news pubblishing

According to a recent report from the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy, total giving from all sources in the U.S. rose from $124.31 billion in 1993 to just over $360 billion last year (2022). However, the report cites that the total giving figure has continued to track closely with the size of the U.S. economy, where the overall "giving " figure remained at roughly 2% of the national GDP over those 20 years.

What the report does show as a major shift is a change from total giving coming from individuals versus foundations, the giving coming from foundations rising significantly, from less than 7% in 1992 to nearly 19% of all giving today.

As more and more news publishers seek innovative sustainable new revenue models to offset the cost of their newsrooms, more and more money is becoming available to support local journalism through philanthropic entities. In this episode of E&P Reports, we explore "The Chronicle of Philanthropy" (CoP), a monthly magazine that covers the nonprofit world and is read by charity leaders, foundation executives, fundraisers, and others involved in philanthropy. The publication was founded in 1988 by Phil Semas and Stacy Palmer, who today is the editor. In May of 2022, CoP announced plans to spin off and become an independent, nonprofit organization that achieved its 501(c)(3) status in February of 2023  upon approval by the IRS.

In this one-on-one with CoP editor Stacy Palmer, we explore why the philanthropic world is becoming more interested in supporting local journalism and how we in the news media industry may be able to use our resources to help educate those in charge of giving. Palmer says:  ” (it’s) fascinating right now is to watch how much interest there is in the foundation world and among big donors about funding local journalism. Grant givers are very, very concerned about the fact that democracy is falling apart because we don't have strong journalism. So, we are covering that and watching that a lot.”

Palmer stated, " I think philanthropy is distressed by the fact that there just aren't resources for local journalism. So, they know that quality journalism isn't happening. For example, when people aren't going and covering the school boards, that is not a good thing. That means people aren't voting in a way that makes sense because they don't have any information. That's what motivates foundations to say, "I want to make sure there is somebody who can go and cover those kinds of things."

In this 184^th episode of “E&P Reports,” we explore the world of philanthropy through the eyes of those who are in charge of where the money goes with The Chronicle of Philanthropy's editor Stacy Palmer who offers insights into the whys and hows big donors are motivated to support local journalism.

There’s no question that Evening Post Publishing, owners of the Charleston Post and Courier (P&C), have been expanding their commitment to local journalism, while other media companies publishing in South Carolina have been downsizing their newsrooms. E&P initially reported in July of 2020 that the P&C had opened news operations in Greenville, where Gannett owned the legacy title, and in Myrtle Beach, a  McClatchy market.

And again, in June of 2022, E&P published a feature story on how even though 10 South Carolina newspapers had already shut down during a global pandemic, the Post & Courier had launched their "Uncovered" project, adding and assigning journalists to different state regions to cover.

But recently, as Executive Editor Autumn Phillips stated, "The Post and Courier has gone all-in by strategically expanding from a core market publication to a statewide newsroom. In each new community, we’ve incubated different models to identify the combination of funding and beat approaches that would lead to a long-term sustainable business and address growing news deserts in South Carolina.”

An example of this expansion is now in Florence, where Lee Enterprises owns the local newspaper. Here the P&C partnered with Francis Marion University to create a learning newsroom funded by donors and digital subscriptions. With these monies, the market is being served by an editor, a publisher, three reporters and six interns.

In total, The Post and Courier has added 27 new reporters working in Columbia, Rock Hill, and Hilton Head (McClatchy markets) and across three other newsrooms as part of this statewide expansion. Phillips stated: "These investments were made with the belief that in-depth reporting in markets hungry for local news will grow digital subscriptions to a level by 2025 that will fully fund the statewide news organization.”

In this 181^st episode of E&P Reports, we “look under the hood” at the Charleston Post and Courier's tailor-made, market-by-market, statewide expansion and why, while others are downsizing, they are finding innovative ways to provide quality local journalism throughout South Carolina. Appearing on this broadcast are P&C Executive Editor Autumn Phillips and Chief Opportunity & Marketing Officer Chris Zoeller, along with PJ Browning, president newspaper division at Evening Post Publishing.

