The path to sustainability through innovation, collaboration and infrastructure with Knight Foundation’s Jim Brady (LNM Episode 39)

Jim Brady, vice president of journalism at Knight Foundation, shares his insights into the current state of local journalism and the quest for sustainability. He discusses Press Forward, a $500 million-plus national initiative aimed at supporting local news. Drawing on his extensive experience in digital media, Jim reflects on the challenges and opportunities facing local news outlets today, with an optimistic view of how new technologies and business models can help them thrive.

He also emphasizes the role of philanthropy in creating a stronger, more resilient local news ecosystem. From increasing audience engagement to reducing operational costs, Jim explores how local journalism can adapt to the evolving media landscape. He also touches on the importance of rebuilding trust with audiences and the need to reconnect local news with community needs.

Throughout the conversation, Jim highlights how local news plays a vital role in a functioning democracy, advocating for a collective effort to ensure its future. Whether through innovative startups or legacy media adapting to new realities, the future of local journalism hinges on collaboration and creativity.

Episode chapters:
(00:02:23) – The state of local news: Challenges and progress
(00:09:33) – Building infrastructure for local news sustainability
(00:15:31) – The “huddling for warmth” phase of journalism
(00:25:53) – Press Forward’s national effort to save local news
(00:31:10) – Public awareness of the local news crisis
(00:34:10) – Adapting to the new reality
(00:37:16) – Hopes for a transformed news ecosystem
(00:48:03) – Trust, bubbles, and journalism’s future
(00:58:07) – Rapid-fire questions
(01:05:47) – Media and local recommendations

Listen to the episode here:

Bio:

Jim Brady has been vice president of Journalism at Knight Foundation since 2021 and oversees Knight’s journalism portfolio of more than $200 million. During his tenure, Brady has been instrumental in developing the strategic framework behind Press Forward, a $500 million effort to revitalize local news in the United States. A longtime digital media innovator and executive, Brady has guided Knight’s investments in sustainable and scalable local news business models that allow for revenue diversification, market expansion, strategic partnerships and innovative product development.

Brady has spent 37 years in journalism, almost 30 of them in digital. He has served as executive editor of washingtonpost.com, editor in chief at Digital First Media, executive director of news and sports at AOL, and public editor at ESPN. He’s also an entrepreneur who bootstrapped the local news startup Spirited Media, which operated Billy Penn in Philadelphia, The Incline in Pittsburgh and Denverite before a successful exit. He’s consulted for legacy and digital publishers; worked with print, broadcast and digital operations; managed editorial, product, technology and revenue teams; and experienced three mergers, three sales, two bankruptcies and countless reorganizations.

Brady’s experience in digital journalism goes back so far that he was on the team that launched washingtonpost.com in 1996, and worked at AOL when it was still considered cool. He is a past president of the Online News Association, a two-time judge of the Pulitzer Prizes, and currently serves on the boards of the American Press Institute, International Media Women’s Foundation and Media Impact Funders. He is a 1989 graduate of American University with a degree in print journalism (yes, print journalism).

Full transcript:

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

JIM BRADY [00:00:00]:Whatever your other priority is, if you think the priority should be, well, I don't care about, you know, sustainability. I wanna cover my community. I don't—I wanna innovate or I wanna have you know, I wanna cover, you know, a new community. It's like you can't do any of those things if you don't exist. You can't innovate technically if you go out of business. You can't be diverse if you don't exist. There's, like, a whole bunch of things that you can't be if you're not there to begin with, and I think that's why we focus a lot on that. Not exclusively.

JIM BRADY [00:00:23]: Obviously, we do fund journalism. We do fund newsrooms in many cases that are doing really good work in communities around the country. But I think we feel like if we just did that, you're picking very specific set of winners and letting everybody else just kinda fend for themselves.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:00:43]: 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 Jim Brady, Vice President of Journalism at the Knight Foundation. Jim oversees Knight’s journalism portfolio and has played a key role in the development of Press Forward, a groundbreaking $500 million initiative aimed at revitalizing local news across the U.S.

We discuss the current state of local journalism and the importance of audience engagement and sustainable business models. Jim shares his optimistic outlook on how new infrastructures and funding models are shaping the future of news. Drawing on his decades of experience in digital media, including roles at The Washington Post, AOL, and ESPN, Jim offers unique insights into the challenges and opportunities ahead for local news outlets.

We also touch on the changing landscape of philanthropy in journalism, how new technologies are lowering the barriers for news startups, and the importance of maintaining a close connection with communities.

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 Jim Brady.

Alright. Well, welcome, Jim. It's an honor to have you on the podcast.

JIM BRADY [00:02:21]: Great to be here. Thanks, Tim.

The state of local news: Challenges and progress

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:02:23]: Alright. So I know a lot of listeners will want to hear some more about Press Forward if they're not sick of hearing about it already. And so we'll get to that. But I wanna set the table with talking about the industry more generally. And you and I have known each other for, I guess, a little over a decade now. I've brought you to Macon when you were, I think you had just launched Billy Pen maybe at the time. Fortunately, I've been able to stay in touch and catch up on everything from the early days of news on the web when I was doing tech at IBM, and you were actually getting the Washington Post, online and a rich rich number of things we could, a lot of things we could delve into. But I wanna start with I think this is a quote you gave the Seattle Times last year, about really what it takes to be viable, and you were – in the talking in the context of Press Forward announcements.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:03:19]: And you said, everybody's got their challenges, but I do think there's a general sense in industry these days that we're starting to come to some level of agreement as to what's required to build a viable business in local journalism. And we're all sort of moving towards that goal. Better audience engagement, diversified revenue with philanthropy being a part of it, but not all. And we could certainly break that apart into many, many different, conversations. But first thing I would say, I found that statement hopeful or maybe aspirational because sometimes I do wonder, you know, are we trying to get the buggy whip industry working? You know, is there a fundamental problem here that, you know, nobody nobody's certainly nobody's figured it all out. But you're pointing there to signs of progress, and we're starting to figure out some of the pieces and put them together. So what gives you caught you know, what's the reason for that optimism, and and, specifically, where do you see, where do you see signs that that is, what's happening?

JIM BRADY [00:04:23]: I think you see it in the growth of reader revenue, you know, whether that's subscriptions or whether membership. I think it took us in journalism, God knows, 10, 20 years to really adjust to the fact that advertising was not gonna be the path forward, and it's not you know, one of the things that's always frustrated me is when you talk to newsrooms who will say, well, sure, advertising's not gonna be our future, it's gonna be readers, it's gonna be membership, it's gonna be subs, it's like, so how are you changing how you operate to make that work? And they're like, well, what do you mean? And it's like, well, those are very different revenue streams and you need to produce different kind of journalism, you need to produce different kind of broader set of content, news and information, you need to be thinking about how you're gonna engage with people if you want them to give. It's not you're just gonna throw a bunch of stories in front of them and cross your fingers and hope they pay. They need to have a sense of who you are, what you're about, what you stand for. And so, like, if you're gonna change your business model, you need to change how you operate completely and I think that took a while. So if it took a long time for us to get to the point where we realized the future's gonna be more membership and subs and it took another period of time after that to recognize that a lot of the activities had to change to make that work. And so I think but I do think you look at, like, the News Revenue Hub is now I think they've generated $106 million in membership revenue for their members over the last eight or nine years, I suppose it is, and, like, they've done a great job helping people get membership up and running and not only just from a technical standpoint, but how you ask for money and how often you ask for money and where on your site you put calls for money and that gets to the second thing that gives me hope is I think there's a real infrastructure for local journalism that is developing pretty quickly that I think is taking care of. I think the thing I don't think we talk nearly enough about when we talk about the economics of local news is expense.

