- In large parts of the United States today, government exists without independent news sources, with a concomitant loss of accountability and diminishing civic participation.

Today's guests tell us that despite these troubling trends, there's actually much to celebrate in the work of community news outlets.

They're Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- This week, we're joined by two terrific guests.

Ellen Clegg has worked for three decades as a journalist, much of that time at "The Boston Globe," and Dan Kennedy is one of the country's best-known media commentators.

Together, they've authored a new book about the news landscape titled, "What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate."

Ellen and Dan, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you, Wayne and Jim, - Thank you.

- So, Ellen, you've worked for three decades as a journalist.

I grew up in a small town where we had two dailies.

We had a regional paper in "The Hartford Courant," and the community was tremendously well served by that kind of coverage.

That kind of landscape doesn't exist in that town anymore, and I think probably not in many others.

What happened to legacy newspapers?

- There are two key factors coming into play here.

One is the collapse of print advertising, especially classified ads.

Those are the tiny little help-wanted ads, for younger viewers who may (laughing) not be familiar.

But at "The Globe," probably 50% of our revenue that supported the newsroom came from our classified ads section.

Craigslist really devastated the print classified ad market.

And the second factor is what might be called corporate greed, chain ownership, Gannett coming in and scooping up papers.

Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund, owning papers.

And they took on a lot of debt, they had to pay shareholders.

That meant layoffs, that meant selling the real estate, and creating ghost newspapers.

- Was there a reinforcing loop in any of this?

One of the things, long before I was thinking about journalism, and local journalism in particular, I noticed that a lot of the papers that I had previously read and enjoyed on a daily basis were shrinking the amount of content that they were producing.

There would be fewer stories, fewer locally sourced stories, more reliance on wire services.

That made me wonder, "Well, why am I even subscribing to this paper anymore?"

Is there a reinforcing loop here that one begets the other that sort of drives it into the ground?

- Oh, definitely.

Ben Bagdikian in his often updated book, "The Media Monopoly," which I believe went back to the 1980s, talked about this in the early days of Gannett when they were running up profit margins of 40% or 50% in some communities.

But over time, he observed that they were losing readers and advertisers because there was no content there.

And for a long time, Gannett was fine with that because the money was still rolling in, even if it wasn't quite as much as it had been in its heyday.

But it finally reached a tipping point to the point where these legacy papers owned by chain corporations are in big trouble.

- So, Dan, because of all these factors, there are many communities, and indeed many regions where there are no longer reporters attending town and city council meetings, school committee meetings, zoning board meetings, all of those governmental bodies that used to be covered religiously back in the day, that's all gone away in so many areas.

What does that pose in terms of a threat to civic life and to democracy?

And it's a grave threat, give us something on that.

- Well, yeah, it really is a big threat.

And there have been a number of studies done that show exactly what happens when a community loses its reliable source of news and information.

Voter turnout goes down.

The number of people running for political office goes down.

Probably the favorite finding that Ellen and I like to talk about is what you might call a corruption tax, where communities without a reliable source of news find that they have to pay a higher interest rate if they wanna borrow money to build a new high school, or a new fire station, or something like that.

But probably the most prominent deleterious effect of all this is that news becomes nationalized.

People want news, and they're gorging on national news.

And all too often, they're gorging on talk shows on cable news.

And as a result, you see people showing up at school board meetings, and instead of talking about, "How can we get math scores up?"

or, "How can we repair the middle school?"

instead, they're yelling about critical race theory and books that they wanna ban.

And that just kind of shows the nationalization of the discourse.

And we believe that in order to reinvigorate civic engagement, we really need to bring back reliable news at the local level.

- So social media has certainly played a role in this, and you write in the book of the growth of Facebook groups for communities and whatnot, and there's a much larger discussion here, but in general, talk about, and both of you can answer this, talk about the effect of social media on news and how people get their news and how people interpret their news, and then how they act on what they are reading on social media.

- Social media is really built on an outrage algorithm.

It's unedited, these platforms are protected against libel laws, and so they are unmoderated, people can post whatever they want.