On February 21, 2023, six news publishing companies: The Baltimore Banner, Block Club Chicago, The Colorado Sun, the Daily Memphian, Long Beach Post and Lookout Local/Lookout Santa Cruz, announced they were forming an organization they collectively called the Alliance for Sustainable Local News (ASLN).

Their industry press release stated these six publishers all shared a “belief in the power of local news to make communities and people’s lives better.” These six have also “found common ground in the successful building of new high-quality, trustworthy, non-partisan news organizations, large enough to serve their communities’ primary news needs.” And “share fundamental values in the greater movement to revive, reinvent and renew the kind of local news journalism communities all across North America deserve.”

Over the last two decades, ASLN founding member, author and industry analyst Ken Doctor has been known not to “pull punches” regarding his opinions about how hedge funds and large corporations have been hurting the industry. When announcing the formation of the ASLN, Doctor stated, “It’s no longer a question of searching for models that might replace dailies whose owners have disinvested. Our members are doing that — and becoming the primary, go-to news sources for their communities.”

However, even though the new ASLN members claim they share “key in-common characteristics,” such as being mission-driven and business-driven in “believing sustainable local news of scale must establish itself largely on earned revenue,” there are several dissimilarities within this group of six. For example, three operate as non-profits, and one recently purchased a community, print-based newspaper group. Finally, one functions as a public-benefit corporation.

As far as the actual company leaders who started the ASLN, three come from a background of senior-level leadership in legacy media companies. Two come from legacy media senior editorial posts. And one came to the news publishing industry from a human resources and municipality public relations career.

However, even though each of these news publishing platforms and their leaders have different origins, these six have developed a strong bond, believing that they may have found a collective way to blend their ideas into a news publishing business sustainability “secret sauce.”

In this 179th episode of “E&P Reports,” we chat with five of the six news publishers who have banded together to form the Alliance for Sustainable Local News. This diverse group believes they collectively care about building a genuine, sustainable local news publishing business model. Speaking with host and E&P publisher Mike Blinder are Imtiaz Patel, CEO of the Baltimore Banner; Larry Ryckman, editor and president of The Colorado Sun; Eric Barnes, CEO of the Daily Memphian; David Sommers, CEO and publisher of the Long Beach Post and Ken Doctor, CEO of Lookout Local/Lookout Santa Cruz.

On February 8, 2023, the citizens of Pulaski, TN were shocked to hear that their 167-year-old newspaper was to be shut down. Then owner David Lake, along with publisher Scott Stewart announced in a statement that: “Declining advertising and subscription revenues combined with increasing costs, finally reached a point where maintaining the Pulaski (Tennessee) Citizen as a business has not been possible, and that county will have no newspaper or news platform dedicated solely to covering local news, sports, events, government and people.”

Pulaski is a city in the county seat of Giles County, located on the central-southern border of Tennessee, where Wikipedia shows a 2020 population recorded as 8,397. The city lies halfway between Nashville, TN and Huntsville, AL, on the I-65 corridor.

The paper’s publisher Scott Stewart, who was born in Pulaski and began as a reporter at the paper in 1995 stated in the closing announcement: “As devastating as this is for those of us who cherish what local news is and means to our community, so many people will never realize what they’ve lost until it’s gone. That may be the saddest part of the whole thing. Personally, I offer my apologies to everyone who does care that the PULASKI CITIZEN is going away. It went down on my watch, and I accept responsibility for my part in its demise."

But, as negative and sad as Stewart's words were, he possibly was unaware of how much the county's citizens actually supported the Citizen. Recently elected Pulaski Mayor J.J. Brindley stated in this interview with E&P that his family "always supported the newspaper" and (that he) relied on the Citizen to ensure pertinent information about the town could be placed. He went on to say: “I believed in the newspaper with everything I have.” And that he and other Pulaski residents were "scared" when the news about the closing was published. However, Mayor Brindley continued, "This almost HAD TO HAPPEN for people to see how valuable this paper is and how much they did to serve this community!”

