How can local online newsrooms best reach, and keep, their audiences?
That question keeps many news publishers up at night. In the inhospitable internet climate of 2024, between the ambivalence-to-antagonism of social media toward news and the looming threat of AI search decimating Google referrals, the need for alternatives to the two sources that were the foundation of traffic for most newsrooms of the 2010s is existential. (See a recent worrying stat from the nonprofit news sector: From 2022 to 2023, “the average number of unique monthly visitors declined by about one-third,” per the latest INN Index.)At this inflection point, Local Independent Online News Publishers found more of its members are investing in products that connect them to audiences without a tech intermediary.1
On Wednesday, LION released a snapshot of data about “how LION members appear to be adapting to reach their audiences,” based on newsroom responses from the last three years of its flagship LION Sustainability Audits program. The organization’s findings are based on responses from 100 newsrooms in 2022, 75 in 2023, and 90 this year, associate director of sustainability audits Andrew Rockway told me in an email. (Applications for 2024 audits remain open until Aug. 30.)While the number of products per newsroom hasn’t changed significantly from 2022 to 2024, “the types of products LIONs create are changing,” as Rockway and research and evaluation associate Dylan Sanchez write in the brief report. “We’ve seen pronounced increases among LIONs producing newsletters (up to 95% in 2024 from 81% in 2022) and events (up to 60% in 2024 from 34% in 2021).”
Rockway and Sanchez also highlight self-reported data from these newsrooms on the most effective ways audiences find them. “We’ve seen particular growth in newsletters, in-person conversations, and events,” they note, “though the latter two may be reflective of a broader shift back to in-person engagement post-COVID.” (LION does not collect traffic data by source from publishers.)
These results also make clear that search and social media remain top sources of audience discovery for the overwhelming majority of newsrooms. Specifically, “73% of organizations noted direct search as effective in 2024, up from 56% in 2022,” the report notes. Organic social media discovery has also “remained consistently high,” with more than 75% of outlets citing it among the “most effective” sources of audience discovery for the past three years.
You can read the full report here.
Vaping and doomscrolling are both addictive and both bad for you, so why not combine the two? Because look, here’s a touchscreen vape that gets news alerts.
You’re still looking at Twitter to get your news? That’s cool I guess. Me? I get it on my vape pic.twitter.com/PHZi022tXf
— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) July 17, 2024
No way we got twitter on my vape pic.twitter.com/Nnaz5fp0Lt
— Jimmer Fredette (@jimfredette32) July 5, 2024
The Swype 30K has a 2.01″ touchscreen and Bluetooth connection to sync with and deliver notifications from your smartphone. (It also has a Find My Phone function.) “There’s a lot to keep you busy when you own this vape,” a reviewer at online vape store EightVape notes. It retails for $19 and is designed to be thrown away.
Carlos Watson’s luck may have run out.
The founder of Ozy — that Google-exec-impersonating, mystery-traffic-generating discoverer of people who have already been discovered — was found guilty Tuesday in his trial in Brooklyn. A jury of his peers found he had indeed engaged in a conspiracy to commit securities fraud, a conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. He now faces up to 37 years in prison; the bail that kept him free throughout his trial has been revoked.Watson was remanded into custody after the government said he repeatedly perjured himself on the stand. U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee agreed and revoked Watson’s bail. https://t.co/2Riz7E8npS
— Nika Schoonover (@NikaSchoonover) July 16, 2024
At one level, Ozy’s demise matches the fate of so many other VC-funded digital startups from the early-2010s glory days. BuzzFeed is a shadow of its former self. Vice is an empty shell. These were the digital-first companies that were supposed to push aside the analog dinosaurs and become their generation’s Condé Nast, Time Inc., or Knight Ridder. Instead, they’ve been humbled.
But yesterday’s verdict secured one important distinction between Ozy and its digital rivals. Watson’s outfit was, at its highest levels, a criminal enterprise, not just one that made strategic errors and bad management decisions. (Watson now joins his co-founder Samir Rao and former chief of staff Suzee Han as frauds in the eyes of the law. They pleaded guilty to the charges and testified against Watson, who pledges to appeal.)
