Urgent Calls to Action from the Lenfest-Aspen Local News Summit

This is going to be a historically difficult time for journalism, a challenge in every regard. It will be much harder than the previous Trump era. All independent institutions are under attack, and journalism in particular.

The president persists in calling us enemies of the people. And everyone I talk with in Washington says he is likely to do all the worst things we feared when it comes to the press.

Indeed, if you watch the interviews President Trump and his supporters have given, you will see a greater hostility toward the press. They interrupt interviewers when they don’t like questions.

They brook no debate, and they offer no sign that they regard journalism as an independent profession worthy of questioning them.

I have no doubt that the central tenets we embrace will continue to be challenged. And that the president’s attacks will continue to erode our standing.

Hopefully Sullivan will survive. But much of our future is now dependent on nonprofits that will also have to withstand attacks.

And of course it comes at a time when we are financially weaker, and when we are in the middle of important debates about our role and how we can best carry out our mission. It also comes as some of the biggest players in journalism are controlled by people who feel the need to protect their other, larger businesses by cozying up to those who attack us.

This is also being felt in local journalism. I’ve worked with more than a dozen newsrooms over the past two years and spent time with a dozen more. Most of them have stories of politicians who have begun slow-walking FOIA requests, or who mimic the Trump playbook with constant attacks on our credibility.

When Chris Damien of the Desert Sun, working with the Times, reported on unnecessary deaths at Riverside County jails, the sheriff didn’t bother to dispute the charges. He simply attacked Chris as being too sympathetic to criminals.

When we worked with the Baltimore Banner to expose the city’s failings to deal with the fentanyl crisis, officials there accused us all of being in bed with the pharmaceutical industry.

And Mississippi Today is involved in a life-or-death struggle with a former governor who isn’t challenging facts, just the paper’s right to report them.

The most visible struggles may be national journalism. But maybe the most important, and the most long-lasting, are in local journalism, the place where the next generation of leaders is already emerging.

On that front, there is a lot to be excited about, a lot of new and old publications doing amazing work, much more than we talk about. (I wish we talked about it more.)

Recently I had lunch with Akash Mehta, who helped create New York Focus. This young man who might have struggled to find his place in my generation of young journalists has built a wonderful newsroom, nearing fourteen in strength and growing every year.

We are working with one of his reporters, Sammy Sussman, who has pretty much on his own filed pro se lawsuits and cobbled together bits and pieces of grants to accumulate an unprecedented amount of information about bad police in the state of New York. He is sort of a wonderful mix of Sy Hersh and Steve Jobs.

Could that have happened before this era? I’m not so sure.

Could Akash, and Sammy, and even ProPublica have thrived in the generation where advertising was king and change wasn’t so easily embraced?

But there are issues we need to confront if local journalism is to stay alive and even thrive at a time when it is under attack on numerous fronts.

So: a few observations from having spent much of the past two years with local editors and reporters around the country.

First, the death of competition is one of the least examined changes in the journalism landscape. Having spent my formative years in the cutthroat world of Chicago journalism, I first thought it was a horrible thing that we were no longer fighting to the death to get it first. Our dirty secret is that the motivation to beat the competition has driven more good journalism than the drive to save the Republic. (Forgive me if I missed the chapter in All the President’s Men where Woodward and Bernstein said they wanted to change the world. They just wanted to beat everybody in the story of a generation.)

Now, decades later, I have come around to thinking that cooperation between newsrooms can be a very good thing, an empowering thing, if we can figure out how to manage it. In a world where dozens of small newsrooms can only cover a slice of a story, we need to figure out models for how they can work together, even across states.

We also have to figure out a way to inject more fun and joy into the reports, even if the world sometimes looks like a dreary place to be. It is a lot easier, I suspect, to raise money to look at the inequities of the criminal justice system than to examine food culture or to provide for interesting and funny columnists.

But we still need to offer readers a greater variety of news and service if they are going to stick with us.

