The fight for local news in the world’s media capital with THE CITY’s Nic Dawes (LNM Episode 44)

Nic Dawes, executive director of THE CITY, discusses the vital role the outlet plays in New York’s shrinking local news ecosystem. He explains how his organization fills coverage gaps left by retrenching legacy media, focusing on investigative reporting and service journalism to meet the needs of New Yorkers across all boroughs.

Dawes also delves into THE CITY’s unique strategies for community engagement, including open newsrooms and dynamic beat assignments, allowing them to stay responsive to the city's most pressing issues. He highlights how their mission-driven approach prioritizes impact over viral traffic, balancing coverage for both affluent media-savvy readers and underserved communities.

On the business side, Dawes shares insights on nonprofit journalism’s financial sustainability, from leveraging philanthropy and membership to navigating New York’s competitive fundraising environment. He reflects on his transition from large global organizations to a leaner, more focused newsroom, where the immediacy of local impact offers both challenges and rewards.

Episode chapters:
(00:02:19) – Why THE CITY is needed in New York's media-rich environment
(00:06:59) – THE CITY's structure and coverage areas
(00:10:10) – Maintaining local focus and resisting viral traffic for its own sake
(00:13:29) – Serving two distinct audiences in New York City
(00:17:34) – Using open newsrooms to engage with the community
(00:20:36) – Financial sustainability at THE CITY
(00:29:51) – Transitioning from large media organizations to smaller teams
(00:35:46) – Challenges of maintaining a diverse newsroom
(00:37:12) – Rapid-fire questions
(00:50:52) – Media and local recommendations

Listen to the episode here:

Bio:

Nic is Executive Director at THE CITY, a news outlet serving the people of New York through independent journalism that holds the powerful to account, deepens democratic participation, and helps make sense of the greatest city in the world. He has led news and human rights organizations on three continents, and was previously Deputy Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Chief Content Officer of Hindustan Times in Delhi, and Editor-in-Chief of South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper.

Full transcript:

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

NIC DAWES [00:00:00]:Many of the most contentious issues in the national discourse are unfolding in New York City. You take migrancy, for example, that's the clearest case. And you have news outlets that are pretty much dedicated to pumping polarized takes on those situations, whether it's migration or crime or marijuana legalization into the bloodstream of national cable and digital media. And the importance of having reality based journalism about those subjects from a city that attracts so much attention is another role that New York City local news can play in the national discussion.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:00:44]: 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 Nic Dawes, executive director of THE CITY, a nonprofit newsroom focused on serving New Yorkers through investigative reporting and service journalism. We discuss how THE CITY fills real gaps that exist even in the media capitol of the world.

Nic shares how the outlet balances accountability reporting with practical issues such as navigating city services. He also explains their innovative approach to community engagement through open newsrooms and how they maintain a mission-focused strategy without chasing viral traffic.

With a background that spans leadership roles at Human Rights Watch, Hindustan Times, and the Mail & Guardian, Nic reflects on the challenges of transitioning to a smaller, more focused team. He offers insights into nonprofit journalism’s financial sustainability and the importance of cultivating partnerships and local trust to build a thriving civic information ecosystem.

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 Nic Dawes.

Welcome, Nick, to the podcast. It’s an honor to have you.

NIC DAWES [00:02:18]: It's good to be here, Tim.

Why THE CITY is needed in New York's media-rich environment

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:02:19]: So why don't you start and just tell listeners about THE CITY and why it's needed in the most media rich place probably on Earth?

NIC DAWES [00:02:29]: Yeah. New York City certainly is a very media dense place. And if you look at New York City from a high altitude, it really looks that way. You know, and you can see, you know, the New York Times is a skyscraper on 8th Avenue. You can, you know, you can see the big broadcast outlets and cable companies, on the Avenue of the Americas and some startups spread across the city too. But underneath that glossy surface, there's been a really profound erosion of coverage of New York City itself and coverage that is directed at New Yorkers by New Yorkers and for New Yorkers. That's obviously very uneven. Right? If you live in the wealthiest parts of town, you can find journalism that's gonna be relevant to you.

NIC DAWES [00:03:19]: There's lots of media about real estate in the tonier parts of Manhattan and Brownstone, Brooklyn, for example. But if you live further into the outer boroughs or if you're really concerned with what's going on in city government and city agencies, there's just been a very, very, very serious reduction in the amount of coverage bodies dedicated to that work. So THE CITY was really founded in response to that issue, and a realization in the latter part of the twenty-teens that, you know, The New York Times had pretty much declared that it focusing on national and global audiences, and reduced its metro coverage really significantly from about 2016 on. The Wall Street Journal actually shut down its Greater New York section in the middle of the mayoral election in 2021. Of course, the biggest retrenchment, if you like, has been at the Daily News, which was one of the two anchors of the New York City tabloid system, you know, owned by the notorious hedge fund, Alden Global, and really profoundly hollowed out. And that well, that was a newsroom of around 300 people 20 years ago with a, you know, huge metro team, people in the courts, people in covering the school system, people covering whole desks, you know, covering these areas, just not there anymore. So New York is not a news desert, and that unit of analysis that is so powerful and helpful in the local news discussion doesn't really compute in New York, but it is a profoundly compromised news ecosystem. And we've ended up with a dominant, highly ideological tabloid in the form of The Post.

