Last week, while I led the virtual opening summit for the 58 newest Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellows, my colleague Rick Edmonds wrote a story about the very reason our fellowship exists — the health of local journalism. 

Edmonds’ story is a digestible way to approach Penny Abernathy’s latest report on the state of local news. It’s rough, he writes, but there are bright spots.

Let’s start with the bad news. According to Edmonds’ story:

• Closures continue: “Newspaper closures since 2004 average out to two a week.”

• Local newspaper journalists are disappearing: “The total number of journalists working at local newspaper organizations is estimated to have fallen by roughly 60% since 2005 to 31,400.”

• Digital is growing, but not big or fast enough: “With 545 digital-only state and local sites, most of them employing six or fewer journalists, the footprint of the new organizations does not yet come close to covering legacy journalism jobs lost.”

So what on earth could be good news here? 

• There are healthy mid-sized newspapers “that both serve readers well and have achieved financial stability.”

• There are healthy regional newspapers “like The Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The Boston Globe, midway into a successful pivot to digital.”

• There’s a growing acknowledgment that local ownership matters, and people in rural and underserved areas deserve quality news sources and are a critical component of a healthy democracy. Abernathy includes examples in her report. “In 2021, Les High sold the 10,000-circulation-weekly in Whiteville, North Carolina, that had been in his family for three generations. The newspaper, under the stewardship of his grandfather, had received the Pulitzer Public Service Medal in 1953 for a courageous two-year crusade against the Ku Klux Klan. Seven decades later, the grandson is taking on a different journalistic challenge. With financial support from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, High has established the nonprofit Border Belt Independent, an online outlet that is covering the news in four of the state’s poorest counties. Minority groups—Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics—account for a majority of the population in three of the four counties, all of which have low broadband penetration. Instead of competing with local newspapers, which have depleted news staff, the Border Belt Independent is offering its news and features free and collaborating with reporters at other newspapers on major investigative pieces. ‘We’re not about competing with existing newspapers,’ says High. ‘We’re about getting the news to people who need it.’”

You can read the full report here.

I’ve been collecting links to share with you for years. OK, one month, but it feels like years. Here you go:

Connect and learn:

From the Local That Works webinar series, learn the strategy of three stations in becoming the go-to place for news.

Submit a pitch to the Independent News Sustainability Summit. It takes place in October in Austin.

If you’ve followed the series of free webinars I’ve hosted on covering the American Rescue Plan Act, you’ll know there were always a lot of great questions and not a lot of time to get to them. So we’re hosting one more webinar, an Ask Me Anything style with our ARPA experts. It’s free and takes place at 1 p.m. Eastern on July 26. Sign up here and if you have questions you want answered, reply to this email and I’ll include them!

The E.W. Scripps Company and Google have partnered to help journalists with print backgrounds transition into broadcast journalism. 

Off the news:

Read Alex Sujong Laughlin for Poynter on how to be a journalist and a human.

From the industry: 

The American Press Institute “launched an initiative to assess and improve how multiple news organizations in a single area cover communities of color.  The first effort began in June in Pittsburgh, focusing on five newsrooms serving the Steel City. In partnership with the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation, the American Press Institute will provide its new Inclusion Index service to a cohort consisting of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh City Paper, PublicSource and Pitt News.”

Read former Capital Gazette editor Rick Hutzell on how red flag laws could save the lives of journalists.

Learn about the topics and solutions shared at the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America.

Check out this database from the Hussman School of Journalism and Media on proposed state legislation aimed at supporting local news.

Read Stefanie Murray for Nieman Reports on why newsrooms are collaborating to take on ambitious work.

From API’s Better News, find out how The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reaching Black audiences through its Unapologetically ATL newsletter.

From Poynter’s Edmonds, see what happened when Honolulu Civil Beat dropped its paywall and moved to donations.

The University of Kansas is leading a project that will test a new business model for rural weekly newspapers.

Growth: 

Up The Block, a project that launched last year from The Trace to help Philadelphians connect with resources around gun violence has added some resources, including a guide on how to write letters to officials, how to become a block captain and how to volunteer. 

From Nieman Lab, learn about The Tributary, a “worker-directed non-profit.” 

And you may remember that I write feature obituaries about regular people for the Tampa Bay Times and spent a year in an RJI fellowship making the case that they’re a critical part of local newsrooms. A few months ago, I got to talk with the smart people at The Oaklandside, and am so happy to see their approach to making a space for this work in their newsroom and community. 

That’s it for me. I told my kids recently that they have five weeks left of summer and now they’re not talking to me. 😅

Thanks for reading (and for still talking to me),

Kristen