On this episode, Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy talk with Barbara "Bob" Allen, an LA-based journalist, trainer and consultant who founded CollegeJournalism.org in 2025. The site provides resources and news for journalism educators and student media advisers across the country.

Allen is also the editor of the Student Press Report, a brand-new national news desk covering the state of the college press. The debut piece — "Cash-starved and censored, America's student press is in crisis" — lays out the financial and free-press challenges facing campus newsrooms. Allen also writes the weekly College Journalism Newsletter.

Allen brings decades of experience mentoring student journalists. She was adviser to the student newspaper at Oklahoma State University and most recently served as director of college programming at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She holds a master's degree from the University of Missouri, home to both a campus paper — The Maneater — and the Columbia Missourian, a lab newspaper covering the city of Columbia.

Allen has also led an ambitious project to map every college newspaper in the country, in collaboration with the University of Vermont's Center for Community News. That effort found more than 1,100 college newspapers, with 766 located in or adjacent to counties with little or no local news access.

Dan's Quick Take stays close to home. The Huntington News, Northeastern's independent student newspaper, just celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Ellen's Quick Take is about a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Provincetown. The Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that partners with the Provincetown Independent, raised money from more than 100 donors to buy the condo to house reporters. Ed Miller, editor and co-founder of the Indie, told Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher that housing was a major barrier to attracting staff to his well-regarded newspaper on the Outer Cape.

Dan and Ellen talk with Dale Anglin, the inaugural executive director of Press Forward, a philanthropic effort that is dedicated to funding local news initiatives nationwide.

Before she was named as the leader of Press Forward, Anglin served as a vice president for grantmaking at the Cleveland Foundation. She also led the foundation's journalism strategy. Then and now, she focuses on local news and information as a way to restore a sense of community.

Dan has a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, one of the most prominent nonprofit digital startups. It looks like readers of The Washington Post who live in the DC area may not be deprived of local news and sports after all despite the recent deep cuts ordered by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. The Banner is expanding, and it's part of executive editor Audrey Cooper's mission to build civic engagement through community journalism.

Ellen's Quick Take is on a bill in New York state that attempts to put some guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Among other things, it would require disclosures, and mandate supervision and fact-checking by actual human editors. It received a hearty endorsement from journalism industry unions. But there's a lot of catching up to do to reign in the robots.

Dan and Ellen talk with Charlie Sennott, a former foreign correspondent at The Boston Globe who left in 2008 to become a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded Global Post and The Ground Truth Project. Ground Truth, a nonprofit, was a partner to GBH News, FRONTLINE, PRX The World, and the PBS NewsHour. It focused on partnerships to amplify international and national news projects.

Now, Charlie has turned his attention to local news. He teamed up with Steve Waldman to launch Report for America as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Dan and Ellen talked with Waldman on an earlier podcast.

Sennott's newest creation is GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC based in Woods Hole, where he leads a small staff and publishes and writes the GroundTruth newsletter on Substack. The non-profit that was called "The GroundTruth Project" has recently rebranded to call itself Report Local with Report for America and Report for the World as its flagship initiatives. Report Local and the University of Missouri School of Journalism did groundbreaking work on water issues in the Mississippi River Basin.

In his most recent post on Substack, Sennott writes about this new branding. He also writes about how he officially stepped aside from the program, but remains incredibly proud of the movement it has created.

As his own act of community service, Sennott is also serving as the publisher and editor of the Martha's Vineyard Times on Martha's Vineyard where he and his wife, Julie, who has an extended family on the Island, now live year round.

Dan and Ellen are also joined by Alexis Algazy, a Northeastern student who has done a compelling story about why politicians need to engage in storytelling on social media.

Dan has a Quick Take about public support for local news. Politico recently published an in-depth story on what's gone wrong with a program in California that was supposed to provide $250 million to help fund local news over a five-year period, with the money to come from the state and from Google. The deal seems to be coming apart. And yet there are reasons to be optimistic — as you will hear.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the role of video in recording the violent acts of ICE agents in Minneapolis, and the protests all over that city. Video by bystanders has played an important role in exposing what's happening on the ground. But video and social media in general also pose a challenge for reporters covering the story for the Minnesota Star Tribune. Editor Kathleen Hennessey spoke about it in a brief interview with Semafor.