Dan and Ellen talk with Sonal Shah, the CEO of the Texas Tribune, a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Shah, a Houston native and first-generation immigrant, took over as CEO in January 2023 after co-founder Evan Smith decided to move on.

Shah is part of a major transition at the Tribune, and brings broad experience in government, the private sector, and philanthropy. She is a trained economist who worked on the Obama presidential transition team, she worked in philanthropy for Google, and she was national policy director for Pete Buttigieg's run for president.

Dan has a Quick Take about Advance Local, a local news chain in New Jersey that is ending print editions and going fully digital.

Ellen's Quick Take is on the Minnesota Star Tribune's editorial non-endorsement in the presidential race and an alternative endorsement of Kamala Harris written on a blog by former Strib staffers.

Dan and Ellen talk with April Alonso, co-founder and digital editor of Cicero Independiente outside of Chicago.

Cicero Independiente and MuckRock won the 2024 Victor McElheny Award for Local Science Journalism, awarded by MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program, for an investigation of air quality called "The Air We Breathe."

April has an extensive background as a multimedia content creator. She was a multimedia fellow for the Chicago Reporter, and served as a multimedia content creator for La Verdad, a bilingual podcast.

Dan has a Quick Take about a town north of Vancouver, in British Columbia, that has learned a bitter lesson about Canada’s law forcing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to pay for news. The law has led to a rise in disinformation with fewer effective ways to combat it. Meta’s greed is at the heart of this, of course. But so, too, is the failure of government officials to realize that their proposed solution to help local news outlets would backfire in an ugly way.

Ellen's Quick Take is on a new philanthropic fund created by the Minnesota Star Tribune. It's called the Local News Fund, and it is soliciting donations supporting statewide journalism that will be matched by a $500,000 grant from a Minnesota foundation.

Dan and Ellen talk with Sophie Culpepper, a staff writer at NiemanLab who focuses on covering local news. She co-founded The Lexington Observer, a digital local news site covering Lexington, a town of 35,000 outside Boston. For two years, she was the nonprofit news outlet's only full-time journalist. She covered public schools, local government, economic development and public safety, among other subjects.

Ellen has a Quick Take on Sewell Chan, the former editor of The Texas Tribune who has just started his new job as executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Ellen interviewed Sewell in Austin for the Texas chapter in "What Works in Community News."

Dan discusses the recent Nonprofit News Awards bestowed by the Institute Nonprofit News. The Service to Nonprofit News Award went to Andy and Dee Hall, the retired founders of Wisconsin Watch, who were guests on this podcast last December. VTDigger won a community champion award. And an INNovator Award for a sold-out event featuring live stories from the stage went to Brookline.News.