JIM BRADY [00:06:07]: We always talk about how to make more money and we all agree making more money is the important thing, like obviously nothing substitutes for bringing in all sorts of new revenue and diverse revenue, etcetera, but there's this whole other side of the balance sheet that you gotta look at too. And as a guy who started Billy Pen 10 years ago now, I probably started that site knowing more about how to launch a digital news operation than 99.9% of people who start them. I've been in—at that point, I'd been in the business 20 years and worked in big, small, and it was still a nightmare. It still cost a fortune to get a content management system up and running and to figure out how I was gonna pay staff and how I was gonna get insurance and copy, you know, like a trademark and, you know, just all of that stuff that you all of these companies that we worked for that frankly a lot of us kinda pissed and moaned about, they did take care of a lot of the hard stuff, and you didn't really have to worry about that. You get to go write your stories or develop your audience strategy or go sell your, you know, membership, whatever it was, but at the end of the day, everything else was taken care of by this company you worked for and then all of a sudden you gotta do all that yourself and you really learn like, oh my God. And, you know, I mean, now I think you're starting to see things like Newspack come up and now Newspack has got 300 ish websites using it now and it's a content management system built and operated by WordPress, but it's developed specifically for news publishers. And there are now publishers using News Pack who are spending tens of thousands dollars a year on their tech stack, who is now spending like $10,000 a year, like taking the cost down dramatically. And I think those things are kinda popping up across the landscape now, so I think we're headed toward a world in which not only do I think we'll start we'll continue to make more money by appealing to readers, but also we'll spend less money because we're gonna plug into existing systems that are built for scale and built to keep the cost down and I think, you know, if you're a small publisher and you go from spending $80,000 a year on your tech stack to 25, I mean, for a huge company, 55k is not that big a deal.

JIM BRADY [00:08:03]: For a lot of the publisher sizes we're talking about, that is a life changer. And I think, and there are organizations that have taken that kind of cut moving to news pack. So we multiply that by a lot of the other things that are out there. There are great organizations like Indie Graph and Tiny News Collective that help tiny, tiny publishers, as the name says, get going. So I think you're starting to see this whole thing developing. And I think it's headed toward period in which we're gonna be able to get sites launched much more quickly and much more cheaply than we could five years ago. And this might be contrarian, but my attitude is if we can make publishing faster and cheaper and that means a thousand new sites can launch next year, I'd rather a thousand new sites launch next year and 500 of them fail than a hundred new sites launch next year and all of them succeed. Because at the end of the day, you're gonna have a lot more new organizations out there if you make it easier to get started.

JIM BRADY [00:08:53]: And I think that's been the hard part, is people getting these things started. And that's I think we're headed past that. So that's why I'm optimistic. I think it's becoming more of a democratic system where you don't have to know somebody at a foundation or have a personal wealth to launch something. You can launch something because it's actually just cheap enough for you to get started. And you know, and I've said this before too, there's two things I think you have to do to succeed in local journalism. You have to produce journalism your community cares about, and you have to figure out how to bring in enough money to keep doing it. All the other stuff, content management systems, CRM, legal support, insurance. Like, there are organizations that do those important things already, and you should plug into those and focus your energy on the stuff you can actually control.

Building infrastructure for local news sustainability

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:33]: Yeah. So, you know, I think you're pointing to something I know Knight has, I think you've been moving this direction maybe even before you you got there, which is towards shared services and infrastructure and ecosystem builders to really enable all of, you know, all of this all of the players that can feed into that to flourish.

JIM BRADY [00:09:54]: That's absolutely right. And it was and it was before I got there. Jennifer Preston, my predecessor, did a lot of work in that space too. They'd you know, Jennifer did large grants to American Journalism Project, Report for America, Institute for Nonprofit News, Lion Publishers. And so I think we've continued with those and added a whole bunch of new organizations to it. And I, you know, I know there are folks who don't like that and they wish we just gave more money directly to newsrooms, but I can't tell you how many times we run into a scenario, you know, like, you're sitting at a bar at a conference somewhere and somebody is complaining that night hasn't funded them. And then as the conversation goes on, they'll say something like, well, you know, I mean, we wouldn't be where we are today if it wasn't for, like, the tiny news collective. And you're like, hey.

JIM BRADY [00:10:33]: We helped fund that. And then they're like, you know, it's another great organization. Reporters committee came in and did this amazing work to help me publish this story. It's like, we did you know? So it's like that's the kind of thing. I forget sometimes that, you know, that even though there are a lot of organizations out there that have taken advantage, I don't know if you've taken advantage in a bad way, but have utilized a lot of the tools that we have helped fund to help them run their business. So even if we didn't many of these organizations didn't get a direct grant, they've got certainly gotten support through these other services, and I think that's the idea. The idea is we don't wanna be the ones to say these 10 websites are the ones we think are gonna win. Let's give them the money.

JIM BRADY [00:11:08]: We wanna create a system where like winners can pick themselves. And I think, you know, the Kansas City Defender is a site that kinda came out of nowhere four or five years ago because it did really, really terrific journalism, but I think they were able to leverage Indigraph, I think it was Indigraph, to get started, and that and that was a they had a path to starting to publish that might not have existed a couple years before. And I love stories like that because there are all sorts of people out there who can cover their communities. It's just we don't know who they all are. And what I love is an idea where a whole bunch of people are gonna just step forward now because the tools make it possible, and I think that'll be a big benefit for local journalism nationally. And that's why we do that's why we've fund the way we fund. We're trying to create the most democratic equitable system we can, and picking winners at the at you know, picking these 10 or 20 winners does not feel like it gets you to that.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:11:55]: Yeah. I've just recently read Raj Shah's Big Bets. Do you know that book? No. So for listeners who don't know him, Raj was one of the early employees at the Gates Foundation and was very instrumental in how they approach philanthropy. And then he went to USAID In the Ebola crisis, he was instrumental in that, and now he's the head of the Rockefeller Foundation. But his books has a lot of interesting points he makes that are relevant to business leaders, but certainly philanthropy. And one of the things he talks about was the work they did in Africa and the last mile problem and all the problems of infrastructure that you yes. You wanna get money to the people on the ground.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:12:35]: But if you don't have the infrastructure there, you're just putting a Band Aid on a problem, and you're not really solving anything. And sometimes I do worry about that for all of this money that's put into to journalism. Yes. You want as much to go to newsrooms as possible, but you also want this to produce something that is more sustainable. And it's a delicate balance of how do you empower people at the ground level, but also make sure that you're not just filling a hole and not helping them grow. So how …

JIM BRADY [00:13:08]: Yeah. It's an incredibly delicate balance. I mean, this is what I kinda hope the infrastructure piece helps fix a little bit, which is that, you know, 99% of news organizations that launch start by hiring reporters because what's the point of hiring a business staff when you don't have any audience or anything to actually monetize? And so I think, like, you often but that sets you up where you're kinda running against the clock to some extent. Right? You're like, I've not built an audience, but I, you know, I've only raised x amount of money and that money runs out on x date. Now I have to make up enough business to make up for those costs. And so you're kinda starting from behind the eight ball a little bit. But the opposite is hard to go out there and say, we don't produce any journalism yet, but give us money for this thing we're gonna do. And so you kinda get trapped, and so you either have to decide to spend the money up front to build your own infrastructure and start writing stories or try to, you know, raise enough money before you launch, and they both are different. They're both tricky paths.

JIM BRADY [00:14:00]: You know, I think the infrastructure piece just allows you to get in a position where you can do the – you can do the basics much more cheaply and get launched much more quickly. And I think that way, even if it doesn't work, the opportunity lost there is not as big for you if you're personally putting money into something. A lot of people are probably willing to lose 20, $25,000 to launch something and fail, and probably not a lot willing to lose $250,000 to launch something and fail. So, I mean, I'm not and I don't mean to focus on the failure, but, I mean, I think you go into starting something up knowing that odds are not necessarily in your favor if you're starting something from scratch. And to make the cost of doing that smaller, I think we'll get more people in and, as a result, I think more people will succeed as well. But I think that's right. And I think then and, you know, and the other piece too is whatever your other priority is, if you think the priority should be, well, I don't care about sustainability, I wanna cover my community, I wanna innovate or I wanna cover a new community, it's like you can't do any of those things if you don't exist. You can't innovate technically if you go out of business.

JIM BRADY [00:14:58]: You can't be diverse if you don't exist. There's like a whole bunch of things that you can't be if you're not there to begin with. And I think that's why we focus a lot on that. Not exclusively, obviously, we do fund journalism, we do fund newsrooms in many cases that are doing really good work in communities around the country. But I think we feel like if we just did that, you would really be back in that scenario I mentioned before where you're just trying to you're picking very specific set of winners and letting everybody else just kinda fend for themselves. And I think, that's not the that's not the what we're trying to create.

