This is primarily a place for my notes from this book for my future reference, but I have also included below an essay about the book I originally posted on Linkedin.
American journalism leaders rightly view local news models as worryingly limited. After nearly 20 years founding and operating a local news org, I believe many take too narrow a view of how to address that worry.
That’s why I was interested to read What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate, published in 2024 and written by Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy, two well-regarded journalism insiders who also host a podcast on local news. (Clegg is a longtime Boston Globe veteran who founded hyperlocal news site Brookline News; Kennedy is a Northeastern University faculty member.)
The book came out two years ago, and for fellow local news nerds, it’s still worth adding to you collection. Buy it!
Below, I share my reflections, and I have criticisms, but they’re more about the broader local news discourse than the book itself 🙂 I come with peace and love.
The book, with chapters dedicated to different local news efforts around the country, is an effective representation of a thoughtful, serious and passionate class of journalism boosters — almost all veterans of a past newspaper era. In my view (having never worked at a newspaper), this book’s representation comes with both strengths and weaknesses that I’ll expand on below:
- The “pros”: the authors assemble a charming and inspiring collection of hardworking, community-minded locals using journalism across the country, with special attention to City Hall, public affairs and the necessary mechanics of government. Good people doing good work!
- The “grows”: even with a dash of diversity here and a nod to the internet there, the projects all look like rough variations on the same newspaper format: “town-square” style, general-interest coverage about a particular group of people in a particular geography. I believe this is too limiting a view, both of form and model.
To be clear, I love these newspaper-inspired, (mostly) nonprofit local newsrooms that have sprouted up around the country. They do great work. They are important. I want every state, every county in the country to be blessed with one. (If you work on one of these, keep doing it!)
My challenge, then, is not on the dozens of examples in the book, and in most local news discourse. Instead, I want to challenge two gaps, in both the book and the wider local news discourse: (a) an over-reliance on a single business model that has emerged and (b) all the focus is on the (important) journalism, and none is on the actual mechanics that make the model.
(a) The Single Model Problem
The book’s chapters seem varied: a beloved site focused on Minnesota’s immigrant communities (Sahan Journal), a cherished legacy print newspaper in Iowa (Storm Lake Times Pilot) and a scrappy Connecticut news site with radio distribution (New Haven Independent). These are important efforts that I admire. But the model that underpins them all (insofar that this book explores them at all) look similar: town-square news for a geographically-bound community (be it identity, town, state) backed by philanthropy, reader revenue and mix of events and modest advertising.
It’s a good model! But it sure seems like only the one model. That feels like a monoculture. And monocultures are fragile.
The authors rightly quote journalism researcher Nik Usher’s warning about over-reliance on reader-revenue models in particular, which tend to target “the rich, white and blue.” Not because reader revenue isn’t important — it absolutely is — but because it’s misguided to treat it as the only acceptable replacement for subscriber revenue.
My theory for why we have such a narrow view of how local “community news” is filed is because online it’s difficult to quickly determine quality and longterm investment, so we defer to “if it acts like a local newspaper and looks like a newspaper, then it must be acceptable local news.”
(A few months back, I talked about this with Caroline Ross and Caitlin Morelli, via Rodney Foxworth, who must have thoughts, since he introduced me to David Bank )
(b) The Disinterest in Mechanics Problem
Worse, even that town-square business model goes without detailed review. A few examples from the book:
- a local news site franchise company (TapInto) is cited, but not whether something actually works about hyperlocal advertising.
- Mentions go to my pals at Report for America, and its offshoots led by Steven Waldman, but not a lick about if/how/why RFA newsrooms attract new financial backers — or why a legislator should direct new state funds for information to a news org rather than, say, a church group.
- The idea of “events” being a revenue opportunity is mentioned several times, but not why specifically anyone would sponsor one, or what precisely someone is buying with a ticket.
As best as I can tell the point of all of this is only “because people want local news.” But we know well that fewer and fewer people think “local journalism” is a thing they want. So why don’t we ever engage seriously with anything that looks really different?
I crave other, widely-ranging examples, both of editorial outside of the newspaper-ish model (museums! schools! researchers! advocacy orgs! civic associations! membership groups! affinity groups! financial firms! creators! interest groups! or anything we’d call “niche!). AND of more varied business models that would come with them (anything more specific about those “events”; anyone competing with “marketing” and “PR” with something journalism-based; data services; job placement; market intelligence or research and analysis).
I know real people doing different, compelling stuff with local news and information: I’m thinking about Matt Wynn, Sabrina Vourvoulias (that WhatsApp group!), David Cohn (texts, and then some!), Andrew McGill (pushing on the AI front), Colin Dean (local voting!) even Alexander Peay and the curation by Liz Kelly Nelson and Adriana Lacy (creators!). (And many others!)
For 20 years, I’ve heard local news leaders say at conferences we’re advancing news and information in new ways. Most seem to imagine newspapers with a donate button.
This sounds too much like what I was talking about with Jim MacMillan, Andrew Nusca , Greg Linch , André Natta , Danya Henninger and Daniel Bachhuber and Lou Dubois and Sean Blanda 15 years ago at unconferences. Or with Jessica Estepa and Matt Thompson and Nina Sachdev and Penny Riordan and Meghan Murphy at some ONA somewhere. I really do think we’ve progressed a ton, so I want the prevailing local news dialogue to too.
