What Works – Media Nation

Zuri Berry tells us how The Banner, a nonprofit startup, is reviving local news in DC’s Maryland suburbs

*Zuri Berry speaks at a community listening session in Silver Spring, Md.. Photo © 2025 by Moriah Ratner for The Banner. Used by permission.*

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Zuri Berry, the executive editor of The Banner in Montgomery County, Maryland. He’s also a Boston Globe colleague of Ellen’s from days of yore. The Banner is a nearly 4-year-old nonprofit digital startup founded in Baltimore that has been expanding into the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., even as The Washington Post has been cutting back on local coverage.

Zuri is one of those journalists who’s done a little bit of everything. We’re talking reporter, columnist, video producer, digital editor, radio host, audio editor over more than two decades in this business. And he’s got an MBA from the McColl School of Business at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, which is a combination you don’t always see in a newsroom leader.

Berry was deputy managing editor at the Boston Herald and managing editor of two NPR member stations. The accolades speak for themselves — he was part of the Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team for breaking news coverage of the 2013 Marathon bombings. At The Banner, he supported last year’s Pulitzer-winning series on Baltimore’s overdose crisis.

I’ve got a Quick Take about a journalist who’s run afoul of ICE and who faces deportation to Colombia. Estefany Rodríguez, a reporter for a Spanish-language newspaper called Nashville Noticias in Tennessee, was arrested by ICE even though her lawyers say she entered the U.S. legally. It may be a case of retaliation, as Rodríguez has reported on ICE activities in the Nashville area. After we recorded this podcast, Rodríguez was released on $10,000 bond, but she is still fighting to remain in the U.S.

Ellen has a Quick Take is about a small newspaper in Wyoming that ditched its police blotter — and almost nobody misses it. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle made the change after taking a course at the Poynter Institute on deepening crime coverage. Dropping the blotter gave the staff more time to do actual reporting.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

A new report on nonprofit local news calls for collaboration — and warns that philanthropy has its limits

*University Herald newspaper office, Seattle, 1919. Photo in the public domain.*

After reading Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s interview with Richard J. Tofel about her new report, “Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: A Field-Level Analysis of Infrastructure Needs,” I was concerned that she was going to propose widespread consolidation in the local and hyperlocal news space. I was alarmed enough to write a blog post reminding my readers of the old slogan “Local Doesn’t Scale.”

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So once the actual report came out, I set aside a couple of hours to read it carefully. It is more nuanced than her interview with Tofel suggested, and I found much of it to be both useful and thoughtful. A reminder: Hansen Shapiro is the co-founder and former chief executive of the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that purchased newspapers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia and ran them with rather mixed results. We interviewed her in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, and she was a guest on our podcast.

Oddly enough, Hansen Shapiro’s conversation with Tofel garnered more attention than the report itself. Tofel told Nieman Lab that it was his all-time most-viewed post. Well, I’m here to rectify that. It’s a dense report, but it’s well worth reading. I’ll guide you through some of the highlights.

Continue reading “A new report on nonprofit local news calls for collaboration — and warns that philanthropy has its limits”

Please join our What Works group on Facebook to keep up on local news — and our upcoming webinar

We have started a Facebook group for people who are interested in keeping up on our activities at What Works: The Future of Local News — especially our upcoming free, all-day webinar for local news publishers, which will be held on Thursday, May 21. The group will also help us with our outreach as we get closer to the event. Please join today!

Barbara ‘Bob’ Allen tells us about the nexus of student journalism and local news

*Barbara “Bob” Allen with Penn State student Sarah Grosch. Photo by Al Tompkins is used with permission.*

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Barbara “Bob” Allen, a Los Angeles-based journalist, trainer and consultant who founded CollegeJournalism.org in 2025. The site provides resources and news for journalism educators and student media advisers across the country.

Allen is also the editor of the Student Press Report, a brand-new national news desk covering the state of the college press. The debut piece — “Cash-starved and censored, America’s student press is in crisis” — lays out the financial and free-press challenges facing campus newsrooms. Allen also writes the weekly College Journalism Newsletter.

