All journalism is community journalism
Reflecting on Mike Pride's legacy—“He really viewed the Monitor as the community’s paper”—and on the future, on Substack and elsewhere.
I had planned to deliver something this weekend about gun violence, public health and parenting, what’s happening in my state and in yours. But I need a bit more time with it. Come back for that later this week.
Today, some not-entirely-formed thoughts on what it means to be a community journalist.
Mike Pride, longtime editor of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire and former administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, died on Monday. A lot has been written about how Mike ran a small newspaper with very high standards for diligent reporting, clear writing and deep engagement with the issues and with the stories that make up a community.
The Monitor is maybe best known outside of Concord for training generations of reporters to cover the New Hampshire Primary and launching them into careers as national political reporters. For me and many others, the Monitor was something else.
I was hired just out of college, with ambitions to be a foreign correspondent. Instead, I learned the reward of reporting in a place where I was rooted, of hearing people at the gas station and at the grocery store and at the bar talk about the stories that my colleagues and I had written, like they were living things. I learned about the absolute privilege of telling the small story and doing it well.
In 2006, I got a call from a woman whose daughter I had written about previously—for collecting change to donate to Indonesian tsunami relief, if my memory is correct (the story is lost to the black hole of the Monitor’s online archives). Her dear friend had a rare, aggressive cancer and wanted to tell her story, as a record for her children. And she wanted the Monitor to do it.
Photographer Preston Gannaway and I followed Carolynne St. Pierre’s family for nearly two years, before and after her death. Preston would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for her work on the project. She has continued to photograph Carolynne’s husband and youngest son, Elijah. A book of that work, spanning sixteen years, will be published later this year.
At the Monitor, we were given time and support and a lot of space to tell one family’s story, because our editors, including Hans Schulz and Dan Habib, knew it wasn’t just one family’s story. (Scroll down here for the full series.) These were not special circumstances for a special story. This was how the Monitor worked.
“You know, there’s a saying that good local journalism should be a conversation with the community, and Mike really embodied that in the way that he managed the Concord Monitor and its newsroom,” my friend and former colleague, Meg Heckman, told NHPR. “He really viewed the Monitor as the community’s paper.”
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what that means exactly, in part because so many of the stories published about Mike’s life and death read like a farewell to a particular kind of newsroom—a whole tradition of local news—that does not exist anymore.
A new nonprofit organization called the Maine Journalism Foundation announced this week that it hoped to raise $15 million to buy the company that owns the Portland Press Herald, where I worked for three years, and 29 other weekly and daily papers in the state. Owner Reade Brower has said he is looking to sell or find new partners. The foundation is a bid to maintain local ownership.
“Going nonprofit would be a transformative move for us,” Press Herald Executive Editor Steve Greenlee told reporter Steve Craig. “We would be an entirely mission-based organization, driven solely by the desire to inform Maine’s citizens and hold the powerful accountable.”
It’s a good mission, an important one, and, for a nonprofit especially, it’s missing a piece, I think. The part that says, this paper is your paper.
Maybe it’s pollyanna to think of journalism this way. To think that the philosophy that made the Monitor great—a community newspaper and a national newsmaker—can be relevant today, when our understanding of community has changed so much. When most models for making the business of journalism work rely on deep-pocketed owners or deep cuts.
(Most of the responses I received when I shared my support for the Maine Journalism Foundation on Twitter expressed gleeful anticipation—no surprise, it’s Twitter—of its failure. “Seeing it melt into the sewer will not disappoint me,” one person wrote.)
Or, maybe, it’s the only way. To say, this is yours. It can only continue to exist with your criticisms, your contributions, your stories, and your support.
All journalism is community journalism.
I learned this week, too, that
was laid off from his role as investigative correspondent at National Public Radio, and that he planned to return to coverage of the war in Ukraine, this time as an independent journalist publishing through Substack.I subscribed and shared the news with my closest friend, with whom I talked almost daily about Mak’s dispatches in the early weeks of the war. His reporting was filled with urgency, with the details we needed to put it all into context and with humanity—also, with dogs.
I feel lots of things about Mak’s move—angry that he was laid off, amazed at his boldness, scared of the risks he’s taking on. And, I’m excited to be able to support his work directly. He is part of my community, and I am his.
Readers fund journalism, either directly through donations and subscriptions or by showing up in large enough numbers that grant funders and advertisers give their money. Substack makes that connection from reader to writer more direct. It could become a powerful tool for journalists. I have mixed feelings about this.
I so value the layers of thinking and editing that a newsroom provides, and the accountability that is required of any single reporter not only to their readers but to institutional standards. But those layers also act as insulation sometimes, keeping us from being accountable to the public good and the changing needs of the communities we serve.
Here's how Mak framed his experiment in his first newsletter at
:Leaving a steady job at an established institution like NPR for an unproven venture is a big bet.
It’s a bet that readers still care about the human toll that this war is taking.
It’s a bet against cynicism, and ignorance, and apathy.
It’s a bet that there are enough of you out there to support a project this ambitious.
While my efforts here are decidedly less dangerous than Mak’s, I’m still trying to figure out what it means for me to do community journalism here, using all that I learned at the Monitor and since then. I recognize that there is no simple solution to any of this, least of all to fixing the local news business. But I know this is one of the challenges for journalists today, to say it over and over again to readers: This is yours to tend to. (In Mak’s case, with an Oregon Trail metaphor.) And then to deliver on the deep and difficult promises that being a part of a community—not apart from it—requires of us.