I’ve spent a lot of the last two years feeling the way parents feel when one child is struggling and one is not. All your attention goes toward the struggler. 

I am not the parent, in this case, and local newsrooms aren’t the children, but the tension feels the same to me. It’s been hard to find time to cover successful collaborations, thriving startups and a whole field of local newsletters amid the loss and decline local news has faced during the pandemic. But the good stuff is happening, too, and at the end of 2021, I got to gather as much of it as I could find. 

Meet the 70+ newsrooms that launched during the pandemic. There are more than 50 newsletters, too. When this story originally published the week after Christmas, I had more than 50 newsrooms. It’s been growing ever since, and if you see one I missed, please let me know and I will add it to the list. 

I didn’t gather this list to offer a counternarrative to what local legacy newsrooms are facing. It’s not BUT, it’s AND. This is also happening. 

Here’s one more bright spot. I spoke with Penny Abernathy, visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, to compare notes. She shared something she’s seeing among her students that’s also worth noting:

“Now there’s a real understanding of how important local news is to the quality of our everyday lives, and that gives me tremendous hope for the long term.”

Here’s the list. You can support those newsrooms, too, with this spreadsheet from Democracy Fund’s Josh Stearns. 

Now, for the links I’ve been collecting for the last month….

Apply for fellowships to the CatchLight Local Visual Desk in California. Through a partnership with Report for America, there are three fellowship positions in three California newsrooms. The deadline is Jan. 31.

Applications are also open for RJI fellowships, which include residential, nonresidential and institutional fellowships. I was a 2020 fellow and was able to build out an obituary project through the program.

Read this terrific piece from City Bureau’s Darryl Holliday on why “Journalism is a public good. Let the public make it.”

Read Politico on “How a 100-year-old newspaper became the go-to way to influence Biden.”

Read CJR on “How the University of Vermont is investing in local journalism.”

Finally some actual numbers on the layoffs that have happened during the pandemic. This is really solid work from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.   

Here’s what diversity and inclusion work looks like in four Chicago newsrooms. 

Read about the former paperboys awaiting justice “after suing Gannett for allowing sexual abuse four decades ago.”

And read The Washington Post on the local newspaper focused on the Black community that is defying the odds. “It’s growing.”

Try this: The Tampa Bay Times (which Poynter owns and I freelance for) used a podcast to bring new audiences to a 25-year-old series on AIDS.

Try this: The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Helen Ubiñas hosted a pop-up newsroom (with chocolates). 

Try this: Learn how the Florida Times-Union used Instagram to connect with new audiences.

And try all of these: Better News’ Kamaria Roberts has a list of success stories from 2021.

Congrats to Richard Kim, who joined The City as its new editor-in-chief. Kim was previously an executive editor at HuffPost. 

Exciting news from Report for the World, which placed an additional nine journalists in newsrooms, for a total of 15. 

Exciting news from Poynter and the Center for Public Broadcasting, which announced last month that 75 public media stations have been selected for a digital transformation program. 

And good news from the Meta Journalism Project (I’ll get used to that at some point), which shared “How 20 US-based, BIPOC-led Publishers Adapted and Prevailed During the Pandemic.”

One more thing to share, and this one is personal. In my obits newsletter for the Tampa Bay Times, I wrote about the oral history interviews I got to conduct this summer with my uncle, who was dying from pancreatic cancer. I used what I wrote for his obituary and eulogy. Now is the time to sit down with the history keepers in your life and capture their stories. 

Thanks for reading, happiest new year to you!

Kristen