Indeed, the defense’s main strategy throughout Watson’s trial seemed to be: Maybe we fluffed up a few numbers, but who doesn’t in this business? We just did the same “puffing and bluffing” that those other guys did. His lawyers tried, unsuccessfully, to have the case dismissed for what they called selective prosecution, saying Watson was being prosecuted because of his race. (Roland Martin had thoughts on that.) But in the end, the event at the case’s center — Rao, at Watson’s direction1, using a voice-changing app to impersonate a Google exec on a call with a potential investor — was enough to illustrate the ethical gap between Ozy and even its most sketchy peers. (Not to mention dragging Google CEO Sundar Pichai into court to testify that, no, he had not offered to buy Ozy for $600 million, at Watson told a different investor.)
Throughout the trial, Watson’s team kept up an active online presence arguing for his innocence (or at least his unfair prosecution). They’ve appeared to fall silent since the verdict; Ozy.com — until this week recast a curated apologia for Watson — has been blanked. The same’s true for TooBlackForBusiness.com, the site which argued at length that Watson was being unfairly persecuted because of his race. But before the Ozy story slips into obscurity, I’ll just note this Instagram post, which lays out an alleged “Timeline of Carlos Watson.” The first item: “1850: Carlos Watson’s grandfather, a runaway slave, escapes,” paired with an image of shackles being broken. It’s certainly possible that story exists in Watson’s family history, but it’s unlikely to involve either of his two grandfathers, who were born in 1892 and 1889.
It cannot be emphasized enough that Watson named Ozy after the Percy Shelley poem “Ozymandias” — an unusual choice, given its content! It appears we’ve finally reached the poem’s end:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
In 2019, the four largest public radio stations in Texas teamed up with NPR to establish a collaborative statewide newsroom. When that collaboration was first announced, NPR specified reporting goals including “increas[ing] coverage of statewide issues and boost[ing] reporting from underserved regions.” But the vision for this experiment was always much bigger than Texas: By investing in one statewide newsroom, NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were betting on a collaborative reporting model as “a prototype for the way stations throughout the country can share resources and produce more of the journalism their communities need.”
Five years later, the one-newsroom prototype has grown to five collaborative newsrooms across the country, with newsrooms added in California, the Gulf States, the Midwest, and, most recently, New England.1 Now, a $5.5 million investment over three years from philanthropists Eric Schmidt (a former tech executive) and Wendy Schmidt (a former journalist who also worked in marketing communications in Silicon Valley), announced on Wednesday, will fund a significant expansion of the network.
By year’s end, NPR will establish a new regional newsroom in Appalachia and strengthen the existing Mountain West News Bureau public media collaboration, bringing its total number of collaborative regional newsrooms up to seven (consistent with a plan first shared in a February board meeting). The hefty investment will also fund expansions of both the California and Midwest newsrooms (which were seeded with a $4.7 million grant from the Schmidts in 2020), and create a short-form video pilot among the New England News Collaborative.
NPR declined to specify how much of the $5.5 million will flow to each of these regions and initiatives (NPR senior vice president and editor-in-chief Edith Chapin told me, “We are still working on specifics, so we consider it best not to comment publicly until that is firmed up.”)
In the network’s five years of growth, “this type of regional collaboration has allowed us to pool resources to create editorial positions that each of the partner stations couldn’t support alone,” Chapin told me in an email. In the Gulf States newsroom, for instance, the regional newsroom structure created the possibility to hire six regional beat reporters (focused on beats including economic mobility; justice, incarceration and gun violence; and sports and culture) and a community engagement reporter “whose work is shared by all the partner stations,” creating “coverage that wouldn’t exist otherwise,” Chapin said.
The collaborative structure results in more local and regional reporting reaching national audiences, and helps NPR take the pulse of national stories by picking up on “patterns and trends — similar stories that pop up in different regions,” Chapin said, which member station and national NPR reporters work on together.