NIC DAWES [00:05:04]: Some local TV stations that try incredibly hard, but have also had deep budget cutbacks focus heavily on crime, fires, those kinds of things. And we really need to rebuild coverage that both serves all New Yorkers and addresses some of those inequalities that I spoke to in in terms of coverage and that can tackle citywide issues at the level of the mayor, at the level of the city council in a way that brings to bear really robust investigative reporting and and service journalism. So that's the role that we're trying to play.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:05:40]: Yeah. And I think, the media capital is also home to one of the canonical examples of the importance of a healthy local news ecosystem with George Santos. I mean, here—in New York, you know, there was a small local outlet that did cover, uncover some of the lies and background, but largely went unnoticed until after he was elected. So the fact that there wasn't really strong local journalism, you know, in his district, I think, shows what happens to you know, and the impact nationally.

NIC DAWES [00:06:14]: Yeah. And, you know, and I would build on that even more, Tim, to say that many of the most contentious issues in the national discourse are unfolding in New York City. You take migrancy, for example, that's the clearest case. And you have news outlets that are pretty much dedicated to pumping polarized takes on those situations, whether it's migration or crime or marijuana legalization into the bloodstream of national cable and digital media. And the importance of having reality based journalism about those subjects from a city that attracts so much attention is another role that New York City local news can play in the national discussion.

THE CITY's structure and coverage areas

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:06:59]: Yeah. Absolutely. So talk a little bit about your structure and your setup. How many reporters do you have, and what do you focus on?

NIC DAWES [00:07:08]: Yeah. So we have about 24 editorial staff total out of a team of 28, 29. And we have changed our structure a little bit recently, but we're organized. Our coverage is organized into two broad areas, accountability reporting, whether that is long term investigations or quicker turnaround responses to developments. So accountability reporting, and then on the other hand, service journalism. And we view them as linked, and we view the service journalism as equally important as the accountability reporting. So we have a section on our website called How to New York, which offers both plain language guides and sometimes data driven tools to help people navigate the complexities of life in this town, whether it's things like voting or how to get your heat turned up in your apartment when it's cold in winter or how to deal with extreme weather. We have a whole series called How to Court, which is on dealing with criminal justice issues, how to get a free attorney, what happens when you're arrested, those kinds of things. So those are the two broad strands of our coverage.

NIC DAWES [00:08:21]: But then, of course, we have a degree of thematic organization within those categories. So we have reporters who cover classical beats like transit and the correction system, the police, climate change and the environment, labor, areas where we think we can add real value. We used to have a single reporter dedicated to each borough, and we've increasingly realized that's just not enough to be able to say that we rarely cover the whole city. Having one person in Brooklyn, great. You know, there's 2.6 million people in Brooklyn. It's—and so we have a phenomenal reporter, Gwynne Hogan, who was our Brooklyn reporter, and she's, that's still her center of gravity, but she also focuses on the migrant crisis and ranges more widely. So there's a little bit of a dynamic beat assignment when something becomes a big issue. Our great investigative reporter, Rosalind Adams, has been covering the marijuana rollout, and that's essentially her beat at the moment, and it'll probably evolve into something else with time. But

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:25]: Yeah. So you're nonprofit. You're online. You have a weekday newsletter. What's your audience reach?

NIC DAWES [00:09:32]: Yeah. So the newsletter goes to about 70,000 people a day. We actually have two at the moment. We also have a summer newsletter, which is a limited, once a week thing. Really fun. So the main newsletter goes to about 70,000 people. The summer newsletter goes to about 4,000 people. On our website, we reach anywhere between five- or six-hundred thousand and 1.5 million in a month, depending on the month.

NIC DAWES [00:09:55]: We probably average around 750,000 uniques, and we do, you know, 1.2-1.5 million page views in a given month. About 20,000 downloads a month of the FAQ NYC podcast.

Maintaining local focus and resisting viral traffic for its own sake

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:10:10]: Yeah. You know, and you describe THE CITY as, you know, news for New Yorkers. One of the things that struck me, I think for a lot of journalists, and publishers, there would be a natural pool, particularly in a city like New York, which has international interest and lots of news stories to really chase after traffic. Right? That would appeal to people all over the globe. So how do you maintain that focus on New Yorkers and not get sucked into the allure of viral articles?

NIC DAWES [00:10:47]: Yeah. That's a great question. And there are a few layers to the answer. The first thing is to keep saying we are for New Yorkers, and to remind ourselves of that and embed that in our culture. And that goes down to, you know, whom we hire and what we incentivize internally. And when you've done that enough, when the temptation arises to say, for example, cover the Trump trial in great detail, where there are, like, 600 other news organizations in the strum, to say, well, no. Firstly, we can't add any value. And secondly, you know, that's not what our mandate is or not what our, not what our mission is.

NIC DAWES [00:11:27]: You know, I'd think of a more complex case, the recent campus protests, which were very heavily covered, which were subject of huge international interest and where we could have chased some numbers. And we didn't because, again, we knew that we would struggle to add value, and we were trying to think hard about the ways in which our coverage would be relevant for a New York City audience. And so, you know, we kept a very close eye on things. We assigned a reporter to watch what was happening, and we could see that as the involvement of the NYPD increased, that the story, we, if we stayed in our lane, the story would veer into our lane. And indeed it did, and we broke the story that a police officer had discharged their fire firearm inside Columbia's Hamilton Hall. That forced the police to hold a press conference and explain why they hadn't admitted to this fact. The story actually did do huge numbers as well, and we were awarded for staying in our lane. And then the last thing I would say is it a little bit matters what you measure, and I think there's a real it's been really tough for many people in our space to think about how we get beyond the head the headline metrics that you and I just talked about, like page views, uniques.

