What Works: The Future of Local News – Details, episodes & analysis

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What Works: The Future of Local News

Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg

News

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/13d. Total Eps: 96

From Northeastern University's School of Journalism. Local news, the bedrock of democracy, is in crisis. Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University and veteran Boston Globe editor Ellen Clegg talk to journalists, policymakers and entrepreneurs about what's working to keep local news alive.

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🇫🇷 France - newsCommentary
27/03/2025
#85
🇩🇪 Germany - newsCommentary
04/03/2025
#69
🇨🇦 Canada - newsCommentary
02/10/2024
#88

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https://www.beacon.org/What-Works-in-Community-News-P1978.aspx
7 shares
https://whatworks.news/podcast/
5 shares
https://www.texastribune.org
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpgarrett/
1 share
https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-hansen-shapiro-5a76339/
1 share
https://www.linkedin.com/in/suecross/
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https://youtu.be/AB-8qWG6YQw?si=EFJ_Z1BsAoiqJG4J
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCwPNtdhmoM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uKV_fFKHBI
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Score global : 68%

Publication history

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Episode 87: Sophie Culpepper

Season 3 · Episode 87

Monday, September 30, 2024 • Duration 37:42

Dan and Ellen talk with Sophie Culpepper, a staff writer at NiemanLab who focuses on covering local news. She co-founded The Lexington Observer, a digital local news site covering Lexington, a town of 35,000 outside Boston. For two years, she was the nonprofit news outlet's only full-time journalist. She covered public schools, local government, economic development and public safety, among other subjects.

Ellen has a Quick Take on Sewell Chan, the former editor of The Texas Tribune who has just started his new job as executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Ellen interviewed Sewell in Austin for the Texas chapter in "What Works in Community News."

Dan discusses the recent Nonprofit News Awards bestowed by the Institute Nonprofit News. The Service to Nonprofit News Award went to Andy and Dee Hall, the retired founders of Wisconsin Watch, who were guests on this podcast last December. VTDigger won a community champion award. And an INNovator Award for a sold-out event featuring live stories from the stage went to Brookline.News.

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Episode 86: Mark Henderson

Season 3 · Episode 86

Wednesday, September 18, 2024 • Duration 44:41

Dan and Ellen fall into their third season of What Works with an interview with Mark Henderson, an old friend of the pod and a pioneer in online media. Mark is a journalist and technologist with decades of experience in news. He is the founder and CEO of The 016, a first-of-its-kind news publisher and distributor focused on Worcester, Massachusetts.

Mark worked at the Telegram & Gazette from 1990 to 2014. He spent 19 years in the newsroom, rising to the position of assistant sports editor before being named deputy managing editor for technology in 2005. In 2009, he was named digital director, where he launched the first paywall at a New York Times Company newspaper. He founded the Worcester Sun, a subscription news site that launched in August 2015 and suspended publication in February 2018.

Mark was also one of the very first people Dan and Ellen interviewed for their book, “What Works in Community News.” Although Mark is not in the book, Dan did write up his conversation for Nieman Lab, which can be found here.

Dan has a Quick Take on a report from the Poynter Institute, a leading journalism education organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that offers a clear-eyed assessment of why there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism despite the very real challenges that we still face.

Ellen recounts a Knight Science Journalism Program panel and awards ceremony last week at MIT. The program honored Cicero Independiente, a nonprofit newsroom in the Chicago area. The staff won for an innovative project that examined toxic air.

Episode 77 | Kyle Munson

Season 2 · Episode 77

Thursday, March 28, 2024 • Duration 37:03

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.

Episode 76 | Emily Rooney

Season 2 · Episode 76

Thursday, March 7, 2024 • Duration 32:40

Dan and Ellen talk with Emily Rooney, the longtime host of the award-winning show on WGBH-TV, "Beat The Press." Dan was a panelist on "Beat the Press," which had a 22-year run but was canceled in 2021 by GBH. The show, which is much missed by many former viewers, had a brief second life as a podcast.

Emily has got serious television news cred. She arrived at WGBH from the Fox Network in New York, where she oversaw political coverage, including the 1996 presidential primaries, national conventions, and presidential election. Before that, she was executive producer of ABC’s "World News Tonight" with Peter Jennings. She also worked at WCVB-TV in Boston for 15 years, from 1979–'93, as news director and as assistant news director.

