Entrepreneurship
How we built equitable and thriving salaries
Figuring out a salary model is one of a newsroom start-up’s toughest challenges, but can also be one of its most rewarding.
Rethinking best practices for working with freelancers
Extending organizational values to your freelance relationships.
How to tell if your news organization suffers from founder’s syndrome
Stave off founderitis by focusing on the fundamentals.
How being a solopreneur has forced me to reckon with my limitations
Learning to set boundaries while I launch a news organization — amid a pandemic — is as important as learning to market and fundraise.
Founding Four Points
A community centered newsroom on the Crow Indian Reservation, Montana.
Business, journalism competition offers real-world industry solutions to Hearken, AP
A University of Missouri team tasked with finding solutions to help Hearken, an engagement consulting startup, expand the business’s target market and make it more sustainable, won the 12th annual Center for the Digital Globe (CDIG) media symposium.
Saving democracy is a slogan not a strategy
In the past four years, I’ve seen increasingly fervent articles, studies and op-eds declaring journalism’s essential role in a healthy democracy. As we’ve heard many times before, local news is critical to informing communities and promoting civic engagement. The very presence of a local news organization revives democracy, underpins democracy, sustains democracy, and yet these proclamations have been strikingly disconnected from reality.
Narrative change: Designing conversations for an inclusive economy
The sustainability of local journalism is tied to the strength of local business and both have been rocked by a deadly pandemic and roused by nationwide rallies for racial equity. In developing blueprints for an equitable post-pandemic recovery, communities have a critical opportunity to address the role of local media in creating a more accurate … Continued
Journalists must play a vital role in fixing America’s false economic narrative
From the Federal Reserve to the U.S. Economic Development Administration to the American Planning Association, pressure is mounting in policy and planning circles to address the economic consequences of structural racism. In an effort to reboot an economy still impacted by COVID-19, the inherited disparities of a pre-pandemic segregationist society have been laid bare across … Continued
What’s Working: Newsletters may be reaching their limits, but there’s hope beyond the inbox
Email newsletters are thriving, but their ascendancy in today’s media brings with it a certain foreboding: Given how successful the format has been the past few years — and how many writers have turned to newsletter platforms like Substack to build their personal brands and possibly earn some real money — it feels almost inevitable there … Continued