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.

Dan and Ellen fall into their third season of What Works with an interview with Mark Henderson, an old friend of the pod and a pioneer in online media. Mark is a journalist and technologist with decades of experience in news. He is the founder and CEO of The 016, a first-of-its-kind news publisher and distributor focused on Worcester, Massachusetts.

Mark worked at the Telegram & Gazette from 1990 to 2014. He spent 19 years in the newsroom, rising to the position of assistant sports editor before being named deputy managing editor for technology in 2005. In 2009, he was named digital director, where he launched the first paywall at a New York Times Company newspaper. He founded the Worcester Sun, a subscription news site that launched in August 2015 and suspended publication in February 2018.

Mark was also one of the very first people Dan and Ellen interviewed for their book, “What Works in Community News.” Although Mark is not in the book, Dan did write up his conversation for Nieman Lab, which can be found here.

Dan has a Quick Take on a report from the Poynter Institute, a leading journalism education organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that offers a clear-eyed assessment of why there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism despite the very real challenges that we still face.

Ellen recounts a Knight Science Journalism Program panel and awards ceremony last week at MIT. The program honored Cicero Independiente, a nonprofit newsroom in the Chicago area. The staff won for an innovative project that examined toxic air.