Lookout Local founder Ken Doctor is about to take the next step in launching his second community news site. Today he’s announcing that Lookout Eugene-Springfield, in Oregon, will debut in early 2025 and that he’s assembled a national team with the aim of moving into “at least five markets” in 2025-’26. I wrote about initial plans for Lookout Eugene-Springfield back in May.
Doctor, a well-known journalist who covers the media business, began Lookout Local in 2020 with a site in Santa Cruz, California. Lookout Santa Cruz won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for its reporting on a January 2023 flood and its aftermath. Santa Cruz is also the home of another high-quality hyperlocal news site, Santa Cruz Local; both Doctor and Santa Cruz Local CEO Kara Meyberg Guzman are featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and have been guests on our podcast.
Lookout Eugene-Springfield will compete with Gannett’s Register-Guard as well as Eugene Weekly, an alternative publication saved by its readers earlier this year after an ex-employee was charged with embezzlement.
The Texas state capitol in Austin. Photo (cc) 2022 by Joe Passe.
If local and regional news is going to survive, we need to find a path for profit-seeking enterprises. The nonprofit sector is becoming increasingly dominant, at least among startups that have any sort of significant reporting capacity. Yet after Ellen Clegg and I finished up our book, “What Works in Community News,” three of the for-profits that we wrote about switched to the nonprofit model: The Colorado Sun, The Mendocino Voice and Santa Cruz Local.
So I was heartened to learn that a new for-profit news site will debut in Texas this Monday. Max Tani reports for Semafor that Barbed Wire, which will cover politics, culture and entertainment, is a for-profit enterprise that’s pursuing advertising and voluntary memberships.
I’m not sure that Barbed Wire will be entirely for-profit, as Tani writes that “the outlet said it had a mix of private investors and nonprofit grants behind it.” But today’s successful for-profits often have a relationship with nonprofits so that they can raise tax-exempt money for public-interest journalism. Those include not just for-profit startups like The Provincetown Independent but also legacy newspapers like The Boston Globe, The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and The Seattle Times.
Barbed Wire is expected to report statewide news with a point of view, and it’s connected with a number of Democratic political figures, according to Tani. We’ll have to see how that plays out, since Tani reports that the site “won’t necessarily be neutral on issues like climate change or abortion” but “is not explicitly partisan.”
That stands in contrast with the state’s largest nonprofit news outlet, The Texas Tribune, which is decidedly nonpartisan. Texas is also home to statewide outlets like Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer, so Barbed Wire is entering crowded territory. But Texas is a big state.
The Star Tribune of Minneapolis has been something of a doppelgänger for The Boston Globe as well as a model. Like the Globe, the Strib, as it is known, has emerged as a profitable, growing enterprise under the guidance of a billionaire sports owner.
In Boston, of course, that’s John Henry, who’s also the principal owner of the Red Sox. In Minneapolis, it’s Glen Taylor, the principal owner of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves. Both men have other sports interests as well. I wrote about Henry’s struggles with the Globe in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls”; the paper didn’t really take off until sometime after that. My collaborator Ellen Clegg wrote about the Star Tribune in our 2024 book, “What Works in Community News.”
The parallels don’t stop there. The Globe, formerly a New England-wide paper that had contracted to Eastern Massachusetts, has been expanding in recent years, with editions in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and more to come. Executives at the Strib have been working to re-establish the paper as a Minnesota-wide entity.
Now the Strib has taken the next step. In a post for our website, What Works, Ellen writes about the Strib’s rebranding as The Minnesota Star Tribune and the innovative approach being taken by the Strib’s new opinion editor, Phillip Morris. Among other things, Morris is building up an ambitious roster of community writers known as Strib Voices and has abolished political endorsements in favor of a deeper dive into candidates and issues — something Ellen, as a retired editorial-page editor at the Globe, takes a keen interest in.