The “huddling for warmth” phase of journalism

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:15:31]: And to that point, you know, and one of the things I've always admired about Knight Foundation, you know, all the way down to the local teams and the community teams and the arts teams. And I think this stemmed from Alberto, sort of the culture he instilled. A lot of foundations are content to just write checks and write checks to the same people, and they're just there as a bank. And Knight, at least in the 12 years I've been dealing with, had that's never been the case. So you care a lot about effectiveness. And stepping aside from your grant making, when you look at the field, how do you think about encouraging innovation so that, not for its own sake but so that you are building something that lasts and newsrooms are doing something different. You know, what do you think is needed as publishers and editors and journalists? How should we be thinking about our own evolution?

JIM BRADY [00:16:26]: Well, certainly, I think part of how we have to think about it is so we're all now in service of trying to preserve those of us who work in local journalism are all in service of trying to preserve local journalism, not trying to preserve our own publication or our own you know, like, we are and have been for a while now in what I have called many times the huddling for warmth phase of journalism, which is we're either gonna work together to figure out how to deal with this problem or we're gonna wander off on our own into the blizzard and I think we know how that story ends, right? I mean, I think right now the idea of competition, the idea that people wake up in a city like Chicago with a binary, I'm gonna either read the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Sun Times, I think, is pretty anachronistic at this point. I mean, people wake up in Chicago and scroll TikTok for an hour and a half or go to YouTube and watch or binge something on Netflix. Like, they're not those are not they're not we're all competing with sort of all of the things that are out there in the world to do now, and we need to collectively sort of work to make local news a bigger part of that diet. And I think the way you do that is by taking the best ideas that you can find out there and trying to spread them as many places as possible. And I think you look at something like documenters. Documenters is a great way to get citizens involved in covering meetings and publishing kind of accounts of those meetings so that the citizenry is not in the dark about what's happening in a lot of important gatherings. And so, like, that's now in eight to 10 cities. You know? There's smaller, you know, things, like, important, but, like, smaller in terms of the scale.

JIM BRADY [00:17:55]: You know, we funded the Salt Lake Tribune chronicling how you go from a for profit to a nonprofit because a lot of people are gonna do that probably over the next 10 or 15 years, and the path to doing that is not really that different for different organizations. You have to deal with the IRS one way or another, and there might be some differences here and there. But for the most part, they put a playbook together of how you do that, and that's shareable to everybody. So I think there's a lot of almost everything we fund, and pretty much everything actually, falls in the category of this is something that we like and we think other people can take advantage of, whether it's plugging directly into the system like a news pack or replicating it like a documenter or even just stealing the idea and doing it locally. So I think that's the whole idea of, even when we fund individual newsrooms, it's often in the, oh, this is an interesting thing they're trying. Let's see if it works. And if it does, then we'll try to communicate out why it worked and hope to encourage others to do the same. So for me, I just think it's about learning from everybody and putting aside this whole, we're all competing with each other because I don't think in any realistic way we can really claim there's a binary battle between people doing x or y organ in most lives anymore.

JIM BRADY [00:19:02]: They're just, there's the bazillion things they could be doing and we're just one of them, local news. And so, I mean, I think, you know, I think we're past that competition, though. I don't really get a lot of that. Like, we don't wanna share anything anymore, like, well, you know, because part of the getting money from philanthropy is whatever you learn, you need to share. You don't get to take philanthropic dollars and, like, build the next, you know, thing that you can turn around and turn into a huge business. You gotta tell everybody what it is you did. We don't really get much blowback on that now. There's almost nobody who is, who says, like, oh, that's too bad because I really wanna take this and do my own thing with it.

JIM BRADY [00:19:35]: So, I think but I think it being open minded. I think it's seeking innovation for the sake of the industry, not just for my organization. And that is not a problem anymore. There are still some there are still some pockets of that. We early on, when we were looking at, you know because Knight I'd say for the record, Knight believes the future of local media has to be both nonprofit and for profit. You know, I think—I don't think people realize that the percentage of media organizations in this country that are for profit is about 80, 85. You know, all commercial television, all newspapers for the most part. And so, I think we feel like it's gotta be both, but the commercial side can be a little trickier.

JIM BRADY [00:20:10]: It's a little trickier, like, on the broadcast side for sure, where you have conversations with, you know, TV station chains sometimes, and they like everything they hear kind of up until the point where you have to share this out. Not all of them, and we're talking right now to a few that don't do that at all, who are actually happy to share out what they're doing because I think we feel like that's an important space for us to figure out. I think if you look at local news as you know, in the US, the thing that gets discussed some ways the least is commercial broadcast. And yet, in most cities, it's still a dominant way people get news. And, frankly, in most cities now, the largest news website in most cities is a TV station website and not the local paper anymore. So we gotta that they can't just be left out of this equation, but there's some changes they have to make as well in terms of a real openness to sharing information, which I think is starting to happen in some places, but it's still it still could still can be a challenge there, but almost no place else.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:21:03]: But, you know, one of the other problems I see actually, Raj Shah had a quote, and he's talking about philanthropy, but I see it a lot. I think, you know, those of us who wanna innovate and I think there's a lot of innovation around the edges. And he said this about philanthropy that sometimes they seem more focused on making the status quo more tolerable with, you know, small improvements and an easy listening soundtrack. And I think one of the problems is I'm not sure we understand what the core problem is in terms of our business, but also in terms of our audiences. You know? What are – what is our core value proposition, and why do people need us? So where do you see, do you see think that's true? Do you see and where do you see signs of people really trying to get to the core and really innovate?

JIM BRADY [00:21:53]: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think one of the things I do see is that we do have still have an audience challenge for sure, and that there's a lot of organizations that do really important work that just don't have massive audience. And I think if you if you go back to what made, like, your average newspaper so incredibly powerful when it was at its height was that you took, like, you had this product that drove hundreds of thousands, attracted a hundred thousand or hundreds of thousands of eyeballs every day, not because of the big investigative stories, but because of horoscopes and high school sports and theater listings and the police blotter or the obits, whatever it was. And then when you dropped that investigative piece, those eyes were already there. And so you had this, like, nuclear reaction of impact because it was eyeballs plus huge story equals change. And now you've gone you have a system where those things have just been separated. You have, like, a lot of newspapers that aren't able to do that level of investigative work anymore, but still have all of those other things I mentioned, Obits Comics, etcetera. And across town, there's a non profit that's raised a bunch of foundation money that's doing the big j journalism, but like doesn't have much audience and doesn't get in front of the people reading the local paper.

JIM BRADY [00:22:57]: So you've like separated those two things. And like how do we get those back together again in a way that can generate that kind of reaction? And one of the ways that has to happen, in my view, is that we can't just give up on the idea that sports coverage and arts coverage and small business coverage and real estate coverage are just things we have to give up on. And that we have to focus purely on capital-J Journalism because capital-J Journalism really has never been the thing that built the business. Capital-J Journalism was always, like, something that was supported by this really great business, but it wasn't the reason people bought the paper. That was pretty clear from all the reader surveys that I ever saw at the Post was the reasons people got it were not that, but they appreciated it. But how do we go back to just making sure we can give make sure people have coverage of all the things that matter in their community so they can look at that paper in the morning for the same reason they used to, which is to figure out whether to bring an umbrella to should I bring you know, like, basic decisions in life. What do I wanna watch when I get home? Is the home team playing tonight? How did my kids' team do last night? And whatever. But, like, I feel like we have to get to the point where we can rebuild that piece of it, and I think that's gonna be our next phase of this.

JIM BRADY [00:24:01]: Because I think we're doing reasonably well in the sense of, I think, there are a lot of really good sites producing, a lot of really good journalism in state capitals around the country, and holding powerful people accountable, getting results in terms of laws being changed. And but I think, like, the audience is not as big as it could be because the daily habit is gone. And the daily habit might still exist at that, again, that paper across town, but not where the not where the story falls. And so I feel like we have this kinda weird little separation now that we have to figure out how to get back. And you look at something like The Daily Memphian in Memphis, which is trying to do all of those things. It's trying to do investigative work. It's covering sports. The Baltimore Banner has gone hard after covering sports.