NIC DAWES [00:12:39]: Should I feel super happy that Apple News put a story on the home page and I got, you know, 5,000,000 last month. Sure. I'm happy about it, but it's not a core return to our mission. So we are trying to look more at the metrics of quality that show that we're building direct relationships and longer term relationships with our audience. So focusing more on returning visits than on absolute visits and seeing how those are growing, focusing more on the newsletter, and seeing what's happening with the absolute size of those lists and open rates, looking what's happening with membership and people who are making small dollar contributions. And so if we put those numbers front and center, we're less likely to chase the, well, otherwise a big viral hit into a cul de sac.

Serving two distinct audiences in New York City

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:13:29]: And I've read you talk about there are basically two components to your audience. So there are the, you know, probably relatively affluent, media savvy, people who just need that local news that they're not getting, you know, from all the other media. And then there's the underserved in New York. So you talk a little bit about that, just those two different audiences and how you approach that?

NIC DAWES [00:13:52]: Yeah. I describe our audience a little bit as a barbell, with a bulge on kind of each end of the income distribution and the power distribution in some ways. And I think part that I think that that's a complicated and challenging bimodal strategy to pull off, but a huge amount of power also comes from it because the people who are most affected by public policy and the quality of public services and so on are also the people who should most be heard by people who have the power to influence policy. And so that is very much the way we work. We definitely have a pretty dedicated audience among people who either just care about New York City, who identify with civic progress, reform, their neighborhoods. And, you know, there's a very long tradition of that, and there are neighborhoods where it's seen as traditionally concentrated, high turnout neighborhoods, affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope and the Upper West Side, but also new centers of that kind of vibrancy, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Long Island City, places where people are moving to, and lots of the most engaged media consumers, but also some of the most interesting new players in the city's politics, Crown Heights, places like that, are living. So those kinds of folks but then, of course, also people who are actually involved in advocacy, nonprofits, the staff of elected leaders, people in the council, and so on. And clearly, being credible with those audiences greatly increases your chances of having impact with your investigative reporting.

NIC DAWES [00:15:38]: But, ultimately, if all you do is superserve that audience, you're gonna miss stories, and you're not gonna execute on a mission that is about providing a healthier information environment and a more equitable information environment for everyone. So we try to do a lot of work to listen to what's going on in communities, understand what people's information needs are, and develop journalism that's responsive to that, whether it's through open newsrooms or input on our you know, to responses to tips or just reporters who are deeply connected and who's who look first for what the outcome of policy choices or the actions of more powerful people is likely to be for people who are more underserved. So a bit like the metrics question is a good segue. You know, reminding ourselves of that, baking it into our commissioning and our story decisions and actually looking fairly actively for opportunities to be helpful, whether being helpful means delivering an impact like, you know, our coverage in 2021 and into 2022 of delivery bike workers was cited by all of the city council members who proposed new legislation to protect their labor conditions as its primary inspiration, and that was the result of spending a lot of time with deliveryistas listening to them, but then executing journalism to a very high standard that council members could take seriously. So we look for those kinds of opportunities for impact, but we also look for ways in which reported explanation can serve people who have to navigate nightmarishly complex bureaucracies and so on. And that really seems to work. People find it through search because they ask questions of Google that they also wanna ask of a smart neighbor. Yeah.

NIC DAWES [00:17:26]: So where we are where we don't have as much of an audience is, you know, the middle between those two, and that's a challenge for the future.

Using open newsrooms to engage with the community

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:17:34]: Yeah. You mentioned open newsrooms. Talk a little bit about how that works and why you do that.

NIC DAWES [00:17:40]: Open newsrooms are a way to listen to communities and involve them in the news process, and they can play out in a number of different ways. One format is that you simply hold an off the record conversation at a place that is easily accessible by people, sometimes in, for example, a public library branch, possibly partner with some community organizations to make sure you get an interesting mix of people there. And you just ask people what's on their minds. Listen to them and, you know, try to take some feedback back to the newsroom and develop stories from that. Sometimes they have more of a kind of town hall quality. They're more public. They're more on the record. You might put together a few—

NIC DAWES [00:18:25]: For example, we did a bunch of work last year on what happens when schools call 911 when kids are in psychiatric crisis. Oftentimes, that results in young kids, usually young kids of color, in handcuffs instead of in the care of, you know, a mental health professional. And so for something like that, we put together an event at the Brooklyn Public Library with some experts in the field and our partners from Chalkbeat and some community organizations and had what I hope was a helpful conversation about how to deal with those issues and where to access resources and so on.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:18:59]: For newsrooms that are intrigued by that, are there any tips you would have for implementing it and maybe mistakes to avoid?

NIC DAWES [00:19:08]: Yeah. I mean, I think that probably the most important tip is you need to have partners whom you can work with. Don't expect that you can show up in a community and, you know, have any credibility on your own or even get people there necessarily. So I think borrowing some tips from community organizing and finding the right partners and being comfortable with the fact that they are not news organizations. They'll have a different view of the world from you, but they provide an entry and they have knowledge that you don't have. So I think that's key. And then being journalists, although listening, being a good listener is a very important part of being a good journalist, being in those settings and being able to listen in a kind of humble, receptive way. This is not technical advice. It's more how do you show up in the world advice, I think is critical, and thinking and being reflective on how it feels to people when you ask questions the way we tend to ask questions and maybe thinking a little differently about what is gonna elicit answers that you don't expect instead of priming people for the answers that you do expect, which is something that we all have a tendency to do.

