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: Read Our Report

This week we released a report on lessons learned in our first 18 months of experiments at the Local News Lab. Our work has focused on testing new revenue streams, expanding community engagement, developing new newsroom collaborations and rethinking the role of philanthropy. In the report you’ll find concrete advice that we think can help foster more sustainable, innovative and inclusive newsrooms. You can read the full report here, or read each section individually on Medium. 

• Part One: Introduction and Key Takeways
• Part Two: Experimenting With New Revenue Models for News
• Part Three: Community Engagement Inside and Outside the Newsroom
• Part Four: How New Networks Can Strengthen Local News
• Part Five: Rethinking Journalism Philanthropy
• Part Six: What’s Next for the Local News Lab
   

Following Up on #JournalismSoWhite

Poynter has a good interview with Jose Antonio Vargas about the need for journalism to confront the impact that lack of newsroom diversity has on the stories we tell and communities we serve. Pivoting from the #OscarSoWhite debate about diversity in Hollywood, Vargas’s journalism-centric hashtag #JournalismSoWhite caught on, creating a space to talk about the “growing frustration among many journalists of color and White journalists who have been awake or have just woken up to this persistent problem.” This all came just a few weeks after Gimlet Media’s podcast Start-up did an episode on diversity at the company, which was followed up by Reply All focusing on diversity in tech and media. 

• Wesley Lowery argues in Nieman Reports that “diversity is a journalistic imperative” and that “Newsrooms need to engage if they want to see real change” 
• At IVOH Allison Griner writes about how a bilingual newsroom united through its work on a diversity series 
• Earlier this month Hollis Wong-Wear wrote that one outcome of a lack of newsroom diversity is the “damaging cultural bias of using the white American experience as normative.”  
• Joy Mayer offers 5 ways to bring different voices into your stories. 

When News Breaks in Your Backyard

The Oregon stand-off came to an end just as we were getting ready to put together this week’s newsletter and Poynter looked at how local paper, The Oregonian, has been covering the story and where they will go from here. Below are a few other recent resources to help local newsrooms plan for crisis scenarios.

• How Lean Newsrooms Cover Breaking News – NPR 
• 10 ways local journalists can better cover their patch – First Draft News 
• How to use Slack to add live chat to your hyperlocal website – Cardiff Center for Community Journalism 

Experience Engagement

Last Fall the Experience Engagement conference brought together a terrific group of journalists to explore some of the fundamental ideas behind the growing trend in participatory journalism and newsroom engagement. The results of that event are an 11 part series that was published last month at MediaShift. It is a must read series and covers a lot of the ideas and trends we often discuss in this newsletter, from deep listening to sustainability. 

• In November ProPublica’s Terry Parris recounted “5 things we learned collecting 3,352 stories about Agent Orange exposure” noting that “It’s not the size of the community that matters. It’s about finding the right one.”
• The Society for News Design describes SNDMakes as a “series of collaborative, prototyping events focused on digital media design and community.” Here are ten projects to come out of SNDMakes that “represent new ways to promote community” 
• In another dispatch from Experience Engagement Sheetal Agarwal writes about “putting a community listening strategy into practice” in her “guide to developing community-based technology”  

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.