10 Comments

Very insightful post, thanks for this. The problem of being "fried and frozen" rings true to me as a co-founder of Report for America where we have worked with about 300 local newsrooms across the country and where over the years we have tried to offer struggling local newsrooms different opportunities to collaborate on editorial projects. Truthfully, it has sometimes been a struggle to find the right formula to work with these struggling newsrooms on editorial collaborations and some of the insights here are very helpful. I am also serving as the publisher of my own local newspaper, and seeing in a very clear and focused way just how hard it is to keep a team working around the difficulties of finding a sustainable way to support local news. Meanwhile, we will be keeping up the good fight to help restore and reinvigorate local journalism in every corner we can. It can sound like hyperbole, but we truly believe our democracy depends on it.

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Yes! You have nailed it!

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Sep 19Liked by Richard J. Tofel

This resonates with both my in-newsroom experience and every client I’ve ever had. Whatever the project, I try to offer help with ruthless prioritization, change management and actually *doing the thing.* thank you for calling this out and to Laura for putting a name to it

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Sep 19Liked by Richard J. Tofel

Dick, as I said to you earlier this morning, you nailed this. Thank you! I hope your readers will especially pay attention to this point:

“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.”

The time for “journalism triage” is over. We must begin to heal the patient. Helping incrementally by offering some training or content or technology doesn’t go far enough. That approach has, in some ways, only delayed fixing the systemic, underlying ailments of the news media business. Those of us who support newsrooms and their evolution must find ways to help them make more time and money internally. Then they can begin to take advantage of other help.

In COLab’s work with more than 180 local news outlets, we see the need to help excise inefficient practices, introduce new technologies, and collaborate on the business side the way we have on the content side. We also see the need that newsrooms need bodies, as Pascale so aptly points out in the comments. They need boots on the ground to help implement these changes. They are, as I said, too "fried and frozen" to do this alone. One approach we’re taking is working with colleges to add some people power, not just in reporting but on the operations side, too. We believe this combined approach can help news leaders create some time and space they need to innovate and really begin reinventing local news in America to better serve their communities. And that, of course, is what they really want to do.

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author

Laura, Thanks so much for this thoughtful comment, as well as for your original insight and powerful phrasing. Hope those trying to help from the "top down" are listening.

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Sep 19Liked by Richard J. Tofel

Great post as always, Dick. This echoes many of the comments I heard at the LION Summit Table Talk on Established Newsrooms. This was a group of about a dozen newsrooms that have published for 10-15 years without explosive growth or a major funding windfall.

Once you get past the No. 1 Question, "Where does the money come from," these similarly situated newsrooms all had different operational & strategic challenges they are trying to find their way through.

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Sep 19Liked by Richard J. Tofel

This post actually brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for describing the problem so clearly.

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Sep 19Liked by Richard J. Tofel

Laura has beautifully summed up the problem. Small newsrooms like ours struggle to get through the day and deliver news to our audience. Would I love to present data visualizations to make a story more impactful and, most importantly, provide readers a better 'product'? Yes, of course. But after 25 years of running a tiny local newsroom, I don't have "one or two people on the team" who can devote time to learn and deploy the latest "tool to leverage [insert AI/data product]."

Besides being fried and frozen, many of us have freezer burn on top of it all. We want to try and adopt new tools, then run into a wall of growing demands on our time by said tools. Services and tools that make a real difference come with realistic descriptions for time commitment and learning curves. Please don't expect an entire small newsroom to work in service of a proffered tool, we really don't have the time.

Just as local doesn't scale up, some tools just don't scale down enough to be of true use for shrinking or permanently-skeletal newsrooms. That's OK, no hard feelings. Send people!

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I appreciate the precision and insight here. As someone trying to offer data services to this audience, it is helpful and I will try to implement the suggestions. Let's also bear in mind, though, that using outside services will generally require collaboration. We aren't Amazon Prime leaving the package on the doorstep. I encourage journalists to decide what they want (from the impossibly large menu) and commit.

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Also on the frozen: If the "fried" editor's paper is part of a chain, like Alden / Media Snooze / Dead F Media, or Contains Nothing Here Inside, they may have bureaucratic hoops to jump through to be allowed to accept such help.

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