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Dan and Ellen talk with Clay Wirestone the opinion editor of the Kansas Reflector. His first book was published Sept. 29. It's called, aptly enough, "Opinionated: Kansas Journalists who Proved Why Commentary Matters -- Then and Now."  His second is set for 2028. Wirestone seems to be on a first-name basis with Kansas opinion journalists past and present, and he profiles a number of them. Wirestone knows the state well: he graduated from the University of Kansas and lives in Lawrence with his husband. He also edited news at The Topeka Capital-Journal and spent more than a decade at New Hampshire's Concord Monitor,  where he worked with Dan's Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman — a past guest on this podcast. Dan has a Quick Take about yet another new book — "Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America," by Nick Mathews. Dan reviewed it recently for The Arts Fuse. Mathews offers some interesting insights into what happens to community life when there's a shortage of reliable news and information. Ellen's Quick Take is on an excellent Substack post by media observer Dick Tofel on the recent massacre at McClatchy. It's like a slasher movie and the slasher has come for newspapers that were great in their heyday.

Dan talks with Margaret Sullivan, who has spent the last decade or so doing the toughest of jobs: Telling the country's most powerful newsrooms what they're getting wrong. She was the fifth public editor of The New York Times, from 2012 to 2016. Somebody once called it the worst job in journalism, but she took it anyway. Then she went to The Washington Post as media columnist, where she covered the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Trump years, and January 6th. She left the Post in 2022, which, in hindsight, looks like excellent timing. (Ellen is ailing but did the editing and will be back behind the mic in the next episode.)  Sullivan writes a weekly column on media, politics and culture for The Guardian US, and she publishes a fearless Substack called American Crisis, where she calls out lapses in media coverage of rising authoritarianism. But she also has deep roots in local journalism. She was a summer intern at her hometown paper, The Buffalo News. She worked her way up to become its first woman editor-in-chief. So she knows firsthand what happens to a community when its newspaper is gutted.  Dan has a Quick Take that Yogi Berra would have called déjà vu all over again. The Block family, which owns The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, says it will shut down the paper if they can't find a buyer by the end of 2026. Now where have we heard that before? He also dives into the new impact report from the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organization that turns out to be one of the biggest funders of nonprofit news in the country. AJP makes the case that nonprofit news as a business model has moved past the experimental stage.

Dan and Ellen talk with Emily Sweeney of The Boston Globe. As the Globe's first social video journalist, Emily broke through the clutter on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram with her Boston accent and her collection of track suits. Not to mention her skills as a reporter.  There's a Northeastern connection, as well. Sweeney played on NU's championship-winning Division 1 women's ice hockey team.  Dan has a Quick Take about NJ Spotlight News, a website and a newscast that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey. It's also featured in "What Works in Community News." Spotlight was in danger of being seriously downsized after Donald Trump and the Republican Congress zeroed out funding for public media. The state of New Jersey, facing a budget crisis, cut its public media subsidy as well. Now, though, it looks like there's good news to report.  Ellen's Quick Take is on a comprehensive investigation into a Trump donor named Tim Barnard. Barnard Construction has received billions in taxpayer dollars to build the border wall in the Southwest. The story was reported by the nonprofit High Country News in Colorado and republished by another nonprofit news site, AZ Luminaria in Arizona. It's a strong example of how a national story can be localized and, in doing so, pack a real punch.

Dan and Ellen talk with Professor Carlene Hempel at Northeastern and her student Sydney Woogerd. This spring, Carlene brought a team of student journalists to Asheville, North Carolina, for a week-long intensive reporting trip that focused on the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The result: a digital multimedia investigation called Caught in the Current: Helene Recovery in Asheville and Beyond. Put simply, this is a stunning project, with podcasts, videos, photos and text. There's a great soundtrack. We'll drop a link in the show notes. Carlene has been a journalism professor at Northeastern University for more than 20 years. She specializes in teaching long-form narrative writing as well as creating on-site, pop-up newsrooms domestically and abroad for her courses. Her 2025 reporting class and resulting magazine about the 10-year anniversary of Flint, Michigan's water crisis won two national reporting awards.  Sydney is studying journalism and international affairs at Northeastern University with a focus on multimedia storytelling. She serves as co-photo director for The Avenue Magazine, a student-led fashion publication, where she directs visual strategy and creates editorial content. She has also contributed to The Huntington News and Artistry Magazine as a writer and photographer documenting community stories across Boston. Sydney served as the project's photo editor. Dan has a Quick Take about the recent What Works webinar for local-news publishers, journalists and volunteers. Ellen shares five lessons learned from watching how the projects that were subjects of the book, "What Works in Community News," have evolved.

