Fostering civic participation and community resilience through journalism with Baltimore Beat’s Lisa Snowden (LNM Episode 41)

Lisa Snowden, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Baltimore Beat, shares her journey from being a reporter to running a Black-led newsroom dedicated to covering Baltimore’s diverse communities. She discusses the challenges and opportunities of sustaining a nonprofit news outlet, supported by a seven-figure donation that helped stabilize the Beat after its initial struggles as a for-profit venture. Lisa emphasizes the importance of intentional, community-centered journalism that aims to elevate underrepresented voices and provide a nuanced perspective on Baltimore’s complex social issues.

She also delves into the dynamics of diversity within newsrooms, the need to foster an inclusive environment, and the unique challenges Black-led media face in navigating networks of power. Lisa highlights the Baltimore Beat’s approach to journalism as a means of empowering residents through trustworthy storytelling and tangible community engagement, such as the Beat Box initiative distributing both newspapers and essential goods.

With reflections on the current state of local news, Lisa offers insights into maintaining sustainable and impactful reporting amidst an ever-changing media landscape, particularly for underserved audiences.

Episode chapters:
(00:02:40) – Origins of Baltimore Beat and Lisa’s journalism journey
(00:09:42) – Financial planning after a seven-figure donation
(00:12:35) – Baltimore’s diverse communities and the need for another news source
(00:17:41) – Sustainably reaching underserved audiences and the role of print
(00:23:29) – Diversity challenges in newsrooms and fostering inclusion
(00:34:22) – Black publishers and navigating networks of power
(00:40:31) – Transitioning to leadership and lessons in entrepreneurship
(00:50:37) – Rapid-fire questions
(01:02:32) – Media and local recommendations

Listen to the episode here:

Bio:

Lisa Snowden is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Baltimore Beat, a digital and print-based news product based in Baltimore City. Passionate about storytelling and community empowerment, Snowden has dedicated her life to journalism, seeking to elevate underrepresented voices and drive meaningful conversations around pressing societal issues. With over 15 years of rich experience in local journalism, she’s shaped Baltimore Beat into an innovative and inclusive platform, focusing on literary reportage and insightful, impactful reporting.

Snowden’s mission is to foster civic participation, combat misinformation, and uphold journalistic integrity while contributing to the resilience and awareness of Baltimore’s diverse and vibrant communities. She aims to create a news ecosystem that reflects Baltimoreans’ lived experiences and serves as a catalyst for positive change and community empowerment.

Full transcript:

(recorded via Riverside.fm; transcript automated via Castmagic.io, mostly unedited)

LISA SNOWDEN [00:00:00]:People have lots and lots of options now, but the way that you overcome that as a news outlet is to make yourself irresistible, is to know your audience very, very well and create a situation where they choose you. Out of all the noise of everything that's happening, they say, let me go look at what The Beat has to say about this. And I think that that's something that Black people have had to do, that other news organizations that serve indigenous folks, Latino folks, same thing. There's stuff to learn, I think, about that because then you don't do every story. Right now, I've watched a lot happen online, you know, regarding our presidential election. There's a lot of noise, but it doesn't feel like a lot of journalism. And I wonder if folks were more intentional about what they were saying and why, then maybe the news would be a little more helpful.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:01:02]: Welcome to the Local News Matters podcast, where we explore pathways to stronger journalism, better businesses, and healthier communities. I'm Tim Regan-Porter, CEO of the Colorado Press Association.

This episode, I talk with Lisa Snowden, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Baltimore Beat, a print and digital news outlet dedicated to covering Baltimore’s diverse communities. We dive into the origins of Baltimore Beat, its mission to elevate underrepresented voices, and the role of journalism in fostering civic engagement and community empowerment.

Lisa shares insights into her journey from being a beat reporter to running her own news organization, offering a candid look at the challenges and triumphs of creating a platform that aims to reflect Baltimore residents’ lived experiences. We discuss the importance of intentional journalism, the unique challenges of leading a Black-led newsroom, and how Baltimore Beat is striving to bridge the gaps left by mainstream media. Lisa also shares her perspective on community-centered reporting and the ways in which Baltimore Beat is innovating to keep the city’s residents informed and engaged.

If you like this episode and what we're doing more generally, please follow in your favorite podcast app, leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and tell your friends about us. This is a side project and a labor of love, and your support means a lot. You can find past episodes, full transcripts, and relevant links, and sign up for our newsletter at localnewsmatterspodcast.com, or for lazy typists like me at lnmpod.com. You also follow us on most social media channels @lnmpod.

And now I bring you Lisa Snowden.

Welcome to the podcast, Lisa.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:02:39]: Thank you so much for having me on.

