Welcome back to the Local Fix. We’ve been hibernating for a few weeks, but we are excited to be back. Since we’ve had a lot of new subscribers, we thought it would be useful to start off the year by sharing some of the big ideas behind this project.

Who We Are

We are Molly de Aguiar, Program Director for Informed Communities, and Josh Stearns, Director of Journalism & Sustainability, at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. This newsletter is part of the Local News Lab, a project of the Dodge Foundation focused on creative experiments in building more connected and collaborative journalism. Each week we look at key debates in journalism sustainability and community engagement through the lens of local news.

What We Believe 

We believe that:

• Local news is a critical space for innovation and engagement.
• Local news can make communities stronger, and communities can make local news stronger.
• Rebuilding local news demands collaboration and transparency.
• We need local news that is more inclusive and diverse. 

Through the newsletter we try to highlight newsrooms who are serving their communities in new ways and testing big ideas for new business models (like this and this). We pair those stories with concrete resources, tips and tools that journalists can put to work in their newsroom (like this and this). Above all else, we want this newsletter to be useful. Check out the archives here. 

How To Get Involved

Many of the links we share come from our readers who send us examples of the work they are doing. All you have to do is hit reply on this email. Please brag, ask advice, send GIFs (or all of the above). We want to hear your stories and your struggles. Follow us on Twitter (@mollydeaguiar and @jcstearns) or over at LocalNewsLab.org and on Medium where we discuss a lot of the articles we share here. 

If you like what you see, please help us grow this community and encourage others to subscribe.

We can do more together than we can apart. 

Have a good weekend,
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.