether its mission was to cover the city or the broader region; whether it saw itself as a traditional news outlet holding the powerful to account or if, instead, it sought to empower the community by providing them with the tools to be their own storytellers, like Documenters or Outlier. Chan also delivers this verdict on Bhatia:
I’ve known Bhatia for close to thirty years. The son of an Indian father, he has been a pioneering Asian American newsroom leader and has the utmost integrity. However, Bhatia had not run a digital-only operation, hadn’t worked extensively in nonprofit fundraising, and didn’t know Houston well.
We are immensely proud of the work we’ve done and the impact we’ve made. Houston Landing has shown what’s possible when a news team commits itself to truth and transparency. Our stories highlighted voices that too often go unheard, sparked conversations that matter and helped inspire positive change throughout the city we love.
It’s a shame. Houston may not have been a news desert before the Landing landed, but more coverage is always better, and the focus on underrepresented communities that Bhatia talked about with Ellen and me will not be easy to replace.
It’s important, too, to recognize that what happened at the Landing says little about the nonprofit news movement in general. Chan quotes Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer of the American Journalism Project (one of the Landing’s funders), as saying that the closing is “not part of a broader trend,” and that nonprofit local news outlets remain on a growth trajectory.
Indeed, many of the nonprofits that Ellen and I track have proved to be remarkably resilient, with a few about to embark on their third decade. Unfortunately, Houston Landing will not join that charmed circle, and will instead close just a little more than two years after it was launched amid a wave of optimism.
Texas Tribune CEO Sonal Shah at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin last September.
Instability in the top ranks of The Texas Tribune continues, as Sonal Shah has announced that she’ll step down as CEO of the nonprofit in December. My What Works partner Ellen Clegg, who profiled the Tribune in our book, “What Works in Community News,” has all the details, writing:
Her impending departure marks yet another jolting transition for a news outlet that launched in November 2009 with a sweeping ambition: to prop up democracy by transforming news coverage throughout the Lone Star State. But nonprofit news sites, which are usually supported by a mix of revenue streams, are not immune to challenging market forces and workplace issues like layoffs and union drives.
The Tribune is among the largest and most respected digital nonprofits to be founded in the second wave of such projects, following such pioneers as Voice of San Diego, MinnPost and the New Haven Independent several years earlier. The site was launched by venture capitalist John Thornton and veteran journalist Evan Smith, and it appeared to be a rock of stability in a rather tumultuous environment.
But Smith moved on from the CEO’s position, and now Shah, citing family reasons, has announced her departure after less than three years. (Shah was a guest on our podcast last November.) Editor-in-chief Sewell Chan cycled through before taking the top job at the Columbia Journalism Review; he was replaced by Matthew Watkins, who’s been at the Tribune in 2015.
Thornton himself had moved on to co-found the American Journalism Project, which seeks to fund local news organizations across the country; he died late last month.
The turmoil at the Tribune could just be one of those things. Here’s hoping that the project can settle down, fix its business challenges and continue providing the Lone Star State with top-notch journalism. Its work is vitally important.
Social media post from Never Ending Books, via the New Haven Independent
With Donald Trump and Elon Musk rampaging through our government and sparking a constitutional crisis, it seems that many anti-Trump folks are changing their news consumption habits in one of two ways: they’re either overloading on the horror show that’s being endlessly reported and dissected on national news outlets, or they’re tuning out altogether.
But this is a moment when local news is more important than ever.
For one thing, it builds community, and we still need to find ways to move past our political differences and work cooperatively with our neighbors on issues that are grounded in where we live.
For another, local-news organizations are documenting how Trumpist authoritarianism is playing out in our states, cities and towns. What they’re offering is a crucial supplement to the top-level coverage that national outlets are providing about issues like JD Vance’s support for a neo-Nazi party in Germany, the angry resignations of career prosecutors over Trump’s corrupt deal with New York Mayor Eric Adams and Musk’s dismantling of the federal work force.
But of course these stories all have downstream effects as well. With that in mind, here are nine recent stories about how Trumpism is playing out at the local level, all reported by news outlets profiled in “What Works in Community News,” the book I co-authored with Ellen Clegg.
Neo-Nazis Gather, Shout, Salute,Disperse, by Brian Slattery, New Haven Independent. “A group of neo-Nazis showed up on State Street Saturday night. Their destination: Never Ending Books, the long-running free bookstore, arts and nonprofit community space. Whatever the purpose of their visit was, it was met with a larger gathering of Never Ending Books supporters, and a police intervention. The incident — which ended without violence — occurred while Never Ending Books was hosting a show of improvised music from the New Haven-based FIM collective.”
