Episode 105: Bill Marx

Dan and Ellen are back from summer break and talk with Bill Marx, the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast and online outlets. He has regularly reviewed theater for the public station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He is a founder of Viva La Book Review, a new organization that aims to foster thoughtful, well-crafted book criticism in community news media across the country.  Bill created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. Until recently, he taught a class on writing arts criticism at Boston University. Dan has a Quick Take about the funding crisis in public media and how that relates to the need to fund reliable sources of local news and information. It’s not just a matter of your local public television and radio station needing more support from its audience than ever before. It’s also a matter of the limits of philanthropy. Can we find the money to support hyperlocal nonprofits too? Ellen dives into a recent update from Joshua Benton at NiemanLab on The Republican in Springfield and the MassLive website, which has become a web traffic powerhouse as it expands. A previous podcast discussion with MassLive's president, Joshua Macht, and editor Ronnie Ramos can be found here.  

Dan and Ellen talk with Katherine Ann Rowlands, who runs Bay City News Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit that publishes journalism for the Greater San Francisco Bay Area at LocalNewsMatters.org and The Mendocino Voice. And by the way, this is the last podcast until September. Bay City News Foundation acquired The Mendocino Voice and took it nonprofit a little more than a year ago. Dan reported on the Voice for our book, "What Works in Community News," and was visiting in March of 2020 when ... well, you know what happened then. Rowlands also is owner and publisher of Bay City News, a regional news wire supplying original journalism for the whole media ecosystem in her area, from TV to start-up digital outlets. Dan has a Quick Take about the Muzzle Awards. Since 1998 he has been writing an annual Fourth of July roundup of outrages against free speech and freedom of expression in New England during the previous year. This is the 27th annual edition a couple of weeks ago.  Ellen reports on the death of Nancy Cassutt, a newsroom leader at Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” Nancy was a driving force in helping Mukhtar Ibrahim get Sahan Journal off the ground. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Stacy Feldman, founder and publisher of Boulder Reporting Lab. The Lab is a nonprofit newsroom covering Boulder, Colorado. She launched the Lab in late 2021 to fill critical gaps in news coverage in a state where newspapers have been gobbled up by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund. Alden is known for gutting papers, not growing them. Stacy was co-founder and executive editor of Inside Climate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the climate crisis. She developed her plans for the Boulder Reporting Lab during a fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her newsroom provided crucial reporting on the recent antisemitic attacks in Boulder.  Dan has a Quick Take later on a huge threat to one of the most important cogs in the regional news ecosystem. I’m referring, of course, to public radio and television, which face huge cuts after the Republican-led House voted recently to cancel $1.1 billion in funding over the next two years that it had previously approved. Now the measure moves to the Senate, which has to take a vote on it by mid-July. Regardless of what happens, this is the closest public media has ever come to an extinction-level event. Ellen's Quick Take is on local news coverage of the assassination of a Minnesota legislator and her husband. Minnesota news consumers have a lot of great media options, and these newsrooms stepped up bigtime to cover this crisis.  

Dan and Ellen talk with Rahul Bhargava, a colleague at Northeastern University. Rahul is a professor who crosses boundaries: the boundaries of storytelling and data, the boundaries of deep dives into collaborative research and interactive museum exhibits and plays. He holds a master's degree in media arts and science from MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. But he also minored in multimedia production. He brings the power of big data research to the masses, through newsroom workshops, interactive museum exhibits, and more. Rahul has collaborated with groups in Brazil, in Minnesota and at the World Food Program. He helps local communities use data to understand their world, and as a tool for change. There's more to data than just bar charts. Sometimes it involves forks! His book, "Community Data," unlocks all sorts of secrets. Dan and Ellen also talk with Lisa Thalhamer, a longtime TV journalist who is now a graduate student at Northeastern. Lisa realized that like many fields, journalism suffers from a gap between academic research and its implementation in workplaces. She is finding ways to bridge that gap, and urges an Avenger's-style team to lift up the work of a free press. Ellen has a Quick Take on a recent visit to Santa Barbara, California, and the efforts to revive a legacy paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press. Dan's Quick Take is about the latest development from the National Trust for Local News. It involves a chain of weekly papers in Colorado — their very first acquisition dating back to 2021. And it’s not good news at all for the journalists who work at those papers and the communities they serve.  

