News Alchemists #19: "Local journalism is in the wrong business"
Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter, also known as the weekly email that is crazy enough to think there’s hope to be found in journalism even in these challenging times – as long as we recenter everything we do on helping people navigate their lives and participate in their communities.
A lot of the hope I curate for you comes from people smarter than me sharing their thoughts and experiences on LinkedIn. That’s why I made it a point since the start of this newsletter to link out to the profiles of the people I feature, so you can follow them and make your feed a little better every week. (And our feeds really need some help: enshittification is in full swing on LinkedIn too.)
Imagine my joy in seeing this plan coming full circle last week, when The Fix included me in a list of 10 media leaders you should follow on LinkedIn now – along with some of my readers, no less! Shout-out to Ezra, Marcela, Amélie, Isabelle, and Madeleine: it's an honour to post with you.
It seemed only fitting to keep the virtuous circle going by sharing mostly LinkedIn posts in today's 7 links.
Before we get there: you know who is one of the people I always recommend following on LinkedIn? 🧞Matt Cronin, the founder of House of Kaizen and generous sponsor of this newsletter.
Matt regularly shares short video snippets from insightful interviews with subscription experts (not only from the journalism space, and that's a plus), exploring questions such as how to prioritise efforts between retention and acquisition, and how to move from count-based to value-based metrics to measure growth.
Friendly suggestion: join HoK's LinkedIn group, SubscriptionWorks, to add more such insights to your feed – and if your company relies on subscriptions or membership, consider hiring Matt's team to help you find better alignment between your audience's expectations and the experience your product creates for them.
And now, the links – which today are accompanied only by a quote because I had some crazy days and didn't find the time to write all the descriptions I'm doing an experiment 😉
1. Local journalism is in the wrong business 👉 LINK
❝ If local journalism just remains in the news business the conversation will struggle to evolve beyond 'helping to sustain'. But if the industry gets into the local community building business it will give itself a shot at a healthy future.❞
🧞Max Kabat, publisher and co-owner of 🧩 The Big Bend Sentinel
2. What happens when journalists throw a party? 👉 LINK
❝ Beyond being a good strategy to distribute our print product, these gatherings reassure us that we have power to bring people together. Could we think of journalists as conveners? Perhaps we should. In doing so, we can nurture trust, spark curiosity, strengthen communities around information and remind everyone—ourselves included—that journalism can be a source of joy.❞
🧞Jazmín Acuña, co-founder and editorial director of 🧩 El Surti
3. Give people a good product and the option to pay. It’s not rocket science. 👉 LINK
❝ Community is not a buzzword. It’s people coming together over a shared passion and you can’t fake that. It takes patience and genuine caring on the part of the media. [...] Listen to readers. They are sick of your prehistoric ways and demand disruption. They demand good local journalism, not this churnalism rubbish. One more suggestion: collaborate. I dare you. It might just save your career.❞
🧞Michael MacLeod, founder of 🧩 The Edinburgh Minute
4. New hope for the newsroom? 👉 LINK
❝ We think of our members as a resource. They are more than just a bunch of people who want to spend their time and attention on our product. Each one of them also represents knowledge, input, ideas, stories. We have an engaged community of members that, on a daily basis, give us ideas, give us feedback, and help us investigate. When we start researching for a big investigative story, it feels natural to reach out to them and say: "We are working on this story, can you help us?" ❞
Excellent interview in the Media Confidential podcast – hosted by Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber – with 🧞Lea Korsgaard, editor-in-chief and co-founder of 🧩 Zetland. (The interview with Lea starts at 14:07.)
5. We want to be relentlessly reader-centric 👉 LINK
❝ Publishers are too internally focused. By stating up front that we want to be relentlessly reader-centric, and putting mechanisms in place to speak with, learn from, and test with readers, we’re laying the foundations to create a product they can’t live without.❞
🧞Nick Petrie, digital director of 🧩 The i Paper, and one of the original news alchemists!
6. What does it take to start a community newspaper? Passionate, frustrated individuals and a gin distillery 👉 LINK
Great story on The Guardian about a group of locals starting a volunteer newsroom to fill the gap left in their Australian town by the closure of the only local newspaper – doing this work mostly from pubs, cafes, and even a gin distillery.
7. I think communities can be monetized ethically 👉 LINK
This is next level: first time I'm sharing not a LinkedIn post but a LinkedIn comment – wrote by 🧞Ashir Badami (senior lecturer at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism) in response to the post about community that opened last week's newsletter. Add your own comment to join the discussion!
What is this newsletter?
The relationship between journalism and the people it aims to serve is broken. But we can heal it if we learn to put audiences and communities at the centre of everything we do. The News Alchemists newsletter wants to help you to do just that.
Every week I share seven links to give you some hope and to introduce you to the many smart, kind, and courageous people (🧞) who strive every day to use journalism as a force for good in society – and to the organisations (🧩) that show us that a different journalism is possible, and profitable.
To respond to this newsletter, just hit reply. I love hearing from you and reading your questions, comments, and suggestions.
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