Editor and Publisher Reports

There’s no question that Evening Post Publishing, owners of the Charleston Post and Courier (P&C), have been expanding their commitment to local journalism, while other media companies publishing in South Carolina have been downsizing their newsrooms. E&P initially reported in July of 2020 that the P&C had opened news operations in Greenville, where Gannett owned the legacy title, and in Myrtle Beach, a  McClatchy market. And again, in June of 2022, E&P published a feature story on how even though 10 South Carolina newspapers had already shut down during a global pandemic, the Post & Courier had launched their "Uncovered" project, adding and assigning journalists to different state regions to cover. But recently, as Executive Editor Autumn Phillips stated, "The Post and Courier has gone all-in by strategically expanding from a core market publication to a statewide newsroom. In each new community, we’ve incubated different models to identify the combination of funding and beat approaches

On its website, the Journalism Funding Partners (JFP) states a mission to “Increase the depth, diversity and sustainability of local journalism by building and stewarding connections between funders and news organizations.” Founded as a 501 (C)(3) in 2019 by the former publisher of the Raleigh News & Observer, Orage Quarles and internationally recognized reporter and senior consultant for the Democracy Fund, Sheila Solomon. JFP has secured and managed more than $5 million in grants to help support new and existing journalism coverage. One of the funding projects that the JFP coordinated allowed for the Nashville Tennessean to create its first beat solely dedicated to covering local First Amendment issues. Thanks to these funds, Angele Latham has been winning national attention with her local reporting on the Sumner County (TN) governing board’s passage of an amendment declaring that the county would uphold “Judeo-Christian values.” Latham also was responsible for recent, in-depth coverage of current Tenne

On February 21, 2023, six news publishing companies: The Baltimore Banner, Block Club Chicago, The Colorado Sun, the Daily Memphian, Long Beach Post and Lookout Local/Lookout Santa Cruz, announced they were forming an organization they collectively called the Alliance for Sustainable Local News (ASLN). Their industry press release stated these six publishers all shared a “belief in the power of local news to make communities and people’s lives better.” These six have also “found common ground in the successful building of new high-quality, trustworthy, non-partisan news organizations, large enough to serve their communities’ primary news needs.” And “share fundamental values in the greater movement to revive, reinvent and renew the kind of local news journalism communities all across North America deserve.” Over the last two decades, ASLN founding member, author and industry analyst Ken Doctor has been known not to “pull punches” regarding his opinions about how hedge funds and large corporations have been hu

On February 8, 2023, the citizens of Pulaski, TN were shocked to hear that their 167-year-old newspaper was to be shut down. Then owner David Lake, along with publisher Scott Stewart announced in a statement that: “Declining advertising and subscription revenues combined with increasing costs, finally reached a point where maintaining the Pulaski (Tennessee) Citizen as a business has not been possible, and that county will have no newspaper or news platform dedicated solely to covering local news, sports, events, government and people.” Pulaski is a city in the county seat of Giles County, located on the central-southern border of Tennessee, where Wikipedia shows a 2020 population recorded as 8,397. The city lies halfway between Nashville, TN and Huntsville, AL, on the I-65 corridor. The paper’s publisher Scott Stewart, who was born in Pulaski and began as a reporter at the paper in 1995 stated in the closing announcement: “As devastating as this is for those of us who cherish what local news is and means to

For two decades, Dr. Richard Haass has been the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent, nonpartisan think tank organization that states this mission on its website: “To help people better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.” Also, his expertise in international affairs and U.S. foreign policy has been tapped by our government, acting as the chair for the multiparty negotiations in Northern Ireland in 2012. From 2001 to 2003, Haass was the director of policy planning for the Department of State, acting as a principal advisor to Colin Powell during the war in Iraq.   However, most of us know Richard Haass from his many appearances on national newscasts and as a consultant to NBC News — providing context to stories centering on international relations and our foreign policy. And within these decades of work, he has managed to find time to author over a dozen books that center on helping us understand the complexities of our plac