Allen brings decades of experience mentoring student journalists. She was the adviser to the student newspaper at Oklahoma State University and most recently served as director of college programming at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Missouri, home to both a campus paper — The Maneater — and the Columbia Missourian, a lab newspaper covering the city of Columbia.

Allen has also led an ambitious project to map every college newspaper in the country, in collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News. That effort found more than 1,100 college newspapers, with 766 located in or adjacent to counties with little or no local news access.

My Quick Take stays close to home. The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper, just celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Ellen’s Quick Take is about a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Provincetown. The Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that partners with The Provincetown Independent, raised money from more than 100 donors to buy the condo to house reporters. Ed Miller, editor and co-founder of the Indie, told Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher that housing was a major barrier to attracting staff to his well-regarded newspaper on the Outer Cape.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

A summary of our conversation

We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 1,200-word summary, which was then read by us for accuracy. The results are below. Do you find this useful? Please tell us what you think by using the Contact form linked from the top of our website.

Barbara “Bob” Allen, founder and director of CollegeJournalism.org, joined Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg on “What Works: The Future of Local News” to discuss the state of college journalism in the United States — its promise, its financial struggles, and its role in addressing the local news crisis.

Continue reading “Barbara ‘Bob’ Allen tells us about the nexus of student journalism and local news”

Dale Anglin tells us how Press Forward is leveraging local news to build community

*Dale Anglin at the recent Knight Media Forum in Miami.*

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Dale Anglin, the inaugural executive director of Press Forward, a philanthropic effort that is dedicated to funding local news initiatives nationwide.

Before she was named as the leader of Press Forward, Anglin served as a vice president for grantmaking at the Cleveland Foundation. She also led the foundation’s journalism strategy. Then and now, she focuses on local news and information as a way to restore a sense of community.

I’ve got a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, one of the most prominent nonprofit digital startups. It looks like readers of The Washington Post who live in the DC area may not be deprived of local news and sports after all despite the recent deep cuts ordered by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. The Banner is expanding, and it’s part of executive editor Audrey Cooper’s mission to build civic engagement through community journalism.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on a bill in New York state that attempts to put some guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Among other things, it would require disclosures and mandate supervision and fact-checking by actual human editors. It received a hearty endorsement from journalism industry unions. But there’s a lot of catching up to do to rein in the robots.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

The New York Times discovers Maine’s Midcoast Villager. Here’s the rest of the story.

*Camden, Maine, home of the Midcoast Villager. Photo (cc) 2020 by Paul VanDerWerf.*

The Midcoast Villager, an innovative weekly newspaper based in Camden, Maine, got The New York Times treatment last week. But though the Times lavished attention on the high-profile journalists who’ve been recruited to work there as well as the café it’s opened to extend public outreach, it missed entirely the Villager’s long history as a tech innovator — a history that extends all the way to the present.

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The Times article and visuals, by Steven Kurutz and Cig Harvey, are certainly entertaining enough, starting with their portrayal of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald, who left a job covering Washington for NBC News to come to Maine. “I did an insane thing,” he tells the Times. “I left one of the last stable jobs in media and took a job in the worst sector of media — and possibly in the economy.”

Continue reading “The New York Times discovers Maine’s Midcoast Villager. Here’s the rest of the story.”

Ellen Clegg digs into a claim of censorship at the Daily Memphian — and finds a more complex story

*President Trump signs order to send National Guard troops to Memphis. Photo via the White House.*

On Friday, Memphis journalist Dan Conaway took to Facebook and leveled a sensational charge on his public feed: that the Daily Memphian, a high-profile nonprofit startup, had censored a column he’d written about Donald Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to the city.

“I have left the Daily Memphian,” Conaway posted on his public feed. “They refused to run my column this week. Too critical of Trump, they said. Trump is not local, they said. This week, of all weeks, Trump is not local? Enough, I said.”

My What Works colleague, Ellen Clegg, took a deep dive into what had happened — and discovered that the Memphian had actually edited out a racist trope that Conaway inserted into the original version of his column.

Ellen has all the details at What Works.

