Tiny News Collective – Media Nation

Please join What Works on April 3 for a free webinar on ‘The Ethics of Nonprofit News’

From left, Josh Stearns, Kara Meyberg Guzman and Joe Kriesberg

If you are a local nonprofit news publisher, editor, reporter, board member or donor, please mark this on your calendar: On Thursday, April 3, our What Works project will sponsor a free webinar titled “The Ethics of Nonprofit News: What Board Members and Donors Need to Know.” Issues will include conflicts of interest and understanding the boundaries between the news and fundraising sides of a community journalism organization.

The webinar will be held from 7 p.m. until about 8:15 and is a project of What Works: The Future of Local News, part of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. The event will feature an all-star panel:

• Josh Stearns, managing director of programs at the Democracy Fund, a longtime activist on issues related to media reform and equitable journalism. Stearns was most recently senior director of the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund, where he led its journalism and technology grantmaking. He was previously director of journalism sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and, before that, press freedom director at Free Press. He currently serves on the board of Honolulu Civil Beat and the Democratizing Philanthropy Project and was a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and First Draft News.

• Kara Meyberg Guzman, CEO and founder of Santa Cruz Local, a nonprofit news organization in California focused on communities not otherwise served by local media. Her passion is producing fair, accurate, reliable news that’s free and accessible to all residents, including those who will never be able to pay for it. She is also a board member of the Tiny News Collective, whose mission is to make journalism entrepreneurship more accessible, equitable and inclusive.

• Joe Kriesberg, CEO of the Massachusetts Institution for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to making Massachusetts a place of inclusive economic opportunity and civic vitality. In that capacity Kriesberg serves as publisher of CommonWealth Beacon, MassINC’s digital publication covering state politics and public policy. Kriesberg has decades of experience in nonprofit management and in working with news organizations.

I’ll be moderating the panel. I’m a professor in Northeastern’s School of Journalism and the co-author, with Ellen Clegg, of the book “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate” (Beacon Press, 2024). Ellen and I also host a podcast and website on the future of local news, part of the School of Journalism, at whatworks.news.

Please register for the event today. Details on how to access the webinar will be sent out closer to April 3.

Tiny News Collective to provide funding to six local news start-ups

Six local news projects will launch or expand after winning a competition held by the Tiny News Collective — a joint venture of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers and News Catalyst, based at Temple University. News Catalyst receives funding from the Knight Foundation and the Lenfest Institute. According to the announcement:

Thanks to a partnership with the Google News Initiative, each organization in the first cohort will receive a $15,000 stipend to help create the capacity for the founders to get started. In addition, the GNI has funded their first year of membership dues in the Collective and LION Publishers.

The projects range from an organization covering education news in part of Orange County, California, to an outlet with the wonderful name Black by God, which seeks “to share perspectives that cultivate, curate, and elevate Black voices from West Virginia.”

Forty organizations applied. Among the judges were Kate Maxwell, co-founder and publisher of The Mendocino Voice, a news co-op that is one of the local news projects I’m following for a book I’m co-authoring with Ellen Clegg.

The Tiny News Collective strikes me as a more interesting approach to dealing with the local news crisis than initiatives unveiled recently by Substack and Facebook. Those require you to set up shop on their platforms. By contrast, the Tiny News Collective is aimed at helping community journalism entrepreneurs to achieve sustainability on their own rather than become cogs in someone else’s machine.

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Why I’m skeptical about the new Substack Local initiative

I’m of two minds about Substack. As a newsletter-and-blogging platform that is attractive and simplifies the task of writers charging readers for their work, it’s fine. As a venture capital-backed company whose leaders seem to have visions of world domination (and endless riches), well, I’m more than a little skeptical.

Which is to say that I’m dubious about Substack Local, a just-announced initiative under which 30 lucky local journalists will be able to get start-up funding and health insurance in order to cover their communities. Obviously the idea addresses the two biggest obstacles to going independent. And if it works, presumably there will be many more such Substack-backed local projects to come.