The collaborative newsrooms have already generated work with impact. Chapin pointed to a story about inadequate oversight for mental illness in California nursing homes by the California regional newsroom, LAist, and APM Research Lab resulting in lawmakers questioning state and county agencies. Similarly, in the Gulf States newsroom, she cited the Utility Bill of the Month series as especially impactful, resulting in bills reduced by thousands for some sources. In terms of successes with readers, meanwhile, she said the open and click-through rates of the Texas newsroom’s bicultural newsletter, Oye Texas, indicates that it “is resonating with readers.”
The collaborative structure can have economic benefits as well, according to Chapin. In Texas, the regional newsroom produces six live statewide newscasts per weekday broadcast across 27 public radio stations, which brings in “underwriting dollars that wouldn’t come in otherwise.” Regional newsrooms have also benefited from “grants from a variety of philanthropic organizations.” (That’s significant at a time when NPR is grappling with falling revenue and a shrinking audience.)
The new Appalachia newsroom will begin as a collaboration among six public media stations in Kentucky and Tennessee “with the possibility of adding more,” per the press release. The Mountain West News Bureau, meanwhile, is a 14-station collaboration spanning six states — Colorado, Iaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — that will become a regional newsroom with the support of this new funding.
From previous regional launches, NPR has “developed a template for the formal agreement among the station partners and NPR” outlining “the new ways we’ll work together and the commitments we’re making to each other” that it plans to use for the new regional newsrooms, Chapin told me. At the same time, the regional newsrooms are not one size fits all; Chapin pointed to an evolution in the Texas newsroom from a focus on statewide newscasts to the later addition of a capital reporter, investigative editor, audience editor, and digital breaking news reporter according to the unique needs of that region’s audience.
NPR has emphasized underserved communities, statewide coverage, and an increased ability to conduct investigative reporting as objectives and advantages of the regional newsroom model. Reporting for underserved communities and bolstering investigative reporting are explicit focuses of the two newest newsrooms, too. Specifically, NPR intends to “strengthen reporting on issues impacting Indigenous and Native communities” with this grant. “In the Mountain West News Bureau, new grant funds will support an Indigenous Affairs reporter-producer, adding to existing coverage of Native communities there,” Chapin specified.
“We’ve learned that putting an investigative reporting team at the regional newsroom not only results in great stories from that team but enables more investigative reporting at the newsroom’s member stations,” Chapin told me. “The central team consults, coaches, advises and pitches in to help stations carry out investigative projects they couldn’t do on their own.”
Beyond that, the new grant will support development of a “talent pipeline,” including by funding professional development and training opportunities, and will “create a shared services model that will provide support for small stations.”
The shared services model is partly based on a structure currently in place in the California regional newsroom, Chapin said. “While the newsroom continues to work with stations on investigations – part of its original mission – it also offers general editing and training to help small-station reporters expand their skills and hone their craft,” she explained. The Schmidt funding “will allow us to add two new editors to focus on audio and digital training for smaller stations in the state where early-career journalists often serve news deserts in need of strong local reporting.”
“Our objective is to methodically build this structure throughout the whole country,” Chapin said, “and we have seen progress in more and more stations and groups wanting to join.”
The short-form video pilot among the 10-station New England News Collaborative, also announced Wednesday, represents a new front of experimentation within the Collaborative Journalism Network. Short-form video certainly isn’t new to NPR writ large (see Planet Money, etc.), and the pilot will build on the network and stations’ “infrastructure and expertise.” It will include “training and mentorship to build visual storytelling capacity and knowledge of best practices for digital platforms.”
Cori Princell, managing editor of the NENC, pointed to the collaborative’s shared Instagram channel Our New England (launched last fall) as the kind of resource-sharing around short-form video the pilot will build on. “That work includes a series of video shorts made by students in New England Public Media’s Media Lab; video portraits highlighting accessibility and inclusivity in the outdoors; ‘Meditation Monday’ ambient videos; and short videos featuring our bilingual video series Conexión: Rooted in New England’s Outdoors,” she said. But the exact shape of the pilot is still in flux: “The grant primarily supports NPR and NENC staff who will work together to develop the structure and specific goals of the project in the coming days and weeks,” she added.