Another, related, point. Investigative reporting, even the pursuit of edgy scoops, is in deep trouble. The new entrants are too small to take risks on stories that may or may not land. One reporter I talked to in Chicago looked puzzled when I asked if they chase tips. “We don’t have time,” he said, pointing out that he has to file many stories in a day. Others admit they don’t chase tips unless they are clearly within the mission of the news organization. After all, a newsroom built to cover the criminal justice system may not be equipped to chase a lead about the mayor.

Some of the legacy newsrooms, like the New Orleans Times-Picayune, have managed to sustain investigative teams that do amazing work. But most have not.

It is harder to hop on planes to chase tips. Publishers have to sign off on expensive travel, and many news organizations can’t afford it. And don’t underestimate the impact COVID had on a generation of journalists. Many couldn’t travel and became stuck on their phones and even more dazzled by a world where you can find out quite a bit without leaving the office.

Editors are overwhelmed, and many don’t have the experience to shepherd the trickiest kinds of stories, the kind that will become even more vital in the Trump era.

And too much reporting, frankly, is done by phone and online. We still need to get out and talk with people and challenge our assumptions and see, face to face, the people we are writing about and for.

Many newsrooms just can’t do this kind of work. It is why ProPublica has created its local network and why the Times is working with local newsrooms.

We are also in an era that too often rewards snark and easy opinion. It is cheaper, of course. And it feels great in this particular era.

So I fear that reporting itself—the act of going out with an open mind, not knowing what you will find—is under threat. Reporting is the central act of journalism—whether it be investigative takeouts or sharp off-the-news coverage. Reporting without preconceived notions, unafraid to state a fact. Reporting not designed to affirm what you already believe or think you know.

So if I could ask us to think about one mission in the coming days, and the coming years: How do we restore reporting, the aggressive gathering of fact, to the center of journalism, where I believe it belongs? How do we make sure every state and city has a newsroom that can do that kind of work?

And how do we make the whole thing a lot more interesting, less dutiful, with vivid visual journalism and risk-taking and, yes, scoops?

I can’t help thinking of Mason Bryan, my friend who is an editor at the Prison Journalism Project, who struggles serving an audience of people who all too often have only a fifth-grade education. Rather than do a 3,500-word story about life in prison during a monumental heat wave, Mason and his colleagues sent out a request to prisoners all across the country to answer the question: How do I know when it is sweltering in my prison?

The answers were wonderful and vivid: From James in Wilmington, Delaware: “I know it’s hot in my prison when the floor is weeping.” Another says he knows it’s hot when he is allowed to stay in his boxers all day. Another said he knows it is hot when the guards don’t yell at him for not wearing state-issued pajamas.

That is innovation in storytelling. I didn’t quite realize it until the past couple of years. But you all are doing the most important work there is right now. Local journalism is not only the coverage of local communities. It is the foundation for the future, the place where the future leaders of American journalism are now laboring.

I’m proud to be part of this, honestly.

In 2010, I was hired as a reporter at the Washington Post. Six months into the job, my editor offered me a new role: creating a blog as part of a wider effort to compete with the rise of new digital media sites.

But then something funny happened: as soon as I took the job, I was promptly notified by the Post union that I now had a “digital job” and, therefore, could no longer be a member. Overnight, I was no longer considered a “journalist.”

While the Post and its union have caught up to acknowledging that bloggers can, in fact, be journalists, the industry as a whole has persisted in its dismissive attitude toward digital-first content creators.

The newest crop of content creators have expanded from blogs to YouTube and TikTok and Instagram Reels. They produce their own podcasts and market their own merchandise, raise funds through Patreon or benefit from the largesse of social media platforms that want their own original content. They are hugely popular, and yet media companies are still moving too slowly to cultivate this talent within their organizations. We do that at our peril.

Let’s start with the business angle. Digital advertising never surpassed the revenue that sustained legacy media—TV, radio, and print—as companies like Facebook and Google snatched up the lion’s share of dollars. Those very same companies are now making it easier for content creators to publish on their sites as more and more dollars shift to the platforms: an IAB report in 2023 showed 44 percent of surveyed advertisers planned to move their ad budgets to content creators.

