Lauren Harris
Columbia Journalism Review
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Past articles by Lauren:
Lessons learned from the Journalism Crisis Project
When I started writing this newsletter in the spring of 2020, it was with the intention of cataloging the financial disruptions in the media industry caused by the pandemic. As CJR and the Tow Center for digital journalism covered newsroom cutbacks, it became clear that though the pandemic was wreaking havoc on the industry, local […] → Read More
Inside The Marshall Project’s local reporting collaboration in Cleveland
Even as the financial models of traditional for-profit journalism have been crumbling at the local level, groups across the US—and the world—have been working to reimagine what local news can look like: how it’s conceived, constructed, distributed, and even defined. In many cases, localized outlets and projects have gained support from national foundations; in others, […] → Read More
In Asheville, a band of retired journalists does investigative reporting for free
The investigative outlet The Asheville Watchdog launched in North Carolina in early 2020 with a highly-experienced staff of retired reporters. Bob Gremillion, the Watchdog’s publisher, is a former Tribune executive. Reporter and editor Peter Lewis was once a senior writer, editor, and columnist at the New York Times. Sally Kestin, an investigative reporter, won the […] → Read More
Reimagining how we think about local news in 2022
It can be difficult to discuss the problem of the local news crisis. On the one hand, the problems are apparent and easily explained: local newsrooms (particularly newspapers) are closing and shrinking, there are fewer people reporting than there used to be, and many people working in local journalism aren’t making much money at all. […] → Read More
Building the Open Newsroom: a Q&A with The City‘s Nic Dawes
In 2019, New York City saw the launch of The City, a local nonprofit news platform built with considerable foundation and donor funding; one of the publication’s goals has been to engage with New York communities underserved by legacy media outlets. The City‘s Open Newsroom initiative, a program dependent on a series of listening sessions […] → Read More
For the Evanston Roundtable, local news is a labor of love
The Evanston Roundtable was born in 1998, when Mary Gavin, her husband, and a small group of colleagues decided to launch a free print newspaper, publishing every other week in their Chicago suburb. At the time, they felt other local coverage was simplistic and overly focused on sports and crime. “We thought that our paper […] → Read More
How the University of Vermont is investing in local journalism
In 2019, The University of Vermont launched a program called the Community News Service: connecting student reporters to local publications across the state with support from mentors that the university provides. So far, the program has produced a thousand stories for local outlets and participated in launching two hyper-local publications in news deserts. Program coordinator […] → Read More
Views, impressions, and what we see on Facebook
Yesterday, The Markup, a nonprofit investigative platform focused on the ethics of technology and its effects on society, published a piece detailing the popularity of sensationalist, partisan media on Facebook. Drawing on data from its Citizen Browser program, which pays a national group of Facebook users to auto-share their news feed, The Markup produced a […] → Read More
Supporting local news beyond the newsroom
Programming Note: In place of our regular Media Today newsletter, CJR is pleased to share the Journalism Crisis Project—Lauren Harris’s weekly newsletter about the challenges facing the local journalism industry and how they might be overcome. The Media Today will return tomorrow. Over the past year and a half, congressional officials have drafted a series […] → Read More
After COP26, localizing the climate crisis
Last week, my colleague Jon Allsop wrote a series of dispatches for this newsletter from COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, considering the media coverage at a global summit centered on one of our most urgent global crises: an experience he called likened to “being at the center of the news universe.” Though Allsop noted often that […] → Read More
How the Post and Courier supports accountability reporting across South Carolina
In 2020, ten South Carolina newspapers closed. “Unfortunately, The Union Times could not survive the COVID-19 Virus and the havoc it has wreaked upon the world,” one editor from Union County wrote in his farewell note. The same was true for many publications across the country, where the pandemic exacerbated the attrition already plaguing many […] → Read More
How an Off-Broadway musical games journalism
Hank Morris is done taking questions from the press. Unless they’re about his new musical A Turtle on a Fence Post. (The title of the show, which is currently in previews, comes from an old Bill Clinton quote.) Morris was a powerful political consultant, until New York’s then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo prosecuted him for his […] → Read More
Local photojournalism gets a boost from a California nonprofit
CatchLight, a California-based nonprofit, was launched in 2015 to create opportunities and support for photojournalists; over the past several years, they’ve created project grants for photojournalists and partnered with local newsrooms to offer financial support and training for early-career photographers (in some cases, partnering with organizations like Report for America to pay… → Read More
Small-market newspapers: the view from on the ground
As recently as six years ago, Minnesota’s Cook County News-Herald employed seven full-time staff. Now, there are two working in the office, in addition to some remote help for advertising and layout from staff in New Jersey working on weekly assignments. In a county of 5,400, the paper has around 2,400 subscribers. In 2020, CherryRoad […] → Read More
Local news and media capture: a Q&A with Phil Napoli
For many years, the term “media capture” was used primarily by economists and political scientists who wanted to understand societies that were Democratic on paper but—in reality—had a captive media under soft control. Political scientist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi described “media capture” as an environment in which news media are controlled “either directly by governments or by […] → Read More
Q&A: Dr. Ashley James on “Off the Record” and the limits of documents
Documents are the building blocks of journalism. Reporters depend on them in order to shape their inquiries and develop their narratives. We also create them, producing stories across a range of media, much of which shapes public notions of the historical record. A document—be it a government record, a photograph, a newspaper, or a coloring […] → Read More
Haiti, the US, and defining the stakes of the migration crisis
Last Thursday, more than ten thousand asylum-seekers, most of them from Haiti, gathered in a makeshift holding facility under an international bridge in the Mexican-American border town of Del Rio, Texas. The staggering number of migrants living in limbo, the poor conditions in which they waited, and the question of how the US government might […] → Read More
Can journalists and educators bridge the news literacy gap?
The information ecosystem is increasingly difficult to navigate. Local news organizations have shrunk or shut down; polarizing national publications and misinformation networks fill the void. Tech platforms dominate the attention economy with algorithms that surreptitiously shape the way users interact with the news. Information is ubiquitous but difficult to parse. There is hope for a […] → Read More
The Local Live(s) project humanizes reporters by putting them onstage
The Local Live(s) project launched amid the pandemic, partnering with newsrooms to host live online events in which journalists talk about their work. Last year, the group worked with six newsrooms to hold ten live events; this year, they’ll expand their scope to highlight the work of thirty local newsrooms across the country. (Disclosure: the […] → Read More
Measuring the local news landscape: A Q&A with Penny Abernathy
Penny Abernathy’s research on mapping “news deserts” is regularly cited in national newspapers to call attention to the economic crisis facing local newsrooms. But the local news crisis is complicated, and a single citation can’t tell the whole story. CJR spoke with Abernathy about measuring the crisis and the complicated nature of telling local stories […] → Read More