But is this really going to work? What happens when — as seems inevitable — the venture capitalists see no path to profitability and decide to cash out? I realize there may not be too many similarities, but this feels like Medium, with its ever-shifting business model, which has left many publishers holding the proverbial bag.

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If I were starting such a site, I’d be much more interested in the Tiny News Collective, which is providing local news entrepreneurs with support for back-end services such as technology, business training and legal services for around $100 a month.

No, it’s not as lucrative as getting VC money via Substack. But as Sarah Scire points out at the Nieman Journalism Lab, the money isn’t all that much and is aimed at moving the sites toward sustainability — a goal that can be pursued without Substack’s help.

We seem to be moving toward peak Substack. My only advice to local news folks thinking about applying is that they should have a clear, detailed plan in place for how to move rapidly to a different platform if they wind up getting Medium’d.

Saving local news: Some ideas from philanthropy, business and technology

Could the example of the late Gerry Lenfest save Tribune Publishing’s newspapers from the avaricious clutches of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital?

About a half-dozen years ago, Lenfest, a billionaire investor, unexpectedly became the owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer and its related media properties. It’s an incredibly convoluted story that I tell in “The Return of the Moguls,” but essentially he had acquired a piece of the Inquirer with the intention of flipping it, and he ended up instead with the whole thing.

Lenfest’s next move saved quality journalism in Philadelphia: In early 2016 he donated his media properties to the Philadelphia Foundation, which in turn set up a nonprofit that, after his death, became known as the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Today the Inquirer is in far better shape than many metro dailies.

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Jim Friedlich, executive director and chief executive of the institute, argues that Tribune newspapers could be saved if deep-pockets philanthropists acquired them and then emulated Lenfest — or simply ran them as for-profit enterprises, as with John and Linda Henry at The Boston Globe and Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune. Friedlich writes:

An Alden purchase of all of Tribune doesn’t have to be a fait accompli. In fact, the threat of such a deal represents an opportunity for civic-minded local investors across the country, who could use this case not only to save a critical local news institution, but to reinvent it.

Soon-Shiong continues to be a major Tribune shareholder, and I recently wrote that he should consider rescuing the chain, which includes papers such as the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America.

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As we know, local news is in crisis, and that has produced a considerable amount of ferment. Most of the attention right now is on Alden’s bid for a majority share of Tribune, which involves regional rather than strictly local news organizations. But there’s a lot happening at the grassroots as well.

For instance, Sarah Scire reports for the Nieman Journalism Lab on an ambitious effort to provide local news start-ups with the support they need to launch and continue operating. Imagine a journalist who’s been laid off by a corporate-owned newspaper and who wants to start something at the hyperlocal level. Where to begin?

According to Scire, the Tiny News Collective takes care of a lot of the back-end details that journalists are usually not trained to attend to themselves. “The project,” Scire writes, “will offer entrepreneurial journalists a tech stack, business training, legal assistance, and back-office services like payroll for around $100 a month.”

The Tiny News Collective, a collaboration between News Catalyst and LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, is hoping to have a hand in starting news projects in 500 communities, half of them covering underserved populations.

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Also worth watching is the Crosstown Neighborhood Newsletter project in Los Angeles — an effort to make smart use of data in order to produce a multitude of newsletters, each aimed at a tiny slice of the public. The editor, Gabriel Kahn, a professor at USC Annenberg, writes that Crosstown — “a collaboration between software engineers, designers and journalists” — recently launched 110 such newsletters in one day. He explains:

Our formula starts with data. We collect data about everything we can in Los Angeles, from traffic and crime to COVID-19 cases and building permits. Much of this data is hiding in plain sight, housed on local government dashboards that are hard to navigate. We divvy up the data by neighborhood. One citywide dataset about parking fines becomes 110 stories about how many more or fewer tickets were issued in each neighborhood during the COVID lockdown.

Crosstown reminds me of EveryBlock, a project started in 2008 by the pioneering data journalist Adrian Holovaty that was also heavily dependent on publicly available data. EveryBlock never really caught on, and it shut down in 2013. But far more information is online today than was the case a decade ago, and the tools for presenting it have improved considerably. It could be that the time for Holovaty’s idea has arrived.

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