In its short-form video coverage so far, the NENC has learned that “coverage of nature, environment and the outdoors is visually compelling and a big topic of interest for our public media stations in New England,” Princell told me. That can mean both feel-good stories about “the joy and wonder of being in nature,” and reporting about the threats to health posed by climate change. The collaborative saw “notable audience growth around the 2024 total eclipse, and this summer, we’re seeing a lot of success with social videos tied to our New England Day Trips series.”The pilot is “an opportunity that builds up our station journalists’ skills in short-form video, and allows us to share best practices on how newsrooms can sustainably integrate video and visuals in the ways we tell stories,” Princell said. While they will further refine specific goals in the next few weeks, “reaching younger and more diverse audiences is a significant part of our strategy in public media,” she said.
“Across the board we’ve witnessed the adoption of short form video as a primary entertainment and information source,” Chapin said. NPR’s Instagram channel, for instance, “has seen triple digit growth in audience and engagement over the last couple of years with a daily audience rivaling our website’s.”
At its core, the Collaborative Journalism Network is NPR’s effort to prioritize and strengthen its local reporting — and do its part to help fill the growing local news voids across the country. “We have all seen the statistics about the decline in local news and we know the effects that has in a community,” Chapin said. “In the five years since we started working on these regional collaborations, we have seen results in terrific local journalism coming out of them, in the news gathering process and in the impact these stories have had locally.”In the two years that The New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn has been on the job, there’s been a firehose flow of challenges to tackle.
In a New Yorker interview with Clare Malone published on Wednesday, Kahn gets into just about all of them: the biggest controversies of his tenure so far like transgender issues and Gaza coverage, managing internal conflict, experimenting with new story formats and artificial intelligence, and more.
Come for Kahn’s answers and stay for Malone’s sharp questions. Below are a few of the most Lab-adjacent bits of the interview, but you should read the full Q&A here.
Read The New Yorker’s interview here.
Last month, I talked to Floodlight’s Miranda Green and NPR’s David Folkenflik about how they teamed up to investigate a news site owned by Chevron. That website was pretty much the only regular source of local news for the city of Richmond, California, and Folkenflik and Green called it a “news mirage” — something that looked like news, but in truth a mouthpiece for Chevron, leaving the residents of Richmond without a place to get rigorous journalism about their city.
That’s finally changing. On Tuesday, Cityside, the nonprofit that also published Berkleyside and The Oaklandside, officially launched Richmondside, a local site for the city’s 116,000 residents. An early post on the site — published before the official launch — details how the team talked to community members before launching to figure out how to best shape their coverage, and intends to continue using community feedback to guide their reporting.
At launch, the Richmondside team consists of an editor, reporter, and two interns. I’m excited to watch them turn their city into a news oasis.
At 6:18 am today there was one less news desert in the Bay Area. Richmondside is live. Stories include: Poss. July Covid spike; new help for homeless people, art stories, @WCCUSD news, food, city hall & restaurant updates. https://t.co/V5TdgU0Yj0 #localnews pic.twitter.com/CDKuGiwx4v
— Kari Hulac (@KHulacRichmond) June 25, 2024
@richmondside launches today – a small but hopefully scrappy news site offering Richmond CA an alternative to dominant outlet owned by the city’s largest employer, taxpayer and polluter: Chevron.
Here’s more about @Richmondside: https://t.co/bPD0v5nT6D
— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) June 25, 2024
The crew at @citysidelocal started talking about opening a site in Richmond in 2021. Today it has become a reality. East Bay: Welcome your newest nonprofit local site: @richmondside #localnewsmatters https://t.co/gmE91xEi8W
— Frances Dinkelspiel (@Frannydink) June 25, 2024