What Works in Community News

We need a renewal of civic life — and that has to start by supporting local journalism

Following Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday night, I’ve seen calls on social media to support independent news organizations like ProPublica and The Guardian rather than traditional outlets. It’s a good idea, though I value the work done by mainstream journalism as well.

But let me suggest a different approach to funding media: using your subscription money or tax-deductible donations to support news at the local level. I’ve been writing about the local news crisis for a decade and a half, and during that time I’ve come to believe that one of the reasons we’re so polarized is that low-quality national news has moved in to fill the vacuum created by the decline of community journalism.

Civic life depends on reliable news and information. Without it, you have people showing up at school committee meetings to complain about phony, Fox News-driven issues like transgender sports and critical race theory rather than test scores and the cost of funding a new teachers’ contract.

Academic studies have shown that a lack of local news leads to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization and what my research partner, Ellen Clegg, and I like to call the “corruption tax” — that is, lenders demanding a higher rate of return when municipalities in news deserts seek to borrow money for such worthy causes as a new middle school or fire station. The lenders, it seems, want a premium if no one is going to keep an eye on how their money is being spent.

Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.

The news desert problem is serious and getting worse. According to the latest State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School, some 3,200 print newspapers have disappeared since 2005. Most of them were weekly papers that provided exactly the sort of coverage needed to build and maintain a sense of community.

At the same time, though, hundreds of independent news projects have launched in recent years. Most but not all are digital-only; many are nonprofit, some are for-profit.

As it happens, this is the time of year when it makes the most sense to support local news, especially nonprofits. Every year, the Institute for Nonprofit News, through its NewsMatch program, provides funds to nonprofits to match some of what they are able to raise within their communities. This year’s campaign began Nov. 1. As INN explains:

Eighteen national and regional funders have pledged $7.5 million to NewsMatch, the largest grassroots fundraising campaign to support nonprofit news in the U.S. Since 2017, participating news organizations in the INN Network have leveraged $31 million in NewsMatch funding to help generate nearly $300 million in support from their communities. All of these newsrooms have met INN’s membership standards for financial transparency, editorial independence, and original public service reporting. Not every nonprofit news outlet meets those standards and is able to become an INN member.

Ellen and I wrote our book, “What Works in Community News,” to profile independent local and regional news organizations that are finding ways to serve the public despite the ongoing financial challenge of paying for journalism. We also talk with news entrepreneurs and thought leaders on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our hope is that the people and projects we highlight will inspire others to fill the information gap in their own communities.

Philanthropy will remain an important source of funding for some time to come. We should assume that long-stalled federal efforts to provide tax credits for local news aren’t suddenly going to start moving forward during the Age of Trump II. Efforts in states that include New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California are worthwhile but limited.

Ultimately the news desert problem will be solved, or not, without government assistance. If your community has an independent news outlet, please support it. And if it doesn’t, I suggest you look into what it would take to get involved in starting one.

At The Minnesota Star Tribune, a non-endorsement leads 15 former staffers to write their own

Last week, in a commentary for CommonWealth Beacon, I compared the outrage that greeted The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times over their non-endorsements with the relative calm with which a similar decision at The Minnesota Star Tribune was met.

I wrote that the problem with the Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and his counterpart at the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, was their last-minute cancellations of editorials endorsing Kamala Harris — and that the Strib had escaped similar opprobrium by announcing its decision back in August.

Well, not so fast. Because as Ellen Clegg reports at What Works, 15 former Star Tribune opinion journalists were so offended by the paper’s failure to endorse Harris that they wrote their own and published it online under the headline “The endorsement editorial the Star Tribune should have published.”

Ellen profiled the Strib in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Like the Post, the LA Times and, for that matter, The Boston Globe under John and Linda Henry, the Star Tribune is owned by a billionaire: Glen Taylor, who has received praise for building up the paper and transforming it into a profitable enterprise.

Earlier this year, the Star Tribune’s new editorial page editor, Phillip Morris, put an end to endorsements as part of a wide-ranging rethink of the opinion section. But Ellen writes that it’s unclear what role Taylor or publisher Steve Grove may have had in that decision.