But it’s not just a question of money. At the same time that we see a massive decline in trust in journalistic outlets, content creators have managed to form strong personal bonds with their audiences. This isn’t totally new: the annual Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s “Digital News Report,” a global survey on the state of media, has long shown that people tend to place the most trust in their local news anchors. People like to know people—whether they have a journalist’s diploma or not. This personal touch will likely become even more relevant as Google search results increasingly become AI-generated synopses of various news reports. Audiences may turn there for quick answers, but ultimately they are going to look for a real human connection to make sense of the world around them.

The best of these independent content creators have engaged directly and deeply with their audiences—talking to them in the comments, setting up Discord servers to interact with them, and so on. That conversation with their audience is a key component of their success—something all journalists should learn from.

It also means their audience can tell them when they make a mistake—a type of accountability that news organizations can learn from. The New York Times wasn’t wrong to say they no longer needed to employ an ombudsman, figuring Twitter could do the job instead, but they never took that very important second step: tasking somebody at the organization with responding to those complaints. Meanwhile, independent creators actively engage with comments, responding to people in real time, acknowledging their mistakes, and helping to explain how those missteps happened, deepening people’s trust in their work.

If we fail to adapt our work to the public expectations today, we will lose out on the opportunity to put our work in front of those audiences. Equally important, we will do a disservice to those independent creators, many of whom are uncovering stories that may fall through the cracks at larger media organizations. By failing to embrace these diligent creators in our news organizations, we also fail to provide them the type of editorial support, resources, and—of particular note now—legal support, all of which could limit their potential and make them shy away from riskier investigative work.

Second, by turning up our noses at independent content creators, we signal to online personalities that journalism should not be a priority, which means complex, nuanced dialogue loses out to gratuitous sensationalism. We already see presidential candidates forgoing legacy media and instead sitting down to interviews with podcasts like Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience, which are far more aligned with the casual and unchallenging conversational tone of daytime television than the more rigorous and challenging back-and-forth of, say, 60 Minutes.

One of the outlets that did learn to experiment in this space, funnily enough, was my old home: the Washington Post, which now has a full team dedicated to its TikTok channel. It’s good to see they’ve learned from their mistakes. I’d caution the rest of us to do the same.

The front page of Ben Franklin’s 1730s newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, looks all too similar to newspaper websites of today. The products of local newsrooms have not evolved rapidly enough to keep up with news consumers’ expectations—younger ones in particular.

The Next Gen News project interviewed forty-five young news consumers (eighteen to twenty-four years old) and found a major gap between how these younger news consumers seek information and what is being supplied by legacy news providers. Despite Medill’s 2024 “State of Local News” report showing that the “loss of local newspapers is continuing at an alarming pace,” young news consumers feel overwhelmed by the volume of news and information they face.

Furthermore, what local news consumers are looking for doesn’t match up with the motivations of many trained journalists. Many journalists see their role as a watchdog for the government, giving voice to the unheard and dealing with misinformation, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center study. Unfortunately, Medill’s survey, “How the Chicago area gets its news,” suggests that personal issues like health and money management are the primary reasons for news consumption. Worse still, the survey indicates that only 8 percent of those surveyed consumed news because it is “enjoyable or entertaining.”

Facing a flood of potential news and information, Next Gen News found, young news consumers take breaks from the news, delete apps, or otherwise protect their mental health by changing their news mix. Most of these young news consumers dedicate much, sometimes most, of their news consumption time choosing what to watch, read, or listen to. Once they engage, they move to one of four other modes of consumption:

· Substantiate
· Study
· Socialize
· Sensemake

Most of those modes speak to something young news consumers are missing. They need more background about the issues; they want to explore primary sources for themselves and know what action to take about the problems that affect their world.

Legacy news organizations need to make changes. The behaviors of these young people are a harbinger of the changing consumer tastes. News organizations must mimic popular social formats, entwine content with social media experiences, and create paths to transition from social to direct channels. They must build audience affinity by embracing younger and more diverse creators—perhaps by elevating existing staff members. They need to modernize the language of news, making it more accessible and colloquial. And they must find ways to empower their audiences, giving them paths to take action.

