Guest Essay

Richard J. Tofel: At the Local News Summit, talk of ‘reinventing local journalism’

By Richard J. Tofel

February 21, 2025

This essay is part of a series on the 2025 Lenfest Institute-Aspen Digital Local News Summit, an annual convening of the country’s leading journalists, publishers, funders, news creators, and other industry professionals. It was originally published in Columbia Journalism Review.

Journalism has found itself in the crosshairs amid the dizzying swirl of news coming out of Washington.

Amid the uncertainty, local journalism got a modest boost last month with the fourth annual Local News Summit, convened in New Orleans—just days ahead of the Super Bowl there—by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism (for which I do some consulting) and Aspen Digital. With a goal to spur the reinvention of local news, the summit brought together about a hundred leaders in local news, philanthropy, journalism more broadly—and, for the first time, an invigorating selection of new news creators.

Many of us have the sense that local news needs not just to be reengineered as a business matter—which it surely does, as most legacy newspapers, especially (but not only) those controlled by hedge funds, continue to wither—but also to be reinvented editorially. The most exciting ideas proffered at the summit pointed in this direction.

For me, the most intriguing of these came from Kevin Merida, former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Washington Post, who now sits on the board of the new Los Angeles Local News Initiative. Lots of people have talked for years about the need to more closely engage with communities, and some have made notable progress in this direction.

But Merida suggested that the time may have come for local newsrooms to be reorganized away from a system of beats based on subject matter (and rooted in legacy newspaper sections dictated by advertising imperatives), such as education, criminal justice, business, etc., to beats centered on neighborhoods or local regions. As Evan Smith, cofounder of the Texas Tribune and now of Emerson Collective, observed approvingly, “proximity is the key,” while Northwestern University Medill professor Jeremy Gilbert, summarizing a recent study on Next Gen News, offered the axiom that the most effective news “must come from someone you know.”

This simple but fairly radical notion of how to organize the scarcest and most valuable of newsroom resources—reporting talent—strikes me as a powerful and potentially revolutionary idea for local news orgs. Of course, subject-matter expertise will always be important, and beats should not be geographically confining; neighborhood reporters might of course still venture out to city halls and local agencies, or even statehouses and the Washington offices of congressional representatives. But a neighborhood focus for the deployment of reporters is an idea we ought to reckon with more seriously.

Other intriguing thoughts from the Local News Summit included the following:

· A number of calls for a more diverse mix of news, with former New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, now running the Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship, calling for “more joy” along with the traditional fare of breaking news, explanatory journalism, and investigative reporting: “It will be hard to grow our audiences unless we broaden our appeal.” Gilbert said news needs to strive to be both more actionable and more hopeful. Baquet also pointed out that while journalists often mourn an undersupply of news, readers more often complain about being overwhelmed by information and need help sorting through it.

· Participants wisely warned that headlines and social media posts that sensationalize or trivialize the reporting for which they seek attention are having the effect of eroding reader trust.

· Spotlight PA CEO Christopher Baxter called for an avowedly populist pitch on behalf of newer entrants in local news, portraying them as a response to hedge fund gutting and neglect of community needs around the country.

· Noting the Trump administration’s rhetorical attacks on the press, and the echoes already starting to surface locally around the nation, a number of summit participants suggested a need for what they termed “collective security” and ultimately perhaps even a “NATO for News” that would come jointly to the defense of any press outlet threatened for the free exercise of its constitutional rights.

· Unusual for a local-journalism gathering was the presence of a dozen news creators publishing independently on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or Substack, some at meaningful scale and earning significant income. Several are native to these media platforms and bring the fresh perspective of other career paths, while others have created second careers following roles at CNN, NBC News, or the Globe & Mail.

The summit concluded on the last day of January with the presentation of a range of “big bets for local news,” initiatives now underway or proposed, and in need of greater support or suitable for wider adoption. Two struck this observer as particularly notable. Jake Hylton, Lookout News’s founding executive director, highlighted the Queer News Network, which launched in prototype last year. Also spotlighted was the annual “Big Towns” convention, focused on cities and towns with populations generally between fifty thousand and three hundred thousand. Christiaan Mader, the founder of The Current of Lafayette, Louisiana (disclosure: another occasional consulting client of mine), who has led the Big Towns project, noted that more than a third of Americans live in communities of this size, decidedly neither rural nor large cities.

There is no question that ours is a moment of confusion in our country and in journalism, and of no little despair. At the same time, as the setting in New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth year since Hurricane Katrina should remind us, destruction, while real and painful, can also provide the impetus for rebuilding and reimagining. At its best moments, this year’s Local News Summit offered some important hints at the way forward.