Episode description

Dan and Ellen talk with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of the National Trust for Local News. She is also a senior research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School in New York. At the Tow Center, Dr. Hansen Shapiro’s work focuses on the future of local journalism and the policies needed to assure that future. Her research involves audience engagement and revenue strategies, as well as the relationship between news and social platforms. She holds a PhD in organizational behavior from Harvard Business School.

The National Trust for Local News is a nonprofit that is dedicated to "keeping local news in local hands." The Trust works with local news publishers, philanthropists, and socially conscious investors, and as Dan has reported, worked with other collaborators to buy 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in Colorado, perhaps saving them from hedge fund ownership.

Dan has a Quick Take on local media people who are starting to fight back against the abuse they’re receiving from some of the more sociopathic members of their audience. Ellen weighs in on the death of Tim Giago, the founder of the first independently owned Native American newspaper in the United States, and dives back in to the Dumpster fire in the newsroom of the Aspen Times in Colorado.