On this week’s podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with David Dahl, editor of The Maine Monitor. David was most recently a deputy managing editor at The Boston Globe. Among his jobs at the Globe: directing hyperlocal Your Town coverage at Boston.com, an initiative that ended not long after John Henry bought the paper in 2013. The pull of Maine was strong, however. He and his wife, Kathy, have a home in Friendship, Maine. When he decided that he was ready to turn the page, he looked Down East.
I’ve got a Quick Take on Bulletin, a feature developed by Facebook to compete with Substack that included local journalism produced by people of color. Sarah Scire has the scoop: Bulletin is shutting down. Ellen has a Quick Take on a new kind of media audit by the Alliance for Audited Media, which has been verifying newspaper circulation for 108 years. The organization says it’s branching out, to audit standards of ethics in journalism. Ellen asks: Why?
Dakotah Kennedy, a graduate student at Northeastern University (who is not related to me), contributes on-the-ground interviews from attendees at the recent Radically Rural conference in New Hampshire. Our recent podcast with Terry Williams, creator of the conference, can be found here.
The Bedford Citizen, one of the first and most successful hyperlocal websites in the Boston suburbs, has hired its second managing editor. Wayne Braverman, a veteran journalist who most recently worked for Gannett, will succeed Julie McCay Turner, who announced her retirement earlier this year.
Turner and two other women founded the Citizen 10 years ago. Originally an all-volunteer project, the outlet slowly morphed into a professional operation that was able to pay Turner and a part-time staff reporter, Mike Rosenberg. The nonprofit continues to be run by a volunteer board of directors. Braverman’s hiring marks the first time that the Citizen will be run by someone who wasn’t one of the founders and thus represents a rather momentous transition. Turner will remain involved in the Citizen as well.
According to Braverman’s LinkedIn profile, he was editor of Gannett’s Boston Homes publication until about two weeks ago, when Gannett closed the publication. He worked as the internship coordinator for GateHouse Media, Gannett’s predecessor company, from 2002-’16 and has also worked as a radio host and public-speaking instructor. He earned a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in political science from UMass Lowell.
The Citizen is among the projects that Ellen Clegg and I are writing about in “What Works,” our book-in-progress about the future of local news.
What follows is a press release from Teri Morrow, the Citizen’s executive director:
I want you to be among the first to know: Wayne Braverman — award-winning journalist and Bedford resident — joins The Bedford Citizenas Managing Editor this week.
Wayne brings both reporting and editorial experience as well as considerable enthusiasm for Bedford to the role.
During his career, Wayne has served as a reporter, senior editor, and managing editor in the Boston area. He’s worked for print and online publications. And he has experience expanding the scope of local news.
As you’ll read this week, Wayne says The Bedford Citizen is “considered by many professional journalists to be the model of how people can come together to create a new media outlet to provide residents with effective coverage of their community.”
I hope you are patting yourself on the back! That’s because you are one of the reasons journalists like Wayne consider The Citizen as a model of local journalism! Thank you for standing up for local news.
Throughout the interview process, Wayne shared that he is “ready to carry on the … mission of The Bedford Citizen.” And that he will “work with our staff and the people of Bedford to take [The Citizen] to its next evolutionary level.”
I hope you are as excited as I am to see what happens in the coming months and years with Wayne in the Managing Editor role. Should you see him around town, please share your thoughts and ideas about The Citizen.
Anne Galloway speaks at VTDigger’s 10th anniversary celebration in 2019. Photo by Glenn Russell, courtesy of VTDigger.
On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Anne Galloway, the founder and editor-at-large of VTDigger in Vermont. Like many journalists, she was laid off in 2009 from her job as Sunday editor of the Rutland Herald and The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.
VTDigger, which is a nonprofit, started with a $16,000 budget with no employees. As Galloway put it in a recent letter to readers, it has grown beyond her wildest dreams. It’s the largest newsroom in Vermont, with dozens of employees and more than 550,000 monthly readers. Galloway not only built the organization, she also wrote notable investigative pieces. Among other issues, she broke open a fraudulent scheme that involve developers at Jay Peak. I visited Galloway and wrote about the newsroom in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”
Earlier this year Galloway stepped aside from her management position in order to concentrate on investigative reporting.
