Ellen Clegg and I are thrilled to be the guests on the new episode of “E&P Reports,” a vodcast hosted by Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher, a venerable magazine and website that covers the news business. We’ve had Mike on our “What Works” podcast, and he is a hoot — witty, engaging and passionate about the future of journalism. You’ll hear those qualities in the questions he asks us about our book, “What Works in Community News.” You can subscribe to the audio-only version of “E&P Reports” on any of the major podcast platforms.
Colorado Public Radio executive editor Kevin Dale. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
No sooner had I written last week that Colorado Public Radio may be the largest news organization in that state than deep cuts were announced. Fifteen jobs were eliminated, which, according to CPR’s Ben Markus, make up “the largest cut to the public broadcaster’s payroll in at least a quarter of a century.”
“I hate to see talented colleagues lose their positions for financial reasons,” Kevin Dale, CPR News’ executive editor, was quoted as saying. “CPR News has been growing into a powerful news source for the past six years. Our mission has been to become an urgent newsroom that also has time to devote to enterprise reporting and accountability reporting, and we remain dedicated to that.”
According to Markus, the cuts follow years of growth, from 48 employees in 2006 to 214 in 2022. When I interviewed Dale in 2021, he told me that about 65 of those employees were journalists. CPR had acquired a city-based digital site in 2019 called Denverite, and its staff members were part of that total. Unlike WAMU in Washington, which is shutting down its DCist site following a similar acquisition, CPR will keep Denverite going.
Although CPR’s woes are reportedly due to changes in audience behavior as podcasts from the likes of The New York Times and Spotify have cut into listenership, Markus’ story also suggests that the operation had been hiring beyond its means and noted that it had saddled itself with a new, yet-to-be-finished downtown headquarters last year costing more than $8 million.
The cuts also come amid austerity measures at several other public radio operations including WAMU, WBUR in Boston and NPR itself. Public radio is our leading free source of high-quality news and for years seemed to be immune from the headwinds that were devastating legacy newspapers. Corey Hutchins, who produces the newsletter “Inside the News in Colorado,” wrote that CPR “stood out as a bright spot amid a weakened local news landscape.” Hutchins is a journalism professor at Colorado College in Colorado Springs and works out of space refurbished by CPR as part of its earlier acquisition of KRCC.
I interviewed Dale in 2021 for Ellen Clegg’s and my book, “What Works in Community News.” Dale, who had previously worked at The Denver Post, described his mission as transforming CPR into a leading news organization by concentrating on in-depth journalism.
“Our goal was to become a primary news source,” Dale said, explaining that his operation tried to offer important contextual stories rather than breaking news. “I’ve been very careful all along to use the article ‘a’ instead of ‘the,’ because I think ‘the’ has connotations that end up in practices that we’re not interested in,” he said. “We’re not going to be out covering a major house fire or a major traffic jam unless it has implications beyond that.”
CPR is an anchor of the Denver and Colorado media ecosystem. I hope this proves to be a temporary setback and that the operation can soon begin growing once again.
I’m excited to be giving the Sidore Lecture at Keene State College in New Hampshire today at 6:30 p.m. I’ll be talking about our book, “What Works in Community News.” Keene, as you may know, is the home of The Keene Sentinel, a great independent news organization. The event is free, so if you’re in the Keene area, I hope you’ll drop by.
Ellen Clegg and I want to share with you some news about a great upcoming event — a free, all-day conference that’s open to the public and will be held at Northeastern University on Friday, March 15. It’s called “What Works: The Future of Local News.” You can register and find more information by clicking here. You can come for all or part of it, and the day will include a light breakfast, a boxed lunch and a reception at the end of the day. Full details are in the flier below. We would love to see you there!
The local news crisis has led to no end of policy proposals, funding initiatives and angry denunciations of the harm done to journalism by the likes of Craigslist, Google and Facebook.
Ideas for responding to the crisis range from paying recent journalism school graduates with state tax revenues to cover underserved communities, as in California; mandating that state agencies direct half of their spending on advertising to community media, as has been proposed in Illinois; and creating tax credits that would benefit subscribers, advertisers and publishers, the subject of several federal and state initiatives.
And those are just a few.
Though all of these have some merit, they share a fundamental flaw: They are top-down solutions to problems that differ from one community to another.
There is an old saying that goes back a dozen years to the earliest days of hyperlocal digital news: Local doesn’t scale. In fact, I’d argue, the real solution to the local news crisis needs to come from the bottom up – from folks at the community level who decide to take their news and information needs into their own hands.
Good to see that some journalists are trying cooperatively owned news projects, as Lauren Mechling reports for The Guardian. One of our frustrations in finding news organizations to write about in “What Works in Community News” was that there were no examples we could find of a successful local news co-op.
The for-profit Mendocino Voice in Northern California considered it but got overwhelmed during the COVID pandemic. As I was wrapping up my reporting, publisher Kate Maxwell told me she was more likely to shift to the nonprofit model rather than pursue a co-op. I spent years following efforts to start a co-op in Haverhill, which were eventually wound down because of fundraising problems. And The Devil Strip in Akron, Ohio, fell apart.
It’s still an interesting idea. Co-author Ellen Clegg and I believe that we need diversity in ownership models. For-profit startups tend to be tiny, and most of the ones with much in the way of reporting capacity are nonprofits. A news outlet owned by the staff and the community would be an interesting alternative. Maybe someday.