Ryan Hall, the self-described “Internet’s Weatherman,” posts weather/storm videos on YouTube and TikTok. His audience wanted to help survivors of severe weather events, so he launched the Y’All Squad, a nonprofit that claims to have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Most of all, legacy news organizations need to remember that news consumers choose where they get news from; it’s not incumbent on news consumers to come to legacy publishers. Consumers are increasingly choosing social platforms. This is not the first time publishers have struggled with new distribution, but we cannot dismiss consumer preference as foolish or frightening—as we have done so often in the past. Here’s what opinion leaders had to say about a few earlier technological innovations:

· 1929: “[It] delivers only pap—brainless diversions that erode listeners’ ability to think, inquire, and judge,” from “Radio: A Blessing or a Curse?” by Jack Woodford, The Forum.

· 2005: “[It] is a recipe for muddled thinking 
and poor performance,” from “Emails ‘pose threat to IQ’” by Martin Wainwright, The Guardian.

· 2006: “[It] is [an] online fetish site for
foolish collectivism,” from “Wikipedia Is Digital Maoism” by Jaron Lanier, Edge.

As we think about how to embrace the next generation of news consumers and creators, we must:

· Remember that news should come from someone you “know.”

· Give our audience a sense that they can “do something” about the issues we report.

· Ensure that news does not sound like something Ben Franklin would recognize.

One of the biggest un-talked-about challenges of our profession is that we don’t know our country well enough. And by that, I mean our fellow human beings. Our understanding of each other is not sophisticated enough.

What is the role of journalism in bridging that knowledge gap?

Historically, we’ve not been that comfortable getting close to our communities, embedding in them, partnering with them. The digital era has created even more distance. More texting convenience and social platform engagement, for sure, and more people walking the streets with their headphones on, not even waving to each other. Our profession has become expert in mining and building databases, making great use of audience metrics and being able to do amazingly creative work without ever leaving a laptop alone. We’ve also normalized email and Zoom interviews—and I’m not mad about it. But I want to normalize doing neighborhood rounds. Drop by Mr. Lucas’s Variety Mart or Gonzales Park or Lily’s Laundromat or Randy’s Donuts. Wherever people gather, eat, drink, shop, play, work out, hang out, and just be, we should be there too.

How often do we, as journalists, talk to people when we don’t want something from them?

I know we feel a fierce urgency around tackling the threats to democracy and the avalanche of misinformation and holding the new administration accountable as it seeks to implement massive changes in policy and government that will affect everyone. I don’t minimize any of it. We need journalism to be vigilant and brave to meet the moment.

But, somehow, we’ve got to get a better handle on the people who live here. Our profession (along with many other interested parties) pored over exit polls and demographic data and sliced and diced the election results, trying to make sense of what happened in November. I was among them. Here’s some of what happened:

· Donald Trump won all seven battleground states; Kamala Harris fared worse than Joe Biden did four years ago in every one of those states.

· Yet Trump’s raw vote margin was smaller than that of any popular-vote winner since 2000.

· In 2020, four in ten voters said COVID was the top issue for them; in 2024, four in ten said the economy was the top issue.

· Approximately three in ten Black men voted for Trump, double what he got from Black men in 2020.

· Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from six in ten who voted for Biden in 2020.

· Harris did better with college-educated white voters than Biden did in 2020, but Trump gained nine points among voters who never attended college.

· And yet, at the start of his second presidency, Trump’s net approval rating of +7, meaning the difference between the percentage of Americans who approve of him and the percentage who disapprove, was lower than any newly elected president since World War II—with the exception of one man, first-term President Trump.

The polls and data are hard to decipher; they puzzle us. That’s because we don’t know enough about one another. Our real-time exploration is honestly not good enough. Human beings are not static. Those categories we like to analyze—college-educated white women, Black men, English-speaking Latinos ages eighteen to thirty-four—are too big for complex understanding. Human beings don’t fit neatly into these kinds of categories, and besides, they change. Constantly.