Origins of Baltimore Beat and Lisa’s journalism journey

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:02:40]: Yeah. It's great to have you. Alright. Well, why don't we start with just giving us a little bit of your background and how you started the Baltimore Beat?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:02:50]: Sure. I never thought that I was gonna be running a newspaper. I thought that I was going to, you know, be in a newsroom, maybe have a beat, and that'd be my career. I got into journalism because I loved reading and I loved writing. I graduated from a school outside of Baltimore City called Towson University. My first job was at a TV station in Baltimore, and I pretty much stayed. I went from that TV station to—well, while I was at that TV station, transitioning from writing for the shows to writing for online, which has kind of been like the trajectory of my career, has been kind of the way that journalism, I think, has been going recently, which is figuring out how to chart the course between what's heard or what's seen, what goes online. How do you spread information? So worked at that TV station, worked at a website that did news for first responders, spent some time freelancing, got hired at Baltimore City Paper, which was Baltimore's 40-year-old alt-weekly.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:04:03]: That was definitely my favorite job. And, you know, as the story goes, for many of us, it ended quickly. Baltimore City Paper was owned by Baltimore Sun, which was owned by a large corporation who felt like it wasn't making enough money, so they ended it. When that ended, we still had so many people who loved City Paper. We had people that wanted to buy City Paper and we had been doing a lot of work, trying to really figure out how to make journalism that was equitable, that served everybody in the city, and we didn't wanna stop that work. So about a week after the last issue of City Paper ended, the first issue of Baltimore Beat hit the stands. At that point, we were a for profit publication. We had a publisher.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:04:57]: We had a weekly paper. And we did that for about five months until our publisher said, you know, sorry, kind of abruptly, Sorry. That's not really financially feasible for us, and we can't do it anymore. Myself and my former boss at Baltimore City Paper, Brandon Soderberg, we're pretty stubborn. So we kinda decided, okay, well, we're not gonna continue on with that publisher, but we still think that there's a space for Baltimore Beat. At that point, I would have been put in touch with LION, Local Independent Online News Association. I was getting to know more journalists around the country who were finding themselves in a similar position as me as a journalist without a newsroom.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:05:43]: And we're just saying, you know, we'll just figure it out. We'll just do it ourselves. And so about a year after The Beat kind of abruptly ended as a traditional for-profit structure, we relaunched it as a nonprofit. In that capacity, it was definitely not a moneymaker for us. We did some crowdfunding. We had people, you know, pitching in $5, $10. We got a few small grants from local organizations. We definitely weren't paying ourselves. If we had, whatever money we had, we were paying freelancers.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:06:17]: And we kind of tried to work it out as best we can. At that time, I got a day job at another nonprofit news organization here in Baltimore. Brandon Soderberg wrote a book about a corrupt police force here in the city. But we always knew that The Beat was our priority. And then in 2020, when everything shut down, the pandemic hit, there were protests over the death of George Floyd, we were approached kind of out of nowhere by a family, the Holofcener family here in Baltimore, that had money that had been left to them by their grandparents and were giving that money out via grants piecemeal and wanted to do something more impactful.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:07:05]: They were seeing kind of what was happening, the fallout from George Floyd's death. They told us they were seeing how the pandemic was disproportionately affecting Black communities and really wanted to do something to make a big change. So they actually gave us all of their money. They divested all of their money, which was a little bit over a million dollars. That was not a quick transition. It still took about a year for all of us to be comfortable and understand what that meant because it had to happen in a way— well, we all kind of wanted it to happen in a way that there were no strings attached. So that meant making the family very comfortable with that, help making sure that they felt comfortable that we had a business structure that was realistic, that would last. We wouldn't just burn through all of their, you know, family's hard earned money.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:07:59]: And about two years after that, August of 2022, is when The Beat relaunched with the help of that money. So we were able to hire Teri Henderson, our arts and culture editor. We hired a news editor. He's not with us anymore. But it also helped us pay for free papers all over the city. It also helped us pay for what we call our Beat Boxes, which are both newspaper stands and also community pantries. So there's space at the top of all those boxes where people can and have just left things that they want people to benefit from, whether it be, like, warm socks in the winter, whether it be masks and COVID tests. We actually just this weekend were approached by the Baltimore Museum of Art, and they have a special exhibition by a Black woman artist from Baltimore.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:08:55]: It's like her life's work. It's amazing exhibition, and it usually costs money to get into it. But they asked us to distribute the tickets in a bunch of our boxes. We left tickets. We've left—we’ve had people leave all kind of things, canned goods, things like that. So now we have a small staff still. We have Teri Henderson, like I mentioned, our arts and culture editor. Sanya Kamidi just came on as our news editor. Myself. And then we have a person who manages our money, our CFO, Jonathan Keen. He's contractual. We have a small staff that manages delivery and outreach, and that's where we are.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:36]: The Beat Box is, that's fascinating. How many of them are there around the city?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:09:40]: Now we're up to 32.

Financial planning after a seven-figure donation

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:42]: I'm also really interested in that process of transitioning and making sure you're not gonna burn through that money. I don't—it could be really tempting, I think, to just take the money and run and go as fast as you can and not really think long term. So what was the process like? What were your considerations and priorities as you were going through that?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:10:05]: First of all, I think that having that big failure—because it really did feel like a big failure of our publisher pulling out. I think, for me, it gave me, a lot of it made me be very humble and very realistic. I think the hardest thing has been, as a person who loves writing and well-told stories, for me, it had to be releasing, I might not always get the stories that I want right now. But what's most important is building a strong foundation so that in a few years, we can. So that was part of the lesson. Another part of it was learning from other—like, this is a new, I think, field for all of us. So being connected with LION helped us a lot. It helped, it connected us with other people who were starting to figure out how to get legs underneath them, make it a financially feasible thing.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:11:06]: So it was learning from those folks, taking advantage of, you know, the education that they were offering many times for free, which is incredibly kind. I think that's one of the things that I've loved the most about the path of nonprofit news that I'm kind of in is that everyone's, nobody wants to hoard the information. Everybody wants to share it. And then with this family, they were not people that knew anything about journalism. So it was kind of educating them about what we do, how we spend the money, how it works, those kinds of things. I think, also, I mentioned Jonathan Keen. He's been super helpful to us because I met him—as I mentioned, I was working at a nonprofit here in Baltimore.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:11:53]: They're called The Real Real News Network. They don't, they're in Baltimore, but they don't really do too much Baltimore news. They're more kind of, like, national and international focused on progressive issues. But they had brought Jonathan in to really help them improve their financial outlook. And he had done a great job. And I knew that he knew specifically nonprofit news and money. So bringing him on was also very helpful in figuring out how to plot, like, a realistic financial path for us. I personally am not someone who has ever been near a million dollars, so I knew that it should not be me. It should be someone who knows how to make that money grow.

