What Works: The Future of Local News

Dan and Ellen talk with Mike Beaudet, longtime investigative reporter for WCVB-TV and a multimedia professor at Northeastern's school of journalism. Mike has won many awards for his hard-hitting investigations and leads a project aimed at reinventing television news. On March 21 - 22, he'll lead a conference at Northeastern called "Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit."   Mike's students are produc...

Dan and Ellen talk with Erica Heilman , who produces a podcast called Rumble Strip . Heilman's shows air monthly on Vermont Public and other NPR stations, as well as the BBC. Rumble Strip can also be found on all the usual podcast platforms. Her episodes range in length from a few minutes to, well, as long as they need to be! As Chelsea Edgar wrote in a profile in Seven Days Vermont, "She wants to...

Dan and Ellen talk with Matt DeRienzo , the new director of SciLine . SciLine was founded seven years ago to make it easier for reporters to get in touch with scientists on deadline and to dig into research. And facts. The program is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a 150-year-old organization that publishes the widely respected journal Science . Most recently, Matt...

Today we're talking with Alison Bethel , chief content officer and editor-in-chief for State Affairs. State Affairs is a digital-first media company that is focused on covering state governments throughout the country.  She was vice president of corps excellence at Report for America . She was also executive director of the Society of Professional Journalists , where she was only the second woman...

Dan and Ellen talk with Bill and Linda Forry, co-publishers of the award-winning Reporter Newspapers in Boston. Bill serves as editor, and Linda focuses on business development and strategic partnerships. The Reporter Newspapers include the weekly Dorchester Reporter as well as Boston Irish and BostonHaitian.com . The publications and their websites are part of a media business owned and operated...

Ellen and Dan talk with Jeffrey Schwaner , executive editor of Cardinal News, a nonprofit digital news outlet covering Southwest Virginia. It also covers something called Southside Virginia, which is an area south of the James River, near Richmond. Since we're taping this in Boston, we'll ask him to explain their coverage area in more detail. Jeff joined Cardinal News in September after nine years...

Dan and Ellen talk with Scott Brodbeck , founder and CEO of Local News Now . Many of the news entrepreneurs on this podcast lead nonprofits. Local News Now is a for-profit. Scott owns and operates local news websites in three big Northern Virginia suburbs: Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax County. Dan has a Quick Take about a corporate newspaper owner that is making a big bet on growth at a major...

Dan and Ellen talk with Sonal Shah , the CEO of the Texas Tribune, a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Shah, a Houston native and first-generation immigrant, took over as CEO in January 2023 after co-founder Evan Smith decided to move on. Shah is part of a major transition at the Tribune, and brings broad experience in government, the private sector, and philanthropy. She is a trained economist who w...

Dan and Ellen talk with April Alonso , co-founder and digital editor of Cicero Independiente outside of Chicago. Cicero Independiente and MuckRock won the 2024 Victor McElheny Award for Local Science Journalism, awarded by MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program , for an investigation of air quality called "The Air We Breathe."   April has an extensive background as a multimedia content creator. S...

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 othe...

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 199...

Today we're talking to ... ourselves. There's lots happening in the local news space, and we want to hit some highlights. We also have a programming note: This will be our final podcast this summer. We're going to make like the French and take August off. Before signing off, we discuss the state of play for newsletters (who knew email is the killer app); podcasts (we're still free and we still do...

Dan and Ellen talk to Larry Ryckman . Ryckman is editor of The Colorado Sun , the subject of a chapter that Dan wrote for our book, "What Works in Community News." The Sun was founded by journalists who worked at The Denver Post , which had been cut and cut and cut under the ownership of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that the Post staff called "vulture capitalists." The Sun was founded as a f...

Today Dan and Ellen talk to Peter Bhatia .  Bhatia is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor who is now chief executive officer of the Houston Landing , a nonprofit, non-partisan, no-paywall local news site that launched in spring of 2023. He has also been editor and vice president at the Detroit Free Press , from 2017-2023, and served as a regional editor for Gannett, supervising newsrooms in Michigan a...

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 owner...

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 Ch...

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. A...

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 ve...

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 free...

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 survi...

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,...

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...

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, becau...

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 t...

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...