JIM BRADY [00:24:40]: Now, both of those are pay walled sites too. And, you know, you can have an argument with people about whether that's a good or you know, it's a good thing financially. Is it a bad thing? Because it means people in those two cities, a lot of people just can't get those stories. But either way, I think, like, that rebundling, I think, is something that is something to pursue with while at the same time acknowledging that the rebundling isn't just gonna be on a website anymore. It's gonna be on TikTok and it's gonna be, you know, using a whole bunch of other tools. I don't think it's going back to this one property everybody puts their eyes on, but it's making sure the brand is in as many places with as a broader range of stories as it can afford to do. So but, yeah, I mean, I you know, innovation wise, I mean, I think there are, you know, a lot of sites out there that are starting, like, two I mentioned, The Daily Memphian and The Banner, I think that are trying to figure out how you can you be all those things can you be all things to all people again in those markets the way the sun and the, commercial appeal used to be? And so, I mean, so that innovation, I'm interested to see how it plays out. I'd love to see that innovation also tried without a paywall to see whether the kind of, you know, control group there about what happens when somebody does all of those things without a paywall. That would have required a massive amount of upfront funding, and so I understand why it hasn't happened, but it's something I'd love to see at some point.

Press Forward’s national effort to save local news

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:25:53]: Let's talk a little bit about Press Forward. So, for probably a small number of people in my audience who don't know what Press Forward is, how do you describe it? How would you describe it?

JIM BRADY [00:26:02]: You could just—you could give a technical description, or you could just kind of say it's a campaign to save local news in America, you know, not put a real fine point on it, but that's kind of what it is in a lot of ways. I mean, I think, it's really designed to get a whole bunch of people who both people who already think about journalism in the United States a lot like Knight and like MacArthur, but also get a bunch of people in who haven't really funded journalism or haven't really been as engaged in the fight to save it, to try to get them in. And now, at this point, we've got 61 different funders in and, you know, significantly past $500 million now in terms of money raised. But I think the idea here is to really just like really make this a national effort in a way that it hasn't really been before, I think. And I think that's where it's been successful so far. I mean, so much of my travel and time right now is going into cities where they're thinking of doing a Press Forward and meeting with groups of 10 or 20 funders and making the best pitch I can to start one in this state or that state or this city or that city. And so far the record's pretty good on getting them started. So because I think there's a real desire there. I think people are really they show up at the meeting wanting to say yes, so I'm not pitching myself as being closing the deal perfectly myself all the time.

JIM BRADY [00:27:15]: I think I have an audience that wants to do it and my job is not to screw it up, I suppose. But I think there's a real desire right now and I think there's a few reasons for that. I think there's a, you know, I think there's a sense that a lot of funders who fund democracy now believe that journalism is part of that, that journalism used to be a kind of a thing that you could you know, if you're standing in the democracy tent, you could sort of see journalism from there, but it wasn't in it. And now I think a lot of funders believe that journalism is an essential part of democracy, which, obviously, I believe as well. So the some folks are coming in on that. There are others like, which, you know, Kaiser Family Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson, who are focused on a particular topic area, but at a local level and wanna fund in that space, which I think is wonderful. And then you have funders, you know, the 3rd group of funders I feel like we've gotten in that I think is an interesting group or kind of the journalism afraid. You know, like, this is a I think when you work in it your whole career like we have, I think you, you kinda look at journalism.

JIM BRADY [00:28:11]: It's we know what it is, and we know how to evaluate it, and we forget that if you don't come from this little weird world we live in. Like, trying to evaluate a journalism proposal is not that easy. If, you know, you gotta know who the person behind it is. You have to know that their, you know, journalistic chops are legit, and it's not as easy as it sounds in a world rife with pink slime sites and people starting sites with very legitimate sounding names. I mean, it's, you know, we used about 20 words to name newspapers in this country for 200 years. So if you just put any two of them together and put a hyphen between them, it sounds like it's a legitimate site. Right? The register bulletin or the bulletin journal, and a lot of these pink slime sites just have these very innocent sounding names and look like news sites. And then the more you dig in, the more you realize there's a political actor behind it, very subtly in many cases.

JIM BRADY [00:29:00]: I, you know, I think people have this misnomer about pink slime sites that they're all really obvious. They're not. A lot of them are actually quite skilled at what they're trying to do. So if you're a funder and you don't really know journalism, you look at this and you think, like, I think I could make the right call here, but the price of making the wrong call is significant. And so maybe I just won't make any. And I think a lot of those funders now think, hey. There's all these people funding journalism. A lot of people here do this, have been doing this for decades.

JIM BRADY [00:29:26]: Like, this is the time to get involved because we can, like, lean on them as part of the collaborative to say, help us evaluate some of these sites that are approach that are coming to us for money, or even just help us figure out how to fund journalism. Because I think there's also a and we've seen this a lot at the local level. The immediate instinct of a lot of people in a local Press Forward is to wanna fund, like, sites locally, and they can and should do that. But you also could do things like create a FOIA fund or create a legal defense fund or fund a new launch of documenters. There's a lot of things you could do that isn't give money to Excite. It's to support the overall ecosystem in your state or your city, and I think that's the kinda counsel and help that people like Knight and MacArthur and Democracy Fund and, you know, who have been funding journalism a long time can really help those funders with. So that's what's exciting about it is all these new names that pop up on the list of people funding Press Forward who either haven't funded journalism much or not at all. And I think that's really where I'm, what I'm excited about.

Public awareness of the local news crisis

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:30:25]: Yeah. You know, I think and, you know, that's what I hear from the national funders as they've talked about Press Forward is that hope to really bring in that new money all the way down to, you know, local community foundations, etcetera. And, you know, you just pointed to one big challenge of that in the evaluation. And I know there used to be a problem of just awareness of the problem that, particularly, if you've got a newspaper that's been around for over a century, you know, the advertising side, the publisher doesn't want the public, they don't wanna talk about it to the public about the challenges. The funders need to know that, you know, news is in crisis and democracy is in crisis, and they're related. So that's one problem. Are you seeing that as less and less of a problem, or are you people still surprised to know that we're struggling in this industry?

JIM BRADY [00:31:10]: A lot of people are surprised to know. I mean, you saw the I was I think it was Gallup and maybe Pew. I'm sorry. I should really know that concern. But, there was this research from a couple weeks ago that 63% of Americans still don't know local news is in crisis. Now I have a somewhat I mean, controversial is not the right word, but a somewhat counterintuitive. I mean, I do think a lot of that's our fault. I don't think that's the public being stupid.

JIM BRADY [00:31:31]: I think we spent a lot of years, I think, not being completely transparent about the problems we were going through. I don't know if it was pride or what it was, but there's way too many examples of stories of, you know, a news organization laying off 20 people and kinda couching it as part of our digital transformation. And it's like, no, you're getting rid of 20 people because you can't afford these 20 people anymore because you're having economic problems. And I feel like if we had been little more transparent about that, the same way we demand transparency of other organizations that we cover, we call them out on it when they're not transparent. I'm not sure we've done a very good job of being transparent ourselves. And, you know, the big example I use all the time is I don't think and and I'd be happy to see many, many examples of this, but I just doubt there are many. I would love to see examples of newspapers writing stories over the last 10 years that explain why the newspaper that people were reading cost now cost three times as much as it used to, but it was one third as big. Like, you and I both know why that happened.

JIM BRADY [00:32:28]: The revenue shifted from advertisers to the audience. But I don't know that a lot of papers wrote those stories explaining why that happened because I do think there's a lot of people who have real affinity and love for those brands who would have understood that and accepted it if they had just been kind of told that. But I feel like the stories are always a little mealy mouthed, a little bit about this is rates going up because of, you know, delivery rates have gone up, and it's like that's not really the story. The story is the revenue the revenue is transferring from one side to the other, and you are bearing more of the cost of this thing that frankly you were paying a fraction of what it was worth before. And I don't think we did a very good job of explaining the shifts in our own industry in a way that would, could've brought readers along in a way that made them more sympathetic and more feeling like they were part of the solution. Instead, we kinda just kinda I felt like kinda wrote these kinda BS stories about our problem. So I do think we are part of the reason that number is 63. Now that number was 75 a couple years ago, so clearly, like, it's getting through to more people and I think that's partially because there's more transparency now about the challenges of the industry even at the individual site level.