Their circumstances change, their mental states, their geographic situations. They have children or not. They have deaths in their families. They have wildly unexpected success, and dramatic, steep falls.

I talked to a friend recently whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. She got divorced, quit a well-paying job, moved from the Northeast to the South (where she used to live and felt more comfortable). The changes in her life may affect how she feels about government, about work, about politics, about every damn thing. This is our reporting challenge. To keep up.

How do we become experts in human beings? How do we nail that coverage?

My contention is that all of the discussion about truth and trust (and Trump) needs grounding in robust local and community-centric reporting. Mastering the enormous challenge of understanding more completely, with greater specificity, our neighbors and neighborhoods, their needs and conditions, is essential for our profession’s survival. And its growth.

Every local news organization won’t be able to run a coffee shop and restaurant, like Max Kabat and the Big Bend Sentinel do in Marfa, Texas. Some are creating community book clubs. My friend Maryam Banikarim cofounded the “Longest Table,” which started in New York City as a pop-up potluck that attracted five hundred people but has now grown to cities and neighborhoods around the country. In LA, my friends at the Boyle Heights Beat, a Latino community-centered news outlet, sponsored a debate around a crucial city council race, and it was packed with local residents.

If our profession is to confront itself, we need to have more courage for disruption. Should we blow up some conventional beats? And for that matter departments and sections? Yes. Get more targeted and focused than education, healthcare, courts, city government, sports, business. Organize ourselves and our work differently. Tell different stories.

And let’s make sure we create enough time for reporters to stop in at Mo’s mechanic shop. Or, for me, Jerry’s Market, two blocks from my house. I love the tuna sandwich there. But what I love most are the conversations. People hanging outside telling stories about their lives, even at night after Jerry’s closes.

Journalists are not going to save democracy.

We are not going to save Trump voters from themselves.

We are not going to stop disinformation—and frankly we should stop using the term, which was never great and today has been weaponized against us.

We are not going to expose Trump and end his political career with some Watergate-like scandal.

On a national and local level, journalists and media organizations have less power and diminished influence. We know this. Much of the population gets its news elsewhere—from online influencers and podcasters whose audiences dwarf most traditional media outlets’. From the ether. From nowhere. From President Trump himself. We have to come to terms with this reality.

It’s equally obvious that as journalists and news organizations we still matter. In fact, we matter enormously—perhaps more than ever. We matter to our audiences. We matter to the culture. We matter to history. But we need to think differently about our role. We are not on offense—fighting to change the narrative. We are playing defense, fighting to protect our rights.

For many years I ran the Committee to Protect Journalists. What I saw as I traveled to support journalists under threat around the world was that journalists and media organizations nearly invariably lost out when they tried to confront the authoritarian directly, believing that ignorance was the enemy and could be defeated with the truth. It doesn’t work that way. What allows journalists to resist repression and fight censorship is not the law, or the norms. It’s power. Once that dynamic shifts, autocratic leaders invariably try to rein in criticism. The media becomes a target.

In this country, President Trump has said he is coming after us. We should believe him. Forces are being marshaled. Kash Patel could be running the FBI soon. Social media is now in the hands of Trump allies—or, in the case of Truth Social, Trump himself. Trump is filing private lawsuits against the media. NPR is on the chopping block.

Playing effective defense is not a retreat. In fact, it’s not going to be easy to hold our ground. If we succeed, we will be defending not only our own rights, but the rights of all Americans—to be informed and to access information they choose, to be full participants in their own future and that of the country. Journalists can’t save democracy. But we can serve it. We can do so by defending our rights effectively, keeping our people safe, and delivering the news and information that our audiences and communities need and deserve.

For more, read an essay, “Preparing for the Onslaught,” that Simon published in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Journalism has found itself in the crosshairs amid the dizzying swirl of news coming out of Washington.

