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.
This time last year, I was working on a project that asked if 2008 to 2018 was the hardest decade
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journalism had experienced. Shortly after that project published, 2019 offered us a nasty “here, hold my beer” and we saw big layoffs at both the local and national level. Last week, Benjamin Goggin reported for Business Insider that 7,700 people had lost jobs
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in media this year.
These numbers come from different places, but compare that tally to the number of jobs lost between 2008 and 2018 from a Pew report
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. In that decade, we lost 28,000 jobs.
At the local level, we started this year with Gannett layoffs, and we’re ending it that way.
It’s terrible, no good, very bad, but … it’s not the only thing that’s happening in local news.
I offered that perspective in a five-minute talk at Newsgeist, an annual media conference that came to Poynter this year. You can see it here
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. I wrote a column today that makes the case that local news is not dying
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, despite all the headlines.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t changing.
“We're at an inflection point in the ways we think about what local journalism can look like, who participates, and who it serves,” said Tasneem Raja, the just-announced new editor-in-chief of a just-announced new newsroom
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in Oakland, California, in an email on Tuesday. “The good news is, there are bright and vibrant examples of people and organizations across the country doing the hard, rewarding, much-needed work to push those ideas forward. They need funding, training, and networks, and I'm happy to see that there's far more infrastructure to address their needs than there was 10 years ago, when I first got into hyperlocal, digital-first community journalism. So as much as it hurts to read the onslaught of news about bad actors decimating our local newspaper chains, let's continue to redirect some of that pain into supporting the individuals and organizations charting a better path forward. Because we certainly are out here.”
Screenshot, Twitter
While you’re here:
Check out the latest
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from LMA and LMC’s branded content project.
LATINEXT
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, a collaboration between The Chicago Reporter and Univision Chicago, will work to serve a Spanish-language audience, starting through WhatsApp.
The Texas Tribune has a new revenue and training lab
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!
LION just got $1 million
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to help make local online news sustainable.
There are tangible lessons and encouraging findings in this new report
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on local news from the University of Oregon.
There are so many resources here in this digest
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of training opportunities.
And you have a few more days to apply
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for this Poynter workshop on earning trust.
That’s it for me!
See you next week for one final Local Edition of the year.
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