JIM BRADY [00:33:34]: I mean, I remember when we were raising money for Billy Penn in 2017 or 2018, I mean, we're pretty clear. It's like, we know you like what we do, but we will not be around in two years if we're not able to raise this amount of money. And I think that's an appeal that works when people really like what you do and you're basically telling them this is basically table stakes, we're not gonna be here, that they're willing to give. And I think more of that from the larger organizations that were going through this, I think, would have benefited them. So, yes, I think that number is frightening, but I also don't I don't wanna fall into the trap of saying it's like, how do these idiots not know that we're in trouble? I think we didn't do a great job of telling them.

Adapting to the new reality

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:34:10]: And I, you know, I think one of the other obstacles there that it's also related to that transparency problem, and that I think we need to be transparent now is we're not going back to the old model. And, you know, amid the $500 million from Press Forward, you know, $100 million over five years, something like—I forget how many billions have been sucked out of the industry. Duc and I actually did this on the napkin when he was in Denver. And so the Press Forward is, like, 1.5 percent of what we've lost. And, you know, so we're not going back to newsrooms with hundreds of people in a city the size of Denver or dozens of people in the city the size of Macon. And community foundations need to understand that, readers need to understand that. You're not gonna get a newspaper that's thick as a phone book on Sundays. And so, yeah, we've gotta talk about that because the solutions going forward might be, like, you were talking about early on, these tiny news sites and these very, you know, niche, focused, journalism outlets. I mean, I hope we still have the Memphis paper that's doing the whole, you know, the bundling. But we're gonna have this is sort of a all hands on deck, all solutions welcome moment.

JIM BRADY [00:35:19]: Right. And look, neither The Banner nor the Daily Memphian, I think, at its height have anywhere near what those papers had at their height. I mean, they're doing terrific work, but they're not trying to replicate those old sizes. I would say the one thing about that is I do think we have to, like, also set the goal properly as to what we're trying to get back to. Because if you take your typical 300 person newsroom and your average mid American city from 20 years ago, I do think the real question is how many of those 300 people were feet on the street in the city covering the city? Because it was not 300. Right? I mean, you had a massive amount that back when you were doing print publications, you had a massive amount of staffers who were production focused, Lot of copy editors, lot of production folks. You also had a whole bunch of special sections that got spun up because there was a lot of revenue attached to them, but they weren't really inherently local. Like, there might be a local story or two in there. But the truth is you had travel and health and home and a lot of these sections because they threw off a lot of cash.

JIM BRADY [00:36:11]: And so take those people off the list. You're probably getting that 300 down to maybe a 100 that were actually out on the street of the city. So let's aim for that. Let's not aim 300 silly anyway. Like, we're never getting back to that. But that shouldn't even be the bogey. Right? The bogey is to try to get back to getting enough feet on the street to cover the things we used to cover. And even if we don't get all the way back there, if you could get 75%, 60% of the way back to that, it's not terrible.

JIM BRADY [00:36:33]: Because I think people go, oh my god, there's 30 people covering Cincinnati and we used to have 300. It's like, that's not really the right number though. That 300 is not the right number. That number may be 90 or a hundred, and then it's a lot, the gap's a lot smaller. Now that all that said, I mean, that means there's fewer copy editors too, and that comes with its own trouble. But I do think, like, when you see these graphs, and you see them sometimes on Twitter or something like, oh my god, this newsroom used to have 600, now it has a 100, and this one used to have 700, now it has 200. Yeah. Those are numbers are accurate, but they're sort of reflecting a newsroom of a different era that we're not trying to rebuild anymore. So I think it's like, what are we trying to rebuild is more important than trying to get back to some number that was always a little bit bloated anyway. So, but yeah.

Hopes for a transformed news ecosystem

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:37:16]: If Press Forward is wildly successful, you know, what do you hope comes out of it? At the Knight Media Forum, I can't remember if it was you or John Palfrey or someone [else], threw out, you know, I hope it's a billion dollars in the five years. But beyond just the number, we know—and just more fundraising from philanthropy, what do you hope happens as a result of all of this?

JIM BRADY [00:37:37]: A bunch of things. I mean, one, I hope it creates a more of a continued culture of philanthropic funding for journalism, not as a full solution to it. I think there's gotta be, you know, there's gotta be a for profit commercial solution that still is powered by reader revenue. But I do think in communities, if more community foundations realize that this is an important part of what they fund it, and if for no other reason, I think Alberto, you know, frequently in this line that has been prominently requoted, but whatever your first priority is whatever your first funding priority is, journalism should be your second one, which is that if you care about education or racial equity or climate, like, good journalism about that topic is gonna do you a lot of good. So, you know, support that as well. So if that takes, if just people more clearly see what a community looks like when it doesn't have a local news source, get back in the game, I think that's one takeaway and I think part of the educational piece of this is to get people more comfortable doing it without maybe this large Press Forward structure being here permanently. I think the second is I do think the combination of this infrastructure that Knight and others are helping build and all this extra money in the system, I think, is gonna lead to a real surge in new organizations kind of launching and getting up and running. And I hope that because of the stuff we talked about earlier with infrastructure, a lot of them will survive and it's a whole new beachhead of sites and organization and cities around the country that start to plug some of the news deserts, that would be great.

JIM BRADY [00:39:01]: But I think it's—I just think it's changing how journalism is seen in the philanthropic landscape. And, but I think it's also helping it rebuild its this surge can help it rebuild its economic base in a way that, nothing has really been able to before because the amount of money was just a lot less than it is right now. Now, you know, with that, you have Meta, you know, not doing journalism anymore, and that took a chunk of money out of the system too. So it's not all new money. It's also there's some money that came out that this is filling and topping more putting on more on top of, but so it's not all good news in the funding space, but I do think, I do think those are the two big goals and, you know, and more more new sites, more of a commitment to fund infrastructure long term. And I think the third one is just showing that this infrastructure model really does work in terms of, like, feeding a whole new ecosystem for local news. Remember, if you go back 20 years, everybody was on their own tech stack. Everybody was doing completely everything, you know, pretty much doing their own thing and now you had this period where everything had to get rolled up often inside really large corporate cultures and I think now you're so it's, like, it's interesting to watch the evolution of the last 20 years and now I think you're in a world where it's just like you have to be on the same back end systems because it's just so much more cost efficient.

JIM BRADY [00:40:15]: And if you look at something like a Newspack, your ability to create a site that looks completely different than every other site on Newspack exists so you're not stuck in some templated world where you have to publish this and that. You basically can make your site look however you want. So the tools that are out there are also flexible. They are shared, but they're not cookie cutter, which I think is important. And I think a lot of the, you know, the way a lot of the corporations and news save money in the last 15 years is they had to cookie cutter everything, and that's not a criticism that was necessary financially to keep them up and running. And I think we're headed into a system now that's not cookie cutter, but is standardized enough to keep costs down.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:40:50]: And I wanna ask you a question that I think we asked when you were in Denver, at a gathering that Melissa Davis had put together. It's sort of what keeps you up at night. And Teresa Gorman jumped in with the first time I had heard this phrase, the Mackenzie Scott effect, that because of high profile philanthropy, you put money in and then others stop giving. And in fact, just this week, I heard about a small foundation who said, they're national in scope. They said we're not gonna give to anybody in a Press Forward local chapter because they've got that taken care of. So it seems a very real concern. Have had to—are you worried about that particular…

JIM BRADY [00:41:31]: Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, I think it's, there's always the, you know, unintended consequence probably isn't the right word, but always the things you don't see coming. And one of them was certainly, like, there was a perception that funding philanthropic funding stopped last year while Press Forward was being put together, and I can certainly say we put out more money in 2023 than we did in 2022. So it wasn't us that stopped. And I don't think it was others who stopped either, but I think what you what people did hear is, I'm interested in this, but I wanna get, I wanna wait till Press Forward launched. I do think that did happen, and I do think that put some decisions out in a way that probably was not positive for some folks. But, yeah, I hadn't heard that particular example, and I and I wish whoever that was would dig in a little bit more because a lot there's not massive amounts of money in some of these local Press Forwards, and I think I think that'd be good you know, those the way I would view it is those are 25, hopefully soon 50, cities in which really good interesting things might come out of, and that should that should be a good lead gen for a national foundation to say, hey. That's a really cool idea. I'll jump in.

