What Works: The Future of Local News

Dan and Ellen talk with John Mooney, the founder of NJ Spotlight News, a digital nonprofit that's part of NJ PBS, the state's public broadcasting network. Mooney, who covered education for The Star-Ledger in Newark, took a buyout in 2008, put together a business plan, and launched their site in 2010 under the auspices of the nonprofit Community Foundation of New Jersey.

 While Spotlight was making a mark j...

Dan and Ellen talk with Neil Brown, a longtime journalist who is the president of the Poynter Institute. For listeners who might not know, the Poynter Institute is a nonprofit based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that is devoted to teaching best practices in journalism. It is named for Nelson Poynter, the bow-tie-wearing legend who led the St. Petersburg Times to national recognition. The paper is now known as the Tampa B...

Dan talks with Marta Hill, an extraordinary young journalist who he got to know during her time at Northeastern. Marta is currently a graduate student in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program at New York University, where she’s also the editor-in-chief of Scienceline. In that role, she works with her peers at NYU to produce what she describes as “an accessible, down-to-earth science publication.” Mart...

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 producing conte...

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 make mea...

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 has been se...

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 and the firs...

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 by the Forry family sin...

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 as a storytelling an...

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 majo...

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 worked on ...

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....

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.

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. ...

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 it for love, not mone...

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 for-profit p...

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 and Ohio.

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