Welcome to the Local Fix. 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…

One Good Idea: Recreating Community History Through Vintage Photos
In a recent feature for the Boston Globe Magazine, Alexa Mills takes readers on a journey to discover the people, community landmarks, and stories captured and preserved in a treasure trove of vintage photos she found. The photos were taken by teens as far back as 1960 who lived in Cambridge public housing and were given cameras to document their lives and neighborhoods. “The result: a collection of photographs documenting life in and around public housing, as seen through the eyes of the kids who lived there. Their photos are, nearly without exception, joyful.”

Notes Alexa in an interview with Storybench after the piece was published, “Journalists are always telling other people’s stories for them. These kids had told their own story through photographs, over many years. I thought that was extraordinary. I believe that all people should be able to tell their own story. What’s more, their collective photos dispelled any number of stereotypes about life in public housing.”  In her pursuit to find and get to know the people in the photos, Alexa masterfully weaves together history, nostalgia, friendship and place to tell a powerful and utterly charming story about a community and the people who love it.

Instagram: A Visual Conversation About Your Community

The story about the photos above got us thinking about other kinds of creative storytelling you can do with photography. Mashable recently wrote about “12 awesome Instagram features you’re probably not using,” one of which was Instagram’s map and geolocation. It’s not the same as finding a box of old photos in a closet, but Instagram is one way to listen to the visual conversation happening in your community. More and more, newsrooms are featuring people’s local Instagram photos on their sites, but how else could Instagram be a tool for participatory media making? Here is a look at how a few journalists are using the photo-driven social network in their reporting: 

• Why Instagram Captions Are the New Blogging – New York Magazine 
• How to Tell Powerful Narratives on Instagram – Neiman Storyboard 
• Newspapers Hunt for New Readers on Instagram – American Journalism Review  
• Instagram Journalism? Why Virginia Quarterly Review Is Funding a New Style of Reporting – Contently 
   

What Is the Future of Local Investigative Reporting?

Last Sunday, inspired by the new Spotlight film, NY Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about the state of local investigative reporting. In her piece, Sullivan highlights the erosion of investigative capacity at many regional papers. A few days later in New Jersey a massive new collaborative local investigative reporting project launched. The effort is a partnership between 10 organizations including public media, nonprofit news, for-profit publishers, hyperlocal newsrooms, citizen journalists, and universities*. It is great to see how Spotlight has highlighted the need for this kind of reporting and we are excited to see the creative ways people are trying to experiment with new models. Here are some other great examples of local investigative reporting: 

• How a niche Chicago site cracked open a major schools scandal: Huffington Post (See also Steve Buttry’s thoughts on this story)
• How an investigative journalist helped prove a city was being poisoned with its own water – Columbia Journalism Review
• Two examples of how indie and freelance journalists are using FOIA to expose corruption: Jason Leopold and Jamie Kalven*
   

Podcasting: In The Shadow of Serial

Serial season two launched this week. One of the big challenges for podcasts is discovery. While the stats for Serial’s first season were huge, the overall stats for podcasting are still quite small. To expose new people to Serial the team has been using creative strategies and partnerships with Facebook and Pandora. But, in the shadow of Serial, there is a lot of other interesting work happening in the business and content side of podcasting. 

• Don’t miss these two big overviews of the field: The Tow Center for Digital Journalism just released a useful new report on podcasting’s history and revenue. Josh Benton argues that podcasting feels a lot like blogging circa 2004. 
• We are, of course, particularly interesting in how local newsrooms are using podcasting. Two places to keep an eye on include West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Voice of San Diego. 
• Slate’s podcast network created an advertiser-funded podcast for GE and it hit number 1 in iTunes. Meanwhile Gimlet Media grappled with the ethics and financial promise of this approach in a useful episode of Start-up. 
• A lot of people are trying to solve the podcast discovery problem, including Google, but we think this NPR podcast concierge is one of the most interesting experiments. (What would a concierge like this look like if it was designed to help people discover local news in a specific city or region?)

*Quick disclosure: We funded the NJ reporting project and ProPublica FOIA event linked to above. 

Have a good weekend – and if you read this far, consider helping us spread the word by sharing our subscribe link: tinyletter.com/localfix.

Molly and Josh 

The Local Fix is a project of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s Local News Lab, a website where we are exploring creative experiments in journalism sustainability.