It was the last great newspaper war in America.

A fabled time in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s when four major daily newspapers were vying against each other every day for breaking news and fighting for circulation in the trenches of newsstands and kiosks that were on every corner. There was the “Gray Lady,” as The New York Times was known, the feisty, down-market New York Post, and Newsday’s New York edition which was snidely referred to as a “tabloid in a tutu.” And then there was the brawny tabloid Daily News, which had the largest daily print circulation in America at more than 1 million, and it was affectionately referred to as New York’s “Hometown Newspaper.”

I worked during that newspaper war as a street reporter, the equivalent to the infantry, and it was exciting to take the next hill, so to speak, and often disillusioning to see the damage that the battles left behind. But one thing is for sure, it was never boring. I also served briefly as a city editor for the New York Daily News and would occasionally go out to the printing plant in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. In the fall of 1992, I remember going to check on a special section that I needed to review before the print run. It was late November and the presses were gearing up for a run for the Sunday after Thanksgiving which was always one of the fattest papers of the year stuffed with display advertising at the start of the Christmas shopping season.

That feeling of the rumbling of the Goss presses and the smell of the six-foot-high paper rolls and the floors sticky with ink is something I will never forget. This was the tail end of the golden age of print newspapers and back then the Daily News was still a commanding force in New York. I would move on from the Daily News to the Boston Globe in 1994 and there the presses rumbled right below the newsroom. On Thursdays, when the Sunday edition was in full production, you could feel huge paper rolls landing with a thud on the concrete loading docks on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester. The sound was the perfect metaphor for the impact the paper had when it landed every morning.

I feel lucky to have worked in newspapers in this heyday. Those of you who read this newsletter, know that we have been chronicling the shift away from print newspapers and into digital media and the demise of print newspapers which are shutting down at an alarming rate. But we have perhaps not focused on enough is the parallel downward trend for printing presses which seems at a glance to be going the way of steam locomotives. There is no question that the number of printing presses at newspapers is dropping, but there are also some interesting and perhaps surprising signs of life for printing presses and journalism with printed editions of magazines and newspapers, particularly for small local weekly newspapers like the one where I serve as publisher.

At a recent seminar sponsored by the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, industry experts did not sugarcoat the bad news, particularly the unpredictability and volatility that comes with printing in the digital age. The price of newsprint has doubled over the last five years due to pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, mill closures, and high energy costs, with costs ranging from approximately $580 to $670 per metric ton in 2025.

Nearly 100 percent of the newsprint in North America is produced in Canada, but newsprint has been exempted from tariffs of up to 35 percent imposed on Canada by the Trump administration. This has offered some short-term relief to the publishing industry, but it has exacerbated the long-term anxiety over the viability of shipping newsprint. The volatility of the print business and the inevitable momentum toward digital first news has caused several major daily news organizations to cease print publication. Two notable examples are the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The closures and consolidations are playing out across the country right now and this has ignited a scramble for community newspapers to find a printing press that will serve their needs. Many local newspapers are having to travel long distances to get the paper printed adding to further costs to produce the print edition. The last printing press in Maine closed down in April last year, leaving the state without a place for a local newspaper to print. Most of Maine’s community newspapers now drive to New Hampshire or even further to get their paper printed.

But not everything is bad news in the printing world. Angie Stroud, market intelligence manager at Billerud, a major international company producing and marketing high-quality paper and packaging, cited research showing that consumers continue to engage with the printed word and that they see signs that consumers are expressing a desire for the tactile experience of print over digital. Billerud does not produce newsprint and was not trying to sell to newspapers at this event.

Stroud highlighted a data point that warms the heart of a print news publisher: A single print magazine is read, on average, by more than seven people. She added that there is a way for print and digital to work together and that each has unique strengths. As Stroud pointed out in the recent issue of Editor&Publisher, digital channels are more designed for speed and frequency, whereas print on paper is better suited for attention and memorability. Stroud pointed to neuroscientific research, including studies from Temple University, saying, “Print consistently outperforms digital in recall, trust and response rates.”

I think about this issue nearly every day in our small newsroom at The Martha’s Vineyard Times. We, like more and more newspapers, have to travel quite a distance to get our paper printed. For us it is made a bit more complicated by the fact that we are on an Island.

Each week, we work with TCI Press out of Seekonk, MA. Every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. we ship the PDF files of the 32-page paper we produce for the 3,500 print subscribers, or “members” in our community. Inside the Seekonk printing plant, our PDF files are scanned onto plates, and then an experienced printing team runs the plates through the web of a four-color Rockwell printer.

The pressroom is not quite as loud as the Daily News or the Boston Globe nor does it have the heft of impact, but it has a heartbeat to it that I love. Big rolls of newsprint are moved around with forklifts to be fed into the rumbling weave of the printer. And when it gets humming, it sounds like a freight train. The floors are as sticky with ink as they were at the Daily News plant in Brooklyn. It is all straight out of another century, and, maybe because I have loved working in print newspapers for most of the past 40 years, I am fond of all that noise and the ink-stained floors and smell of those rolls of paper. It smells like, well, news.

When our paper is printed and the copies are bundled together with twine, they are loaded into the back of a produce truck provided by the owner of The Martha’s Vineyard Times who happens to also be the long-time proprietor of Cronig’s Markets which keep the Island supplied with fresh produce in addition to everything else we need. It warms my heart to see the newspapers when they arrive to the loading docks at the back of the grocery store in the produce truck with loose heads of cabbage and broccoli rolling around the top of the shrink-wrapped pallets filled with our newspapers ready for delivery. We like to think the community service of journalism we provide is as much a part of the health of our community as the fresh vegetables with which the print edition arrives.

For publishers like myself that are tempted to walk away from the expense of producing the print product, it is a very important insight. Digital news gathering has far better metrics to assess audience engagement, but print has an intuitive feel that readers want and she warns this emotional reality should not be overlooked. For those considering dropping their print edition, Stroud had this to say: “Based on all the research that I’ve done and the impact that print has on people’s attention … to me, it’s a huge mistake.”

What we’re reading this week

• When the killing of journalists disrupts nothing: a conversation with safety expert Elena Cosentino | Maurice Oniang’o, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• The Centre Daily Times unionizes after backlash to McClatchy’s AI tool | Andrew Deck, Nieman Journalism Lab

• War in Ukraine: How RSF continues to help journalists working under Russian fire | Reporters Without Borders

• The 60 Minutes Crisis Reveals the 3 Questions Every Leader Should Be Asking Right Now | Soren Kaplan, Inc.

• This CEO keeps going viral for thirst-trapping journalists with $200k jobs to be head of content. Yes, he’s trying to prove a point | Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune

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Fifty years ago, “All The President’s Men” opened in theaters across the country.

The blockbuster film chronicles how Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein investigated the Watergate break-in and traced it back to the White House, setting in motion calls for President Richard Nixon’s impeachment and then his resignation in August 1974.

I was 14 years old in that Spring of 1976 and I remember settling into our local movie theater in Natick, MA and watching Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein in a film that would speak so directly to my heart that I knew I was going to be a reporter. I am far from alone in that memory. A whole generation of journalists coming of age in the 1970s were inspired by the work of Woodward and Bernstein, their dogged investigative reporting and the idea that you could have a job in which you get to ‘stick to the man.’ I fell in love with the whole idea of American journalism. I was hooked, and, well, I still am. Hopelessly.

A half century later, it is hard to convey the power of this film to the new generation of reporters who I work with. It’s almost impossible for them to imagine that journalism could yield truths that would change the course of history. Yet, this is exactly the movie that this new generation of journalists should be watching to be inspired, a reminder that getting to the truth is hard work and comes with grave risks, and that it can actually produce profound change if you stay with it and don’t give up.

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The parallels between Nixon and the current administration are unsettling and all of us who work in journalism are left wondering what the hell it is going to take to get American audiences to see that the story of corruption, power, politics and the dangers of an imperial presidency that was at the core of Watergate is just as present today. If you have never seen this film or not seen it in a long time, sit down and stream it.

When you do, you will immediately recognize that the media landscape today is profoundly different. The Washington Post’s fierce reputation for independence was recently diminished by its billionaire owner, and the nobility of Kay Graham and her family that once owned the paper and stood firmly by maverick editors like Ben Bradlee are just framed portraits on the wall, no longer part of the living reality at the paper.

You will also be reminded that audiences these days are fractured and stories like the Watergate break-in quickly pixelate into shards of partisan opinion and ideologies that seem to trump facts. (Pun intended.) Readership is hard to calculate when so few people actually read the stories. I believe these grim but very real trends today make the film more important than ever, and might help us see the film not as a regretful reminiscence but a hopeful reminder of what the power of a free press can look like in a healthy democracy. This film can hopefully stir our collective memory.

The opening scene of “All The President’s Men” is etched into my memory: A close-up of a blank sheet of paper rolled into an old clacking typewriter. The strokes of the keys are decisive and powerful. They sound like the crack of a distant gunshot as if the words themselves are a weapon that can defend us, and protect our democracy. The date that is typed out at the top of the page is “JUNE 1, 1972” and just after the ‘ding’ of the carriage return, it cuts to a helicopter landing on the Capitol Plaza that morning as Nixon arrives to address the House of Representatives and takes the podium at the height of his power.

The next scene is from outside the hotel and we see a flashlight flickering in an office where the burglars are setting out to do their work and the conspiracy is just getting rolling. By pure chance, undercover D.C. police are sent in to check out the report of a break-in and they arrest the men whose names would go down in history for their bizarre role in a plot to protect a paranoid president who wanted to silence his critics and do whatever it took to win an election. Sounds familiar?

Cut to Woodward: a young metro reporter covering courts assigned to the arraignment of these men. One of my favorite angles of this narrative is the fact that Woodward was not a national reporter and that his editor was fighting to keep the Watergate break-in coverage a local story. You have to really love the inside-baseball of a newsroom and the dynamics of power that used to drive them to understand how important that subplot is.

Bernstein is an older, cagier veteran rewrite man also on the local news desk. How they fall into a partnership and start digging on the story drives the momentum of the narrative which is essentially a paper chase to get at who was behind the break-in and why. We all know the history so I won’t unpack it all here, but there is a small moment I love when finally the city editor successfully defends Woodward and Bernstein’s assignments to cover the story. In the beautiful and chaotic symphony of what newsrooms used to look and sound like — the loud clacking of typewriters, the constant din of banter and the mountains of paper that cluttered desks in that lush analogue world of yore — the local news editor Harry Rosenfeld walks briskly by and says, “Woodward, Bernstein: You’re both on the story. Now don’t fuck it up!!”

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Their journey down into the rabbit holes of Washington is guided by Woodward’s deeply placed source in the FBI known to us only as “Deep Throat.” He is played by Hal Holbrook who, with a raspy whisper in a dimly lit parking garage, instructs Woodward on how to direct his reporting: “Just follow the money.” It is certainly the single most memorable line of the movie and one that would also serve any reporters today, a half century later, looking to dig down into the surreal warren of corruption in Washington in the age of Trump. It is worth noting that there are indeed some fine examples of great reporters following the money, most notably David Frenthold for his reporting at the Washington Post and more recently the New York Times on the Trump family and their various conflicts of interest.

The most powerful visual of the film comes at the beginning of their investigative journey toward “following the money.” In the scene, the two reporters enter the Library of Congress looking for White House documents and are blocked by a dismissive clerk, but subsequently they gain access by going down into the basement and finding a lower-level clerk who turns them over.

The scene pulls back into a gorgeous overhead shot filmed on location at the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. It features a dramatic, high-angle camera shot looking down upon them as they sit in the Main Reading Room, surrounded by immense stacks of documents, highlighting the daunting nature of their research. As the shot pulls back, the concentric circles of the Library of Congress take shape, floor by floor, surging to a height of more than 100 feet. It is an iconic piece of cinematography, which was shot using cranes and a pulley system by the legendary, late Gordon Willis, who in his later years lived close by in North Falmouth, MA. To my relatively untrained eye, the scene reflects the Library of Congress as an oculus, an enormous eye looking down from on high. And there in the imperfections of the iris of this eye are the two reporters toiling away and scouring the documents to find answers.

As they close in on the story, they realize they finally have the goods on the big story that connects the White House to the conspiracy. They have worked for a year to get the story, publishing incremental pieces but now they really had it and they were going to print but they go to see Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee, played by Jason Robards. They are worried about surveillance so they talk in the yard outside his home, and Bradlee tells them to stay focused and keep working.

Bradlee gets slightly pissed off at the two reporters and admonishes them but also supports them by reminding them of how important the work is. For those who see the movie today, especially young reporters, Bradley may as well be speaking directly to the moment we live in:

“Nothing’s riding on this, except, uh, the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.”

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The phrase “artificial intelligence” was first coined in 1955, the year Pope Leo XIV was born.

How that phrase has evolved over the last 70 years is essential in understanding this unique moment in world history as the first ever American pope has taken a stand as a moral philosopher and world leader challenging the primacy of technology and warning us all to “disarm” AI.

On Monday, the Pope offered his first encyclical, a form of papal communication that has a long history and serves as guidance to the bishops and the whole of the Catholic Church on challenging moral issues of the time. The encyclical is entitled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”

Although the title might suggest otherwise, the pope is not so much weighing against AI as he is reflecting on the unique power of humanity and encouraging us not to forget what it means to be human.

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” Leo writes.

The message of his encyclical, which grows out of a decade-long dialogue between the Vatican and global leaders in technology, stands in a marked contrast to the high priests of Silicon Valley, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and their doctrines of faith in the power of technology, the primacy of AI and the bounty of profits it will offer. They arrogantly believe they are saving the world. But, in his 42,000-word tome, the pope humbly expresses his fear they are in danger of destroying it.

This fear was in the air this week at college graduation ceremonies across the country. Many commencement speakers sought to tackle the issue from many different disciplines. Interestingly, students were also collectively voicing a shift in distrust of AI with a smattering of “boos” when the word was mentioned. At Harvard University’s 375th commencement, comedian Ronny Chieng, known for his work at “The Daily Show,” startled a few parents with the level of profanity and anger he directed at AI. The opening line was “Fuck AI,” which he said three times in a row for full effect.

Speaking in a large auditorium on Wednesday at what is known as “Class Day,” Chieng said, “In respect to graduation speakers in colleges around America telling you you need to master AI for the future, I am here to tell you: The mission of your generation is to destroy AI. Kill it! AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber.”

His talk was met with applause and some laughter, as he continued, saying, “Untalented people love talking about AI helped them draft speeches and their scripts and their podcasts … What they are missing is this: The creating is the fun part, and I know this platitude is almost worthy of AI. But the reason shortcuts aren’t always good is because the journey isn’t just how we acquire skills, the journey is the point of all this. It is!”

The comedian and the pope are mostly in sync. But the power of the pope’s message is that he is not rejecting innovation or blindly opposing technology. Instead the pope is setting out to raise a voice in defense of humanity and issuing a warning. As a gesture of aligning himself with thoughtful leaders in technology, the pope presented the encyclical in person alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the AI research company Anthropic. Throughout the presentation, the central message by both the pope and the technologist was that AI must be human-centered.

“We are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human,” he said earlier this month just before the document was published.

The date the encyclical was published, May 15, carries meaning as it marks the same day on the calendar 155 years ago when his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, released the “Rerum Novarum” (“Of New Things”) encyclical, a moral indictment of the stark economic inequality wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and an unequivocal rejection of the laissez-faire capitalism and rigid ideology of socialism in favor of the process of collective bargaining and a timeless cry for social justice. So, in short, if Leo XIII was indicting robber barons; Leo XIV was making the case against tech moguls. The importance of this document, its timeliness, and its potential to reframe the dialogue around our future and the emergence of AI has everything to do with the unique narrative of this American pope.

He came into the world on September 14, 1955 on the gritty southside of Chicago with the name Robert Francis Prevost. It so happens that that was the same year that a young professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College coined the phrase “Artificial Intelligence.” The pope loved math and would go onto major it in at college, but most of the pope’s biographers make the case that he was just a normal Catholic kid coming of age at a time when John F. Kennedy would be the first Catholic elected to be the president of the United States.

He earned his college degree in Mathematics and Philosophy at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. The future Pontiff received his theological education at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. At the age of 27, he was sent by his superiors to Rome to study Canon Law at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In Rome, he was ordained a priest on June 19, 1982. He later went on to serve in Peru for more than a decade before returning to the Chicago archdiocese and then taking on leadership roles in the Vatican where Pope Francis named him the prefect of the dicastery of Bishops. He was made a Cardinal in 2023. After the pope’s death last year, Prevost’s name appeared on the paper ballots used by the college of cardinals and he was elected, becoming the first ever American to lead the global church which is composed of nearly 1.5 billion baptized Catholics.

