Dan and Ellen talk with Mike Shapiro. Mike is a friend of the pod. He came on in 2022 to talk about his role as founder and CEO of TAPinto. TAPInto is a network of nearly 100 franchised local news and digital marketing sites serving more than 150 communities in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Shapiro is a graduate of Rutgers and Stanford Law School, but he's got the journalism bug, as well. He was working as an attorney in New York when his young son underwent open-heart surgery. He wanted to spend more time at home, so he and his wife, Lauryn, launched The Alternative Press in 2008 to give their hometown of New Providence, New Jersey., an independent, all-digital daily news source.

Pretty soon, neighboring towns asked for their own sites, and a network was born. In 2013 Shapiro turned TAPinto into a franchise model: local owners run their own sites, while the company supplies the technology, training and back-office support, and franchisees share content and sell advertising across the network.

But now, he's expanded the business model again. In 2024 he launched the Hyperlocal News Network, a licensing option that gives publishers more freedom to control their own branding but helps with those vexing back-office needs.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the Minnesota Star Tribune's lack of endorsements in some very consequential state races. The Strib's editorial board didn't interrogate candidates, do its own reporting, and weigh in on who would make the best governor or senator. Instead, op ed columnists wrote in support of each candidate. The Strib called these columns "closing arguments."

Dan has a Quick Take about OpenAI's support for local journalism. On the one hand, it's a welcome development. On the other hand, I'm worried that news organizations may be getting co-opted by a technology they should remain deeply skeptical of. Will newsrooms shy away from critical coverage of AI lest they offend the golden goose?

Dan talks with Jon Keller, who has been explaining Massachusetts politics to Boston broadcast audiences for nearly half a century. Jon returned to WBZ-TV just in time to cover a contentious governor's election. He brought his trademark quick thinking and level-headed approach to the recent debate between Maura Healey and Mike Minogue. Jon was a colleague of Dan's at The Boston Phoenix, where he wrote a political colum. His Keller @ Large show remains one of the longest-running political franchises in local television.

Boston Magazine twice named him "Best TV Political Analyst" and he's won a boatload of New England Emmys. In the Jurassic era, Jon wrote an opinion column for me at The Boston Globe, and today writes a column for the MASSterlist political newsletter.

Jon has also been caught in the Paramount media swirl, as well. WBZ-TV laid him off in October 2025 as part of Paramount's cuts. But WBZ brought him back as a special contributor in March of this year.

Dan has a Quick Take about turmoil at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. Editor Rob Curley, who's leading an effort to take the paper nonprofit, was placed on administrative leave recently for unspecified inappropriate behavior. Now a deeply reported article by two nonprofit news outlets have published a devastating story about what went wrong.

(Ellen couldn't make it on air for this episode, but she's editing behind the scenes and will be back soon.)

Dan and Ellen talk with Clay Wirestone the opinion editor of the Kansas Reflector. His first book was published Sept. 29. It's called, aptly enough, "Opinionated: Kansas Journalists who Proved Why Commentary Matters -- Then and Now." His second is set for 2028.

Wirestone seems to be on a first-name basis with Kansas opinion journalists past and present, and he profiles a number of them. Wirestone knows the state well: he graduated from the University of Kansas and lives in Lawrence with his husband. He also edited news at The Topeka Capital-Journal and spent more than a decade at New Hampshire's Concord Monitor, where he worked with Dan's Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman — a past guest on this podcast.

Dan has a Quick Take about yet another new book — "Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America," by Nick Mathews. Dan reviewed it recently for The Arts Fuse. Mathews offers some interesting insights into what happens to community life when there's a shortage of reliable news and information.

Ellen's Quick Take is on an excellent Substack post by media observer Dick Tofel on the recent massacre at McClatchy. It's like a slasher movie and the slasher has come for newspapers that were great in their heyday.

Dan talks with Margaret Sullivan, who has spent the last decade or so doing the toughest of jobs: Telling the country's most powerful newsrooms what they're getting wrong. She was the fifth public editor of The New York Times, from 2012 to 2016. Somebody once called it the worst job in journalism, but she took it anyway. Then she went to The Washington Post as media columnist, where she covered the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Trump years, and January 6th. She left the Post in 2022, which, in hindsight, looks like excellent timing. (Ellen is ailing but did the editing and will be back behind the mic in the next episode.)

Sullivan writes a weekly column on media, politics and culture for The Guardian US, and she publishes a fearless Substack called American Crisis, where she calls out lapses in media coverage of rising authoritarianism. But she also has deep roots in local journalism. She was a summer intern at her hometown paper, The Buffalo News. She worked her way up to become its first woman editor-in-chief. So she knows firsthand what happens to a community when its newspaper is gutted.

Dan has a Quick Take that Yogi Berra would have called déjà vu all over again. The Block family, which owns The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, says it will shut down the paper if they can't find a buyer by the end of 2026. Now where have we heard that before? He also dives into the new impact report from the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organization that turns out to be one of the biggest funders of nonprofit news in the country. AJP makes the case that nonprofit news as a business model has moved past the experimental stage.

Dan and Ellen talk with Emily Sweeney of The Boston Globe. As the Globe's first social video journalist, Emily broke through the clutter on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram with her Boston accent and her collection of track suits. Not to mention her skills as a reporter.

