Sarabeth Berman on What Dies When Local News Does: The Crisis Nobody's Covering

SARABETH BERMAN:

This is not about some highfalutin idea of we need to be informed to engage in our democracy. This is about how do we have the information to make life easier and so that you can have a seat at the table in your community. And so I think about this work of rebuilding local news as a public good, as a kind of call to action for citizens.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Over the past two decades, local newspapers have been fighting a largely losing battle for survival. The results of this decline have been dramatic. Today's podcast discusses what's really at stake when a community loses its local newspaper. And my guest today will not only answer that question, but propose solutions to this dying medium. Sarabeth Berman is the CEO of the American Journalism Project, the first venture philanthropy dedicated to local news. She discusses the relationship between civic life and local news. The decline of local news means corruption goes unchecked and people disengage, suddenly in the dark on even the most basic issues shaping their neighborhoods. And this crisis is playing out slowly and quietly in communities across the country and largely without the attention it deserves. But while the market can no longer sustain it, Sarabeth points out that local news remains the most trusted form of journalism, particularly when the news organizations are rooted in and accountable to the communities they serve.

And so she argues quite compellingly that they should be treated like an essential public good, a nonprofit model funded through philanthropy and sustained by the community. That is the bet that AJP is making, and so far it's doing pretty well. Here's Sarabeth Berman.

SARABETH BERMAN:

I think it can be easy from afar to watch the decline of local newspapers and see it in the same way we've watched other disruptions that happen from the rise of the internet. I grew up going to Blockbuster. There were thousands of Blockbuster stores. There's now I think like one lonely blockbuster store in Bend, Oregon. For consumers, we now have Netflix online and can stream anything we want whenever we want. But the decline of local newspapers, which happened also because of the rise of the internet, has had these very insidious implications on the health of our communities and ultimately on the strength of our democracy. And the research is really clear on this.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Oh, interesting. Tell me about that.

SARABETH BERMAN:

Communities that lose a local paper, people are less likely to vote. They're less likely to be civically engaged to show up at public meetings, to run for office. And then also people are more polarized in their mindsets. People who live in communities without local news are less likely to want their children to marry someone from the other political party.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I want to drill down on the civic engagement part because I understand that there's a correlation, but I'm wondering if you can speak to the causation. How do we know that these two things are connected and what do you see there?

SARABETH BERMAN:

When you don't know what's going on in your community, you have no reason to get engaged. If you don't know that there is water pollution, why would you show up to talk to your lawmakers about what they could do about it? If you don't know about any of the issues that elected officials are running on, you wouldn't show up. And so while when you go to a local community right now, many people still feel that they're informed because they're being bombarded with information. But what they're informed about are national issues and national news and not the issues of what's happening in their local community. And so not knowing about the issues then makes you less inclined to engage. You asked about how do we know that local news impacts civic engagement? I'll give you a very present day example. There are huge data centers being proposed to be built all over the country right now.

And in Wisconsin where we fund a nonprofit newsroom called Wisconsin Watch, there were these secret developments under discussion to build new data centers in these communities. And people really had no idea these conversations were even going on. Wisconsin Watch got wind of the fact that this was happening and reported on the fact that communities were evaluating these proposals. And as soon as it came into the light, into transparency, the community got so engaged and had very strong feelings about this.

And so once that came to light, communities started really voicing their perspectives on this, both perspectives that were excited about these developments and also perspectives that were very, very nervous and skeptical and against these developments.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Well, that's a great example for a couple reasons, but one of them is that data centers, as you know, obviously use a huge amount of electricity, but they don't create any local jobs. And the cost of that increased demand for electricity falls on the rate payer, the local community that's being serviced by the utility. So they are very much going to receive an additional cost on their day-to-day life without creating any kind of communal good necessarily. And other positives for data centers as well, but that's a great example of a local issue that could very easily fall under the radar screen that has a material impact on the day-to-day living of the citizens of that community.