Harvard professor of history and best-selling author, Jill Lepore, wrote eloquently in last week’s New Yorker, “If those of us Americans who are Catholic are proud of this Pope, many of us are even prouder that the first American pontiff has taken on this vital matter, and at such a crucial moment. In much of American culture—and especially in the business and tech press—challenging the economic power and oligarchic rule of U.S.-based artificial-intelligence companies is an act tantamount to heresy. Pope Leo is not only willing but eager to dissent. Bless him.”

The pope embraces the idea that AI has brought the world to a crossroads. And he argues that as humanity stands at this crossroads, there are three elemental questions that must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”

These are the questions of our time. The pope acknowledges that AI promises much that is good for breakthroughs in medicine and mathematics and deeper understanding around complex challenges such as climate change and economic inequity. But it also presents peril. The pope expresses a fear that AI could turbo-charge disinformation by blurring the lines between facts and fabrications and undercutting the human endeavor of critical thinking. He worries that the culture of capitalism and the pursuit of profit around artificial intelligence can easily undermine the search for truth that is necessary for both democratic life and any possibility for a genuine spiritual existence.

Because of the clear and present danger it presents, the pope believes there must be democratic control of artificial intelligence through various forms of regulation, and above all he believes that AI must align itself with the pursuit of truth. Indeed, he writes that the opportunity for that alignment to happen could be an historic breakthrough for humanity. And on that path, he calls, above all else, for “disarming” AI.

He writes, “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.”

The instinct to dismiss any claim of moral authority by the Catholic Church is understandable. Its failure as an institution for not protecting children nor prosecuting predators is profound. As a journalist, I have reported extensively on the Church’s failings. I have also interviewed senior clerics on the Church’s inability to employ its moral teachings towards stopping war. It has much to answer for in its unconscionable silence in the face of the rise of antisemitism in Europe that paved a path to the industrial killing of Jews in the Holocaust. But often the Catholic Church’s daily work against poverty in every corner of the world is too easily dismissed. And the ability for the Church’s best leaders to define conscience at a time when the world feels morally untethered is too easy to overlook.

The recent debate surfacing in Washington around “just war” theory and Vice President J.D. Vance stands as proof of the need for us all to be tethered to a mooring that can stand up against the shifting tides of politics amid the wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine. Vance took a swipe at the pope for, in his view, failing to understand that the U.S. and Israel’s airstrikes on Iran represented a “just war.” The pope assured Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, that the Vice President had very little understanding of the idea of a “just war,” the theology and history that lies behind it, and interestingly suggested that AI and its role in modern warfare may in fact require a rethinking of the Church’s teaching on “just war.”

“The ‘just war’ theory which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” wrote Leo in his encyclical, adding that “Humanity possesses ​far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness,” he said.

The pope made clear we need moral grounding to steel ourselves for the challenges that AI presents in these active wars as well as the challenges it presents in our daily lives. This pope’s words offer an important and thoughtful road map for us to find our way forward. And, equally important, it offers a call to action. The pope is urging journalists and educators to train people in recognizing the manipulative machinations of AI. He calls on journalists in particular to help us develop greater literacy about media as part of making sure we are discerning users of AI so we can harness its power for good and do not fall prey to its worst flaws. If journalism in its core is about the pursuit of truth, there are so many ways we can align ourselves with its capacity for organizing information. The key, as the pope makes clear, is to be sure that in doing so we never forget the “magnificence of humanity.”

What we’re reading this week

• Inside the news industry’s efforts to join forces to defend its journalism from AI companies | Marina Adami, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried | Matt Pearce, Nieman Lab

• A Star Is Born | Adam Piore, Columbia Journalism Review

• Press crackdowns in Gulf spike following Iran war, risk becoming permanent | Mohamed Mandour, Committee to Protect Journalists

• How Mongabay built a global model for environmental accountability journalism | Maurice Oniang’o, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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The dramatic decline of news organizations in the United States over the last two decades has coincided with a steady drop in union membership overall across the country, but recently the NewsGuild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America, is reporting a stirring of activity and a rise in membership.

So what does that mean in real terms? In short, it is too early to tell and the trendlines are not clear, but they suggest that the promise and peril that AI represents has motivated more journalists to demand a seat at the table where the future of journalism will be decided. And that’s a good thing.

But while pondering the change that is upon us, it is essential to recognize this is a far more revolutionary moment than the last time the world saw a transformative technology like this, which was Web 2.0. Back then the historic shift was part of what was called “The New Information Order.” The changes were mostly around newsrooms seeking to digitize content and optimize for search engines through Google and setting out to outflank traditional media through new platforms like Facebook. Labor unions were not really a part of that chapter in history even if their members were directly affected by its consequences. Back then it was traditional media companies that were slow to move or resistant to the change and they were marginalized, and as a result their business models were disrupted. The breaking mechanism on inevitable change this time seems to come from the labor movement, and a growing concern that AI presents an existential threat to journalism jobs.

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The NewsGuild-CWA, which now represents over 25,000 workers in 519 workplaces, has experienced a tilt upward in organizing activity and member-driven labor actions in recent years. According to an Axios analysis, since 2020 an average of 23 media unions have formed annually, compared to just 8 per year in the decade prior.

Amid severe industry downsizing, unions are seeking to secure contracts and their ranks are growing through campaigns in both digital and legacy media, including local newsrooms and tech staff, according to the NewsGuild.

Early this spring, members of the Guild at ProPublica, one of the most successful, respected and largest nonprofit newsrooms in America, overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike. Out of the roughly 150 journalists, copyeditors, videographers and other newsroom workers in the Guild, 92% of members voted to walk off the job and they did so on April 8 in a one-day strike.

ProPublica’s union, which was first recognized in 2023, has been negotiating the first collective bargaining agreement around the boilerplate issues of job security and cost-of-living wage increases, but interestingly it is also zeroing in on an article that would prohibit ProPublica from laying off employees due to AI adoption. If no settlement is reached in the coming months, the union has threatened another walkout.

Other news organizations have also been simmering over how newsroom employees and the unions that represent them will be impacted by the sweeping changes that are coming with AI. According to Neiman Journalism Lab, AI was referenced in 43 contracts negotiated by units of the NewsGuild-CWA.

In three large metro newspapers, The Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee and the Kansas City Star, unions have filed grievances against parent company McClatchy after senior executives began introducing a “content scaling agent,” or CSA, which is an AI summarization tool powered by Anthropic’s Claude. Management at McClatchy, a respected news organization fighting for sustainability as it operates 30 daily newspapers and dozens of other weekly and digital news organizations across 15 states, wants to place a bet on this AI tool to help find and segment new audiences. Unions representing its journalists are not so thrilled about what it might mean for the quality of what is written under their byline. The union sent a letter to management on May 1. That was followed with a quiet revolt by dozens of unionized reporters at the three papers withholding their bylines on stories and demanding more input on how such decisions are made.

At the New York Times, the Times Guild, representing some 1,500 members from the news organization’s editorial employees, has developed a subcommittee specifically focused on issues surrounding the use of AI in the newsroom. The unit sent a letter in early April to the publisher and senior news executives, stating that the Times’ standards on AI were “woefully inadequate,” citing “serious concerns” after a freelancer was found to have plagiarized an article using AI.

A member of the guild bargaining committee laid out for Axios some of the core issues that the union is seeking in relation to AI, including a mandate for “clearer disclosures around the technology’s use in its journalism.” And further clarity around “the way Times journalists’ name, image and likeness would be protected.”

Senior management at the Times wrote in a note to union members that its latest contract proposal addresses the guild’s main concerns, which in addition to AI include health care, wages, remote work and unionizing The Athletic. Axios, which formed a content partnership with OpenAI, quoted the management letter to the union which “gave assurances that our use of A.I. would be informed by our current best-in-class guidelines and standards while leaving flexibility to iterate as the technology evolves.”

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In addition, the letter stated, “We also added strong language that guarantees that The Times would not create a digital replica of a bargaining member’s image, voice or likeness without their consent — a provision the Guild had told us was very important to its members.”

The union’s contract at the Times lapsed at the end of February and the negotiations are ongoing. Based on the coverage, the tone seems to be respectful, but the issue of AI has become a more significant flashpoint between the management and unions at the Times and other newsrooms as the news organizations seek to experiment with new tools and to seek major partnership deals with AI platforms.

It is too early to tell where all this is headed, but it seems safe to say the issue of how newsrooms will handle the quiet, smoldering labor unrest is not going away. Riddhi Setty, at the Columbia Journalism Review, has been covering the issue as a Delacourt Fellow, which allows recent graduates of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to bring fresh eyes to media coverage and to immerse themselves in its thorniest issues. Setty wrote on April 30, “Some newsrooms, as large as CBS and as small as Vermont’s VT Digger, have had success in ratifying contracts with AI guardrails in the past month. But for many journalists, the battle is far from over.”

Setty’s piece quotes Hilke Schellmann, an AI expert and journalism professor at New York University, stating, “Now is the time to fight this fight. Because once it becomes standard in a union bargaining agreement across the journalism industry that journalists or employees have no say over AI tools, that quickly becomes a standard.”

Equally concerning is the need for news organizations and the journalists who work at those organizations to fully embrace the potential for transformation that AI promises. This moment is about far more than digitizing content or getting more eyeballs on a website. This is about how content will be verified and whether this new transformation of the model – from search engine to answer engine – can restore trust for news consumers who have so profoundly lost faith in the practice of journalism. If we plunge forward with the right spirit and the right guardrails then the massive investment flowing into AI and the diminished business models of journalism can actually be aligned in an unprecedented way around the pursuit of truth. That, I believe, would be very good news for the craft of journalism.

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Jelani Cobb’s writing on race and culture for the New Yorker stands out as among the finest in contemporary America, but Jelani’s skill as a speaker is in some ways an even more extraordinary gift. The resonance of his words may have something to do with his training as a scholar in history, before he set out on a career in journalism that carried him all the way to serving as Dean at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. His signature is the way he listens and then responds with a deep timbre in his voice, formulating answers as smooth and steady as a Charles Mingus bass line with strokes as powerful and well-timed as a home-run crack off of Barry Bonds’ bat.

For this post, I wanted to bring readers as close as I could to the experience of listening to Jelani, which is why I was planning to run excerpts from our conversation this week at a dinner to benefit the Boston Book Festival and to celebrate his most recent book, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012 - 2025. My hope was to give you a chance to read Jelani’s beautifully spoken words and how, as he writes in the introduction, he “pulled together pieces that shed light on the places, events and personalities that are important to understanding how we navigated a besieged decade.”

But as we all know, few plans, even safe ones, survive contact with reality. The recording on a colleague’s iPhone failed and there was no video of the evening since we decided from the start that setting up a tripod and placing microphones would have robbed us all of the proximity of the conversation. So I was not taking notes when Jelani and I perched ourselves on stools in front of the other guests at the home of dear friends amid a group of journalists, authors, entrepreneurs and thought leaders.

After the dinner, when we realized that technology had failed us, we talked about how it seemed appropriate to have to write this one from memory. We would just have to internalize what was simply an extraordinary moment in time to hear a brilliant essayist walk us through his book, which is a collection of narrative journalism, profiles and cultural criticism published in the New Yorker. The book begins with a piece from March 21, 2012, with his coverage of the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and how it suggested “the benefit of the doubt in the shooting of a black teenager extends even to unauthorized, untrained, weapon-toting private citizens who pursue unarmed pedestrians.” He ends with an essay published November 7, 2024, titled “2016 and 2024” chronicling Trump’s two election victories, writing, “The prospect that a presidential candidate could be embraced not only by white supremacists but also by one of the two major political parties and almost half the electorate triggered an enduring dread that the progress we had made was fragile and impermanent.”

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As he explains early in the book, the title, “Three or More Is a Riot,” is a reference to the frequent criminal code definition holding that riot is the concerted unlawful action of “three or more” people, serving as a metaphor for the paralyzing incongruity that simple, organized assembly for racial justice is frequently deemed a threat or “riot” by detractors to highlight the criminalization of Black protest and racial justice movements over the past decade.

Beyond Jelani’s erudite writing and the fury of his thinking is a big and warm family man, who I have had the great pleasure to get to know in some quieter moments out of public view with his wife, Danielle, and their daughter and twin boys. Perhaps that is why my favorite passage in this book comes from a dialogue with one of the twins, August. He writes:

“The clouds rolled in from the West. Standing at the window, I could see darkness unfolding across the horizon. Then I noticed the heavy drops of rain that had begun to fall on the Hudson River while the streets below remained dry, their inhabitants largely unaware of the nearby torrent. I called to my sons. They are astute observers of natural phenomenon in the way that five-year-olds often are. I pointed to the raindrops that we could see splashing in the river and the dry streets just a few hundred feet away. Almost as if on cue the downpour began on the streets and then a single drop splashed against the window, followed until they made a steady percussion against the glass. ‘What does this tell you?’ I asked them. August, who is older than his brother, Hollis, by nine minutes, volunteered an answer. ‘Storms don’t stand still,’ he shouted. That’s right, I told him. Storms don’t stand still so it is important to understand what directions they’re headed in.”

“It strikes me that the work included here could be thought of as a particular type of storm-chasing. What began as a few scattered, angry clouds on the distant horizon at the beginning of this collection coalesced into what looked to be a shower a few years in, a passing storm after that and ultimately the maelstrom of volatile white nationalism that defines the moment which this book finds its way to publication … My hope is that it contributes just a little to our ability to recognize patterns that are reasserting themselves – and maybe even helps discern where the storms are heading next.”

This was indeed the question that so many of us had for Jelani on this memorable night in Brookline, Massachusetts, including our hosts, a brilliant lawyer and dear friend, David Feinberg, and his equally brilliant wife, Marina Kalb, a former documentary producer who now serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival. We all wanted to know where the galloping pace of history was going. The truth is Jelani does not offer direct answers to this question in the book. It would have to be said that this is not a hopeful book, but it is helpful in collecting precisely reported and beautifully rendered stories that together serve as complex data points that are forming patterns. If we pay attention, the patterns will prove to us not only, as August observed, “storms move” but as his father shared “it’s important to understand what direction they are headed in.”

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Jelani shared in his talk how the gale force winds of the storm are battering hard-fought protections of civil rights and contributing to the erosion of a free and independent press, especially as it is impacting local news. He made a point of also highlighting many bright spots across the country where new media initiatives were finding a way to replace traditional news organizations.

Specifically, Jelani discussed the fallout from the Supreme Court ruling that has narrowed the scope of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and weakened Section 2, which has long been used to ensure fair congressional redistricting for minority voters. The April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais makes it much harder to challenge state voting maps as racially discriminatory by requiring proof of intentional discrimination rather than just discriminatory, and this, Jelani shared, undercuts the chances of the Democratic Party taking back control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

The power of this book is the warning it provides that we are indeed in a fateful and damaging storm pattern. And it serves as a stark reminder that it will be up to all of us to not only seek shelter and to be sure the windows are battened down, but perhaps more importantly, to do everything we can to ensure that the structure of our democracy is sufficiently strengthened to endure the onslaught.

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About 35 Islanders crowded into the modest and cluttered newsroom of the Martha’s Vineyard Times on the edge of the harbor amid boats undergoing repairs and restoration, a rite of Spring on any island. It was late in the afternoon on May 3, which marked World Press Freedom Day, and you could feel a cold, damp breeze blowing in through rattling window frames.

This quarterly gathering, which we call a “Publisher’s Forum,” grows out of a promise we made to the community when I became publisher just over two years ago, to host outreach and information sessions about what we are working on and what our readers would like to see us working on. They offer essential insights into the community we serve and are important for all of us trying to keep local journalism alive in our respective towns and cities. We often hear about the big themes our audience cares about: the environment, education, housing, immigration and the economic inequity that challenges the island. This time, all those same issues came up. But what made it feel different is that the gathering landed on this date honoring press freedom, and that brought to the forefront some of the global challenges of journalism, and how those challenges play out locally.

At this forum, we chose to look out beyond the harbor at the world to better understand our own community. And I shared an analysis that has shaped much of my work as a local and national reporter and as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and beyond. My take on this distressing moment we live in is that the crisis in local news has everything to do with the crisis in global democracy. As I have written before, local news is a binding agent that, when done right, can pull communities together around a shared set of facts, around solutions to challenges we face, and around the stories of those who need to be held accountable and those we need to celebrate.

