If you know the name Steven Waldman, it’s probably because of his involvement in helping create Report for America, the nearly decade-old nonprofit endeavor to match ambitious journalists with growing newsrooms that at times has funded 30-40 reporters covering the education beat alone.
What you may not know is that Waldman is now growing a new organization called Rebuild Local News, an even more ambitious effort to win government support for news coverage that is dropping precipitously.
The former politics and government reporter is now now doing politics and government — an irony of which he’s well aware.
Watch or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to it on Spotify or Apple.
Waldman’s overall take is that the state of local news is bleak even while there’s so much innovation going on.
“There’s a lot of wonderful new things going on,” says Waldman. “They just tend to be small.”
That’s why you hear about the same “green shoots” at conferences, he says, but innovation can still seem hard to find when you’re looking at the whole ecosystem of 7,000 local newspapers and TV stations.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s having an impact because it’s a minority of what we’re experiencing.”
Asked to name some examples of innovation and leadership towards journalism reform, Waldman cites Outlier in Detroit, the American Journalism Project’s efforts to train people to run the business side of journalism organizations, Ken Doctor’s Lookout Santa Cruz, Documented, Report for America, and Spotlight PA.
When it comes to building intermediary nonprofits, Waldman’s big lesson may be the peril of relying on big grants like the $2 million that Facebook gave RFA rather than a diversified set of funders.
He’s also learned to pivote when necessary, as in the case of broadening out his new organization’s initial focus on the U.S. Congress to focus on states — now six of them — that have passed laws that provide an estimated $75 million in revenue for journalism.
Other notable insights:
*Twitter still has its moments but LinkedIn is the place to spend time.
*Attracting younger people remains a journalism weak spot.
*Non-traditional journalists who succeed tend to be national rather than local.
*Desperate times have made traditional newsrooms much more interested in non-traditional content creators.
Previously from The Grade
How a Teach For America-inspired journalism program aims to bolster local news coverage (on the initial 2017 launch of Report For America)
Report for America goes to school (2020)
Literacy, blue-state politics, & media reluctance (with The Argument’s Kelsey Piper)
How to cover Trump 2.0? (with ProPublica alum Dick Tofel)
Eviction, housing affordability, & rethinking education news (with Pulitzer finalist AP education reporter Bianca Toness)
Inside the Harper’s magazine story about teaching at an ESA-funded micro-school (with Harper’s magazine writer Chandler Fritz)