Amid the uncertainty, local journalism got a modest boost last month with the fourth annual Local News Summit, convened in New Orleans—just days ahead of the Super Bowl there—by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism (for which I do some consulting) and Aspen Digital. With a goal to spur the reinvention of local news, the summit brought together about a hundred leaders in local news, philanthropy, journalism more broadly—and, for the first time, an invigorating selection of new news creators.

Many of us have the sense that local news needs not just to be reengineered as a business matter—which it surely does, as most legacy newspapers, especially (but not only) those controlled by hedge funds, continue to wither—but also to be reinvented editorially. The most exciting ideas proffered at the summit pointed in this direction.

For me, the most intriguing of these came from Kevin Merida, former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Washington Post, who now sits on the board of the new Los Angeles Local News Initiative. Lots of people have talked for years about the need to more closely engage with communities, and some have made notable progress in this direction.

But Merida suggested that the time may have come for local newsrooms to be reorganized away from a system of beats based on subject matter (and rooted in legacy newspaper sections dictated by advertising imperatives), such as education, criminal justice, business, etc., to beats centered on neighborhoods or local regions. As Evan Smith, cofounder of the Texas Tribune and now of Emerson Collective, observed approvingly, “proximity is the key,” while Northwestern University Medill professor Jeremy Gilbert, summarizing a recent study on Next Gen News, offered the axiom that the most effective news “must come from someone you know.”

This simple but fairly radical notion of how to organize the scarcest and most valuable of newsroom resources—reporting talent—strikes me as a powerful and potentially revolutionary idea for local news orgs. Of course, subject-matter expertise will always be important, and beats should not be geographically confining; neighborhood reporters might of course still venture out to city halls and local agencies, or even statehouses and the Washington offices of congressional representatives. But a neighborhood focus for the deployment of reporters is an idea we ought to reckon with more seriously.

Other intriguing thoughts from the Local News Summit included the following:

· A number of calls for a more diverse mix of news, with former New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, now running the Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship, calling for “more joy” along with the traditional fare of breaking news, explanatory journalism, and investigative reporting: “It will be hard to grow our audiences unless we broaden our appeal.” Gilbert said news needs to strive to be both more actionable and more hopeful. Baquet also pointed out that while journalists often mourn an undersupply of news, readers more often complain about being overwhelmed by information and need help sorting through it.

· Participants wisely warned that headlines and social media posts that sensationalize or trivialize the reporting for which they seek attention are having the effect of eroding reader trust.

· Spotlight PA CEO Christopher Baxter called for an avowedly populist pitch on behalf of newer entrants in local news, portraying them as a response to hedge fund gutting and neglect of community needs around the country.

· Noting the Trump administration’s rhetorical attacks on the press, and the echoes already starting to surface locally around the nation, a number of summit participants suggested a need for what they termed “collective security” and ultimately perhaps even a “NATO for News” that would come jointly to the defense of any press outlet threatened for the free exercise of its constitutional rights.

· Unusual for a local-journalism gathering was the presence of a dozen news creators publishing independently on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or Substack, some at meaningful scale and earning significant income. Several are native to these media platforms and bring the fresh perspective of other career paths, while others have created second careers following roles at CNN, NBC News, or the Globe & Mail.

The summit concluded on the last day of January with the presentation of a range of “big bets for local news,” initiatives now underway or proposed, and in need of greater support or suitable for wider adoption. Two struck this observer as particularly notable. Jake Hylton, Lookout News’s founding executive director, highlighted the Queer News Network, which launched in prototype last year. Also spotlighted was the annual “Big Towns” convention, focused on cities and towns with populations generally between fifty thousand and three hundred thousand. Christiaan Mader, the founder of The Current of Lafayette, Louisiana (disclosure: another occasional consulting client of mine), who has led the Big Towns project, noted that more than a third of Americans live in communities of this size, decidedly neither rural nor large cities.

There is no question that ours is a moment of confusion in our country and in journalism, and of no little despair. At the same time, as the setting in New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth year since Hurricane Katrina should remind us, destruction, while real and painful, can also provide the impetus for rebuilding and reimagining. At its best moments, this year’s Local News Summit offered some important hints at the way forward.