When a community loses its local news source, forming a barren media landscape known as a “news desert,” we know three things happen: voter participation declines, polarization rises, and bond ratings are weakened. The impact on bond ratings, in simple terms, indicates that banks and other institutions of lending do not want to invest in communities where no one is watching the store. So that is why I say the crisis in local news has everything to do with the crisis in our democracy. We are coming undone and pulling apart in no small measure because we are losing the glue that holds us together: trusted, local news.

You’ve probably heard this crisis explained before if you have read my essays in this space, but it is sadly becoming more and more true every day, not only in the United States but also in Ukraine and across Europe, in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and so many places where conflict is brewing. So, we thought World Press Freedom Day felt like the right day to make the connection to what this day means for the year-round community of about 20,000 people who live on our island. The population surges in the summer to 100,000, which creates stresses and strains and economic disparities on our island as it does in so many seasonal communities.

With refreshments donated from a diner across the street, I shared our efforts to become “digital first” in our editorial mission at the Times, which has a weekly print edition with 3,500 readers, or “members,” as we call them, as well as daily online coverage that serves about 20,000 subscribers. We are increasing the commitment to digital content, I explained, with a much-needed investment in and redesign of our website, which has been desperately in need of an overhaul in recent years. I used the phrase “deferred maintenance,” which evoked some nods of the head on an Island where the brutal New England weather keeps every homeowner on their toes providing maintenance to houses battered by the salt air and strong wind.

One persistent issue that readers wanted to address is the moderation of the comment section on our website. It is a common criticism of publications – local and national – that comments can quickly descend into polarized and divisive dialogues. We do our best to moderate the comments for our members even as many newspapers have grown so frustrated with the lack of civility that they have just dropped them altogether. We learn by listening to our audience how we can make the dialogue productive, and we are going to keep working on it.

We are definitely not done with this process of reviving our website, and we shared with our readers that we still have quite a way to go to get it right. We also made several important announcements at our forum in the newsroom, including the fact that we are hiring a new director of marketing and digital strategy, a position that we hope will help us to better serve our community and grow our audience.

As publisher of our local newspaper along with the owner, Steve Bernier, we are committed to keeping the business plan within the model of a “for-profit.” I add the quotes because it is “for profit” only in name, not in reality. Our local news organization, like so many others across the country, continues to suffer losses. We have tried to offset those losses by serving our community through a non-profit arm which we call Islanders Write. The name comes from an event that brings Island journalists and authors to talk about their craft, which we have offered free every summer for the last 14 years. The initiative allows us to blend traditional advertising revenue with non-profit fundraising that is mission driven. It is a “hybrid” model which I have been working on for almost two decades now, and which I have written about as an emerging model in struggling local news organizations across the country.

This “hybrid” approach has also allowed us to support a full-time reporter, or “Island Writer,” as we have named them, since last year. She is Sarah Shaw Dawson, who was born and raised on Martha’s Vineyard and focuses on housing issues on an island where the lack of affordable housing is a crisis for our year-round residents who are being priced out by expensive summer homes. It is a problem exacerbated by a short-term rental market that is pushing up the price on year-round rentals and leaving many hardworking people on the Island living in overcrowded conditions all summer, or in many cases just leaving the island to live elsewhere.

We see that exodus of locals as a threat to the character of our community, and that is what motivated us to start this non-profit initiative so we can offer year-round jobs in journalism and hopefully retain local voices to tell the story of their island. We will be adding two more of these reporters in the year ahead thanks to some generous donations.

We also announced an internship in the name of the late Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer and year-round resident who loved every inch of the Island. The new intern we have named hails from the Brazilian community that is vital and thriving on our island despite the climate of fear created by the aggressive federal immigration policies. We are thrilled to have a young intern who can be part of our effort to serve the Brazilian community and the whole Island by offering a translation service for all of our articles into Brazilian Portuguese. There is a chance here for us to all learn much more about the community, and for the community to learn more about our Brazilian neighbors.

So why am I sharing these very small town updates on the business model of my local newspaper here in a newsletter that tries to serve a community that is national and global? It is because this kind of local innovation and reinvention and outreach is happening in small newsrooms across America, and around the world. For sure, we are fortunate on Martha’s Vineyard to have resources that can help us get the job done, but we believe every community out there has its own landscape of opportunity and terrain of adversity that needs to be explored, and we applaud all of you out there who are navigating it every day.

I am often writing about the crisis in local news and the news deserts and hopefully you have been following our journey to different newsrooms across America and around the world and it can feel like it is all bad news out there. But as I took on the humbling task of trying to figure out how to keep our small paper up and running in my local community, I realized I am part of a family of local publishers who are all working overtime to serve our communities through trusted, local news. And I applaud all of the efforts to keep the lights on. To those publishers and leaders in media out there and all the reporters working with them: Keep the faith. What you are doing is part of a fight for press freedom in America and around the world. It is a global battle fought on local frontlines, and a struggle for truth that is worth fighting for.

What We’re Reading this week

• Trolling, memes and deepfakes: How AI is thickening the fog of war | Gretel Kahn, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• With Malice | Jem Bartholomew, Columbia Journalism Review

• Newsletters, live coverage, a one-time magazine: The World Cup is becoming a testbed for journalism experiments Neel Dhanesha, Nieman Journalism Lab

• In this Duke journalism class, failure was part of the assignment. It led to real AI tools for local news | Bill Adair and Tyler Dukes, Poynter

• The Intercept didn’t just publish a story about ICE — it drove it around JFK | Hanaa’ Tameez, Nieman Journalism Lab

For more than two months, GroundTruth has been on a virtual road trip through the crisis in local news across America. We’ve been from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to Chicago and Montana down to Austin, Texas. But this week I am looking at how this issue is playing in other countries. These two paths — local and global — run parallel to each other and are headed in the same distressing direction that traverses the rising peril for journalists and the steep decline in press freedom.

Sunday marks World Press Freedom Day, and it feels right to recast our gaze abroad and focus on the reality that more than half of the world lives in a country where press freedom is in a “very serious” situation. According to the World Press Freedom Index, that means 4.25 billion people in 42 countries live in places where being a journalist means risking your life or your liberty. As the death toll continues to soar for journalists killed trying to do their job, the persistent fact is that 90 percent of the attacks on journalists take place with impunity. The culprits almost always get away with murder.

That is why World Press Freedom Day is so important. It is a day to remember that everyone, and particularly our leaders, need to recommit to press freedom. It is also a day of reflection among media professionals, an opportunity to celebrate the fundamental principles of our profession; defend the media from attacks on their independence; and pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty.

It is hard to know where to begin on this global exploration of the decline of press freedom, but it makes sense to head toward places where gathering facts and telling the truth can be a death sentence.

Among the 20 countries with the worst safety scores for journalists, several particularly worrying situations stand out, according to research by the World Press Freedom Index. I realized in writing this that I have touchstones in each of these regions through my 40 years as a journalist. I have seen the hope for press freedom in some of these corners in dramatic and inspiring ways. And in more recent years I’ve witnessed the dispiriting collapse of a free press and the steady erosion of democracy that comes along with it.

Middle East

Simmering conflicts from Lebanon to Yemen have long presented peril for local journalists as well as Western journalists who have been kidnapped, tortured and killed in these countries for decades now. But the war on Gaza has escalated into one of the most dramatic conflicts for the muder of journalists in recorded history. Palestine is now regarded as the single most dangerous place in the world for journalists. With more than 200 reporters, photographers, and media workers killed in Gaza by the Israeli army since October 2023, including at least 44 of whom were slain while doing their job.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Israel’s killing of journalists marks the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that the organization has documented in its 45 years of existence. Palestinian journalists are being threatened, directly targeted, and murdered by Israeli forces, and are arbitrarily detained and tortured in retaliation for their work, CPJ reports.

Israel has systematically destroyed media infrastructure in Gaza, and tightened censorship throughout the West Bank and Israel. International media have been barred from independent reporting in Gaza where a consensus has been building among international experts on humanitarian crises that a genocide is taking place against the Palestinian people. It is important to note that inside Gaza, journalists have also long reported harassment and intimidation by Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Group which has a military force and a political wing that has governed Gaza since 2007.

I began reporting in Gaza in the late 1990s and witnessed the hopeful return of a free press under the Palestinian Authority. Truthfully the PA was never too kind to those who sought to expose corruption, but it was still going through the motions of allowing for a free press. Then I watched the pretensions of support for the role of independent journalism smashed by Hamas as it rose to power. And now too many of us have to watch from afar as Israel targets those Palestinian journalists who seek to cover the war on Gaza and ban all of us from entering and documenting the destruction, the human rights violations and the killing unfolding every day.

Asia

China and Myanmar top the list of Asian countries with the most detained journalists. There are currently 123 journalists wrongfully detained in China, including 10 in Hong Kong. And 59 media professionals are behind bars in the country of Myanmar, where a military coup in 2021 paved the way for the return to a police state. That military junta has extinguished hopes for a democracy where press freedom is respected.

Just 12 years ago, I reported in Myanmar, or Burma with a team of young journalists, 10 locals and 10 Americans, and it was a very different place back then. With support from The Open Hands Initiative, we carried out a reporting fellowship titled “Burma Telling Its Own Story,” during which we sought to build upon the heroic independent journalism that established itself in exile over the years. Now many of those talented, young journalists who worked with us, live in fear and have returned to exile, have been detained or find themselves watching their dreams of working in journalism deferred.

My colleague Gary Knight, the co-founder of VII Photo and co-founder of GroundTruth, worked with me to lead the reporting initiative in Myanmar, recently returned to the region, heading to Chiang Mai, Thailand where Burmese journalists have set up newsrooms in exile or worked as freelancers from there. Gary shared:

“The situation for journalists in Myanmar is terrible, and they are considered ‘enemies of the state’. Burmese journalists living in Chiang Mai told me that approximately 1500 of them are in exile, either internally, or in neighbouring countries. I do not know of a larger diaspora of journalists anywhere. I was told that those that stayed behind in Yangon have largely quit journalism because it’s unsafe, and are doing other things to make a living, like working in real estate. The diaspora suffers not only because it is vulnerable from an immigration perspective, but also from economics because USAID pulled the plug on media that they could work for. The Burmese Press has been eviscerated and they have few places to publish. From a combined publishing, safety and sustainability perspective I can think of few worse places.”

Africa

This is a region where candidly I do not have extensive experience, but I have reported on the perils of truth telling in Nigeria amid violence that is often ignited by misinformation by one side or the other and often fueled from afar by extremists who are both Muslim and Christian. The violent divide we covered featured in a short documentary titled “A Bridge in Kaduna,” which is set in what is known as the “Middle Belt” between herders in the predominantly Muslim North and farmers in the predominantly Christian South. The plight of Nigeria’s Christian communities in Kaduna and elsewhere has been an obsession for American Christian evangelical groups and has received the very recent attention of President Trump’s White House in a way that seems to overlook the great work being done by a free press to expose how outside forces fan the flames of hatred.

There are many other countries in the continent where journalism is at risk, but any thermal mapping of the perils faced by a free press would include a burning red indicator across the Great Lakes region, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a recent report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), “The epicentre of the region’s deteriorating security situation lies in the conflict-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).”

As the report reveals, the Great Lakes are a region struggling with the geopolitical tensions around natural resources, and journalists in the area are constantly on the move. The new RSF report takes readers inside the day-to-day lives of media professionals who continue to report the news despite grave risks. It states, “Independent reporting in the east of the DRC has become virtually impossible. Reporters are caught between the anvil of the armed group M23 and the hammer of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC).”

Too often, this means arrests, attacks, threats, enforced disappearances, executions and the closure, looting and ransacking of newsrooms.

Europe

The war in Ukraine rages on the gates of Europe in a brutal stalemate with sputtering talks about a ceasefire that seem to go nowhere. It is a war of attrition where heroic work is being done by journalists who are risking their lives every day trying to cover it. But long before the war started, Russia began systematically crushing an independent press just as it was starting to emerge following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia’s effort to undermine a free press was intended to create news deserts in the border regions where misinformation and disinformation could seep into the barren media landscape, particularly in the Donbas region.

This calculated policy by Russia led up to the first Russian assault on Ukraine with the invasion and occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Seven years later, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2021 as Russian forces attacked Kyiv. Since then journalists have been under attack repeatedly and many have lost their lives covering the conflict.

Over the last five years, I have taken several reporting trips into Ukraine and each time have been drawn to the city of Bucha, the dateline where the world first saw the brutality of the unprovoked Russian assault on Ukraine. I have twice attended what has become known as the Bucha conference, which focuses on the important role of a local media in Ukraine. The conference brings together local media from every corner of the country. There, I learned a fairly hidden history of Russia undercutting the independent media. Today these newsrooms are often shuttered or struggling mightily to survive and stay on the story as Russia seeks to destroy the country’s infrastructure and bulldoze any hopes of a free press under the rubble of relentless drone attacks. But funding for such efforts to establish a free press is just one of the many casualties of Putin’s war in Ukraine.

I have gotten to know the committed and talented and courageous team of reporters at Ukrainska Pravda, a leading, independent digital news organization in Ukraine. I am proud to serve on the advisory board, and to support them any way I can as I’ve gotten to see up front the heroic work they do. I am thinking of the whole team on this day, and praying for their safety and hoping that the country will get back on the road to building their democracy and that Americans will wake up to how important it is that we support a strong, independent press in places like Ukraine.

Latin America

Long a place of great peril for journalists, Mexico today still holds the record for the highest number of missing journalists, with 28 unsolved cases to date. Mexico’s shameful record is often attributed to the drug cartels, but the police and security forces in the country are also culpable, particularly in doing virtually nothing to bring those who murder journalists to justice.

In this vacuum, other journalists have taken upon themselves to find the truth. I’ve been drawn to the work of Katherine Corcoran, former AP Mexico Bureau Chief, who investigated the murder of Regina Martinez, a legendary Mexican journalist who was killed on the verge of exposing high-level government corruption. Corcoran was tired of seeing the killing of journalists going unsolved, or cases fabricated to make it look as if they were killed by drug cartels when in fact the government had done this kind of extrajudicial killing and covered up their crimes almost always by making it look like a drug hit.

Martinez, an investigative reporter out of Veracruz where she worked with a controversial, independent news organization known as Proceso, was just about to break a big story on corruption linking the government to the cartels and she was found bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. Questions began to emerge immediately as Martinez had no connections with cartels and the crime scene was suspicious as the only thing of value that was taken was a television. With the assistance of four reporter proteges who worked with Martinez, Corcoran dug in on the story and together they doggedly pursued several different theories of who was responsible for the killing. But they arrived at the conclusion the killing of Martnez was likely a hit ordered by the Attorney General. In her book “In the Mouth of the Wolf” she convincingly shines a light that breaks through the fog the government often created by blaming the murder of journalists on the cartel.

“It turns out that was a pattern in many of these cases and an attempt to undercut journalism as not trustworthy, and this is why it was important to go back,” Corcoran told me in an interview in January last year.

She added that during her research she was drawing parallels in the way President Trump sought to tarnish journalism and defame journalists as the “enemy of the people.” “This is all the same stuff we heard in Mexico through its history and sometimes they were even using the same language and same narrative. Referring to her home country of the United States, she said, “We are going down that path, and this is where that path leads you. The point is it is not about the press, it is about controlling the population. My book is a cautionary tale, and I hope it is one that might be heard in America.”

The backdrop for the killing of Martinez, she said, was that the threats posed by narcos as well as the government silenced the media in Mexico. There, she said, they do not have news deserts; they have patterns of self-censorship and fear that end with news organizations shutting down. They are called “Zonas de Silencio,” or “zones of silence.”

“Too often with these attacks, the newspapers shut down and self-sensorship is huge. Then people no longer know what is going on in their communities.” This, she said, is what ties together the threads of the crisis in local news around the world and in the United States. We have to be vigilant and we have to be sure that the forces trying to silence the media are called out. If we don’t we are looking at a bleak future.

This Sunday, on the actual day recognizing World Press Freedom, I will be in the small, local newsroom where I serve as publisher and will be hosting a forum for my local community to discuss the importance of local newspapers in a functioning society. It can be a tall order to try to encourage Americans to see these connections between the erosion of press freedom around the world and the ways in which American news deserts and the collapse of local news is producing a different, but pervasive threat to American democracy.

Next week I will post about the forum, the next stop on our journey through the crisis in local news, nationally and globally.