SARABETH BERMAN:

And I think in the days where people read the local paper, that kind of information was very much available to people. They knew what the big issues in their town were. And now increasingly, people really do not know what's happening in their community, and therefore they don't have the chance to voice their perspective on that.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Okay. So let's dig into the American Journalism Project. What does it actually do?

SARABETH BERMAN:

We are a venture philanthropy, which is a fancy word for saying we raise philanthropic dollars and we invest in local news organizations across the country. We have come to really believe that the nonprofit business model is a smart business model for how to sustain local news. It's really reimagining local news as something that we fund in the way we do other institutions that are very important to our communities that we don't rely solely on the market to provide. Things like our museums, our libraries, and these pillars of our community that help weave us together and that we don't assume the market's going to provide for us. And so we have come to really see this model as a promising way for growing original reporting across the country. We have a team that works with local philanthropy and civic leaders to assess what is the state of local news in your community?

What do you have? What do you not have? We've now talked to thousands of people across the country about what is it that you want from local news? Where are you getting your information right now? And then we use all that to put together a solution for how philanthropy can invest their dollars. So that has led to the launch of many new news organizations. We launched in Ohio, a news organization called Signal Ohio, which started in Cleveland. We have a new news organization in Tulsa called the Tulsa Flyer, a new news organization in Indiana called Mirror Indie.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Well, it sounds like a really pragmatic approach that's got a lot of great momentum and you sound really passionate about it. So I'm curious how you came to this. Was it the loss of local news that first hit you or did the decline in civic engagement grab you? What led you personally to this?

SARABETH BERMAN:

I grew up with parents who joined the Peace Corps. So I grew up with a very, very strong sense of public service in our house. My parents were one of the very first classes of the Peace Corps. They were really inspired by JFK's call to action. So I grew up with stories of hearing about their time in India. And so when I graduated from college, I had a very similar instinct having heard about their travels abroad. So I moved to China and was involved in helping to build Teach For China, which is based on Teach for America. Along the way, I met my husband who was a journalist working in China. And when you're living in a foreign correspondent community, you have a lot of access to some of the most exciting stories, but it was really a unique moment because China, of course, does not have a free and independent press.

And so the Foreign Press Corps was playing a really important role of bringing transparency to China and reporting on issues that the local press was not able to report on. We moved back to the US, I'd spent time abroad, I'd spent time thinking globally and ultimately wanted to invest my time in what was happening locally and felt like this was an area that my experience in the nonprofit industry could use that insight. How do you build strong nonprofits in pursuit of supporting journalism?

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Well, what I like about what you're doing and in the world of finance, you're building durable businesses. There's a focus on this is, to the point of it being a venture fund, you're trying to kickstart it, provide a catalyst, but it's critical that this is something that's durable, it can last after this initial funding period. But I wonder if it creates a bias towards wealthy communities because of the — how do you do this in rural communities?

SARABETH BERMAN:

The way we are currently addressing that is trying to build networks of nonprofit newsrooms, so shared HR, shared finance team — so a team that is thinking about the business and then off the back of that, launching news sites or merging with news sites who are focused on the original reporting in communities. So we see it as an opportunity to bring philanthropy from markets that have more philanthropy to markets that are lower income. I think the other question on the table is the role that public policy can play. We're part of a coalition called the Rebuild Local News Coalition, which is looking at smart policies like income tax credits or tax credits to small business to incentivize them to advertise in local news. So there's a lot of policies that we could generate across the country that would also create conditions for news organizations in smaller markets to be successful.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

How is that being received by local politicians? There's always a tension between government incentives, particularly as it relates to media, and the idea that it's funding or helping support is not aligned with the political messaging of the day.