However, within that same week the Citizen was publishing its last issue, word about the closing came to Dave Gould, the owner of Main Street Media, a company he founded in 2013 that publishes 12 local weekly newspapers in 10 Nashville-area counties. Once he got word via a Facebook post shared by one of his reporters, he quickly contacted then-owner David Lake. In a matter of hours, he negotiated a purchase and saved the publication from extinction.

Gould stated, "There was a passion for this newspaper within the community. There was a lot of angst and worry about it closing. So, we felt good about the purchase and have seen overwhelming support from the people of Pulaski.”

In this 178^th episode of "E&P Reports," we explore a single week in the life of the 167-year-old Pulaski (TN) Citizen — a newspaper announced its closing, the citizen's reactions to the pending loss of their newspaper of record, and the last-minute saving of the publication as a new owner swooped in to purchase it. Chatting with the host and publisher of E&P Magazine, Mike Blinder, were recently-elected Pulaski Mayor J.J. Brindley, Citizen Publisher and Pulaski life-long resident Scott Stewart, and the new owner of the paper, Main Street Media's CEO and Founder Dave Gould.

The Medford, Oregon Mail Tribune can trace its roots back to 1909 when the morning Medford Mail and afternoon Tribune merged under the Putnam family, creating what the paper claimed to be "The largest printing and publishing establishment in Southern Oregon.”

It was decades later that this venerable brand would begin a journey of "swap and sale," moving from Down jones/ Ottaway ownership to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., to Newcastle Investment Corp. (an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group) and later merging into the growing Gatehouse Media Group.

Gatehouse sold the Mail Tribune in 2017 to media businessman Steven Saslow and its sister paper, the Ashland Daily Tidings, for $15 million. Saslow then reportedly secured financing from the right-wing-centered Sinclair broadcast group that same week, according to public records obtained by Jefferson Public Radio. Shortly after the purchase, the paper began working under the ownership name of Rosebud Media in conjunction with the Sinclair-owned TV station in Medford, KTVL. In a very short time, many of the newspaper's newsroom employees were let go, replacing most of the website content with video programming. In 2018, Mail Tribune online viewers were 1^st greeted with a “Rosebud Update” video, which included national and local headlines from a studio in Florida and a right-wing oriented video op-ed section entitled Rosewood Commentary.

In August 2021, the Mail Tribune went from printing the newspaper seven days a week to four days per week. Then, on September 30^, 2023, Saslow announced that the Mail Tribune would cease publication of a printed edition, stating that "printing and delivery costs for the newspaper were threatening the business.”  And finally, on Wednesday, January 11, 2023, Saslow made the unexpected announcement that he was shutting down the online operations altogether and letting the entire team go — thus ending the over 100 years of publishing.

While the industry was grappling with the idea of Oregon’s fourth largest MDA with a population of over 200,000, losing its newspaper of record, news soon broke that EO Media Group, a fourth-generation family-owned company based in Oregon that publishes 18 titles, was going to launch a new newspaper to serve the Medford area, The Rouge Valley Tribune, with a debut print edition “hitting the streets” today, February 18, 2023.

EO Media Group stated that they will place an editorial staff of 14 in the newsroom. The editorial team will work for long-time Mail Tribune journalist and former editor David Smigelski, who EO Media COO Heidi Wright recently hired. Smigelski reminisced about his 16-plus years at Mail Tribune in his first editorial for the new Rouge Valley Tribune, stating, "We became pawns in a multinational media chess game." He then said, "The Mail Tribune was abruptly closed on January 13, with just two days' notice to employees. Ten days later, I was standing inside the JC Penney building in Medford with Bulletin publisher Heidi Wright, figuring out where to put desks and phones. As we planned, she used words I could understand. “We know newspapers aren’t a cash cow, but we’re not here to get rich,” she said. “We want to do this because it’s important.” I wanted to hug her, but I thought it might be unprofessional. Crying was probably poor form, as well, but I couldn’t stop a little mist from building up. After 16 years, I feel like I'm back home. With newspaper people — family people.”