Baltimore’s diverse communities and the need for another news source

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:12:35]: I wanna talk through your transition to entrepreneurship and to running this. But before we get there, I think it might be helpful to just talk a little bit about Baltimore itself. You know, I think a lot of a lot of listeners, a lot of the public will know Baltimore from, you know, when it makes national news, when a politician says something, positive or negative. Unfortunately, more negative from some circles, or they might know it from, you know, The Wire. And in media circles, of course, it's gotten a lot of press over the years with the changes in ownership there and these couple startups, and even, a little Twitter thing with David Simon, but which we can go into or not. But why don't you just describe the city and the need for something like Baltimore Beat?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:13:28]: Baltimore is just—there's so many worlds in Baltimore. On one hand, there's a lot of very educated people here. We have a lot of colleges and universities. We have Johns Hopkins University. We've got Morgan State, which is a historically Black college. We've got smaller places like the org, the school I graduated from. We've got DC right up the road. So there's a lot of education.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:13:54]: There's a lot of money, but there's also a lot of poverty. And for me, I've been in journalism. Like I said, I spent most of my career in journalism here in Baltimore. And I saw that the news kind of works for you if you're okay, if you're financially okay, if you can act—you know, pay for cable, if you can pay for subscription to The Sun. Now if you can pay for a subscription to the Baltimore Banner, which is another, you know, great nonprofit here in the city. But if you are not able to buy your way into those conversations, you are completely left out. And I just felt like that's not acceptable. And I think also, you know, like I said, I've been in newsrooms my whole career here.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:14:44]: And even though Baltimore is a 60% Black city, newsrooms don't look like that. And I think that that's actually something that is reflective of our industry in general. There's not a lot of diversity in it, which also just angered me because we can't tell the stories about what's happening right now if we don't have a diversity of outlooks. So if we don't have—like, if I could, if I write a story, there'll never be a situation where I write a story and I just post it or publish it on The Beat. I technically could. Like, I'm the boss, so I could. But I know that I always need to double check with another perspective because they can't just be me. That's not journalism.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:15:30]: That's maybe a rant, maybe an opinion piece, but it's not journalism. And I think that journalism does itself a disservice when everyone looks the same or if everyone has the same background, which a lot of times is you have to have a certain amount of money to go to school for journalism. Sometimes you even have to have a certain amount of money to have a career in journalism because you have to have other supports if you're gonna take a job that makes, you know, that pays you not very much money, like 40,000 a year or something like that. That's not always money that somebody can live off of and certainly not money that you can live off of and have a family and a nice home and a nice life. So all of those things kind of converged in what I wanted The Beat to do. I wanted it to help be a nurturing space for people who wanna work as journalists, but maybe don't fit into the traditional model of what a journalist is. And I also wanted to make sure that everyone is involved in the conversation about what's happening in the city of Baltimore, which does not happen if they don't know what's happening in the city of Baltimore. This weekend, I went and gave out papers at an event that was organized by a woman whose son was killed by Baltimore City Police.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:16:48]: This was not, you know, a very fancy part of the city. There were not a lot of people walking around that made a lot of money. This event was a place to get access to city resources. They gave out free food. They gave out free, you know, sanitary supplies. And I had people coming up asking for the paper and saying, oh, like, I see this paper outside of the hospital, or I see this at the library. And I had two different people say, I read everything that I can get my hands on. That's what we want.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:17:19]: Like, we want people that are clamoring for the news because then we have people that can go to the polls and make good decisions and press our leaders in the way that they need to be pressed. So I feel like I'm rambling right now, but those are kind of like the things that have converged in to get to make what I hope that The Beat, the lane that I hope that The Beat is still in.

Sustainably reaching underserved audiences and the role of print

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:17:41]: Yeah. No. That's great. And there are two things I wanna dig in there. One is diversity within the newsroom and how, you know, particularly mainstream and white-led newsrooms might think about that differently. And also maybe start with reaching the audience that you're trying to serve. So, you know, a lot of startups these days are digital only, And there's a lot of emphasis on reader revenue, which, unfortunately, I think gets turned into paywalls, and it stops the news from getting out to maybe those who most need it and want it. So talk a little bit about why do a print product, and how do you overcome the obstacles when—the financial obstacles to serving an audience that is not affluent and who can't pay for it often and advertisers don't necessarily wanna reach them as much.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:18:36]: First, we have gotten some ads. So the Baltimore Museum of Art, they've been a very loyal ad buyer since our relaunch back in 2022. And they have been super intentional in their work in expanding, kind of, what an art museum does and what artists that they, you know, feature. So they've been very intentional about serving more. I think right now, they had this big exhibit on indigenous artists. Before that, they've done a lot of Black-focused art exhibitions. When they have the Black-focused art exhibitions, they buy ads in the paper. We also have a partnership with the state of Maryland because they have different things that they're trying to get the word out on.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:19:21]: So right now, we have—I think, every issue they've done a big ad buy on drug use awareness and options for folks who would like to stop using drugs. So we've had other places like nonprofits, different places like that that have reached out to wanna buy ads. It's still something that we wanna work on because we're so small that we have to make sure that it makes sense for us to be. It still kinda has to be a higher threshold. Like, we can't, unfortunately, service necessarily a mom-and-pop shop that might have a very small ad buy. So we're trying to figure that out, but I feel like there's a way to do that. We haven't figured it out yet, though. The reason why I wanted to have print is because, again, poverty means that my phone is pretty much always in my hand. There are many people who don't have that luxury.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:20:12]: Like, if something happens, you know, on a national or local level, I know it quickly because I get a news alert or I'm just living on Twitter, for better or for worse. Or, you know, I subscribe to The Sun. I subscribe to The Banner. So I get those news alerts. There are other people that don't have that kind of luxury, but they still deserve to know what's happening. And, we try to offset the kind of the cost in that. We don't do, we aren't a daily anymore. I mean, a weekly.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:20:42]: I'm sorry. Baltimore, the Baltimore City paper was a weekly paper every Wednesday that came out. We are every other week. So there are ways that we kind of try to make concessions. It's not a huge paper. It's 20 pages. That's about it. But I think that it's worth it to get those audiences.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:20:59]: I was wondering what would happen with older folks in Baltimore because we are kind of in the alt-weekly tradition, so we are a little bit more progressive. We do kind of step on the line a little bit. But older folks are happy to have something that they're like, I don't have to get my grandkids to help me figure out how to log in and do this. We deliver to a senior high rise facility and the papers go. But I think at the same, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there are young people that love the content. There are young people that we see that are like, I've collected every issue of the paper. Because I try to really keep them in mind. We recently did a youth voter guide.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:21:46]: Our youth voter guide came out this spring because that's when Baltimore's primary election is and Baltimore is majority Democrat. So in a lot of ways, that kind of is the ballgame for, you know, mayor, city council president, a lot of city council races, things like that. And we focused it on young people because there's a lot of conversation about what young people should and shouldn't be doing in Baltimore, especially Black and brown young people, whether they should or should not be standing around, whether they do need job, whether they should be allowed to be at the mall or at the inner harbor. And what I've noticed in the decades that I've been here is all this conversation happens over their heads. Like, no one ever asks them how they feel about it, but they're used kind of as boogeymen sometimes. Sometimes they're used as props. Like, look at how great I am. Look at these pictures of me.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:22:38]: So I wanted to do something that was like, let's actually let them say something. So we did surveys. We did listening sessions with them. And we also did just basic information about voting. And in that way, I knew that it would both serve them, but also I knew that everybody needs basic voter information. It's something that we kind of get—if we're in high school, we get kind of, you know, our civic class, and that's it. But I think that everybody kinda always needs a refresher. And I think that there are older people that are curious about what younger people actually think because they are the people that are gonna be in charge pretty soon.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:23:16]: So it was I think it was very popular, both here and actually as I've gone around to different, like, journalism gatherings and other places. Other people have been very interested in it and wanted to figure out how to do it on their own.

