Transcript: Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy

My interview with the authors of What Works in Community News

We hear a lot of grim predictions about the future of local news, both in the United States and in Canada. But my guests on this week’s program are feeling optimistic. For their new book, the pair did a deep dive into innovative local and regional news startups across America, and they say these startups are changing the media landscape, one outlet at a time. 

Ellen Clegg spent more than three decades at The Boston Globe. She’s co-founder of a non-profit local news outlet in Massachusetts, Brookline.News. Dan Kennedy is a journalism professor at Northeastern University and a media commentator. Their podcast is What Works: The Future of Local News. And together, they are the authors of What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate. 

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the episode for free here.

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TH: Wonderful to have you on today to talk about your book, What Works in Community News, for our own series on local news, here at Lean Out. I came away from reading your book so energized. Ellen, you spent more than three decades at The Boston Globe. Dan, you are a professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a media commentator. What made the two of you decide to embark on this particular project together?

DK: This is actually a pretty good story, do you want me to tell it Ellen? 

EC: Please do.

DK: Ellen and I had known each other for quite a while and Ellen was starting to move toward retirement, and so we said, “Would we like to do something together?”  

“Absolutely, but what are we going to do?” We actually spent some months thinking that we were going to write a textbook about opinion journalism, until we decided that that didn't sound like much fun. We wanted to do something that would be fun, but at the same time useful and make a real contribution. So that's when we hit upon the idea of taking a look at local and regional news organizations that are actually keeping their heads above water — most of these are startups — and holding them up as an example in the local news crisis. Saying, “Look at these interesting things that people are doing. Perhaps you could do this in your community or your state as well.”

EC: Dan has been researching this question much longer than I have. He has developed a list of independent startups throughout Massachusetts. I wanted to tag along. We abandoned the idea of doing a textbook on opinion journalism. We realized that's basically a tweet: Opinion should rest on a strong foundation of fact. [Laughs] So we moved in this direction. I remember coming to Northeastern in what, 2019?

DK: It was right after Covid. It was June or May of 2021. 

EC: So I came over to Northeastern — I live in Brookline, adjacent to Boston — and we mapped out the projects we wanted to look at on a whiteboard.

DK: That's right. And honestly, there were hundreds of these projects out there. I wouldn't say that what we picked at random. We definitely had an idea of going for geographic diversity, business model diversity, size diversity, and also audience diversity. So, I think that readers will find, we've got everything from rural America to urban communities of colour in our book.

TH: It is such an inspiring book — especially for those that are making a go of it independently. There's so many lessons here. Before we get to the bright spots, for context, for listeners who may not be familiar, can you sketch out for us just how dire the situation is for local news in America. And how did it come to be so? 

DK: Well, Penelope Abernathy, who is the gold standard for the big picture stuff on the local news crisis, she's now at Northwestern University (not to be confused with Northeastern). She has documented that 2,900 newspapers have closed since 2005, and they are mostly weeklies serving local communities. She expects that that will continue. That's about a quarter of the total number of newspapers, and she expects it to reach a third over the next few years. 

There's a more or less proportionate number of newsroom folks, whose jobs have been eliminated over that same period of time. So, it's pretty bad. But what really animates Ellen and me is our belief that an awful lot of the trouble that has come about in recent years is not just Craigslist, not just Google and Facebook, but also the rise of corporate chains and hedge funds as newspaper owners, which are really squeezing out the last remaining revenues — rather than reinvesting them, both in coverage and in technology that might pave a way for the future.

We figured if we can get past the corporate and hedge fund owners of these papers, and look at what independent people are doing, the picture might look quite different. And in fact it does.

TH: Those trends also apply to Canada. Very big issues in our media landscape. To set this up for listeners: What is at stake here? What happens to a community when it becomes a news desert?

EC: We did some research that finds that in the United States, in these communities where a newspaper shuts down, there's what's called a corruption tax. There's no watchdog watching the local budget. There's nobody attending the town meeting, where fiscal allocations are made. Economists did a paper a few years ago that found that the municipal bond rating goes down, making it more costly for a town to borrow money. That voting participation also goes down. There's more of what we call in the States “straight-ticket voting,” where voters have less information. There's no stories about candidates, there's no debates, there's very little information. So instead of voting for an individual, they'll just vote down the party line, Democrat or Republican.

DK: We also believe that the obsession with national political news in particular correlates with the decline of local news. It's not that people aren't interested in the news, but they're not getting much in the way of news and information about their communities. So they gorge on cable news and become very animated about what's happening in presidential politics. We think that this is really bad for the country, and what we really need is a reinvigoration of civic engagement. But you can't really have that reinvigoration without reliable news at the local level.

TH: I want to talk about some of these startups that are bright spots. One of the ones that many people are watching is the non-partisan, non-profit Texas Tribune. It has one of the largest state house bureaus in the country, and it provides all of its content free to print, digital, and broadcast outlets in Texas, and to its national partner, The Washington Post. What's working in that example?

EC: I went to Austin, Texas, and the Tribune was in transition. It's really a pioneer in this space. It was founded in 2009. Austin and Houston have legacy newspapers, but they were downsizing. So, a legendary political journalist named Ross Ramsey partnered with Evan Smith, who was a renowned writer and editor at Texas Monthly magazine, and a venture capitalist. They funded a nonprofit newsroom that in 2009 was very small. They focused mostly on state house news in Austin, which is the state capital of Texas, and they built from there. 

I remember them talking about posting up a database of the traffic. There were these traffic cameras at intersections that recorded people who ran red lights and stop signs. This was a public database that got a lot of interest, a lot of hits. They also started a political newsletter for insiders that they did charge money for, and they made a go of it. They are renowned for their events. The Texas Tribune Festival attracts many people nationwide. There are over a hundred different talks. They partnered with the famous South by Southwest event planners, and that's become a real hit for them.

DK: I want to point out, too — because some of your listeners probably know that The Texas Tribune has had to do some downsizing over the last six months or so. I've actually heard some people say, “Well, that's proof that The Texas Tribune isn't working.” Every organization has its ups and downs and there is absolutely no evidence that this is any more than a temporary blip. It's not good for the people who lost their jobs, but the Tribune remains one of the most important statewide news organizations in the country. And probably will be well into the future.

TH: I also wanted to ask you about the Tiny News Collective. I thought that was a really interesting case study. Walk us through what you learned from them.

DK:We interviewed Kara Meyberg Guzman, who is the co-founder of Santa Cruz Local. It's a tiny news organization, and she is very active in helping along the Tiny News Collective. The situation that’s out there for these startups is that they know how to do journalism. For the most part, a lot of the people who are doing these startups have been mainstream journalists. Now they're trying to figure out how to be entrepreneurs and they really need help with the back office stuff. Figuring out how to do a budget, how to have a content management system, advice on how to sell advertising. The Tiny News Collective is essentially dedicated to providing some of these back office services, in an off-the-shelf manner. But they're not a commercial entity. They're a non-profit.

There's another project we looked at in New Jersey, TAPInto, which is a for-profit that essentially allows people to start their own hyper-local news site, as a franchise model. That's a good model for some people. But what is really cool about the Tiny News Collective is that they're really providing more of a service for news entrepreneurs who really want to strike out on their own and chart their own way forward. The Tiny News Collective has also been very good about gearing their services toward women and people of colour.

TH: One of the issues that your book grapples with — and a number of your subjects are grappling with — which I think is really important to address, is that a lot of the communities that end up with these startups are communities with connections, with wealth, with funders, with active paying subscribers. So, they tend to get covered better than poorer communities. How do we think through that challenge?