SARABETH BERMAN:

Any journalist gets very uncomfortable when you start talking about government funding and journalism. One of the primary roles of journalism is to hold government to account, and you certainly don't want, in one hand, taking money, and the other hand writing in your notebook, any policy really does need to be built in a way that ensures editorial independence. What's interesting is local lawmakers really love their local newspaper. I remember when the New Bedford Light launched, which is a new nonprofit newsroom in New Bedford, Massachusetts, there was this great quote from the mayor who said, "It used to be that I could not sneeze without someone asking me a question, and now I can't get anyone to ask me any questions." Local lawmakers understand the relationship between local news and their work, and they need that mechanism to get their messages out there, to ask questions, to help the community understand the issues that they're dealing with.

A lot of it really comes back to people wanting their community's story to be told by their community and not by national news flying in when there's a crisis in their community, but really wanting people of their place telling their story. And so we have a lot of allies on both sides of the aisle that care about this issue.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Did the cutting of funding for the corporation public broadcasting and PBS as a subsidiary, did that just increase the urgency for what you're doing or was that just a different lane altogether?

SARABETH BERMAN:

I think it increased the urgency. It's the further erosion of local information ecosystems and further evidence that we need new models for how we're funding and distributing local news and communities.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

What we've seen in the modern media ecosystem is this bifurcation of everybody sort of having to go to one side of the poll. And then The New York Times would consider themselves independent, but they're seen as left leaning, The Wall Street Journal, seen as right leaning, and then you kind of just go out from there and it's clearly an effective business model to be more partisan in your reporting. How do you create a system that these local organizations don't have to fall into that same trap?

SARABETH BERMAN:

I think the more local you get, the less polarizing the issues are. That's not to say that people don't care incredibly passionately about the issues, but they fall less cleanly into those red and blue teams. And what we find is that the more local the news is, the more accountable people are to their communities. You are out in your community. If people disagree with you, they are going to tell you. So there's a real accountability mechanism built into the fact that you're in your community, you're interacting with your community. If you get a story wrong, you're going to hear about it right away. And so that relationship that readers have to local reporters is very different than a relationship you may have with, say, a Jake Tapper, who is someone very far away talking about issues very far away from you.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Given the value of this as a public good, why is there not a for- profit business model that can fill this vacuum?

SARABETH BERMAN:

There are some profitable for- profit local news organizations across the country. So it is not to say that it is impossible to run a profitable business that does local news. Our starting point for the problem we're trying to solve is what is minimum viable journalism for our democracy to succeed? What does our country need in terms of the number of journalists across the country, in counties across the country, and how are we going to finance and sustain that? And there is very little evidence that you can do that through a for- profit business model. And so while we're cheering on individual entrepreneurs who can make a for- profit business model work with one or two reporters, we are also clear-eyed that there is a level of original reporting we need in communities that the market hasn't resolved for.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

How do you measure success? I mean, because on the one hand, you have impact of story, but it seems like that may at times be juxtaposed to page clicks, for example, or the substance of the story. How do you help these organizations find the right balance or does it happen organically?

SARABETH BERMAN:

The starting point needs to be, are you helping your community get stronger? And we need to be thinking very thoughtfully about, are we building news organizations that are helping to reverse those trends? And of course, part of reversing those trends needs to be having readers who read it. And also, are you doing investigations that help shift policy, help bring understanding to communities? That's different than driving a particular policy outcome, but it is equally as important, which is, are you giving your community the information they need to be participants? And so those are the kinds of metrics that over time we need to measure. On the shorter term, we think about a few things. One is, are these organizations growing their revenue? Are they able to inspire philanthropy? Are they able to inspire readers to give? Are they able to activate advertisers and corporate sponsors? Philanthropy's not going to fund you if you're not having an impact on a community.

Readers aren't going to fund you if they don't think you're valuable. Sponsors aren't going to fund you if they don't see the brand value and the audience that you're able to connect to.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Where do you get the most pushback? I mean, are there people fighting against this? Are there people that have sort of a antagonistic response to it?