Ellen has a quick take on a study about the state of U.S. democracy from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The study says it’s critical to fight disinformation, and advocates rebuilding trusted local news sources.
I report on a promising merger between public radio station KERA and the Denton Record-Chronicle, a daily newspaper that covers the suburbs north of Dallas. This move was facilitated by the National Trust for Local News, which raises money and connects legacy newspaper owners with possible buyers in order to keep them from either shutting down or falling into the hands of corporate chain owners. Our podcast with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of the trust, can be found here.
On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with David Greising, the president and chief executive of the Better Government Association, a century-old civic nonprofit organization that is also home to a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom as part of a new collaboration with the Illinois Solutions Partnership.
The new partnership is funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. The BGA separates its investigations team and policy team in order to wall off its journalism from its advocacy work. In May 2022, Madison Hopkins of the BGA and Cecilia Reyes of the Chicago Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for an investigation of the city’s history of failed building and fire-safety code enforcement, which proved lethal many times over.
I’ve got a Quick Take on a new development at The Provincetown Independent. Co-founder and editor Ed Miller was a guest on the “What Works” podcast earlier this year. The Indie is trying something really interesting: A direct public offering, or DPO.
Ellen has a Quick Take on the INNYs — the Institute for Nonprofit News Awards. A reporter named Sally Kestin won for best investigative journalism in a small newsroom. We’re talking really small: She works for the Asheville Watchdog, a nonprofit news outlet in North Carolina with only one paid employee. The rest are retired journalists, many of them quite well-known. Kestin won the 2013 Pulitzer for Public Service at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The Denton County Courthouse in downtown Denton. Photo (cc) 2014 by Kent Kanouse.
Of the various new business models that are emerging for community journalism, mergers between public broadcasters and existing news outlets are among the most promising.
One of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I are tracking for our book-in-progress, “What Works,” is NJ Spotlight News, a nonprofit digital startup covering politics and public policy in New Jersey that was acquired several years ago by WNET. They’ve merged their operations, continuing to offer deep coverage on their website while rebranding the daily half-hour newscast that appears on NJ PBS.
Now comes another move that’s well worth keeping an eye on. Public radio station KERA announced earlier this week that it intends to acquire the Denton Record-Chronicle, a daily newspaper that covers the suburbs north of Dallas. In a statement, owner and publisher Bill Patterson said, “This arrangement gives us the opportunity and the ability to preserve local journalism for the people of Denton County. As our population continues to grow, it’s imperative that we grow as well. With KERA’s commitment and expertise, our organization will be able to serve our audiences well into the future.”
What’s especially encouraging about the move is that it was facilitated by the National Trust for Local News, which raises money and connects legacy newspaper owners with possible buyers in order to keep them from either shutting down or falling into the hands of corporate chain owners. Terms of the Denton deal weren’t announced, but according to the National Trust, it was one of four that will be supported through a $17.25 million fund. According to Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the National Trust:
Communities across the country are clamoring to ensure the long-term sustainability of their local and community news. This expected acquisition of a beloved and storied community newspaper by a strong public media station shows another way forward. This new “public media community anchor” model to keep local news in local hands has important implications for media sustainability that reach far beyond the hills of North Texas.
Hansen Shapiro, by the way, was a recent guest on the “What Works” podcast.
The National Trust is best known for helping to purchase 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. The papers are now owned by a nonprofit organization (the papers themselves remain for-profit) and managed by The Colorado Sun, a for-profit digital startup.
The population of Denton is about 148,000, according to U.S. Census data. The Record-Chronicle doesn’t report its circulation to the Alliance for Audited Media, but this Wikipedia article claims that, as of 2011, it was about 12,500 on Sundays and 9,200 on weekdays. If the paper is like nearly every other daily, the circulation is no doubt smaller today.
