Special Episode: Covering California, Panel 1 – A Crisis in Local News

CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST: This Special Episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live at Capitol Weekly’s conference COVERING CALIFORNIA: The Future of Journalism in the Golden State, which was held in Sacramento on Thursday, May 30, 2024

This is PANEL 1 – A CRISIS IN LOCAL NEWS

Panelists: Danielle Bergstrom, Fresnoland; Larry Lee, The Sacramento Observer; Colleen McCain Nelson, Sacramento Bee; Christa Scharfenberg, California Local News Fellowship Program UC Berkeley

Moderated by Pamela Wu, University of California

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

PAMELA WU: Tim, thank you very much. Thanks to all of you for being here today. As mentioned in the introduction, indeed, there is a crisis in local news. And no better than the four people who are seated with me to address it today.

Please welcome our panelists. I’ll begin with Danielle Bergstrom, a journalist and the founder of Fresnoland. Now, Fresnoland is an award-winning nonprofit news organization covering Fresno and Madera County and specializing in, I love this: “explanatory and investigative reporting.” It launched in 2020.

Bergstrom’s reporting is focused on the areas of housing, water, development, and inequality. She has been a Knight Fellow in Poynter’s Media Transformation Challenge and a California Journalism Fellow with the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Before becoming a journalist, she worked for over a decade as a city planner, holding roles at the City of Fresno, Office of the Mayor, Central Valley Community Foundation, and Oakland-based PolicyLink, described as a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity.

Larry Lee, is president and publisher of the Observer Media Group and the Sacramento Observer Newspaper. The Observer has been called the most honored black newspaper in America. It has received more than 700 awards for journalism excellence and community service. And this year, the Observer marks its 64th anniversary.

Lee has a long background in ethnic media and marketing. He credits his principles of quality, community, work ethic, and dedication to excellence to his late parents, Dr. William H. Lee and Kathryn C. Lee, who were the founders of the Observer. And his plan is to take the Observer Media Group further into the 21st century as a powerful multimedia voice for the African American community.

Next is Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Colleen McCain Nelson, the executive editor of the Sacramento Beeand the California Regional Editor for McClatchy. Nelson works with the journalists in all of McClatchy’s California newsrooms, including: the Sacramento Bee, the Fresno Bee, the Modesto Bee, the San Luis Obispo Tribune, and the Merced Sun Star. She previously worked as a White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and as a political reporter, chronicling three presidential campaigns.

“We cover the city and county general plans because, as it turns out, those plans are very important when it comes to issues around whose streets get paved, whether roads get widened or not, you know, very basic pocketbook issues” – Danielle Bergstrom

In 2016, she crisscrossed the country with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders. She wrote about the policies, politics, and personalities in President Barack Obama’s administration traveling the world with the president and the vice president.

And Christa Scharfenberg is project director of the California Local News Fellowship, which is based at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining the fellowship program, Scharfenberg was senior vice president for portfolio success at the American Journalism Project, or AJP. AJP is a venture philanthropy that invests in the growth of local nonprofit newsrooms across the country. Previously, she spent more than 18 years at the Center for Investigative Reporting, serving as CEO there from 2017 to 2021. She is an advisory board member at the Poynter Institute, the Legal Clinic Fund and Correctiv, a nonprofit independent newsroom in Berlin, Germany. Please give a hand to our panelists.

All right, let’s dive right in. And we’ll begin with a little bit of background. A study by Northwestern University last year showed that local newspapers are closing at a rate of 2.5 per day. That’s the fastest in our history. More than 200 counties in the US have only limited access or even no access to reliable local news. Research has shown that shrinking availability of local news translates to less government accountability and more disinformation. Exactly as you would think. And I would love to know from each of you what your respective roles are in solving a problem like local news deserts.

Could each of you please give us a glimpse of your role and what your institution or media outlet are doing? I’d like to hear from all of you, but we’ll start at the end with Danielle.

DANIELLE BERGSTROM: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Can you all hear me? Okay, great. So, like you said in the introduction, I founded Fresnoland in 2020, and we were initially launched as a vertical within the Fresno Bee to really cover some topics that the greater Fresno metropolitan area hadn’t seen for some time around development, inequality, housing, equity issues. And because I come from a city planning background, the gap that I saw in our sort of local news ecosystem was that a lot of people were getting pretty surface-level news about what was happening.

And as a person who at one point in my career… I’ve worked in city hall, I’ve worked on the outside of a lot of political issues. And I know that the decisions that are being made behind closed doors, whether it’s where a new park goes, where new housing projects go, how transportation funds are spent, the way that those decisions are communicated to the public are often vastly different than the way that they are decided indoors, inside these meeting rooms. And I felt like more people needed to see the mechanics of these decisions.

And so that was why I started Fresnoland. We initially launched as this… And that continues after we spun out from the Fresno Bee and went Independent in 2022. We’ve really seen that that’s the role that we need to play in the ecosystem, is providing in-depth coverage to really explain policy decisions in a way that engages people to participate back into the process.

And so we do a lot of coverage on really wonky things that most people may not really initially understand why it’s important to them. We cover the city and county general plans because, as it turns out, those plans are very important when it comes to issues around whose streets get paved, whether roads get widened or not, you know, very basic pocketbook issues.