What we’re reading this week

• The journalist pioneering a new approach to journalism training in Ghana | Maurice Oniang’o, The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• Is Kidnapping Back? | Joel Simon, Columbia Journalism Review

• The missing Ukrainian reporter, the Russian prison – and a vital lesson learned about journalism in a dangerous age | Laurent Richard, The Guardian

• Unchecked Abuses: Female journalists face discrimination and harassment in Somalia | Mona Miski, ARIJ

• ​​“Like nailing jell-o to a wall”: Why unions are struggling to protect journalists’ rights in the age of AI | Gretel Kahn, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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It was early in 2022, and I was part of a virtual panel on the crisis in local news hosted by WBUR in Boston along with an extraordinary entrepreneur and force of nature named Crystal Good, who was dialing in from West Virginia. It was on that panel that I heard the term “creator journalist” for the first time.

Good was explaining her role as an independent “publisher,” that is the title she preferred, as the founder of a multimedia organization called “Black by God: The West Virginian” that serves the Black community in a handful of rural counties in Central Appalachia. Given the wattage that comes off of just about everything Crystal Good says and does, I should have paid much more attention to this idea of “creator journalism.” For me, she is the embodiment of that movement.

Now at journalism conferences, from the Online News Association’s gathering last month in Chicago to this month’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, the buzz is all about “creator journalism.”

There are seemingly endless panel discussions and keynote speeches by and about “creator journalism,” as the phrase finds itself thrust into the very center of the debate on the future of news and how journalists will build back trust with audiences after years of seeing it erode.

The questions that loom over this idea are mostly around how it will be funded and whether a galaxy of independent, individual approaches serving smaller niche audiences is sustainable as a way to fill information gaps in news across the country, and around the world. Project C and its founder Liz Kelly Nelson offer a critical source of research on the emerging market in America, and surveys of top creator journalists in the U.S. reveal that the movement took shape in 2020 and is in some ways born of the pandemic. But it has grown exponentially, particularly over the last year, and a Muck Rack study last year found that fully one-third of all journalists fit the definition of “creator journalist.” It is now an important force that is essential to understand.

The individuals who make up this sector depend largely on direct audience support through platforms, like Substack and of course YouTube and TikTok, that are making this easier, according to Project C. Other important platforms for monetization are happening on beehiiv, Twitch and Ghost.

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Bringing some order to the ferment of this universe is The Tiny News Collective, a collaborative founded by a team of local news entrepreneurs that supports new and early-stage local news founders. It lists this mission statement on its website: “We make journalism entrepreneurship a more accessible, equitable and inclusive opportunity for people who care about their community.”

Okay, so … while aware of the risk of sounding like a traditional journalist, which I am, and a boomer, which I also am, I have to say that the notion of “creator journalism” has been perplexing to me, and even, well, maybe a bit annoying. Why? Because of its imprecision. After all, independent journalists have been creating new formulas for journalism and sharing them in different ways dating back as far as the pamphlet in the American Revolution. So was Thomas Paine a “creator journalist” when he wrote Common Sense in 1776 in just 45 short pages that helped frame the issues that ignited a revolution?

That journalistic search for an independent path carried right through to the power of freelance journalism in the Vietnam War era, at what might be considered the apex of mainstream journalism. Were independent journalists like Seymour Hersh “creator journalists” when he was out there cobbling together funding to investigate the big stories like the My Lai Massacre that exposed the war in ways that traditional journalism, like the New York Times and CBS News, was too often failing to do? And, of course, the idea of independent journalists creating a space to develop their own voice carried right into more recent decades with blogs that have become journalistic institutions, the Huffington Post serving as the most obvious example. So how do we understand “creator journalism” in the contemporary interpretation of the word?

So let’s go back to that day in January of 2022 when I was in my basement on Zoom as we were still in the loosening grip of COVID and I met Crystal Good. Right away it was very clear she was an early adopter and a social entrepreneur who was out to serve her community of approximately 65,000 Black Appalachians in a handful of rural counties in West Virginia where she came of age.

A sixth generation West Virginian Black writer, poet, entrepreneur and newspaper publisher, Good’s resonance is obvious the moment you meet her and her mission to center a narrative about the existence and influence of Black Appalachians. If you ask Good about the name of her organization, she will tell you, “Well, the news is kind of my ministry. “ But specifically, she will also explain, it is an idiomatic expression that refers to West Virginians who often say they are from “West by God Virginia” to distinguish themselves from those of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

She has journalism deep in her veins. Her father worked his way up from janitor to executive director for news at a local, Fox television station. She says, “That background gave me confidence that I could do this.” And she certainly has done it, starting with early support from the Tiny News Collective, and developing a business model that is built around advertising, sponsored content and a non-profit with a fiscal agent, Black by God is definitely what we would call a “hybrid” model for sustainability.

This newsletter, GroundTruth on Substack, has been writing about the concept since last year when my former colleague, Rahim Jessani, who served as our digital strategy lead before plunging full time into his role as a creator journalist, wrote a guest post that explored the best way to define the term with greater precision. He relied on the words of Project C’s Liz Kelly Nelson in defining the term as an organization that supports and studies creator journalists. Drawing a clear line between “content creators” and “creator journalists,” Nelson explained it this way:

A creator journalist is “an individual who combines elements of journalism with content creation techniques to produce news, stories, or informational content for digital platforms. Unlike traditional journalists who typically work for established news organizations, creator journalists operate independently or as part of alternative media outlets, utilizing platforms like social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, and blogs to disseminate their work.”

Honestly, that definition didn’t help me to discern the importance of the movement much a year ago. But what is clear now is that “creator journalism” has found its place in the ecosystem for news in a significant way. It is gaining traction and there is a mountain of data and market trends that indicate that this is not just a fad, but a genuine industry shift driven by a growing desire for editorial independence fueled by the direct-to-audience capabilities of social platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Substack and it is supported on these platforms by an audience that prefers individuals over brands.

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That support is significant, but often not enough to guarantee a stable income or replace a traditional paycheck. Muck Rack’s The State Of Creator Journalism study found that 63% of creator journalists make a portion of their income from their solo work. Nearly 40 percent say they make no income from their self-publishing, and more than 60% make some money from their endeavors. Creator journalism is a piece of the puzzle of sustainability, but isn’t the be all and end all that will solve the crisis we find ourselves in.

A way to understand the approach of “creator journalism” is not so much as a trend or a new wave, but a reflection of a deep need for journalists to find a way to restore trust with their audiences. To do that, they are rejecting the trappings of traditional journalism and its formulas, and they are trying new approaches and new platforms to reach audiences and try to win their trust. The Local Media Association got at this last month at their Local News Summit with a broad framing around the idea that “Creator journalism isn’t a format — it’s a trust model.”

So in cobbling together these impressions for this newsletter, and in revisiting the notes from my chance meeting with Crystal Good way back in 2022, which feels now like a different era of journalism, it is worth noting that this writer is indeed what might be called a “creator journalist.” It was in 2006 that I broke away from traditional journalism as the founder of GlobalPost and then continued to create through The GroundTruth Project in launching Report for America. And now in this new iteration of GroundTruth Media Partners, I have proudly broken away even further to try to develop a voice on Substack. So, on reflection, I would have to say I am proud to be in that communion of the saints that have “come marching in” to “creator journalism” from Thomas Paine to Sy Hersh to Ariana Huffington and, yeah, all the way right up to Crystal Good. As the hymn goes, “I want to be in that number.”

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Just days before it was condemned to cease operations, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was granted a reprieve that restores a much needed hope not just for the city of Pittsburgh but for all of us who care about local journalism.

The publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit news outlet the Baltimore Banner announced this week that it has agreed to acquire the assets of the Post-Gazette, a nearly 100-year-old print newspaper that traces its roots all the way back to 1786.

I wrote about the fate of the historic Pittsburgh Post-Gazette back in January and described its plans to shut down as an alarming development, one that I argued should be a wake-up call to AI platforms to recognize that the demise of these fact-seeking organizations presents a looming threat to the trustworthiness of their own large language models and the answer engines they fuel.

I wrote that the plight of the Post-Gazette presented an extraordinary opportunity for OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini) or Anthropic (Claude) to use the staggering amount of capital they have amassed to invest in acquiring distressed, but vital sources of local truth like the Post-Gazette. In my column, I posed this question about what seemed an imminent closure: “Will it at last spur the aggressive venture capital firms pouring investment into applied AI to recognize that the promise of AI depends on reliable and independent sources of journalism?”

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It turns out that my framing of the question missed a stunning plot twist. As fate would have it, it was not an AI firm awash with capital that came to the rescue, nor was it a voracious hedge fund like Alden Global Capital (fortunately). At the end of the day, it was a mission-driven, non-profit news venture that stepped up and saved the day. Hallelujah!

In this story of salvation, it seems the hero may well be Maryland hotel and nursing home magnate-turned-philanthropist Stewart W. Bainum Jr., who has dedicated himself to bolstering local journalism through the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which he founded. The institute has pioneered a model that seeks to support strong local journalism while also establishing economic sustainability at a time when so many legacy news organizations are crumbling. The Banner has proven a stunning success story since it launched in 2022, winning the Pulitzer Prize last year and executing on an enviable audience strategy which brought it 79,500 paid subscribers with more than 4 million monthly page views.

The Post-Gazette, which had been suffering losses for at least twenty years, was expected to face a death sentence on May 3, which ironically marks World Press Freedom Day. Instead it has a resurrection scheduled for May 4.

That’s when the sale by its current owner, Ohio-based Block Communications Inc., will become effective, ending nearly a century of family control of the newspaper but serving to ensure the future of Western Pennsylvania’s largest news organization. The Venetoulis Institute announced that the newsroom and a set of local news executives will remain in Pittsburgh. But it has telegraphed that other functions, including technology and overall business operations, will be reconfigured as part of the larger non-profit institute.

The new business model is seen as confirmation of a growing confidence in non-profit approaches to sustaining journalism. But the Venetoulis Institute’s model also tempers its approach by planning to retain a robust advertising team that will be a core part of the revenue that sustains operations. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘hybrid’ approach, and one that has gained considerable traction in recent years among news organizations large and small, including the small, weekly newspaper where I serve as publisher. The idea is to find the right mix of paid subscriptions, advertising and philanthropy to achieve sustainability at a time when local journalism has been in a freefall, as we have chronicled extensively in this newsletter.

In an interview published April 14 in the Post-Gazette, Bainum explained the approach, saying, “The test is not whether you’re for-profit or nonprofit, but whether you’re providing high quality journalism to communities that need it most.”

In the same article, the Post-Gazette quoted Karen Johnese, chair of Block Communications, from a prepared release, which stated, “We are excited to hand our treasured paper over to such a committed and creative organization.

She added, “We trust in their integrity and care for our community.”

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But the end of this story has not been written as many employees and unions that represent them are less trusting, and want to see more assurances about the approximately 100 staff members that make up its newsroom. The Newspaper Guild joined the Teamsters in a rancorous strike at the paper nearly three years ago. A majority of editorial employees resigned from the Guild during the strike and continued to publish online and print editions. The strikers returned to work in November after a federal court ruling ordered the Post-Gazette to fulfill obligations to live up to health care benefits it promised its employees.

The Newspaper Guild released a statement this week, saying an asset sale does not inherently eliminate legal liabilities incurred by the company and that the Post-Gazette “continues to owe its workers several million dollars, and the enforcement of unfair labor practice rulings, including a requirement to bargain in good faith, remains.”

The union said it was “excited for this historic institution to survive and eager to ensure that it operates in a way that respects the people of Pittsburgh and the journalists who strive to serve them.”

Amen to that. But it is clear this salvation story, as hopeful as it is, still has several key chapters that are not yet written.

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More than 1,300 newsrooms all across the country marked the inaugural Local News Day yesterday on behalf of community-based journalism. Proclamations were signed by state, city and town governments to officially recognize the importance of trusted, local journalism in bringing communities together around shared sets of facts.

What seems most striking about the success of the initiative is the way in which local communities are starting to tell the story of why local journalism matters in their communities. I have believed for a long time that we as journalists need to do a much better job telling the story of the decline of our own industry and the threat it poses to our craft and to truth itself, and this movement should spur us on to do so.

More than a fundraising campaign, the success of Local News Day seemed to be most pronounced around increasing awareness of the crisis in local news and the way in which it has contributed to a crisis in our democracy. And equally important, the day was a chance to highlight the incredibly exciting innovation that is underway in local journalism with dozens of new start up and innovative ideas helping to sustain local news coverage that serves local communities all across the country.

John S. Adams, the founder of the Montana Free Press, described his surprise with the level of support for the initiative saying, “It’s truly incredible to see an idea sparked over a cup of coffee turn into a national movement. As I wander around the internet and social media today, I’m simply blown away by the level of participation in — and enthusiasm for — this national day of action celebrating and supporting the contributions of local news.”

He added, “Local and state governments are passing proclamations declaring April 9, Local News Day. Businesses and institutions are partnering to create “News Cafés,” open houses and other in-person activations. News organizations are launching new products, hosting live events, and experimenting with referral campaigns. Nextdoor announced it is opening early access to verified “Local Journalist Accounts” on the neighborhood-focused social media platform. We’re even seeing high school students celebrate Local News Day!”

North Carolina was a stand out in the effort with over 45 newsrooms holding in-person events, and was among those states that signed a proclamation marking April 9 as Local News Day. North Carolina Governor Josh Stein declared local news deserves to be officially recognized “a foundational element of a functioning and healthy democracy; and local journalism equips communities for civic engagement and action.” The mayors of New Jersey and Maine similarly signed proclamations, along with at least 20 towns across the country.

GroundTruth got behind this effort as a partner. Report for America, a national service program to support a new generation of journalists to serve communities through local journalism, was also among those supporting the effort.

And in my own local community, The Martha’s Vineyard Times, where I serve as publisher, was among the participants. Here is a link to my column which we published on April 9. Perhaps the most important task now is to remember that one day of action alone will not be enough to solve the crisis in local news, we will have to keep sounding the alarm and letting our local communities and our national leaders know that trusted, local news is vital to preserving our democracy and essential for us to sustain vibrant communities. So let’s not stop, and keep making noise! Support your local news organization by subscribing, donating, showing up to their events, sharing their stories, and if you own a business, consider advertising with them.

Here is a list of all of the events that newsrooms took part in yesterday:

1. San Francisco, CA — KALW — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

2. Nevada County, CA — Yuba Net — Open house — event link

3. Palm Desert, CA — Desert Sun — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

4. Dubuque, IA — Telegraph Herald — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

5. Warren County, IA — Indianola Independent Advocate — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

6. Indianapolis, IN — WFYI — Trivia night — event link

7. Bar Harbor, ME — The Maine Monitor — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

8. Portland, ME — Portland Press Herald — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

9. Oxford County, ME — Sun Journal — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

10. Waterville, ME — Central Maine.com — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

11. Knox County, ME — Midcoast Villager — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

12. Baltimore, MD — Baltimore Banner — Open house — event link

13. New Bedford, MA — New Bedford Light — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

14. Milwaukee, WI — (multiple outlets) — Bar/pub event — event link

15. Haddon Heights, NJ — NJ Pen — Ask a journalist — event link

16. Narrowsburg, NY — River Reporter — Community conversation — event link

17. Delaware County, OH — Delaware Source — Open house — event link

18. Waco, TX — The Waco Bridge / KWBU — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

19. Fredericksburg, VA — Fredericksburg Free Press — Community conversation — event link

20. Lexington, VA — The News Gazette — Open house — event link

21. Franklin County, VT — Saint Albans Messenger — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

22. Montpelier, VT — The Bridge / VTDigger / Vermont Journalism Coalition — Screening/panel — event link

23. Laramie, WY — WYCF — Bar/pub event — event link

24. Homer, AK — Homer Independent Press — Community conversation — event link

25. Nome, AK — Nome Nugget — Community conversation — event link

26. Oviedo, FL — Oviedo Community News — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

27. Miami / Tallahassee / Neptune Beach, FL — The Florida Trib — Bookstore meet up — event link

28. Athens, GA — The Red and Black — Debate — event link

29. Alamance, NC — Impact Alamance — Cafe/coffee meet up

30. Asheville, NC — Ashevegas, Asheville Watchdog, Beacon Tribune, Enlace Latino NC, Mountain Express, Radio Asheville WPVM 103.7 — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

31. Burlington, NC — Elon News Network, NC Health News, The Alamance Fabric — Cafe/coffee meet up

32. Carrboro, NC — The Carrborean — Bar/pub event

33. Carrboro, NC — WUNC — Cafe/coffee meet up

34. Cary & Western Wake, NC — The Line / The Assembly — Community conversation

35. Charlotte, NC — The Charlotte Observer, La Noticia, QCity Metro, Qnotes, WCNC-Charlotte, WFAE — Community conversation — event link

36. Durham, NC — The Assembly, INDY, NC Health News — Cafe/coffee meet up

37. Lexington, NC — Davidson Local — Bar/pub event

38. Murphy, NC — Cherokee Scout, WKRK, Local TV 4, WCNG-WCVP — Cafe/coffee meet up

39. Nags Head, NC — Outer Banks Insider, Island Free Press, The Sound 99.1, SamWalkerOBXNews, Ocracoke Observer — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

40. Sanford, NC — Sanford Herald, Sandhills News, The Rant, WFJA Radio — Community conversation

41. South Durham, NC — Southpoint Access — Community conversation — event link

42. Sylva, NC — The Sylva Herald, Smoky Mountain News — Cafe/coffee meet up — event link

43. Wilmington, NC — WHQR, Encore, Port City Daily, WECT, Wilmington Star-News, Greater Wilmington Business Journal — Open house

44. Waynesville, NC — The Mountaineer — Cafe/coffee meet up

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Editor’s note: A version of this column was first published today for the Martha’s Vineyard Times.