Diversity challenges in newsrooms and fostering inclusion

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:23:29]: So, yeah, let's talk a little bit about diversity within the newsroom. So, you know, you're obviously Black-led, Black-controlled, and I assume you have an easier job of getting diversity within your newsrooms, but maybe that's not even an accurate assumption.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:23:44]: That is not an accurate assumption. And it's because—I think about the people that I was friends with, the Black people that I knew when I was in college that were journalism majors just like me. You run into these white newsrooms, and you get defeated. You get told your perspective is, being is kind of discounted because it's not neutral. If you talk about your experiences as a Black person, you're like, well, you're not being, you're supposed to be impartial. And also just the lack of money. All of these things kind of combine to mean that there's not really a lot of my peers left in this industry. A lot of people that I've started with in college, all of us as journalism majors, very few of them are still working as journalists.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:24:30]: A lot of them have left and gone to PR, gone back to school, just done other things. I also kind of have a problem with a pipeline because I think that there are lots of invisible slights, invisible racism that still exists in newsrooms from the very beginning. So take a person, you know, 20 years later graduating from college after me. They have to get their foot in the door. And they're running into, again, the same things that my peers ran into. Once you get in there and you're making no money, then you have to run into maybe being talked to in a different way, given different assignments, having your voice kind of edited out of your pieces. And so I really do a lot of training when it comes to bringing on diverse candidates. And it's hard.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:25:29]: It's hard because we're already very small. And so I have to figure out not only how to build The Beat, keep things going, grow The Beat, but also be figuring out how to train and give opportunities to people who are coming in completely green. But I also feel like it's completely worth it.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:25:53]: Yeah. Yeah. You know, so I what I'm hearing too, there are kind of two root causes of that pipeline problem. One is— and I'm just trying to find a quote that I can't pull up right now—but where you've talked about, and this won't come as a surprise to any of my listeners, the local news, and national news as well, for people of color often is viewed as you're entering into that relationship with distrust because of harms that we have done in our coverage of communities of color. They've been extractive at best, maybe, and racist at worst. And so that doesn't, that's not gonna attract people of color to your industry if that's their perception. I think the industry's come a long way, still have more to go. So there's that aspect.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:26:44]: And then the aspect you mentioned of when people of color do get in newsrooms, I don't think that white-led newsrooms—I don't think people who look like me recognize the extra care, the extra burdens that maybe a person of color feels, and they're, you know, they're quickly burnt out or, you know, disillusioned or maybe feel actually are are victims of racism, subtle or not, in their newsrooms. So maybe talk a little bit, why don't we start with that first one? Just the healing that we have to do as an industry with communities that we have harmed and that impact on the pipeline and the journalists of color who are still in the industry. How important it is to recognize that?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:27:29]: We have an organization in Baltimore called the Organization of Black Journalists. And one of the things that we had a gathering about one time was covering communities when there's a crisis, like, figuring out how to do that. And so it was me. There were some TV reporters, and there were some print, some other print reporters. And we all talked about how when we were out covering and, you know, trying to gather information, more often than not, there are opportune, there are times where people will talk about other bad interactions that they've had with journalists, where they, like, felt like the story wasn't kind, where they weren't respected, where they didn't get the facts right. And that's something that I think that news needs to figure out how to address because people don't forget those things. If somebody's in a crisis and, you know, one of their loved ones has died, and that's been written about because of the Internet, that lives forever. And that also, I think, lives forever inside of them.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:28:32]: I can't imagine that it wouldn't. And I do see, I feel like I see more now news organizations that are kind of addressing that by having other times where they interact with the public. So it's not just like, oh, we're only gonna, you're only gonna see us if there's a fire, if there's something terrible. I'm beginning to see more now, especially in the nonprofit arena, you know, places that have open newsrooms, places that are like, hey, we are journalists. We're just hanging out. Please come and ask us questions.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:29:06]: I think that more that needs to be done. I think that that helps a lot because then it also just demystifies what happened. I always talk about how I think that we're very good at telling stories. We're good at getting information out of people. We're terrible at talking about what we do. I need to be kind of like a student that people know, but they don't know at all. Like, I've had people you know, when they—a lot of times people will ask, well, can I see a story before it's published? They don't understand that we have kind of guidelines that say that doesn't happen. Or, you know, I emailed you and I told you about the story.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:29:41]: You guys never wrote about it. Like, well, yes. Because we have to kind of decide what is, quote, unquote, newsworthy. And there's a whole lot of you know, those kinds of things, I think, help a lot. I would love to see more outlets doing the kind of work that I'm doing, especially the outlets that have more money than me, figuring out how to train folks so that it's not just, like, extractive. Sometimes it can be, oh, we wanna talk to young people. We wanna talk to young Black kids in Baltimore. That's nice, and that'll be a great story.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:30:13]: But what about figuring out how to help them tell their own stories? The response I get is that there's not enough time. And I don't think that we're in a place where we have the time to not do it. Also, we all figure out how to make our other deadlines. There's no, there's not gonna be a time where The New York Times is like, sorry. We ran out of time. And this is not to say that the New York Times doesn't do—I'm not sure. They might be doing training things. That is just an example.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:30:42]: Or, you know, whatever given paper. Sorry. We ran out of time so the paper was not there. We operate on deadline. So if we wanted too badly enough, we could figure out how to do more when it comes to training people who come from nontraditional backgrounds, maybe people that couldn't afford to go to college. Maybe grown people who are not even just 20 years old, but maybe just grown people who are like, I want to be a writer. I gave a—that needs to happen.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:31:11]: Absolutely. I think our communities are woefully untapped resources, you know, and we're here to serve them. So why not pull them into the whole process?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:31:24]: One thing I think about also in Baltimore, we've lost so much institutional knowledge. If you think about The Sun as kind of our paper of record, The Sun has just been having buyout after buyout for years. There are so many people with deep knowledge of Baltimore's history that goes, you know, longer than you or I have even been out, been alive and they're gone. They're not in the newsrooms anymore. And so I think that figuring out how to get more diversity into the newsroom gives you that background. Like, there are so many stories that even I read that, I can tell that it's by somebody who just got here. So there is context that's missing because they just don't know it. Not that they're not good journalists.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:32:05]: They just weren't here in 1998 or 1978, or they don't know this thing that this former governor or this former mayor did that affected why this other thing happened. So there's a lot of benefit, I think, that we get from making our newsrooms more diverse.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:32:23]: In terms of the second part of that equation of keeping people of color in newsrooms and not burning them out and not, having them feel unsupported or even attacked, You know, what what recommendations come to mind in, you know, the other newsrooms can do to better foster a whole ecosystem that supports journalists from different backgrounds?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:32:46]: When I hired Teri Henderson, our arts and culture editor, she had never been an editor before and actually was kinda like, can I do this job? I had been watching her work, and I knew her for a long time. So I knew that she could. And I also knew that there was a possibility that in another newsroom, she would be told for a very long time, well, you have to wait. You have to wait and wait and wait to become an editor. So for me, it was very easy to just say, you know what? I'm not gonna just hire you and have you be an arts writer. I want you to be an arts editor. And the things that you don't know about being an editor, we will train you and get you there. And that's what I've done, and that's what she has done.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:33:29]: So Teri now, you know, she came in here being a beautiful arts writer. And now she also manages freelancers. She can also now copy edit and content edit and, you know, make sure that she's checking in with folks who are shooting for us and planning things long term. Like, those are things that we were intentional about training her to do because we wanted to make sure that she had power. It's important that you don't just hire, like I said, somebody who's brand new, fresh out of college, and make them whatever the entry level position in your newsroom is. You also have to make sure that you're hiring diverse people that have—that are editors, that have power to do things, that have power to make calls. Because otherwise, everyone, they're just gonna get stuck at that lower level.