I’d be surprised if the Globe drops endorsements. Indeed, the paper just unveiled its first endorsement of the 2024 election, backing Mara Dolan in the Democratic primary for Governor’s Council. But at a time when they are increasingly seen as an anachronism, and with even The New York Times ending local and statewide endorsements, I’d also be surprised if it’s not at least being talked about at the Globe.
Reading the papers in San Francisco. From one of the murals at Coit Tower.
Is San Francisco a local news oasis amid the desertification of community journalism across the country? That’s what The New York Times claims.
Eli Tan reports that news in the Bay Area is as strong as it’s ever been (free link), noting that the city is served by a healthy daily (the San Francisco Chronicle), a billionaire-funded startup with paper-of-record ambitions (The San Francisco Standard) and a wide range of hyperlocal nonprofits and radio stations.
With 27 news organizations in a city of 800,000, Tan writes, San Francisco has about the same number of local news outlets that it had a decade ago.
Now, my first reaction to Tan’s story is that you could say the same about the Greater Boston area. The media scene here may not be quite as rich as it is in San Francisco, but we’ve got a lot, and the rise of digital nonprofits in a number of suburban communities has helped offset moves by Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, to close or merge many of its weeklies and to slash its dailies to the bone.
But on further consideration, I think it’s worth noting that a number of large cities are reasonably well-served; it’s the exurbs, rural areas and urban communities of color that are struggling. That’s true even in places like Denver (which Ellen Clegg and I write about in out book, “What Works in Community News”) and Chicago, where the hedge fund Alden Global Capital has hollowed out the legacy dailies but where a number of other news organizations, many of them new, have risen up to fill the gap.
In general, cities and affluent suburbs have the people and the money needed to support local news. What’s happening in San Francisco may be something of an outlier — but not quite as much of one as the Times seems to believe.
File this under “the wheels of justice grind slowly”: The former Kansas police chief who ordered an illegal raid against a newspaper office and two private homes one year ago has been charged with felony obstruction of justice.
The single charge against former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody alleges that he knowingly or intentionally influenced the witness to withhold information on the day of the raid of the Marion County Record and the home of its publisher or sometime within the following six days.
For those of you who have been following this case from the start, the charge pertains to a restaurant owner whose driving records were obtained by the newspaper. The records were obtained legally, and the paper never actually wrote about them, but Cody claimed the paper violated the law because of a statutory quirk. It later turned out that the Record was investigating Cody’s wrongdoing at his previous job — something that was entirely unrelated to the restaurant owner.
Last month, former Record reporter Deb Gruver reached a $235,000 settlement in her federal lawsuit against Cody, whom she accused of grabbing her cellphone and injuring her hand.
Publisher Eric Meyer is suing local officials over the death of his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, who was stricken a day after officers entered her home and rifled through her property.
Here are a few other developments on the local news front:
In New York City, WCBS-AM is ending its 60-year run as an all-news station, a move that The New York Times reports will claim 23 jobs. The station’s owner, Audacy, will continue with an all-news format on WINS-FM. New York is also the home of WNYC-FM, a large public station devoted to news and information.
Times Media Group, a newspaper chain based in Tempe, Arizona, has gone on a rampage of cuts at four weekly papers and a semi-monthly that it acquired in Southern California recently. Thomas Corrigan, who writes the Inland Empire MediaWatch newsletter, reports that editors at three of the weeklies have been fired and that the new owner has cracked down on freelance expenses as well. Corrigan observes that the papers will “lose years of institutional and community knowledge.”
Michael Aron, regarded as the dean of New Jersey’s press corps, has died at the age of 78. Aron spent the latter part of his career as a political reporter at NJ Spotlight News, one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
I’ll be speaking this Monday, Aug. 12, from 1 to 2 p.m. on “What Works: The Future of Local News” as part of the Summer Institute for Journalism Education at Fitchburg State University. The event will be held at the Fitchburg Historical Society at 781 Main St. and is free and open to the public.
I’ll discuss what caused the local news crisis as well as “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about possible solutions. The three-day conference features a great lineup of speakers from journalism, public access television and academia, so I hope you’ll check it out. Please register here.