Dan and Ellen talk with Ron Mitchell, publisher and editor of the Bay State Banner. In 2023, Mitchell and Andre Stark, both seasoned television news journalists, purchased the Banner, a newspaper covering the Black community in Boston. The Banner was started in 1965 by Melvin Miller. The print weekly is legendary for covering stories that were ignored by other publications. Stories about the Black and Latino communities in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. Mitchell and Stark are expanding its digital footprint. During his 27 years at WBZ, Mitchell created news coverage focused on racism in elementary school textbooks in 2014, and a series chronicling an 11-year lawsuit that culminated in an $11 million dollar award to a Black firefighter in Brookline. Dan and Ellen also talk with Sanjana Mishra, a Northeastern journalism and criminal justice graduate. She's worked in local news, communications and social media. She took two courses with Dan last semester and somehow lived to tell the tale. She wrote a final paper called "How private equity and corporate ownership are killing local journalism and American democracy," an in-depth examination of how Alden Global Capital and USA Today Co. — known as Gannett until recently — have hollowed out newsrooms in a never-ending quest for higher profits. Ellen has a Quick Take on North Star Stories, a daily radio broadcast on local news carried by AMPERS, a network of 17 community FM stations across Minnesota. It's by community, for community, and it's funded partly by donors and partly by the state. Dan has a Quick Take about the latest on The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which announced earlier this year that it was shutting down in the face of mounting losses. What's happened since is mostly good — but it comes with a sour aftertaste.

Dan talks with Joe Kriesberg, the publisher of CommonWealth Beacon, and Laura Colarusso, the editor. CommonWealth Beacon is a digital nonprofit that's part of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, better known as MassINC, and Joe is the CEO. CommonWealth Beacon covers politics and public policy at the state level, and has increasingly been branching out into local coverage as well. And it happens to be celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Joe has been with MassINC since 2023 and has overseen the expansion of CommonWealth Beacon's staff and mission. Before that, he was president and CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, where he was a leading advocate for affordable housing. He brings decades of nonprofit management experience and an extensive background of working with news organizations. He has raised millions of dollars for mission-driven organizations. Laura is an award-winning editor and reporter who combines digital media expertise with a commitment to old-school reporting. Before coming to CommonWealth Beacon, she was the editor of Nieman Reports, a magazine and website published by Harvard's Nieman Foundation that covers issues related to journalism. She has also worked as the digital managing editor at GBH News and the digital opinion editor at The Boston Globe, and is a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly. Dan has a Quick Take on the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, published recently by the international organization Reporters Without Borders. It shows that the United States has fallen to 64th, coming in just behind Botswana and just ahead of Panama. Also, an important announcement: Our annual What Works webinar will take place on Thursday, May 21. It's a free, all-day event aimed at enhancing skills in audience development, ethical and effective uses for AI, and how to plan a successful event. You can register at our website, whatworks.news. Just look for the "What Works Webinar 2026" tab at the top of the page. (Ellen is off the air this week but editing behind the scenes.)

Dan and Ellen talk with Rachel White, CEO of the Associated Press Fund for Journalism. Rachel joined the nonprofit AP Foundation in 2024, after a 10-year run with The Guardian, the one-time print newspaper in the UK that has become a global digital powerhouse. In 2016, White became president of  theguardian.org, a nonprofit organization she founded that raises tax-deductible funds to support The Guardian's journalism. The AP Foundation has a similar mission, but is laser-focused on state and local news outlets all over the US. The AP Fund is expanding. Fifty news organizations have just joined, for a total of 100 newsrooms. News outlets get help with reach and strategy to achieve financial stability. Dan has a Quick Take on Local News Day, which is on April 9 and billed as "a national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news." Ellen's Quick Take is on an opinion column apocalypse in Fargo, North Dakota. The Fargo Forum, a locally owned news outlet, has forced out three long-running columnists. Why? Take a wild guess. Here's one headline on a recent column by journalist Jim Shaw: "Our local leaders oppose free and fair elections." He's now an ex-columnist. A big hat-tip to Alex Ip, a Gen Z publisher and editor at the xylom.com, which explores how communities are influenced and shaped by science. Alex broke this news about Fargo on social media.