As Deportation Fears Spread, Memphis Mayor Promises to Focus Elsewhere,by Brittany Brown, MLK50. “Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s communications team told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism that the city does not currently plan to partner with ICE to carry out mass deportations. ‘Our police [department] is understaffed and has pressing issues to address,’ Young said in a statement. The mayor refused to say if the city will make any proactive efforts to support Memphis’ immigrants, who make up more than 7% of the city’s population.”
17 Colorado Environmental Projects Are in Limbo after Trump Halts Spending from Biden-era Law, by Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun. “The proposed projects focus on improving habitats, ecological stability and resilience against drought in the Colorado River Basin, where prolonged drought and overuse have cast uncertainty over the future water supply for 40 million people. The bureau also awarded $100 million for Colorado River environmental projects in Arizona, California and Nevada.” By the way, the Sun has a special section on its homepage titled “Trump & Colorado.”
The New Administration Acts and the Heritage Foundation Smiles,by Alan Gueberg, Cherokee Chronicle Times, which is affiliated with the Storm Lake Times Pilot of Iowa: “Project 2025 is the cornerstone of President Trump’s governing plans. Moreover, many of his most controversial cabinet and other federal appointees come with Heritage Foundation’s stickers on their considerable baggage. Those plans and that assembled team — including policy-heavy, farming-lite secretary of agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins — will have a deep impact on farmers, ranchers, and rural America if used as guidelines to write the 2025 Farm Bill.”
Trump Administration Freezes Billions for Electric Vehicle Chargers, by Michael Sol Warren, NJ Spotlight News. “The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, NEVI, was created as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by former President Joe Biden in 2021 with the goal of building out America’s network of fast chargers for electric vehicles. Of the $5 billion allocated for the program, $104 million is dedicated to New Jersey. The Garden State is supposed to get that money over a five-year period, according to the state Department of Transportation.”
Slew of Minnesota Companies beyond Target Go Mute on DEI, by Brooks Johnson, Patrick Kennedy and Carson Hartzog, Sahan Journal, Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Target has been considered for years a national corporate leader in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices — a position bolstered after its support of Black-owned businesses following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. So when the Minneapolis-based retailer announced last month it is pulling back on its diversity goals, Target was accused of political expediency, losing the trust of some Black activists who said the betrayal hurt more than other DEI pullbacks from companies such as Amazon, Google, Deere and McDonald’s.”
Wary Town Departments Identify Programs,by Mike Rosenberg, The Bedford Citizen, Bedford, Massachusetts. “Bedford Town Manager Matt Hanson met this week with municipal department heads to identify programs and activities that might be jeopardized by funding suspensions and/or terminations at the federal level. ‘At a high level, we have started to discuss ways to continue to provide the same level of services to residents should certain programs be cut or scaled back from the federal government,’ Hanson said. ‘But there are many moving parts to consider.’”
Texas Migrant Shelters Are Nearly Empty after Trump’s Actions Effectively Shut the Border, by Berenice Garcia, The Texas Tribune. “Migrant shelters that helped nearly a thousand asylum seekers per day at the height of migrant crossings just a few years ago are now nearly empty. The shelters mostly along the Texas-Mexico border reported a plunge in the number of people in their care since the Trump administration effectively closed the border to asylum seekers in January. Some expect to close by the end of the month.”
North Coast Counties React to Trump’s Funding Orders, by Mary Rose Kaczorowski, The Mendocino Voice, Mendocino County, California. “Between President Donald Trump’s plans to take over Greenland, Panama, Canada, and now Gaza, it’s not surprising that people might have lost touch with what’s happening here at home. That luxury is not granted to a wide variety of nonprofits, districts, and agencies. Trump’s recent executive orders to pause all federal funding until recipient programs could be reviewed for adherence to his policy priorities are at the moment legally suspended. That doesn’t mean the matter is dead.”
Texas Tribune CEO Sonal Shah at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin last September
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sonal Shah, the CEO of The Texas Tribune, a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Shah, a Houston native and first-generation immigrant, took over as chief executive in January 2023 after co-founder Evan Smith decided to move on.
Shah is part of a major transition at the Tribune and brings broad experience in government, the private sector and philanthropy. She is a trained economist who worked on the Obama presidential transition team, worked in philanthropy for Google, and was national policy director for Pete Buttigieg’s run for president.
I’ve got a Quick Take about Advance Local, a local news chain in New Jersey that is ending its print editions — including the storied Star-Ledger of Newark — and going fully digital.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on The Minnesota Star Tribune’s editorial non-endorsement in the presidential race and an alternative endorsement of Kamala Harris written on a blog by former Strib staffers.