And so Fresno and Madera continue to be… there are multiple media outlets, and I’m glad that we have a roughly competitive ecosystem. But a lot of communities that have historically been marginalized don’t necessarily see themselves in a lot of the coverage. And so that’s another role that we’re trying to play, is making sure that we’re covering Southeast Asian communities that are really large in Fresno and making sure they see themselves in coverage as well.

PW: Thank you, Danielle. I mentioned in your intro how much I love “explanatory journalism.” I think it’s so important. I can speak as a former news person and still sometimes news person these days, that so often news is about what just happened, what’s the latest, but it doesn’t tell you how it started. So I think that is so valuable. Thank you so much. Colleen.

COLLEEN MCCAIN NELSON: Thank you, and thanks for having me today. It’s a great topic to tackle and news deserts are a crisis in this country. And it’s stunning how many there are across the country. It’s stunning how many news deserts there are right here in California.

What we’re doing in our newsrooms is kind of twofold. We have five McClatchy newsrooms in California, as was mentioned. And as we’ve seen the number of local journalists decline, we’ve really narrowed our focus to make our news organizations hyper-local. And it wasn’t that long ago when you would see the Sacramento Bee covering the Olympics or covering something happening in another country or sending journalists around the country or around the globe to cover news.

There are plenty of journalists in DC, there are plenty of journalists covering Congress, covering the Olympics. There aren’t nearly enough journalists covering our local communities. So we’ve made our focus entirely hyper-local. We want to serve the communities where we are, and we want to make sure that we’re protecting those journalist jobs and responding to readers’ needs in those communities.

And so in the last few years, we’ve really turned our focus to things that we think and that we’ve heard from readers that they want in terms of accountability journalism, holding the powerful to account in our communities. We’ve invested in new teams focused on public service journalism. Those journalists are really responsive to what readers are telling them they need, and want to help navigate life in their communities.

So we answer a lot of reader questions. We provide basic information about how to vote, how to pay your taxes, how to just navigate life in your community.

“I feel like all of our newsrooms need to be healthy. I want a very healthy Sacramento Bee. I want a healthy CalMatters. I want a healthy ecosystem in our region.” – Larry Lee

And so we’ve tried really hard to be focused on local, and to be responsive to readers’ needs. And while the communities where we have newsrooms aren’t news deserts, we’re also talking about how we might expand our reach into nearby news deserts and actually build some journalism capacity in those places.

And so we’re really excited to be part of the California Local News Fellowship, that Christa will talk about. But we have a Fellow coming to the Sacramento Bee later this year, who we will deploy to Sutter County, which is a news desert not too far from here. And so we’re going to use the firepower of the Sacramento Bee and support from the California Local News Fellowship to experiment and think about how we could build some journalism capacity in a county where there isn’t a newspaper. And so we’re going to be doing some other efforts like that to figure out how we can add some journalists where there simply aren’t journalists on the ground.

PW: Thank you. Larry Lee.

LARRY LEE: Sure. Again, thank you for inviting me. I appreciate being part of this great panel. So the Observer, as you mentioned, is historically this community’s African American newspaper. We do so unapologetically. We’re very focused on the African American experience. But as a person who has grown up in this community, I’ve always recognized the importance of our role here in Sacramento.

Covering California: A Crisis in Local News. Larry Lee, The Sacramento Observer; Colleen McCain Nelson, Sacramento Bee; Danielle Bergstrom, Fresnoland. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly.

At this point in time, the Observer is the longest standing locally owned newspaper in Sacramento, which is unfortunate, but it also creates a level of responsibility for us that we take very seriously. So not only have we been very focused on really trying to do more substantive work, I think the term that we use in our own newsroom is “high impact journalism,” really focusing on the issues, concerns.

Currently we’re doing a series on mental health challenges for African American men, doing analysis on how food deserts are impacting African Americans in Sacramento, how gun violence is impacting African Americans in Sacramento. So, over the last few years, we’ve been able to kind of shift our focus on that high impact journalism.

So we’re really focused on that. But in my personal role in trying to sustain not only us but the region as well… About 2018, I started having listening sessions with local leaders, newsroom leaders around the region, some of whom are in the room, to kind of find out what were their pain points? What were some of their challenges, and what does collaboration look like for them?

And once COVID hit, I kind of accelerated an effort that we had locally called Solving Sacramento, where we recognized, and it wasn’t just our own challenges or the challenges that others were facing, but we’re also recognizing the real challenges that the Bee was facing with a shrinking newsroom of their own, and seeing that there were some gaps that were happening from local news coverage. So how can we kind of help support that?

I feel like all of our newsrooms need to be healthy. I want a very healthy Sacramento Bee. I want a healthy CalMatters. I want a healthy ecosystem in our region. And because communities suffer, as you said, and it becomes an information gap when there isn’t [coverage].

And so really trying to help fulfill those needs was accelerated during COVID. And we came together and started a collaborative called Solving Sacramento, which has really helped… We’ve done hundreds of stories on affordable housing. You mentioned arts and culture. These are areas that we feel as a region are really important to our local community.

So we’ve found ways to get some support philanthropically through there, but we are also learning and evolving as local smaller newsrooms, to diversify our revenue, and to diversify the revenue of Solving Sacramento so we can continue to sustain ourselves.

It’s not easy as we know, as you mentioned, all the different challenges that are facing newsrooms. You know, during COVID, more than 300 newspapers have gone out of business, 6,000 journalists have lost their jobs. So it’s a real crisis. And as a local community leader in this space, I’m very committed to really trying to make sure we fill that gap.

PW: Thank you. Christa.

