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: Figuring Out Facebook
Publishers have now had a few weeks to test Facebook’s new features since both Live and Instant Articles rolled out to everyone. There is now some good hands-on advice available to help you figure out how you might want to use these tools and avoid some of the pitfalls associated with them. Joe Amditis at the Center for Cooperative Media has created a guide for small community journalists to get Instant Articles up and running on their site. In two recent articles NPR and the New York Times share lessons and guidance on getting the most out of Facebook Live. 

Collaborative Journalism on the Rise

Building new kinds of collaborations and networks around both the editorial and business side of journalism is at the heart of the work we are doing at the Local News Lab. Around the world we are seeing more and more evidence of how these sorts of partnerships are strengthening reporting.

• The BBC is committing 8 million pounds to hire 150 journalists who will work for local newsroom partners on accountability reporting. The move is just one of a series of local/national initiatives announced by the BBC this week. – The Guardian  
• Panama Papers show the value of newsroom collaboration – Columbia Journalism Review 
• How ICIJ got hundreds of journalists to collaborate on the Panama Papers – Poynter 
• Seven Illinois stations start news collaboration – Current 
• What publishers around the world learned by sharing their climate change coverage with each other – NiemanLab 

A Spotlight on Creative Storytelling

What an amazing time it is to tell powerful stories. We’ve been floored recently by some of the creative journalism projects we’ve seen tackling big complex issues. Some of these examples demand a big newsroom with lots of resources, but others could be scaled down and done on small budgets in any newsrooms. 

• The New York Times presented this multi-part opinion piece in the form of a stark graphic novel. 
• The Guardian’s VR project “Welcome to Your Cell” puts views into 6×9 cell to give them a sense of what it is like in solitary confinement.  
• Summer of Darkness is a story based app that uses push notifications to unlock parts of the story in “real time” — “concurrent to the dates and times the events actually took place in 1816 ” 
• NiemanLab writes that “From bingo games to brackets, The Washington Post is building ‘alternative story forms’“

Simple Design Tips and Tools

We’ve collected a bunch of really basic, but quite powerful and useful, design tips and tools here that are super useful for small newsrooms where people often wear many hats and play many roles. From designing social media graphics to interactive maps these should offer a good foundation for getting going with design. 

• A presentation and list of links from Molly McLeod on the basics of good design  
• The Vox meme maker is a dead simple tool for making social media graphics with an image and text overplayed on top. 
• Journalism.co.uk looks at how to create interactive maps with MapHub. 
• How Atlas, a project from Quartz, can help you organize your data and build various graphs and charts. 
• How typography can save your life. Lena Groeger on why “What words look like matters” 

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.