Mike Shapiro launched his first publication in New Providence, N.J., which is now the headquarters for TAPinto and the Hyperlocal News Network. 2012 public domain photo by Tomwsulcer.
If local news is going to thrive, we need a variety of business models, especially on the for-profit side. Yet, at least among news start-ups with robust reporting capacity, nonprofits are becoming more and more dominant. Indeed, three of the for-profits that Ellen Clegg and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News,” The Colorado Sun, The Mendocino Voice and Santa Clara Local, have converted to nonprofit status in the past year.
One unique exception is TAPinto, a New Jersey-based company with about 100 franchises. The way it works is that local entrepreneurs start a TAPinto in their community and are able to — well, tap into the mothership’s tech, advertising and training resources. It’s not bad for an out-of-the-box solution, but there are limitations.
Recently, though, TAPinto chief executive Mike Shapiro launched a related business called the Hyperlocal News Network. It’s similar to TAPinto except that publishers have more flexibility to establish their own identity. Sophie Culpepper writes about Shapiro’s new venture for Nieman Lab, reporting that Shapiro told her by email:
There are … hundreds, if not thousands, of existing publishers who are really struggling with their digital presence and would benefit from our technology and back office services, yet want to keep their own branding. Our license model enables them to do just that.
Shapiro spoke with Ellen and me on our “What Works” podcast in April 2022. You can listen to it and read an AI-generated transcript by clicking here. We also wrote about TAPinto in our book, and I’m providing an excerpt below.
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TAPinto is a network of nearly a hundred hyperlocal websites, most of them in New Jersey, that employs an innovative franchise model. The network was begun in 2009 by Michael Shapiro, who back then was a New York lawyer looking to spend more time with his young son after he underwent open-heart surgery (he made a full recovery). Shapiro started a website that he called The Alternative Press in New Providence, where he lived, because he was dissatisfied by the lack of coverage in the local newspaper. As Shapiro tells it, he soon heard from residents of other communities asking him to expand, and a network was born. (The “TAP” in TAPinto stands for “The Alternative Press.”)
Although Shapiro is not a journalist, he said in an interview and on the “What Works” podcast that he takes journalistic objectivity seriously and requires his franchisees to adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. The way it works is this. For a fee of $5,000, a franchisee can set up shop with what is essentially a turnkey operation: a website based on a ready-made template with backend and technical support, training, and everything else they might need to begin covering local news and selling advertising. Publishers keep 80 percent of whatever ad revenues they’re able to earn, with 20 percent going to TAPinto. Advertising can also be shared across sites, and some editorial content is shared as well. Publishers are required to produce at least one original piece of journalism each day; stories typically cover such topics as neighborhood development issues, feel-good features, and public-safety news. A common arrangement, Shapiro said, is for a businessperson to become a franchisee and employ a journalist either full- or part-time.
Access to TAPinto sites is free, and Shapiro said the $5,000 franchise fee is far lower than what it would cost for a local media entrepreneur to get started on their own. “I think we’ve been able to demonstrate that you can have profitable local news sites that are 100 percent advertising-based, and that, to me, is really important,” he said. “People who are economically distressed shouldn’t have to choose between putting food on the table or buying medicine and finding out what’s going on in their town. So that’s very fundamental to us. And it’s also fundamental on the ownership side. In a lot of these situations, you have to be wealthy to start an online local news site if you want to have the technology and the functionality and stuff we offer.”
Observers we spoke with gave Shapiro generally high marks but said the sites tend to be of uneven quality, which is not surprising given the inexperience of many of the franchisees. Nevertheless, TAPinto represents a genuinely new way of providing local news and bears watching — particularly if Shapiro is able to build out his network nationally or inspires imitators.
If we’ve learned anything about news publishing in recent years, it’s that the giant tech platforms are not our friends. Google is embracing artificial intelligence, which means that searching for something will soon provide you with robot-generated answers (right or wrong!), thus reducing the need to click through. Facebook is moving away from news. Twitter/X has deteriorated badly under the chaotic leadership of Elon Musk, although it still has enough clout that President Biden used it to announce he was ending his re-election campaign.