CHRISTA SCHARFENBERG: Thank you. Thanks for having me. We’re going to talk about the fellowship program in a bit more detail shortly, so I won’t explain it all right now, but I will say that the core of our model is that we’re placing reporting fellows in existing newsrooms. So by design, we’re not naturally serving news deserts, but we recognized right away that we needed to think about a strategy to have fellows serving communities in California that really don’t have sufficient reporting.

“When the news ecosystem struggles, ethnic publications struggle the worst and the most” – Larry Lee

And kind of next to that, there was some concern because this program is publicly funded about us putting fellows in the big mainstream news outlets that… I mean, everybody’s struggling, but that are more well-funded than some of the smaller, community-based newsrooms.

So we had the idea that if we were going to work with newsrooms, like the ones that are the McClatchy papers in the state, that we could work with them to think about how those existing papers or news outlets could extend their coverage to try to serve news deserts in their region.

And so we actually, in the first cohort, which is up and running now, we are working with the Fresno Bee. There’s a reporter there, but he’s actually doing most of his reporting in the neighboring county of Madera.

We’re working with the Bay Area News Group, and while the reporter is based in San Jose, or the paper is based in San Jose, the Mercury News, he is reporting mostly in Gilroy and Watsonville, where the paper doesn’t typically have reporters based.

So we’re trying to get creative with the existing news outlets to think about extending their coverage. And then I’d like to think the fellows themselves are mostly from California. They’re from communities around the state. We’re giving them a two-year reporting experience to really launch their careers, and many of them are deeply, deeply committed to community reporting.

I don’t have the answer for how we’re going to bolster journalism in news deserts, but as the industry is figuring that out, we’re trying to train people who really wanna go back to the communities that they’re from, or are living in the communities that they’re from, to do kind of deep and meaningful reporting for their people. So that’s the role we’re trying to play in kind of teeing up this next generation of journalists.

PW: Fantastic. So many of these information deserts that we’re talking about are in communities of color, communities with large numbers of Black and Brown populations. Larry Lee, as an expert in this subject area, how are Black newspapers and other ethnic media working to address this really growing need?

LL: So I think that there is a definite effort and commitment by ethnic publications to really find ways to be sustainable. I think there’s the old saying: “When white America gets a cold, Black America gets pneumonia.” When the news ecosystem struggles, ethnic publications struggle the worst and the most. And we’ve been very focused on really diversifying that revenue stream and finding opportunities like the California Fellowship, to try and, whether it’s through philanthropic means, through traditional advertising means, and the like.

“There’s really been a long tradition of not having public funding of journalism in this country. Of course, it’s standard in many other countries around the world, but there’s always been a really strong firewall here between public funding and journalism” – Christa Scharfenberg

But I think there has also been more willingness of those outside of our community to take opportunities to collaborate. I mentioned the Solving Sacramento collaborative, but that’s not the only one I’m in. I’m also in another one, that is national, called Word in Black. Where it’s 10 Black newspapers across the country, and we are doing something similar, where we’re doing higher impact journalism focused on these issues that are impacting African Americans nationally.

But the reality is those gaps exist in a way that is not an easy answer, but it has to get addressed. We’ve recognized… I mentioned Solving Sacramento, it’s a diverse group. It’s: The Observer, it’s News and Review, the Business Journal, Outward Magazine, Russian American Media, Univision. But even in that group where we’ve been very focused on diverse groups, we noticed the real gap in the AAPI news coverage. And so how do we help really support that community? And or support that community with possibly a newsroom that can help serve that community? I think those are the things that ethnic publications, ethnic media outlets have a more hyper level of sensitivity to that is really critical.

Covering California: A Crisis in Local News. Larry Lee, The Sacramento Observer. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly.

The real thing, as well, too, is to really help support those that have been doing the work. I am all for, again, I’m all for a healthy news ecosystem. I want newsrooms to be as healthy as possible. But taking opportunities to partner with legacy – whether they’re newsrooms or news leaders – to really help have authentic voices for those communities that have been going without is really critical. So I can’t say that… I get upset sometimes when I see in other communities, I won’t speak about Sacramento…. but when I see it in other communities where there might be an opportunity where someone feels like there is a lack of coverage within a certain ethnic community, but there’s a news outlet that has been doing the work but hasn’t been able to get the support that is needed.

And so it’s great to look at the shiny new penny that is showing up on the block, but sometimes that old penny is really important. So I would encourage those that are in opportunities and spaces to invest in or support or partner or collaborate with ethnic media, that they do so with intentionality, and to do it unapologetically.

PW: We need to mind all the pennies. [laughter]

LL: Yes, all the pennies matter.

PW: And also thank you for mentioning the API community. I’m on the board of Sacramento’s Asian American Journalists Association. We should talk after this. Let’s do it.

LL: Absolutely.

DB: Christa, you mentioned the California News Fellowship program. Love the idea of boosting this pathway for future community journalists. I’d like to talk about its funding and how state support plays a really large role.

CS: State support plays a 100% of the role there. [Laughter]

PW: Oh, that’s a lot.

CS: And we are also here to support the pennies. We’re trying to support the pennies.

So as you all probably know, there’s really been a long tradition of not having public funding of journalism in this country. Of course, it’s standard in many other countries around the world, but there’s always been a really strong firewall here between public funding and journalism. Except for public radio and public television. Although the public support for those entities is also quite a small part of their budget overall, that’s not the perception out there, but it is.

