What Works – Page 7 – Media Nation

Pioneering digital publisher Howard Owens tells us about a new idea for raising revenues

Howard Owens. Photo by Don Walker and used by permission.

On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Howard Owens, the publisher of The Batavian, a digital news organization in Genesee County, New York, way out near Buffalo. When I first met Howard, he was the director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media, which later morphed into Gannett. Howard launched The Batavian for GateHouse in 2008. In 2009, GateHouse eliminated Howard’s job, but they let him take The Batavian with him, and he’s been at it ever since.

The Batavian’s website is loaded with well over 100 ads, reflecting his belief that ads should be put right in front of the reader, not rotated in and out. He’s also got an innovative idea to raise money from his readers while keeping The Batavian free, which we ask him about during our conversation with him.

We’re also joined by Sebastian Grace, who just received his degree in journalism and political science from Northeastern. Everyone in journalism is freaking out about ChatGPT and other players in the new generation of artificial intelligence. Seb wrote a really smart piece, which is up on the What Works website, assuring us all that we shouldn’t worry — that AI is a tool that can allow journalists to work smarter.

Ellen has a Quick Take on Mississippi Today, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for stories that revealed how a former Mississippi governor used his office to steer millions of state welfare dollars to benefit family and friends. Including NFL quarterback Brett Favre! We interviewed Mary Margaret White, the CEO of Mississippi today, on the podcast in November 2022. And reporter Anna Wolfe has a great podcast about her prize-winning series.

I observe that journalism these days is often depicted as deep blue — something that liberals and progressives may pay attention to, but that conservatives and especially Trump supporters dismiss as fake news. But Steve Waldman, the head of the Rebuild Local News coalition, says it’s not that simple, and that the local news crisis is harming conservatives even more than it is liberals.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

I’m back on Twitter, and no, I’m not especially happy about it

Recently I wanted to add a news feed to What Works, the website that Ellen Clegg and I host about the future of local news. There are a fair number of items that come to our attention, and we wanted a way to alert our readers without necessarily writing a full blog post.

Because we had deleted our Twitter account last fall in response to Elon Musk’s sociopathic debut as the platform’s new owner, I looked into setting up a Mastodon news feed. I began by signing up for a Mastodon account for What Works. That was simple enough. Then I tried to figure out how to embed it at our website. I’m not going to get into the technical details except to say that it would have required either more money than we wanted to spend or more hassle than I wanted to put up with. We revived our Twitter account — we’re at @whatworks_nu — and added a news feed to the right-hand column of whatworks.news.

How long will it last? I don’t know. Musk has been arbitrarily cutting off access to Twitter’s API, which means that the feed could stop working at any moment. For now, though, it’s by far the best alternative we have. Which brings me to the state of Twitter and its various alternatives and would-be alternatives.

Twitter is of no importance to most ordinary people, and they should feel fortunate. I’d been a heavy user since the early days, though, and I wasn’t sure what to do when Musk took over. But in late November, following some particularly vile behavior by the Boy King, I decided I’d had enough. I stopped using Twitter and went all-in at Mastodon, writing about it a few weeks later.

And I stuck with it for three months. I don’t believe I posted any tweets in December, January and February except to remind people that they could find me here or on Mastodon at @dankennedy_nu@journa.host, or to rip into Musk. I was so anxious to get rid of my blue check mark that I found out how to do it myself without waiting for Musk to get around to it. In March, though, I started drifting back, and there I remain — mostly on Mastodon, but on Twitter as well.

If you don’t care, believe me, I get it. You’re under no obligation to read this post. But if you’re dealing with the same dilemma as me, here are the various reasons that I came back: Only a tiny handful of the people and accounts I follow on Twitter moved to Mastodon. Black Twitter has most decidedly not moved to Mastodon. Likewise with conservative voices that I value. Some of Mastodon’s biggest boosters have continued tweeting like crazy. Most media and political people are still exclusively on Twitter, especially at the state level. The local news outlets and journalism organizations I follow as part of my work are not on Mastodon. Big Media won’t move, either. Finally, despite everything, Twitter is not nearly as broken as some observers will have you believe. It still works, even though it goes down more than it did before Musk laid off most of his workforce and stopped paying the bills.

