The “What Works” podcast is back after our summer hiatus. My co-host, Ellen Clegg, was feeling under the weather, so I’m flying solo. But no worries — Ellen still handled editing and production, and she should be back for our next episode.
We’re pleased to have Margaret Sullivan as our guest. Sullivan has spent the last decade or so doing the toughest of jobs: telling the country’s most powerful newsrooms what they’re getting wrong. She was the fifth public editor at The New York Times, from 2012 to 2016. Somebody once called it the worst job in journalism, but she took it anyway. Then she went to The Washington Post as its media columnist, where she covered the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Trump years, and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. She left the Post in 2022, which, in hindsight, looks like excellent timing.
Sullivan writes a weekly column on media, politics and culture for The Guardian US, and she publishes a fearless newsletter on Substack called American Crisis, where she calls out lapses in how the media are covering Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.
But she also has deep roots in local journalism. She was a summer intern at her hometown paper, The Buffalo News, and worked her way up to become its first woman editor-in-chief. So she knows firsthand what happens to a community when its newspaper is gutted. In 2020, she published a book about the local news crisis called “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy” and, we’re pleased to say, she blurbed our book, “What Works in Community News.”
I’ve got a Quick Take that Yogi Berra would have called déjà vu all over again. The Block family, which owns The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, says it will shut down the paper if they can’t find a buyer by the end of 2026. Now where have we heard that before? I also dive into the new impact report from the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organization that turns out to be one of the biggest funders of nonprofit news in the country. AJP makes the case that nonprofit news as a business model has moved past the experimental stage.
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