JIM BRADY [00:42:28]: Thank you for letting me know that this great thing was happening in your market, not as a place to not fund anymore because somebody there is already doing it because the variation in how much people are spending in local Press Forwards is huge. There's somewhere there's not that much money in them. And, yeah, the goal is to get a foundation, even if they don't put up a massive amount of money out of the gate, is to get them to recruit other funders so that that number goes up. So I would certainly, yeah, not wish anybody would just sit out the Press Forwards. But there's a lot of things that keep you up at night. One is just that we have an audience problem, and there's a news avoidance challenge that we can't ignore, like we can fix the infrastructure and we can get more sites up and running, but they're not gonna make it if they're not powered by the actual interest of human beings. And I think, you know, we've seen a lot of decline in the last couple years of audience, although not significantly by the way of revenue, so that's encouraging, which is it shows I think the shift that the reader revenue model has had, which it just shows that if you can make a really important difference in somebody's life, I will give you money. And that's not based on how many times I went to the site last year.

JIM BRADY [00:43:29]: It's often based on what impact you're having in my community or on my life. And so the fact that traffic could go down dramatically and revenue does not go down with it is a sign of a new era, which I think is great because in the early digital era that we lived through, it's like page views went down, the only way you could keep the revenue from going down was jam more ads on the page because your revenue was completely tied to the ad units. And so, page views were revenue in a sense and we've gotten away from that world now, which is great. You can get a 1,000 people to read your story instead of a million, but if it's a really important story and 500 people say I'm gonna write a check to keep this work alive, then we're all better for that. So I do think that's the encouraging thing, but the fact that the audience is declining is a problem, and I don't think the audience can keep declining without revenue at some point taking a hit. That feels inevitable. So I do think we have an audience problem, and I do think we have to think about some of those other coverage areas that I think people look at as not important. They're not, it's not investigative to cover arts, or it's not investigative when I cover local sports, but that is what gets people to come to your organ you know, come to your site or your TikTok feed every day.

JIM BRADY [00:44:34]: And I think we do have to be cognizant of the fact that not everything has to be a deep piece of investigative journalism to count these days. You need to get people engaged in other things in your community. And so that's the so I do worry about audience. I do worry that we're a little too niche and a little too boutique right now in the sense that that really important work that's being done is not enough in and of itself.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:44:57]: One of the other things that came up, at actually this year's, Knight Media Forum and Joaquin Alvarado, a couple years ago at our conference, was talking about philanthropy, and he's talking to a group of ethnic media publishers and talking about some foundations coming into a city to do something new and didn't even talk to the Black publication there. And then Mitra brought this up on the panel at Knight that, you know, if you're going into a city, please go talk to the legacy outlet first. But interestingly, after that panel, I was talking with a leader in philanthropy who works with a lot of publications. She herself is Black. And she said, I don't know. Those are the publications I avoid because they're not interested in innovating, and they're really hard to work with. And so there's definitely some challenges there with any legacy media. So how do you think about balancing all of those concerns?

JIM BRADY [00:45:58]: Yeah. I mean, look, I think it's hard to make any kind of broad statement about anything in this business and have it really hold, like, right? I mean, there are, we one of the it was the first significant grant I made when I got in the job was to create the LMA or the Knight/LMA Bloom Lab, which is the funding of a sort of technical editorial and business transformation of 26 publishers around the country. But we didn't just, like, just pick the top 26 cities and go there. You had, you know, these were these were organizations where the CEO themselves, like, would show up on the calls to, like, you know, talk about what their you know, how their digital transformation was gonna be like. There was a commitment from the top that this was gonna happen, and you fund those. Now, you know, not every organization that was that applied to be part of the Bloom Lab passed that test. There are others who just it was clear, we're not ready to make the transformation, and in those cases, there was not an investment made. So I don't you know, I do think you're gonna run into that everywhere.

JIM BRADY [00:46:53]: There are progressive and non-progressive legacy organizations, and I don't so when people say, well, we should support legacy organizations more. It's like, well, like, not not as a broad statement, it doesn't really mean it doesn't really mean anything. But I do think and so it really depends on the city, but I will proudly say the Bloom Lab has been a massive success in terms of both into revenue, audience growth. It's bringing down the cost of the tech stack. Like, it's one on all fronts, and it's really changed the trajectory of the publishers who are a part of it in a way that, like, I know I'm personally really proud of because those are organizations that have been in families for five or six generations and absolutely essential to their communities. They just were, like many legacy brands, were just behind on the digital transformation. But I think, you know, you can find people that really wanna make that shift. There's a lot of news organizations out there, you know, that are legacy based or family owned that really, really wanna figure this out.

JIM BRADY [00:47:45]: And I think it doesn't take that long to figure out whether they're serious about it or not. So I think, to Mitra’s point, you have the conversation to find out, and you might find out in some cases that you're not able to work with them because they're just not ready to make the shift. But I think more often than not these days, you'll find that they are. They just need somebody to help them figure out how to do it.

Trust, bubbles, and journalism’s future

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:48:03]: And now I wanna reference something you wrote. I guess it's been four years now for your 2020 predictions for Nieman Lab, which was really all about trust and bubbles. And you said, you know, you we forget there was a time when good journalism penetrated ideological bubbles. So why doesn't it now? And you talked about, you know, we're not trusted. We haven't moved digitally. We've done a poor job of communicating with our audience. You know, some of the things we've already talked about. What kind of progress have you seen along those lines? I mean, clearly, trust is a huge problem nationally. The surveys show local news is faring better, but it's not going in the right direction.

JIM BRADY [00:48:44]: It's trending better. I mean, I think it's even up a little. I think it might have been up from the last survey, but it's, but it's still in the thirties, I think, whereas, like, national's, like, 10 or 15 or something. So but, you know, at some point, that's, like, being better than national news at a trust level is not exactly a, you know, not exactly something to pop champagne over at this point. So, no, I mean, I think we still have a lot of progress to make. I mean, I think one of the areas, I mean, I do think we're in a bubble. I think journalism's always probably less so now. I think when you're in the ad business, you could be more in the bubble because you weren't your money wasn't coming from the audience.

JIM BRADY [00:49:20]: So, like, you didn't really have to talk to them very much. And it's kinda interesting because while, obviously, we all talk about those as the good old days when the margins were huge and the newsrooms were massive and the expense accounts were larger, But at the same time, like, the the bad side of that wasn't even just the collapse of it, but the bad side of that really good period was I feel like it there was a certain distance from our audiences that grew in there because that that com that daily conversation with your audience wasn't necessary because they weren't paying the freight. You know, I've said many times before, like, just joked about the fact there's a reason you could put a quarter in a newspaper machine 20 years ago and take all of them, and it's because that wasn't where the money got made. They were perfectly fine if you took all of them because they already got the money from the car dealers and the banks and the department stores and all those places. But that—so there was, I think, a bit of a you know, I said before that a lot of Metro Dailies, I feel like, in that period kind of wanted to be of the people. They just didn't really want to be with them. And I think that's changed dramatically, but I still think there are still organizations that I think, get so focused on kinda what happens inside the building that they're still not great at looking, at engaging with the audience in a way that makes them feel like they're part of something, and I think that's the shift. I do think all organizations are talking to their readers more because they understand that's where the revenue's coming from, but then there's that other piece beyond that, which is getting to know them at sort of an individual level, which I know sounds crazy, but I'll tell you that we did Billy Penn when we were trying to grow membership.