Everything is always subject to change, and I wish I hadn’t sounded as definitive as I did when I wrote that I was leaving. If you want to call me a hypocrite, go right ahead. I still like Mastodon, I still expect that at some point it will become more feasible (or necessary) to leave Twitter for good, and I continue to be interested in other alternatives — especially Bluesky, with which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is involved.

For now, though, I’m back on Twitter — chagrined, not as active as I was before, but with a greater understanding that most people are not obsessed enough with social media to go to the bother of packing up and moving to a new, unfamiliar platform.

Pulitzer notes: The Globe’s harrowing story on child abuse is named a finalist

The word “harrowing” is an overused cliché, but it’s exactly the right word to describe Janelle Nanos’ story about an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, published by The Boston Globe Magazine last summer. Nanos’ 11,000-word account of Kate Price’s long quest to learn the truth about what had happened to her was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing; this year’s Pulitzers were announced on Monday.

Price remembers being raped by her father — possibly starting when she was as young as 3 — and being pimped out to other men who he would contact via CB radio. She has spent her adult life trying to nail down the details, and by the end of the story we learn that she’s succeeded in coming about as close as she’ll probably ever get to proving that her memories are real.

Nanos, a reporter and editor for the Globe’s business section, has been following Price for 10 years and is currently expanding it into a book. The personal tone she takes is handled deftly, enhancing the narrative by making herself part of Price’s journey. Her story also helps puncture the argument, still made in some circles, that claims of childhood sexual abuse are not to be believed because memories of such abuse are not reliable.

At The Batavian, an innovative paywall gives subscribers a four-hour head start

Now, here’s an interesting idea. The Batavian, a for-profit digital news outlet located in Genesee County, in western New York, has begun charging readers who want to see stories as soon as they’re posted. Others have to wait four hours.

In a press release posted by the trade publication Editor & Publisher, Howard Owens, who has led The Batavian since its founding nearly 15 years ago, explained that the website has begun charging $8 a month, or $80 a year, for subscribers who don’t want to put up with the four-hour delay. He calls it an “Early Access Pass,” and he writes:

I’m not aware of any other news publication using a similar reader-revenue model. For 15 years, our news site has been supported by more than 150 locally owned businesses, and we had an obligation to our fellow small business owners to ensure The Batavian remains the first stop in our community for local news. A paywall like many newspaper sites erect would kill site traffic, but with this model, we anticipate our program will keep our market-dominating traffic numbers high.

In a post at The Batavian, Owens says that the Early Access Pass is off to a fast start. He quotes one couple who told him: “We believe that being connected to local news is important for a healthy community. Knowing what’s happening in our own backyards helps raise awareness of events that we can have an effect on. We appreciate having an unbiased news source, and that is still free for our neighbors who may frequently face difficult financial choices.”

The Batavian has been an innovative project since its founding, and I reported on it for my 2013 book “The Wired City.” Owens launched the site as a pilot project for GateHouse Media in 2008, when he was the chain’s head of digital publishing. After GateHouse eliminated his position the following year, he took The Batavian with him and has been at it ever since. (GateHouse, as you know, merged with Gannett in 2019 and took its name.)

You’ll be able to hear Owens talk about The Batavian on an upcoming episode of the “What Works” podcast.

A family-owned newspaper in Pennsylvania will be donated to a public broadcaster

Lancaster, Pa. Photo (cc) 2016 by Steam Pipe Distribution Venue.

Some very good news on the community journalism front: The family who owns the daily newspaper LNP of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is donating it to the local public broadcasting outlet. WITF will acquire LNP, Lancaster Online and several other media properties, known collectively as LNP Media. LNP reporter Chad Umble writes:

The Steinman family’s 158-year ownership of a daily newspaper in Lancaster will end in June with a gift meant to safeguard the future of its flagship publication.

Steinman Communications leadership on Tuesday announced to staff their plans to give LNP Media Group, publisher of LNP | LancasterOnline, at no cost to WITF, the Harrisburg-based public broadcasting station operator. WITF will oversee the Lancaster media company, which will be converted to a public benefit corporation and become a subsidiary of WITF.

Robby Brod of WITF covers the story as well.

Significantly, the deal will be accompanied by a major donation from the Steinman family, which will provide LNP with five years of runway to achieve long-term sustainability. Now, that’s stepping up. You may also recall that WITF was absolutely fierce in calling out elected officials in Pennsylvania who lied about the 2020 election results.