In this 175^th episode of "E&P Reports," we explore how EO Media Group is replacing the now shut-down Medford, Oregon Mail Tribune with its new start-up publication: "The Rouge Valley Tribune." We speak with EO Media Group's COO Heidi Wright and EO Media Group Board Member and Director of Audience Development Susan Forester Rana about why and how the company is committing to launch a new print publication during such tumultuous times. Also joining in the dialogue is David Smigelski, former editor of the Mail Tribune, now in his first week of print publishing as editor of the new The Rouge Valley Tribune.

Recently Meta (formally Facebook) made it official that it was leaving the news business, as they included most of the staff that worked within their “Meta Journalism Project Accelerator Program" in the 11,000 company positions eliminated in their mid-November 2022 mass layoffs.

Since 2019, the U.S.-based Local Media Association (LMA) and associated Local Media Foundation worked in partnership with Meta as a facilitator providing administrative services and publishing case studies about how over $16.8 million in funds were distributed across North America to local publishers. The funds were to assist them in initiatives that included building reader revenue, monetarizing branded content and others.

Some within the news publishing industry have criticized big tech companies like Google and Meta’s journalistic philanthropy, stating it was just a means to help them lobby against pending legislation. That legislation — the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) (H.R. 1735 and S. 673) — would allow news publishers to collectively negotiate with the tech platforms for fair compensation for the use of their content.

Others, like former ProPublica president Dick Tofel, have been adding their voice to many who feel that there are flaws in how these hundreds of millions in big-tech philanthropy have been allocated through organizations and not directly from the providers themselves.

However, LMA CEO Nancy Lane has been very outspoken lately in defending the positive impact the Meta Journalism Project has had on the industry, posting a statement about their organization's Meta dollars, "Most of the $16.8 million ($12+ million) was distributed through the COVID-19 relief fund and nearly 80 percent of recipients were family- or independently-owned.”

Lane stated: “More than half of the funds were used to benefit publishers by or for communities of color; nearly 40% were digitally native publishers, and over 1/3 were nonprofits." She also stated that "82% used the grants to expand their local reporting on COVID-19 issues. 23% said the funding outright saved their newsrooms from extinction.”

In this 164^th episode of "E&P Reports," we go one-on-one with Local Media Association (LMA) and associated Local Media Foundation CEO Nancy Lane on her impressions of how the millions of dollars that Meta/ Facebook has donated to the news publishing industry since 2019 has benefited local journalism and the impact it may have in the future as those funds cease to exist. We also posed questions on the future of local news enterprises and what she feels are viable, sustainable business models for local journalism.

Damian Daniels had three encounters with the local police during the last 48 hours of his life. The Army veteran was in his home in August 2020, amid a mental health crisis, when his brother — 800 miles away in Colorado — called the Red Cross for help. The agency, in turn, called 9-1-1, and police officers were dispatched for a welfare check that turned deadly, culminating in an officer shooting Daniels twice, killing him.

Tragedies like this — when a person in the throes of a mental health crisis is shot and killed by police officers — aren’t rare. Washington Post reporters Jon Gerberg and Alice Li found 178 similar cases over the course of three years. They wrote about Daniel’s death in “When a call to the police for help turns deadly,” part of the Washington Post’s “Unaccountable” investigative series — a deep dive into how the police serve the communities they’re tasked to protect.

Jon Gerberg is a senior video journalist for the Washington Post and a member of the investigative team. He's been with the news organization since 2017, and before that, he reported for The New York Times, the Associated Press, TIME, and worked as a foreign affairs producer for “PBS NewsHour.”  