Dan and Ellen talk with Zuri Berry, the executive editor of The Banner in Montgomery County, Maryland. He's also a Boston Globe colleague of Ellen's from days of yore. Zuri is one of those journalists who's done a little bit of everything. We're talking reporter, columnist, video producer, digital editor, radio host, audio editor — over more than two decades in this business. And he's got an MBA from the McColl School of Business at Queens University of Charlotte on top of all that, which is a combination you don't always see in a newsroom leader. He was deputy managing editor at the Boston Herald, and managing editor for two NPR member stations. The accolades speak for themselves — he was part of the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning team for breaking news coverage of the 2013 Marathon bombings. At The Banner, he supported last year's Pulitzer-winning series on Baltimore's overdose crisis. Dan has a Quick Take for later on in the podcast about a journalist who's run afoul of ICE and who faces deportation to Colombia. Estefany Rodríguez, a reporter for a Spanish-language newspaper called Nashville Noticias in Tennessee, was arrested by ICE even though her lawyers say she entered the U.S. legally. It may be a case of retaliation, as Rodriguez has reported on ICE activities in the Nashville area.  After the podcast was recorded, Rodríguez was released on $10,000 bond, but she is still fighting to remain in the U.S. Ellen has a Quick Take is about a small newspaper in Wyoming that ditched its police blotter — and almost nobody misses it. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle made the change after taking a course at the Poynter Institute on deepening crime coverage. Dropping the blotter gave the staff more time to do actual reporting.

On this episode, Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy talk with Barbara "Bob" Allen, an LA-based journalist, trainer and consultant who founded CollegeJournalism.org in 2025. The site provides resources and news for journalism educators and student media advisers across the country. Allen is also the editor of the Student Press Report, a brand-new national news desk covering the state of the college press. The debut piece — "Cash-starved and censored, America's student press is in crisis" — lays out the financial and free-press challenges facing campus newsrooms. Allen also writes the weekly College Journalism Newsletter. Allen brings decades of experience mentoring student journalists. She was adviser to the student newspaper at Oklahoma State University and most recently served as director of college programming at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She holds a master's degree from the University of Missouri, home to both a campus paper — The Maneater — and the Columbia Missourian, a lab newspaper covering the city of Columbia. Allen has also led an ambitious project to map every college newspaper in the country, in collaboration with the University of Vermont's Center for Community News. That effort found more than 1,100 college newspapers, with 766 located in or adjacent to counties with little or no local news access. Dan's Quick Take stays close to home. The Huntington News, Northeastern's independent student newspaper, just celebrated its 100th anniversary. Ellen's Quick Take is about a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Provincetown. The Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that partners with the Provincetown Independent, raised money from more than 100 donors to buy the condo to house reporters. Ed Miller, editor and co-founder of the Indie, told Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher that housing was a major barrier to attracting staff to his well-regarded newspaper on the Outer Cape.

Dan and Ellen talk with Dale Anglin, the inaugural executive director of Press Forward, a philanthropic effort that is dedicated to funding local news initiatives nationwide. Before she was named as the leader of Press Forward, Anglin served as a vice president for grantmaking at the Cleveland Foundation. She also led the foundation's journalism strategy. Then and now, she focuses on local news and information as a way to restore a sense of community. Dan has a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, one of the most prominent nonprofit digital startups. It looks like readers of The Washington Post who live in the DC area may not be deprived of local news and sports after all despite the recent deep cuts ordered by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. The Banner is expanding, and it's part of executive editor Audrey Cooper's mission to build civic engagement through community journalism.  Ellen's Quick Take is on a bill in New York state that attempts to put some guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Among other things, it would require disclosures, and mandate supervision and fact-checking by actual human editors. It received a hearty endorsement from journalism industry unions. But there's a lot of catching up to do to reign in the robots.