On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sophie Culpepper, a staff writer at Nieman Lab who focuses on covering local news. She co-founded The Lexington Observer, a digital local news site covering Lexington, a town of 35,000 outside Boston. For two years, she was the nonprofit news outlet’s only full-time journalist. She covered public schools, local government, economic development and public safety, among other subjects.
I discusss the recent Nonprofit News Awards bestowed by the Institute for Nonprofit News. Three of the awards went to projects that have been featured on the “What Works” podcast. The Service to Nonprofit News Award went to Andy and Dee Hall, the retired founders of Wisconsin Watch, who were guests on this podcast last December. VTDigger won a community champion award. And Mississippi Today won an explanatory journalism award.
In addition, an INNovator Award for a sold-out event featuring live stories from the stage went to Brookline.News, a digital nonprofit founded by Ellen.
The Texas state capitol in Austin. Photo (cc) 2022 by Joe Passe.
If local and regional news is going to survive, we need to find a path for profit-seeking enterprises. The nonprofit sector is becoming increasingly dominant, at least among startups that have any sort of significant reporting capacity. Yet after Ellen Clegg and I finished up our book, “What Works in Community News,” three of the for-profits that we wrote about switched to the nonprofit model: The Colorado Sun, The Mendocino Voice and Santa Cruz Local.
So I was heartened to learn that a new for-profit news site will debut in Texas this Monday. Max Tani reports for Semafor that Barbed Wire, which will cover politics, culture and entertainment, is a for-profit enterprise that’s pursuing advertising and voluntary memberships.
I’m not sure that Barbed Wire will be entirely for-profit, as Tani writes that “the outlet said it had a mix of private investors and nonprofit grants behind it.” But today’s successful for-profits often have a relationship with nonprofits so that they can raise tax-exempt money for public-interest journalism. Those include not just for-profit startups like The Provincetown Independent but also legacy newspapers like The Boston Globe, The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and The Seattle Times.
Barbed Wire is expected to report statewide news with a point of view, and it’s connected with a number of Democratic political figures, according to Tani. We’ll have to see how that plays out, since Tani reports that the site “won’t necessarily be neutral on issues like climate change or abortion” but “is not explicitly partisan.”
That stands in contrast with the state’s largest nonprofit news outlet, The Texas Tribune, which is decidedly nonpartisan. Texas is also home to statewide outlets like Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer, so Barbed Wire is entering crowded territory. But Texas is a big state.
I got to know Johanna when we were both Joan Shorenstein Fellows at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2016. I wrote part of my book about a new breed of wealthy newspaper owners, “The Return of the Moguls.” Johanna wrote a paper that examined how mobile technology was actually contributing to the digital divide between rich and poor.
Dunaway recently received a $200,000 grant from the Carnegie Fellows Program to further her work on local news. Among other things, she plans on building out an expansive database that lists local news outlets throughout the United States. She also plans to examine whether the nationalizing of news contributes to the toxic quality of public discourse.
I’ve got a Quick Take on what has been a bad year so far for public broadcasting operations, with cuts being imposed from Washington, D.C., to Denver and elsewhere. In Boston, where “What Works” is based, GBH News, the local news arm of the public media powerhouse GBH, has imposed some devastating cuts. But they’ve also brought in new leadership that could lead to a brighter future.
Ellen looks at a new use of print by the all-digital Texas Tribune, the nonprofit news outlet based in Austin.
Congratulations to Lookout Santa Cruz, a digital local-news startup that on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. The site was recognized for its reporting on a January 2023 flood and its aftermath. In the words of the Pulitzer board, Lookout Santa Cruz published “detailed and nimble community-focused coverage, over a holiday weekend, of catastrophic flooding and mudslides that displaced thousands of residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses.” Here’s what Lookout Santa Cruz had to say about winning the award:
We reported quickly and carefully, vetting often scattered and confusing facts, making sure we got out the accurate news and information essential to individual and community decision-making. We documented in words, images and videos what people from the reaches of San Lorenzo Valley to Pajaro to Capitola were experiencing. We called on President Joe Biden to visit beleaguered South County as well as jaw-dropping coastal damage. We did what we always do, but at warp speed and still made sure that our deep reporting work got its usual double edits by our experienced, diligent editors.
Ellen Clegg and I looked at the Santa Cruz news ecosystem in our book, “What Works in Community News.” The region is served by two digital startups — Santa Cruz Local, originally a for-profit that launched in 2019 and that converted to nonprofit status after our book was finished, and Lookout Santa Cruz, a for-profit public benefit corporation right from the start. (A public benefit corporation is a for-profit that is legally required to operate with a public service mission.) We’ve also offered more depth on the two news organizations through our podcast, interviewing Santa Cruz Local co-founder Kara Meyberg Guzman and Lookout Santa Cruz founder Ken Doctor.