Today is Local News Day.

The idea, according to its founders, is to establish a “national day of action connecting communities with their trusted local news organizations.” And at the Martha’s Vineyard Times, we are joining more than 1,200 local news organizations as part of this inaugural Local News Day. On a personal level, as the founder of GroundTruth Media Partners, I am proud to be one of 200 partners who are both promoting and financially supporting this non-profit initiative which seeks to create sustainable models for local news for generations to come.

I recently met up with John S. Adams, publisher of the Montana Free Press who is the inspiration for what feels like a movement in supporting this day. It is being led by a coalition of journalists, non-profit leaders, and media innovators, including the American Journalism Project, Press Forward, and NewsPack, an open-source publishing platform that supports smaller news organizations and with whom we have recently partnered.

As Adams explained, “This event is about celebrating local news and helping Americans connect with the great newsrooms, from longstanding local institutions to newer digital outlets, that are serving their communities … As technology changes how people get information, we need new ways to help people stay connected to what’s happening where they live.”

“The key is for every community to join in and for every local news organization to do what it can to highlight the importance of the role local news plays in our communities,” he added.

In the runup to Local News Day, I’ve been writing a series for my newsletter, which is called GroundTruth on Substack. It is a free newsletter dedicated to celebrating journalism that is focused on on-the-ground reporting both locally and globally, and I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along. We are mapping the crisis in local news on Substack, and I have set out to navigate big city newsrooms that are seeing their staffs cut and their impact waning as well as regional news organizations that are struggling to sustain themselves. I’ve also been checking on exciting new models for local journalism that are reimagining what it means to serve a local community.

In the last few months, I have written about big old media organizations that have fallen on hard times, like the New York Daily News under the ownership of a venture capital firm that has gutted what was once a great newspaper, and the Washington Post, which has also been decimated by its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world who has gutted the newsroom at the legendary paper where enshrined on the masthead, there is a powerful phrase: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

As I have been looking at this issue across the country, there is no question that the landscape is bleak for local news across the country. Nearly 40 percent of all local newspapers have shut down over the past two decades — 130 in the past year alone, according to a study by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. As a result, roughly 50 million Americans have limited or no access to reliable local news, and 212 counties have zero local news sources. The crisis deepened when the Trump administration cut $1.1 billion in federal funding for public broadcasting, forcing layoffs at hundreds of stations that served as a vital news lifeline for millions of people.

The consequences are significant: As news deserts grow, communities lose the watchdog journalism that holds local governments and institutions accountable. Even as nonprofit organizations and independent outlets work to fill the gap, the pace of innovation hasn’t matched the scale of the decline. So I definitely don’t want to sugarcoat this crisis.

But on this journey to assess the landscape of local news, I also want to stress the fact it’s not all bad news out there. There are many powerful examples of new and sustainable models for local journalism, so I am also chronicling beacons of success across the country. Just across the water, there is the impressive and relatively new, nonprofit, digital news organization, the New Bedford Light. And out in Western Massachusetts, I did a post about the Berkshire Eagle, a legendary newspaper with a long distinguished history that has made itself a model of sustainability. Last week, I was in the “City of Big Shoulders” and wrote about a new digital news organization called Block Club Chicago, which is doing great work, and soon, I will be writing about the Sahan Journal, an innovative and impactful news organization that covers the immigrant communities of Minneapolis. There are many great success stories out there, and we are determined at The Times to try to be among that number.

It was the legendary Massachusetts politician and Speaker of the House, the late U.S. Rep. Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, who coined the phrase, “All politics is local.” Well, I believe, all journalism is local. The most important information we need is the information about our own community, the news of where we live and how that news shapes our lives. The Times has always been dedicated to just that, to serving the 20,000 people who live on the Island year-round. We want to be sure these Islanders know about the work of their local school board and the pot holes that need fixing. We also inform them on big national stories like immigration reform and how it is playing out in our community or how global issues, such as climate change, are impacting us right here along our coastline. As a local news organization, we want to share the stories about our heroes who make us proud, and we want to provide reporting on our elected leaders to be sure they are held accountable. We want to be part of the local celebrations of our culture and our shared heritage through music, dance, film, and food, and we want to let our readers know about our local industries, like fishing and local trades that sustain the Island and restaurants and hotels that serve tourists every summer when the Island swells to 100,000 souls.

I believe that the crisis in local journalism in the U.S. has everything to do with the crisis in our democracy. I have written those words in this newspaper before and I have spoken them countless times at events and conferences and media appearances for at least the last 10 years when the GroundTruth Project began to give shape to Report for America, a national service program for local journalism that has placed nearly 800 reporters in some 300 newsrooms across all 50 states since it was launched in 2018. I stepped down as the CEO of GroundTruth before coming to the Island to live year-round and to take up the invitation from Steve Bernier to serve as the publisher of the The Times

As publisher, I would like to invite you to join us and mark the day by becoming a subscriber to GroundTruth on Substack and check out our storymap charting the crisis in local news on our website at www.groundtruth.org. Our weekly newsletter does not block anyone behind a paywall. It is free for all who want to follow our work highlighting local journalism nationally in the US and globally. But it requires funding for us to continue our work, and so please consider offering some level of support. And please join us as a I continue my journey to navigate the landscape of local news across the country, exploring newsrooms that are struggling, those that are innovating and sustaining and those that are thriving in serving their local communities.

Most importantly, there is no day better time than Local News Day to take action by supporting your local news organization whether that is a donation to your local public radio station or a paid subscription to a local daily or weekly newspaper. Perhaps equally important, please help us tell the story about why local news matters, how sharing sets of trusted facts is essential if we are going to pull together and have a functioning democracy.

That role that local news organizations play by serving their communities – that binding agent that can unite us locally at a time of deep division and polarization – has never felt more essential.

Editor’s Note: This is part of a continuing series mapping the crisis in local news, navigating newspapers in distress, those finding a way to sustain and highlighting bright spots in the new digital organizations that are emerging.

CHICAGO – The city of big shoulders knows how to push back.

It’s been six months since the Trump administration launched what felt like a military assault on Chicago by masked federal agents, but the city has stood firm. Since then, Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is a former social studies teacher, says his city can offer a civics lesson to the whole country about the importance of resisting unlawful, autocratic rule and the vital role of a free press in doing so.

“Somebody has to punch back and stand up to a bully, and that is who we are in Chicago,” Johnson told the Online News Association’s annual gathering, which this week brought together hundreds of journalists representing digital media and emerging, independent voices from around the country.

The mayor, who has had a strained and sometimes confrontational relationship with the media, stressed the vital role that a free press, especially the new, independent outlets have played in documenting the Trump administration’s unlawful offensive in Chicago with tactics that violated the constitution. He pointedly chastised traditional media for largely failing to do so over many years, and for slowly losing the trust of Chicagoans as a result.

A series of rulings found that sweeps of marginalized neighborhoods violated the right to due process and that unlawful arrests were made based on illegal searches and invalid warrants. Journalists who documented these abuses and who covered the unrest in Chicago over the last year have been threatened, intimidated and, in some cases, attacked by the federal agents.

“Trump’s attack on journalists has illuminated what so many already know: It’s a dangerous assignment to cover the most vulnerable in our society,” said Johnson, praising the courage of reporters who have put their own safety on the line in documenting unlawful tactics by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said Johnson.

He added, speaking to “journalists who are covering stories on the frontline, I am grateful as well as horrified by the blatant brutality.”

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The mayor seemed to go out of his way this week to credit independent media, particularly Block Club Chicago, an independent digital outlet with an emphasis on ground-level reporting, for serving the city well in defining itself as a paragon of resistance to Trump. Johnson pointed out that journalists at Block Club and other organizations have courageously documented the actions of masked federal agents who stormed the city in riot gear and armored vehicles late last year and who have continued to carry out illegal searches and arrests that resulted in constitutional violations of due process.

On the sidelines of the conference, I met up with Jen Sabella, a co-founder and co-executive editor of Block Club. A Chicago native like most of the staff, she told me how Block Club rose out of the ashes of what was known as DNAInfo, an online news startup that lasted five years until 2017, when local billionaire Joe Ricketts suddenly pulled the plug.

A few months after the bad news, DNAinfo editors, including Sabella, Shamus Toomey and Stephanie Lulay, committed to continuing their mission and started Block Club Chicago. It derives its name from a traditional Chicago neighborhood association – blocks within neighborhoods that band together to share information and improve the community. Block Club Chicago’s stated mission remains then as now “to build community through truly ground-level reporting of the city’s neighborhoods.”

It’s a simple idea, and a profound one. They have built a local news organization that structurally begins at the very foundational unit of each city neighborhood, and then built itself up block by block.

Two major crises, Sabella said, shaped the organization’s identity and created a huge opportunity for them to be of service: COVID in 2020 and the ICE raids last year known as Operation Midway Blitz. Both of these huge national stories required trusted and verified information. They made the truth a valuable commodity that could be the difference between life and death during the pandemic, or between freedom and deportation during the sweep by ICE.

It was the kind of information that could be most effectively gathered from a hyper local approach, and while Block Club may have discovered its voice in 2020, five years later it learned power chords that resonate across the city.

Block Club now covers 50 of the city’s 77 community areas, and is continually adding reporters. Back in 2019, they were one of the earliest newsrooms to host Report for America corps members, and became a trusted partner throughout many years. They hosted four corps members, two of whom became full-time staff members after the end of their service, and hired Manny Ramos, a former corps member from RFA’s first full cohort, as an investigative reporter. Right now, the staff is at more than 40 with reporters covering several neighborhoods at a time. It sustains its growth by directly appealing to the community to support local journalism. It steers away from a beat structure, and instead focuses on reporters who cover everything in one patch of the city, from housing to education and health.

There are 20,000 paying subscribers who can join at a number of different tiers. The basic subscription offers not only unlimited access to the site’s reporting but also newsletters written by the neighborhood reporters offering additional information and story links. At the same time, Block Club continues to keep much of its reporting out of the paywall, particularly when it comes to public service reporting such as the work they did on the pandemic or in alerting the community how to be aware of the presence of ICE in different neighborhoods.

Foundations have also provided crucial support, including the McCormick Foundation, which aims to boost the site’s investigative reporting, and the American Journalism Project, which supported the hiring of five staffers to focus on raising revenue.

Tim Franklin, a dean and professor on local news at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing and Communications, in an interview with Poynter did not mince words in praising Block Club Chicago as “one of the most successful local digital news startups in the nation in the last five years and there are lessons to be learned in its growth.”

Franklin explained, “First and foremost, Block Club understands its audience and listens to its readers, and it’s been very disciplined about staying laser-focused on serving their needs and interests. Block Club is not trying to be the (Chicago) Sun-Times or the Tribune. It’s figured out how to fill a void in the market covering unique, hyperlocal news across the city.”

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“And, importantly, the leadership team there has been entrepreneurial in building its business model — a diversified mix of crowdfunding, reader revenue, advertising, merchandise and philanthropy. They’ve built a journalistic and financial model with legs, and one that could be replicated elsewhere, especially in densely populated urban areas.”

Block Club Chicago was in the vanguard of using federal government data, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, to contravene the Trump administration narrative that those arrested were violent criminals, or “the worst of the worst” as Trump repeatedly claimed. They also partnered with other new digital organizations, such as The TRiiBE, an award-winning, independent Black-owned newsroom, and Borderless, a magazine that according to its website is “reimagining immigration journalism for a more just and equitable future,” to work together to serve their community. As Sabella puts it, “Collaboration is everything.”

At the end of last year, Block Club Chicago revealed that roughly two-thirds of those arrested by ICE in Illinois had no criminal history prior to their arrests. Instead, the majority of the arrests were what was known as “collateral arrests” of people rounded up without sufficient probable cause.

In my ongoing tour of local newsrooms we have heard distressing stories about the dismantling of once proud institutions of journalism, but also inspiring stories like Block Club’s. Their experience shows that there isn’t one formula to succeed in local news. The key takeaway is to listen to your audience and adapt your model to their needs.

When asked about how Block Club was successfully serving the communities of Chicago and finding a sustainable business model in doing so, Sabella said “our long standing presence in the community really helped us here.”

It’s pretty simple, she explained, “we are all from Chicago and care deeply about Chicago, and I think the future needs to be that. It needs to be local people serving their local community. I think that is the most likely way to connect with the community and find success.”

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Editor's note: Charles Sennott is out of the office this week. In his stead, we asked GroundTruth Media’s Alana Campbell – who develops our story maps – to add to our ongoing tour of local newsrooms with a piece looking at the recent changes in the place where she got her start in journalism: Washington D.C.

For more than a century, the Washington Post has stood as one of America’s largest news organizations, with the resources to shape national discourse and provide local accountability. But last month, that legacy was weakened by one of the largest single-day layoffs of journalists in a generation.

Initial reports suggested the cuts affected around 300 of the Post’s nearly 800 staffers, but in the days that followed, the final count reached upwards of 350, bringing the total percentage of layoffs close to 45%. The publication employed over a thousand journalists in 2022 but now has fewer than it did when Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, initially took it over in 2013.

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” said former Executive Editor Marty Baron, who led the Post through its 3 million subscriber peak and retired in 2021. “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished… and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

In the wake of the Post’s decimation, several local news organizations have stepped up to try to fill the void. From worker-owned cooperatives to billionaire-backed ventures, these organizations are offering an alternative for local and national audiences, particularly those interested in political coverage. If they succeed, it would not only shift the local media landscape, but provide an example of how to make it more diverse and resilient.

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What D.C. lost

Washington, D.C., is not a news desert in the way that thousands of American communities have become. It has a dense media ecosystem of national publications, public broadcasters, local TV, and a growing number of digital outlets. But for decades, the Post has been in a league of its own in its capacity for deep investigative work.

The local reporting team, once a cornerstone of accountability journalism in Washington, was reduced by 70 percent in the latest cuts. Prior to the cuts, City Cast CEO David Plotz estimated that the Post originated 75 percent of D.C.-area stories that got picked up by other outlets. “Even people who weren’t consuming Post Local news were consuming it — they just didn’t realize it,” he said. The paper also eliminated sports coverage, shuttered foreign bureaus, including those in the Middle East, just before the war against Iran started.

The latest round of layoffs is the culmination of years of turbulence at the Post. In 2023, 240 staffers took buyouts, another round followed in 2024, and a 4% cut last year affected dozens more roles. Leadership decisions added to the strain, with Bezos’s 2024 decision not to endorse Kamala Harris for president resulting in reader backlash that reportedly cost the paper around 300,000 subscriptions — about 12 percent of its subscriber base. Top-down changes to the opinions page triggered another wave of cancellations as well as some high-profile resignations.

Even in its diminished state, the Post was bigger and had more resources than its local competitors. Now, after even more cuts, the question is if the surge in local coverage by smaller players will be enough to compensate for the losses at the Post. At a March 25th panel hosted by the Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship, local newsroom leaders described a future defined not by one dominant institution, but by a network of smaller players.

Who’s stepping up?

“Now [After the layoffs at the Post] that ecosystem has to reset — there’s been a fire, and new species have to come in and build up,” said Plotz in an interview with Nieman Lab, alluding to the crop of news organizations that have announced, or are planning to expand their coverage.

City Cast, the for-profit podcast and newsletter network with a presence in multiple American cities that Plotz leads, announced plans to hire at least four reporters for its D.C. operation. It has already brought on Emma Uber, a former Post Local breaking news reporter, and is hiring an executive editor and managing editor.

The Baltimore Banner, Maryland’s largest news organization, announced an accelerated expansion into Prince George’s County, a D.C suburb, with plans to have reporters covering education, local government, and community there by April. A week later, it announced it would also hire reporters to cover D.C. sports — including the Nationals and Commanders — an opportunistic move directly responding to the Post’s decision to eliminate its sports desk, according to Banner CEO Bob Cohn. Observers have noted that the Banner has registered the domain names dcbanner.com and thedcbanner.com.