If you’re north of Boston, I hope you’ll drop in at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton this Friday, March 1, at 7 p.m., when Ellen Clegg and I will be hosting an event for our book, “What Works in Community News.” Please click here for more information.
The Illinois Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2023 by Warren LeMay.
Illinois lawmakers this week unveiled a massive package aimed at bolstering local news. According to Mark Caro of the Local News Initiative, based at Northwestern University in Chicago, the package comprises two separate bills:
The Journalism Preservation Act would require Big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook to compensate news organizations for the content that they share, display or link to on their platforms. The Strengthening Community Media Act offers a broad array of incentives, tax breaks and scholarships intended to repopulate local newsrooms. Included in that bill is a provision that calls for 120 days’ written notice before a local news organization may be sold to an out-of-state company.
As I’ve said before, I’m less than enthusiastic about going after the tech platforms, which presupposes that they are somehow stealing journalistic content without paying for it. Facebook executives have made it clear that they can live quite nicely without news. With respect to Google, media outlets find themselves in the awkward situation of demanding compensation while at the same time depending on the search giant to drive traffic to their websites. Indeed, any one of them could insert a simple line of code in their sites that would make them invisible to Google. None of them does. I would like to see Google and Facebook do more for local news, and maybe it ought to be mandated. But this bill seems like too much of a blunt instrument, as does similar legislation being pushed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar at the federal level.
The second Illinois bill includes a number of different ideas. I particularly like the proposed requirement for a 120-day notification period. As Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, said recently on the podcast “E&P Reports,” a mandatory delay can give communities time to rally and prevent their local newspaper from falling into the hands of chain ownership.
Other provisions of the Strengthening Community Media Act would mandate that state agencies advertise with local news outlets, provide tax credits to publishers for hiring and retaining journalists, enact additional tax credits for small businesses that advertise with local outlets, and create scholarships for students who agree to work at a local Illinois news organization for two years or more.
It’s good to see action taking place at the state level given that several federal proposals in recent years have gone nowhere despite bipartisan support. It’s also notable that the proposals were drafted by Illinois’ Local Journalism Task Force, which was created in August 2021. Here in Massachusetts, legislation was signed by then-Gov. Charlie Baker way back in January 2021 to create a commission that would study local news. I had a hand in drafting that legislation and would be one of its members, but the commission has yet to get off the ground.
There are several other developments in local news that are worth taking note of.
• Gannett is making a $2 million investment in its Indianapolis Star aimed at bolstering the newsroom and the advertising sales staff. Two top Gannett executives recently appeared on “E&P Reports” about Gannett’s plans to reinvest in its properties. Unfortunately, Holly V. Hayes of the Indy Star writes, “This is the only site in the USA TODAY Network, which includes more than 200 local publications across the country, where such an investment is being made.” My hope is that if the investment leads to a boost in circulation and revenues, then it will serve as a model for what Gannett might do elsewhere.
• A new hyperlocal news project has made its debut in Boston. The Seaport Journal, a digital news outlet, covers the city’s newest neighborhood. Meanwhile, the Marblehead Beacon, one of three independent projects covering that town, has announced that it’s ending regular coverage but will continue to “pursue periodic and unique pieces, and shift away from daily, weekly, or otherwise regular articles.” A reminder: We track independent local news organizations in Massachusetts, and you can find a link to our list in the upper right corner of this website. Just look for “Mass. Indy News.”
• Local access cable television plays an important role in community journalism by carrying public meetings, providing a platform for residents to make their own media, and, in some cases, by covering the news directly. Unfortunately, cord-cutting has placed access television at risk since stations’ income is based on a fee assessed to cable providers for each subscriber. In CommonWealth Beacon, Caleb Tobin, a production technician at Holbrook Community Access and media and a junior at Stonehill College, argues in favor of Massachusetts legislation that would impose a 5% fee on streaming services. “While often viewed as a relic of the past,” Tobin writes, “the services that cable access stations provide are more important now than they’ve ever been.”
• Many thanks to Tara Henley, host of the Canadian podcast “Lean Out,” who interviewed Ellen Clegg and me about our book, “What Works in Community News.” You can listen here.
I am excited to share some big news about my friend and collaborator Ellen Clegg. Ellen has won a 2024 Yankee Quill Award, given by the Academy of New England Journalists, for her “contributions to the betterment of journalism,” which include a long and distinguished career at The Boston Globe; her work on our book about local journalism, “What Works in Community News,” and our podcast; and her co-founding and ongoing leadership of Brookline.News, a digital nonprofit startup.
Ellen is not the only journalist I’m associated with who won a Yankee Quill. Ed Miller, the co-founder and editor of The Provincetown Independent, has built a unique news organization — a print and digital outlet that’s a for-profit public benefit corporation, with a nonprofit arm known as the Local Journalism Project that supports certain types of public interest reporting at the Independent. (Disclosure: I’m a member of the Local Journalism Project’s advisory board.)
There were three other winners as well: George Brennan, a longtime editor on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard who also worked a stint at the Globe; Izaksun Larrañeta, executive editor of The Day in New London, Connecticut; and Mark Pothier, a veteran journalist and Globe alumnus who helped start the nonprofit Plymouth Independent and is now its editor and CEO. (A further disclosure: I’m a proud member of the Yankee Quill Class of 2019, and yes, I had a hand in picking this year’s honorees.)
The five will be honored at the New England Newspaper and Press Association convention on March 23. Here’s the press release, including bios of the winners. Congratulations to everyone!