Ryan Dohrn is a motivational speaker, won an Emmy for sales & marketing, has been recognized by Forbes.com with the “Best of the Web” award for his business strategies and is considered one of the top media sales trainers in the world today. Since 2008, Dohrn’s Brain Swell Media consulting company has helped over 200 media companies find new revenue through innovative sales strategies and his unique ad sales training. Today, Dohrn is also the owner and CEO of Niche Media, an organization that claims its "ethos" is centered around creating events that bring together like-minded media pros to help drive revenue through niche publishing. Hundreds gather at the yearly Niche Media Conference to attend programs focusing on revenue generation, sales training, audience growth, and emerging media trends. In this 176th episode of "E&P Reports," we go one-on-one with multimedia sales guru Ryan Dohrn to gain new ideas he shares on how news publishers can grow top-line revenue in the ever-increasing turbulence in

The Medford, Oregon Mail Tribune can trace its roots back to 1909 when the morning Medford Mail and afternoon Tribune merged under the Putnam family, creating what the paper claimed to be "The largest printing and publishing establishment in Southern Oregon.” It was decades later that this venerable brand would begin a journey of "swap and sale," moving from Down jones/ Ottaway ownership to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., to Newcastle Investment Corp. (an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group) and later merging into the growing Gatehouse Media Group. Gatehouse sold the Mail Tribune in 2017 to media businessman Steven Saslow and its sister paper, the Ashland Daily Tidings, for $15 million. Saslow then reportedly secured financing from the right-wing-centered Sinclair broadcast group that same week, according to public records obtained by Jefferson Public Radio. Shortly after the purchase, the paper began working under the ownership name of Rosebud Media in conjunction with the Sinclair-owned TV station in Medfor

In May of 2020, The Anchorage Daily News (ADN) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their yearlong series entitled “Lawless,” which provided an in-depth look at the criminal justice system's failures across Alaska. The team who created the series was led by ADN special projects editor Kyle Hopkins who had the assistance of ProPublica, the nonprofit entity that assists news publishers nationwide with investigative reporting projects.  As “Lawless” was being picked up by national news sources resulting in a visit by then U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, Hopkins started hearing from TV and movie producers who began showing interest in adapting the stories the ADN was uncovering. It was Tom McCarthy,  the well-known writer and director of the 2016 Emmy Award-winning movie "Spotlight," centered on the Boston Globe's investigation of sexual abuse by the Roman Catholic clergy, who had been thinking of creating a show that went deeper inside the workings of a newspaper newsroom. He eventually brought the ADN into the nat

In the January 2023 issue of Editor & Publisher Magazine, E&P featured an article about Dr. Peter Laufer's book, “Slow News: A Manifesto for the Critical News Consumer,” and the subsequent film documentary "Slow News" that speaks to how media companies chasing "clicks" in a digital age has led to the erosion of quality journalism and the public’s trust. However, what this professor of journalism and James N. Wallace Chair of Journalism at the University of Oregon was chasing was a personal dream to save the local cities newspaper — The Eugene (OR) Register-Guard. In a recent article for the local weekly entitled "How to Save the 'Guarded-Register, ' Dr. Laufer writes, "We in Eugene are witnessing the slow murder of our daily newspaper. But maybe, just maybe, what’s rapidly becoming too thin to wrap fish and line the bird cage, can still be saved." He goes on to state, "When what's now the Gannett Company — the corporate monster that owns more U.S. newspapers than any other — bought the R-G, butchery

The numbers are staggering. As the U.S. population grows, the number of local newsroom employees continues to decline, as an average of two newspapers shut down each week. Moreover, research shows that a shortage of local news harms the very fabric of our communities. With less new coverage comes more government corruption and local apathy regarding voting or civic involvement. And today, with large corporations and hedge funds who now own what was once vibrant family-owned local news operations and seek more profit by gutting newsrooms, less and less local reporting is taking place. This has created "ghost newspapers" that generate only a handful of stories each week that serve the common good. Over the past few years, some controversial bills have been introduced into Congress to tap into the large amount of locally available ad revenue that has been gobbled up by "big tech." Historically, that revenue was used to help fund local newsrooms. One of the bills that did not gain complete industry support was th