Two years ago, former staffers of the DCist website launched The 51st, a worker-run nonprofit co-op. The organization, which describes itself as a newsroom “where journalists and community members are the decision makers — not billionaire owners, wealthy shareholders, or a C-Suite with limited experience in local news,” had been building steadily when the Post layoffs arrived.

Since then The 51st has gained more than 1,100 new paying members, bringing total paid membership to nearly 4,400 out of more than 15,500 total subscribers. Executive Editor Christina Sturdivant Sani, who spoke at the March 25 panel, noted that around 70% of The 51st’s revenue comes from readers — a model she sees as fundamental to the organization’s mission of journalism as public service.

The publication is trying to model something different — including its financing structure. The organization recently received a loan from the D.C. Solidarity Economy Loan Fund, a cooperatively-governed nonprofit financial organization. “Seed Commons represents a real alternative,” The 51st wrote in an announcement. “They’re a network of cooperatives and community-led organizations that believe capital should serve people, rather than extract profits.”

It hopes to prove that journalism can thrive without billionaire backing. Still, Higgins acknowledges that the 51st’s team “lacks the resources to fill the void left by the Washington Post.”

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NOTUS and the Allbritton Journalism Institute

One of the most ambitious expansion announcements has come from NOTUS – News of the United States – a digital news outlet founded in 2024 by Politico cofounder and billionaire media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton. Despite being a newcomer in DC journalism, NOTUS has already made waves on Capitol Hill. A memo posted on X outlines Allbritton’s plans, which according to him, were “precipitated” by the layoffs. Among them are doubling NOTUS’ staff of around 50 reporters by the end of 2026, hiring some of the top talent laid off from the Post, and expanding local coverage.

“The world of Washington journalism is in a moment of generational change,” Allbritton, NOTUS Editor-in-Chief Tim Grieve, and CEO Arielle Elliott wrote in the memo. “We’re going to seize it by building the next great Washington newsroom — a team of reporters and editors who will cover government, politics, policy, local news, and D.C. sports with the power of The Washington Post in the 1970s, the punch of Politico in the 2010s, and the audience focus required to build a sustainable news organization in 2026.”

The publication’s name is also expected to change, with Allbritton working with trademark attorneys on options — and reportedly interested in including “Washington” in the new name. The Washington Star and Washington Sun trademarks were recently registered.

Integral to NOTUS’ ambitions and to its long-term talent pipeline is the Allbritton Journalism Institute (AJI), an independent nonprofit launched in 2023 that trains emerging journalists and places them as full-time fellows at NOTUS. AJI currently has around 20 fellows at any given time, drawn from across the country, with more than 80% coming from local news backgrounds. The fellows’ work is also distributed through the Washington Bureau Initiative, a program that co-publishes coverage with local outlet partners in 12 states.

Leading AJI is Kevin Grant, who became its executive director earlier this year. Grant is a familiar name to readers of this column, having co-founded the Ground Truth Project alongside Charles Sennott, and spent a decade building the organization, including launching both Report for America and Report for the World, before departing in 2024.

Grant said he was drawn to AJI’s mission and excited by the organization’s culture. “I love their mission to help bring next-gen journalists from underrepresented backgrounds into the D.C. press corps and love their focus on strengthening democracy,” he said. Grant is careful to distinguish between AJI and NOTUS itself. AJI is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit, and an educational institution. Still, he adds, “we’re going to work closely with NOTUS on making sure that our fellows are able to contribute to that expansion in local coverage. In that way, we will have a direct role to play in bolstering local coverage in the D.C. area.”

On what it feels like to watch the D.C. journalism landscape transform, Grant was measured. “I think it’s something like a process of mourning. There’s some anger. And, as a number of organizations are stepping up, including NOTUS, to hire some of the incredible journalists who have been let go, there’s also a sense of hope that what these organizations are building will be really strong.”

The organizations expanding are diverse in their models, their missions, and their resources, but what the Post provided cannot be replaced overnight. News leaders like City Cast’s Plotz remained optimistic.

“We’ll do a good job collectively filling the void.”

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Editor’s Note: Charles Sennott is out of the office this week. During this pause in his tour of local newsrooms, we want to take a step back and look at the scope of the crisis Charles is highlighting, and how his tour is putting the spotlight not only on the places where journalism is in dire straits, but also on those where new approaches are being implemented with success.

Charles’ journey is better understood through the storymap we launched last week, and even more when you compare it to the map of news deserts in America. We invite you to explore the map, see the upcoming stops on his tour, and leave a comment or questions you have for the editors and reporters of these organizations.

About the map:

It’s one thing to read that almost 3,500 newspapers have closed in the first quarter of this century, but it’s another to see it on a map, with so many empty spaces representing news deserts. The image is a striking and powerful reminder for those of us who live in cities and towns that still have a local news source that there are 50 million Americans who don’t have access to reliable local news.

As I write these words, that number continues to increase. Today, CBS News announced that it would lay off 6 percent of its workforce and shut down CBS News Radio, a service that has operated for almost 100 years, delivering the news from the front lines of World War II to the current conflict with Iran. The decision also affects more than 700 affiliated stations that will need to find replacements as well as the millions of listeners who are losing a trusted news source.

If you add last year’s cuts to public broadcasters, the landscape looks even more dire. But these negative trends have also motivated Charles to highlight the newsrooms that are acting as bright spots during this time of crisis and rebuilding local news and their connection with audiences. Although the number and scope of new digital organizations are not keeping up with the decline of traditional media, it is important to get the word out about their work and help people see that there are answers to the crisis of local news.

The newsrooms that Charles is highlighting serve as both a cautionary tale and an inspiration. Even in places where the mismanagement of longstanding news institutions have led to their fall, there are people who remain committed to on-the-ground reporting that holds the powerful accountable and that is dedicated to the community. To succeed, they only need the support of the people they are serving.

This is the idea behind Local News Day, an initiative created to draw attention to the excellent work that many local news organizations are doing and help people see why they are vital for their communities. As John S. Adams, the founder of the non-profit digital news service the Montana Free Press and one of the organizers of the initiative, said: “This event is about celebrating local news and helping Americans connect with the great newsrooms, from longstanding local institutions to newer digital outlets, that are serving their communities.”

Take a look at the storymap, and we hope you can join us with your questions, comments and support for the rest of Charles’ tour, throughout and beyond the celebration of Local News Day on April 9th.

Wilson Liévano, managing editor of GroundTruth Media

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Editor’s Note: This story is part of GroundTruth’s continuing series of posts on the state of local news across America. Today, we are launching a map of the series in the lead up to Local News Day on April 9. You can view the story map here.

The Eagle building is nested into the triangle where Eagle Street meets North Street just along the railroad tracks off the Common in Pittsfield, MA in the Berkshires. A flat-iron building with a brick facade and enormous windows, it embodies the grandeur and the muscle of this factory town and what made The Berkshire Eagle such a great and beloved newspaper, with roots dating back to 1789. The paper was always considered the town square where people came together to share ideas and build the community.

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The Eagle building grabs your attention when you drive into Pittsfield, but it is no longer the home of the Berkshire Eagle. To get to the current newsroom, I drove around the corner and over to a converted mill building at 75 South Church Street that in a way echoes the dark period of the newsroom, when it fell into the hands of people not focused on informing the community, but on extracting as much profit as they could, without giving much of anything in return. The paper’s former owner, the venture capital firm Alden Global Capital left the paper half gutted. But this isn’t a story of the fall of a legendary local paper, but of its revival. It is a story about how sometimes the good guys win and why local ownership matters for news organizations that serve local communities.

You learned about the vulture capitalism practices of Alden Global Capital last week, when I stopped at the New York Daily News, as part of my tour of local newspapers around the country in the lead-up to Local News Day on April 9. The News has always been New York’s hometown newspaper, but since it was acquired by Alden it has seen its newsroom hollowed out year by year with a small staff that now represents a shadow of what it once was.

Alden was on its way to do the same to the Berkshire Eagle until community stakeholders and a team of investors in the Berkshires rallied together to buy the Eagle back and save it from the ravages of the New York-based venture capital firm’s predatory, cost-cutting approach.

The Eagle was owned for decades by the Miller family. With a flatbed press and one typesetting machine, Kelton B. Miller started publishing the Eagle in 1892, succeeded by sons Pete and Don in 1941, and by grandsons Mark and Michael in the 1980s. Throughout the years, the Millers kept investing in the paper and made it the pride of Pittsfield, an industrial town that housed General Electric and had a solid middle class and a circle of towns around that were beautiful and filled with great music and theater and became the place for proud second homes of a certain wealthy elite that heralded from Boston, New York and beyond. As the Berkshires became more desirable for tourists, it faded in its industrial base and lost most of its middle class, not unlike so many corners of America. Still the Millers kept turning a modest profit and built an unusually large staff for a paper with a circulation, at its peak, of about 35,000.

It earned a national reputation for being both elegant and tough at the same time. In 1972, Washington Post press critic Ben Bagdikian told Time magazine there were only three great newspapers in the world: “The New York Times, Le Monde, and The Berkshire Eagle.”

As a result, The Eagle became a training ground for top, emerging talent in the country. Notable alums include Gustav Niebuhr, who became a respected religion writer at The New York Times; Helen Donovan, onetime executive editor of the Globe; and Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002 while reporting a story about Al Qaeda. Large black-and-white photographs of these legends adorn the walls of the newsroom. But they feel like museum pieces enshrining a past era of greatness that came very close to vanishing.

A critical turning point for the Eagle came in the late 1980s when the Miller grandchildren undertook a questionable real estate deal, acquiring the old Sheaffer-Eaton mill. They sold off the beautiful Eagle Building where they had always been housed and spent $23 million to renovate the 11-acre Sheaffer-Eaton mill for the newsroom, a new printing press and they were hoping other tenants would follow and pay the mortgage.

The year they pulled the trigger was 1987, the same year the stock market crashed, and the cost of newsprint soared while print advertising began to decline. Soon after, General Electric, which once employed 13,000 people at its Pittsfield plant, announced mass layoffs, devastating the local economy. Drowning in debt, the Miller family sold the Eagle and a group of papers they owned in Vermont and Connecticut to the legendary Dean Singleton, a Denver newspaper executive dubbed “Lean Dean.” His MediaNews Group made its mark buying regional papers and cutting costs by consolidating business operations, ad sales, and printing.

The writing was on the wall for the Berkshire Eagle as it began to tumble down into a mean-spirited era of decline in American newspapers which was made more precipitous by the advent of the internet and the collapse of the traditional newspaper business model which held together around print advertising.

Singleton’s Colorado publishing company, formerly known as Digital First Media, became a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, which has more than earned a reputation as a predatory force that buys beleaguered papers and slashes staff in order to raise profits. Alden now owns dozens of newspapers, including The Denver Post, The Mercury News of San Jose, California, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, and the Boston Herald, which it bought out of bankruptcy last year and promptly cut a quarter of the staff. And, of course, the New York Daily News.

A man named Fred Rutberg was watching this tragedy unfold around his beloved local newspaper with particular interest. Rutberg, a respected leader in the community for more than 40 years, was a prominent attorney with a practice in Stockbridge. He was eventually named chief judge in the Berkshire County District Court, and as he approached his retirement nothing made him more sad than seeing the Berkshire Eagle wither and fade.

In 2016, Rutberg was on his way to retirement. He had reached the age of 70, which is the mandatory age for retirement for judges in Massachusetts. He began a journey to try to save the paper and restore local ownership. He wanted to keep alive, he said, the idea that the Berkshire Eagle was the “town square” in his community. When asked why he did it, he said, “ I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought I could maybe do some good for our community.”

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He began to pull together the investors and the stakeholders who could make it happen. They formed a board of directors, and, as he remembers it, two of the more prominent board members offered different ways to define the mission statement. There was a local banker, Robert Wilmers, who described it this way: “To create the finest local newspaper in America.” And for John C. (Hans) Morris, a good-hearted and successful head of Nyca Partners, a “fin tech” firm out of New York who had a spectacular second home in the Berkshires, the vision was described this way: “To build a company that would last 100 years.”

The challenge, according to Rutberg, was to bring those two visions together to form a single “north star” that would allow him as publisher to balance “the aspiration of greatness with the discipline of a sustainable operation.”

“To be high quality but sustainable in a small market, well, that is a challenge and a struggle, as you know,” said Rutberg, referencing the idea that the two of us are publishers who are sharing notes while traveling similar roads. Rutberg succinctly framed the question all publishers of print newspapers face these days: “How do we convince the next generation that paying for content is in their best interest?”

He offered his own answer, saying, “We have to keep making the product that is worth being paid for, and communicate that because that is what is going to keep this alive. Philanthropy is great, non profit models are great, but you have to have a product that has value and that the value is expressed by people stepping up and saying they will pay for it.”

In the end of September, as the fall foliage was taking hold, I took a long drive from Martha’s Vineyard to the Berkshires to meet with Rutberg, who I had gotten to know through the years of building Report for America and partnering with the Eagle to help them build back their staff. Just under ten years into his journey to rebuild the paper, Rutberg built it back to a total staff of 125 and restored readership to 20,000 daily readers in both print and digital. One part of the formula of their success was a time-tested approach: they hired more talented reporters and editors and recommitted themselves to the Eagle’s tradition of solid local coverage that serves their community.

What I did not know until the day I walked into his newsroom was that this was the day Rutberg was planning to announce that he would step down and hand the baton of publisher to a young protege named Gary Lavariere, who was 31 years old at the time.

It was quite a moment and I recently circled back to talk with Rutberg and Lavariere about the first six months of the new era.

The locally born and raised Lavariere rose through the ranks of the paper on the business side of operations. He had a brief, two year interlude where he headed up a digital transformation for a newspaper in Las Vegas, but returned to the Berkshires just before COVID and felt it was a stroke of luck to be back at the Eagle where he wanted to be and in the place where he wanted to raise a family. He and his wife have two kids and a house just one town away from where he was born in North Adams.

Promoted to Chief Revenue Officer, Lavariere developed a digital strategy at the Eagle that is still in mid-stride and involves an ongoing remake of the backend and the website through a host of contractors. I plan on circling back to him to discuss in more detail how his plan to not just save the paper, but to make it grow is going. When asked how he wanted his tenure to be remembered ten years from now, Lavariere said, “The role of the news organization today will be the same ten years from now. We will still be the town square, the conversation starter. As we evolve and lean into digital, we will need to focus harder on how we bring the community together. We will have to keep working hard at that through leveraging events and leveraging the emotional connection people feel with our brand.”

One of the goals that Rutberg will be helping him with is building the non-profit arm of the news organization which helps the business raise philanthropic dollars to add specific reporting beats that the organization otherwise may not be able to afford. Together, Rutberg and Lavariere are on their way to beating the odds and establishing a local newspaper with a long history that can survive well into a future that promises transformational change.

Through all the change that has happened and through all the tumult and change that lies ahead with the advent of AI, Rutberg still maintains that the story of the Berkshire Eagle is a fable that revolves around one word: “Trust.”

Rutberg explained, “Our most valuable asset is the trust the community has in us. Absentee ownership didn’t destroy all of that but it nearly did, and we have worked hard on rebuilding that trust. For any local paper struggling to sustain, I think that is the thing to remember: you have to have the trust of your community.”

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Crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan at sunset, there is a sweeping view of the Upper West Side down to the long, urban expanse and the spires of the financial district. On a recent drive, I found my eyes still searching for that place on the horizon where the fallen towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

I covered the long trail of local stories in New York City and New Jersey that would ultimately lead to the toppling of the towers on September 11th, 2001, and an era of international terrorism. It was a war that was global and local, and I believe it ended on Sunday with the joint U.S. and Israel attack on Iran.

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We are now entering a whole new global struggle with a completely different threat matrix and a different kind of peril than we have ever seen before. I want to share why I believe that to be the case, but this is part of a series of columns about local news and the existential threat it is facing in America and why we all should care about that. That is what put me on a journey of reflection about the crossing of the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge, a road that will circle back to my coverage of 9-11 as a local story by a local news organization in New York. Thanks for joining us on the journey

***

Crossing the steel expanse of the George Washington Bridge brings it all back: Forty years ago in the Spring of 1986, I began commuting every work day from my apartment on 105th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan over to New Jersey for my first newspaper job at The Record of Hackensack. I had a 1965 Volvo 122S that rumbled over the bridge every day as I set out to cover local municipal elections and endless meetings like the Zoning Board of Adjustment and the School Board in the corrupt waterfront hamlets that were my beat in Hudson County. My muse back then was a local political boss named Joe Mocco of North Bergen. Mocco and his henchmen were characters straight out of The Sopranos. I will come back to Mocco, and the fate of The Record, a once great, family-owned newspaper which is now a shadow of what it used to be, later on in this journey.