Black publishers and navigating networks of power

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:34:22]: Speaking of power, one of the— you alluded to LION earlier, which is an important network for you. And one of the things you talked about in the Poynter article on the David Simon dust up was how Black publishers and, you know, beyond are often locked out of powerful networks and the harm that does. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:34:49]: Yeah. I mean, the thing that really was concerning to me about what happened with the—so, basically, what happened is The Sun was purchased by someone who already owns a very right-leaning television station. And so everyone was freaking out about this, justifiably so. The conversation that was happening was that the Baltimore Banner was our only hope. I think that David Simon said specifically, it's our best and only hope. And I was like, hey, I'm here too. Like and it's not just me. The Baltimore AFRO American Newspapers are over 100 years old.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:35:34]: I wanna say, I don't wanna be wrong, but I think that they're over 130 years old. How can you discount that? How can you discount the Baltimore Times, which is also run by a Black woman? How can you discount Baltimore Fishbowl, which is run by a Latina? How can you discount the Baltimore Brew, which run by an Asian American woman? And to be clear, the editor in chief of The Banner is an Asian American woman. Her second in command is a Black woman. But what I'm talking about is outlets that are intentional about the community that they're serving. So The Beat and the AFRO, at least, I think Baltimore Times is a little bit different, are very intentional about serving Black communities because there's a need to serve Black communities. And sometimes it feels like that's not treated as real news. And in a city that's 60% Black, it's definitely real news. And also in the city where a lot of the folks that are, you know, most living in poverty, most at risk for many things, COVID-19, homelessness, a lot of things that can harm communities are also Black.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:36:53]: We need to make it, like we need, the fact that that’s their audience really matters. So it just upsets me that—not that The Banner doesn't do great work because they do, but I don't think that there's any news organization that you can say is our only hope in saving democracy or whatever.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:37:14]: Yeah. You know, and I think that points to I think, you know, David Simon's tweet and the back and forth points to something that I sense in the industry that you explicitly mentioned and that I don't think people understand, the value of publications that aren't focused on the mainstream, you know, that don't target a specific audience. And so I wanna delve into that just a little bit to help people understand why these are needed and why shouldn't everything just go to a mainstream publication. You know, one of the things that struck me, still strikes me today, when I interviewed Sarah Lomax and Mitra at URL Media, one of them said, you know, we don't have the same trust conversation that's going on in the industry because our audiences do trust us and have trust in us, and it's a whole different thing. And I think a lot of mainstream journalists just don't understand that dynamic and that need to serve an audience that is better defined than just, you know, geography.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:38:21]: Yeah. I was just saying that the other day. I was like, I don't have an engagement problem. I have a money problem. But like I said, I have people that are coming up asking for the paper. I have people that not just save it, but, like, preserve the paper. Like, it's a special thing to them. I think there's a lot of things that people of color have ended up having to pioneer in this country just because they had to.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:38:44]: And I really think that this way of being intentional is another way of doing that. When I was at The Real News, I talked about how when you go online, you have a million options. We don't live in a world where it's like, you know, there's a few things. There's the local TV stations, cable news, and a paper, and that's it. I go online. I open my phone up for, like, one thing. Like, I'm like, I wanna see when my daughter's doctor's appointment is. I end up 20 minutes deep on Instagram looking at I don't even know what.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:39:22]: People have lots and lots of options now, but the way that you overcome that as a news outlet is to make yourself irresistible, is to know your audience very, very well and create a situation where they choose you, where out of all the noise of everything that's happening, they say, let me go look at what The Beat has to say about this, or let me go see what this has to say about this. And I think that that's something that Black people have had to do. That's when you know, there's other news organizations that serve indigenous folks, Latino folks, same thing. And I think that there's stuff to learn, I think, about that because then you don't do every story. Right now, I've watched a lot happen online since you know, regarding our presidential election. And there's a lot of noise, but it doesn't feel like a lot of journalism. And I wonder if folks were more intentional about what they were saying and why, then maybe the news would be a little more helpful.

