Help for Local Newsrooms Needs to Meet Them Where They Are

How to deal with the problem of being “fried and frozen”

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

I had the opportunity recently to talk to well more than a dozen local newsroom leaders about how some folks at the national level might help them (other than by sending money). I listened carefully (I hope), and learned a lot. The most important thing I heard was from my friend Laura Frank, whom I memorably met in 2009 when I happened to be scheduled to give a talk in Denver on the night the Rocky Mountain News, where she worked as an investigative reporter, shut down. Laura, who has worked in nonprofit news almost ever since, and now runs the Colorado News Collaborative, offered a warning.

Many if not most local newsrooms, she said, are stressed from tight budgets, enormous demands from managers and readers, and never-ending change. They are confronted by a flood tide of news— the ranks of public relations professionals have exploded even as those of journalists have shrunk— and it is a struggle to separate news from noise, wheat from chaff. At the same time, she continued, they find it difficult to spare the attention and effort sometimes even to accept proffered help. In her memorable phrase, they are, thus, simultaneously “fried and frozen.” It beautifully summed up a lot of what I saw on my recent calls and have observed elsewhere in recent months and years.

fried and frozen

Everybody understands the “fried” part—it’s an element of why they want to pitch in. But I think many people structuring national initiatives to aid local newsrooms aren’t taking the “frozen” part sufficiently into account. Here are some of the manifestations and implications of that:

• If you are offering stories or story ideas or resources from which stories might be created to local editors, you need also to ask yourself if they have the bandwidth to think about those possibilities or the capacity to execute on them. If they don’t, you simply aren’t offering enough, or offering a genuine resource. You should augment or transform your offer into something that will produce real results. Maybe it needs to be made even easier to use, or served up artisanally rather than algorithmically. Maybe you need to “push” your offering, and to do so in a customized manner, rather than expecting newsrooms to “pull” it.

• For specialized services like data journalism or audience tools, national players need to better recognize that many local newsrooms don’t yet have either the people or the skills to make use of what may be on offer. It may be that such tools will, at least for a time, have to be accompanied by individualized assistance putting the tools in place and even operating them.

• For some ideas around training, for instance, no matter how well intentioned, it may be that the would-be beneficiaries simply can’t spare the time (or don’t think they can) to take advantage of it. If that’s the case, you either need to somehow convince them otherwise, or to move on to other ways to help. One technique I hope funders will avoid is offering small sums of money for large blocs of newsrooms’ time. Editors and publishers starved for cash may take you up on it, but the trade-off for them may be harmful— at least in opportunity cost.

Needed: operational understanding

All of this will tend to require that national actors— who sometimes like to act like every solution they offer is, almost definitionally, turnkey— become much better acquainted with the detailed operations of those they are seeking to help. And that will mean understanding that, at the operational level, almost every local newsroom is different, and needs to be approached slightly differently. Unfortunately, many national foundations, especially, are notoriously weak in understanding the newsrooms they seek to aid on an operational level.

The problem of “fried and frozen” will also put a premium on listening to the people you want to help, rather than telling them what they need, or what you perceive that they lack. You may be right on those needs and shortcomings, but that’s only the beginning of real solutions. You also need to know whether the help you proffer will actually be taken up, that newsrooms will find the time and the talent to employ it.

As always, the test of philanthropic impact isn’t intentions, it’s results; it isn’t the grantor’s outputs, it’s the recipient’s outcomes. As recognition of the depth and breadth of the business crisis in news grows, more people are trying to help, and more resources are becoming available. That’s great. But the help and the resources must be deployed thoughtfully, and with real awareness of what can and will be actually put to use in the newsrooms doing the work our communities so badly need.