And the more outrageous, it seems to rise in the algorithm, I think social media can be used for good purposes, to amplify news stories, to amplify a reporter's work, but there's a big downside.

- I'm gonna stick up for Facebook a little bit here.

(Jim laughing) Because our community, I live in a medium-sized city outside of Boston, and we lost our Gannett paper two years ago.

And we have several Facebook groups where people try to keep up on what's going on.

And I don't know what it is about the culture of our community, but I have found that people are pretty well behaved.

But instead of picking up on answers to their questions, we get questions, "Does anybody know what's going on with this?

Has anybody heard what's going on at the school committee?"

And this is what you lose, we lose that reliable news source, whether it's a newspaper or online, and so you move over on to social media, and even well-meaning people end up having more questions than they do answers.

- Well, and you write also that that void is, in part, being filled by these sort of websites of murky providence, let's call it.

You write, "Ideologically motivated websites with murky funding designed to look like legitimate outlets pop up and fill the vacuum."

Ellen, can you talk a little bit more about that?

What are these sites and what are they doing to the discourse in local communities?

- Well, they're known colloquially (laughing) as pink slime sites.

And pink slime is actually a term that comes from meat processing.

It's a finely textured beef product used in burgers, but anybody can stand up a digital site.

There's very low barrier to entry in the digital world.

And many of these are conservative right-wing sites, but some are progressive and on the left, pushing a partisan point of view designed to look like a real news site.

One example here in Boston is called "The North Boston News."

(laughing) There's no such thing as North Boston.

(Jim and Wayne laughing) - [Wayne] There is East Boston.

(laughing) - I would also point out that there have been various iterations of pink slime sites going back about a dozen years now.

And now we're starting to see what I call Pink Slime 3.0, (Ellen and Wayne laughing) Which is adding artificial intelligence on top of all this.

- Oh.

- And it's just a disaster.

- I think we could probably do an entire episode on that piece, but we do wanna talk a little bit about some of the good news, because that's really what the book is about, identifying places where community news is actually making progress.

So, Ellen, you and Dan write about five of these.

or excuse me, you write about nine of these.

We are only gonna have time to get to a few of them.

Let's start though with "The Texas Tribune."

Tell us what they're doing and why it's so important.

- "Texas Tribune" is so important because it's a pioneer in this space.

It was founded in Austin in 2008 by three people, a venture capitalist, a legendary editor of "The Texas Monthly" named Evan Smith, and a political writer.

They focused on the State House, the state capitol of Texas is in Austin, and they now have the largest State House bureau in the United States.

They were well capitalized from the start and they developed a legendary events arm, revenue arm.

They have the Texas Tribune Festival every year.

It's modeled after South by Southwest, which is also in Austin.

They have made the transition now to a new CEO and a new editor.

You may have seen in the news, they did have some layoffs at the end of last year, but they still a total staff of 90 people.

A nonprofit is a tax status, it's not a business model, and you still need to keep the revenue streams coming in of a nonprofit.

- So, Ellen, you also went out to rural Iowa, where "The Storm Lake Times Pilot" is published.

Art Cullen is the editor there, and his family runs that.

And we've had Art on the show and we admire what they're doing there.

And I would just like to say that even though I don't live anywhere near Iowa, I bought a digital subscription to support them.

(Ellen laughing) - Me, too.

(laughing) - (laughing) You, too?

Good.

So talk about "The Storm Lake Pilot."

- Well, Storm Lake is in Northwest Iowa.

It is a really small town.

And in Iowa, I think almost 1/3 of the population lives in tiny towns.

And rural towns have difficulty supporting a for-profit or a nonprofit.

And "The Storm Lake Times" went through hard times (laughing) during the pandemic.

They went into some debt, Art and his family, I think they do not take salaries really.

Art has said he's on Social Security.

And so they've tapped into the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, which is a nonprofit, "Storm Lake Times Pilot" is a for-profit, but they apply for grants from the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to supplement their advertising revenue.