Tracy Baim tells us about the LGBTQ+ Mapping Project and her work with Press Forward Chicago

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Tracy Baim, a Chicago-based journalist who directed the recently published LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project, which tracks LGBTQ news outlets across the country.

The LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project was created in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Media Foundation, News Is Out and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. The project surfaced 107 LGBTQ media outlets in total, 80 of which responded to the survey.

According to the accompanying report: “While they may have few similarities, there are several common denominators: Most are in need of additional resources to better cover their communities, and most are facing strong headwinds as advertising and sponsors reverse course, pulling back from diverse marketing efforts.”

*Baim interviewing Chicago Mayor Harold Washington in his City Hall office in 1987. Photo by William Burks / Windy City Times. Used with permission.*

Baim is also the executive director of Press Forward Chicago, the local arm of a national philanthropic effort to address the community news crisis.

I’ve got a Quick Take about the state of Kansas, where authorities have banned print newspapers in prisons, a ban that affects some 9,000 inmates in 20 correctional facilities. Weirdly enough, officials have not banned digital newspapers, although, as media commentator Bo Sacks observes, “Most Kansas inmates have limited or no meaningful internet access.”

Ellen’s Quick Take is on a column in The Minnesota Star Tribune written by Steve Grove, the CEO and publisher. He writes about the “stabilizing power of quality journalism” and announces a new team in the newsroom devoted to investigative reporting. But he also announces the outsourcing of the Strib’s print product, which means job losses.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Mapping LGBTQ media; plus, news behind bars, going mobile and some well-deserved recognition

*Click on image for the interactive version of the map.*

A new grant-supported project tracks LGBTQ media projects across the country.

According to News Is Out, the LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project “offers the first in-depth look at the scope, impact and urgent needs of local LGBTQ+ media across the United States. The report shows how these vital outlets, from one-person operations to established multimedia platforms, face shrinking advertising revenue, little foundation support and growing external threats, even as their audiences surge.”

The project was created in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Media Foundation, News Is Out and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Continue reading “Mapping LGBTQ media; plus, news behind bars, going mobile and some well-deserved recognition”

How our What Works project tracks solutions to the local news crisis

*Photo by Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke via Pixabay*

Nearly four years ago, Ellen Clegg and I began tracking solutions to the local news crisis with our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our first guest was Lori Ehrlich, at that time a state representative who was working to launch a commission to study the state of community journalism in Massachusetts and make some recommendations.

The commission has twice failed to achieve liftoff, but Ellen and I have built a multidimensional project. We wrote a well-received book, “What Works in Community News,” which was published by Beacon Press in 2024. And we are involved in other ways as well.

Today the What Works project, which is part of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and affiliated with the university’s Center for Transformative Media, comprises several different initiatives:

- Our website, where we post updates to the projects that we write about in our book, new episodes of our podcast, and news and commentary about other developments in local news.
- Our podcast, on which we interview enterpreneurs and thought leaders on an every-other-week basis. We’ll be back later this month with our 105th episode following a summer hiatus.
- Our Bluesky feed, where we link to coverage and smaller items that don’t quite meet the criteria for a full blog post. If you’re not interested in joining Bluesky, you’ll find our news feed embedded on the website. If you’re reading What Works on your laptop, just cast your eyes to the right.
- A database of independent local news organizations in Massachusetts. Although much of our work is national in scope, we also believe we can offer unique value to the grassroots journalism community right here at home. Look for links to “Mass. Indy News” in the upper right corner of this blog and at the What Works website. You can also bookmark it at tinyurl.com/mass-indy-news.
- Speaking appearances at which we talk about our book and evangelize about the future of local news. We also engage in ad hoc consulting with the leaders of news projects that are either startups or moving in new directions.
- Gatherings for local news leaders both in person and via webinar. We’re already planning our second in-person conference, which will be held next year on Friday, March 13.

Ellen and I are trying to build something of lasting value and to push back against the narrative that local news is dead. Through independent community control and innovative nonprofit and for-profit business models, we believe the local news crisis is being solved one community at a time.