Transitioning to leadership and lessons in entrepreneurship

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:40:31]: Let's talk a little bit about your transition to leadership and entrepreneurship. You know, you started off by saying you never thought you would be in this position, that you'd just be a beat reporter and that would be, you know, your career. Talk about the pros and the emotional process of going through that because it's gotta be intimidating to start that. And, you know, I think most people suffer from imposter syndrome, and that's probably just gotta magnify it. How did you deal with that sort of just belief in yourself to go out there and take the risk and do it?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:41:07]: I feel very lucky about the time that I entered this field and the people that I met almost immediately. They were just so welcoming and so willing to share their wins and losses. Like, I know Sarah. I know Mitra. I know the ladies in Detroit at Outlier Media. I know a bunch of folks in Chicago at some of those outlets, and all of them, no—I've never felt, like, shunned by them or no one has ever made me feel like I couldn't do this work. And I think that that has been very, very helpful.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:41:45]: The work that LION does, the work with some of the other organizations that have kind of sprung up around nonprofit news is just like it's just such a supportive space. My problem with them is not them at all. It's making time to be able to watch all the podcasts and sign up for all the services that they offer because there's so much support. I think also I had to learn like I said, having our publisher pull out the way that they did was very painful. And I've felt very flat on my face because I left the job to do that. I have been—when The Sun killed City Paper, they hired me as, they kept me and hired me on their editorial board. So I had a job. I mean, I don't know how stable it was because journalism in general, but it was a job.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:42:39]: So I had left it for a job that only lasted five months. That was hard, but it taught me, number one, that I had to be very, very careful about partnerships. I had to be very, very careful about ownership. I think that was why we knew that we had to have that money that we got from the foundation with no strings attached because it can't be a lot of hands in the pot. It has to be people that know what they're doing as far as journalism and storytelling, really being controlled. And the more that I've gone through this, the more that I've understood that I can do it. And also the fact that I don't have access to a lot of power. Again, not so great as far as money.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:43:29]: I'm not Rick. But I think it really helps me be very strong in what The Beat wants to do and who we are serving. If somebody offered me multi-millions, but they also were sitting in meetings every day, in editorial meetings, or saying, okay, this is your board, and it's a bunch of, you know, powerful developers and industry in Baltimore. And they were like, this has to be your board. The Beat would not be the paper that it is. So it's been also figuring out how to ]turn the things about me that can sometimes be seen as weaknesses and use them as strength. I also think that my background in journalism hopefully helps me be a better boss to other journalists.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:44:22]: I don't want to ever burn my staff out. I don't think it's worth it. I don't—I want my staff to feel like they have time off. We are taking a month off in August, and we'll be working a lot of it. We are doing kind of internal work instead of the work of putting out a paper, but there also is time for rest. And we do breaks where we'll skip an issue throughout the year because I want them to understand that I see them as people and not just content machines. And I think that that's from being thought of as a content machine. So yeah.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:44:58]: Those and, also, I guess the last thing I'll say is one of the things that I learned when I was at The Real News was the way that your skills as a journalist can help you as a manager. Because sometimes you have a situation where there's a conflict and everyone's telling you a different perspective. And then as a journalist, you kind of can divorce all of these feelings out of what everybody's telling you and say, okay, what are the actual facts? And I think that that really helps a lot. Like, those journalism skills help in managing.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:45:30]: What has been the biggest surprise in that transition?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:45:35]: That I enjoy it. Like, I like leadership. I like coming up with ideas. I like working with my team. Again, the personality that makes you be a journalist is not necessarily one of a people person. So if I had been, I think, just a writer somewhere, I don't think that I'd be as collaborative or inventive. I think that I would have just been working, you know, writing my stories, but I really do like the fact that I'm creating something new that excites people. And I can bring an idea that I have and bring it to my team and or the other folks that I'm collaborating with, and they can take it and run with it and be like, what about this? What about that? The youth voter survey that I talked about earlier, that was not just a Beat project.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:46:31]: We're part of a news collaborative with The Banner, WYPR, which is our local NPR station here in Baltimore, Morgan State University's journalism program, and Maryland Public Television. And so that youth voter guide was all of us working together to figure out questions to ask the young people. It included links to reporting that those newsrooms had already done because we can't do a ton of reporting because we're so small. But, you know, WYPR has amazing Report for American journalists who I don't even know how they sleep because they just do so much amazing youth-centered coverage. The Banner has a huge newsroom. So they've done youth-centered coverage in addition to a lot of their other other coverage. And we could repackage that and use that as kind of part of the story that we were telling about what it looks like, what the youth vote looks like right now in, you know, April of 2024. So that gives me a lot of joy, like figuring out how to work with people and create things that have never been created.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:47:39]: And I think at this moment in time where so much about journalism feels like it's falling apart, where people are asking more of journalists or questioning things that we're always been taught are just the rules. This is it feels like this is exactly the right time to be doing that kind of work.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:48:00]: What's been the hardest lesson to learn in that transition?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:48:04]: Time. Everything takes longer than I thought it was going to take. I was just talking to Teri the other day, and I said, it feels like we've hit a really good growth spurt at The Beat. We have content that goes in the paper. We have other, we're beginning to have other content that goes online, which gives us greater ease when we're deciding what goes in the paper because we are just, it's not like a race to that deadline to get the paper to the printer. So it feels good right now. We have a good team of freelancers that we're using for both writing and photography. It feels like we are at the beginning of another phase.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:48:45]: But then I was like, we started in 2017. Then we relaunched two years ago. So that was constant hard work to get to this point, which still is like another level of work. So it's like knowing that the kind of journalism that I felt we would do when I first thought about The Beat is still off, like, there're a ways off. I would love to do more investigative reporting. That takes a lot of money and time that we honestly don't have right now. We're lucky in that there's organizations that offer support.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:49:25]: We just did a series on the death of Donnell Rochester. He's the young man who was killed by police whose mother did the event I was talking about. So we partnered with them and did two in-depth pieces about his life and the circumstances around his death. So we're lucky in that there's now those kinds of resources available to small newsrooms like ours. But I would love to do more. The journalism nerd in me would love to have a deep, deeply reported, took-a-year-to-do story in every single issue. That's not going to happen anytime soon. But the thing that I keep in my mind is that I'm creating, what I hope I'm doing is creating a stable base for maybe 10 years from now.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:50:14]: Or maybe it won't even be me. Maybe I'm creating the stability for the next person who will take over for The Beat. And it's important, but sometimes, like I said, the writer in me would love to have some of those stories. The Banner has some of the stories that I would love to be able to do, but I do not have their money. So that's not happening right now. That I think is the hardest thing.