They're in print and digital.

I found in Iowa that print is really big still.

- On "The Texas Tribune," we were talking about venture capital and revenue streams and sort of national-level convenings that they're doing to bring revenues in.

"Storm Lake Times," I think, is still the smallest newspaper to win a Pulitzer for editorial writing.

Literally, the family's not taking a salary from it.

How does that ever become sustainable for local news, Dan or Ellen?

- That's a great question.

It's eking it out, fighting it one day at a time.

And they go door to door to sign up local merchants for ads, they supplement with the grants from the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, and subscribers.

- So, Dan, let's talk about a couple of the publications that you visited and you write about.

Start with "The Sun," in Denver, and that was the subject of Chapter 4.

What did you find?

First of all, why did you go there?

What attracted you there?

And what did you find in Denver?

Which, of course, is one of the great large cities of our nation.

- I think the founding of "The Colorado Sun" was one of the more widely told stories in the news meltdown and renaissance in recent years because there was a revolt at "The Denver Post" at the round after round of cuts that Alden Global Capital had imposed.

And it led to "The Post" editorial page editor writing an editorial asking that the city rescue "The Post."

That did not happen.

And then finally, 10 of the top journalists at "The Denver Post" left and started a digital-only project called "The Colorado Sun."

And over the last few years, it has grown into one of the larger news organizations in Colorado.

They're up to a couple of dozen people at this point.

I think that what interested us in Colorado was that they have been very innovative in moving from one business model to another, to another, in order to try to stay ahead of trends in our business.

Believe it or not, "The Colorado Sun" started thinking that they were going to make some of their startup money from a relationship with a cryptocurrency firm.

And they were going to be on the blockchain.

And I'm not really sure what that means and-- (Jim and Wayne laughing) - I don't think anyone is sure (laughing) what that means.

- Well, when I interviewed the editor about it, Larry Ryckman, either he wasn't quite able to explain it.

(Ellen laughing) Or he wasn't able to explain it in a way that made it into my dense head, I'm not sure which.

And that went the way of all crypto, it did not work out, although "The Sun" did end up getting some crucial startup money out of that relationship.

The next thing they tried to do was to start a for-profit public benefit corporation.

And they operated that way for several years.

And all a public benefit corporation means really, it's kind of a term of art, but it's a legal designation that says they are not obligated to use revenues to enrich their shareholders, they can invest it back in the journalism.

At the same time, similar to what's going on in Storm Lake, Iowa, they worked out a relationship with a nonprofit, and the nonprofit enabled people to give money to support certain types of public interest reporting at the for-profit "Colorado Sun."

The next step in their journey was that the National Trust for Local News, which is a nonprofit that tries to rescue papers that are in danger of falling into the hands of corporate chains, brought "The Colorado Sun" in as a part owner of a chain of 24 weekly and monthly newspapers that it had acquired in the Denver suburbs, which was another very interesting model.

And then finally, just this past fall, too late for the book, unfortunately, Larry Ryckman, (coughing) excuse me, Larry Ryckman and his colleagues decided that "The Sun" was going to go fully nonprofit, it would no longer be a public benefit corporation, and they decided to unwind the relationship with the weekly papers.

And I just think it's a really fascinating example of how they've been able to adjust and move along and keep trying to find different business models to stay ahead of the curve.

- There's a lot of experimentation and innovation and trying stuff out and seeing what works and what doesn't.

Ellen, is there a place, though, for public funding for community news?

- Well, there is some public funding that exists around the country.

One example is in California, there's, what, $26 million set aside for UC Berkeley journalism grads, who then go on to cover under-covered communities, underrepresented communities.

This fund pays their stipend.

I think there's a similar fund in New Jersey.

There are several bills that are stuck in Congress that would provide some sort of public funding or allow publishers to band together to negotiate with Google and Facebook.

Those are unlikely to pass anytime soon, I would guess.

And I don't know, I think journalists are usually wary of being funded by a legislature, for example, which can withdraw funding.

- There are also bills at the federal and state level that would provide tax credits.

