Welcome to the Local Fix. Each week we look at key debates in journalism sustainability and community engagement through the lens of local news.  This week, we have one good idea, and two requests:

One Good Idea: We Care About Local News, and We Know You Do, Too.

This week was another week full of bad news for local news. The closure of DNAinfo and Gothamist, layoffs at Denverite and Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora, and probably many others throughout the country. 

But there were also positive moments.

• Over 200 local independent online news publishers like Tasneem Raja gathered to share success stories with each other on how to build and sustain a local news business.
• Chicago’s City Bureau sold-out their first ever community gala.
• Baltimore will get a new alt-weekly in November.
• Over 20 news organizations in New Jersey are throwing potlucks and collaborating on elections coverage.
• Nonprofit news organizations are getting donations to them doubled by Newsmatch this giving season. 
• Richland Source shared the huge impact that their neighborhood baby showers had in Ohio.

That’s just a quick sampling. We’re sure there are many more positive stories out there, so please indulge us in a little counter-programming from the doom and gloom about the future of local news. To do that we need two things from you.

1. Send us something positive about local news. It can be a person working in local news that you want us to highlight, a story that did well, an experiment you’re trying, an impact your work has had, or something completely out of left field.
2. Do you know of a job opening? Email it our way, or tweet it to @TheLocalNewsLab. We’ll share it with our network and hopefully we can connect some of the great journalists who lost jobs this week with their next gig.

P.S. Thanks Damian Radcliffe for the inspiration for the optimistic tone this week. As he said at the LION Publishers conference last week about local news: 

“We’re not dead yet and we’re not going to be for a very long time.”

Have a good weekend,

Josh and Teresa
@jcstearns, @gteresa

The Local Fix is a project of the Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program, which invests in innovations and institutions that are reinventing local media and expanding the public square. Disclosure: Some projects mentioned in this newsletter may be funded by Democracy Fund, you can find a full list of the organizations we support on our website.