At CCM headquarters in Englewood, Colo. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
The National Trust for Local News is shedding papers in Colorado, while in Maine a former top executive with the Trust is taking on a new role. The Trust, a nonprofit that buys newspapers to save them from falling into the hands of corporate ownership, has some 50 titles in Colorado, Maine and Georgia.
I’ll deal with Colorado first. The Trust made its debut in the spring of 2021 when it purchased Colorado Community Media, a chain of 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver area. The Colorado Sun, a digital startup based in Denver, was brought in to help run the papers and was given an ownership stake. Ellen Clegg and I wrote about all that in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
A lot has happened since then, including the Sun’s decision to unwind its relationship with the papers. Now CCM is breaking up, with 21 publications in the Denver metropolitan area being transfered to Times Media Group, a Tempe, Arizona-based chain whose owner has ties to Colorado. Seven other papers will be retained by the National Trust.
Congratulations to the new inductees to the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame — and especially Callie Crossley and Greg Moore.
Callie is an old friend from “Beat the Press” days on GBH-TV as well as a regular guest speaker in my opinion journalism class. She was also a guest on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” to talk about her GBH Radio program, “Under the Radar with Callie Crossley,” and her radio essays.
I interviewed Greg, who I knew from his years at The Boston Globe, about the Denver media scene for our book, “What Works in Community News.” After leaving the Globe, Greg served as the longtime editor of The Denver Post, moving on in the face of devastating cuts imposed by the paper’s hedge-fund owner. He’s also been on our podcast.
Callie Crossley and me at a speaking event in Wayland in 2024.Greg Moore in Denver. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
Ellen Clegg and I are thrilled to announce that our book, “What Works in Community News,” has been longlisted for a Mass Book Award by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. We’re one of 12 in the nonfiction category. Winners will be announced this fall.
Some big news today from The Bedford Citizen, one of the first digital nonprofit community news sites in Massachusetts and a project I’ve been tracking for the past dozen years: Wayne Braverman, the Citizen’s managing editor, is stepping down.
This follows the death of reporter Mike Rosenberg in late February, and it leaves the Citizen with vacancies in its two key news positions, at least for the moment. “We have a strong team still in place and a plan for coverage during this transition,” said board president Elizabeth Hacala in an email that was sent to email subscribers earlier today.
Hacala added that the Citizen is in the process of hiring a community reporter to replace Rosenberg, a legendary figure in Bedford who died at 72 while covering a high school basketball game. Mike was one of the people Ellen Clegg and I wrote about in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
Braverman became managing editor in October 2022, replacing co-founder Julie McCay Turner. He and executive director Teri Morrow appeared on our podcast a little over a year ago. Hacala’s full message is as follows:
Thank you for being a part of The Bedford Citizen community. I wanted to let you know about a change in our team that will be announced later today.
Wayne Braverman is wrapping up his time with The Citizen. We are in the process of updating the Managing Editor role and beginning the search for a new editor.
We have had an exciting response to our Community Reporter posting and look forward to having someone on board soon. In the interim, many members of the community have stepped forward to help us keep the presses running so to speak. This takes us back to our roots when volunteer writers created most of our stories.
We have a strong team still in place and a plan for coverage during this transition. Since you are a loyal reader of The Citizen, I wanted to make sure you heard the news directly from me before it is published on the website and social media later today.
Thank you again for being a part of The Citizen. Your support is critical to all we do. We are, as always, committed to being your local, non-profit, independent news source.
Update: Braverman has written a heartfelt farewell, saying, “Leaving The Citizen at this time is a good thing while I am healthy and still have the energy to engage in meaningful opportunities in the remaining time that I have on this planet. I don’t want to leave this world feeling like I didn’t do all I could to help make this a better place, especially in the era we find ourselves today.”
Correction: This post has been revised to eliminate some confusing and incorrect language I had inserted.
