What’s going right

At a time when there is so much tumult in the media industry, a number of journalism thinkers are instead focusing on what’s working in local news, regardless of the ownership model.

This was a theme of a conversation that Editor & Publisher’s Mike Blinder had with George Adelman, director and head of partnerships at FT Strategies, which along with the Knight Foundation recently published a report on commonalities among publishers that have found ways to sustain themselves.

In his summary, Blinder wrote: “Ultimately, the report suggests that the future of local journalism will not be defined by a single innovation or funding model. Instead, it will be shaped by organizations that understand their communities, build direct relationships, diversify revenue and apply technology with purpose.”

Dan Kennedy’s recent piece in The Conversation about the regional formula used in Minnesota, Massachusetts and three other places made a similar point about the importance of mission regardless of ownership.

“Whether owned by wealthy people or run by nonprofits, they place service to their city and region above extracting the last smidgen of revenue they can squeeze out,” he wrote.

Finally, Brian Morrissey in his Rebooting newsletter also tackles the “what’s working” question, one he says he plans to focus on more frequently. The fact that many publishers are in “triage” mode, he writes, often obscures what strategies are effective. He lays out six approaches that he sees are driving sustainability.

News In Focus
Headlines, resources and events aligned with API’s four areas of focus.

Civic Discourse & Democracy

>> This small New Jersey newsroom treated its voter guide like a service product (Center for Cooperative Media) 

Joe Amditis describes how the Jersey Bee found a path to success around a typically low-engagement product: The voter guide. In describing how the Bee approached it during the special primary election to fill the congressional seat previously held by now-Gov. Mikie Sherrill, Amditis says “the product thinking” was key. “A lot of newsrooms create voter guides as static pages and figure out promotion later. The Jersey Bee started with how people would use the thing and designed the experience around that,” he writes.

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Culture & Inclusion

>> ‘Just go independent’ is not a strategy (Influencer Journalism) 

While some laid-off journalists can go the creator route, it’s not realistic for all of them. Certain kinds of journalism today require institutional support that media companies can offer — legal guidance, FOIA support or health insurance, among many others, writes Adriana Lacy. At the same time, the creator community is also growing and thriving. “So here’s where we land: the answer isn’t everyone going solo, and it isn’t everyone staying institutional. It’s building the connective tissue between the two.”

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Community Engagement & Trust

>> New report helps journalists dig deeper into police surveillance technology (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Police technology is “often sold as a silver bullet,” EFF says, billed as a way to make communities safer and eliminate human bias. “Behind the slick marketing is a sprawling, under-scrutinized industry that relies on manufacturing the appearance of effectiveness, not measuring it,” it says. Its new report produced with the Center for Just Journalism and IPVM includes questions to ask, how to assess public records and story ideas for public safety reporting. 

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Revenue & Resilience

>> A new startup is personalizing paywalls for bots and humans alike (Adweek) 

Eventually, writes Mark Stenberg, “the leading answer engines will have consumed and trained on all of the data available on the web,” at which point publishers creating new content will have some leverage over them. Among those developing “payment architectures” to facilitate these deals is a new startup, Monetization OS, he writes, explaining such a system could “use a single infrastructure for content creators to monetize both their human and machine traffic.”

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What else you need to know

📺 Federal Communications Commission chair backs Nexstar, Tegna merger (Reuters)

🤖 X’s algorithm pushes users to lean more conservative, researchers find (Gizmodo)

🔮 Substack, Polymarket announce partnership: ‘Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets’ (The Hill)

📉 How Trump Media collapsed (Popular Information by Judd Legum)

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Weekend reads

+ Opinion: I trusted Jeff Bezos. The joke’s on me. (The New York Times)

+ Essay: I’m a Caribbean journalist. This was my experience visiting America amid harsh scrutiny of non-nationals. (The Colorado Sun)

+ Is it hypocritical for news publishers to complain about tech companies’ platforms — but still be on them? (Nieman Lab)

+ The day Jesse Jackson made me cry, by Kevin Merida (The Atlantic)