NIC DAWES [00:20:19]: Yeah. So I think those are the key things, and don't do the opposite of those things. Don't show up with a pre-baked agenda. Don't assume that people even know who you are, let alone trust you, and work to plug those gaps.

Financial sustainability at THE CITY

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:20:36]: Let's talk a little bit about your financial model and sustainability. So philanthropy is a big part of it. What are the other components?

NIC DAWES [00:20:45]: Yeah. So philanthropy is the primer, is the biggest engine of it, mixed between, you know, institutional philanthropy and individual, larger individual gifts. The other components are membership and corporate sponsorship. Membership is gifts that, you know, total over a year less than $1,000, and that accounts for about 12% of our total revenue, about $560,000 last year. And that's really powerful. It's, you know, it's your readers putting money voluntarily behind what you do, not to get through the paywall but to signal that they value the work, and I would love to see that grow significantly. It grew quite a bit last year. We went from about 3,200 people giving to about 5,000 people giving last year.

NIC DAWES [00:21:33]: And then corporate sponsorship is a mix of, you know, public radio style underwriting and more advertising, which is not, you know, that whole market is in essentially crisis, whichever way you slice it. So it's not hugely remunerative, but it certainly adds at the margin. And in New York City, of course, we have the Mayor's Office of Community and Ethnic Media, which, implementing Local Law 57, tries to ensure that a certain amount of city advertising goes to community outlets. So, you know, we're able to earn a little bit over there at rates that are a little better than what you get from auctioning yourself off on an ad tech platform.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:22:16]: Yeah. That last piece has caught a good bit of interest in, you know, my field of press associations and others who are looking at, you know, their local cities and states. And I'm just curious. Part of what I've heard from some outlets and even the city and CUNY about that program is that there have been some benefits to the city for actually, from actually advertising in these outlets that they didn't realize until they were kinda forced to that—you know, these local ethnic and community outlets have a different relationship with their community. They're reaching audiences that, you know, mainstream media might not and social media might not. Has that been your experience in working with the city?

NIC DAWES [00:22:59]: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we don't have very deep qualitative insights, into it, but but it's certainly true just, from a classical advertising metrics perspective that, you know, we see higher click through rates than you would expect or than sort of typical industry benchmarks when when we when we carry those ads. And that says to me, you know, that we're reaching people that are engaged with these issues that are present locally. You know, we're not shoving a story in front of 15 million international readers who care about a viral moment in New York. We're reaching people who live here, who need these services, who may not be aware of them. And so the returns are just superior as a result.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:23:42]: And for, you know, publishers who are outside of New York, particularly small, you know, community outlets, they might hear numbers. And if they don't think about the competition in New York, they might assume that, you know, you're in the advertising capital of the world. You've got a great audience, and philanthropy would just—and advertising would both just kinda flow in the door on its own. You'd turn on the spigot. But last year, I know you had some cuts in philanthropy. Semafor covered that, and your staff volunteered to take pay cuts. So talk a little bit about sustainability and stability and what your approach is to that.

NIC DAWES [00:24:22]: It's tough. I think we are—all the things you said about New York City are true. Right? This is a place where there are tremendous resources. And so you might imagine that the streets are paved with gold, and you just have to walk around and pick it up. But nonprofit news is still a new category for philanthropy, and people have deeply established patterns of giving. They know what it is to give to the ballet or the Natural History Museum or their local hospital, and the networks around all of those things and the practices are deeply established. These are real institutions of New York City life, and people have deep and long relationships with them. And we're showing up in a new category and saying, hey.

NIC DAWES [00:25:03]: Well, you know, if you want to have a thriving civic information environment, you might wanna consider adding local news to the list of things that you fund. And we provide a kind of information infrastructure that's akin to libraries or parks or schools, other categories that people give in. But we are making the case for this new thing in an environment of intense philanthropic sophistication and competition. And it's tough. It's also an expensive place. You know, we wanna pay people properly to live in an expensive town. Rent is high. Everything is expensive.

NIC DAWES [00:25:42]: So, that's the challenge on the other side of the income statement. And while there is a lot of philanthropic excitement nationally with Press Forward and other initiatives, you know, it’s the speed at which these things happen is the speed at which it happens. So it's really challenging. I think we have the opportunity to build something incredibly powerful here, and there are ways in which being in a city that has so much scale just journalistically and from a product perspective and an audience perspective enables us to try some things and build some things that are gonna be relevant elsewhere. But anyone who sits in these roles will tell you that almost wherever you are, it's exceptionally, exceptionally tough.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:26:29]: And so what's your approach to sort of managing that and charting a, you know, a financial plan for the organization?

NIC DAWES [00:26:38]: You know, I think that there are a few keys to it. One is that you need to have enough investment in fundraising and the business side, and not simply believe that if you build it, they will come. And, so the temptation is and, certainly, our staffing structure was a few years ago, overwhelmingly, the costs were overwhelmingly dedicated to the journalism. And, obviously, it's crucial to have as much of your resources going into the journalism as possible in a context where you have enough to drive sustainability. You have a professional fundraising operation. You have, you know, solid financial management, and also that you have enough product capability and marketing capability to actually get in front of people. And, you know, that's just something the American Journalism Project emphasizes everywhere it goes. You know, we really do need to build out business infrastructure.