On our new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with John Mooney, the founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, a digital nonprofit that’s part of NJ PBS, the state’s public broadcasting network. Mooney, who covered education for The Star-Ledger in Newark, took a buyout in 2008, put together a business plan, and launched NJ Spotlight in 2010 under the auspices of the nonprofit Community Foundation of New Jersey.
While Spotlight was making a mark journalistically, it wasn’t breaking even, and its sponsor, the Community Foundation of New Jersey, was getting impatient. After extensive talks, Mooney affiliated with NJ PBS. The name changed to NJ Spotlight News, and the merger means true collaboration between the newsrooms. Both the broadcast and digital sides take part in news meetings, and there are considerable synergies between the website and the daily half-hour newscast. (In a previous podcast, Northeastern University professor and TV journalist Mike Beaudet discussed his initiative aimed at reinventing TV news for a vertical video age.)
As we wrote in “What Works in Community News,” the story of NJ PBS and NJ Spotlight News suggests that public broadcasting can play a role in bolstering coverage of regional and statewide news. It’s a question of bringing together two different newsroom cultures. There’s also a Yo-Yo Ma angle to our conversation, so you won’t want to miss that.
Ellen has a Quick Take about the death of John Thornton, a venture capitalist who helped launch The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Austin, in 2009. He also was a founder of the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country. Thornton, who had struggled with mental health issues, took his own life. He was 59.
I’ve got a Quick Take about our webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News,” which was held the evening of April 3. Panelists gave great advice about what board members and donors need to know. You can watch the video and read a summary generated by Northeastern’s AI tool, Claude, on our website.
Texas Tribune CEO Sonal Shah at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin last September.
Instability in the top ranks of The Texas Tribune continues, as Sonal Shah has announced that she’ll step down as CEO of the nonprofit in December. My What Works partner Ellen Clegg, who profiled the Tribune in our book, “What Works in Community News,” has all the details, writing:
Her impending departure marks yet another jolting transition for a news outlet that launched in November 2009 with a sweeping ambition: to prop up democracy by transforming news coverage throughout the Lone Star State. But nonprofit news sites, which are usually supported by a mix of revenue streams, are not immune to challenging market forces and workplace issues like layoffs and union drives.
The Tribune is among the largest and most respected digital nonprofits to be founded in the second wave of such projects, following such pioneers as Voice of San Diego, MinnPost and the New Haven Independent several years earlier. The site was launched by venture capitalist John Thornton and veteran journalist Evan Smith, and it appeared to be a rock of stability in a rather tumultuous environment.
But Smith moved on from the CEO’s position, and now Shah, citing family reasons, has announced her departure after less than three years. (Shah was a guest on our podcast last November.) Editor-in-chief Sewell Chan cycled through before taking the top job at the Columbia Journalism Review; he was replaced by Matthew Watkins, who’s been at the Tribune in 2015.
Thornton himself had moved on to co-found the American Journalism Project, which seeks to fund local news organizations across the country; he died late last month.
The turmoil at the Tribune could just be one of those things. Here’s hoping that the project can settle down, fix its business challenges and continue providing the Lone Star State with top-notch journalism. Its work is vitally important.
Poynter Institute president Neil Brown interviews Robin Roberts, co-anchor of ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” at Poynter’s 2024 Bowtie Ball last November. Roberts received the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Neil Brown, a longtime journalist who is the president of the Poynter Institute. For listeners who might not know, Poynter is a nonprofit based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that is devoted to teaching best practices in journalism. It is named for Nelson Poynter, the bow-tie-wearing legend who led the St. Petersburg Times to national recognition. The paper is now known as the Tampa Bay Times.
Poynter is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Last September, Poynter issued a report called “OnPoynt,” which attempted to place journalism’s ongoing economic crisis in context and give some hope for optimism. The goal was to offer “a forward-minded look at the state of journalism and the news industry that propels the story by considering trends related to creative product ideas, audience growth strategies and traction around revenue, artificial intelligence and innovation.” We talked with Neil about that report along with other topics.
