Welcome to the Local Fix newsletter. Get the Fix in your inbox by subscribing at tinyletter.com/localfix.

Each week we look at key debates in journalism sustainability and community engagement through the lens of local news.  But first, we always begin with one good idea…

Where KCUR Central Standard’s guests are from (Screen capture/KCUR.org)

In an effort to get a better idea of what voices they may be missing on-air, Kansas City’s public radio station KCUR recently shared the results from a year-long survey of guests that appeared on their show Central Standard. The voluntary survey asked questions about age, location, political ideology, race and sexual orientation. They shared the results publicly, and have given themselves a “gut check” and a benchmark for the future. It’s a smaller-scale version of NPR’s own source reviews that could inspire other local newsrooms. Do you have a method to “gut check” in your newsroom?

A List of 50 Organizations Working on Diversity in Media

• The State of Diversity in the Media: A Field Analysis – Democracy Fund
• 4 steps newsrooms are taking to boost diversity – CJR
• The Ida B. Wells Society wants to build a better pipeline to connect news orgs with journalists of color – NiemanLab
• OPB and The Nevada Independent launch Spanish-language pages
• Outside inspiration: How can architecture schools increase diversity? – Curbed

Work, Work, Work, Work

• If your newsroom only has one meeting, make it this one – Poynter
• How a production workflow can help you avert disaster – NPR Training
• 5 Things To Build Into Your Digital Workflow – Source
• Usefulness, community, format: Questions to ask to improve your editorial projects – Journalism.co.uk
• From the archives: Workflows of public radio reporters – NPR

Mind the Gaps in Local News

These experiments and organizations have identified an information gap and filled it with new ideas. Where are the gaps in your neighborhood? What are the needs? Get some inspiration from these newspapers, TV stations, newsletters, and digital startups:

• Verification and local investigations: Inside two organisations plugging the gaps – Journalism.co.uk
• This anti-Brexit newspaper first launched as a pop-up, but it’s doing well enough to continue indefinitely – NiemanLab
• Boston’s relaunched WHDH offers 87 hours of local news a week – NiemanLab
• How a small news site successfully ran Croatia’s first media crowdfunding campaign – IJNet
• Taproot Edmonton Creates Community Based News Site – Editor and Publisher

🔗Local News Lab Link of the Week🔗

Our new site is full of practical advice, tools and tips. For a few weeks, we’ll highlight some of them here. This week, we recommend our guide to newsletters as news products. Learn more about monetizing, writing, and designing your email newsletter, and print out the guide to share with others.

After you hit print, don’t forget to send us your feedback and ideas for other resources that you would find useful on the Lab at localnewslab@democracyfund.org.

Have a good weekend,
Josh and Teresa
@jcstearns, @gteresa

The Local Fix is a project of the Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program, which invests in innovations and institutions that are reinventing local media and expanding the public square. Disclosure: Some projects mentioned in this newsletter may be funded by Democracy Fund, you can find a full list of the organizations we support on our website.