When people see Jasmyn Rowley at the grocery store, they get excited. 

“It’s like, oh my gosh, is she gonna buy our groceries?,” she thinks they might wonder.

And sometimes, she does. (And sometimes, she’s just there with her son, you know, buying groceries.)

Rowley is in her seventh year bringing random acts of kindness to her hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada. The video series from SooToday partners with local businesses and brings acts of kindness big and small. 

And it started with a simple question: How can we surprise deserving people?

Once they asked, the community showed up.

“All you really need to run it are generous community members who want to be on board and want to help others, and from there it is so easy to find special people who deserve this type of recognition.”

Rowley started the series as a local reporter, and she’s continued it as the director of communications and community engagement for Village Media, which owns SooToday. She did not expect the project to grow the way it has. 

The hyperlocal site now features one random act of kindness each month and 12 big ones for the holidays. Rowley told me that local news matters because it informs people about their communities. The random acts project has helped her find stories that might not be “hard news,” but are still powerful and important.

You can read about SooToday’s Random Acts of Kindness today.

Screenshot, SooToday.com

While you’re here:

• First, a programming note: I’m off next week, and hope that by Wednesday you’re wrapping up pre-Thanksgiving work, so – no newsletter next week. The week after, I’ll be at a media conference in Poland, and I’ll have a special guest take over for me.

• Thinking about launching a paywall? It’s worked well for the Shawnee Mission Post.

• Chalkbeat is the first non-profit news org to join Vox Media’s Chorus publishing platform.

• Check out this report from the Knight Foundation on people’s perceptions about local news and who should pay for it.

• And the Facebook Journalism Project has an update on its local news membership program. 

That’s it for me! I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving, get a break from work and know how grateful I am that you’re a subscriber to this newsletter.

See you in a few weeks!