SARABETH BERMAN:

I would say there are people who believe right now that the battle for our democracy is a partisan battle, and they need to be investing their dollars on partisan wins or maybe shorter term wins in what happens in Washington. And I think our perspective is that in addition to people advocating for whatever their political beliefs are, we also need to be investing in the kind of basic civic infrastructure that makes the democracy work.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I've been struck this week in particular. We just started military operations in Iran and the misinformation about the war on social media seems to have peaked above anything I've seen in the past. I'm wondering how you think about AI in all of this and the role that misinformation's playing because it feels like as a society, we're tipping on the precipice of living in a truly post-factual world.

SARABETH BERMAN:

I share that fear. I think AI is both an extraordinary tool for local reporting and local news organizations, and we are seeing news organizations use AI in ways that allows them to do a lot more with a lot less. So you can now, instead of sending a reporter to a public meeting, you can now read through the transcripts, create tools that will notify you if something important happened to that meeting that you should be aware of. It's been extraordinarily helpful with translation. So now news organizations can publish in many languages, in culturally competent ways that actually valuable to readers in different languages. So there's a lot of use cases for AI that we think are really exciting. There's also this real fear that we are going to see fast spread of misinformation. I think we're already seeing it that will live in a space where people really can't make sense of what is true and what is not.

And I think in that space, the trust factor that local news has is so important. At a moment where trust in institutions is plummeting, trust in the news media is lower than trust in Congress. I mean, local news is still extraordinarily well trusted. So I think there is a real opportunity for local news organizations to have real trust value within communities in a way where people are having trouble making sense of what's true and what's not, and you need those trusted purveyors of information.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

How about opinion pieces? What role did they play in local news? Because we've seen the opinion sections of places like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have grown substantially in recent years and you've talked about the need for independence in local news. So how do you incorporate opinion into that model, if at all?

SARABETH BERMAN:

Most of our news organizations are not primarily focusing on opinion writing. I think they're feeling like the dearth in communities is not in opinions, it's in original reporting. Some of them do have robust opinion sections, and it can be a really powerful way of engaging your community because people from the community can publish their perspectives. So that's often the way these news organizations are structuring their opinion or ideas sections. So it's less about the publication having an opinion and more about platforming and editing really smart, well-informed opinions from the communities. One of our news organizations is the Salt Lake Tribune, which is over a century old. And in 2019, they transitioned to a nonprofit and they have a really robust opinion section and a robust newsroom. But by and large, this effort that we're undergoing is really about rebuilding original reporting in communities.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Is there a cultural component of this, this sort of just getting people back into the habit of engaging their local news?

SARABETH BERMAN:

Absolutely. It's interesting how much a lot of these news organization strategies go back to basics. They are hosting community events. They're showing up in public libraries. They are doing the in real life activities you do to build community and build audience. And that's a big part of reestablishing and build the culture that this is something we need in communities and help create the mindset that you're not just supporting this as a transactional exchange in the way you do your Netflix subscription, but you're supporting this because you think that this is important to your community, not just for you to have that information, but for your neighbors to have that information.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

You've raised quite a bit of money, over $200 million so far for this project. How much does it take to sort of seed and fund this and get this like two decade decline reversed?

SARABETH BERMAN:

We're trying to build in a billion dollar nonprofit news sector. When we started in 2019, nonprofit local news was under a hundred million dollars. We're trying to accelerate that growth to in a billion dollar industry. It's more than tripled since we started. So we're watching that happen by news organizations launching and news organizations growing. And we think that you can provide the kind of original reporting we've talked about across the country with a sector that's about a billion dollars. The newspaper industry used to be closer to 60 billion. So we're talking about building a much cheaper industry. And that's of course because a lot of the roles that the newspaper used to play in a community, they no longer need to play. You used to go to the newspaper for the weather. You used to go to the newspaper for the —

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Movie times.