But as we all know that the industry is in such crisis and really in an era of collapse, and I think people, like probably many people in this room, and people on this panel are almost desperately looking for sources of revenue to sustain this work and grow this work and evolve the work of reporting in and for their communities.

And so Senator Glazer, who’s speaking at lunch today is just… I think you’ll hear when he speaks, just deeply passionate about the role of local news in a functioning democracy. He sees it, feels it viscerally; that the absence of access to information that people in the state need to make informed decisions is really impacting the work that policy makers are doing here in California.

And he just decided that he wanted to do something to support local news, and in 2022 was able to allocate $25 million to launch this program in partnership with the journalism school at UC, Berkeley. The Berkeley Journalism [school] is one of the more elite graduate schools for journalism in the country.

And honestly, many of the graduates there, they would set their sights on the New York Times and the Washington Post and the big national outlets, because they could. The school has partnerships with those outlets, and that was like the pathway after graduating. And the dean of the journalism school got her own start in local news. She worked at a little weekly shop on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. I’m from Boston, so I appreciated that. And really understood the value of working in a local community early in your career, but throughout your career, the kind of work that you can do, you can really have such a huge impact.

And so she wanted to incentivize graduates to think about local news after they graduated instead of setting their sights on the big national outlets. So there was kind of a marriage made between these two ideas, and the fellowship was funded.

So we’ve got this current $25 million that funds three cohorts of fellows to work for two years in local newsrooms around the state. Full disclosure, there’s fellows in all three of these organizations, and we have a fellow in the room, Tony Rodriguez over here who is at CapRadio. He’s one of our superstars.

So, we have an advisory board of people from around the state that’s about half journalism educators, from one person from Berkeley, but people from CSU journalism programs, and community college journalism programs, and then the other half is representing newsrooms. So both individual newsroom leaders and also people from California Black Media, Ethnic Media Services and Latino Media Collaborative. And we really had a commitment from the beginning to work with newsrooms that, as Larry said, don’t typically get the resources or maybe the attention that they deserve.

So we’re working with a wide variety of news organizations, as you can see from the people represented here, but really with a focus on smaller community rooted newsrooms and ethnic media outlets around the state.

The fellows themselves are really representative of the state in terms of ethnically, racially, it’s about 65% people of color. Many people are the first in their families to go to college. They’re from throughout California. We do take people from outside of California, but we like the Californians, so it’s mostly people who are from the state. They’re people who have under five years of experience in journalism. You don’t have to have gone to college, you don’t have to have graduated from high school. You don’t have to have a journalism degree.  You can come to the program with any combination of work experience, and educational experience, as long as you just have the kind of fundamentals of reporting down.

“Our newsroom is smaller than it once was. And not that long ago, we were able to have reporters on the ground and devoted to every single suburb, and every single part of the city, and showing up to every single meeting. And now you have to pick and choose” – Colleen McCain Nelson

And then we provide lots of support and coaching and training to the fellows throughout their time to kind of augment the newsroom experience. So we are working very hard now to figure out ongoing funding for the program, but we’ve got two more cohorts. So we’ll soon have 80 people working across the state. There’s 40 now.

PW: That’s amazing. 80 is so impactful.

CS: I think so, yes. I hope so.

PW: Yes, we all hope so in this room. I wanna get just a little bit explanatory here. You used the term “era of collapse,” and I don’t think that that is overstating things. We all know that this really boils down to a revenue problem. Fewer readers, fewer subscribers means less revenue. But I’m interested in asking our newsroom leaders, what does that look like inside your newsroom? What do those cuts mean for you as manager? Like, what’s your biggest challenge when the bottom line shrinks?  [Laughter]

LL: Who do you wanna start with?

PW: I invite anyone to jump in. Go ahead.

LL: You want me to start? Okay, I’ll start. So again, as I said, we historically have been underfunded, just that ethnic media has historically been underfunded. So we unfortunately have… you say you’ve been living with less for a long time. I think, you know, what does that mean? It means different things to different people.

Covering California: A Crisis in Local News. Colleen McCain Nelson, Sacramento Bee; Danielle Bergstrom, Fresnoland. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly.

I think for us, one of the things that impacted us was we had to kind of relocate from our physical structure. The building that we had was not gonna work with us moving forward if we were gonna be able to sustain ourselves. So that was one of the areas that has impacted us. I think it really comes down for everybody, it ends up being, you have to make those harder decisions on what you cover, and where you spend your resources.

So for a newsroom like ours, historically, the thing about the Observer for 50 years or so was that if somebody had an event or something like that, we were there. We had the ability to cover things on the weekend with regularity. Photographers, reporters, et cetera…. But as we kind of reassessed our ability to be able to maintain ourselves, we had to kind of make a decision.

I was like, “Okay, are we gonna continue to do those things that people are posting on Facebook and beating us to, and are getting their own audience and traffic? Or are we gonna try and do something that they can’t do?” So our decision was to do something that they can’t do. And that’s serving us well right now. And it has allowed us, even in the midst of the storm, to be able to grow our team in a considerable fashion.

Over COVID, we tripled the size of our newsroom. That’s kind of stabilized a little bit, but it’s still a capacity that we didn’t have before. But I’ll let the others add.

