As a reporter who covers my own industry, my job has always felt a little meta. The journalists I interview often (always) say, “it’s so weird to be on the other side of this.” They’re also the first to send tips with exactly the right kind of details (thank you, thank you) to help us tell stories like this. 

Lately I’ve found myself in this weird place where I’m being interviewed by journalists about my work covering the local news industry in a critical time. It’s like a meta ouroboros. For fun, or in an attempt to avoid 3rd and 6th grade homework for as long as possible, I put together a list of those questions and my answers, which are starting to feel canned (sorry.)

What would you add?

Why does local news matter?

Journalism is critical to democracy, and that matters way up high and down at the local level, too. Pen America’s Viktorya Vilk pulled a lot of strings together in this comprehensive report with details about drops in voting, participation in elections and increased political polarization when there’s no local news. Also, and this matters just as much, at least to me, people deserve to have information about the place they live. It’s in the work of the six volunteers who took over a local publication when the librarian who started it died last year. It’s in the work of the college kids who’re covering a nearby town without a paper. It’s in the weekly that showed up on my driveway today and told me about my community and saved me from the neighborhood Facebook page which is now unbearable. It matters because people need to know what’s happening where they live, and the people in charge need to know someone’s watching.

Did newsrooms do anything that helped cause this?

How much time do we have? I’ve started saying the biggest failure of newspapers wasn’t going online and putting their work up for free. It was a failure of imagination — a failure to think the gates would ever come down, to think readers habits would ever change, to keep up with technology that’s made us all sophisticated users unable to stand pop-up ads and auto-play videos, and a lot more. So yeah, some of this is self-inflicted.

What can people do?

Subscribe. Become a member. Email staff. Share their work widely and often. Give it to them when they get it wrong. Build relationships with the people, who matter more than the institutions. And if you’re unsatisfied with your options, start something of your own. LION, INN and LMA are all great resources and communities.

Are there any bright spots?

I know I’m relentlessly optimistic, but I’m still finding them all the time. From journalists helping each other to school kids who cover the news to the journalist who started a site in the midst of this to people giving money to help local newsrooms to members of my own community figuring out they like the e-edition better after all. 

And last: What’s the answer?

There isn’t one. There are many. We’re finding them right now, in the middle of the toughest thing many of us have lived through, which makes them that much more remarkable. 

While you’re here:

• Apply to Frontline’s Local Journalism Initiative, which “provides financial, editorial, and audience development support to local newsrooms pursuing enterprise projects.” Your deadline is June 16.

• Check out the Center for Cooperative Media’s mapping of news ecosystems. 

• The Stanton Foundation has a weekly contest “to identify and reward what we judge the best new Applied History article or op-ed that illuminates the current coronavirus crisis.”

• Looking forward to the work of the first class of West Virginia University’s new masters’ program that’s helping prepare a new generation of local news owners.

• See how the Associated Press is working with local newsrooms in Colorado.

• As a NextDoor user, I would LOVE to see INN member work in that feed. This is a great partnership.

• Here’s a reporting fellowship from a new publication, Rest of World. “These are paid, nine-month-long fellowships, with the possibility to be based anywhere in the world.”

• And I was one of these kids a long time ago, but I never made anything nearly this cool. Or this cool. 

That’s it for me. Stay well. 

Kristen

Pictured above: News from Weare in the World, a publication in Weare, New Hampshire.