Dan and Ellen talk with Carlene Hempel and Harrison Zuritsky. Carlene, a journalism professor at Northeastern, recently led a reporting trip to Flint, Michigan. Harrison and other students produced a stunning internet magazine called Flint Unfiltered that takes a deep dive into the causes and effects of Flint's economic downturn and toxic water crisis.

Since 2009, Carlene has been leading students on reporting trips, where they work as part of a traveling press corps. She has taken groups to many countries, including Egypt, Syria, Cuba and Panama. Harrison, a second-year student with concentrations in journalism and data science, joined her on the Flint trip.

Like so many at Northeastern, Carlene has a background that includes academic achievement as well as wide-ranging professional experience. She has been a professor for 20 years and holds a PhD from Northeastern. She also started her career writing for The Middlesex News in Framingham, now The MetroWest Daily News, and The Boston Globe. She then moved to North Carolina, where she worked for MSNBC and The Raleigh News & Observer.

Dan has Quick Take from Maine. The former owner of the Portland Press Herald is going to have three of his weekly papers printed at the Press Herald’s facility in South Portland, giving a boost to the National Trust for Local News. And he’s also followed through on a plan to open a café at one of his weeklies in a unique effort to boost civic engagement.

Ellen weighs in on a new study of local news by our friend of the pod, Professor Joshua Darr at Syracuse University. Darr teamed up with three other researchers to do a meta analysis of surveys on media trust. They made a number of findings, but the headline is that Americans trust local newsrooms more than national news outlets. This is especially true if the local news outlet has the actual name of the community in its title. But there's a downside: that automatic trust also allows pink slime sites to take hold.

For their 100th podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with Tom Breen, the editor of the New Haven Independent. Tom joined the staff of the Independent in 2018, and then became managing editor. Last November, he stepped up to succeed founding editor Paul Bass, who launched the Independent in 2005 and is still very involved. He's executive director of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization he set up to oversee the Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel in New Haven’s northwest suburbs, and WNHH. He continues to report the news for the Independent and hosts a show on WNHH, and he started another nonprofit, Midbrow, which publishes arts reviews in New Haven and several other cities across the country.

Listeners will also hear from Alexa Coultoff, a Northeastern student who wrote an in-depth report on the local news ecosystem in Fall River, Massachusetts, a blue-collar community south of Boston that flipped to Donald Trump in the last election after many decades of being a solidly Democratic city. We recently published Alexa’s story at Whatworks.news.

Ellen has a Quick Take on two big moves on the local news front. The National Trust for Local News has named a new CEO to replace Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who resigned earlier this year. The new leader is Tom Wiley, who is now president and publisher of the Buffalo News. And in the heartland, the Minnesota Star Tribune has named a new editor to replace Suki Dardarian, who is retiring. The nod goes to Kathleen Hennessey, the deputy politics editor of the New York Times and a former AP reporter.

Dan's Quick Take examines a recent court decision ruling that Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the way it controls the technology for digital advertising. This was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and a number of states, but it’s also the subject of lawsuits brought by the news business, which argues that Google has destroyed the value of online ads. It’s potentially good news. It’s also complicated, and its effect may be way off in the future.

Dan and Ellen talk with John Mooney, the founder of NJ Spotlight News, a digital nonprofit that's part of NJ PBS, the state's public broadcasting network. Mooney, who covered education for The Star-Ledger in Newark, took a buyout in 2008, put together a business plan, and launched their site in 2010 under the auspices of the nonprofit Community Foundation of New Jersey.

While Spotlight was making a mark journalistically, it wasn't breaking even, and its sponsor, the Community Foundation, was getting impatient. After extensive talks, Mooney affiliated with NJ PBS. The name changed to NJ Spotlight News, and the merger means true collaboration between the newsrooms. Both the broadcast and digital sides take part in news meetings. (In a previous podcast, Northeastern University professor and TV journalist Mike Beaudet discussed his initiative aimed at reinventing TV news for a vertical video age.)

As Dan wrote in "What Works in Community News," the story of NJ PBS and NJ Spotlight News suggests that public broadcasting can play a role in bolstering coverage of regional and statewide news. It's a question of bringing together two different newsroom cultures. There’s also a Yo-Yo Ma angle!

Ellen has a Quick Take about the death of John Thornton, a venture capitalist who helped launch The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Austin, in 2009. He also was a founder of the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country. Thornton, who had struggled with mental health issues, took his own life. He was 59.

Dan has a Quick Take about our webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News,” which was held the evening of April 3. Panelists gave great advice about what board members and donors need to know, and the video can be found on the website, whatworks.news.