Not too many parallels come to mind. Probably the closest took place in 2022, when WBEZ acquired the Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid that was traditionally that city’s No. 2 daily. The Sun-Times was converted to a nonprofit, whereas the LNP properties will be run as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit whose governance structure imposes certain requirements for serving the public interest. Both deals, though, show that public broadcasters can help save regional news coverage.

I’ve reported pretty extensively on yet another situation that involved not a major regional newspaper but, rather, a medium-size digital-and-broadcast operation: NJ Spotlight News, created in 2019 by the merger of NJ Spotlight and NJ PBS. The combined operation includes a website that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey as well as a half-hour television newscast. The website and the newscast both incorporate quite a bit of journalism in common. The story of the merger and its aftermath will be told in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I are working on.

Recently my friend and mentor Thomas Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School wrote a paper on how public radio stations could do more to help solve the local news crisis; I wrote a response. The merger taking place in Pennsylvania isn’t quite what Patterson and I have in mind, but it’s adjacent. And it’s a great example of public media filling the gap at a time when traditional for-profit newspapers are fading.

Linda Shapley talks about journalism, leadership and the power of diversity

Linda Shapley. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

On the new episode of the “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I speak with Linda Shapley, the publisher of Colorado Community Media, who describes herself as a longtime denizen of the state’s media ecosystem. Indeed, she was at Colorado Politics and worked for 21 years for The Denver Post. “I’ve been a lieutenant for a lot of really great generals,” she once said. “This is my opportunity to be a general.”

CCM is a group of about two dozen weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. They were saved from chain ownership two years ago when they were purchased through a deal led by the National Trust for Local News. Last August we spoke with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the trust.

Shapley has talked about the power of representation as a visible Latina leader in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by white men. She says she hopes to use her position to encourage more diversity in journalism. Her mentor at the Post, Greg Moore, was a previous guest on What Works. You can listen to his episode here.

Shapley grew up in northeastern Colorado, in a rural county. Her father had a dairy farm. When I was in Colorado doing research for our book-in-progress, “What Works in Community News,” she told me that dairy farming is a lot like newspapers, because cows don’t know it’s Christmas.

Also this week, we talk with Madison Xagoraris, a graduate student in the Media Advocacy Program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Xagoraris recently reported on KefiFM, a Boston-based Greek music outlet dedicated to serving the Greek and Greek American communities in the Boston area and throughout New England.

Ellen has a Quick Take about retired journalists who are busy launching startup newsrooms. Nieman Reports has a piece by Jon Marcus that looks at the Asheville Watchdog in North Carolina, and the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts. These journalists say they want to help bolster the profession they gave their lives to by setting up nonprofit community news sites and mentoring younger reporters and editors. They aren’t playing pickleball.

I’m in a Colorado state of mind: My Quick Take is on the fifth anniversary of the Denver Rebellion, when the staff of The Denver Post rose up against further newsroom cuts being imposed by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. That rebellion sparked a revolution in Denver journalism.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Five years after the Denver Rebellion, local news is surviving in Colorado

The Buell Media Center, home of The Colorado Sun. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

Of all the alarms that have been sounded over the decline of local news, perhaps none was louder than the one in Denver, Colorado, five years ago this month. In what became known as the Denver Rebellion, editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett wrote a front-page editorial calling for the Post’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital, to sell the paper to local interests. Plunkett wrote:

We call for action. Consider this editorial and this Sunday’s Perspective offerings a plea to Alden — owner of Digital First Media, one of the largest newspaper chains in the country — to rethink its business strategy across all its newspaper holdings. Consider this also a signal to our community and civic leaders that they ought to demand better. Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom. If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will.

Unfortunately, Alden did not sell; after all, there were still profits to be squeezed out. At one time, the Post employed a newsroom of about 300 people, and its competitor, the Rocky Mountain News, had another 300. But the Rocky was shut down by a different chain owner years ago, and by the time that Plunkett wrote his manifesto, Alden was in the process of downsizing the Post again, from about 100 journalists to 60.