CMN: Larry’s exactly right. You have to make tough decisions every day, and you have to set priorities. And so our newsroom is smaller than it once was. And not that long ago, we were able to have reporters on the ground and devoted to every single suburb, and every single part of the city, and showing up to every single meeting. And now you have to pick and choose. And we hear from readers every day, telling us, “you used to cover X. Why don’t you cover X anymore?” And that’s a tough question to answer for readers, because we want to serve them, but we have to make tough decisions. And we do our best to be responsive to what readers are prioritizing and what they want, but we’re not able to cover every single meeting and we’re not able to be in every single outer ring suburb.

And one thing we hear a lot from readers is about arts coverage. And we used to be able to do a lot more arts coverage. And that’s something we simply don’t have the manpower to do anymore. And so we’ve tried to be responsive to what readers are telling us is most important to them.

“No one can do deeply researched, well reported, ethically consistent and valid investigative journalism except for trained newsrooms. And that’s a really, really, really hard thing to outsource” – Danielle Bergstrom

Like Larry, we’ve also worked to get creative about finding new revenue streams, new funding sources, new strategies to add to our newsrooms with fellows and with philanthropic funding. And so we’ve been able to ultimately add some jobs that are supported by the community, supported by foundations, supported by the California Local News Fellowship, but those are not necessarily permanent solutions. They’ve given us a boost at this moment, and allowed us to add some jobs back.

But we also hear from a lot of philanthropic funders that they are willing to do this because they want to create a bridge to a sustainable model. And so they say, “We’re willing to support you right now, but you need to figure out the long-term plan.”

And so our challenge then is to create the sustainable model. We’re very grateful for the support right now, but we need to figure out what does this look like long term? How do we make this sustainable? So when the funders who say: “Okay, we’re giving you a bridge.” When that bridge runs out, we have a sustainable model that will serve us in the long term and serve the community in the long term.

DB: So we’re one of the new nonprofit newsrooms that popped up in the era of COVID, and there’s quite a bit of us that did that. And I’m not entirely sure what was going on in a lot of our heads. So we started newsrooms in the middle of a pandemic, and I had a 2-year-old at home, so that was also a bad idea.

PW: Oh my gosh.

DB: But anyways, here we are. And so on one hand, we’re a little bit immune in some ways to the headwinds that a lot of the legacy and longer established papers have been hitting over the last few years.

Although, if you’re paying attention to the nonprofit news world, you may have seen some of the hits that have been coming to places like the Texas Tribune and the Center for Public Integrity, and a lot of the public radio newsroom.

So I don’t have any illusions that our model is somehow better in a lot of ways than the for-profit model. It’s different, but we’re still a business. We still have to make money. We have seen philanthropic funders come and go already and have to figure out how to plug gaps. Our fellow, through the California Local News fellow, actually did plug an incredibly important gap in our newsroom.

“You won’t be replaced by AI, but you could very easily be replaced by the person who uses AI” – Larry Lee

So we had a housing reporter that has always, from day one, been a really key beat for us, and covering housing from particularly a working class perspective. Not necessarily here’s the newest shiny subdivision that you can potentially buy a home in, but how are a lot of local policy issues impacting renters in Fresno? Renters are 60% of our population. When a funder decided they weren’t interested in funding local news anymore, and left that beat high and dry, we were able to backfill it with the fellowship, and we’re deeply grateful to that.

But all of this is to say that, I think that for me, something I’m always paying attention to is when you strip down what we do as newsrooms, as journalists, what is the essential thing that we can do that no one else can do? Because there’s so many content creators, especially in news deserts, that have stepped in to do a lot of things that newsrooms used to do.

And we hear a lot…. Larry, you were just talking about like, you can’t send everyone to every event anymore, even though you hear probably all the time: “Why weren’t you at this event?”

And the thing that sticks out to me is, no one can do deeply researched, well reported, ethically consistent and valid investigative journalism except for trained newsrooms. And that’s a really, really, really hard thing to outsource. And it’s something that also readers value. We see most of our reader donations come through on our investigations. It’s something that funders love.

Now, sponsors, corporate sponsors don’t love investigative journalism, so we haven’t figured out that piece yet. But reader sustainability is always gonna have to be at the core of everyone’s business model. And so I think that if you stick with that, you have something going.

LL: Can I just add something? So I appreciate what you just said too. Again, the idea about nonprofit newsrooms have popped up and some have been very successful and the like. But to your point, I always say whether you’re nonprofit or for profit, the only thing different is that it’s just a tax status. Otherwise you have to have a business model that is allowing you to be sustainable.

Another thing that I wanna make sure that I say that we are trying to do. That I’m trying to make sure that is part of our DNA as a newsroom, and a news organization is embracing, and leading, and stepping into AI, and how we can use it in our newsroom to help us be more efficient and help serve those communities that are missing.

“There was a Pew study that came out a few weeks ago… and 63% of people said that they think their local newsroom is doing well financially, which is a jaw-dropping thing for all of us to read” – Colleen McCain Nelson

There’s been a lot of conversation about AI and its role and everything. People say: “Will AI replace newspapers or reporters?” I always tell my team: “You won’t be replaced by AI, but you could very easily be replaced by the person who uses AI.”

You have to know how to use AI in order to do those things more efficiently. And it is going to be part of newsrooms across the country. You have to embrace it as a newsroom, because if you don’t, you’re going to have gaps. You’re going to be left behind. And so whether it is… and it’s not saying write the story, but it is pulling information, it’s missing a board meeting, using AI to transcribe it, then using AI to kind of help you pull in critical points, and then having a reporter then go in and do the work.