Ellen also notes that Grove is writing a memoir and says: “Let’s hope that along with chapters about ‘reinvention, love, community, and what holds us together,’ he explains how he’ll stand up to powerful people who would prefer that the independent press heed their whims, and to the dark forces that want to extinguish it altogether.”

Correction: It’s Grove who’s writing a memoir, not Taylor, as I incorrectly wrote earlier.

The end of The Star-Ledger’s print edition marks the next step in Advance’s digital strategy

Downtown Newark. Photo (cc) 2016 by massmatt.

News that Advance Local is closing its print newspapers in New Jersey is sad on one level. On another level, though, it marks the continued evolution of the chain’s digital-first strategy, which I reported on in the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News.”

Ellen and I also talked about Advance’s digital focus on our podcast this past May with Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos, the top two executives at MassLive, the chain’s statewide online news organization in Massachusetts.

According to Lola Fadulu and Tracey Tully of The New York Times (gift link), Advance will end the print editions of three daily papers in New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey Times. A weekly, the Hunterdon County Democrat, will also end its print run. Another daily, the Jersey Journal, which covers Jersey City, will shut down altogether. According to a statement from Advance:

“Today’s announcement represents the next step into the digital future of journalism in New Jersey,” said Steve Alessi, President of NJ Advance Media. “It’s important to emphasize that this is a forward-looking decision that allows us to invest more deeply than ever in our journalism and in serving our communities.”

Alessi said that that ceasing print publication will allow NJ Advance Media to reallocate resources to strengthen its core newsroom. He said that the newsroom has more reporters than it did a year ago and has plans to continue to grow in 2025 as the organization looks to bolster reporting in previously under-covered areas of the state.

That strategy reflects the direction that Advance was moving in back in March 2022, when I interviewed Chris Kelly, who at that time was the interim editor of NJ.com. Advance was already taking a one-newsroom approach, putting NJ.com first and then doling out stories to its print edition. It was a strategy that had allowed NJ.com to build up strong statewide and regional coverage, Kelly said, although he conceded that it meant hyperlocal coverage was lacking. Here’s an excerpt from our book:

***

In New Jersey, as elsewhere, the newspaper scene today is much diminished. The Star-Ledger remains the largest paper in the state, with a weekday print and digital circulation that averaged nearly 125,000 and a Sunday circulation of about 140,000. Next up is The Record, which covers northern New Jersey (35,000 on weekdays, 40,000 on Sundays) and the Asbury Park Press (27,000 on weekdays, 39,000 on Sundays), both of which are owned by Gannett. Observers we spoke with gave those papers reasonably high marks for the quality of their reporting, but the breadth of their coverage was regarded as lacking. The Star-Ledger, owned by Advance Publications, is worth a closer look. Advance is a privately held company based in New York and controlled by the Newhouse family. It is best known for its magazine division, Condé Nast, which publishes prestige titles such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. But the company operates a number of daily newspapers as well, including The Birmingham News of Alabama, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland and The Oregonian of Portland.

Advance runs its newspapers in regional groups, emphasizing paid digital subscriptions over print. In New Jersey, that means The Star-Ledger and two smaller dailies, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey News, as well as a number of other Advance publications, are all part of NJ.com. A unified newsroom feeds stories to its digital hub and to its print newspapers. Some of those stories are specific to a particular region and might only run in one paper; others, more general in nature, might run statewide. All of them are posted at NJ.com, which, as of early 2022, was attracting about 1.5 million daily visits. What it means is that NJ.com is able to field the largest editorial staff in the state — about 115 journalists — as well as offer robust statehouse, investigative and data reporting. The advantage is that Advance is able to provide its audience with strong statewide and regional coverage. The disadvantage is a shortage of day-to-day accountability journalism at the community level.