NIC DAWES [00:27:32]: So, that's certainly what we're trying to do. I think also, and certainly, you know, a lesson that I took in last year after two years of, you know, quite robust growth in 2021 and 2022 was that all of the promise of the new enthusiasm for local news as a category doesn't doesn't mean that the money is here yet. We still have to be really patient and try to lay a foundation for growth because the scale of the available resources is not yet commensurate with the scale of the crisis. And so we're gonna have to go a little bit deliberately.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:28:12]: What tips do you have for nonprofit leaders and publishers who are looking for those revenue people, whether it's ad sales or grant writers or just, you know, development people?

NIC DAWES [00:28:25]: I think you want to have those people really integrated in your leadership team and show them that you can that they are a key part of the strategy, not think of it as an adjunct. And I think that, you know, when I'm, we're trying to hire a new head of development at the moment, and, you know, we're not able to pay at the level that, you know, a museum is able to necessarily or certainly a hospital or a university. But there are a lot of development, great development professionals who wanna be part of a compelling mission and who wanna be part of its strategic leadership. So I think that's one thing I would say. The other thing is that I really think it's worth having product and technology leadership kind of at your top table. We all have to get beyond putting a lot of words on a page and leaving it at that. Advertising is not really a nut that I've cracked. You know, we have had some success with corporate sponsorship.

NIC DAWES [00:29:25]: We recently inked a fairly significant, by our standards, deal with JPMorgan Chase, which was also associated with a bigger deal that American Journalism Project did. I think there, we are, you know, the question of how much to invest relative to the return in this ad market is a complicated one, and I wish I had great advice about that. And I think it's just, like, I have to keep the costs down, but not down so much that you don't actually deliver anything.

Transitioning from large media organizations to smaller teams

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:29:51]: Talk a little bit about your journey to THE CITY. You know, a couple jobs ago, you were, you know, chief content officer at Hindustan Times, the second largest English language publication in India. I think you I think I read you had 500 staff and a large budget, obviously, to go along with that. I assume in Johannesburg, your paper there was considerably bigger in terms of staff. What's it been like to go from those much, much larger institutions, and broader scope too editorially to managing a much smaller staff and a tighter focus?

NIC DAWES [00:30:27]: I mean, I've spent most of my career working in legacy institutions of one kind or another, you know, at different scales. HTU, Hindustan Times, was actually close to a 1,000 people in the newsroom, and then Human Rights Watch was 500. The Mail and Guardian was smaller, about a 100. And it's enormously different. You know, having a lot of people around you means that you spend a lot of your time as a leader essentially hiring, setting the culture, and delegating. And, you know, in a role like this one, you just have to do a heck of a lot more yourself. And it's a complex balance that I don't think I've always got right. You know, what do you take on yourself? What do you share, off board? How do you create consultation and support around what you're doing even in a smaller setting and trust people? On the other hand, you know, there's vastly less inertia, and if you want to move things, you can move them, which is pretty amazing.

NIC DAWES [00:31:29]: And then the narrowness of focus does not bother me at all. In fact, I find it kinda great. I mean, firstly, New York City obviously contains multitudes, even if you are limiting yourself to accountability reporting and service journalism. And I think having clarity in this media environment is a very, it's a wonderful thing, and you can find all kinds of richness within a clear and more delimited scope. And I guess the last thing I'll say is that one of the reasons that I wanted to do this was that I had been part of, you know, for the preceding four years, Human Rights Watch, a massive global NGO. And I would literally go to, like, 15 countries in a year. And one day, I'm in Japan talking to the finance committee of the Diet about, you know, Chinese finance technology and privacy. And the next week, I'm in Brazil talking to the foreign minister about the Amazon. And while our investigative work at Human Rights Watch was incredibly rigorous and credible, and I felt very proud and confident making advocacy arguments based on those investigations.

NIC DAWES [00:32:33]: You know, I was some random dude who showed up from thousands of miles away. And working at a local level means you're, you know, literally, you know, looking across the table at the people whom you're reporting on. You live side by side with them, and you can see the impact of your work. You have a kind of locust stand eye. People can call you out on it and praise you on it, and that's just an incredibly satisfying and compelling place to be in.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:32:59]: And that bridges me to my next question, which is going from Human Rights Watch back into journalism and, you know, leading a completely different type of organization. What did you learn just about management and organizational leadership coming from that environment that maybe you wouldn't have had if you had stayed purely in journalism?

NIC DAWES [00:33:23]: Yeah. It's for, that's a very interesting question. And then in a way, I think that the challenges that international NGOs have had with management, and they've had a lot over the last 10 years, are quite similar to some of the challenges that news organizations have faced. They attract quite similar people who are mission-driven and often quite convinced of themselves, who have been elevated into management because they're great professionals, not necessarily because they're people who care about management. And they also have cultures where the outcome, whether it's an advocacy outcome like Human Rights Watch pursues or a humanitarian outcome like getting the food to the kids, is placed above all else, placed above, the you know, people's health and happiness and sometimes even above ethics, in the conduct of the work. And there's quite a lot of that in news organizations too. And so I think what I learned at scale in Human Rights Watch dovetailed quite closely with things that I learned, for example, at Hindustan Times and that I think are really relevant to news organizations. So believing that management is important, having an internal culture that prioritizes diversity, that prioritizes accountability at all levels, that is collaborative and open and constructive, those kinds of things go just as strongly in news organizations as they do in international nonprofits.