JIM BRADY [00:50:50]: If you get somebody to come to an event, the odds that they would become a member skyrocketed. I mean, people really do wanna engage with brands where they feel like they know somebody or have a feeling about the quality of the people behind the byline in a way that they just didn't 30 years ago. So I do think more organizations are getting there. I do think it's penetrating the bubble a little bit, but I still think, I still think that, you know, we're not talking to them enough to recognize that there's an awful lot of things they wanna know about that we still don't cover. And some of that's because we don't have the bodies, but I do think there's still more need for landscape analysis and really deep reader surveys on what people want because I think most readers would probably say I would rather have, you know, coverage of high school sports than investigative. I'm not saying they should because investigative is amorphous. It could be about anything. Like, you know, I think they have this desire to know more about arts and sports and the things we talked about earlier.

JIM BRADY [00:51:42]: I'm not saying they should do that because investigative is crucial, but, like, the average reader doesn't really know how to define investigative in a way that journalists do. And I think we have to be better at explaining to them, like, why investigative matters, but we also have to be open to the idea that we should create beats and cover things that they really want that we might either look down on or feel like isn't really important. So I do think we have to have much more of a dialogue and get out of the rarefied air of everything we do has to, like, take down a mayor or put somebody in jail, and I think we wanna do all of those things. But, man, that day to day TikTok stuff is just crucial because I think it helps penetrate the bubble. Right? I mean, I really I'm I'm not bullish on the state of national news right now, to say the least. And I feel like, you know, the antidote to, like, the frustration people have with national news to me is more local news because I feel like every every brain cell that is now focused on national news, if you can convert it into one that's thinking about local news, I feel like you you become a smarter We become a smarter society because so much of national news, you have no control over, you have no connection to. All you can do is get angry about this policy happening a thousand miles away that no one's gonna ask you about and you're gonna have very little say over. Whereas in your backyard, you've got school policies, transportation, you've got bonds.

JIM BRADY [00:52:56]: There's all these things that you actually can get involved in in a way at your local level, you just can at a national level, and— but coverage of that helps activate people's interest in those things. And so I do think one of the ways, you know, we have to keep penetrating the bubble is just we've just gotta get back to doing some of the daily the daily work of covering communities in ways that are not necessarily as sexy as as the big investigative piece because I just feel like that's a a missing link. So that'll help us get out of the bubble a little bit, but I do think, you know, like, journalism Twitter, I think was probably some of what I've referenced in that column. I'm not sure if I did, but I know I thought it, which is just there's sort of this Twitter journalism or journalism that people in journalism debate each other all day long about it. And I feel like that's I'm not sure how helpful that is.

JIM BRADY [00:53:36]: I stepped out of that debate a long time ago just because I realized, like, I'm spending too much time on Twitter. I'm talking to people just like me all the time in terms of, like, you know, just it felt like I was not growing much at all in that, so I stepped out of it. So, and I think more people are. I mean, I really do think since 2020, there's been some progress on this front because I think more journalists have decided spending all day on Twitter is not healthy for them either. And, so, anyway, I think I think we're making progress, but I still stand by most of that. I certainly stand by it from the time I wrote it because I was especially frustrated about it at that point.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:54:07]: Well, you know, I think a lot of the trust solution that you're getting at with the bundle and writing about, you know, the sports and culture comes down to a sense of, do you care about the city and are you part of the city? And there's a story I've recounted from you, and so you can correct me on the specifics that I've been mistelling. But you told the story. Is it a Newsgeist or News Foo or maybe it was the Scripps entrepreneurial thing, something out at ASU. And you were recounting one of those events at Billy Penn, and I think it was a city council member or somebody came up to you and said, boy, you've hit us hard, but at least I know you care.

JIM BRADY [00:54:51]: Yeah.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:54:52]: And that's an indictment that our legacy publications, people have the sense that it just doesn't care about the city. They're there for clicks or the gotcha you know, to get the mayor booted out or something to burnish their own credentials.

JIM BRADY [00:55:06]: He just basically knocked on the door of our office and our coworking space and said, I don't like a lot of the things you have written about me, but I respect how much you care about the city. And, like, you could just tell from the way it was written that these were people who had passion about Philadelphia. And I think even when we picked the tagline for the site, for a better Philly, like, I know it's one of my friends in journalism say, like, you can't say that. It's like, why not? It's like, who wants it to be worse? And it's like, and by the way, what's a better Philly, right? Everybody's gonna have a slightly different answer to that question. But we're saying is whatever you fight for what you think will make Philly better and this will be the place where we can air those ideas out and debate them. But, like, I don't think there's anything controversial about saying we'd like to live in a better city. We just can all define it differently. And I remember that very well because I thought I remember I wasn't actually, I wanna say I wasn't there.

JIM BRADY [00:55:55]: But the team that was there, like, turns around and sees this guy who they've written an awful lot of bad things about standing in their doorway, and it's like, uh-oh. And instead, they got kind of, yes, I'm going to remind you that I don't like these stories, but I'm also gonna compliment you because, you know, you guys show up, and you're here, and you and so that was really that was a moment I was really proud of, and I think that's all really important. And I think the other thing too is, I do think there's just so much in a local community that binds people in a way that just does not happen at the national level. You know, I mean, I think when you sit in this I mean, you're stuck in traffic on 95, I mean, like nobody's thinking about whether the person in the car next to you is a Republican or a Democrat. You're just all frustrated you're there, and you all wanna know what the solution to this constant traffic problem is. Like, And you're all rooting for the local sports team, and you all wanna get out of town when the hurricane's coming, and, you know, there's a local kid, you know, going to America's Got Talent. If you're not rooting for them, you're just a jerk at that point, right? I mean, at some point, you just, like, there's so much that binds people locally that doesn't have to be ideological, and I think that's why I think more local news is good for the soul because it's not stuff that's gonna make you angry all the time. Yes.

JIM BRADY [00:57:01]: There's gonna be political issues locally that'll get you ticked off, but so many things we deal with at local are just not automatically drive people to rage where it just feels like so much a national does, partially because the organizations, especially on the cable TV side, that's the job. The job is to drive division because division drives revenue. And so as long as division drives revenue, we're gonna have division. And so I think, that's why I just think this fight for local is so important because it—by the way, local when you can produce a hell of a lot more local stories, some of that stuff will bubble up to a national level too. And I think that's probably a good thing as well is, replace some of this airtime of people screaming at each other with actual stories that could require the use of a reporter sometimes would be nice, but that might be a pipe dream. But in general, I just think more local news is the answer to a lot of our national news problems too, but we've gotta build an economic system that allows more of that to happen than it does today. As we've discussed most of this conversation, I see a lot of positive signs there, but there's a lot of miles ahead of us on this road.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:00]: So we're past 12:30. Do you have 10 minutes to do the rapid fire, or do you need to jump?

JIM BRADY [00:58:05]: Sure. I can do rapid fire.

Rapid-fire questions

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:07]: So the first question, you pretty much answered, but I'll see if you wanna summarize it. Compared to a year ago, do you feel more or less optimistic about the future of local news?

JIM BRADY [00:58:15]: More.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:17]: What if you had to give three reasons, what would your top reasons be?

JIM BRADY [00:58:21]: I think the improved infrastructure is allowing for better expense, lower expenses, I should say, too. I think the system's gonna start allowing for a lot more new sites to get up and running, which I think is a good thing, and three, the philanthropic surge.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:36]: Does AI fill you with more hope or dread when it comes to journalism?

JIM BRADY [00:58:40]: Hope. Because I feel like we have a long history, and this is I'm not sure how rapid fire this is, but I'll give you the one minute. It's, like, I feel like most of my 30 years, I'll be 30 years in digital next April. So, and I feel like our history in digital with technology is to pretty much treat everything as a threat first and an opportunity second. And I think that we have never succeeded because of that. And I think at AI, we either have to yes. There's lots of threats. Yes. There's copyright.

JIM BRADY [00:59:04]: Yes. We gotta figure all that out. But my god, AI could do so many things for local journalism if we start with the idea that there's a lot of positive there. And I think so far, we're off to a better start on that. I hear more journalists talking optimistically about what AI can do for their own operations yet while still worrying about that other stuff, but not making it the focus.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:59:22]: Do you have a favorite piece of advice, you've been given or you like to give?