Later on in the podcast, I’ve got a Quick Take on President Trump’s bouncing tariffs. They’re on, they’re off, they’re on, they’re off. But his gyrations are having real consequences. In central New York State, Trump’s threats have killed a daily newspaper — and not just any paper. The Cortland Standard, one of the oldest family-owned papers in the country, folded in mid-March, as Trump’s proposed 25% tariff on Canadian newsprint proved to be the last straw.
(Since we recorded this podcast, Trump has imposed tariffs that were far deeper and more damaging than many observers had expected. Newsprint, though, remains exempt.)
Ellen’s Quick Take comes from a tip from Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times who is now a distinguished professor of the practice here at Northeastern.
Jeff Morrison, a journalist who is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, has compiled an incredible timeline of the decline of newspapers in Iowa. A highlight: The Storm Lake Times Pilot, a twice-weekly print paper featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” is dropping a print edition and going weekly.
You may have heard that less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes from the federal government. That figure is sometimes bandied about by those who wonder why the news organization doesn’t just cut the cord and end the debate over taxpayer-funded news. The problem is that it’s more complicated than that.
In today’s New York Times morning newsletter, media reporter Benjamin Mullin explains the reality. Public radio stations in general are highly dependent on funding from the quasi-governmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and those member stations pay a lot for NPR programming.
In rural areas, in particular, public radio is a primary source of news when there is an emergency such as a tornado or flooding. And many of those stations would not survive a cutoff in government funding. Mullin writes:
NPR can weather the funding cut, … thanks in part to aggrieved listeners: Executives predict a sudden boom in donations if Congress defunds it, as listeners rush to defend their favorite programs. But they will likely give more in big-city markets.
Or as former CPB board member Howard Husock has put it: “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”
Mike Rosenberg with a cartoon by local sports artist Dave Olsen. 2018 photo by Julie McCay Turner is used with permission.
One of the best parts of writing about local-news startups is the opportunity to go out on stories with reporters to observe how they do their jobs. And so it was that on a midsummer day in 2021, I accompanied Mike Rosenberg of The Bedford Citizen as he toured the town’s new cultural district.
Mike, then 72, was the first paid staff reporter since the Citizen’s founding as a volunteer project nine years earlier. He died on Monday while he was covering a basketball game at Bedford High School, according to an account by the site’s managing editor, Wayne Braverman.
I’d like to share with you what I wrote about Mike in “What Works in Community News,” by Ellen Clegg and me. He was a colorful character, deeply devoted to his town and to the Jewish community, with a strong sense of ethics and fair play. My condolences to Mike’s family, the folks at the Citizen and all of those he touched over the years.
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Mike Rosenberg was walking along the Narrow Gauge Rail Trail, a dirt path that takes its name from the type of train that used to chug through the area. On this hot July morning in 2021, Rosenberg was reporting on the new cultural district in Bedford, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Leading the way were Alyssa Sandoval, the town’s housing and economic development director, and Barbara Purchia, chair of the Bedford Cultural Council. The town’s planning director, Tony Fields, joined the group about halfway through the tour.
A couple of cyclists rode by. “Hi, Mike,” said one of them. Rosenberg returned the greeting and then said to no one in particular: “I have no idea who that is.”
The Associated Press has been in the news a lot lately, both because of its feud with the White House over Donald Trump’s insistence that it refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and for some cuts it’s had to implement (see Gintautus Dumcius’ story in CommonWealth Beacon and Aidan Ryan’s in The Boston Globe).
But here’s some good news: The AP announced on Thursday that it’s creating a Local Investigative Reporting Program to support efforts at the community level. According to an annoucement by executive editor Julie Pace, the initiative will be headed by veteran AP editor Ron Nixon, who “will work with state and local outlets to cultivate stories and support their investigative reporting needs.”
The program will encompass training, resources and access to AP services, and will build on the agency’s Local News Success Team “to localize national stories for member audiences and provide services and support to newsrooms across the U.S.”
Congratulations to the new inductees to the National Association of Black Journalists 