NIC DAWES [00:34:52]: But international nonprofits maybe have, maybe started investing in them a little earlier because the crises they had were more severe and more visible. Yeah. So, you know and I think that the issues around building diversity and having a, both an approach to diversity that centers it across your strategy is an area where where NGOs also have had similar problems to news outlets, you know, heavily white organizations with a very strong normative culture that grows out of that demography. And so tackling that, you know, reversing it, and trying to build more inclusive cultures that represent and look like the people who work there is a very relevant set of shared challenges that we have and that other nonprofits do.

Challenges of maintaining a diverse newsroom

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:35:46]: On that diversity point, you know, I think a lot of people in, particularly in rural America or in the states that just aren't quite as diverse might assume that that you have it a lot easier in diversifying your staff, but I have a suspicion that it's still challenging. What's been your experience there?

NIC DAWES [00:36:06]: I, you know, I think we've been able to hire, you know, incredible reporters and editors of all kinds of backgrounds. And, you know, one big advantage in that is CUNY and the j-school, which is a you know, it's a great j-school, and it really plays an important role in building a cohort of reporters and editors who come from all backgrounds, in New York City and who have the chops. So that has helped. I mean, certainly, holding on to people in a market where we are elevating their work to a high level of visibility, and it can be seen by the New York Times or Bloomberg or people like that in a way that it might not be if we're in a smaller town means we have to work twice as hard to retain people. So I don't, we haven't struggled to hire a diverse team. You know, maintaining that diversity, making sure that it's actually given full expression in the culture of the organization, in our editorial decisions, obviously, that is a work of kind of pretty constant vigilance and and hopefully, you know, positive intent as well.

Rapid-fire questions

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:37:12]: So now we can move to our rapid-fire questions. And the questions will be quick, but your answers don't have to be, and I might even ask for elaboration. So for first question, compared to a year ago, are you more or less optimistic about the future of local news?

NIC DAWES [00:37:28]: I am both more optimistic and less optimistic. You know, on the positive side of the ledger, I think we've got a pretty clear sense of what works now. Local nonprofits were all over the Pulitzer Prize list. They've driven the news on some of the biggest stories of the day, everywhere from San Francisco to Mississippi to us here in New York City. I think there's a growing understanding beyond our own sector of how deep the crisis is and how urgent their task of rebuilding is. And we're, you know, we're seeing more and more outlets create sustainable plans to provide an answer. So we have more models. We have, yeah, just an extraordinary growing national network of new local news organizations, which are gonna be at least guideposts to the future even if they themselves aren't the ultimate answer.

NIC DAWES [00:38:18]: So I'm really optimistic about that and about the community that's working on these issues. On the other hand, I think the pressures are continuing to build, And, you know, we're continuing to see red ink, you know, all over commercial media balance sheets. We're continuing to see retrenchment and pullback for many of them. The public radio system is under huge pressure, and I don't think that the nonprofit resources or the philanthropy resources are swinging in the direction of an answer nearly as fast as the damage is being done. So I think it's a very hopeful moment, and we're kind of building the beginning of a bridge to whatever the future is, but it's fragile too.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:39:04]: Speaking of the future, does AI fill you with more hope or dread when it comes to journalism?

NIC DAWES [00:39:10]: At the risk of being boring, I'm also gonna say both, and I think we have to understand the impact of AI in all its dimensions. And starting with what it means for our overall operating environment, what do we cover? What is the information ecosystem that we're working in look like? How does it impact our business models? Can we make use of it in our newsrooms? And those in a—if the development of these systems is such that our overall information ecosystem becomes profoundly polluted by fakery or highly targeted polarizing content, and then we have to battle in that space, you know, that's a terrifying thing, of course. For us and for smaller news organizations, there is some hope, I think, that we can scale up our effectiveness by building tools that empower reporters and editors. For example, at THE CITY, we're experimenting with a few different AI tools. We built a tool to map all of our coverage and see if it's true that we, in fact, cover the whole of New York, and we were able to do that for, you know, a few thousand bucks instead of many tens of thousands of human time tagging stories. We're also building a chatbot that'll be trained entirely on our own service journalism and, hopefully, be able to answer readers' questions accurately based on our prior reporting. So I think thoughtful, targeted uses of these technologies in under-resourced newsrooms could be very helpful, but there are also profound threats even to a nonprofit business model. For example, if large language model summaries displace search results so far down the pages, they're already starting to do, discovery of our work and what we do and the whole pipeline to deliver people to membership or to show donors that we're actually reaching them gets put under pressure.

NIC DAWES [00:41:11]: And we don't have the resources or the heft to be battling tech companies over intellectual property the way that, for example, The New York Times is. So we have to leave our fate a little bit in the hands of others. There's also very unequal access to the kinds of engineering and other tech resources you might need to take advantage of this stuff. You know, and we were already seeing what happens on apps like Newsbreak or the cannibalization of the local space by AI. So I have all kinds of pretty concrete fears, I think, but also a sense that we need to work in the space.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:41:52]: Messy desk or clean desk?

NIC DAWES [00:41:53]: Messy desk.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:41:54]: Do you have a favorite piece of advice that you've received or that you like to give?