So what should publishers do instead? It’s no secret — they’re already doing it. They are using email newsletters to drive their audience to their journalism. A recent post by Andrew Rockway and Dylan Sanchez for LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers reports that 95% of member publishers are offering newsletters, up from 81% in 2022. “The decline in referral traffic,” they write, “will likely lead to more direct engagement by publishers with their audiences.”
Some observers worry about newsletter overload as our inboxes fill up with email we may never get around to reading. That’s potentially a problem, but I think it’s a more serious problem for larger outlets, many of which send out multiple newsletters throughout the day and risk reaching a point of diminishing returns. By contrast, users will value one daily newsletter from their hyperlocal news project with links to the latest stories.
By far the most common approach publishers use is to offer a free newsletter aimed at driving users to their website, which may be free or subscription-based. The Massachusetts-based Bedford Citizen, for instance, sends out a daily newsletter generated by its RSS feed and a weekly human-curated newsletter. The Citizen is a free nonprofit, but once they’ve enticed you with their top-of-the-funnel newsletter, they hope they can lure you into becoming a paying member. Ellen and I interviewed executive director Teri Morrow and editor Wayne Braverman on our podcast last February.
The Colorado Sun, a statewide nonprofit, offers a series of free and paid newsletters, while the website itself is free. The paid newsletters represent an unusual twist: Some of them feature deeper reporting than you can get from the website on topics such as politics, climate change and outdoor recreation. At $22 a month for a premium membership, users pay no more than they would for a digital subscription to a daily newspaper. Editor Larry Ryckman talked about that in our most recent podcast.
In some places, the newsletter is the publication. An example of that is Burlington Buzz, a daily newsletter that covers Burlington, Massachusetts. Founder, publisher and editor Nicci Kadilak recently switched her newsletter platform from Substack to Indiegraf, and her homepage looks a lot like a standard community website — which shows that it’s a mistake to get too caught up on categories when newsletters have websites and websites have newsletters. Ellen and I talked with Nicci last year.
What’s crucial is that news publishers have direct control of the tools that they use to connect with their audience. Gone are the days when we could rely on Facebook and Twitter to reliably deliver readers to us. We have to go find them — and give them a reason to keep coming back.
Correction: Burlington Buzz has moved to Indiegraf, not Ghost.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk to Larry Ryckman, editor and co-founder of The Colorado Sun, the subject of a chapter that I wrote for our book, “What Works in Community News.” The Sun was launched by journalists who worked at The Denver Post, which had been cut and cut and cut under the ownership of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that the Post staff called “vulture capitalists.”
The Sun was founded as a for-profit public benefit corporation. A PBC is a legal designation covering for-profit organizations that serve society in some way. Among other things, a PBC is under no fiduciary obligation to enrich its owners and may instead plow revenues back into the enterprise. And we’ve found that for-profit models are rare in the world of news startups. But that changed last year, when the Sun joined its nonprofit peers. Ryckman explains.
In our Quick Takes, I give a listen to a New York Times podcast with Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist who wrote “Bowling Alone” some years back. In a fascinating 40 minutes, Putnam talks about his work in trying to build social capital. He never once mentions local news, but there are important intersections between his ideas and what our podcast and book are focused on.
Ellen reports on an important transition at Sahan Journal in Minnesota, one of the projects we wrote about in our book. The founding CEO and publisher, Mukhtar Ibrahim, is moving on and a successor has been named. Starting in September, Vanan Murugesan will be leading Sahan. He has experience in the nonprofit sector and also has experience in public media.
Well, this was fun. Ellen Clegg and I recently spoke about “What Works in Community News” with Charlotte Henry, the U.K.-based host of “The Addition,” a podcast about tech, media and politics. Charlotte turns out to be a sharp interviewer with a sense of humor, so we hope you’ll give it a listen. Here’s part one, and here’s part two. Of course, you can also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