As the database editor for the investigations unit at the Washington Post, Steven Rich knows data and how integral it is to investigative stories. Rich and Gerberg were E&P Publisher Mike Blinder's guests on E&P Reports 149th episode. They were joined by E&P contributor Gretchen A. Peck for a conversation about data and the “Unaccountable” series.

“I got the job here at The Post through an internship,” Rich recalled during the vodcast. “I turned that internship into a second internship and into a job. At the time, there was not as much data capacity at The Post. They sort of needed me, and I was focused largely on large investigative projects.”

Though the term “data journalism” may be relatively recent on the news-evolution timeline, the practice is hardly novel. “Data journalism has kind of been under the surface for a very long time,” Rich said, citing Ida B. Wells as an example, who in effect collected data about lynchings in the south.

Rich sees data as a way to offer larger context to otherwise anecdotal stories. “My job is to take your anecdotes and to tell you how often they happen,” he said.

For roughly seven years, The Post’s data team has been building a publicly available database of police shootings across the country, populating it, mining it, and gleaning patterns and revelations to inform their reporting.

For example, they track the number and location of police-involved shootings, whether the victim was armed, and where it took place — for instance, in a private home versus in a public setting. They also seek insight into why the police are on the scene at all — if a call to 9-1-1 was the only option for help. 

The investigative team knew that Damian Daniel’s death was not unique. They knew of other high-profile incidents when the police were called to help people in mental crisis, only to kill them during the course of that interaction. They cited Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York and Walter Wallace, Jr. in Philadelphia.

“But we wanted to know how often this is actually happening, and that’s where we turn to colleagues like Steven, who have actually been compiling this database,” he added.

With the help of a team of journalism students from American University, The Post’s investigative team could look at approximately 1,000 police shooting cases and drill down to those for which mental health was a suspected or known factor.

They found 178 such occurrences, representing victims of all ages, races and genders.

There were some things the data didn't reveal, which required the investigative team to find answers in other ways. For example, the database doesn't currently track officers' disciplinary records or suspensions, whether they were involved in prior similar incidents, or whether they've been violent outside of the job.

“My approach to data journalism is and has always been as a way to take a great story and make it excellent,” Rich said.

“The most important part of data journalism is the journalism itself. … It’s one thing to collect data, but you have to actually extract the meaning out of it,” Rich suggested.

The “Fatal Force” database continues to inform the investigative team’s reporting. “It’s kind of a gift that keeps on giving, from a storytelling and reporting perspective,” Gerberg told Blinder and Peck.

"Data really is the fundamental spine of our reporting because why are we telling these stories if they do not tell us something about the world in which we live? I would just add that if you kind of take the inverse of that, if you only have the data and are never taking stories out of that, what does it mean in the first place? I think a crucial part of our job is to take that data and identify those trends, but also work to really illuminate and understand what kind of consequences these trends are having in the lives of everyday people,” Gerberg concluded.

The team’s reporting of this story inspired change in Bexar County, Texas. “Bexar County had a mental-health response unit within its own police department,” Gerberg explained. “The problem was, Mr. Daniels was actually in the jurisdiction of the Bear County Sheriff’s, rather than the [San Antonio Police Department] — so, a different jurisdiction. But since Mr. Daniel’s killing, the judge there has implemented a secondary program to increase mental health options for the rest of the county, as well.”

Jon Marshall teaches media history and reporting as an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications. In his new book “Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis,” he examines the adversarial relationship between presidents and journalists amid periods of national crisis.

Some administrations he explores within the pages of “Clash” include how in 1798, John Adams used a newly enacted Alien and Sedition Act to muzzle his press critics. Or, how in 1917, Woodrow Wilson, who had similar ideas to cease the probing of his administration by white house reporters, used legislation outlawing expressions of disloyalty to prosecute and jail journalists. And it was in the late ‘60s that Richard Nixon was the first to attempt to delegitimize journalists by being the first to brand them as “elites” and describing them as “the media,” to change the public perception of the press as something that was wrong with America, not unlike crime or drugs.