Dan and Ellen talk with Carlene Hempel and Harrison Zuritsky. Carlene, a journalism professor at Northeastern, recently led a reporting trip to Flint, Michigan. Harrison and other students produced a stunning internet magazine called Flint Unfiltered that takes a deep dive into the causes and effects of Flint's economic downturn and toxic water crisis. Since 2009, Carlene has been leading students on reporting trips, where they work as part of a traveling press corps. She has taken groups to many countries, including Egypt, Syria, Cuba and Panama. Harrison, a second-year student with concentrations in journalism and data science, joined her on the Flint trip.  Like so many at Northeastern, Carlene has a background that includes academic achievement as well as wide-ranging professional experience. She has been a professor for 20 years and holds a PhD from Northeastern. She also started her career writing for The Middlesex News in Framingham, now The MetroWest Daily News, and The Boston Globe. She then moved to North Carolina, where she worked for MSNBC and The Raleigh News & Observer. Dan has Quick Take from Maine. The former owner of the Portland Press Herald is going to have three of his weekly papers printed at the Press Herald’s facility in South Portland, giving a boost to the National Trust for Local News. And he’s also followed through on a plan to open a café at one of his weeklies in a unique effort to boost civic engagement. Ellen weighs in on a new study of local news by our friend of the pod, Professor Joshua Darr at Syracuse University. Darr teamed up with three other researchers to do a meta analysis of surveys on media trust. They made a number of findings, but the headline is that Americans trust local newsrooms more than national news outlets. This is especially true if the local news outlet has the actual name of the community in its title. But there's a downside: that automatic trust also allows pink slime sites to take hold.

For their 100th podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with Tom Breen, the editor of the New Haven Independent. Tom joined the staff of the Independent in 2018, and then became managing editor. Last November, he stepped up to succeed founding editor Paul Bass, who launched the Independent in 2005 and is still very involved. He's executive director of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization he set up to oversee the Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel in New Haven’s northwest suburbs, and WNHH. He continues to report the news for the Independent and hosts a show on WNHH, and he started another nonprofit, Midbrow, which publishes arts reviews in New Haven and several other cities across the country. Listeners will also hear from Alexa Coultoff, a Northeastern student who wrote an in-depth report on the local news ecosystem in Fall River, Massachusetts, a blue-collar community south of Boston that flipped to Donald Trump in the last election after many decades of being a solidly Democratic city. We recently published Alexa’s story at Whatworks.news. Ellen has a Quick Take on two big moves on the local news front. The National Trust for Local News has named a new CEO to replace Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who resigned earlier this year. The new leader is Tom Wiley, who is now president and publisher of the Buffalo News. And in the heartland, the Minnesota Star Tribune has named a new editor to replace Suki Dardarian, who is retiring. The nod goes to Kathleen Hennessey, the deputy politics editor of the New York Times and a former AP reporter. Dan's Quick Take examines a recent court decision ruling that Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the way it controls the technology for digital advertising. This was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and a number of states, but it’s also the subject of lawsuits brought by the news business, which argues that Google has destroyed the value of online ads. It’s potentially good news. It’s also complicated, and its effect may be way off in the future.    

Dan and Ellen talk with John Mooney, the founder of NJ Spotlight News, a digital nonprofit that's part of NJ PBS, the state's public broadcasting network. Mooney, who covered education for The Star-Ledger in Newark, took a buyout in 2008, put together a business plan, and launched their site in 2010 under the auspices of the nonprofit Community Foundation of New Jersey.  While Spotlight was making a mark journalistically, it wasn't breaking even, and its sponsor, the Community Foundation, was getting impatient. After extensive talks, Mooney affiliated with NJ PBS. The name changed to NJ Spotlight News, and the merger means true collaboration between the newsrooms. Both the broadcast and digital sides take part in news meetings. (In a previous podcast, Northeastern University professor and TV journalist Mike Beaudet discussed his initiative aimed at reinventing TV news for a vertical video age.)  As Dan wrote in "What Works in Community News," the story of NJ PBS and NJ Spotlight News suggests that public broadcasting can play a role in bolstering coverage of regional and statewide news. It's a question of bringing together two different newsroom cultures. There’s also a Yo-Yo Ma angle! Ellen has a Quick Take about the death of John Thornton, a venture capitalist who helped launch The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Austin, in 2009. He also was a founder of the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country. Thornton, who had struggled with mental health issues, took his own life. He was 59. Dan has a Quick Take about our webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News,” which was held the evening of April 3. Panelists gave great advice about what board members and donors need to know, and the video can be found on the website, whatworks.news. 