There's a Northeastern connection, as well. Sweeney played on NU's championship-winning Division 1 women's ice hockey team.

Dan has a Quick Take about NJ Spotlight News, a website and a newscast that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey. It's also featured in "What Works in Community News." Spotlight was in danger of being seriously downsized after Donald Trump and the Republican Congress zeroed out funding for public media. The state of New Jersey, facing a budget crisis, cut its public media subsidy as well. Now, though, it looks like there's good news to report.

Ellen's Quick Take is on a comprehensive investigation into a Trump donor named Tim Barnard. Barnard Construction has received billions in taxpayer dollars to build the border wall in the Southwest. The story was reported by the nonprofit High Country News in Colorado and republished by another nonprofit news site, AZ Luminaria in Arizona. It's a strong example of how a national story can be localized and, in doing so, pack a real punch.

Dan and Ellen talk with Professor Carlene Hempel at Northeastern and her student Sydney Woogerd. This spring, Carlene brought a team of student journalists to Asheville, North Carolina, for a week-long intensive reporting trip that focused on the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

The result: a digital multimedia investigation called Caught in the Current: Helene Recovery in Asheville and Beyond.

Put simply, this is a stunning project, with podcasts, videos, photos and text. There's a great soundtrack. We'll drop a link in the show notes.

Carlene has been a journalism professor at Northeastern University for more than 20 years. She specializes in teaching long-form narrative writing as well as creating on-site, pop-up newsrooms domestically and abroad for her courses. Her 2025 reporting class and resulting magazine about the 10-year anniversary of Flint, Michigan's water crisis won two national reporting awards.

Sydney is studying journalism and international affairs at Northeastern University with a focus on multimedia storytelling. She serves as co-photo director for The Avenue Magazine, a student-led fashion publication, where she directs visual strategy and creates editorial content. She has also contributed to The Huntington News and Artistry Magazine as a writer and photographer documenting community stories across Boston. Sydney served as the project's photo editor.

Dan has a Quick Take about the recent What Works webinar for local-news publishers, journalists and volunteers. Ellen shares five lessons learned from watching how the projects that were subjects of the book, "What Works in Community News," have evolved.

Dan and Ellen talk with Ron Mitchell, publisher and editor of the Bay State Banner. In 2023, Mitchell and Andre Stark, both seasoned television news journalists, purchased the Banner, a newspaper covering the Black community in Boston.

The Banner was started in 1965 by Melvin Miller. The print weekly is legendary for covering stories that were ignored by other publications. Stories about the Black and Latino communities in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. Mitchell and Stark are expanding its digital footprint.

During his 27 years at WBZ, Mitchell created news coverage focused on racism in elementary school textbooks in 2014, and a series chronicling an 11-year lawsuit that culminated in an $11 million dollar award to a Black firefighter in Brookline.

Dan and Ellen also talk with Sanjana Mishra, a Northeastern journalism and criminal justice graduate. She's worked in local news, communications and social media. She took two courses with Dan last semester and somehow lived to tell the tale. She wrote a final paper called "How private equity and corporate ownership are killing local journalism and American democracy," an in-depth examination of how Alden Global Capital and USA Today Co. — known as Gannett until recently — have hollowed out newsrooms in a never-ending quest for higher profits.

Ellen has a Quick Take on North Star Stories, a daily radio broadcast on local news carried by AMPERS, a network of 17 community FM stations across Minnesota. It's by community, for community, and it's funded partly by donors and partly by the state.

Dan has a Quick Take about the latest on The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which announced earlier this year that it was shutting down in the face of mounting losses. What's happened since is mostly good — but it comes with a sour aftertaste.

Dan talks with Joe Kriesberg, the publisher of CommonWealth Beacon, and Laura Colarusso, the editor. CommonWealth Beacon is a digital nonprofit that's part of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, better known as MassINC, and Joe is the CEO. CommonWealth Beacon covers politics and public policy at the state level, and has increasingly been branching out into local coverage as well. And it happens to be celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Joe has been with MassINC since 2023 and has overseen the expansion of CommonWealth Beacon's staff and mission. Before that, he was president and CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, where he was a leading advocate for affordable housing. He brings decades of nonprofit management experience and an extensive background of working with news organizations. He has raised millions of dollars for mission-driven organizations.

Laura is an award-winning editor and reporter who combines digital media expertise with a commitment to old-school reporting. Before coming to CommonWealth Beacon, she was the editor of Nieman Reports, a magazine and website published by Harvard's Nieman Foundation that covers issues related to journalism. She has also worked as the digital managing editor at GBH News and the digital opinion editor at The Boston Globe, and is a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly.

Dan has a Quick Take on the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, published recently by the international organization Reporters Without Borders. It shows that the United States has fallen to 64th, coming in just behind Botswana and just ahead of Panama.

Also, an important announcement: Our annual What Works webinar will take place on Thursday, May 21. It's a free, all-day event aimed at enhancing skills in audience development, ethical and effective uses for AI, and how to plan a successful event. You can register at our website, whatworks.news. Just look for the "What Works Webinar 2026" tab at the top of the page.

(Ellen is off the air this week but editing behind the scenes.)