In this 139^th episode of “E&P Reports,” professor and media historian Jon Marshall offers an overview of his latest book, “Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis.” During the broadcast, he discusses some of the most interesting ways that over 200 years of various white house administrations dealt with the press.

With a mission to “investigate inequality with and for the people who are affected by it,” The Center for Public Integrity(CPI) is one of the oldest nonprofit investigative news organizations in the country.

Over the years, their reporting has led to hundreds of law and policy changes, forced the federal and state governments to release information critical to the public interest, and held corporations to account for abuses of power.  It was also recognized with the Pulitzer Prize and countless other news publishing industry awards.

CPI collaborates with other organizations, particularly local news outlets, to publish data-driven and narrative journalism that reveals the causes and effects of inequality and exposes discriminatory systems in employment, housing, health care, education, and access to democracy.

Recently CPI announced the appointment of Paul Cheung as their new Chief Executive Officer. Cheung's background includes 20 years of experience in leading industry digital transformation working for NBC News Digital, The Associated Press, The Miami Herald, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as managing a multimillion dollars investment portfolio for the Knight Foundation.

In this episode of E&P Reports, Publisher Mike Blinder speaks with CPI's new CEO Paul Cheung and CPI's Editor-in-Chief Matt DeRienzo about the organization's near-term plans.  They also discuss how Cheung's digital background may affect their methods to continue in their mission to fight inequality in America.

Ryan Dohrn is a well-known industry sales coach who has traveled far and wide helping media companies of all sizes perform better (and he writes our monthly Ad Sales Life column). On his website, it states, “Ryan actively sells print, digital, broadcast, event sponsorships, exhibit space, and radio.” On his Twitter account, his description reads: Ryan Dohrn is a “motivational speaker, 28-year sales and marketing strategist.” And on the top of his LinkedIn page, there are just six words: “Sales Strategist – Keynote Speaker – Emmy Winner.” There is no question that when you watch Dohrn speak, there is always a true transference of positive energy emitting from him

In this episode of “E&P Reports” publisher Mike Blinder chats with Dohrn about how ad sellers should adapt to a post-pandemic world. Dohrn offers actionable advice on how we can find, recruit, and keep sales talent. What are our best target business categories to prospect? How do we interact properly in a new Zoom world and use it to your advantage with potential and existing advertisers? There’s a lot of usable content packed into this “E&P Reports” where two industry sales veterans take a deep dive into the best practices to adopt in ad sales strategies.

According to Google, the word “unpublish” is defined as a verb that means “to make content that has previously been published online unavailable to the public. As in ‘The magazine first amended and then unpublished the article.”

Years ago, publishers did not face problems of information permanence when a daily printed product was quickly discarded the next day. But more and more news publishers today are receiving requests from individuals to remove, obscure or significantly alter once-accurate information published about them in the past. In some cases, these requests are happening many years after a story was initially published online.

A recent survey also suggests that more than 80 percent of North American news publishers believe all news organizations should follow a set of standard guidelines about what information can and cannot be removed from their archives. But are such standards being compiled?

Exploring this issue is Deborah Dwyer, PHD candidate UNC Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media who is working on a current initiative to create a single repository of newsroom unpublishing policies. Her latest project is a Website: unpublishingthenews.com, described as “a place on the web where news leaders and advocates can hash out the conundrum of “unpublishing” (in its broader context).”  Here any editor or journalism can find a blog centering on the issue, along with resources that provides a growing list of policies and best practices, research, codes of ethics and more.

In this segment of “E&P Reports,” publisher Mike Blinder speaks with Dwyer about her research and work on compiling best practices of “unpublishing” the news. Also appearing is one of the initiative’s advisors Kathy English, chair of the Canadian Journalism Foundation.