By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
At What Works, my colleague Ellen Clegg offers some analysis on news that the staff of The Texas Tribune has announced plans to unionize. The Tribune is one of the projects that we profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
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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.”
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.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Paul Bass, the founder and former editor of the New Haven Independent. Bass is originally from White Plains, New York, but he arrived in New Haven in the late 1970s to attend Yale, and he has been reporting on all the quirks and glory of his adopted hometown ever since.
Bass was the main subject of my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” and is one of the news entrepreneurs featured in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.” Bass launched the New Haven Independent in 2005 as an online-only nonprofit.
Last fall, Bass announced he was stepping aside as editor, handing the top job over to managing editor Tom Breen. But he’s continuing to play a role at the Independent and its multimedia arms, and he has just begun another venture: the Independent Review Crew, which features arts and culture reviews from all over, including right here in Boston via Universal Hub.
Ellen has a Quick Take on The Texas Tribune, the much-admired nonprofit news outlet started by Evan Smith and others in Austin. The Tribune has been a model for other startups, so it rocked the world of local news last month when CEO Sonal Shah announced that 11 staffers had been laid off.
I report on another acquisition by Alden Global Capital, the New York-based hedge fund that has earned scorn for the way it manages its newspapers. Alden acquired four family-owned newspapers in Pennsylvania. Worse, the family members who actually ran the papers wanted to keep them, but they were outvoted by the rest of the family.
You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
The Texas Observer, a progressive publication that has been covering politics in the Lone Star State since 1954, has survived its near-death experience — at least for now. The Texas Tribune reports that the one-time home of the late, legendary Molly Ivins has raised $300,000, most of it through a GoFundMe, since announcing it would close and is now plotting a path forward.
This is good news, of course. Still, telling your readers that you’re going to shut down unless they respond to an emergency appeal does not constitute a business model. The reality is that the Tribune, a large, well-funded nonprofit that is grounded in reporting rather than ideology, has established itself as the one essential outlet for coverage of politics and public policy in Texas.
I hope the Observer can survive — but if it does, it will be in the shadow of the Tribune.
Earlier:
The Texas Observer, a highly regarded publication that was once the home of the late, great Molly Ivins, is shutting down and laying off its 17-person staff, which includes 13 journalists. The Texas Tribune has the story and notes:
The closing of the Observer raises questions about whether small progressive publications can survive the digital and demographic transformation of journalism and the information ecosystem during a time of rapid social and technological change.
Indeed, the Tribune, a nonprofit digital startup with more than 50 journalists, would be foremost among the new wave of publications that led to the Observer’s demise.
The Observer had been in turmoil for quite some time. My “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, talked about it on our podcast a year ago this week. Click here and go to 29:00.
On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mary Margaret White, the CEO of Mississippi Today, a nonprofit digital news outlet that has been covering the state for more than six years. The staff has a robust presence at the statehouse in Jackson and provides cultural and sports coverage as well.
Mary Margaret is a Mississippi native. She has a bachelor’s in English and journalism and a master’s in Southern studies from the University of Mississippi. She also spent almost 10 years working for the state, with jobs in arts and tourism. Her work has appeared in The Listening Post Collective, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and on Mississippi Public Broadcasting radio.
I’ve got a Quick Take on a major transition at the New Haven Independent. Last week the indefatigable founder, Paul Bass, announced he was stepping aside as editor of the Independent. The new editor will be Tom Breen, currently the managing editor. Luckily, Bass isn’t going anywhere but will continue to play a major role.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on another big transition at The Texas Tribune. Economist Sonal Shah is becoming CEO at the Tribune in January. Shah, who has had leadership roles at Google, the White House, and other high-impact organizations, replaces co-founder Evan Smith, who is taking a role as senior adviser to the Emerson Collective. It’s a big change at a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Smith says he’ll continue to spread the local news gospel in his new role.
You can listen to our latest podcast here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I dive into our reporter’s notebooks after our scheduled guest had a last-minute medical emergency, catching up with NJ Spotlight News, the emergence of The Lexington Observer, the transition at The Texas Tribune, and the turmoil at The Graphic-Advocate (both of them!) of Lake City, Iowa.
Ellen also has a rave for Emily Rooney’s “Beat the Press” podcast and her recent interview with legendary WCVB-TV news anchor Natalie Jacobson, who’s written a memoir about her life and career.
