Hi! Today I want to share a short story about how some newsrooms in the same county are working together to make sure county government and county issues get covered.
For the last few years, several news websites in Union County, New Jersey, have chipped in each month for something important — a reporter to cover the county.
TAPinto has 95 sites, each owned independently, in New Jersey, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania. It was founded 15 years ago, and takes a franchise approach to local news. According to its site, “Our franchisees fill a major void in educating the community about their surroundings. We specialize in connecting businesses and organizations to the communities we serve through content and marketing opportunities.”
TAPinto’s publications include more than a dozen in Union County, New Jersey.
“What we started to notice a few years ago was that no one was covering Union County news very well, and that left a big chunk of government to do whatever it wanted to do without anybody looking at it,” said Jackie Lieberman, the publisher of TAPinto Westfield.
She considered funding the coverage for her newsroom and offering it to other TAPinto newsrooms to publish. But what if they all actually tried working together?
Dwindling coverage of local and state governments is not a new problem.
It has been bolstered recently by nonprofits and student journalists. Documenters, a program that trains and pays local citizens to attend and report on local government meetings, is now in nine different cities around the country.
In Union County, between weeklies, local newspapers and regional publications that dip in now and then, Lieberman saw gaps at the county level.
“And we thought, someone needs to be at these meetings,” she said.
Now, someone is.
Thirteen TAPInto newsrooms each pay a small amount toward a freelance reporter who goes to county government meetings and covers county issues. Lieberman is currently the one in charge of editing those stories, which adds up to about one a week. It’s also online and there’s no paywall, making sure people around the county can access it.
Lieberman thinks it’s been effective, too. Coverage has included how much money elected officials gave themselves in raises, underreported hate crimes and what happened to a man at a county facility who died while being held down by police.
“We saw that there was this void,” she said, “and our job is to fill voids in local news coverage.”
I’m always looking for stories about things that are working in local news, if you have one, reply to this email and tell me all about it.
A few things to share this week:
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The Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Society of Professional Journalists are having a virtual panel on the PRESS Act, followed by a Q&A, at noon Eastern Time on March 7. Details here.
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Here are the results from RJI’s burnout survey.
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If you’re not managing people but ready to lead with influence, we have the perfect training for you.
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And read my colleague Angela Fu on The Desert Sun’s open-ended strike.
That’s it for me. I took my 13-year-old to see Olivia Rodrigo last night and have the T-shirt and the hearing loss to prove it 😃
Kristen
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