The Record-Chronicle traces its roots to 1892. In recent years, it’s had a close relationship with the Dallas Morning News, the major metro in that region: the Patterson family sold the paper to the Morning News’ parent company, A.H. Belo Corp. (now the DallasNews Corp.), in 1999, only to buy it back in 2018.
I hope the Record-Chronicle thrives under its new arrangement, which is scheduled to become official in 2023. And I hope it serves as a model for many more such arrangements.
One February day in 2020, an obituary caught Paul Cuno-Booth’s eye. At that time the police and courts reporter for The Keene Sentinel in rural western New Hampshire, Cuno-Booth had two years earlier written about one of those wacky incidents that editors and readers love.
A 47-year-old woman had driven out onto the ice on a pond, doing donuts, knocking over fishermen’s equipment and leading police on a slow-motion chase, throwing things out of her window as she drove. She was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and disobeying an officer.
Now, reading her obit, he learned more about the woman who’d been arrested on the ice that day. She’d had surgery for a brain tumor in 2016. She’d worked with mentally disabled people. She was a triathlete. Hers was a deep, well-rounded life, and the Sentinel’s story had reduced her to a caricature for the entertainment of its readers.
Cuno-Booth and others at the Sentinel started talking about how they could cover criminal justice in a way that reflected the complexities of the people they were writing about — people who were, in many cases, suffering from substance abuse, trauma and poverty. Crime coverage at the Sentinel, he said, was typical of most papers, consisting of “a lot of quick-hit articles,” press releases from the police, “not a lot of reporting, not a lot of context.” They decided they needed to make some changes. But where to begin?
From Cuno-Booth’s slideshow
Cuno-Booth described the Sentinel’s dilemma and the steps that it took to improve its coverage at the Radically Rural conference last week in Keene, New Hampshire. Sponsored by the Sentinel and the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship, the conference, now in its fifth year, featured panels on agriculture, housing, the environment and community journalism. Ellen Clegg and I interviewed the Sentinel’s president and COO, Terry Williams, on the “What Works” podcast a few weeks ago.
Cuno-Booth said he left the Sentinel but stayed in touch with the paper; he’s now a freelancer, working with New Hampshire Public Radio and other outlets. The paper’s crime coverage, he told the audience, was reoriented with the help of Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Essentially, it came down to being more deliberate — individual crimes would not be reported unless the paper was prepared to follow them all the way through the court system, which immediately ruled out minor offenses. They’d look for trends rather than writing about, for instance, an 18-year-old picked up on an alcohol violation. They’d give people a chance to have stories about their earlier misdeeds be removed from Google search, although they’d remain in the Sentinel’s archives — a step taken by a number of news organizations in recent years, including The Boston Globe. Mug shots would rarely be published.
“I think it’s still very much a work in progress,” Cuno-Booth said. Nevertheless, that one moment of infamy for a troubled woman in 2018 has led to some significant changes in the way that the Sentinel covers crime and serves its community.
Hermione Malone, left, of the American Journalism Project
On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Hermione Malone, vice president of strategy and startups for the American Journalism Project. The AJP describes itself as a nonprofit venture philanthropy organization that focuses on supporting the future of local news. The organization makes grants to nonprofit news organizations, partners with communities to launch new outlets, and coaches leaders as they grow and sustain their newsrooms.
Hermione oversees local philanthropy partnerships. In that role, she helps nonprofit news startups get launched and nurtures coalitions of community stakeholders and local philanthropies. Her career has included work in diversity and inclusion and in community outreach. As executive director of Go.Be, a New Orleans-based nonprofit, she coached businesses owned by people of color and women, helping them figure out how to grow.
Ellen’s got a Quick Take is on Permian Proud, a pink-slime site put up by Chevron that provides a gusher of one-sided PR spin. Mine is on new research by Josh Stearns, senior director of the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund. Josh has fresh evidence that shows that local news is vital for democracy.