And so it’s finding those ways and tools that you say, “okay, there was a gap here six months ago, but now we’re able to fill it with some regularity,” because we’ve now leaned into AI and used it in our newsroom.

PW: It is a tool, and it is so essential for newsrooms to lean into new technologies. I think that we’re all old enough to recall that some newsrooms really tried to resist, like having a website for a while. Do we need to have a website? And I had a news director who used to say, when it comes to technology, if it’s a pool, you can either dip your toe in or you can cannonball in. News people need to cannonball in. So thank you for raising AI. It’s such a hot topic.

Covering California: A Crisis in Local News. Christa Scharfenberg, California Local News Fellowship Program UC Berkeley. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly.

Colleen, the comments that you just made about prioritizing coverage really underscore the fact that large newspapers in many cases are hit as hard as small ones. You’ve talked about evolving your approach to making coverage decisions. We have a lot of Bee readers in this room. Can you please share what Bee readers can expect moving forward?

CMN: Absolutely. So as I mentioned before, we’re really leaning in on the types of stories that we know readers value. And you’ve touched on some of those absolutely: investigative reporting, accountability reporting, public service journalism and coverage that readers can’t find anywhere else. I think what you’re hearing from all of us is we’re having to ask ourselves, okay, what can we provide that no one else can provide? What can we give readers that will be first and best and different from everything else that’s out there?

So I think we’re all looking to kind of find our own lanes, distinguish ourselves so that we’re not just replicating what’s already out there. And our readers tell us they really value accountability journalism. We’ve launched a project that we call Reality Check where we’re encouraging readers to tell us things that they want us to check out: Is there a politician who said something that doesn’t sound quite right? Is there something happening at City Hall that you want us to check out?

And so we’re really trying to make this a two-way conversation with readers. So you tell us what you want us to report on, and we will check it out and we will deliver the facts to you.

And so going forward, I think you’re going to see us being even more responsive to readers.

I arrived here, you [Danielle Bergstrom] started Fresnoland in the midst of the pandemic. I arrived here in the midst of the pandemic, which is a tough way to start this job. Now that we are back out into the universe, we’re working really hard to make sure that you’re seeing Bee reporters in the community and making sure that we show up, so that you have a chance to interact with our journalists, get to know our journalists, tell us what you want to hear.

We’ve been hosting events at the Bee, we’ve been showing up to more events in the community, we really want to make sure that we’re building a deeper connection with our readers, and I think we’re all learning: We need to engage with readers in different ways than we have in the past and really help them understand how they can help support us. How we can make this a mutually beneficial relationship.

And you’re talking today about the crisis in local news, but what we hear from the community is how much they still value local news. And there was a Pew study that came out a few weeks ago that was really fascinating that I think is worth talking about for a minute, because there was a lot to really encourage what we’re doing, but also some stark reminders about how we need to communicate with our communities about the crisis in local news.

So that Pew study said that 85% of people find local news is either extremely important, very important or somewhat important. So the vast majority of people value local news, the majority of people who responded to this study said that local news usually gets it right, that they trust local news to deliver them the facts, so that’s all really encouraging.

But then you go further down into this study, 15% of people said that they had paid for local news in the last year, 15% of people had either subscribed to local news or made a donation to a local newsroom. So 85% of people say it’s important, but 15% of people are paying for it. So there’s a big disconnect there.

And then you go a little bit further into the study, and 63% of people said that they think their local newsroom is doing well financially, which is a jaw-dropping thing for all of us to read. And so clearly we’re not doing enough to communicate about what’s happening in the local news industry. And what we need from our community so that we can create a sustainable model.

So I’m really heartened and energized by the fact that people value what we do, that people trust us, but we’ve got to help them understand that the business model for all of this has changed. And whereas we used to get the vast majority of our revenue from advertising, we’re now largely dependent on subscription revenue or community funding and some other new revenue streams. And so we can’t just count on advertisers to support this model. We have to create an entirely new business model.

“There’s concerns about public funding, but news organizations, legitimate, ethical news organizations, know how to create firewalls between advertisers and the journalism, between funders and the journalism” – Christa Scharfenberg

And so I don’t think we’ve done a good job of telling our story and helping the community understand what’s happening in local news. And that if you do value local news and you do trust local news, we need you to subscribe. Or we need you to support us, or we need you to read our stories on a regular basis. And so I think there’s a lot we can do to tell that story and to work collectively, so that we are collaborating and working together to make sure that folks understand what’s happening in local news.

PW: Let’s talk about legislative efforts to try to help media outlets survive. Earlier, there was a reference to the bill from today’s keynote speaker, Senator Steve Glazer. That bill is now tabled. The nutshell version though, is that it would put a tax on big tech companies that mine for personal data, and then that money would go to fund journalism jobs. So I’d like to ask anyone here who wants to weigh in, what are your thoughts on such efforts to legislate ways to help revive local news?

DB: I’m happy to jump in. So Fresnoland did a position letter in support of that bill, just for full transparency. We do receive some support from Google, indirectly, not directly from Google, but we didn’t feel like that really mattered in putting our support into the bill.

But from my previous life before I was in journalism, I dabbled quite a bit in urban policy and it’s super normal for the Legislature to establish tax credits that basically incentivize industries that they find important to the State of California. So I don’t think journalism is really an exception to that, and I see no problems with the approach.

CS: I’ve realized I didn’t fully answer your question earlier. I could have said this the first time, so I’ll say it now.

PW: Oh, do it, now.