Back in those early local reporting days, I would come home over the George Washington Bridge at the end of the day looking out at New York and dreaming of working in the big city. I got my shot when I landed a job in 1989 covering the Bronx for the New York Post. The feisty tabloid had a new owner in real estate magnate Peter Kalikow and had pretensions to step up its reporting and a group of young reporters bought that pitch and took jobs there, enlisting into what we would later see as the last, great newspaper war with The Post, the Daily News, Newsday and the New York Times fighting for survival.

I covered the emergence of crack cocaine as it ravaged the city, and the paper even sent me all the way to Medellín, Colombia to cover the cartels and the narco wars. I was sent to Belfast to cover The Troubles and a story of an IRA fighter who had been arrested in New York and whose name was emblazoned on green sashes in the St. Patrick’s Day parade while his lawyers fought extradition by the Reagan administration. I broke a story that was considered the first national priest sex abuse scandal in the country. It was a big exclusive about a legendary street priest, a celebrated star of the New York Archdiocese, who turned out to be a predator.

That reporting landed me a job at the New York Daily News where I covered cops and courts for what was then a muscle-bound newsroom that had more than 1.2 million readers of its print edition, making it the largest circulation daily in America at the time. The Daily News building was a prodigious Art Deco skyscraper at the corner of 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue that spoke to a very different era of local journalism in New York. It was a cathedral of street-smart storytelling, the home of the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Jimmy Breslin, and a storied stage set for Superman where mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent would transform into a super hero. A world globe creaked as it spun on its axis in the marble atrium of the lobby, turning day by day through the American century from the Great Depression, through World War II, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights movement and even chronicling the earliest days of an upstart real estate mogul chasing publicity on its gossip pages: Donald Trump. It was hard not to be taken by the theater of it all at the Daily News and to see how the place inspired The Daily Planet of Superman fame.

I was part of a team that covered two trials of the mafia boss John Gotti and I was assigned to cover the Gulf War when it broke out in August of 1990. Yes, there were stories about the world and national stories, but the real competition was in the city. It was local.

On February 26th, 1993, I was about to order lunch at a diner in lower Manhattan when a loud bang interrupted the chatter at the counter. It was greeted with a shrug on a busy morning in a bustling city. But I heard one siren after another heading down town, and so I left the diner and just started walking in the direction that so many people were running from. As I got closer to the World Trade Center, I could see smoke billowed out of the parking garage. People looked afraid and shaken, some had faces covered in soot from an explosion of some ill-defined origin in the parking garage beneath the towers. The first reports on live radio and television were of a generator explosion. I got to the ramp that led down into the garage and slipped under the police tape and walked forward confidently like I was supposed to be there, the trick of any able street reporter. Then I caught a glimpse of a crater more than four stories deep with cars tumbled into it. I knew from Medellín and Belfast what a bombing looked like, and I called from a payphone to tell our City Desk it was a bombing despite what was being said on television. Remember this was 1993, a full eight years before September 11th, 2001 would wake America up to the threat of global terrorism.

I was on a story that in many ways I have been covering ever since. I started breaking stories on the World Trade Center bombing and began stitching together threads of reporting. One was about the Palestinian cab driver who federal agents tried to tell us was among the masterminds of the bombing plot. That is, before he was arrested when he went to the Ryder Truck Rental agency in New Jersey to reclaim his deposit on the truck used to carry the explosive into the parking garage. Another fabric of the reporting was a feature about a spiritual leader of the group, an Egyptian cleric known as “the blind sheikh” named Omar Abdel Rahman, who preached at mosques in Jersey City and Brooklyn.

With these pieces, my boss, City Editor Bill Boyle asked about these immigrant New Yorkers the operative question, “Why would they want to blow up the World Trade Center?” To answer that question and figure out who these suspects were, I was sent to the Middle East and the countries from where the suspects came – Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the West Bank. It was good old fashioned police reporting writ large. And it opened a new chapter in my career that to this day has served as a prime example of why all news, even global news, is local, and why being there on the ground to tell the story is what it is all about. The difference between then and now is that back then the Daily News was a paper with the money and the ambition to do whatever it took to get a story. These days the Daily News is a hollowed out shell of what it used to be. The beautiful old News Building was not part of a distressed sale that “saved” the Daily News after the 1990 strike. In fact, the reporters there now tell me there really is no newsroom just a workspace with a few desks that face a wall.

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The last quarter century in the Middle East has been defined by the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as the administration of George W. Bush called it. This week, America entered a new chapter of history in the Middle East, “a war of choice,” against Iran. No one who knows the Middle East and the horrors of the theocratic regime in Iran and the way it has spread terror and violence through its proxies would shed a tear for the clerical leadership that has been annihilated in Iran. But nor would anyone who knows the Middle East claim to know where this is now headed and where it will take us.

Today, the Daily News reporters could be helping us understand the uncharted terrain by interviewing members of the Iranian community in the city to hear their long view. They could reach out to victims of Iranian-backed terrorism. They could trace how the attacks on the United Arab Emirates impact shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in ways that will inevitably drive up costs on everything from gasoline to everyday goods shipped around the world in containers. They should be investigating the financial connections between Trump, his family and their supporters from the wealthy Gulf States through which these military operations are being staged. They should be scouring the military contracts in high tech, and in AI in particular, that have preceded this unprecedented military adventure in which the administration has not sought congressional approval nor bothered to brief senior congressmen on the specific rationale or imminent military threat that called for this joint attack with Israel on Iran. It is not known where these reporting trails would lead, but pursuing them would bring us further down the road to understanding this conflict and the ways it is different from – and the same as – past wars of the Middle East.

Yet there is almost no one left to do that job. The Daily News is owned by a venture capital firm called Alden Global Capital which has ravaged the news organization, most recently firing 16 people on the eve of Valentine’s Day, leaving only four people to cover U.S. and international news and 16 to cover the city. In a nod to some of the great old mob hits that produced classic Daily News frontpages, the union produced a mockup of a frontpage on the strike under the headline: “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” And it features another classic ingredient in a Daily News frontpage: a villain. And there’s Heath Freeman, owner of Alden Global Capital, smiling on the front page. When you put it all together, you can’t help but think Superman would have been laid off by Alden. Clark Kent would not have been offered a buyout or a pension even after all those years of dedicated service to the good fight in local news.

This is part of GroundTruth’s continuing series of posts on the state of local news across America.

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A historic blizzard descended upon Massachusetts this week, leaving 200,000 without electricity, and prompting Governor Maura Healey to declare a state of emergency. On the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where I live among a year-round population of 20,000, it was particularly brutal, as we were cut off from the mainland with a shut down of the ferry service and half the Island had no power.

This ‘blizzard of ‘26’ also forced a delay in my plans to set out for the first leg of a journey I described in last week’s column to trace the path of a crisis in local news across the country, spotlight the new beacons of truth that are reinventing how we think about local news, and explore what it has meant for our democracy. I can’t wait to get out there and share those stories over the next few months.

And yet, it feels perfectly fitting that a big local weather story has kept me at home focusing on our community and leading our coverage at the local weekly The Martha’s Vineyard Times, where I serve as publisher. I was incredibly proud of our team of 12 people, a mix of staff reporters, editors, freelancers, designers as well as a skeletal production and distribution crew, who rallied to keep the Island informed. They shoveled their way out, foraged for power and internet connections and did their jobs, and in the process, we learned just how much the Island community relies on the trusted information we gather week in and week out.

It also helped me realize that I haven’t shared much about the local news operation I’m currently running, our challenges and the incredible work that is being done here. Our reporting team managed to keep the website updating throughout the blizzard which began in earnest on Sunday night and dumped, depending on how one measures, somewhere between 20 inches by an official yardstick in West Tisbury to more informal measurements of more than two feet in the further climes up Island. In Seekonk just across the Vineyard Sound on the Massachusetts South Coast, where our paper is printed, there were measurements of 37 inches which surpassed the legendary blizzard of 1978 which is still talked about by Bay Staters of a certain age. We gathered in the newsroom Wednesday not certain if our printer would be able to plow a path for the trucks that handle their shipping when presses were scheduled to roll on Thursday morning.

We’ve had a home on the Island for more than 30 years. My wife has family here and I have family nearby on Cape Cod. But it was about three years ago that we moved here year round. The idea was to step back from a busy life in Boston as the founder and CEO of The GroundTruth Project, which first launched Report for America, the non-profit service program that has now placed some 800 reporters in local newsrooms across the country. But before I knew it, I was pulled into helping The Martha’s Vineyard Times. A new owner said he would save the paper by retiring its debt and he asked me to serve as publisher and I said yes. My wife, Julie, is in this too as our manager of operations. The oldest of our four sons has recently written about a legendary fishing boat captain who died when his boat capsized. My other son and his girlfriend have been helping out with distribution to newsstands.

As you will learn along this journey, I will do just about anything – even enlisting my own family – to help save local newspapers and to support local news gathering. I have always believed local news forms the cornerstone of our democracy, and that cornerstone has been crumbling over the last decade in distressing ways. After a decades-long career reporting on the frontlines in war zones, people sometimes ask me if it is hard to stay interested in the finer details of local issues such as housing, education, the consequences of climate change and ICE’s disruptive presence on our island. I usually answer by pointing out that the struggles of the people and the risks taken by journalists are immeasurably higher in the conflict zones I’ve covered and comparing them borders on the obscene. But I also try to highlight a reality which is that despite all of the excellent journalism in Afghanistan, Gaza, Ukraine and so many other datelines, there is very little that seems to affect change on a local level. The cycle of the stories by foreign correspondents coming out of places like Ukraine and Iraq, despite the extraordinary number of journalists who have lost their lives, and despite the powerful stories that Western journalists have brought home to their respective news organizations, does little to create positive change and indeed those places are often ending up in a worse place.

I genuinely believe the heroic work that foreign journalists do is important and serves a purpose, but I also believe that local news carried out by local reporters can have a greater impact than international news done by foreign correspondents. You can affect change on a local level through journalism and that is just not as true when reporting from the big datelines of conflict zones. It is important to note that the erosion of local reporting is happening in these war zones as well, and it can compound the multiple challenges they face, including susceptibility to misinformation and disinformation. I believe in local reporting, and I believe a shared set of facts is essential to communities making good decisions. That is how local reporting carries a power to affect change on a local level, and it can remind all of us working in the craft of journalism that local is indeed where it’s at. To slightly recast a quote from the late, great, native son of Massachusetts politics, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O’Neil: All news is local.

This motto was clearly on display throughout the blizzard. Our team worked furiously on every angle of the storm coverage and our colleagues at TCI Press in Seekonk plowed the lots, cleared the trucks and helped us to get the paper printed at a time when so many newspapers caught in the spiral of this fierce nor’easter failed to get their print editions out. The venerable Boston Globe, my alma mater, notably was not able to print on Monday when the blizzard brought snowfall that rivaled the infamous blizzard of ‘78, making this Tuesday the first time in The Globe’s 153-year history that it failed to get a print edition out for delivery.

We are proud to maintain our track record for delivery and come through with a paper for our community. Trucking and U.S. Postal Service delays meant that home delivery on the Island came one day later than usual, but we were determined to get them into mail boxes today. To make sure that happened, Julie was there at the loading dock early this morning to fill up the bed of our pickup truck with bundles of the freshly printed newspapers to deliver them to the post office where they were stuffed into mail boxes across the Island.

This is an operation that we realized most of you do not know about, which involves an all-week newsgathering process, then careful editing and layout that ends on our deadline at exactly 3:00 p.m. every Wednesday. That’s when we have to ship electronic files, or PDFs, over to TCI Press, where they are scanned onto plates and then an experienced printing team runs the plates through the web of a four-color Rockwell printer. The press room is loud; enormous rolls of newsprint are moved around with forklifts to be fed into the humming weave of the printer.

The floors are sticky with ink. It is all straight out of another century, and, maybe because I have loved working in print newspapers for most of the last 40 years, I am fond of all that noise and the ink-stained floors. It smells like news.

One of our intrepid reporters drove 67 miles from his home in Falmouth all the way to Seekonk to fill up the trunk of his sedan with about 1,000 copies so that we could get them here on the Island. At TCI Press, there are still two more pallets stacked with approximately 3,500 copies of The Times, which arrived on the Island today through our trucking depot in Warwick, Rhode Island as is done every week. The trucks, which carry fresh produce, and allow us to squeeze in our pallets stacked with the print editions were then brought over on the Steamship Authority ferry at 6:00 a.m. today and arrived at the loading dock at Cronig’s Market in Vineyard Haven. I love the fact that our newspaper arrives on the Island in a produce truck as fresh and nutritious as the vegetables that are loaded in all around it!

I shared this behind-the-scenes look at our operation because I truly believe that if our readers had a better understanding of how this process unfolds every week – the heart and the grit and craft – they would have a better appreciation for their local news. I think all of us need to be sure we are thinking about that as I start my journey through other newsrooms and we count down to Local News Day on April 9th.

This is part of a continuing series of columns leading up to Local News Day

What we’re reading this week

• States making progress on saving local journalism | Brier Dudley, Seattle Free Press

• Record 129 press members killed in 2025; Israel responsible for 2/3 of deaths | Committee to Protect Journalists

• Ukraine’s Young Journalists Investigate Through the War’s Most Brutal Winter | Ilya Lozovsky, OCCRP

• Voice of America is covering Iran’s protests, but not its best-known dissident | Scott Nover, The Washington Post

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It was something to see John S. Adams at work as an investigative reporter scouring the corridors of power in Montana’s State House in Helena as he did for so many years.

His work exploring the intersection of money and politics was well documented in the 2018 award-winning PBS film, Dark Money. The camera follows him as he tracks down and holds both the corporate lobbyists and elected officials accountable for the corruption that occurs when private and public forces collide. Dark Money is the story of shadowy campaign contributions in Big Sky country and how they play a role in deciding elections, and how local reporting can bring that to light.

Now, eight years after the documentary, Adams has emerged as a social entrepreneur who has launched a respected, non-profit digital news service, the Montana Free Press, where he has built a team of more than 20 people who continue the good fight for transparency and accountability in state government.

He is also the chief architect of a new initiative called Local News Day, which is gaining traction across the country. We at GroundTruth are proud to be partners and sponsors of Local News Day (LND) along with American Journalism Project, NewsPack, Institute for Non-profit News and many others. LND will take place on April 9. And so in advance of the big day, I want to highlight this call to arms among a coalition of journalists, news organizations, foundations, universities and local communities to fight against the tide of decline in local news organizations in America and the corrosive effects it is having on our communities and on our democracy. The coalition shares a common goal as stated on its website: “connecting people with trusted local outlets and expanding the reach of local newsrooms.”

“This event is about celebrating local news and helping Americans connect with the great newsrooms, from longstanding local institutions to newer digital outlets, that are serving their communities,” Adams said. “As technology changes how people get information, we need new ways to help people stay connected to what’s happening where they live.”

The road to this celebration of the importance of local news began with a decisive moment for Adams that came in 2015.

While the cameras were rolling in the early research for the documentary, Adams was in the process of being downsized at the Great Falls Tribune amid a brutal restructuring of Gannett, the largest publisher of newspapers in the United States, which could be looked upon now as the beginning of the great unraveling of local news across America. Adams was suddenly underemployed but the “fire in the belly,” as the journalism of olde used to call that force that fueled great reporting, was still burning.

“Right in the middle of our film something happened to him that has happened to a lot of investigative reporters he got laid off. We’ve seen those cutbacks , we’ve seen that consolidation happening again and again. Within a matter of weeks, the state house bureaus for the two largest newspaper chains in Montana shut down. Overnight, there was no statehouse coverage, no way for the average citizen what was happening,” said Kimberly Reed, the director of the film.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, and Adams was certain that he needed to be part of reinventing accountability reporting in Montana state government. We are kindred souls in some respect as I think are all entrepreneurs, or ‘reluctant entrepreneurs,’ who see a problem in a field they love and they feel thrust into action to do something about it. Adams is that guy.

Corey Hutchins of the Columbia Journalism Review captured his spirit well, and particularly his reluctant side in a 2016 Q&A:

Hutchins: You once told me you hoped someone else might start something in Montana, but now you’ve done it yourself. What made you stick with journalism instead of doing something else?

