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: From PDFs to People
A lot of environmental investigations are done by government agencies or nonprofit advocacy organizations. Too often the research and findings from those studies are locked away in PDFs and don’t reach the people most effected by the issues being studied. A new collaboration between a London-based investigative reporting project Earthsight and environmental news site Mongabay aims to unpack those dense PDFs and turn them into powerful journalism delivered to people via a range of social platforms. The newsrooms are upfront about grappling with possible bias in the reports and creative in how they think about using local networks of people to share and spread the work. While this is a global project, there is a lot for local newsrooms to learn from Laura Hazard Owen’s profile of their work.  

Thanks to Viewers Like You

This week we celebrated #givingtuesday and #givingnewsday.  After a week of generosity, it’s a perfect time to check out how local news organizations are saying  thank you to their communities during the holidays (and prime giving season). After emails from Vermont’s VT Digger readers led to a mention in The New York Times, VT Digger penned a heartfelt thank you note in return. The Green Bay Press-Gazette’s editorial board gave back to their community by working with readers to raise over $65,000 for 27 different food pantries and programs. The Honolulu Civic Beat created a thank you video after viewers raised $22,000 on this year’s #GivingNewsDay. There are countless ways to thank your readers and communities. How have you done it? Send us an example at localnewslab@democracyfund.org.

• Stock the Shelves: Thank you for your generosity – Green Bay Press-Gazette
• Thank you, readers, for a shout-out from The New York Times – VTDigger
• Thank you from Civil Beat – Honolulu Civil Beat

*This section was curated by Daniel DeBrakeleer, our Public Square Fall Intern. Thanks Dan! We’re hiring for our Spring 2018 intern. Is it you or someone you know? More info here.

How Do We Tell New Stories?

It is thrilling when we stumble on something truly original in storytelling, something novel, unpredictable, fresh. There is something marvelous about when a journalist is given the space to try something new, to let a new story demand a new kind of telling, a new mode of delivery. The articles below explore how we can bring creativity and surprise into our work, drawing on the new tools we have. Done right, new story formats are not only about delighting the reader, but about telling the story more fully and more deeply. What were the most visually stunning, immersive, or surprising online journalism pieces you saw in 2017? 

• Beyond 800 words: new digital story formats for news – BBC News Lab 
• Using Digital Games to Make Engaging Journalism at Miami Newsjam –  Mediashift
• How to Do Better Visual Journalism for Solutions Stories –  Nicole Dahmen 
• Introducing a New Format for Evolving Stories – Medium 
• 2017 was the year of push alerts and this new report illustrates why – NiemanLab

Local News and the Nazis Next Door

There has been a lot of ink spilled about The New York Times’ profile of an Ohio Nazi this weekend. Given the increasing attention newsrooms are paying to white supremacy and hateful speech in local communities, we wanted to highlight some of the ideas and suggestions people have offered in response to the piece. A few themes that emerged in the various pieces focused on why local reporters are better positioned than national reporters to cover these issues, why the lack of diversity in newsrooms creates blind spots around this kind of coverage, and why it is critical to lift up the voices of victims of hate, not just the purveyors of it. A number of the pieces below cite this twitter thread from Magdalene Jacobs – If you read nothing else on the topic, do read it.  

• How to write about Nazis – Poynter 
• Reporting on extremism, from those who have done it best – Columbia Journalism Review 
• The problem with the New York Times’ chummy profile of a Nazi sympathizer – Quartz 
• The New York Times and that nice young Nazi next door – Media Nation  
• The media isn’t diverse – and this leads to appalling reporting – The Guardian 

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.