June 16, 2017
Local Fix: Disrupting and Repairing
We’ll be in Phoenix next week attending events with the Institute for Nonprofit News, Local Independent Online Publishers, and Investigative Reporters and Editors. If you’ll be out there too please be sure to say hello – we’d love to chat. Best way to reach us is replying to this email or finding us on Twitter @jcstearns or @gteresa. Since we’ll be on the road, there won’t be a Local Fix next week.
But first, we always begin with one good idea…
One Good Idea: We Need to be Disrupting and Repairing
Diagram is from a local media ecosystem design workshop in Chicago.
Andrea Hart of Chicago’s City Bureau writes about journalism’s ongoing state of disruption and talks about how they are approaching disruption in their local media ecosystem. She writes, “We choose to disrupt processes within journalism that are barriers to inclusivity and accountability. In our endeavor to build strong relationships with our audience, we disrupt processes that perpetuate harmful reporting and create community distrust. Disruption does not mean destruction. For us, disruption is the first step on the way to repair.” We recommend reading the whole piece and thinking about what we are trying to disrupt, and whether we have invested enough in the repair that comes after.
Local News in an Age of Migration
- Five lessons from creating a bilingual, multicultural newsroom in Southern Indiana – Daniela Gerson
- The News Deserts in Immigrant Communities – Madeleine Bair
- Ethnic media is more than a niche: It’s worth your attention – Sarah Bartlett
- What Ethnic Media Can Teach Us About the Future of News – Jeff Severns Guntzel
- Subscribe to the Migratory Notes Newsletter (it is so good) – Daniela Gerson and Elizabeth Aguilera
Five Ways to Think About Ads
- The state of mobile advertising – DigiDay
- Josh Benton’s annual look at the scariest chart in Mary Meeker’s slide deck for newspapers – NiemanLab
- Melanie Deziel’s rules for creating great native advertising – Fipp
- As Apple and Google take aim at ads, publishers tremble – DigiDay
- 9 Tips for Selling Ads to Local Businesses – Rhiza
Local Investigative Reporting Matters
- Three young journalists saw national watchdog work getting all the attention, so they started looking for it locally – Poynter
- What a hyperlocal investigative powerhouse looks like – CJR
- The Bureau Local held a hack day in five cities to investigate voter power ahead of the UK election – Journalism.co.uk
- ProPublica tweets great local investigative news stories
- How a Wisconsin couple grew an idea from a basement office into an investigative institution – Poynter
Have a good weekend, and see you in Phoenix,
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.