For just under two decades, residents in Bucks County, Penn., a suburb of Philadelphia, were served by the Bucks County Herald, a weekly publication started by Bridget Wingert and her late husband, Joseph T. Wingert. In 2020, as a global pandemic ravaged its advertising base, the family ownership, now including Bridget's son and Publisher Joseph Wingert, had to face the possibility of ceasing publication, which so many other community news publishers did, leaving voids in local cities across the nation. However, the community support for having a local voice was so strong that in the fall of 2020, the Wingerts donated their ownership to a new charitable entity which formed the Bucks County Herald Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which through private and business donations along with advertising revenue has produced a sustainable business model that serves over 200,000 readers each week. Recently, the foundation produced a compelling video, viewed by thousands, entitled "Miracle in

On December 5th, 2022, well-known news publishing analyst Ken Doctor, published a 2800-plus word updatevia Nieman Lab on the 2-year progress of his innovative Santa Cruz, CA digital news start-up, Lookout Local.   Within the document, Doctor pulls no punches about his opinion on the state of legacy media and its desire to help bolster a sustainable business model via big tech compensation by writing: "Lookout Local has never been about money itself, but money to the end of the mission — money that can prove out the proposition that a robust replacement for suicidal dailies can, indeed, be built. That’s especially important in the age of Gannett’s trainwreck, Axios Local’s skimming, and the misguided Journalism Competition and Preservation act currently before Congress.” He also claims good progress, with a digital-only local news enterprise reporting that without print costs, 80% of his bottom-line expenses are a staff of 15 full-time people, with 10 working in the newsroom and five on the business side. He

As Executive Vice President and General Counsel for the News Media Alliance, Danielle Coffey leads the advocacy efforts for the NMA's over 2000 news and magazine publishing members worldwide. 2022 was a busy year for Coffey as the U.S. Congress held committee meetings to consider passage of the well-publicized “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act” (JCPA), introduced in the House (H.R. 1735) by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), and in the Senate (S. 673) by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA). If made into law, this legislation, greatly supported by the news publishing industry, would allow news publishers to collectively negotiate with “big tech” platforms like Google and Facebook for fair compensation for using the news content these publishers generate. The NMA has been promoting a number of cogent arguments as to why the JCPA is necessary to help local news publishers maintain sustainable business models. These "talking points" include:   “News publishers pr

Dave Stevens is an athlete, a seven-time Emmy Award-winning sports broadcasting professional, and the only person to ever play college football and minor league baseball without legs. Stevens, a congenital amputee, always had a passion for sports. In high school, he was a three-sport athlete playing football, baseball, and wrestling. Later, he tried out for the Dallas Cowboys, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Minnesota Twins. Stevens even played outfield with former Major League players Barry Bonds and Oddibie McDowell. Stevens entered media as an Assignment Desk Manager at ESPN, then as the Coverage and Content editor. He worked at ESPN for 20 years, covering 11 Super Bowls, 3 World Series, 3 NCAA Final Fours, and various other historic sports events. Today he is a reporter for the Disability Channel, where he interviews some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment history. He co-hosts a Celebrity Amputee Golf tournament and is a professional in residence at the School of Communications at Quinnipiac Un

Serving as a forum for personal and professional networking is a benefit of social media, but its global reach and popularity have resulted in the posting of information — often described as “news” — from less-than-transparent and unverifiable sources. In this environment, the public has difficulty trusting what they read, hear or see, even when it’s the work of professional journalists and media organizations. To make it easier for the public to recognize trustworthy journalism, Reporters Without Borders created the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) in 2019. It has a three-step process to help media outlets distinguish themselves from the myriad of other sources sharing information on the internet and social media. This was the topic for discussion during a recent E&P Reports vodcast hosted by Mike Blinder, publisher of Editor & Publisher. His guests were Beth Potter, Ph.D., U.S. regional manager of the Journalism Trust Initiative; Paul Samyn, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press; and Kevin Rehberg, vic