But journalism in Denver survived. Earlier this month, Plunkett wrote an opinion piece for The Colorado Sun looking back on the past five years. The Sun grew out of the Post: 10 senior people left after the rebellion and launched a digital-only news project that has grown to a couple of dozen people. This time around, Plunkett, now at the University of Colorado in Boulder, took a more optimistic view:

So much new talent has bubbled up around us as a result it’s difficult to keep track. The legislature’s got more reporters than you shake a stick at. Who could deny the excellence and the ambition of presenting and covering Denver’s recent mayoral debates?…

Hey, it’s heartening to see media companies banging around like they want to fight. Think of how bad off we’d be if we didn’t have such energy.

What’s happened in Colorado led Ellen Clegg and me to include it in our book, “What Works in Community News,” which will be published by Beacon Press early next year. I visited the Denver area in September 2021 and learned that the metro region is being well served. The Sun, the Post, Colorado Public Radio and another startup, The Denver Gazette, were all doing good work.

The problem, though, was in those places that weren’t within commuting distance of Denver. The news deserts that exist in the rural parts of the state were why The Colorado Sun was trying to provide some statewide coverage rather than merely focusing on Denver. So it was heartening to see that several papers whose owners wanted to move on have been acquired by a small chain. The indefatigable Corey Hutchins of Colorado College reports that O’Rourke Media Group, based in Arizona, is the new owner of Colorado papers in Salida, Buena Vista, Leadville, Park County and Fairplay.

“I feel like I’m taking over newsrooms that are well resourced,” the chain’s CEO, Jim O’Rourke, told Hutchins. “I like that, because that gives us an opportunity to come in and work with this team on things that we can do differently moving forward — things that we could do to help. And it’s better starting from a position like this versus going into a totally distressed situation where the previous company gutted the place.”

The news desert problem is real. But what’s happened in Denver and, now, in rural Colorado demonstrates what I’ve seen since I started reporting on the local news crisis some 15 years ago: Where there is failure there is also opportunity.

More: Ellen and I recently interviewed former Denver Post editor Greg Moore on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” And in June 2021, I wrote about how 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs were saved through an effort that included The Colorado Sun.

In the end, the Texas Observer couldn’t survive the rise of digital media

The Texas Observer, a highly regarded publication that was once the home of the late, great Molly Ivins, is shutting down and laying off its 17-person staff, which includes 13 journalists. The Texas Tribune has the story and notes:

The closing of the Observer raises questions about whether small progressive publications can survive the digital and demographic transformation of journalism and the information ecosystem during a time of rapid social and technological change.

Indeed, the Tribune, a nonprofit digital startup with more than 50 journalists, would be foremost among the new wave of publications that led to the Observer’s demise.

The Observer had been in turmoil for quite some time. My “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, talked about it on our podcast a year ago this week. Click here and go to 29:00.

Mark Histed of the Democracy Policy Network talks about local news vouchers

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mark Histed, a researcher at the Democracy Policy Network. DPN is a network of policy organizers who have a simple mission: sustaining democracy. That work takes place largely at the local level. Mark and others at DPN do research and provide deep-dive policy kits that help local citizens and legislators champion big ideas.

Mark leads the Local News Dollars effort and recently wrote a report on how states can establish a system where residents are issued vouchers they can use to subscribe or donate to the local journalism outlet of their choice.

In our Quick Takes, I discuss Ralph Nader — remember him? The consumer advocate-turned-presidential political spoiler got a lot of favorable attention late last month when it was learned that he would help launch a nonprofit newspaper in his hometown of Winsted, Connecticut. The paper, the Winsted Citizen, was the town’s first in a couple of years, although the daily Republican-American covers the area, too. But now people are wondering what exactly is going on — and if Nader is really going to come through with enough money for the Citizen to achieve liftoff.

Ellen tunes in to the new “Boston Strangler” movie on Hulu. In the movie, Keira Knightley portrays the late, great Loretta McLaughlin, who paired up with reporter Jean Cole at the Boston Record American to write a series of stories about the murders of women in Boston in the 1960s. Loretta moved on to The Boston Globe, where she did groundbreaking work on the AIDS crisis and became editorial page editor. She was a mentor to many, and an especially fierce advocate for the advancement of women in journalism.

You can listen to our latest podcast here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Talking local news with Gerard Cunningham of ‘Freelance Forum’

Great talking with Gerard Cunningham on his podcast, “Freelance Forum,” about the future of local journalism and my book-in-progress with Ellen Clegg, “What Works in Community News.” Please give it a listen.