NIC DAWES [00:41:58]: I think the thing that's mattered the most to me and has made the most difference is, like, don't think you have to do everything yourself. Your team actually wants to help you, and you need and they want you to rely on them. Corollary of that is that, you know, when you're in a leadership role, you don't have to be completely invincible. You don't have to be the one that never takes a break and that is always there first and leaves last, and quote, unquote set an example. What I've learned a little bit is that when you do that, which I'm certainly tempted to, it can put impossible pressure on everyone else to be like you and set the tone in a way that you will ultimately find as unhelpful.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:42:35]: Is there a piece of common advice or conventional wisdom that drives you crazy and it's wrongness or oversimplification?

NIC DAWES [00:42:43]: There are many many such pieces of conventional wisdom. I think, you know, in our space, the thing that makes me the craziest is the idea that it's just enough to do great work and that, you know, journalistic quality will out, people will find you, and you'll get results. I think we have to be much more intentional about getting our work in front of people, growing it, and actually investing in making sure that we are relevant and that we're in the conversation. If you build it, they will come is not a mantra for success in our business.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:43:17]: Silicon Valley has valorized favor over the last decade or two. Journalists find that hard to come by. Of course, you know, there has been a lot of damage by some of those failures, but, more so by their successes. And journalists always wanna get things right, but I think failure is an important part of life and certainly business. Do you have a favorite failure of yours?

NIC DAWES [00:43:39]: I mean, the failures that I think about the most are ones that I've made in an, at more in an editorial context, but that also teach me things about working on the business side. And when I was, for example, when I was the editor of The Mail and Guardian back in South Africa, we had a very celebrated cartoonist named Zapiro, whose people would wait for his cartoon to drop every week, and he was a kind of national figure in many ways, you know, larger than anyone else on our staff. And I think it was in 2012 or 2011, a number of years after the original prophet Mohammed cartoons, there was an international cartoonists’ Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. And our cartoonist did a very gentle, non-Islamophobic, sort of mildly amusing cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammed, you know, making a joke to his therapist. And he sent it over to me, and, usually, we would spend, like, an hour or so discussing his cartoon. We didn't really. I was a bit distracted, and I just let it go in the paper. I thought it would be fine. And that was obviously, like, a profound lack of cultural competence on my part.

NIC DAWES [00:44:50]: And we would pin the ready pages of the paper that I'd signed off up on the wall. And as the last pages were going to press, so one of my staff came over to me and said, you realize that that cartoon is gonna be a problem. And by that point, it was too late. And I was like, oh, yeah. Maybe it is. It seemed mild to me, but maybe it isn't. And by the next day, we were facing calls for a boycott of the paper, death threats to the staff. I had to get a bodyguard and meet with the leadership of the Muslim community in Johannesburg to talk through why we published the cartoon.

NIC DAWES [00:45:28]: And then there was huge pressure from both sides of the spectrum, from free speech advocates who said, you know, hang tough. You did the right thing. You know, that's the brand of your newspaper. And deeply, aggrieved and offended people who wanted a full throated apology. And so I learned a lot from navigating that process and coming up with a nuanced set of answers. But the fundamental thing really was that it was a it was a kind of cultural political blind spot that I'd had in passing the cartoon without more thought and that I needed to have since I had that blind spot myself, I needed to more intentionally create ways to hear from other people in the newsroom more consistently. And I've, you know, there I've had other varieties of that same failure, and I think about it a lot.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:46:21]: You know, this industry is tough. Lots of industries are tough, but sometimes it seems, particularly tough, particularly in this election environment. And as you just alluded to, sometimes you face death threats for just doing your job. What's one thing you do to maintain your sanity and restore yourself?

NIC DAWES [00:46:39]: Yeah. I ride my bike, or go to the hills. New York City, probably contrary to popular belief, is a great town to be a cyclist in. So I will hop on the Metro North and go a little bit up the Hudson and go ride my gravel bike in the woods or get on my road bike and cycle out to Nyack and the hills beyond. New York City offers incredible access to some pretty stunning countryside as well. So and if it's not on the bike, I'll go run or hike and spend long hours doing that, clear my head.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:47:12]: And you've alluded to earlier sort of the need to to have a healthy culture and work life for your staff. What are some tips or things you do as a leader to help your staff maintain its sanity and mental health?

NIC DAWES [00:47:28]: Yeah. I mean, again, one thing we do is to talk about that and to prioritize it as a value, and not project a kind of “toughness is the answer” approach to work and life and mental health. We have brought in the DART Center to talk with people, particularly in the immediate aftermath of COVID, just about the stresses that were building up and ways to manage an unremitting stress and find space. You know, we try to, you know, have obviously decent hard policies about, leave and time off and and and so on, and to celebrate that and to nudge people in the direction of taking their time. So a lot of this is kind of culture setting stuff, and how do you message time off, and how do you talk about your own activities? So we try to have the right policies and procedures and then also a culture that leans in that direction. And, generally, with journalists, your problem is never gonna be that you have to, like, harass people into doing stuff. It's more like you have to harass them into not doing stuff.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:48:31]: Yeah. I think that's you when you were talking about NGO, you know, mission-driven people and how that's similar to journalism, I think it's a particular problem for mission-driven fields where it can almost be manipulative, either—from your own standpoint sometimes even that you feel like you have this burden on you to save democracy or that sort of thing.