I’d like to let you know about a special program coming up on the crisis in community journalism. Titled “The Decline of Local News and the Rise of Polarization,” the event is part of the Masterman Speaker Series and the Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk Law School. It will be held next Thursday, Sept. 29, at 5 p.m. in Sargent Hall, 120 Tremont St., in the Blue Sky Lounge on the fifth floor.
I’ll be moderating, and I promise to inject some optimism into the proceedings. We’ve got a great panel:
Joshua Darr, associate professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Darr earlier this year on the “What Works” podcast about his research into polarization and local opinion.
Renée Loth, an opinion columnist for The Boston Globe and a former editorial-page editor of the Globe.She is currently an adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Charles St. Amand, practioner in residence in Suffolk’s communication and journalism department and a 31-year veteran of community journalism, most recently as editor of the Sentinel & Enterprise in Fitchburg.
The program is free, but you do need to register. Just click here.
Maya McFadden of the New Haven Independent interviews Victor Joshua, CEO of RespeCT Hoops, at the Farnham Neighborhood House in New Haven, Conn. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
I recently wrapped up my third book on the road ahead for local and regional journalism. “What Works: The Future of Local News,” a collaboration with former Boston Globe editorial-page editor Ellen Clegg, is scheduled to be published by Beacon Press in the fall of 2023.
Although I may yet write another book, it will probably not be the same type of project. That sparked some nostalgia on my part as I thought back to the places I’ve been to over the past 13 years. I’ve compiled a list of places I’ve visited. Most involved interviewing people in their newsrooms. Some don’t have newsrooms. Some couldn’t meet me on site because of COVID-19. In all of these, though, I traveled to where they were, interviewing some people at their homes or in restaurants. It’s quite a list, and I look back fondly on every one.
The 016, Worcester, Massachusetts
Baristanet, Montclair, New Jersey
The Batavian, Batavia, New York
The Bedford Citizen, Massachusetts
Billy Penn, Philadelphia
The Boston Globe
Burlington Free Press, Vermont
Colorado Community Media, Englewood, Colorado
Colorado Public Radio, Denver, Colorado
The Colorado Sun, Denver, Colorado
The Connecticut Mirror, Hartford, Connecticut
CT News Junkie, Hartford, Connecticut
The Daily News, Batavia, New York
Fort Bragg Advocate-News, California
Haverhill Matters, Haverhill, Massachusetts
Inner-City Newspaper, New Haven, Connecticut
KZYX Radio, Philo, California
Los Angeles Times
Mendocino Beacon, Fort Bragg, California
The Mendocino Voice, Ukiah, California
Montclair Local, New Jersey
The Montclair Times, New Jersey
New Haven Advocate
New Haven Independent
New Haven Register
NJ Spotlight News, Newark, New Jersey
OC Weekly, Costa Mesa, California
Orange Coast Magazine, Newport Beach, California
Orange County Register, Santa Ana, California
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Philadelphia magazine
Portland Press Herald (Maine)
San Diego CityBeat
Seven Days, Burlington, Vermont
The Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey
Ukiah Daily Journal, Ukiah, California
Vermont Public Radio, Burlington, Vermont
Voice of San Diego
La Voz Hispana de Connecticut, New Haven, Connecticut
Terry Williams, right, speaks on rural journalism at the Knight Media Forum 2020 in Miami. Photo (cc) 2020 by the Knight Foundation.
The “What Works” podcast is back from its August hiatus. This week, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Terrence Williams, president and COO of The Keene Sentinel in Keene, New Hampshire, one of the oldest newspapers in the country.
Terry and the Sentinel are the creators of the Radically Rural conference, now in its fifth year, which will be held Sept. 21 and 22. The conference looks at issues such as housing, farming, the environment and — most important to us — community journalism.
I’ve got a Quick Take on The Salt Lake Tribune’s new venture, called Mormon Land, an interesting example of how a local news organization can leverage news in its own backyard in order to attract a national audience.
Ellen highlights a podcast called Shevotes, which recounts the battle for suffrage and recounts historic efforts at voter suppression. Award-winning journalists Ellen Goodman and Lynn Sherr cohost, and actress Christine Baranski makes a contribution, too.