Adams: “When we talked last I was kind of on the fence. I had started my own business and was doing some freelance work, and I was doing some writing and I was doing some consulting and that kind of thing. So I was kind of riding that line of doing the whole PR thing. I’d done a little of that, mostly for nonprofits and stuff. I did have one corporate client where I was writing some blog posts that had government angles, tracking transportation bills and stuff. So I was getting closer and closer to that line, on the verge of kind of crossing into a realm of pure sort of PR-type work. I felt if I did that, then that would really hamper me in terms of ever going back to being a journalist.

Nobody was knocking on my door saying, “Hey, John, we’d love to pay you a reasonable, professional salary to be a journalist in Montana.

Adams took the plunge, and started to raise money for a non-profit organization and joined the self-appointed ranks of social entrepreneurs like myself who were committed – or who some might say should be committed for psychological observation – to risk it all to make a change.

This time frame of 2016 is right about the time I started running into and hearing about Adams at local journalism conferences like the Online News Association and the Knight Media Forum. I don’t know Adams well, but I was getting to know his story and it is an important one in understanding how we are going to sustain efforts to serve communities with local journalism that serves as a watchdog, and in so doing forms the cornerstone of our democracy.

As the bleak mid winter turns into April, I am planning to set out on a journey that will shape a series of columns about news organizations that I’ve been watching in recent years. I want to share these stories in the run up to the April 9 Local News Day.

Some of the news organizations I’ll be visiting are places where I worked during a career that now spans more than 40 years. My first job out of college was as an on-air reporter at the small public radio station in Western, MA in the mid 1980s. I covered largely rural communities and small cities that were witnessing dramatic decline as the industrial base moved overseas. I want to stop in and see how they are faring these days after the Trump administration shut down federal funding to PBS.

It was on this beat where I sometimes carried an old Nagra reel-to-reel recorder on my shoulder, where I first encountered reporters in the field from the prodigious newsroom of the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, MA. The paper had just won a Pulitzer Prize and was thriving back then. Long owned by the local Miller family, the Eagle struggled amid the decline in print advertising in the late 1990s and early 2000’s and was acquired by Digital First Media, which was part of the hedge fund Alden Capital, which nearly crippled the whole operation. Thanks to a heroic intervention by local investors and community leaders, the paper was saved from ruin in 2016 and local ownership was restored. It is now thriving as a hybrid for-profit and non-profit news organization. I recently visited with the publisher who led the rescue, Fred Rutberg, and I plan to share how he made that happen.

The next chapter in my career was written in New York City, where I went to graduate school and landed a staff job at The Record of Hackensack, NJ. I covered municipal government in the New York City suburbs and focused on the gritty towns along the Hudson River waterfront where I had a chance to work as a reporter and learn a course of study that could be titled “Corruption 101.” Now, The Record, a once great, family-owned newspaper that was known as a feeder to the New York Times, is part of Gannett, or as it is known now, USA Today Co. It was acquired in 2016 and circulation has plummeted since the change in ownership by as much as 80 percent, according to some estimates.

After The Record, I plan to check on my alma mater the New York Daily News, which just suffered more layoffs at the hands of the vulture capitalists of Alden Global Capital. I wrote about this struggle in a previous post, but will revisit now that Alden has made clear its contempt not just for the union, but for the reporters and the city they serve.

My journey will then bring me back to New England and The Boston Globe, which I grew up revering for the muscle and swagger it brought to investigative reporting, for the voice of its columnists and the stands the editorial page took against the war in Vietnam and for publishing the Pentagon Papers despite the efforts of then President Richard Nixon to seek an injunction. And, of course, I loved the Globe for its sports page, which remains the best in the country. Okay, there is a bit of hometown bias in that grandiose statement, but name me a better sports page and we will have at it.

I will also be traveling to newsrooms that I have gotten to know in my role as the founder of The GroundTruth Project, which launched Report for America, a national service program that places reporters in under-covered corners of the country to serve local communities with trusted local news. Our very first newsrooms were in Kentucky and West Virginia and as we branched across the country we saw first-hand the ravages that were unfolding as local newspapers struggled and the communities they served suffered the consequences. I will be retracing steps back into those newsrooms to see how they are doing now, those that managed to stave off the decline in local reporting and those newsrooms that have not.

This will be an attempt to mark Local News Day in the best way I know, on the ground, assessing the newsrooms I have gotten to know along the way. It will be about chronicling decline, but also celebrating resiliency like that shown by the Montana Free Press and the many other heroic stories of survival by newsrooms that seek to serve their local communities. It will of course end up back in my own local community where I serve as the publisher of The Martha’s Vineyard Times, and where every day I am humbled by the challenges faced by so many newsrooms like ours who struggle to make payroll every week. We work day to day with a small, under-paid staff who dedicated themselves to being fair in telling the stories of their community, to finding the ‘ground truth’ in their own backyard.

I hope you’ll join us on this journey and offer thoughts and questions for the newsrooms and the communities they serve by commenting on this post or through our social media channels. See you on the road.

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CAMBRIDGE - An arctic chill cut its way down Massachusetts Avenue here in Harvard Square where I came for an academic conference titled “Solidarity Within and Beyond Ukraine.”

It was the morning of January 30th, and I was cursing the frigid cold and the poorly plowed roads while climbing a snow bank to feed a parking meter, a feat which required better boots than the ones I was wearing. It was so damn cold I could not think straight and was fumbling with my credit card when I looked up in despair at the Cambridge Savings Bank to see the digital clock blinking at 9 degrees in the late morning sun. With the windchill factored in, the temperature was dipping well below zero. That’s when it hit me that the cold and the discomfort we’ve felt here in New England in this bleak midwinter of 2026 has produced an unconscionable chorus of whining, and I was part of it.

How could I possibly complain about the frigid temperatures when I would be heading into a conference to hear Ukrainian dissidents and soldiers and a former prisoner of war telling their stories of grit and survival. It was a profane moment that came with a flush of shame.

All I could think of now were the Ukrainian colleagues gathered for this conference who were shouldering a burden of guilt about brothers in arms on the frontlines of the war in Kharkiv and the Donbass or loved ones – children, wives, grandparents – in Kyiv amid the coldest January in 16 years. As Vladimir Putin’s military dispatches wave after wave of Russian drones aimed at destroying Ukraine’s energy grid, some apartment blocks in major Ukrainian cities like Kyiv are recording temperatures consistently below freezing on the inside of the building.

There is a tyranny to sub-zero temperatures. Like a brutal occupier, the cold descends on your brain and your body and you are quite literally frozen into a kind of submission that makes it impossible to think rationally or to ponder really anything outside of the idea of finding a place to get warm. It is animalistic. Putin knows this. It is also a war crime.

If there is anything we can take from this winter of 2026, it is to breathe in the frigid air as a bond of solidarity with those suffering in Ukraine. But on the exhale take time to ponder what is solidarity, and what does it mean for Americans to be in solidarity with Ukraine? This was the purpose of the conference at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI.)

This month, on February 24, the world will mark the 4th anniversary of the war in Ukraine, making it the longest and largest land war in Europe since World War II. Consequently, the death toll is mounting every day. The number of Russian and Ukrainian troops killed, wounded or gone missing in nearly four years of war could reach 2 million by this spring, according to a report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS.) The report estimates Russia has had about 1.2 million casualties, including as many as 325,000 deaths, while close to 600,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed, wounded or gone missing.

And while Ukrainians shiver and fear for their lives and for the fate of their country, the president of the United States was just returning from Davos at the World Economic Forum, where he and his administration worked overtime to undercut the international world order that once provided the only framework that could force Putin to stop Russian aggression against Ukraine.

The next stage of this diplomatic battle will take place today at The Munich Security Conference, the biggest gathering on international security policy in the world, which will bring Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio face to face with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But there is very little hope that the gathering will yield any diplomatic breakthroughs. The European Union has committed to $100 billion more in military support for Ukraine this year. But the U.S. has made clear to Ukraine that it will not finalize a deal on security guarantees to protect Ukraine from future Russian aggression until Kyiv and Moscow reach an overall agreement to end the war, according to two of the European officials and a senior U.S. official. And with Russia holding firm on demands for territory that Ukraine won’t budge on, the peace process is jammed.

Emily Channel-Justice, director of HURI’s Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program and the organizer of the conference, said, “There is not just one solidarity, there are many kinds. Even when we get frustrated with the U.S. for doing such a terrible job with being in solidarity, there are important ways to think about the word and what it means.”

Channel-Justice defined three broad ways of showing solidarity on a personal level: speaking, acting and knowing.

Acting on solidarity for friends and colleagues who are freezing in apartments can feel futile in a war with such a devastating toll, but she said even the smallest efforts, like donating a $15 blanket, can be a meaningful form of solidarity.

Speaking out against the war and making your voice heard even on a local level also matters, she said, such as encouraging your congressman to take action or asking your community to support Ukraine and organizing efforts through faith communities and local chapters of human rights organizations.

Knowing is perhaps the most important basis for action, she said, adding, “This is what felt like a very interesting idea for me, having a deeper understanding of the country, recognizing that the future is not certain and there is no easy resolution. That idea of knowing is what will stay with me the most.

“You can’t be in solidarity with people you don’t know,” she added.

“This anniversary is difficult. It feels less hopeful particularly with the rising death toll and the lack of success in talks to end the conflict,” she added.

“It is difficult to watch a U.S. president negotiating with a leader whose country is over and over again committing war crimes and treating civilians as if it is nothing.

“Solidarity with Ukraine means solidarity with the world order that we all agree on in the aftermath of World War II. We have to understand that or it will mean we are potentially really in for a wake up call,” Channel-Justice said.

Yevhen Hlibovytsky, a former Ukrainian journalist and public intellectual who serves as an advisor to the Frontier Institute, a pro-democracy center that helps Ukraine focus on its strategic vision, said it is important to ponder the meaning of solidarity within Ukraine when considering the global context of the war.

“Solidarity is a dirty word in my book, and for many who came of age in the former Soviet Union. The word represented something meaningful in Poland, but for us [in Ukraine] it only carries the meaning of solidarity in a Marxist sense which rings hollow.”

What is most important to understand is Ukraine’s internal solidarity which he said has gone “un-interpreted in the US.”

“You have to see the solidarity of those who were at each other’s necks in the past, different religions, ethnic origins … Some have Russian last names and Crimean or Tatar language … So no easy answers here. But the solidarity is for all of these different perspectives coming together to sustain through this war, and to understand how high the stakes are.”

“We are finding something that we have never had before, and that is internal strength,” he said.

A resonant voice at this conference emerged from the keynote speaker, Maksym Butkevych, a human rights activist, journalist, former military serviceman and former prisoner of war. From the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, he joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine and was taken prisoner in June of 2022 in occupied Luhansk. After more than two years in captivity, he was released in a prisoner exchange in the fall of 2024. Last year he was awarded the prestigious Václav Havel Human Rights Prize.

Wearing a black sweatshirt that read “Ukrainian POW: You are not forgotten,” Butkevych shared how he was considered a pacifist before the Russian full-scale invasion. But he said that there was no question he had to take up arms to resist the tyranny of their full-scale invasion. He described the Kafkaesque legal proceedings that led to his conviction in the court of the Russian Federation and the sentence of 13 years. He learned of the acquiescence of Russians who participate in the tyranny of the system, but he also saw Russians who stood up and supported his cause on a very human level. At the end of the day, he said Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s aggression is a battle on behalf of not just Ukraine, but the whole free world.

“Ukraine is defending not only its territorial integrity or independence. As a country, Ukraine is defending fundamental values which are shared by many peoples around the globe, all those who want to live free in mutual respect, respect for human dignity and without fear,” Butkevych said in his address to the conference.

“We believe that we defend something very fundamental against imperialistic power which wages open war not against just certain independent entities, but against that worldview which has values of human dignity, human rights and human freedom at its very core…. This is why we treat this as our common story with so many people, and this is why solidarity with Ukraine to us is the solidarity of all people who want to base their lives on respect for human freedom and dignity,” he added.

Butkevych’s speech came at the end of the day. When he finished, he received a resounding applause and then the attendees, buttoned up their winter costs, put on hats and gloves and wrapped themselves in scrves as they pushed out into the still-frigid temperatures in the long shadows of the late afternoon on Harvard Square, reflecting on his words and Channel-Justice’s reminder that there are many ways to show solidarity, we just need to act on it.

What we’re reading this week

• The battle for Ukraine isn’t just over territory | Deb Amos, The World

• Maria Ressa on Trump’s 2nd Term: “Narrative Warfare & the Breakdown of Reality” | Amanpour and Company

• When local news disappears, people turn to social media feeds, influencers and gossip | Michael Lev and Eric Rynston-Lobel, Poynter

• What the Post Cuts Will Do | Siddhartha Mahanta, Columbia Journalism Review

• The scramble to save D.C. sports journalism | Cuneyt Dil, Axios

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It’s getting darker, and democracy is dying.

The gutting this week of one-third of the Washington Post staff by billionaire Jeff Bezos prompted my slightly revised and updated version of “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the oft-quoted slogan introduced in 2017 as a mission statement at the very beginning of President Trump’s first term.

My revisions are perhaps a bit overstated, but it is hard not to feel the dim light of dusk creeping over our democracy. And it seems worth noting that the light of a free press is not only flickering out thanks to Trump but due to Bezos himself, who so proudly trotted out this slogan as a bulwark for journalism to do its job in holding Trump and other tyrants accountable lest we see democracy fall.

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Bezos, owner of Amazon and among the richest of the billionaire class, made the sweeping layoffs as part of what is being called a “strategic reset” that will shrink news coverage, particularly the Post’s on-the-ground reporting in its own backyard in DC and in the Middle East, Asia and a good part of the global South. The cuts effectively gut the international desk. That decision comes on the heels of a year in which Bezos has sought to curry favor with Trump.

The cost cutting prompted Marty Baron, the legendary and Pulitzer-prize winning executive editor who he hired to lead the Washington Post for eight years, to speak out against the massive layoffs in a statement that did not mince words:

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever. … This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

We live in a head-spinning period of decline in traditional journalism. This month the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was officially dissolved after Congress bowed to the will of Trump and voted for spending cuts that stripped the private, non-profit corporation of its more than $1 billion in funding after 58 years of service in support of 1500 public radio and television stations across the country and after establishing educational television programming ranging from Sesame Street to the PBS FRONTLINE award-winning documentary team. The move has severely impacted the PBS network which is not shutting down but struggling with staff cuts and restructuring after its federal funding was gutted. At the end of last year, we also saw CBS News, the network that served as home to legends like Walter Cronkite and Edward R Murrow, gutted amid a restructuring in the wake of the takeover by CEO David Ellison who received Trump administration approval for a merger of Paramount, which owns CBS, with Skydance. Ellison has close ties to Trump facilitated by his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, who is the co-founder of Oracle.

Beyond billionaire oligarchs tearing the heart out of the best of traditional media in the United States, the crisis in local news across America also continues apace. It seems one proud old newspaper after another is falling on hard times. Last month it was the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which announced it would cease publication citing unsustainable financial losses over the last 20 years. The demise of organizations like the Post-Gazette is happening across the country with a staggering rate of 2.5 local newspapers closing every week, based on research by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and that has meant a loss of as much as 75 percent of the workforce in newspapers over the last 20 years, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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It’s hard not to feel dispirited these days, and it is amid this terrible twilight that some of us are trying to hold onto some sense of optimism, that often irrational fuel that motivates entrepreneurs. This week I sat down for an interview with my long-time Boston Globe colleague and friend, Ellen Clegg, and a longtime associate from WGBH in Boston, Dan Kennedy, for an appearance on their podcast, “What Works” to talk about my journey as a self-confessed, serial entrepreneur in new media in both for-profit and non-profit models aimed at supporting a new generation of journalists to serve in under-covered communities.

I also had a chance to share the goals of my newest creation, GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC which is a spinoff of the non-profit GroundTruth Project. The new entity is the home of this Substack and seeks to explore possibilities on the frontiers of AI particularly where applications meet local news.

As I shared in the podcast, there needs to be more focus on how the AI platforms will require healthy local news organizations if they are going to train their Large Language Models on reliable and verified information. They will be wise to invest in struggling local news organizations and pay attention to an aphorism of the AI age: if local news did not exist, AI would need to invent it.

It is a challenging time for journalism for sure but also an exciting moment for creativity and innovation and I am reaching out to any and all who are inspired to meet the moment and fight like hell for a free press as the cornerstone of democracy. If democracy dies in darkness, then let’s be damn sure to do whatever we can to keep the lights on.

You can listen to my conversation with Ellen and Dan on their “What Works: The Future of Local News” podcast here

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