What Works: The Future of Local News Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg

Dan and Ellen talk with Johanna Dunaway, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. She is also research director of the university's Institute for Democracy, Journalism, and Citizenship in Washington D.C.
Dan got to know Johanna when they were both Joan Shorenstein Fellows at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2016. Dan wrote part of his book about a new breed of wealthy newspaper owners, “The Return of the Moguls.” Johanna wrote a paper that examined how mobile technology was actually contributing to the digital divide between rich and poor. 
She recently received a $200,000 grant from the Carnegie Fellows Program to further her work on local news. Among other things, she plans on building out an expansive database that lists local news outlets throughout the United States. She also plans to examine whether the nationalizing of news contributes to the toxic quality of public discourse. 
Dan has a Quick Take on what has been a bad year so far for public broadcasting operations, with cuts being imposed from Washington, D.C., to Denver and elsewhere. In Boston, where “What Works” is based. GBH News, the local news arm of the public media powerhouse GBH, has imposed some devastating cuts. But they’ve also brought in new leadership that could lead to a brighter future. Ellen looks at a new use of print by the all-digital Texas Tribune, the nonprofit news outlet based in Austin. 
 
 

Dan and Ellen talk to Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos. Both are leading an expansion by the MassLive Media Group, which operates MassLive.com.
Macht, the president, previously led the digital transformation of the Harvard Business Review.
Ramos is the vice president of content and executive editor of MassLive. Ramos comes to Massachusetts after leading newsrooms in Miami, Indiana, Memphis, and Chicago.
In Quick Takes, Dan discusses an announcement Google made last week that could prove to be pretty harmful to local news publishers. Essentially Google is going to merge its search engine with Gemini, its artificial-intelligence tool, which is similar to ChatGPT. Soon, anything you search for on Google will give you not just links but an AI-generated answer. Most people aren’t going to bother with those links, thus depriving news outlets of much-needed traffic.
Ellen reviews the findings from a recent Pew Research Center poll that studied local news habits. It's perhaps no surprise to see that the US adults surveyed increasingly turn to websites and social media for their news.
 

Today Dan and Ellen talk to Anne Eisenmenger, who is president of Beaver Dam Partners and publisher of several weekly newspapers in southeast Massachusetts, including Wareham Week and Sippican Week. Anne has a laser focus on developing and operating hyperlocal for-profit newspapers.
Anne lives in Wareham, and she founded her community news company there in 2010 with the launch of Wareham Week. And, yes, it's an actual print newspaper, with a for-profit business model, and it's packed with ads. 
Dan dives into one of the best newspaper stories in the country, which is right here in our backyard, or at least in the western sector of our backyard. It involves the Berkshire Eagle, a daily based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that was once regarded as one of the best small papers in the country. Then it fell into the hands of Alden Global Capital, so we all know what happened next. This story, though, has a happy ending, at least so far, and I’ll talk about it in our Quick Takes.
Ellen talked recently with Paul Hammel, a reporter doing a story on the loss of small-town newspapers across Nebraska. He focused on a couple who sold their paper, in a town of 1,000, but had to come back after retirement when the new owner quit in the middle of the night.

Dan and Ellen talk to Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher Magazine, which is now much, much more than a magazine. It's a cutting-edge multimedia source of information on innovation in our industry. Mike hosts E&P's weekly Vodcast series, "E&P Reports." And much more. He’s been a guest on this podcast previously, and today’s he’s back to talk about a new venture.
Blinder has a new vertical on public media, called Public Pulse. It's newsy and filled with insider information. It aggregates the latest on stories like conflict ignited by Uri Berliner at NPR, and features reporting on trends like the collaboration of universities and public radio stations. There’s already an excellent publication in this space called Current, and Public Pulse is a welcome addition to that.
Ellen has a Quick Take on a big award going to MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. The nonprofit Memphis news outlet, which we profile in our book, “What Works in Community News,” will receive the Lorraine Branham IDEA Award from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. We discuss other media criticism up for awards, as well. 
Dan gives a shoutout to a New Hampshire news project previously featured on the podcast. InDepthNH recently revealed some pretty disturbing details about a state representative — and it came only after a four-year quest to obtain public records. It demonstrates why journalists need to be persistent. 

Dan talks with Josh Stearns, the senior director of the Public Square Program at Democracy Fund. The Democracy Fund is an independent foundation that works for something very basic and increasingly important: to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges. Josh leads the foundation's work rebuilding local news. The Democracy Fund supports media leaders, defends press freedom, and holds social media platforms accountable. (Ellen was stuck in traffic somewhere on the Zakim Bridge in Boston for the duration of this show, but she'll return next episode!)
In our Quick Takes, Dan poaches in Ellen's territory and reports on a development in Iowa, the Hawkeye State.   When two local weekly newspapers near Iowa City recently got into trouble, their owner found an unusual buyer: The Daily Iowan, the independent nonprofit student newspaper. Now there are plans to supplement local coverage with contributions from student journalists. It’s not something Dan would like to see everywhere — after all, we want to make sure there are jobs for student journalists after they graduate. But at least in this case, it sounds like the Iowa solution is going to be good for the weekly papers, good for the students and good for the communities they serve.
 

Dan and Ellen talk with Kyle Munson, president of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation. The foundation was launched in August 2020, during the heart of the pandemic. It was a challenging time for newspapers. As Dan and Ellen wrote in their book, "What Works in Community News," the Storm Lake Times Pilot saw a real collapse in local advertising. Art Cullen, the editor, was worried about survival.
The foundation is set up as a nonprofit, so it can receive tax-free donations and philanthropic grants. In turn, it has doled out grants to small papers in western Iowa, including the Carroll Times Herald, La Prensa, and the Times Pilot. These grants were critical because the crisis in local news has hit rural areas hard. 
Dan has a Quick Take on The Associated Press, which is the principal source of international and national news for local newspapers around the country — and in many cases for state coverage as well. Two major newspaper chains have announced that they are going to use the AP a lot less than they used to, which will result in less money for the AP — and either higher fees, less coverage or both for their remaining clients.
Ellen looks at Outlier Media, a woman-led team of local journalists in Detroit. They formed a network called the Collaborative Detroit Newsrooms network to produce and share news for underserved populations. They've won a major international award from the Association of Media Information and Communication. Executive editor Candice Fortman traveled to Barcelona to pick up the juried prize.