NIC DAWES [00:48:54]: Yeah. And that's so huge and impossible that you can completely sacrifice yourself on its altar and, you know, see only, you know, an incremental contribution, and it's never ending. Actually, someone when I was, at Human Rights Watch, a counselor that we brought in to work with our staff and support them in thinking differently about these things, she noted how, you know, everyone would say, well, like, I'm having a tough time, but the people I work with, you know, it's so much worse for them if they're human rights defenders or refugees. And she said, you know, it's not an Olympics of suffering. You don't have to win the medal in having the hardest time for the way you feel to be justified. And I think that Olympics of suffering approach can happen in newsrooms as well. And, yeah, we need to be quite conscious in avoiding those tropes.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:49:41]: Yeah. Absolutely. Do you have a favorite time saving hack?

NIC DAWES [00:49:45]: I mean, brush your teeth in the shower. You know, in New York City, I don't know if this applies to everyone, but, take the subway or ride your bike, never drive.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:49:54]: Five years out, what does wild success look like for THE CITY?

NIC DAWES [00:49:59]: Wild success, I think, really means that we are able to be the place where the New York City conversation is convened, and the place where New Yorkers are able to converge around a trusted set of facts. And so that means we're probably about twice, I think we can do that at about twice our current size and have a, you know, powerful investigative reporting, data reporting service journalism as we currently do, but a broader palette and a richer set of ways to meet our audience, that aren't, just, text and data journalism on a page, but then include, you know, video-based formats, audio, other places to reach people. But, you know, fundamentally, if we think about it in outcomes terms, it means that we are the, you know, the primary locus for New York City news in New York.

Media and local recommendations

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:50:52]: And now the last two questions are recommendations. Obviously, you get lots of visitors to the city. What are three to five places you would recommend to people coming from out of town?

NIC DAWES [00:51:04]: I think a lot of people don't realize that New York City is a beach town. And you can get to the beach on public transit. You can either take the New York City ferry, which is kind of amazing, all the way to Rockaway, or you can take the subway to a bunch of different beaches. I particularly like Jacob Riis Beach, which is a beautiful expanse of sand. It has some great food concessions. You know, there are a few sharks, but seemingly under control is here, and the park service and the city fly drones to look out for them. So strong recommendation for New York City as a beach town. You can even take surfing lessons in Rockaway.

NIC DAWES [00:51:39]: You know, another very classic one is to go to Food Court in Queens. I would suggest the New York Food Court, which is in Flushing. Incredible, incredible, mostly Chinese, food outlets there and just, you know, an evening in a part of town that you may not go to on the regular tourist map. And maybe if that doesn't work for you and you wanna do the classic take the ferry to Staten Island, I think getting on the water is a good idea if you can make it happen. Take the free ferry to Staten Island and take a bit of a walk over to Victory Boulevard, probably take about 20 minutes, and get some Sri Lankan food. You know, I think if you're in the museum district and you're going to The Met, you should pop up the road to the Museum of the City of New York, which has amazing historical exhibits on the city, and you'll understand the place you're in hugely better after a few hours at the Museum of the City of New York. And then finally, maybe, you know, I'm sure people will wanna do Broadway or those kinds of things. A different sort of evening might be to go to one of the poetry evenings at the KGB Bar on the Lower East Side. There's a long history as a literary gathering spot in New York, and you can hear some of the most celebrated poets in the country there and have a beer.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:52]: Do you have a favorite Indian or South African restaurant?

NIC DAWES [00:52:57]: I do not have a favorite South African restaurant. You know, I do like—for Sri Lankan, I do like New Asha on Staten Island. I strongly recommend that. It's very, very cheap, less than $10, kind of amazing. For fancier Indian food, there's a restaurant group that owns three or four relatively high end but incredibly authentic and very, very good restaurants. And my favorite of those is one called Dhamaka, which is on the lower east side. Absolutely astonishingly great Indian food. But there are lots of more mom and pop places that are good too.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:53:27]: And then final question, three to five media recommendations. Any form of media?

NIC DAWES [00:53:33]: You know, I thought hard about what to recommend here. And, you know, so one thing I would say is that I think that, I'm spending a lot of time with media that is about the real structure of the economy. And, you know, for people who don't already listen to it, I'd strongly recommend the Odd Lots podcast from from Bloomberg, which has a really—the Odd Lots team, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, ask questions in a very curious and open way, and they bring in great experts, and they make sense of things you may never have thought of. Like, why is Tractor Supply Company thriving, and how is that connected to larger forces going on in national life? And at a global level, Adam Tooze, the Columbia economic historian, posts an amazing list of links every week, called Chartbook, which connects what's going on at the Federal Reserve to the politics of climate change. Lots of, for people in local news, I think lots of the big forces that are acting on us get explored in both of those outlets. For entertainment, if I can call it that, you've I've just finished reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, which was, I think, last year's Booker Prize winner. Absolutely chilling, incredibly lyrical, powerful depiction of Ireland as it falls under the spell of a right wing nationalist leader and drifts into authoritarianism. And, it's a slightly terrifying, but also very gorgeously written, echo of our current moment.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:55:13]: Well, thank you very much, Nick. This has been a treat.

NIC DAWES [00:55:16]: Thanks, Tim. Really fun.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:55:20]: 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.

And thanks to our production partners at Pirate Audio. Pirate Audio believes every community deserves great things to listen to, and they're on a mission to help local newsrooms reach their communities via audio. If you're interested in starting a podcast or need production support for an existing one, let me know, and I'll be happy to connect you.

If you have guest recommendations, others doing interesting and innovative work in local news, let me know through the contact form at the website, lnmpod.com.

Past guests on the Local News Matters podcast include: Allison Taylor Levine (Local News Initiative Delaware), Crystal Good (Black by God), Lisa Snowden (Baltimore Beat), 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), C