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: All Eyes on Missouri
Student journalists at the University of Missouri have been doing an amazing job covering the historic events unfolding on the campus this week. One specific project stood out to us. Students at The Maneater created a useful timeline of events as national attention turned to Columbia, Missouri, and people grappled for context for a story they were just learning about. The timeline helped add context and give people outside Missouri a sense for what led up to the events this week.

As a side note, it is sometimes easy to forget that for many student journalists a campus is not just a place you take classes but also a place you live. It is your home. The people organizing rallies are not just protesters, they are your friends, classmates and teachers. At a moment of great consequence, not only for the school but also for the national discussion about racism and equity on campus, the student journalists at Mizzou have exhibited grace, passion and skill. 

Is Tech Eating Media?

“Any industry sufficiently powerful to absorb the fourth estate is worthy of its scrutiny. This is not quite a paradox. It is disorienting. And suddenly urgent. Tech is consuming the media.” Thus begins an article by the Awl’s John Herrman that set off a rich discussion about the changing relationship between journalism and technology. Herrman’s piece and the responses to it are worth the time to read in depth, but they are only the most recent in a series of sharp, pointed articles exploring the power dynamics, possibilities and pitfalls in the awkward dance between platforms and publishers. If you haven’t been following this debate, I think it raises important questions for anyone working in online journalism. Here is a short reading list for get you caught up:

• Tech Is Eating Media. Now What? – by John Herrman (be sure to read the comments from Katie Hawkins-Gaar, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Eli Pariser, Jill Abrasion and others)  
• Will the Race for a Faster Web Kill Off Small Publishers? By Damaris Colhoun 
• Facebook Is Trying to Keep You Interested Forever By Moving Beyond Friends – by Julia Greenberg  
• As Giant Platforms Rise, Local News is Getting Crushed – by Josh Benton 
• When Journalism Meets Silicon Valley – by Francesco Marconi 
   

Rethinking The Article

A few weeks ago we had a section focused on creative storytelling examples from local newsrooms. This week we wanted to specifically look at how people are rethinking the article. While some of the examples below demand staff time and expertise that many local newsrooms may not have, there are low tech ways to experiment with these ideas inside our current content management systems. We’ve included a short quote from each article to highlight a few key ideas. 

• The Future of News is Not an Article – by Alexis Lloyd – “Once we begin to capture and encode that knowledge that is contained within articles, it can be used in all sorts of ways to transform the news reading experience.”  
• Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – by Anthony De Rosa – “The concept of atomizing news was not something Circa invented but the idea of using those atoms, apply[ing] metadata to them and allowing a reader to follow discrete stories which would only push to you the atomic units you had not already read” 
• How to Break Away From Articles and Invent New Story Forms – by Jeff Sonderman and Kevin Loker – “As publishing has moved to digital forms, journalists have discovered it is quite possible — and sometimes preferable — to tell a news story without writing an article.” 
• The Journalist-Engineer – by Matthew Daniels – “Lately, some of the best articles in the NY Times and Bloomberg are 99% code. The end-product is predominantly software, not prose.”
   

Give Until It Hurts

Tis the season for year-end fundraising, and we’ve been keeping an eye out for useful fundraising tips like this comprehensive guide to Giving Tuesday (December 2) and making the most of your Facebook community. Did you know Giving Tuesday raised $45.7 million in 2014? A 63 percent increase over 2013. Of course, donors don’t just magically appear – it takes a lot of time and effort to build and grow meaningful relationships within the community you serve. No one knows this better than the folks at PRX and Radiotopia who have built amazing communities around their Kickstarter campaigns. But for their end of year sustaining member campaign Radiotopia turned to a new platform that will help them better understand and better serve their listeners, and, in turn, strengthen their business model. This week also saw the launch of Mynte, part of the new Audience Engine suite of open source tools for newsrooms and radio stations. Mynte is a smart community driven fundraising tool that empowers your fans to raise money for you. WFMU, the creators of Mynte and Audience Engine, raise 70% of their station budget online using this tool. (Disclosure: we have funded part of the development of Audience Engine.)

Stop, Collaborate and Listen

In 2009, Alan Rusbridger, then the editor of The Guardian, wrote, “I’ve seen the future, and it’s mutual.” The shift in journalism from competition to collaboration has been slow, but every year it seems there are more newsrooms tackling big stories together. Sometimes it is across town, sometimes it is across the globe, but regardless of the scope, collaboration is proving a profoundly important part of how news is done today. In the articles below, you’ll see some great examples of unique and creative partnerships over the last few months. Also, in Net News Check, Kevin Davis makes an argument for why partnerships will create stronger independent media. And on Medium, Julia Haslanger offers some concrete advice for content sharing agreements. 

• The Intercept mulls working with other newsrooms to maximize its impact – by Benjamin Mullin 
• How two Florida papers partnered for a harrowing probe of state mental hospitals – by Susannah Nesmith 
• Independent media have plenty of common cause – by Kevin Davis 
• Best practices for newsrooms setting up social distribution partnerships – by Julia Haslanger 

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.