CS: But when I took this job, well, first, I’ll say coming from non-profit journalism, where we are frequently accused of being beholden to our philanthropic funders. I spent decades arguing that we were not, and that we had all of the firewalls in place to protect journalism. I see this the same way. There’s concerns about public funding, but news organizations, legitimate, ethical news organizations, know how to create firewalls between advertisers and the journalism, between funders and the journalism. And it’s no different with state funding. If you have all of the policies and practices and editorial workflows in place, it is no different.

Sorry, but all money has an opinion, a point of view… potentially corrupting, and you have to guard against it no matter where the revenue is coming from. And I think it’s exactly the same.

And our democracy is truly in peril. I believe there’s a role for government to play at the local, state and federal level, and there are efforts happening on all of those levels. Ours, the California project, is by far the biggest, but I think there’s a movement towards exploring the role that public funding can play.

And I’ll just say quickly that when I took this job, I was worried about pushback from news organizations around the state. I thought they would all freak out that this program was publicly funded: Not a one. Not a one. I mean people are like, these people know how to manage their newsrooms effectively, and we need resources, we need an infusion of capital and human beings, and energy into this industry. And I just don’t think it’s that different then funding sources from anywhere else, personally.

CMN: I think there’s a lot of momentum around this right now, and it’s a really interesting moment. You see this being debated around the world and around the country. Australia and Canada already passed legislation that compelled Big Tech to pay for news that they link to. You just saw this week, the Illinois legislature passed tax credits to fund journalists. The New York legislature did something similar. And while Glazer’s bill is tabled at the moment, Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks has a bill AB 886 that would compel Big Tech to pay for news that they link to. And, full disclosure, McClatchy has been supportive of that measure, and I think this is all just part of the larger discussion of what does that new model look like? What does that new mix of revenue streams look like?

“Since Google has removed California news links, our newsroom has had a drop of about 20% of traffic. I’ve talked to some newsrooms in our region, smaller newsrooms that have had as much as a 60% drop in traffic” – Larry Lee

And so I think we’re going to need lots of different revenue that we didn’t use in the past, and right now, Google and Meta control the digital ecosystem. And some of these efforts are aimed at having them pay for the news that they’re benefiting from. They link to our news stories and they benefit from that and they collect the revenue. And so I think to get to a sustainable place, they’re going to need to pay for that news, and we’re going to need that revenue.

LL: So I think conceptually, the idea of supporting news and newsrooms, and the news ecosystem in California is something that makes a lot of sense. We support infrastructure in lots of different ways, and the role that the press and the media plays is an infrastructure type of role. So conceptually that makes a whole lot of sense to me.

I think where you get caught up in is some of the nuances of how it gets done. I think, obviously our industry, probably more than any other industry, has been upended by technology, and the use of our content, and our work to kind of help technology. So I am not a fan, necessarily of the Buffy Wicks legislation. I know I’ve been in constant communication with Senator Glazer about his legislation. I think that there is definitely a role that needs to be played.

I will say this much, and we’ve received resources and funds from Google, both indirectly and directly. I am not a fan of their response to that, by cutting off funding in California as well as news links in California. I feel like that was… And I’m very close with the people at Google, there are some people there that I would call real professional friends. I’ve been really disappointed by the response of the entity of Google in that regard. And so that’s been very frustrating.

But I think that there is a role that they should play particularly. I really like the nuances of Senator Glazer’s bill by taxing them related to the information… when they’re getting our information, because that’s what they’re doing. They’re getting our information and then using that as an advertising model. Which is the model that we had, so they took our model and then they have control over the technology of whether or not our audiences can see our work.

I know since Google has removed California news links, our newsroom has had a drop of about 20% of traffic. I’ve talked to some newsrooms in our region, smaller newsrooms that have had as much as a 60% drop in traffic. So it’s something that is really critical, and I’m hoping that we can come to some sort of understanding where big tech understands its responsibility in helping our communities at large, and not just the bottom line.

PW: I’d like to close with a final question that is forward-looking and hopeful as well. Originally, I was going to ask, “where do you see local news going in 5 or 10 years?” But I’m going to ask these influential newsroom leaders and news leaders, “where would you like to see local news go in 5-10 years?”

These wistful faces.

CS: I think there’s a lot of room for collaboration, which has been mentioned here by a few people, and now that I have this kind of bird’s-eye view of newsrooms around the state, everybody is struggling. To your point, no matter what the business model is, struggling with the same challenges everyone is recreating the same infrastructure. I think there’s enormous possibility for organizations to pull together through formal mergers or collaborations or shared services to really think more holistically and sort of get outside of your individual newsroom to think about: how do we serve the public? How do we serve California’s information needs?

And there’s such great examples of this happening already. Neil’s (Neil Chase) here from CalMatters, and they’re just like the collaboration machines around California. And I think that that is a path forward to really revitalizing the industry… and get creative and share.

LL: I guess if I was to be aspirational, I would say that there is a well-understood and appreciation to Colleen’s point, about the value of news and that people invest in news.

I have an anecdotal response to that survey. Just the other day, my 19-year-old daughter was at the house, she goes to Fresno State. And she was telling me about a homicide that happened near where she worked, and she pulled up the Fresno Bee on her phone to show me the news story. and I said: “Oh, I’m not sure if the Fresno Bee is free or has a paywall?” and I said: “Oh, you pay for the Fresno Bee?” And she said: “You have to pay for news stories?”