Rapid-fire questions

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:50:37]: Yeah. Alright. Well, we can move on to the rapid fire segment. And, my questions will be quick, but your answers don't have to be. Okay. So first question, compared to a year ago, are you more or less optimistic about the future of local news?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:50:55]: Yes. I am. The thing that makes me more optimistic is the people that I meet when I go to conferences, the people that I get to meet that reach out, and they're like, I'm trying to do this. Or the thing that scares me is that we have no idea how free we will be in a few months. That's the reality. One of the candidates for president has already expressed a distaste for journalists and journalism. And there are many things that he said that have outlined ways in which we're less safe. We're already less safe. I was talking to a lady who runs an outlet, I think, in West Virginia that does news on different far right, things that happen regarding the far right.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:51:45]: She said she can't sit on the porch of her house anymore. She and her family used to sit on the porch of her house and have coffee on Saturdays, Sundays. They can't do that anymore because it's not safe for them to do so. So we're already less safe, and we have no idea what we could possibly be headed to. Our lives could all be very different this time next year. And while, so that's the balance. I know that there are amazing people working in local news that are doing amazing things, but we have no idea what the greater world around us will look like to enable those kinds of things to continue.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:25]: Yeah. I'm worried that no matter which way the election goes, I worry about the aftermath, at least the immediate aftermath.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:52:32]: Yeah. Because I think that it's already out. Like I said, the lady already can't sit on her front porch. There are other journalists that have been injured. There are journalists that have to take special—you know, they can be targeted online now. So that's already in the world, and that that's not a genie that can just be crammed back in the bottle the day after the presidential election.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:56]: When it comes to journalism, does AI fill you with more hope or dread?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:53:02]: AI helps me sometimes. As a small newsroom, there are things that we can use AI. Like, AI can help me copy edit. We do have copy editors, but it can also catch some of my mistakes before I send it to the copy editor. It's a tool. Tools aren't good or bad. They're just tools. So like I said, I think that there are ways that it can help me.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:53:25]: I wish there was more conversation in journalism about how to treat it with care. I've seen a lot of conversations that are like, we've gotta get ahead of this thing because it's coming, and we can't sleep on this. We have to be at the forefront. But what does that mean? I wish that, in general, I wish that our industry stopped and thought a little bit more. And so I wish that there was more stopping and thinking around AI. Because, again, it's always worse for minorities. It's always worse for people of color. Like, we already know that there have been things that have been proven where someone will say Black woman and plug that into, you know, ChatGPT and, like, these terrible racist sterotypes come out.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:54:14]: So, basically, whatever—we're always going to have, wherever we are, there we are. Like, there's not gonna be a thing that catapults us into this idealistic future. It's always going to be benefits and then the same old problems that have been plaguing us. We have to actually confront the problems because they're not gonna go away. AI is not gonna make them go away. So that's, I guess, my very rambling answer to that.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:54:40]: No. That's good. Messy desk or clean desk?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:54:43]: Oh, it's messy right now. I am sitting amongst piles of things.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:54:50]: Do you have a favorite piece of advice you've been given or that you like to give?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:54:54]: I think the advice that I like to give is what I just said, which is go slow. Actually, you know what? That's not even just my advice. There is an actor from Baltimore. His name is André De Shields. He was on he was in The Wiz on Broadway. He's an older guy that is in his seventies now. He's been in all these amazing performances over the course of his life. He won a Tony a few years ago.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:55:24]: And part of what he said was, he was kinda like, this is my advice for younger folks. And one of them was, slowly is the fastest way to go. And I'd already been thinking about that with The Beat because, again, kinda got knocked, you know, around a little bit in what I thought it was gonna be. And I think that really confirmed it for me. I think it just is helpful in general, even as a journalist. Like, you want to get the story out, but you don't wanna rush your story. You don't wanna put out a wrong story just for the sake of breaking it. So I really try to think about that as much as possible.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:56:05]: We're not, we're probably not gonna break any stories anytime soon, but there's still lots of great reporting we can do around things that happened in Baltimore. The Beat is not going to be the New York Times tomorrow or maybe ever. But there's still lots of great work that we can do if we kinda go step by step.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:56:28]: Is there a piece of conventional of common advice or conventional wisdom that drives you crazy in its wrongness or oversimplification?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:56:37]: That we have to wait for some kind of perfect opportunity to make this an industry that is more diverse. We don't have the time to waste. If we want people to be educated, if we want people to go to the polls, if we want to have a society that cares about making things better, we have to be better as an industry. And part of that is making sure that we have the best storytellers we have we can get. That means those kinds of storytellers come from all types of places. They might come from Ivy Leagues and, you know, two parents that are millionaires. They could also come from West Baltimore. We need both of them, and we can't wait anymore. We see the world that we have right now, and we need to do everything we can to make it better.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:57:27]: Do you have a favorite failure of yours? Something that put you on a new path, that looking back, you're kind of glad it happened.

LISA SNOWDEN [00:57:36]: I think it's the first iteration of The Beat when we had a publisher because it made me realize that I can't depend blindly on anyone else. I think that the way that I was taught as a journalist was like, you don't think too much about the business side. It's not really, it's really frowned on. It, or at least it was, kind of frowned on to think about the money in general in journalism. The money kind of, you know, muddies things. It makes you less unbiased. So I think I entered into that relationship still kind of being like, you know, I could worry about editorial. The money will handle itself. It did not. And so it made me realize I can't—if I want this thing to exist in the world, I have to take ownership of it.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:29]: What's one thing you do to restore yourself and maintain your sanity?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:58:33]: Right now, it's going for walks. It's summertime, so I have a gym membership with a pool. So it's, like, not just putting off going to the pool. It's, say, okay, I get to go to the pool for an hour. Because I have a friend who was the editor of a different paper, and he told me the paper will take whatever you give it. And that has stuck with me because I'm like, I don't, I cannot give this whole paper my life. I'll be miserable. I have two children. That's another reason why I can't give the paper my life because they still actively need to be raised, and they deserve a mother who's not, you know, stressed out and resentful and tired and burned out. So I have to take time.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:59:24]: What's one thing you do as a leader to help your team maintain some balance and sanity?

