by Josh Stearns and Teresa Gorman

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 < Many good ideas
This week we launched an open spreadsheet of all the sites, news organizations, and resources we use to put the Local Fix together. Currently, we’ve compiled 76 sites with valuable resources for journalists and 61 “good ideas” culled from past newsletters. We hope this tool can help you quickly reference case studies, track down resources, and maybe even find new partners. Read more about this project and why we began tracking the sources we cite in our newsletter. What are your go-to sources for innovation and inspiration? We’d love to hear them. Reach us at localnewslab@democracyfund.org or @TheLocalNewsLab on Twitter.

Who Is Local Leaving Out? 

Earlier this week Molly de Aguiar of the News Integrity Initiative (and former co-editor of the Local Fix) tweeted about a series of recent reports that dive deep into how communities feel about local journalism. Importantly, each of these studies focus on communities who haven’t always been well served by local news, and their feedback reflects that. The studies reveal deep wells of frustration, and very clear ideas about what they need from local news. However, across the board these communities also say they want to be involved in helping shape the future of journalism. They see the value of local news, they want to be seen as partners, and they are willing to volunteer. These findings resonate with an earlier study from the Pew Research Center of local news ecosystems in Denver, Macon and Sioux Citywhich revealed a huge gap between people’s high level of interest in local news and their low satisfaction in local news. Pew identified race and ethnicity as one of the great divides in how people experience local new ecosystems. What all these studies add up to is a picture of local news that still leaves too many communities out of the picture, but the links below also provide clear avenues to begin changing newsroom practices and authentically engaging, representing and serving these communities. 

• Deep Listening to Map a Community’s Information Needs: How El Tímpano asked the Oakland community about the information they want, and what we learned in the process – Madeleine Bair 
• New report shows New Jersey residents are frustrated with local news, want better government coverage: Residents from cities with lower median household incomes expressed great dissatisfaction than those from higher-income areas – Center for Cooperative Media
• Listening is not enough: Mistrust and local news in urban and suburban Philly– Columbia Journalism Review 
• How are we going to invite and listen to audiences we’ve typically ignored? A report out from Chicago. – Jenny Choi 

Uncovering Bias in Covering Terrorism

A new report from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding released this week found that “Muslim perpetrators of violence are subject to more severe legal charges, up to three times the prison sentence, and more than seven times the media coverage compared to non-Muslim perpetrators.” The report comes a few weeks after coverage of the Austin bomber sparked a debate on the pages of the New York Times about their coverage of the white suspect in that case. But this is not a new debate, in the links below we highlight how people inside and outside the journalism community see unequal treatment of violence in different communities and explore what the implications of that coverage are for our communities and society. 

• Equal Treatment: Measuring the Legal and Media Responses to Ideologically Motivated Violence in the United States – Institute for Social Policy and Understanding 
• ‘He Is Not a Victim’: Our Austin Bomber Coverage Explained – The New York Times 
• When Is It ‘Terrorism’? How The Media Cover Attacks By Muslim Perpetrators– NPR 
• ‘Lone wolf’ or ‘terrorist’? How bias can shape news coverage – Poynter 

Local News Innovation Around the Globe

One of the gaps we’ve heard from readers, and that we saw in our sources list above, was in our curation of international journalism experiments and models. To that end, we’ve gathered four very different stories about local journalism around the globe. The themes of these articles will be familiar to Local Fix readers — membership programs, learning new skills, networks and collaborations — but we think most of the examples will be new. 

• Working with its members, Republik wants to show there is demand for reader-funded journalism in Switzerland – Journalism.co.uk  
• Coconuts, a fast-growing, cities-focused network of sites in Asia, takes a hard right into paid memberships – NiemanLab  
• A radio reporter unfamiliar with data journalism finds his calling while investigating the Guatemalan health system. – Internews 
• 14 Independent News Sites Changing Cuban Journalism – Global Investigative Journalism Network 

Have a good weekend,
Josh, Teresa and Melinda
@jcstearns, @gteresa, @SzekeresMelinda

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.