Dan and Ellen talk with Charlie Sennott, a former foreign correspondent at The Boston Globe who left in 2008 to become a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded Global Post and The Ground Truth Project. Ground Truth, a nonprofit, was a partner to GBH News, FRONTLINE, PRX The World, and the PBS NewsHour. It focused on partnerships to amplify international and national news projects. Now, Charlie has turned his attention to local news. He teamed up with Steve Waldman to launch Report for America as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Dan and Ellen talked with Waldman on an earlier podcast. Sennott's newest creation is GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC based in Woods Hole, where he leads a small staff and publishes and writes the GroundTruth newsletter on Substack. The non-profit that was called "The GroundTruth Project" has recently rebranded to call itself Report Local with Report for America and Report for the World as its flagship initiatives. Report Local and the University of Missouri School of Journalism did groundbreaking work on water issues in the Mississippi River Basin.  In his most recent post on Substack, Sennott writes about this new branding. He also writes about how he officially stepped aside from the program, but remains incredibly proud of the movement it has created. As his own act of community service, Sennott is also serving as the publisher and editor of the Martha's Vineyard Times on Martha's Vineyard where he and his wife, Julie, who has an extended family on the Island, now live year round.  Dan and Ellen are also joined by Alexis Algazy, a Northeastern student who has done a compelling story about why politicians need to engage in storytelling on social media.   Dan has a Quick Take about public support for local news. Politico recently published an in-depth story on what's gone wrong with a program in California that was supposed to provide $250 million to help fund local news over a five-year period, with the money to come from the state and from Google. The deal seems to be coming apart. And yet there are reasons to be optimistic — as you will hear. Ellen has a Quick Take on the role of video in recording the violent acts of ICE agents in Minneapolis, and the protests all over that city. Video by bystanders has played an important role in exposing what's happening on the ground. But video and social media in general also pose a challenge for reporters covering the story for the Minnesota Star Tribune. Editor Kathleen Hennessey spoke about it in a brief interview with Semafor.

Dan and Ellen talk with Mike Beaudet and Lisa Thalhamer. Mike is a colleague at Northeastern, where he is a journalism professor. He is also an investigative reporter at WCVB-TV, Boston's ABC affiliate. He's worked in local television news for more than 30 years. Before joining WCVB-TV he was an investigative reporter and anchor at WFXT-TV in Boston. Beaudet's research at Northeastern focuses on the future of local television news and finding new ways to grow the audience and engage younger viewers where they're consuming content. Lisa is a journalist and researcher. She's currently editor-in-chief of The Scope, a hyper-local publication in Boston, as well as an adjunct professor at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on improving the mental well-being of journalists, particularly those in local TV news, where she worked for more than 15 years as a producer. While earning her master's degree at Northeastern, Thalhamer was Reinvent's Video Innovation Scholar, helping newsrooms evolve their video storytelling skills to fit the world of social media. In keeping with the all-Northeastern theme of this podcast, Dan and Ellen are also joined by Greg Maynard, a student of Dan's who has done a compelling story about what cord-cutting means for local cable access outlets.  Ellen has a Quick Take on the end of an era in Minneapolis. In December, the daily newspaper, the Minnesota Star Tribune, stopped printing copies at their giant brick plant in downtown Minneapolis. The Strib is printing at a Gannett plant in Des Moines, Iowa. That means earlier deadlines, and 125 jobs lost. Dan has a wild story for his Quick Take. Last summer there was some sad news coming out of Claremont, New Hampshire: the Eagle Times, a star-crossed paper that had had its ups and downs going back to the 1940s, was closing its doors after its wealthy owner, Jay Lucas, failed to meet payroll. At the time, New Hampshire Public Radio ran a story on the shutdown that was harsher than you would have expected. But there was a reason.