In various iterations, sometimes they talk about tax credits for subscribers, sometimes for local advertisers, sometimes for the publishers themselves.

And you'd say, "Well, you don't tax credits for publishers to get into the hands of these large chains."

And in an ideal world, you wouldn't, but the fact is, they don't get the tax credit unless they hire and retain journalists.

So it incentivizes good behavior rather than bad behavior.

I don't think either Ellen or I are wildly enthusiastic about the idea of government assistance.

But if it's done in a way that really keeps that independence for local journalism, then there are some experiments that are probably worth trying out.

- Yeah, I'm just gonna get on my soapbox for just a second here.

We work at the Pell Center named for Claiborne Pell, who created the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I could just throw this out there that a national endowment for local news might be a good idea for some member to pick up.

But, Wayne, I pitch it over to you.

- I like it, yeah.

(Wayne laughing) Yeah, right, I'm just saying.

- It was born here, that idea.

(laughing) - If anybody's listening, yeah.

- So, Dan, back to you.

You wrote the first chapter, Chapter 1, which is, "New Jersey: A Digital Innovator Joins Forces With a Public Television Powerhouse," and that's NJ Spotlight News.

Tell us about that, that seems to be maybe not a unique model, but certainly it caught our attention.

- It's a little bit different from anything that we've seen anywhere else.

I mean, there are partnerships and mergers representing public media and digital news, but this one is more fully developed in terms of its complete merging of what they do.

There was, about 10 or 12 years ago, a website called NJ Spotlight was started to cover the New Jersey State House, politics and public policy.

And they continued, they did good work and experienced some growth over the years, but they weren't really able to get up to the level that they needed to be.

Meanwhile, they already had a bit of a partnership with public television in New Jersey, which is now called NJ PBS.

And a few years ago, they reached an agreement for a complete merger.

And it's really fascinating what they do.

If you go to the website now, they have the same text-base coverage of politics and public policy that they had from the beginning, but they also run a number of video clips from the daily newscast that appears on the PBS station.

At the same time, the PBS station has a half-hour newscast every day that features reporters from NJ Spotlight on quite frequently.

The merged operation is known as NJ Spotlight News.

And we think that it could serve as a model for how public media could step up to help solve the, this isn't really a local news crisis, but it's a statewide and regional news crisis that an existing model of public media can be used to apply that and provide reliable news to the people in New Jersey.

- Yeah, Ellen, if you're a community member in one of these underserved communities and you care about these things, what can you do to try to make a difference on your own?

- You can get something started.

You can get residents, retired journalists, business people in town, and start media literacy campaign, for one thing, to say, "What is local news?

What do you wanna read?

What are we missing?"

We did this in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I live.

Starting in 2022, Gannett shut down the weekly print, "Brookline Tab."

We weren't getting election results, Brookline is governed by a town meeting that's quite large and there are big issues in town, affordable housing, mass transit issues, climate change.

So a group of us started meeting on someone's back porch and we began talking to the Chamber of Commerce, having listening sessions, holding Zooms, sitting at a table outside Brookline Booksmith.

And we raised money, we got a fiscal agent.

We have an NPR model with small donations, medium-sized donations, and we raised enough money to hire our first employee, our founding editor, and launched a newsletter and website last year.

- [Jim] That's outstanding.

- So we only have about a minute left here, so it'll have to be a very quick answer, but, "The Future of the Fourth Estate," is in the subtitle of your book, are you optimistic about that future?

- We are optimistic, we are always optimistic.

(Ellen, Jim and Wayne laughing) I've been tracking this space for 15 years now, and what we've really seen in the last few years is the rise of these new local news projects have gone from a trickle to hundreds of them in the last few years.

And we think that will continue.

What we really wanna see is an evolution of the business model and better ways of serving urban communities of color and rural communities, frankly.

That's the toughest challenge right now.

- Well, Ellen Clegg, Dan Kennedy, the book is "What Works in Community News."

Thank you for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us at pellcenter.org or visit us on social media.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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