As was the case with many media outlets in the spring of 2022, the NJ.com newsroom was closed as a consequence of the COVID pandemic. We met Chris Kelly, NJ.com’s senior director of news, features, topics and innovation, who was serving as interim editor, at a restaurant near his home in Maplewood. [He is now managing producer of entertainment.] He spoke animatedly about Advance’s strategy for covering New Jersey. “My argument in the eight years that I’ve been here is that you’ve got to basically become a statewide news outlet and almost move from man-to-man coverage to zone coverage,” he said. “We just simply cannot sustain a reporter covering Maplewood, covering Millbrook. I’m not unaware that doesn’t come without the downside of, yeah, we cannot cover every council meeting, we are going to miss things. But that’s been the strategy that mostly seems to be working and has allowed us to kind of sustain at the level we’re sustaining.” He also lauded Advance’s commitment to enterprise journalism, telling us: “The one thing that I can say is, if we’ve got a story that we’ve got to get, we’re going to get it, and we’re going to keep doing it. That level of commitment, the financial support, the legal support has been unwavering since I’ve been there.”

‘What Works in Community News’ will soon be available in paperback

“What Works in Community News” will soon be available in paperback! The nice UPS driver delivered some advance copies to Ellen and me on Wednesday. The list price is $19.95, which is $10 less than the hardcover edition, and, according to Bookshop.org, you can pre-order it now for shipping on Nov. 12. There’s an audio version, too, which is perfect for those long fall walks as you ponder how to launch an independent news project in your community.

Northeastern news project wins $100k grant; plus, more on the Herald, and AI hell in Melrose

We have some exciting news about one of our sister projects at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Scope, a professionally edited digital publication that covers “stories of hope, justice and resilience” in Greater Boston, has received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a major philanthropic initiative funding local news.

“Since its launch in late 2017, The Scope has become a national leader in leveraging university resources to help solve the news desert crisis. This grant is a vote of confidence in our model,” said Professor Meg Heckman in the announcement of the grant. “Rebuilding the local information ecosystem is a big job, and we’re thrilled Press Forward sees the School of Journalism as a vital part of the solution.”

Heckman has been the guiding force behind The Scope for several years now. Joining her in putting the grant application together were the school’s director, Professor Jonathan Kaufman, and Professor Matt Carroll.

The Scope was one of 205 local news outlets that will receive $20 million in grant money, according to an announcement by Press Forward on Wednesday. Several of the projects are connected in one way or another to What Works, our project on the future of local news:

• Santa Cruz Local (California), which competes with a larger and better-known startup called Lookout Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz Local co-founder Kara Meyberg Guzman and Lookout Santa Cruz founder Ken Doctor were both interviewed for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” as well as on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.”

• The Boston Institute for Nonprofit News, an investigative project that publishes stories on its own website as well as in other outlets. Co-founder Jason Pramas has been a guest on our podcast. Several other Boston-based outlets received grants as well: the Dorchester Reporter, a 40-year-old weekly newspaper; Boston Korea, which serves the Korean American Community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and El Planeta, a venerable Spanish-language newspaper.

• The Maine Monitor, a digital project that covers public policy and politics. Now-retired editor David Dahl has been a guest on our podcast.

• InDepthNH, published by the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. The site focuses on public policy and politics, and its founder, Nancy West, has been a podcast guest.

• Montclair Local (New Jersey), a hyperlocal website that is one of the projects we write about in “What Works in Community News.” In 2009, the Local merged with Baristanet, one of the original hyperlocal news startups, which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City.”

• Eugene Weekly (Oregon), an alternative weekly that suffered a near-death experience earlier this year after a former employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. I wrote about that here and at our What Works website.

More on the shrinking Herald

Earlier this week I wrote about the latest paid circulation figures for the Boston Herald based on its recent filings with the U.S. Postal Service. I lamented that the numbers weren’t as complete as I would have liked because the Alliance for Audited Media was no longer providing its reports for free to journalists and researchers, as it had done in the past.

Well, it turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door. I now have recent reports for both the Herald and The Boston Globe. The AAM figures don’t significantly change what I reported about the Globe, but they do fill in some gaps for the Herald.

For March 2024, the most recent AAM report that’s available, the Herald’s average weekday paid print circulation for the previous six months was 12,272, a decline of 2,247, or nearly 15.5%, compared to its March 2023 totals. Sunday paid print circulation, according to the March 2024 report, was 15,183, down 2,690, also 15%.