LISA SNOWDEN [00:59:30]: Taking those breaks I talked about. So I think we don't put out an issue in December. We take, we skip an issue for spring break. And then, like I said, this August, we are skipping both issues. We're every other week. So we're skipping both of those issues. And I want to do that because I want them to rest. I want them to do the other kind of thinking that you can do when you're not rushing towards the deadline. And I know that this is, doing The Beat is a marathon, not a sprint. So I want them to make sure they don't burn themselves out now because I need them in the long run.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:00:14]: Do you have a favorite time saving hack?

LISA SNOWDEN [01:00:18]: I think the thing that has helped us right now be efficient is sticking to the format of the paper that we have. So there's always a news piece. There's always an art piece. They're like the features. There's always calendars. There's always a poem. There's always a film review. So knowing that those things are always going to be hit and there's not gonna be a lot of, you know, me coming up every week and saying, we're breaking the format. We're doing this other thing. Staying steady and reliable saves a lot of time and also emotional energy. Because if we're always adapting to something else, it's chaos. We have had a few issues where we have broken the format, like the youth voter guide that was completely off format, and it did almost kill me. But I think that keeping things steady and reliable saves a lot of time and energy. Not trying to chase after every single story saves all the time and energy. If it doesn't fit into that category, then we're not doing it.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:01:25]: Five years out, what does success at the Baltimore Beat look like?

LISA SNOWDEN [01:01:29]: We are a slightly bigger newspaper. I am right now, I am still in editorial in that sometimes I write. I'm still kind of checking in with my editors. Sometimes I'm, you know, copy editing something. I need to be out of editorial completely. That's the best way that I can show up to make sure that we have a strong base. And so it's hopefully having somebody to manage kind of both sides of our editorial team and maybe at least one more full time writer.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:02:06]: And then the final two questions for recommendations. So if someone is visiting Baltimore, what are three to five places or activities that you would recommend?

LISA SNOWDEN [01:02:18]: I recommend getting crabs at Nick's Fish House. I also recommend crab cakes at Koco’s. These are two different flavor experiences. I would also say for my third kind of general recommendation is think beyond the inner harbor. A lot of times people go there. That's kind of what you what Baltimore is known for. It's right by the water. But Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods, and there's so many charming communities in Baltimore you miss if you just stay kind of downtown inner harbor area.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:02:54]: And then the final question, three to five pieces of media you would recommend.

LISA SNOWDEN [01:03:00]: One book that I am reading right now is News For All the People. It's by Juan Gonázlez and Joseph Torres. I might be pronouncing his name wrong. But it looks at the beginning of journalism in America up to present day. And they write about how, really, racism has shaped journalism that we know. Early journalism was about making people hate indigenous folks or hate and fear indigenous folks or hate and fear Black folks so that we were kind of kept as slaves. It also is where I learned that the reason why newspapers were able to kind of propagate in the way they did was because Congress helped. Like, Congress made it so that you, could you could put newspapers in the mail for very, very cheap.

LISA SNOWDEN [01:03:53]: So there's that practical stuff too. And, again, I just feel like if we are talking about what works and doesn't work in journalism, if we're talking about what the future of journalism is, we have to know the past. And a lot of times the past that I have been sold is that journalism has always been this very neutral thing, always unbiased, always helping everybody. And it did, but that's not the whole story. I could not think of other specific things to tell people to read, but I do want to make sure that people—you know, we talked a little bit about how folks kind of sometimes forget about Black-run newspapers. They don't think about them. There's a few that I think are just amazing. Capital B is a nonprofit, a Black nonprofit that's attempting to do news on a big scale.

LISA SNOWDEN [01:04:47]: You know, like, The Beat is just, we're just in Baltimore. Capital B is in communities, Black-run communities all over the—not all over the country, but in certain areas of the country. So they're in Gary, Indiana. They're in Atlanta. They're in, I wanna say, the Bay Area of California. So reading them, they're, it’s amazing journalism, and it gives you another perspective. I'm not in Detroit, but I love Outlier. I'm not in Mississippi, but I love MLK 50. I think that those are places that are really creating the footprint for what journalism will be in the future. Also, The Triibe in Chicago.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:05:27]: Well, thank you for your time. This has been wonderful.

Thank you for listening to the Local News Matters podcast. Never miss an episode by subscribing in your favorite podcast player and sign up for our newsletter at lnmpod.com.

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Past guests on the Local News Matters podcast include: Karen Rundlet (INN), Jim Brady (Knight Foundation), Candice Fortman (Exit interview, Outlier Media), Jean Friedman-Rudovsky (Resolve Philly), Jay Rosen (NYU), Sue Cross (Exit interview, INN), Mary Margaret White (Mississippi Today), Amy Kovac-Ashley (Tiny News Collective), Michael Shapiro (TAPinto), Kenny Katzgrau (redbankgreen and Broadstreet), John Garrett (Community Impact), Shannon Kinney (Dream Local Digital), Larry Ryckman (The Colorado Sun), Frank Mungeam (Local Media Association), Kelly Ann Scott (Alabama Media Group), Sara Lomax and S. Mitra Kalita (URL Media), Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro (National Trust for Local News), Mike Rispoli and Richard Young (via When the People Decide), Sarabeth Berman (American Journalism Project), Rabbi Hillel Goldberg and Shana Goldberg (Intermountain Jewish News), Lyndsay C. Green (via The Journalism Salute), Rashad Mahmood and Mark Glaser (New Mexico Local News Fund), Christian Vanek and Barbara Hardt (The Mountain-Ear), Dan Grech (BizHack), Zack Richner (Easy Tax Credits), Tracie Powell (Pivot Fund), Dan Oshinsky (Inbox Collective), Linda Shapley (via What Works), Yehong Zhu and Jake Seaton (Zette, Column), Charity Huff (January Spring), Joaquin Alvarado and Dave Perry (Aurora Sentinel), Steve Waldman (Rebuild Local News), Maritza Félix (Conecta Arizona), Michael Bolden (American Press Institute), Jeff Roberts and Corey Hutchins (CFOIC, Colorado College), Eve Pearlman and Erica Anderson (Spaceship Media), Jennifer Brandel (Hearken, Democracy SOS), Corey Hutchins with Bay Edwards, Todd Chamberlain and Raleigh Burleigh (Sopris Sun).