The limitations of the ‘news ecosystem’ metaphor
Metaphors are useful, until they’re not. A few years ago, I taught basic ecology to preschool students, using a tarp as a teaching tool. I would help a group of small children gather on the blue piece of plastic, explaining that each child represented an animal and that the confines of the blue plastic square represented their home. Over time, I would fold the tarp in halves as the “ecosystem” deteriorated, narrating a series of imagined environmental factors. Students would shuffle, contort, or be forced to step off the tarp. Animals in changing environments, I told them, must likewise move, adapt, or die.
Amanda Richardson talks the path to nonprofit news in New Jersey
Last week, the Corporation for New Jersey Local Media announced that the New Jersey Hills Media Group had committed to a partnership to convert all fourteen of the chain’s newspapers to non-profit ownership. If the transition is successful, New Jersey Hills Media Group will be the largest nonprofit weekly newspaper chain in the country.
CJR spoke to Amanda Richardson, executive director of the Corporation for New Jersey Local Media, about the process of establishing a partnership, the nonprofit business model, and hopes for the future. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What I’ve learned in nine months of covering the journalism crisis
When I began writing this newsletter, in June, I imagined the local journalism crisis as a graph with a simple line, rising and falling with each wave of cuts, marking how the world of news was getting worse or getting better. After nine months of reporting, I’ve realized it’s not that simple. It’s not just about what the numbers mean for those who were laid off or furloughed, but sometimes, how the newsroom that is left survives. A graph shows what is lost and gained, but not what it means to undergo such radical fluctuation and change.
In Vermont, one hyperlocal newsroom aims to fill a void
Record
ceased publication at the end of March, Waterbury, Vermont, was on its way to becoming another news desert. At the time, Lisa Scagliotti a longtime Waterbury resident who used to work as managing editor of two of the
Record’s sister weeklies was running a journalism internship program at the University of Vermont: training students, offering editing and feedback, and helping aspiring journalists place work in local publications. When covid-19 interrupted daily life, students’ schedules were upended, and Scagliotti’s local paper shut down. So she and her students seized the moment and launched their own publication: the
“If voters aren’t listening, then what are we doing here?” A Q&A with Pat Rynard
On January 4, political news site
Iowa Starting Line announced it was going on hiatus until further notice. “Good journalism should hold the powerful accountable, but it should do so in reality, not just theory,” Pat Rynard, founder and managing editor, wrote. “And if voters aren’t listening to it, then what are we doing here?”
Rynard launched
Iowa Starting Line in 2015 as a left-leaning news blog for political insiders “a way to bring some balance to the online political conversation in Iowa,” he says. Over the years, the publication evolved into a full-fledged news outlet with a large staff. One year ago, in the lead-up to a chaotic primary election, the