Interview with Doug Holder
Well, I have worked in the trenches of community journalism for about 23 years now. Physical newspapers have gone the way of digital media. But still-- I must admit --I get the physical New York Times and The Boston Globe at my favorite coffee shop. I must look like a historical reenactor to many of the younger folks out there. I remember my father, (an advertising Mad Man in New York)--brought home a host of newspapers, and I became a junkie at a young age. My father was even afraid I would become a Collier Brothers hermit-- like the very men who drowned in a sea of newspapers in their Harlem tenement building. There are no more ink-stained wretches working the presses; the clean and efficient internet have to a good degree replaced the slap of the paper on the pavement with its yelping headlines, as we saw in so many old movies. So I was interested to interview Dan Kennedy, a former journalist at the Boston Phoenix and Professor of Journalism at Northeastern University, (who along with his colleague Ellen Clegg) collaborated on a new book "What Works in Community News..." This study deals with community journalism, digital media, and how community newspapers can survive in this bottom line milieu we live in.
Q: First off, why did you guys feel the need to write this book?
A: I’ve been working in this space for years—it’s actually my third book about the future of local news. Ellen Clegg wore a lot of hats at the The Boston Globe, and at one time ran the Sunday regional sections the paper used to have that covered local news. So the fate of community journalism is a real passion of ours.
About 2,900 papers, mostly weeklies, have closed since 2005, according to a study by Northwestern University, and corporate chain ownership is squeezing the life out of many of those that remain. What we wanted to do was shine a spotlight on independent projects that have risen up to fill the gap. Most of them are digital startups and most are nonprofits. But we also looked at for-profit newspapers, tiny radio stations and a large public television operation. What unites all of them is a passion to serve their communities with reliable news and information.
Q: You write that that community newspapers are essential for 'self-governing' democracies. How so?
A: Over the past couple of generations, we’ve lost our connection to civic life, and the decline of community journalism has a lot to do with that. How can you cast a meaningful ballot for mayor, city council, select board, school committee and the like if there’s no reliable source of news? Who is holding the police department accountable? How are you going to find out about the apartment building that’s being proposed for your neighborhood?
Ellen and I also believe that local news can help us overcome the intense political polarization that has come to define national issues. If we can relearn the art of cooperation at the local level, we may discover that we all have more in common than we thought.
Q: How important is it for the print newspaper to survive with all the digital opportunities we have now?
A: It is not important at all. Most of the projects we look at are digital-only. In fact, Ellen is the co-founder of a startup nonprofit, Brookline.News, that is digital-only.
Q: I believe you started out in a community newspaper in the area. Are these good training grounds—a sort of minor league of journalism?
A: Yes, I worked at The Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn during the ’80s, and I’m happy to say that it’s still owned by the Haggerty family, who founded the paper in 1901.
I don’t think of community journalism as the minor leagues at all, and I wish more young people would build their careers around local news.
Q: Many fiction and poetry writers (Hemingway for one) have said that newspaper writing gave them good skills for their creative endeavors. What is your take on this?
A: Learning to write quickly and communicate clearly are essential skills for journalists, and I agree that those skills can be transferred to other forms of writing. I don’t write fiction or poetry, but I have written four books, and I rely heavily on what I learned in my 20s. This is Ellen’s third book. That’s a pretty high level of productivity, and our background as newspaper journalists has a lot to do with our ability to crank it out. I’ll leave it to others to judge the deathlessness of our prose.
Q: Many community newspapers are transforming into nonprofits. I know the paper I am arts editor for—The Somerville Times—didn't see the need to go nonprofit. Do you think non-profits are the way to go?
A: Nonprofit is a business model, just like for-profit. There are hundreds of local news startups across the country, and most of them are technically for-profts—one- or two-person operations that are almost more passion projects than they are real businesses. Ellen and I found, though, that most of the larger projects with real reporting capacity are nonprofit, because in the current environment that’s where the money is. In fact, two of projects that we write about, The Colorado Sun and Santa Cruz Local, switched from for-profit to nonprofit after our deadline.
The problem with for-profit is that advertising brings in very little money compared to years past. A healthy nonprofit news organization is generally built on top of a three-legged stool: large gifts in the form of grants and donations from high-net-worth individuals, which I’ve learned is nonprofit-speak for “rich people”; voluntary membership fees from readers, sometimes in exchange for extra goodies like a newsletter or a T-shirt; and what is often referred to as “earned income” in the form of advertising—again, to use nonprofit-speak, “underwriting”—and, in some cases, an events business.
I also want to mention the hybrid model, by which a for-profit news site either works with a nonprofit or has a nonprofit arm of its own so that it can accept tax-deductible donations to support certain types of public interest reporting. That’s what The Colorado Sun was doing before it went fully nonprofit. It’s also a model that’s being used by a number of other news outlets such as the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Iowa, The Mendocino Voice in Northern California and, closer to home, The Provincetown Independent.
Q: Twenty years from now—do you think we will see a community newspaper void or a thriving landscape?
A: On the one hand, I think things are going to get worse before they get better because so many papers are still under the control of corporate chains and hedge funds. On the other hand, I do think things are eventually going to get better. Ellen and I are especially hopeful that our book will serve as a roadmap for folks across the country who’ll learn about these projects and say, “Hey, we can do this.”
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