Lookout Santa Cruz is a high-profile, well-funded project that received $2.5 million in startup money from the likes of the Knight Foundation, the Google News Innovation Challenge and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Doctor, a former executive for a former newspaper chain, Knight Ridder, spent years writing about the business of news for publications such as Nieman Lab and his own blog, Newsonomics, which is now on ice.
Doctor’s entry into the Santa Cruz media scene was not without controversy. As we wrote in our book, “Another competing media outlet, the alternative weekly Good Times, greeted Lookout with a blast, claiming that Doctor was benefiting from the ‘false narrative’ that Santa Cruz was a news desert. Doctor responded by calling that ‘the greatest free publicity that we could ever get.'”
Guzman, too, expressed a bit of pique over Doctor’s arrival, telling us that she and her business partner, Stephen Baxter — unlike Doctor — had struggled to raise the money they needed to start Santa Cruz Local after leaving Alden Global Capital’s Santa Cruz Sentinel, though over time they were able to attract some money from Google and Facebook and build a viable business. Guzman described Santa Cruz Local’s mission as providing deep accountability journalism of local government and other institutions, while Doctor said Lookout Santa Cruz was aiming to become the “new primary news source” at a time when the Santa Cruz Sentinel was fading away.
Lookout Santa Cruz is also intended as the first in a series of Lookout Local sites. Maybe the Pulitzer will give Doctor’s project the prominence it needs to start building out his idea.
Two finalists of note
Lookout Santa Cruz was one of three projects profiled in “What Works in Community News” to receive Pulitzer recognition on Monday, though it was the only one to make it into the winner’s circle. Here are the organizations we followed that earned finalist recogition:
Mississippi Today, in Local Reporting, for a collaboration with The New York Times that offered a “detailed examination of corruption and abuse, including the torturing of suspects, by Mississippi sheriffs and their officers over two decades.” We interviewed Mississippi Today CEO Mary Margaret White on our podcast in November 2022. (Mississippi Today’s Anna Wolfe won a 2023 Pulitzer for her coverage of official corruption.)
The Texas Tribune, in Explanatory Reporting, for a collaboration with ProPublic and “Frontline” that reports on “law enforcement’s catastrophic response to the mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school and also for documenting the political and policy shortcomings that have led to similar deadly police failures across the country.” The Tribune is the subject of a chapter in our book.
Courage recognized
When we think about courageous journalists, what usually comes to mind are war correspondents. But courage can be found closer to home, too — as in the case of Lauren Chooljian and her colleagues at New Hampshire Public Radio, who were subjected to frightening harassment and daunting legal challenges while they were reporting on “corruption and sexual abuse within the lucrative recovery industry.” For their efforts they were recognized as a finalist in the Audio Reporting category. And here is a New York Times story (free link) on their ordeal.
Old-school paywalls. Photo (cc) 2008 by Dan Kennedy.
•Are we really doing this again? Richard Stengel argues in the paywall-protected Atlantic (free link) that news organizations should publish their journalism for free during the 2024 campaign lest readers be driven to non-paywalled sources of misinformation and disinformation. He provides no advice on how these news organizations are supposed to pay their journalists, and he makes no mention of the many high-quality sources of free news that still exist — among them The Associated Press, NPR, the PBS “NewsHour,” The Guardian, BBC News, local public radio and television stations, national network newscasts and local TV newscasts. You may disdain that last suggestion, but surveys show that local TV news is the most trusted source of journalism we have, and it’s an important source of breaking news.
•Still more on the internal crisis at NPR. Alicia Montgomery, who held several high leadership posts at NPR before moving to Slate, has written her own essay about what’s wrong with the network’s culture, partly in response to Uri Berliner, partly to get a few things of her own off her chest. Montgomery’s essay is nuanced, and she acknowledges that NPR’s culture can be more than a little twee. But here’s the money quote: “In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” That certainly reflects my experience as a listener — that though NPR may tilt left on culture, its coverage of politics too often indulges in both-sides-ism at its most reductionist. And here’s yet another piece prompted by Berliner’s essay, this one by NPR anchor Steve Inskeep.
•Two digital news giants walk into a room… Richard Tofel, a founder and former president of the investigative nonprofit ProPublica, recently interviewed Evan Smith, a founder and the former CEO of The Texas Tribune, the largest statehouse nonprofit in the U.S. My colleague Ellen Clegg, who wrote about the Tribune for our book, “What Works in Community News,” offers her perspective on the encounter — which took place not in a room but in Tofel’s must-read newsletter, “Second Rough Draft.” As Ellen writes: “When two legends in digital publishing sit down to talk in unvarnished terms about the past, present and future of nonprofit journalism, it’s worth noting. And reading.”
