Trippin on the Shoestring

This week, our guests let us in on an open secret in the journalism world: nobody knows how to fund local news anymore. With the traditional pillars that supported local information ecosystems eroding and eventually collapsing over the last few decades, recent years have seen experimentation with all kinds of economic models, including the nonprofit. In this episode, Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen are joined by three guests fighting to save local news: Jason Pramas, executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism; Corinne Colbert, editor-in-chief of the Athens County Independent in Ohio; and Brian Zayatz, managing editor of The Shoestring. Together, the group discusses discuss the crisis in local news, how to duct tape together an information ecosystem, and some of the organizing we've done together to advocate for reforms that would support stronger local news for everyone.Produced by Dusty Christensen. Music by An Archaeologist.

In this week's episode of Trippin' on The Shoestring, host Shelby Lee is joined by guests, and impromptu political correspondents, Dan Cannity and Jeff Napolitano to discuss the dumpster fire that was the 2024 U.S. national election. Recorded the day after the election, we discuss the trends we could see from the results and what this means for the future of the political parties and control of the government.Dan Cannity is a returning voice on the podcast, a former co-chair of the Northampton Policing Review Commission and a regular presence in Northampton as a community advocate. Jeff Napolitano, also a returning guest and local political analyst, is a longtime western Massachusetts activist who has the distinct honor of being blocked by U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern on social media.

This week, Shelby Lee is joined by a special guest co-host — Shoestring friend and former co-chair of the Northampton Policing Review Commission Dan Cannity — to have an important conversation about the U.S. military, its impact on the world, and the people who participate in it. Joining them for that conversation are three veterans who have served in the armed forces across three generations from 1960 to 2016 and are currently organizing for peace in western Massachusetts: Nick Mottern, Martin Omasta, and Donovan Lee.

In this week's episode of Trippin' on the Shoestring, co-hosts Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen explore the connection between local politics in western Massachusetts and U.S. foreign policy, the consequences of which continue to roil the region. Protests have exploded across the region, for example, over the U.S. government’s arming of the Israeli government as it continues to bombard Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. And with the United States continuing to be a leading greenhouse-gas polluter globally, western Mass has experienced record-breaking heat and rainfall – events that can be directly attributed to climate change. Joining the podcast to talk about all of those issues — all the way from Santiago, Chile — is the renowned scholar, journalist, and dissident Vijay Prashad. A longtime resident of western Massachusetts, Prashad is the director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and has written over 40 books on many topics including Palestine, U.S. imperialism, climate change, and more.

On this week’s episode, Trippin' on the Shoestring comes to you from Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus R41 and bus stops in Easthampton, Holyoke, and Springfield in an effort to document the daily experience of navigating public transit in the Connecticut River Valley. Many municipal and state leaders have talked about making public transit free for riders by removing fares, but that’s not necessarily the biggest issue those riders are facing. Come take a ride with co-hosts Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen to hear directly from bus riders about their public-transit concerns and biggest dreams.

Trippin’ on the Shoestring is back from vacation and ready to take on a heavy topic: how we as a society respond to those in our communities experiencing crisis. The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 renewed national calls for better crisis response models to reduce aggressive and sometimes fatal interactions that result when police are the ones showing up to the scene. Municipalities locally here in the Connecticut River Valley and nationally have begun to adopt various crisis-response models in answer to this mounting public pressure. We sat down with two guests to talk about what is happening at the state level here in Massachusetts around these crisis response models. We were joined by Sera Davidow, an author, filmmaker, and director of the Wildflower Alliance – a national training and peer support organization rooted in harm reduction. We were also joined by Earl Miller, the director of community supports at Wildflower Alliance. He is the former director of the civilian-response department that began operations last year in the town of Amherst, the Community Responders for Equity, Safety, and Service, also known as CRESS. 

It's summer break! As our podcast hosts and producer take some time to recharge, our hosts Dusty Christensen and Shelby Lee look back on Trippin' on the Shoestring's year so far, bringing back clips from some of our favorite guest moments and sharing updates on some of the issues we've discussed over the last six months. From politics to labor organizing to social movements, our guests have shared sharp analyses with us on issues both local and national, and some even seem to have predicted the future. We'll be back with a regular schedule of episodes this fall, so if you, too, have powers of clairvoyance when it comes to predicting how the powerful operate in western Mass, drop us a line: you could be our next guest! 

In this episode, we delve into the student-led, anti-war activism that has been building on campus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It’s a movement that has been around long before the school’s leadership called in the police to break up a protest encampment this spring. That decision resulted in a violent crackdown during which police arrested more than 130 people who continue to face charges. The “Popular University for Gaza Encampment,” as it was known, was aimed in part at drawing attention to the university’s partnership with weapons manufacturers.Co-hosts Shelby Lee and Dusty Christensen are joined by two guests this week: Kevin Young, a history professor at UMass Amherst, and Max Greenberg⁩, a PhD student in the university's economics department. Young is part of the group Faculty for Justice in Palestine and an elected leader in the university’s faculty union. He’s also part of the multi-union environmental coalition on campus, the Environmental and Social Action Movement. Greenberg is a union member with the Graduate Employee Organization, which represents grad-student workers on campus, and is part of the steering committee of the union’s Palestine Solidarity Caucus. He has also done organizing with the Western Mass Coalition for Palestine.

We have been away, out in the field, working on an important episode about the housing crisis facing western Massachusetts. First, in Easthampton we interviewed 81-year-old resident Jean Frances, who is facing a steep rent increase on a fixed income. She welcomed us into her home to talk about the reality renters are facing. Then, we sat down in Springfield to talk radical action with Rose Webster-Smith, director of Springfield No One Leaves, a grassroots group fighting against evictions and for housing justice. Rose shared her own experience with eviction and discussed strategies and resources tenants can use to fight back.

In every month of 2023, average global temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels. That’s a first, and it’s a tipping point that climate scientists have raised concerns about for years. The Connecticut River Valley is not immune to those impacts. Last year, western Mass experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, a deluge of smoke from wildfires spreading across Canada, and the devastating flooding of the Connecticut and Mill rivers, which wiped out crops. Many plots at the farming organization Grow Food Northampton were among those that were flooded out. On this week’s episode, Dusty Christensen and Shelby Lee sit down with two guests from Grow Food Northampton: Alisa Klein, the organization’s director, and Piyush Labhsetwar, GFN's farm and land stewardship manager whose work as an agroecologist looks at finding ways to strike a sustainable balance between ecological relationships and agricultural production.