Tag: Texas Tribune

Taking in the sites: Local-news outlets respond to Trump, Musk and authoritarianism

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 tells us what’s next for the pioneering news project

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.

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

Sophie Culpepper tells us about covering the local-news beat for Nieman Lab

Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab

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.

Ellen has a Quick Take on Sewell Chan, the former editor of The Texas Tribune who has just started his new job as executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Ellen interviewed Sewell in Austin for the Texas chapter in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

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.

You can listen to our conversation here and access an AI-generated transcript. You can also subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Barbed Wire, a new Texas project, hopes to give for-profit journalism a much-needed jolt

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.

Johanna Dunaway tells us about her plans to create a local news database

Johanna Dunaway

On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Johanna Dunaway, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. She is also research director of the university’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship in Washington D.C.

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.

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

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Pulitzer congrats to Lookout Santa Cruz, featured in our book and podcast

Ken Doctor (via LinkedIn)

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.

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Catching up on the news about the news: Paywalls, NPR and the future of nonprofit media

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.”

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Why large foundations need to step up for smaller local news projects

Postcard of Athens, Ohio, via Wikimedia Commons

In the course of our reporting for “What Works in Community News,” Ellen Clegg and I were confronted with a reality that cuts against our usual optimism: that though news startups across the country are helping to fill the gap created by the decline of legacy newspapers, the new media landscape is unevenly distributed.

Large regional and statewide nonprofits like The Texas Tribune and NJ Spotlight News are doing reasonably well, though the Tribune has recently hit a few bumps and Spotlight has never been a fundraising behemoth. Smaller projects serving affluent suburbs, like a number of startups in Eastern Massachusetts, are doing well. But there are few independent news outlets serving low-population rural areas and urban communities of color, and those that do exist are often overlooked by the larger philanthropic organizations.

Corinne Colbert writes about that reality for a newsletter called Local News Blues, which I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of until my friend and teacher Howard Owens of The Batavian pointed me to it a few days ago. Colbert is cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Athens County Independent, a nonprofit digital startup that in southeastern Ohio. Late last week she wrote a commentary headlined “Does big philanthropy really care about our smaller news markets?” Now, you know the rule about question headlines: the answer is almost always “no.” She observes:

Nearly 60% of foundation grants go to national and global nonprofit outlets, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News. Local outlets — which INN defines as those serving audiences at the county, city or town level or having a specific focus — represent almost one-fourth of nonprofit news jobs, but we get less than 20% of foundation funding. That gap represents millions and millions of dollars.

Recently the Houston Landing, a well-funded nonprofit with strong backing from the American Journalism Project, imploded when the publisher fired the highly regarded editor and the top investigative reporter without offering any logical explanation. The Landing may recover, but there’s been a serious lack of transparency. Meanwhile, projects that Ellen and I have written about such as MLK50 in Memphis and the New Haven Independent have never been able to attract much in the way of national funding, even though both are performing vitally important work.

Nonprofits are bringing news and information to communities in ways that for-profits often no longer can. But it’s time for major foundations — including Press Forward, a $500 million effort comprising 22 philanthropies — to bring renewed efforts to helping not just large, sexy projects but more quotidian efforts as well. Fortunately there are signs that Press Forward gets it.

“Small markets … present business challenges that corporations are often unwilling to face,” writes Colbert, “and those challenges make launching or growing a local news operation especially difficult. National funders could ease those burdens, but first they have to acknowledge our existence — and our importance.”

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A new report finds that news deserts are spreading — but there are bright spots, too

Photo (cc) 2008 by Stefano Brivio

The release of a new report by Penelope Muse Abernathy on the state of local news is always a big deal. For 15 years now, she’s been tracking the extent of the crisis, and has done more than anyone to popularize the phrase “news deserts,” which describes communities without a source of reliable news and information. This week Abernathy, now at Northwestern University’s Medill School, issued “The State of Local News 2023.” It’s a downbeat report, although there are a few bright spots. Here’s a key finding:

The data and insights collected and analyzed in this 2023 report on The State of Local News paint the picture of a country and society increasingly divided between the journalism-have’s — mostly residents in more affluent cities and suburban areas where alternative news sources are gaining traction — and the journalism have-not’s, those in economically struggling and traditionally underserved metro, suburban and rural communities. This partitioning of our citizenry poses a far-reaching crisis for our democracy as it simultaneously struggles with political polarization, a lack of civic engagement and the proliferation of misinformation and information online.

Before I continue, a disclosure: Abernathy, who’s been a guest on our “What Works” podcast about the future of local news, was kind enough to provide a pre-publication endorsement of the book that Ellen Clegg and I have written, “What Works in Community News,” which comes out in January.

Abernathy’s principal collaborator on the new report is Sarah Stonbely, director of Medill’s State of Local News Project, who I interviewed in 2022 when she was at the Center for Cooperative Media, part of Montclair State University in New Jersey.

If you’d like a good summary of Abernathy and Stonbely’s report, I recommend Sarah Fischer’s overview in Axios, which leads with the prediction that the U.S. will have lost one third of its newspapers by the end of 2024.

The cleavage between affluent urban and suburban areas and less affluent urban and rural areas is one of the major challenges Abernathy and Stonbely identify, and it’s definitely something that Ellen and I noticed in our reporting for “What Works in Community News.” I recall asking folks at the start-up Colorado Sun why they were trying to stretch their resources to cover stories across the state rather than focusing on Denver. The answer: the Denver metro area was already fairly well served despite massive cuts at The Denver Post, owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. By contrast, there was very little news coverage in the more rural parts of the state.

As Abernathy and Stonbely put it: “The footprint for alternative local news outlets — approximately 550 digital-only sites, 720 ethnic media organizations and 215 public broadcasting stations — remains very small and centered around metro areas.” Indeed, this chart tells a rather harrowing tale. As you can see, people who live in news deserts are considerably less affluent and less educated than the national average.

The report also includes a section called “Bright Spots in the Local News Landscape.” Although the interactive map is a little hard to navigate, I can see that several projects that Ellen and I profile in “What Works in Community News” are included, such as NJ Spotlight News, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, The Texas Tribune, The Colorado Sun and the Daily Memphian.

The report also highlights The Boston Globe as one of its good-news stories, observing that, under the ownership of John and Linda Henry, the paper has thrived on the strength of its digital subscriptions. In a sidebar, Tom Brown, the Globe’s vice president of consumer analytics, tells Abernathy that digital growth continues, although at a slower rate than during the COVID pandemic. Retention is down slightly, too. “We are nonetheless still seeing overall strong retention,” Brown says, “and we are investing in several areas of the business with the goal of engaging subscribers more and, in particular, our new subscribers.”

Editor Nancy Barnes adds that though the Globe is ramping up its coverage of the Greater Boston area as well as in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, it can’t fill the gap created by the gutting and closure of local weekly papers at the hands of Gannett, the giant newspaper chain that until recently dominated coverage of the Boston suburbs and exurbs.

“Having returned to Boston after many years away, I have been stunned by the decimation of local newspapers across Massachusetts and New England,” Barnes says. “However, our coverage strategy is not tied to specific Gatehouse newspaper communities [a reference to Gannett’s predecessor company]. We cover greater Boston in depth, but we don’t have the bandwidth to be the local news source for everyone.”

This week’s Medill report is the first of a multi-part series. Future chapters will be released over the next few weeks and into January.

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