##
It’s a good book! A helpful collection of well-liked efforts. I recommend it. But my local news tribe seems uninterested in the details of why other businesses work.
It felt telling that in a chapter dedicated to the well-regarded NJ Spotlight (an organization I respect greatly, led by John Mooney ), the authors thoughtfully name every newsroom member, but only a single business teammate gets an airing. Even then, I’m not sure there was any insight. (Would they consider selling reader data? With whom do they compete that is not a news organization? When their audience will always be smaller than social media, why actually does their aggregate audience matter?)
So what does work in local community news, in the estimation of the authors? Local control and deep care in producing high-quality local journalism, with fairly vague references to reader revenue, supportive philanthropy and charitable advertising and a splash of “events,” without much digging into formats. (The half-dozen event planners I’ve employed through the many years must be screaming “What kind of event do they even mean!?)
My bet is most of us reading this essay would much prefer to discuss the granular details of the sloppy, and unedited, writing I did on a Sunday night, rather than the granular details of, says, a local news events model. That would have been my stance at the beginning of my career. Then, unable to get a journalism job in the Great Recession and needing to pay rent, I got really interested in the cost of renting chairs and the effects rain has on attendee show-rates. We need the details and to encourage a range of models.
I admire Clegg and Kennedy. They’ve made important contributions, and this book is one of them. Thank you! It contains many earnest and important examples of community news, and how that information helps people.
It also mirrors what I find dispiriting about our decades of local news discourse: Nostalgia for when big, lively newspaper newsrooms could overlook the rest of the operation.
Below I have my notes for future reference.
- In 2011, a Chicago is the World blog post coined “news deserts”
- Penny Abernathy: “ghost newspapers”
- “Pink slime journalism” is a metaphor for low-quality, often partisan websites masquerading as legitimate local news, using generic names and automated content (sometimes AI-generated from press releases) to spread propaganda, influence opinion, or harvest data, rather than provide real journalism,
- Henry David Thoreau: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas may be have nothing important to communicate”
- For the role of the press, Lippman wrote of “the manufacture of consent,” but Dewey believed in a better informed citizenry
- “When many Americans are highly engaged with national news, especially with the divisive talk shows that are carried on cable outlets, local journalism can be a way to bring us together”
- Nikki Usher: reader revenue paywall has to target “the rich, white and blue”
- …although Boston Globe charges $1 a day, in line with inflation adjusted newspaper prices from 1980
- All the orgs they profile are free to access
- NJ Spotlight , and state funded civic consortium is the book’s first chapter — but puzzlingly little about any of the models in detail , like what value is being created
- NJ Spotlight’s revenue mix: quarter from events/advertising, a quarter from individual donations and half from grants — Mooney’s goal was a third from each, a la that Texas Tribune model
- TAPinto: franchisee pay $5k (not clear if one time or annual) to get website, they keep 80% of any advertising
- [[The book makes me think, what my ideal be for Technically? Maybe 40% underwritten, and 20% each from advertising, grants (to encourage public-interest reportage) and individuals for an online community (and our annual conference)]]
- The authors name all the journalists but not the other staff of NJ spotlight
- Minneapolis news ecosystem is another chapter, including Sahan Journal (grant funded from Minneapolis Public Media), NewsMatch and Knight etc , AJP
- Decentralized nonprofit video news site Unicorn Riot is funded reader donations
- Influential news sites founded by rich guys: Minnpost was led by Joel Kramer who paid himself $1, Voice of San Diego started by a venture capitalist (Buzz Woolley)
- A lot of Google and Facebook talk of digital advertising monopoly but not talk about why those companies ran away with the cateogry
- Star Tribune rebound in quality, whihc had MinnPost evolve to more magazine-style
- Another chapter is on Steve Waldman and his Rebuild Local News, including policy strategy
- They ask Waldman in their podcast if the policy can cut out corporate chains and he says yes by employee count but why? The idea is to tip motivation into scale, so if motivating higher-quality journalism is the focus, and it can do that, why parse?
- Nonprofit newsrooms can’t endorse candidates.
- Waldman: “ I don’t think it would necessarily be a good thing if the entirety of the local news system were nonprofit.”
- Tiny Bedford Citizen (many retiree writers active in town affairs) represents what Howard Ziff calls the choice between cosmopolitan and provincial journalism — those distant and objective and those living in that community (for tiny towns the provincial means lots of overlap, the old chain days meant junior trained reporters who weren’t there long)
- Ziff: neither model is superior, they are different
- Experienced Corps: RFA for retired framer journalists (there are more retired than working)
- Bedford Citizen has a glossy magazine that sells agent ads
- Colorado Sun: public benefit corp, free to read but premium stuff behind a member paywall – 200k subscribers, 17k are members , 1.2m unique monthly visitors
- Memphis MLK50
- Mendocino Voice co op
- Meredith Clark newsroom diversity survey
- LoveBabz LoveTalk is a
WNHH Community Radiopodcast and show hosted by Inner City News CT editor Babz Rawls-Ivy, featuring interviews with New Haven’s community figures. - Stork Lake Times Pilot is another chapter
- Center for journalism and liberty
- Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro cofounder National trust for local news
- Texas Tribune: nonprofit model of donors and sponsors
- Media Monopoly book by Ben Bag