Like Boston’s Orange Line and Green Line, the “What Works” podcast will be off the intertubes for a few weeks as Ellen and I race to meet the deadline for our book about the future of local news. You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
Our latest “What Works” podcast features Jaida Grey Eagle, a photojournalist working for Sahan Journal in Minneapolis through Report for America. She is Oglala Lakota and was born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and raised in Minneapolis.
Launched in 2019, Sahan Journal covers immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota. Report for America places young journalists at local news outlets across the country for two- and three-year stints.
Grey Eagle’s photography has been published in a wide range of publications and featured on a billboard on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. She is also a co-producer of “Sisters Rising,” a documentary film about six Native American women reclaiming person and tribal sovereignty in the face of sexual violence.
Ellen Clegg and I also offer our quick takes on paywalls and media companies that target well-heeled readers, and on Evan Smith’s announcement that he’s stepping down as chief executive officer of The Texas Tribune.
You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
Previously published at WGBHNews.org.
No, the still-unfolding catastrophe in Texas could not have been prevented. But vital investigative reporting over the past year and a half shows how it might have been more manageable if government officials had taken heed. More important, the journalists’ findings lay out a path forward that should be carefully studied once the waters begin to subside.
The reporting is contained in a series called “Hell and High Water,” which was produced by three nonprofit news organizations: ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and “Reveal,” a public radio program from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The journalism is impressively deep and features a number of interactive graphics that allow users to test various storm scenarios. In summary, though, the story is a simple one:
“The Texas coast powers the nation,” state land commissioner George P. Bush (son of Jeb and Columba) told the journalists. “Its vulnerability should be considered a national-security issue.”
The challenge, not surprisingly, is a broken political culture that values money over lives and that includes more than a few political figures who regard climate change — not to mention basic science and engineering — as “fake news.” Take, for instance, Mike Talbot, who until recently was head of the Harris County Flood Control District, which includes Houston. Talbot derided scientists and conservationists, calling them “anti-development” and adding: “They have an agenda … their agenda to protect the environment overrides common sense.” The article adds ominously: “His successor shares his views.”
There are two major pieces in the series. The first, published in March 2016, examines what would have happened if Hurricane Ike had directly hit Houston in 2008 rather than veering off course at the last minute, causing less damage than had been projected. (Not that Ike wasn’t devastating. Seventy-four people were killed, and damage was estimated at $30 billion.)
For the past nine years, scientists and officials have talked about plans to protect the region from such a disaster. But talk is cheap, and action still appears to be years away. The most ambitious of those plans is the “Ike Dike,” based on a project in the Netherlands aimed at protecting inland areas from a 10,000-year storm. But it’s clear that there is little political will in Texas for such an undertaking, which could cost $8 billion or more — a pittance compared to Hurricane Harvey’s eventual price tag.
The other major article, published last December, takes a look at the increase in flooding in recent years, a direct consequence of climate change and the loss of land to absorb increasing amounts of rainfall. Incredibly, Harris County’s freshwater wetlands diminished by 30 percent between 1992 and 2010. The result is that concepts like 100-year storms and 500-year storms have been rendered meaningless.
Unfortunately, the remedies suggested — tougher regulations on development, preservation of green spaces, and removing some 140,000 homes that are in the 100-year floodplain — seem marginal in the face of the challenges facing the region. Yet they probably go further than the political establishment is willing to embrace, although it’s possible that the devastation of Harvey has created a new reality.
“Hell and High Water” represents public-interest journalism at its best, but it also tells us much about the limits of journalism. Investigative reporting does not normally end with the crooked president flying off in a helicopter or the pedophile-priest-coddling cardinal fleeing to Rome. After all, such denouements are unusual enough that they make movies out of them. Most great journalism shines a light and explains. It is up to members of the public whether they will choose to be outraged enough to demand action.
Right now, the focus in Texas is on saving people’s lives, as it should be. But in a few weeks, or a few months, the public’s attention will turn to softening the effects of such catastrophes in the future. “Hell and High Water” will still be there, supplemented, no doubt, by additional reporting on Harvey and its aftermath. In it readers will learn how their leaders let them down — and how they can make sure it doesn’t happen again.