As I explained earlier, AAM tallies up paid digital circulation differently from a newspaper’s internal count; among other things, AAM allows for some double-counting between print and digital. Nevertheless, its digital figures are useful for tracking trends.

In the March 2024 report, according to AAM, the Herald’s total average weekday paid digital circulation was 30,009, which actually amounts to a decrease of 2,250, or about 7%, over the previous year. Sunday paid digital in March 2024 was 29,753, down 1,952, or about 6.1%.

Needless to say, that’s not the direction that Herald executives want to be moving in — although I should note that, in its September 2024 post office filing, the Herald reported a slight rise in its seven-day digital circulation compared to the previous year.

What fresh hell is this?

The Boston suburb of Melrose is not a news desert. It has a newspaper, the Melrose Weekly News. But, like many communities, it would benefit from more news than it’s getting now, especially after Gannett shuttered the venerable Melrose Free Press in 2021.

So … artificial intelligence to the rescue? In CommonWealth Beacon, Jennifer Smith introduces us to the “Melrose Update Robocast,” which uses fake voices, male and female, to talk about local issues based on information that’s fed into it to produce an AI-generated script. (Note: Smith interviewed me for the piece, though I didn’t make the cut. I’m also on CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)

“In a way, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” “Robocast” creator Tom Catalini tells Smith.

Yet all across Massachusetts, independently operated news sites with real human beings are springing up to cover local news. Community journalism is how we connect with each other, and an AI-generated podcast can’t do that.

In Medford, where I live, we haven’t had a local news source for two years. But we do have a podcast, “Medford Bytes,” hosted by two activist residents who convene important conversations about what’s going on in the city, including a recent interview with the mayor about three contentious ballot questions that would raise taxes in order to pay for schools, road repairs and a new fire station.

That’s the sound of community members talking among themselves.

A news outlet in Haverhill, Mass., pushes its newsletter to fight algorithmic Facebook censorship

Tim Coco, general manager of WHAV in Haverhill, Mass.

Facebook’s brain-dead algorithm is censoring important public-safety information, reports WHAV in Haverhill, Massachusetts. WHAV is a nonprofit news organization with a low-power/online radio station as well as a website.

According to WHAV general manager Tim Coco:

In the last week, a local news warning about the sinkhole along the southbound lanes of Interstate 495 near Ward Hill was flagged as spam and removed by one social media site. Another blocked WHAV story was news of possible restoration of Haverhill’s 1845-era (gun) powder house. The tech giant behind these removals piles on with intimidation by writing “Repeatedly breaking our rules can cause more account restrictions.”

Even more mind-boggling, Coco writes, is that when the Haverhill Police Department attempted to share WHAV’s item on the sinkhole, Facebook removed that, too.

This is nothing new for Facebook. In “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, we tell the story of an emergency route during a wildfire that the sheriff’s department had shared with The Mendocino Voice in Northern California. The Voice posted it on its Facebook page, one of its primary distribution channels — and then watched in alarm as it disappeared. In the excerpt below, we talked with Kate Maxwell, then the publisher of the Voice, and Adrian Fernandez Baumann, then the editor:

The sheriff’s department asked the Voice to get the word out that people living in the national forest would run into danger if they tried to evacuate through the nearby community of Covelo. It was potentially lifesaving information, but Facebook took it down. “It had like a thousand shares in an hour,” said Maxwell. “Facebook flagged that post and deleted it.” The article was restored about a half-hour later following an uproar from the community. Maxwell said she never got a good explanation of what happened, even after talking with someone from Facebook at a conference. Maybe it was because the algorithms identified it as fake news. Maybe, as Baumann speculated, it was because the article included a reference to “Indian Dick Road.”

Coco doesn’t identify Facebook as the culprit, but the screenshots that he posted are clearly from that platform. He’s asking his readers and listeners in the Haverhill area to stop relying on social media for WHAV stories and instead to subscribe directly to the news outlet’s daily email newsletter.

