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: You Autocomplete Me
Wired wins for clever idea of the week: their short and entertaining video with actress Angela Bassett featured questions from Google searches, like “Is Angela Bassett a vegan?” and “Was Angela Bassett in the Thriller video?” This is a perfect idea to experiment with. What are people Googling about your community and who might be able to answer? Maybe it’s a Google autocomplete interview with a local celebrity, policy maker, artist or activist? Use the curiosity of your community and let us know if you try something like this video. See also Mashable’s map detailing what each state wants according to Google autocomplete. 

What is the Right Scale for Local News?

Rafat Ali defines scale as making sure his site’s reporting is a big part of the lives of community he covers (in his case this is the travel industry). He juxtaposes that notion of scale with “scale for scale sake… a model that may ultimately eat itself.” “Ad blocking, platform dependence, clickbait, every trouble media is in today is a result of this quest of scale for scale sake,” argues Ali. In local news, one of the dangers of playing the scale game is that it tends to force newsrooms into a box, into doing the same thing as everyone else, into erasing the unique character that makes us local. Here at the Local Fix we think that the long terms success of local news will depend on deeply knowing and serving our communities not endlessly competing for other people’s eyeballs. We like to talk about innovation at a human scale, defined not by reach but by relationships.  Here are a few more pieces on rethinking scale. 

• Matt Thompson on Building Journalism for Scale and Love – by Josh Stearns 
• Sex, Startups and Scale – by Jennifer Brandel and Mara Zepeda 
• The Wrongheaded Belief That Every Business Should Scale Up – by Antara Halder 
• Why the New York Times is Building New Products on a Smaller, More Targeted Scale – by Ken Doctor 
• Pardon the Seinfield Here, but What’s the Deal With Scale? – by Laurenellen McCann 
   

Great Links for Training and Advice

Occasionally we like to highlight good resources, round-ups and lists of tools and advice that you can bookmark, and refer back to in your daily work. Here are a few we found recently:

• NPR’s new training site is a huge library of great advice and case studies across a range of topics. 
• CUNY’s Jeremy Caplan has collected a great list of links on entrepreneurial journalism issues and ideas. 
• Sree Sreenivasan recently completed an epic series of more than 100 tweets chock full of links and advice for social media best practices.  
• The Next Web offers “5 of the best social media tools that help newsrooms find and share content.”  
   

Your Community’s Wicked Problems

Do you have issues in your community that seem intractable? Is your community grappling with problems that seem utterly intertwined with other problems? Does every stakeholder define the problem differently?  There is a name for these kinds of problems: Wicked Problems. Journalism can help communities grapple with these complex problems, or it can further complicate the debates. Here are a few useful explorations and some concrete advice for newsrooms who want to tackle wicked problems. 

• Covering Wicked Problems – by Jay Rosen 
• Video: Got a Wicked Problem? First Tell Me How You Make Toast – by Tom Wujec 
• Considering Wicked Problems and Transformational Solutions – by Keith Hammonds 
• The Hard Part of Solution Journalism is Agreeing on the Problems – by Jonathan Stray  
• 10 Tips for Making Hard Facts Easy Reading – by Roy Peter Clark 

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.