Dan and Ellen talk with Jennifer Peter, who was named editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project in September of 2025. The Marshall Project is a national nonprofit that covers issues related to criminal justice. She's only the third editor in 10 years, replacing Susan Chira, a former New York Times editor. Peter started her career as a reporter, working for 12 years at newspapers in Idaho, Connecticut and Virginia before joining The Associated Press in Boston. From the AP, she moved to The Globe, where she rose quickly through the ranks. She was regional editor, politics editor, and city editor. As metro editor, she oversaw The Globe's Boston Marathon bombing coverage, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News.  In 2018 she was promoted to managing editor, the number-two position in the newsroom. In our conversation, Peter tells us about The Marshall Project's mission, including its foray into local news in Cleveland, St. Louis and Jackson, Mississippi. A production note: Dan is at Northeastern, but Ellen is beaming in from a studio at Brookline Interactive Group, which handles multimedia for the town of Brookline. BIG, as it is known locally, is also host to a class of Brandeis students who travel to Brookline to report and write stories for Brookline.News, the nonprofit newsroom Ellen is part of. BIG provides audio and video of Brookline civic meetings and also works with Brookline public school students on multimedia projects.   Dan has a Quick Take about yet another newspaper that's gone out of business, although this one has an unusual twist. The devastating wildfires that ripped through the Los Angeles area last January have claimed the Palisadian-Post, a twice-monthly newspaper that had been publishing since 1928. The problem is that many of the residents were forced to leave, and though rebuilding is under way, the community hasn't come close to recovering.  One of Dan's Northeastern students, Abbie O'Connor, is from the Pacific Palisades — her home is still standing. She wrote several times in my opinion journalism class during the semester about how the Palisades were affected by the fire. Among other things, an enormous number of Palisades residents moved to Manhattan Beach, re-creating the sense of community they had in their former homes. Abbie's final project was an enterprise story on racial and economic disparities in the rebuilding resources that are being made available to the mostly white, affluent residents of the Pacific Palisades and the lower-income, historically Black community of Altadena.  Ellen's Quick Take is about Brian McGrory returning as editor of The Boston Globe in January. McGrory left in early 2023 to become chair of Boston University's journalism department. He'll replace Nancy Barnes, who announced last week that she'd be stepping aside.

Dan and Ellen talk with Chris Fitzsimon, publisher and CEO of The States Newsroom, the nation's largest nonprofit news organization covering state government. Chris is also the host of a new podcast called Stories from The States. Recent topics on his pod include the impact of Medicaid cuts, ICE detention, and redistricting.   Fitzsimon knows his way around state politics. From 2004 to 2017, he directed a team of seven journalists at the NC Policy Watch, which he founded. He also hosted a weekly radio show and wrote a syndicated column on North Carolina politics and government. From 1991 to 1994, he was the spokesperson, speechwriter and policy adviser for the North Carolina speaker of the House. Before that, he was a television news reporter covering politics and government. Dan has a Quick Take about The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah. In 2019, the Tribune became the first legacy daily newspaper to become a nonprofit. Unlike a few notable hybrids like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Tampa Bay Times, which are for-profit papers owned by nonprofit foundations, the Salt Lake paper is a true nonprofit, just like your local public television or radio station. And the Tribune has been notably successful. Ellen's Quick Take is on an investigation by SpotlightPA into the director of the Penn State Cancer Institute. The news outlet, which is a nonprofit that provides reporting to more than 90 outlets throughout Pennsylvania, uncovered damaging clinical practices and a toxic work environment. After the story ran last month, the director resigned.

Dan and Ellen talk with Todd Landfried, co-founder and CEO of N2 Media Holdings. As consumers cut the cord on cable TV, he hopes to develop a sustainable model for local news production. We know from our research here at What Works that local television news is still highly trusted. His mission: to reinvent local news for the streaming era. Ellen is back and fully bionic after a short hiatus for knee replacement surgery.  Dan has a Quick Take about a finding in a recent report by LION Publishers that gets into how to think about raising money. LION, as most of our listeners know, stands for Local Independent Online News. Anyway, its latest sustainability report found that startup news organizations can't just hope that revenues are something that are going to materialize. Fundraising takes dedicated employees, as Dan will explain. Ellen's Quick Take is on an alt-weekly in Seattle called The Stranger that has become an influential political force. This summer, 47 candidates for local office paid a call on the newsroom in order to seek an editorial endorsement. And they brought snacks!