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.

Dan and Ellen talk with Mike Beaudet and Lisa Thalhamer. Mike is a colleague at Northeastern, where he is a journalism professor. He is also an investigative reporter at WCVB-TV, Boston's ABC affiliate. He's worked in local television news for more than 30 years. Before joining WCVB-TV he was an investigative reporter and anchor at WFXT-TV in Boston. Beaudet's research at Northeastern focuses on the future of local television news and finding new ways to grow the audience and engage younger viewers where they're consuming content.

Lisa is a journalist and researcher. She's currently editor-in-chief of The Scope, a hyper-local publication in Boston, as well as an adjunct professor at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on improving the mental well-being of journalists, particularly those in local TV news, where she worked for more than 15 years as a producer.

While earning her master's degree at Northeastern, Thalhamer was Reinvent's Video Innovation Scholar, helping newsrooms evolve their video storytelling skills to fit the world of social media.

In keeping with the all-Northeastern theme of this podcast, Dan and Ellen are also joined by Greg Maynard, a student of Dan's who has done a compelling story about what cord-cutting means for local cable access outlets.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the end of an era in Minneapolis. In December, the daily newspaper, the Minnesota Star Tribune, stopped printing copies at their giant brick plant in downtown Minneapolis. The Strib is printing at a Gannett plant in Des Moines, Iowa. That means earlier deadlines, and 125 jobs lost.

Dan has a wild story for his Quick Take. Last summer there was some sad news coming out of Claremont, New Hampshire: the Eagle Times, a star-crossed paper that had had its ups and downs going back to the 1940s, was closing its doors after its wealthy owner, Jay Lucas, failed to meet payroll. At the time, New Hampshire Public Radio ran a story on the shutdown that was harsher than you would have expected. But there was a reason.

Dan and Ellen talk with Jennifer Peter, who was named editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project in September of 2025. The Marshall Project is a national nonprofit that covers issues related to criminal justice. She's only the third editor in 10 years, replacing Susan Chira, a former New York Times editor. Peter started her career as a reporter, working for 12 years at newspapers in Idaho, Connecticut and Virginia before joining The Associated Press in Boston. From the AP, she moved to The Globe, where she rose quickly through the ranks. She was regional editor, politics editor, and city editor. As metro editor, she oversaw The Globe's Boston Marathon bombing coverage, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News.

In 2018 she was promoted to managing editor, the number-two position in the newsroom. In our conversation, Peter tells us about The Marshall Project's mission, including its foray into local news in Cleveland, St. Louis and Jackson, Mississippi.

A production note: Dan is at Northeastern, but Ellen is beaming in from a studio at Brookline Interactive Group, which handles multimedia for the town of Brookline. BIG, as it is known locally, is also host to a class of Brandeis students who travel to Brookline to report and write stories for Brookline.News, the nonprofit newsroom Ellen is part of. BIG provides audio and video of Brookline civic meetings and also works with Brookline public school students on multimedia projects.

Dan has a Quick Take about yet another newspaper that's gone out of business, although this one has an unusual twist. The devastating wildfires that ripped through the Los Angeles area last January have claimed the Palisadian-Post, a twice-monthly newspaper that had been publishing since 1928. The problem is that many of the residents were forced to leave, and though rebuilding is under way, the community hasn't come close to recovering.

One of Dan's Northeastern students, Abbie O'Connor, is from the Pacific Palisades — her home is still standing. She wrote several times in my opinion journalism class during the semester about how the Palisades were affected by the fire. Among other things, an enormous number of Palisades residents moved to Manhattan Beach, re-creating the sense of community they had in their former homes.

Abbie's final project was an enterprise story on racial and economic disparities in the rebuilding resources that are being made available to the mostly white, affluent residents of the Pacific Palisades and the lower-income, historically Black community of Altadena.

Ellen's Quick Take is about Brian McGrory returning as editor of The Boston Globe in January. McGrory left in early 2023 to become chair of Boston University's journalism department. He'll replace Nancy Barnes, who announced last week that she'd be stepping aside.

Dan and Ellen talk with Chris Fitzsimon, publisher and CEO of The States Newsroom, the nation's largest nonprofit news organization covering state government. Chris is also the host of a new podcast called Stories from The States. Recent topics on his pod include the impact of Medicaid cuts, ICE detention, and redistricting.

Fitzsimon knows his way around state politics. From 2004 to 2017, he directed a team of seven journalists at the NC Policy Watch, which he founded. He also hosted a weekly radio show and wrote a syndicated column on North Carolina politics and government.

From 1991 to 1994, he was the spokesperson, speechwriter and policy adviser for the North Carolina speaker of the House. Before that, he was a television news reporter covering politics and government.

Dan has a Quick Take about The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah. In 2019, the Tribune became the first legacy daily newspaper to become a nonprofit. Unlike a few notable hybrids like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Tampa Bay Times, which are for-profit papers owned by nonprofit foundations, the Salt Lake paper is a true nonprofit, just like your local public television or radio station. And the Tribune has been notably successful.

Ellen's Quick Take is on an investigation by SpotlightPA into the director of the Penn State Cancer Institute. The news outlet, which is a nonprofit that provides reporting to more than 90 outlets throughout Pennsylvania, uncovered damaging clinical practices and a toxic work environment. After the story ran last month, the director resigned.

Dan and Ellen talk with Todd Landfried, co-founder and CEO of N2 Media Holdings. As consumers cut the cord on cable TV, he hopes to develop a sustainable model for local news production. We know from our research here at What Works that local television news is still highly trusted. His mission: to reinvent local news for the streaming era.

Ellen is back and fully bionic after a short hiatus for knee replacement surgery.

Dan has a Quick Take about a finding in a recent report by LION Publishers that gets into how to think about raising money. LION, as most of our listeners know, stands for Local Independent Online News. Anyway, its latest sustainability report found that startup news organizations can't just hope that revenues are something that are going to materialize. Fundraising takes dedicated employees, as Dan will explain.

Ellen's Quick Take is on an alt-weekly in Seattle called The Stranger that has become an influential political force. This summer, 47 candidates for local office paid a call on the newsroom in order to seek an editorial endorsement. And they brought snacks!

Dan talks with Kade Krichko, the founder of Ori Magazine, a beautifully crafted premium print publication devoted to grassroots storytelling across the globe. Kade describes himself as a world wanderer with a knack for misadventure. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, ESPN, VICE, and Outside, among other publications. He admits to loving a good story, and writes, "If the tale has a pulse, I'm listening." Kade is a Northeastern University graduate, and a part-time lecturer in the School of Journalism. He created and taught a course in Sports, Media and Digital Storytelling.

Dan also checks in with longtime political journalist Jon Keller. Jon was recently laid off by WBZ-TV (Channel 4) after a 20-year career there. He was one of five staff members who lost their jobs as part of what appears to be a deep corporate purge by David Ellison, whose Skydance Media company bought Paramount earlier this fall. CBS is part of Paramount, and WBZ is part of CBS. Jon is not going away, fortunately, and is still writing for MASSterList and Boston Magazine. He has some sharp observations on the role of local TV news in covering state and city politics. (Ellen is recovering from knee replacement surgery but is producing behind the scenes. She'll return soon.)

Later on in the podcast, Dan has a Quick Take about the latest bad news from our tech overlords. The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the new AI-powered web browsers designed to replace Chrome and Safari are able to circumvent a news organization's digital paywall. Not always — it depends on the technology that was used to build the paywall. But at a time when publishers are already losing traffic because of AI, this is a direct assault on the business model for journalism in the digital age.