SARABETH BERMAN:

Movie times. There were a lot of roles that the newspaper played that we don't need to rebuild, but there are aspects of it that we really do need to rebuild.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

What's amazing is, I mean, it's a big number, but it's also a tiny number in terms of thinking about the impact that comes from this. If it's really impacting a direct causation on civic engagement in this country, that is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

SARABETH BERMAN:

I think a lot of people, when they hear what we're trying to do, just think like, "I don't really think that's possible." But actually, if you map it out, there is a lot of reasons to believe that it is possible. We spend about $2.5 billion a year in philanthropy on the performing arts. There's no reason to believe that we couldn't build this civic sector and we're seeing it happen. We're seeing more philanthropy flowing in. We're seeing these new models emerge. We're seeing readers invest. I think it will take several years to do this, but I absolutely think it's possible.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Are there instances where you have invested in a local news organization and it hasn't worked? And were there learnings from that or have they all worked?

SARABETH BERMAN:

Yeah, absolutely. We wouldn't be doing our jobs well if everything was working because I say that seriously because I think philanthropy needs to have a real risk tolerance. We helped launch a new nonprofit newsroom in Houston several years ago called Houston Landing, and it shut down after two years. And so some of the dynamics at play are similar to, I think any investor would be familiar. You do have the right management in place. Are you creating a product? In this case, the product is journalism that is differentiated and that the community is hungry for, therefore willing to pay. Are you disciplined about financial management from the start? Are you building a strong startup culture? All those things play into a successful enterprise and not all those pieces come together all the time.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Six years in, what is your biggest fear or concern about the ability to succeed at this point?

SARABETH BERMAN:

I think anyone who's awake right now should be unsettled by the rise of AI and what that will mean for how audiences are consuming information and engaging with information. I think that these businesses are really hard. There is no silver bullet to solving local news across the country. To run a successful nonprofit news organization, you need to both be incredibly competent as journalists. You have to be really responsive to evolving audience habits and the ways in which people are shifting how they get information. You also need to be really strong at running a successful nonprofit, making the case for why your work matters to philanthropy and to readers. So we really need the talent out there who can invest in making this happen. I think that's a real challenge. Can you build the talent core across the country to build these organizations? There's a lot of reasons to believe you can, and we see a lot of talent from all over the country coming into this space, but that's something that keeps me up at night.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Is there a world where AI can do this on its own?

SARABETH BERMAN:

I think there is an edge of information that AI will never be able to replace, and I believe the AI companies know that also. I think about Anna Wolf, a young reporter in Mississippi who spent years digging into the question of why it was that only 1% of families in Mississippi were being approved for welfare funding. In a state that poor, why was that happening? It took years of digging and cultivating sources for her to ultimately get access to information that was leaked to her, that made clear a sprawling misuse of welfare funding that involved people at the highest corners of power in the state, including the former football star, Brett Favre. That wouldn't have happened without a person cultivating those relationships, asking that question, digging in. So I think there is an element of original reporting that AI will never replace, and certainly there are aspects that AI will, and that news organizations are trying to be really savvy about leveraging AI in those ways.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

So I'm particularly curious, given your background, what you think makes a good citizen. What are the characteristics?

SARABETH BERMAN:

There's this very famous quote from Thomas Jefferson about newspapers where he says, where I had to choose between a government with no newspapers or newspapers with no government, I would choose the latter. And I think underneath that quote is a understanding that you need an informed citizenry for our government and our society to function. So I think really prioritizing being informed, but not just being informed, but ensuring that we have a healthy information ecosystem is a very key component to being a citizen in our country. And so I think about this work of rebuilding local news as a public good, as a kind of call to action for citizens, that we support local news because we know as citizens, we need to stay informed. This is not about some highfalutin idea of we need to be informed to engage in our democracy. This is about how do we have the information to make life easier and so that you can have a seat at the table in your community for what happens to your kids at school or what happens to your street and your neighbors.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Sarabeth, thank you so much. This has been awesome.

SARABETH BERMAN:

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Sarabeth, you're doing such important work and I'm excited to see the American Journalism Project continue to grow. So thank you for spending this time with me. I really appreciate it. And listeners, head to theajp.org to learn more. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the future of storytelling and charts and leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.