Dan and Ellen talk with Neil Brown, a longtime journalist who is the president of the Poynter Institute. For listeners who might not know, the Poynter Institute is a nonprofit based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that is devoted to teaching best practices in journalism. It is named for Nelson Poynter, the bow-tie-wearing legend who led the St. Petersburg Times to national recognition. The paper is now known as the Tampa Bay Times. Poynter is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Dan has a Quick Take on President Trump’s bouncing tariffs. They’re on, they’re off, they’re on, they’re off. But his gyrations are having real consequences. In central New York State, Trump’s threats have killed a daily newspaper — and not just any paper. The Cortland Standard, one of the oldest family-owned papers in the country, folded in mid-March, as Trump’s proposed 25% tariff on Canadian newsprint proved to be the last straw. Ellen's Quick Take comes from a tip from Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times who is a distinguished professor of the practice here at Northeastern. Jeff Morrison, a journalist who is a member of the Iowa Writers' Collaborative, has compiled an incredible timeline of the decline of newspapers in Iowa. A highlight: The Storm Lake Times Pilot, a twice-weekly print paper featured in our book, "What Works in Community News," is dropping a print edition and going weekly.

Dan talks with Marta Hill, an extraordinary young journalist who he got to know during her time at Northeastern. Marta is currently a graduate student in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program at New York University, where she’s also the editor-in-chief of Scienceline. In that role, she works with her peers at NYU to produce what she describes as “an accessible, down-to-earth science publication.” Marta is originally from Minneapolis, which makes it almost a tragedy that Ellen, a fellow transplant from the Twin Cities, couldn't be here. (Ellen will be back for our next podcast). At Northeastern, Marta served in various capacities at The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper, including a one-year stint as editor-in-chief. She was also in Dan's media ethics and diversity class in the fall of 2023. Whenever Dan teaches ethics, a week gets devoted to talking about the harassment that journalists face both online and in real life. It’s a problem that’s been getting worse in recent years, and it’s something that young reporters in particular really have to think about before deciding whether to go into journalism full-time. Marta decided she wanted to explore the issue of harassment and student journalism more deeply in the form of an honors project, and Dan was her adviser. She wrote a wide-ranging reported article, and a shorter version of that article was recently published by Nieman Reports, part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Her article, titled “J-schools Must Better Prepare Students for Handling Harassment,” lays out some concrete steps that journalism educators can take so that their students are not caught off guard when they encounter harassment at their student news outlet or on the job.  Dan has a Quick Take on a new nonprofit initiative to bring more and better news to Tulsa, Oklahoma, a thriving metro area with nearly 700,000 people in the city and surrounding county. The area is currently served by the Tulsa World, a daily paper that’s part of the Lee Enterprises chain, which, like most corporate newspaper owners, has a reputation for aggressive cost-cutting. The new nonprofit, the Tulsa News Initiative, is built around a venerable Black newspaper, but there’s more to it than that.     

Dan and Ellen talk with Mike Beaudet, longtime investigative reporter for WCVB-TV and a multimedia professor at Northeastern's school of journalism. Mike has won many awards for his hard-hitting investigations and leads a project aimed at reinventing television news. On March 21 - 22, he'll lead a conference at Northeastern called "Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit."  Mike's students are producing content for everything from Instagram, YouTube to TikTok. Dan has a Quick Take about the National Trust for Local News. Co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro exited the nonprofit suddenly last month. That came amid reports that the Portland Press Herald and other papers that the Trust owns in the state of Maine might soon announce budget cuts. Now comes more bad news. Colorado Community Media, a group of 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs, is closing two papers and is losing money. Those papers were the National Trust’s first acquisition. The Trust’s mission was to buy papers that were in danger of falling into the clutches of corporate chain ownership. It’s a worthy goal, but the Trust has obviously hit some significant obstacles. Ellen has a Quick Take on the fact that Harvard University is shutting down Harvard Public Health, the digital home to stellar longform journalism about public health. At a time when the very facts of science are challenged on social media every day, this is disheartening news.