There's a revival of interest in responsible media criticism. Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr recently wrote an op-ed calling for the restoration of a public editor position at The New York Times, The Globe and other news outlets.

Dan has an update on one of our favorite topics — pink slime. Wired magazine has a wild story out of rural Iowa involving a Linux server in Germany, a Polish website and a Chinese operation called “the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” Ellen recounts a legal saga in Southeastern Minnesota involving the sale of a newspaper group and allegations of intellectual property theft. It's all about a single used computer and its role in creating a media startup.

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Episode 75 | Teri Morrow and Wayne Braverman

Season 2 · Episode 75

Thursday, February 22, 2024 • Duration 37:17

Dan and Ellen talk with Teri Morrow and Wayne Braverman of The Bedford Citizen in the Boston suburb of Bedford, Massachusetts. Wayne is a longtime journalist who is now serving as the managing editor of the Citizen. Teri, the executive director, has lived in Bedford since 1996, and has been active in local government. Dan wrote the chapter on this homegrown, grass-roots news site in "What Works in Community News." In the book, he tells the story about how the free digital site grew out of co-founder Julie McCay Turner's desire to find a home for information on a church plant sale.

Dan has a Quick Take on an unlikely good news story. The media industry is in the midst of another painful downturn, with news organizations from The Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times to CNN cutting their newsrooms and with The Messenger, a high-profile national startup that never seemed to make sense, shutting down after less than a year. But there's one news organization that’s hiring journalists and that says it’s succeeding at the very tough job of selling ads. You won’t believe who he's talking about, so stay tuned.

Ellen talks about the robots that may come to steal our jobs. Or at least help us compile real estate listings and police blotters. It's all part of an initiative undertaken by that venerable journalistic organization, the Associated Press.

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Episode 74 | Laura Pappano

Season 2 · Episode 74

Thursday, February 8, 2024 • Duration 27:30

Ellen talks with Laura Pappano, an award-winning journalist who has written about education for more than 30 years. Laura has a new book out from Beacon Press. The title is "School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education." By the way, Beacon also published our book, “What Works in Community News.” Dan and Ellen are recording their segments separately, because Ellen was travelling. So, don't worry, they're not breaking up.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a philanthropic gift from Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, that is designed to cover full tuition for many graduate students in journalism at the City University of New York. That's good news for students wondering whether to take on $50,000 or more in tuition debt to get a master's degree in journalism at a private university. Craigslist destroyed the classified ad market, but Newmark continues to make his mark as a philanthropist.

Dan offers two cheers for billionaire newspaper ownership. With the news business dealing with a difficult round of layoffs, a number of media observers have jumped to the conclusion that billionaire owners are not the solution to what ails journalism. Well, of course it isn’t. No one ever said otherwise. But the record shows that civic-minded ownership by wealthy owners has proven to be a workable solution in several cities.

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Episode 73 | Wendi C. Thomas

Season 2 · Episode 73

Saturday, January 27, 2024 • Duration 26:11

We talk with Wendi C. Thomas, the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Thomas founded MLK50 in 2017 as a one-year project designed to focus on the antipoverty work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King had traveled to Memphis in April of 1968 to support striking sanitation workers who were fighting for safer working conditions and a living wage.

But MLK50 became much more than a one-year project. She and her staff have gone on to produce journalism that has changed the dialogue, and changed lives, in Memphis. Her work has garnered numerous awards. In 2020, she was the winner of the Selden Ring Award for her groundbreaking investigative series, "Profiting from the Poor," an investigation of a nonprofit hospital that sued poor patients over medical debt. The series, co-published with ProPublica, had major impact: the hospital erased $11.9 million in medical debt. MLK50 is one of the projects that we profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Ellen has a Quick Take on the situation at Houston Landing, a highly anticipated and well-funded nonprofit newsroom that launched in 2023. Dan's Quick Take is on The Baltimore Sun, the venerable 186-year-old daily newspaper that at one time was home to the infamously caustic writer H.L. Mencken. Earlier this month, Alden Global Capital sold the Sun to a right-wing television executive who hates newspapers. But not to fear — public interest journalism is alive and well in Baltimore, as Dan will explain.

