by Corey Hutchins, Colorado College, [This article first appeared in The Conversation, republished with permission]

Over the years, the crisis facing local news has meant the disappearance of reporting on the arts, politics, sports and local government.

Newspapers have disappeared from many local communities, and the ranks of individual local journalists have plummeted over the past two decades.

The retrenchment has also led to a loss of something else: reporters and columnists at local news organizations who decades ago regularly focused on their local media as a beat.

There are very few of them left.

I’m an instructor at Colorado College, where I manage the Journalism Institute. I also compulsively keep track of our state’s shifting media landscape.

Recently, I produced a nationwide study called “Local News as a Public Good: Increasing Visibility Through University-Led Statewide Newsletters.”

The Center for Community News at the University of Vermont solicited and published the report. The goal was to find out who is doing similar work and where.

The Center for Community News is interested in fostering partnerships between academic programs and local newsrooms. The center is also seeking to find other ways higher-ed institutions are supporting their state’s media ecosystem — so they were especially interested in media newsletters being produced at a college or university.

Few state-based newsletters

The problem is, there weren’t many to track. I found just six, including my own, while researching for the report.

Very few states, it turns out, “have a dedicated publication, site, or newsletter that regularly and independently reports on and analyzes ongoing developments in the local media scene,” the report found.

My own weekly Substack newsletter is called “Inside the News in Colorado.” Each week, I report on, comment on and analyze the goings on in Colorado’s media scene. I connect local developments to what’s happening nationally, and I explore what makes the state’s local news ecosystem unique.

My newsletter also pokes and prods, critiques and uplifts, and seeks to spark debate and a better understanding about the practice of local journalism. And it maintains a weekly running tab on the health of the state’s media landscape.

Other newsletters across the country include NC Local, authored by Catherine Komp. The Newsroom Digest, out of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey, is another. Gateway Journalism Review from Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s School of Journalism, in the College of Arts and Media made the list. And Media Nation by Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy in Massachusetts is another.

Kennedy has been producing Media Nation for more than 20 years and writes more about national media issues. But he mixes it with plenty of local and regional happenings.

If someone were to, say, leak an internal email from The Boston Globe, it is likely they would do so with Media Nation.

The NC Local newsletter’s format is a mix of digestible roundups and some original reporting.

A recurring item titled “Well Done” offers “noteworthy work from the NC news & information ecosystem.” The most-clicked links each week tend to come from a bulletin board section where Komp rounds up job postings and opportunities.

The chunky Newsroom Digest newsletter highlights notable local journalism in New Jersey. It comes with a “Media Moves” section that introduces its audience to new local journalists and tracks newsroom personnel changes.

While they differ in style and delivery, each is filling a gap in coverage in their state or region by reporting on an important industry: their own.

“When I was at the (Boston) Phoenix, I think all of us at the alternative press thought big local media were a powerful local institution that ought to be held to account just like big business and everything else,” Media Nation’s Kennedy said for the report.

Where to house the news about the news?

I believe colleges and universities make good places to produce these kinds of state-based media newsletters.

Journalism departments in particular are likely equipped to run them, especially if they have practitioners on the faculty. They are outside of a state’s established media organizations but also adjacent to them.

Richard Watts, the director of the Center for Community News, commissioned the “Local News as a Public Good” study. He says there are important reasons for more newsletters consistently reporting on local media in individual states.

“They draw attention to the key role local news plays by writing about the stories and the impact of those stories,” he said. “They help amplify and they showcase the importance of the media ecosystem for a vibrant democracy.”

Furthermore, such newsletters can serve as the “canary in the coal mine to draw attention to media platforms in trouble, or actions by unscrupulous owners,” Watts added. “And they can share ideas and best practices across the system to help strengthen individual media platforms. And, lastly, they help create a community of stakeholders committed to the importance of a free press.”

To that end, the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont is looking to help anyone in a higher-ed program who might be interested in launching a state-based media newsletter.

“I think a really good person to do something like this is, first, someone who is doing more than just reporting on the industry or ecosystem,” said Komp of NC Local in the Center for Community News study.

“It does need to be somebody who is engaging with journalists, with publishers, with journalism educators, with students, with funders, in ways that are not just reporting on what’s happening but in ways that are looking to always find solutions and address challenges.”

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Corey Hutchins, Manager, Colorado College Journalism Institute, Colorado College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.