JIM BRADY [00:59:26]: Oh, that's a good one. I think the one I try to live by certainly is, I mean, not it's not a journalism one. It's more a management one, but it's basically when somebody is in front of you and they're yelling at you 90% of the time, is my father's advice, 90% of the time when somebody's in your face about something, it's about them. It's not about you. So if you can just not react with the requisite anger and you can just really listen and don't in on what the problem is and try to solve it, you will, a, keep yourself a lot more chill, but two, you'll solve more problems. So it's try to stand up in the face of anger or frustration. Just deal with the problem. I only lose my temper during jet games.

JIM BRADY [01:00:03]: That's pretty much all.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:00:05]: Is there a piece of common advice or conventional wisdom that drives you crazy and it's oversimplification or just wrongness?

JIM BRADY [01:00:12]: God. So many. Gotta try to think of one right now because I say this all the time, like, that's just that makes no sense to me. It's, well, the one that I remember that I never liked is 80% of life is showing up, and I'm not sure what that even means. I mean, I've showed up at lots of things and been useless, and I'm not sure that it that solved 80% of the problem. But now that there's a lot of them. If I had more time, I could have thought of a good one on that one. I'm sorry. I'm not coming up with a better one.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:00:36]: Do you have a favorite failure of yours?

JIM BRADY [01:00:39]: Yeah. I mean, I think a favorite, I mean, one that I learned a lot from even back at AOL for the 2000 Olympics, we did research that showed that most readers said they did not wanna know what had happened in the Olympics until it was on NBC, and the time difference made it so that so we actually created a site that only had what NBC had shown on it. Another one that had what had happened in real time. And 80% of people said they would own they would use the one that was the NBC version, and in reality, 90% of the people used the one that was live. And so it was a complete failure to do it that way, but we based it completely on reader research, but also a lot of us saw that research and said we didn't believe it, but we went with it anyway. So the lesson there was no matter what you see in research, like, never let your gut completely go away. Like, the gut there would have been a good counterbalance, and we probably wouldn't have gone as far as we did to build a whole other site. So we made a lot of conversations about it.

JIM BRADY [01:01:30]: We kept focusing on the research, the research, the research. Well, that's what it says, so let's just live by that 100% even though there was a part of all of us that said there's no way that that many people wanna read it that way. And we were right, but we did all the wrong things. So it's, like, mix of data and instinct is a good way to go forward. Don't put too much in either.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:01:50]: As a field, we've been increasingly reporting about the mental health crisis in this country, and particularly since 2020 and and actually since, the whole journalists as enemy of the people thing. I've been very worried about the mental health of our field, and we just drive people out. So two questions. one, for yourself, what do you do to maintain your sanity? And then do you have advice for leaders on just taking care of your team and making sure that we all stay mentally healthy?

JIM BRADY [01:02:20]: Yeah. I mean, it's a — they're good questions. I mean, I think in terms of taking care of the team, I think it's, I mean, it's it's, you know, it's I've I've long said, you know, whenever I get if I get asked a question, which I do time to time as what's the best job you've ever had, my answer is usually actually I quit when it becomes a job. Like, I really feel like most of my career I've been really lucky and that I've done things I've really liked doing. And so maybe that still means it's a job, but in my definition of it, that just means I'm lucky enough in my life to do something professionally that I really like doing. I think I just know myself well enough to know that I have to be in a position where I like doing what I'm doing because otherwise I just can't stay in it and I wouldn't be—it would be no fun for anybody to work with me in that scenario. So I think, like, managing the team, I think we've, in every place I've ever worked, I've tried to do two things, be as transparent as I can about what's going on even sometimes at my detriment, but I feel like the team a team functions really well when it knows as much as it possibly can about what's going on around them, and two, just try to make it as fun as possible. I'm always, you know, there are times where people walk by our the journalism team meetings at night, and we're all in there cracking up, and they're always looking in there, like, what the hell is going on in there? And it's, like, well, we like each other, we understand how hard the job is, but we also have to make sure to balance that out with some camaraderie and levity and all that.

JIM BRADY [01:03:35]: So I do think it's, you know, making sure the work environment doesn't feel like you're at a job all the time, which is easier said than done in certain certainly easier said than done in a foundation than it is in the newsroom right now. So I think in terms of the mental health piece, I think it's you just gotta really be on top of that and you have to watch closely for signs that somebody needs a break. I mean, my advice for us, you know, you should always take all your vacation time every year. You should never roll over a minute of vacation because human beings need time off. And if you're worried that you can't go on vacation because you're wondering whether the organization can live without you, it can. And at some point, it will. So don't deprive yourself of getting away and getting a break when you can because—so I think you have to really, and you have to be able to watch people and say, don't come in tomorrow. Don't even put in for a vacation day tomorrow.

JIM BRADY [01:04:24]: I can tell you're a little burned out you need a day off. Just stay on the couch, and I'll see you Monday. And so you just have to — you know, it's a lot of it is just instinct and just recognizing when people look different than they usually look in terms of stress. So, I think you have to be a much more active manager and a much closer to talking to people as much as you can. I don't mean active manager and micromanaging. I just mean active manager and staying close to your people. That was not a lightning round. I'm sorry.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:04:51]: No. That's perfectly fine. That's good. Do you have a favorite time saving hack?

JIM BRADY [01:04:57]: Yeah. I got a lot of time saving hacks. I mean, I categorize my email very aggressively, automatically, but depending on who sends it. That way, I can deal with all of the emails we get from grantees at one time. I can deal with all of my calendaring things at one time, all of, like, that just because when you're in the mode of dealing with a certain type of an email answer, you can get through 20 of them a lot faster than you just get through whatever 20 emails are at the top of your inbox. So I try to bucket email consumption pretty aggressively so that I can power through categories at a time. And that, I have friends who will say to me, like, oh, I see you finally. I see which category you were focused on yesterday because I got 10 emails from you yesterday. So but, yeah, so I try really aggressively to manage email as much as I can.

JIM BRADY [01:05:40]: I'm not, Duc Lou who's on our team likes to brag about being inbox zero. I can't ever say that I really get to that.

Media and local recommendations

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:05:47]: I've started asking people about their, where they live because this is about local news. So, next time I come to Miami for Knight Media Forum, you have three to five places you'd recommend or activities?

JIM BRADY [01:06:01]: Yes. El Carajo. It's a great restaurant in the back of a gas station convenience store, but it's a long-standing Miami staple. Joe's Stone Crab is always great. Sure, you know, so the original is down there, and it's a fabulous place to go. Is three to five to go anywhere or three to eat?

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:06:22]: Anywhere. Like, or activities.

JIM BRADY [01:06:24]: Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, Vizcaya is a great place to go just to check out a great old mansion right on the water. Big fan of Coconut Grove, which is where the office is, but also Coral Gables. And, you know, we go to Miami Beach sometimes, but I really like to stay in more oh, you know what a great place to go in town is actually Wynwood, which is the arts district, which has incredible wall art, graffiti, whatever you wanna call it, but incredible like, every building in Wynwood is just gorgeous and and decorated with all sorts of interesting art, and it's a lot of great restaurants and shops. So I'd say Wynwood would be probably the one that's a little more off the beaten path than the others.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:07:02]: And then final question with apologies to Ezra Klein, three to five pieces of media, and they don't have to be books, and they could be entertainment or nonfiction news.

JIM BRADY [01:07:12]: 12 Angry Men, the movie, original 1957, still my favorite movie, I think, of all time. Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch on the civil rights movement, fabulous account of that. Moving Pictures by Rush, so if we're talking music, as a, you know, a child of the eighties, Mark LaValle on my team will be, he could finally check his bingo card that in any conversation, he says I mentioned Rush at least once, so I've done it there now. And in terms of other books, I mean, in terms of just straight up novels, like, The Silence of the Lambs, the actual book, but Thomas Harris is amazing, but, boy and I guess I'll put this one on there, which will shock everybody, but only because I'm a New York kid, and it was my first Broadway show. It's totally off brand for me, but Annie. Because that was I saw Annie as my 1st Broadway play, which blew my mind that people could get on stage every night and remember all these lines and do it twice a night sometimes. So, like, I that experience to me was something even if I can't say I play the Annie soundtrack very often anymore.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:08:11]: Well, Jim, thank you very much. This has been great.

JIM BRADY [01:08:13]: Thanks, Tim.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:08:16]: 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: 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 Shaprio (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).