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Episode 72 | Norma Rodriguez-Reyes

Season 2 · Episode 72

Monday, January 8, 2024 • Duration 41:13

Dan and Ellen talk with Norma Rodriguez-Reyes, the president of La Voz Hispana de Connecticut. La Voz started circulating in New Haven in 1993, but fell on hard times. Norma helped take charge of the paper in 1998 when it verged on bankruptcy. Under her direction, the newspaper has grown into the state’s largest-circulation Spanish-language weekly. It reaches more than 125,000 Spanish speakers across Connecticut.

Norma is among the folks highlighted in Dan and Ellen's new book, “What Works in Community News,” which, at long last, will be out by the time you hear this podcast. In addition to her work at La Voz, Norma is the board chair of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit umbrella that includes the New Haven Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel, and WNHH community radio. The Independent and the radio station both work out of La Voz’s offices in downtown New Haven.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a surprising development in local news on Martha's Vineyard.The ownership of the weekly Martha’s Vineyard Times has changed hands. Longtime publishers and owners Peter and Barbara Oberfest sold the Island news organization to Steve Bernier, a West Tisbury resident and longtime owner of Cronig’s Market. And the acting publisher is Charles Sennott, a highly decorated journalist and founder and editor of The GroundTruth Project. He also helped launch Report for America.

Dan discusses a hard situation at Eugene Weekly, an alternative weekly in Oregon that’s been around for four decades. EW has shut down and laid off its 10-person staff after learning that the paper was the victim of embezzlement.

Episode 71 | Andy and Dee Hall

Season 2 · Episode 71

Thursday, December 14, 2023 • Duration 40:03

Dan and Ellen talk with Andy and Dee Hall, co-founders of Wisconsin Watch. Wisconsin Watch was launched in 2009 as the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. It's nonprofit and nonpartisan, and it has grown a lot over the last 14 years. Andy is retiring on December 31 of this year, and is helping the new CEO, George Stanley, with the transition.

Dee Hall, co-founder and former managing editor of Wisconsin Watch, is also moving on, and is now editor-in-chief of Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom with a clear mission: Floodlight investigates "the powerful interests stalling climate action." Floodlight partners with local and national journalists to co-publish collaborative investigations.

The What Works podcast will resume after the holidays, and Dan fills listeners in on events surrounding the launch of our book, “What Works in Community News,” which is coming out on January 9. We'll be talking about the book that night at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner in Brookline, MA.

Ellen has a Quick Take on Signal Ohio, a well-funded nonprofit news startup in Ohio. It's expanding into Akron. We've worked with a Northeastern graduate student, Dakotah Kennedy (no relation to Dan), on this podcast. She is now a service journalism reporter for Signal Cleveland. For more reporting on the media meltdown of Akron's Devil Strip, check out Dan's story here and a NiemanLab story here.

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Episode 70 | Bob Sprague

Season 2 · Episode 70

Thursday, November 30, 2023 • Duration 31:26

Dan and Ellen talk with Bob Sprague, a pioneer in hyperlocal journalism and the founder of yourArlington. Bob, who has lived in Arlington since 1989, was not only the founder: he was the editor of the website until July 1 of this year, when he retired. The new editor is Judith Pfeffer.

Bob was an Arlington Town Meeting member in 1994, and was also a journalist. He has been a reporter and an editor at The Boston Globe and Boston Herald, among other publications. He founded the town's website in 1998, but also recognized a need for an independent, nonpartisan source of information. In 2006, he launched yourArlington.

Dan has a Quick Take on the latest report on the state of local news by Penelope Muse Abernathy, who’s now at the Medill School at Northwestern University. The report has a lot of bad news, some good news, and some interesting information from The Boston Globe and from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is one of the news outlets that we profile in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.”

Ellen talks about another local startup, The Belmont Voice. The Voice has an impressive roster of advisers from the print and digital world.

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What Works: The Future of Local News – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

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Apple Podcasts

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What Works: The Future of Local News – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

LinkedIn29

Youtube9

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

LinkedIn29

Youtube9