Coco, by the way, is in our book and has been a guest on the “What Works” podcast.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is also getting swamped with complaints about entirely harmless posts being removed from its Threads platform because of algorithmic decisions being made with no human involvement. I can speak from personal experience, too. Twice over the past year or so, I’ve responded to questions asking about great song lyrics, and I’ve gone with “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” from Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Both time, my posts were removed from Facebook and Threads, and I was given a warning.

So let me repeat something I’ve said a number of times: News organizations should not rely on social media any more than absolutely necessary. Do what Coco is doing: Push newsletter subscriptions, because that’s a platform that you control and own.

The October Surprise, 44 years on; plus, extremism at home, and more on sponsored content

American hostage Ann Swift shortly after her release in January 1981. Public domain photo by the Department of Defense.

The October Surprise. These days the phrase is often used to describe fears that a political campaign will drop some sort of bombshell in the final weeks before Election Day.

Then-FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 would certainly qualify, though there was no evidence that the Trump campaign was behind it — nor, for that matter, any evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton.

So, too, would the Hunter Biden laptop story of 2020, though the Trumpers who were behind it were hampered by the inconvenient fact that they’d targeted the wrong Biden.

But I don’t think anyone used the phrase October Surprise until 1980, when it was used to describe something that Ronald Reagan and his associates feared would happen but ultimately did not: the release of more than 50 American hostages who had been held by Iran for many months. If President Jimmy Carter brought them home just before the election, it could have given him the boost he needed to win a second term. Continue reading “The October Surprise, 44 years on; plus, extremism at home, and more on sponsored content”

The Maine event: Ellen Clegg and I will be talking about our book in Portland on Oct. 15

Photo (cc) 2022 by Jules Verne Times Two

I want to let you know about one of the biggest events that Ellen Clegg and I have had to discuss our book, “What Works in Community News.” We’ll take part in a public conversation on Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 7 p.m. at the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine. The institute is part of Northeastern University. You can register here.

The program is part of the “Newsroom Live” series, sponsored by the Maine Trust for Local News, the nonprofit owner of the Portland Press Herald and a number of other daily and weekly newspapers and digital publications.

The Maine Trust was created several years ago after the media properties were acquired by the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that has also purchased papers in suburban Denver and Georgia to prevent them from falling into the hands of corporate chain owners.

We write about the National Trust and include a conversation with its executive director, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, in our book. In addition, I wrote about the Press Herald’s pre-Trust ownership struggles in his 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls.”

We hope to see you on Oct. 15.

A conversation with ChatGPT, given a voice by Siri, shows AI’s promise and limitations

Mike Blinder, publisher of the trade journal Editor & Publisher and the host of its vodcast, “E&P Reports,” tried something unusual recently. He hooked up ChatGPT to Siri and conducted an interview about issues related to artificial intelligence and journalism. The result is like a smarter version of Eliza, a 1960s-vintage AI program that could carry on what seemed like a realistic conversation.

Blinder has become something of an AI evangelist, using to automate some of E&P’s editorial processes and asking ChatGPT to write bios of guests on “E&P Reports.” But AI has a long way to go in terms of carrying on an intelligent conversation that’s also spontaneous.

For instance, as you’ll hear, Blinder’s approach in interviewing ChatGPT is to lead the witness with long, information-packed questions that the chatbot can then use to scour the internet and come back with a plausible-sounding answer.

I also detected at least one error. In response to a question about the possibility that AI-powered search engines will harm news organizations by removing any incentive to click through, ChatGPT says:

When AI tools like Perplexity or Chat GPT provide detailed summaries of content without directing traffic back to the original source, it creates a real challenge for news publishers who rely on page views for ad revenue and subscriptions. I completely understand the concern.

The problem is that Perplexity actually does cite its sources, which differentiates it from ChatGPT and other competitors. It’s why I suggest to my students that Perplexity is a useful tool as long as they click through, and it’s why I use it as well.

Nevertheless, Blinder’s close encounter of the robotic kind is fun and interesting. You can watch it on YouTube or subscribe on any podcast app. Blinder’s been a guest on our “What Works” podcast about local news twice, and Ellen Clegg and I were on “E&P Reports” earlier this year to talk about our book, “What Works in Community News.”

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