And I said: “Daughter, this is what your Dad does!” [laughter] I’m like, “Come on.”

So, having an understanding for the next generation, to kind of understand the value of news and its role in the community, of course, that puts the burden on us to make them understand. And so it puts a responsibility on us. And I’m game for that, but if there can be an understanding that what we do is important. Whether it’s from a teenager or the state legislature or to the United States government. That people understand how important news is and that we cannot go without it.

CMN: So, I’ll say three things that I hope for in the future. One is, just kind of building off of that, we manage to reshape and deepen our relationship with readers so that they are willing to subscribe. So that we show them the value of local news and that they’re willing to pay for it and support us. So that we are not just beholding to the latest algorithm change or hoping that Big Tech doesn’t stop linking to us.

“One of the really sad things that has happened as a result of the decimation of so many local newsrooms is that the majority of local news that people receive now is crime and car accidents and bad things. That’s really created a sense of apathy in so many communities” – Danielle Bergstrom

So that we build a deep relationship with readers, so that they come to us directly, that they subscribe to our newsletters, they subscribe to our products, they come to our news sites, and we have a relationship with them. And we don’t have to depend on Big Tech as a middle man and hope that their algorithm is favorable to us.

The second thing is, I hope that we do embrace AI and all that technology can offer local news.

We’re talking, and doing a lot with that in our newsrooms already, and it’s coming out as fast. We’re absolutely going to be the cannonball on this, we’re not going to just dip our toe in the water and hope that this might all go away. So I think there’s so much that AI can do to help elevate our journalism and to do some of the things that could be easily automated so that our human being journalists can do deeper dives. And do more meaningful work and do investigative journalism that a GPT can’t do.

And so I think there’s so much opportunity there for us to use AI to the benefit of our newsrooms, and the benefit of our communities. And so I hope that we do embrace that opportunity, and I’m really excited about the possibilities there. We’re already working on a lot of experiments that I see great potential in.

And then I hope that we also collaborate and work together, and we are all rooting for each other. We all have different business models, we all have different approaches, but our goals are the same and our aims to serve the community with fact-based journalism are the same.

So while one of our newsrooms may not be able to be everywhere all the time, collectively, we can do a lot, and so I think there’s a lot to be gained from us just having conversations about how we can kind of divide and extend our reach as collaborators try to achieve the same goals. So those would be my three hopes for local journalism.

DB: One of the really sad things that has happened as a result of the decimation of so many local newsrooms is that the majority of local news that people receive now is crime and car accidents and bad things. That’s really created a sense of apathy in so many communities that we cover, and so when we talk to people, when we’re reporting stories right now, a lot of people just feel this sense of like,” even if I give my perspective on this topic, it’s not gonna change.”

So that’s the thing I would like to see change is that people, again, receive local news as a way to get more civically engaged and to build their hope that they can change things. As opposed to a sense of, “everything is horrible and I’m just gonna tune out.”

PW: What a perfect note to end on. I’ve learned so much today, and I hope that you have too. This is Christa Scharfenberg, Larry Lee, Colleen McCain Nelson, Danielle Bergstrom. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today. May I please have a round of a applause for the panel.

RICH EHISEN: Hey Pam. We’re out of time for questions, but I have to throw one question at you. Sorry, I’m gonna take editorial privilege here.

You’ve talked a lot about AI. Are you guys gonna be able to train your reporters properly, or are they gonna be responsible for doing it themselves? And I ask because a lot of your reporters are freelance, that’s a big part of our world right now. So who’s gonna be training reporters to use this information, this tool properly?

LL: Yeah, I mean, yes, we had a training session last Thursday, meeting in our newsroom, we’ll probably have another one next week, so yes. We are training our team on how to use it and how to use it responsibly. So yes, absolutely.

CMN: We’ve already started doing a lot of training, so I went to a week-long AI training session in January. I went to another week-long AI training session in March. We’ve now done training sessions for every single journalist in our newsrooms, and we have more to come. We’ve also come up with AI policies around ethics and transparency, both internal and external, so that we’re making clear to all of our journalists, where the guardrails are and what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate.

And also we wanna make sure that we’re completely transparent with readers about how we’re using AI. So if AI was used in any way to summarize a story or to create a graphic or to augment anything that we’re doing, we’re explaining that to readers and being completely transparent about that. So no surprises there, and so our journalists are doing lots of training, and there’s a lot more to come. We’re just getting started.

DB: We have not dove in deep into the AI pool yet, Fresnoland, we’re a very small newsroom, but there’s really wonderful support organizations in the non-profit news land that offer many trainings. And so I have zero hesitation that when we’re ready to jump in the pool, we have a lot of support and other newsrooms who have. But you guys have an AI policy, and have paved that path for us so we know where to go.

RE: Thank you. I’m gonna give Tim a heart attack if I don’t wrap this up now, so Pam, you may now, wrap it up for everybody. Thank you.

PW: All right. Please give a hand to our wonderful panel. Thank you so much.

Thanks to our COVERING CALIFORNIA sponsors: THE TRIBAL ALLIANCE OF SOVEREIGN INDIAN NATIONS, WESTERN STATES PETROLEUM ASSOCIATION, PHYSICIAN ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA; KP PUBLIC AFFAIRS, PERRY COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITOL ADVOCACY, LUCAS PUBLIC AFFAIRS, THE WEIDEMAN GROUP, and CALIFORNIA PROFESSIONAL FIREFIGHTERS