Rob Tornoe is a journalist/ cartoonist for the award-winning Philadelphia Inquirer, where some of his work (including political spoofs from Al Gore to Peanuts) is syndicated and internationally recognized. Tornoe also writes & illustrates each month for Editor & Publisher about the many aspects of the news publishing industry.  In this 166th episode of “E&P Reports,” internationally recognized journalist/ cartoonist Rob Tornoe reviews some of his 2022 monthly contributions to E&P Magazine, which include his March 2022 interview with The New York Times's David Leonhardt on “The polarization of pandemic reporting.” An April 2022 column looked at editorial cartoonist David Fitzsimmons. May 2022’s look at how the Pulitzer prize category changes left illustrators feeling slighted. An August 2022 in-depth column looked at Twitter’s possible overuse by newsrooms. A well-researched and sourced piece in September 2022 examined how to keep political reporting from becoming polarized. And there's so

Doug Phares is a passionate business consultant who helps executives find ways to get past all the hurdles and challenges that slow us down. From small-scale work like examining product bundling to assisting decision-makers in developing 3-year plans, Phares has seen it all over the course of his career. In his news media career, Phares was most recently the CEO of the Sandusky Newspaper Group (SNG), a media holding company operating in Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Before that, he was Boone Newspapers's group president and managed Copley properties.  Today, Phares is managing director of Silverwind Enterprises, a Florida-based firm that provides executive-level business services. He's also the board chair of the Professional Association of Résumé Writers and Career Coaches, an organization with 3,000-plus international members comprised of independent business owners and non-profit career centers such as colleges and universities, military bases, workforce development offices and state Departments of Labor

Recently Meta (formally Facebook) made it official that it was leaving the news business, as they included most of the staff that worked within their “Meta Journalism Project Accelerator Program" in the 11,000 company positions eliminated in their mid-November 2022 mass layoffs. Since 2019, the U.S.-based Local Media Association (LMA) and associated Local Media Foundation worked in partnership with Meta as a facilitator providing administrative services and publishing case studies about how over $16.8 million in funds were distributed across North America to local publishers. The funds were to assist them in initiatives that included building reader revenue, monetarizing branded content and others. Some within the news publishing industry have criticized big tech companies like Google and Meta’s journalistic philanthropy, stating it was just a means to help them lobby against pending legislation. That legislation — the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) (H.R. 1735 and S. 673) — would allow

After senior management positions at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, Dick Tofel helped start and eventually led the well-known, nonprofit investigative journalistic entity ProPublica for 15 years. Today he consultants the industry as the principal of Gallatin Advisory. However, Tofel recently "lit up the Twittersphere" when he posted on his blog, "Second Rough Draft," an unabashed and unvarnished assessment and warning about how philanthropic funds are awarded to journalistic enterprises. He stated how there may be flaws within the process that some organizations and associations employ today — questioning that "Given limited resources, shouldn't more money go to news orgs directly, even if that means making hard choices?” In the November 3, 2022 post entitled "A Few Words of Warning About Funding Intermediaries and Philanthropy’s Leaky Bucket,” Tofel states that he is concerned that organizations like LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, the Knight Foundationand others “may be getting a

As the news publishing industry continues to fight the big tech giants, Google & Facebook, for what is considered fair compensation for the content journalists create and that the tech companies monetize via clicks and posts, one voice tweets to over 170,000 followers: "Klobuchar's JCPA is shit legislation” and “Protectionism is not a business model. Whining is not a business model. Handouts are not a business model. Lobbying politicians is not a business model. Adding value to communities and their conversations, helping them meet their goals: that is the only model worth pursuing.”   Those tweets and comments belong to the director of the Tow-Knight Center at the Craig Newmark Graduate School at CUNY, Jeff Jarvis, who also posts that “paywalls damage democracy." He states, "When disinformation is free, how can we restrict quality information to the privileged who choose to afford it?”   Jarvis is not a newcomer to our industry, starting in the '70s as a columnist at the San Francisco Examiner, spending