Local News & Information

I am moving away from the “grant for life” model. This $330k seed investment acts as the bridge to self-sustainability. The grant covers the first 12 months of professional salaries and the total front-loaded cost of the “Coordination Layer.” By Month 13, our target 20% conversion rate should generate the monthly recurring revenue required to carry... See more

What I have learned in my years studying the role of journalism in civic discussion is that democracies are best served when media coverage focuses on issues that affect society and people’s everyday lives and minimizes “horse race” reporting that obsesses over who is ahead in opinion surveys or fundraising.

James Madison — a.k.a. Guy Who Wrote the First Amendment — argued that newspapers should have a massive subsidy from the federal government to encourage the distribution of newspapers. The “postal subsidy,” which provided discounted mail, would be about $46 billion in today’s dollars — bigger than the NASA budget.

I think there’s an opportunity to create something very substantial here in Manchester: a company that revives local journalism across the country and connects people via storytelling , a means of human communication that goes back much longer than the history of newspapers. As the popularity of American magazine-style journalism shows, people... See more

"The large metro dailies covered a broad geographic region," Dougherty told me. "That was their strength and then their downfall. They may not cover the town unless the shit hits the fan, but they don't inform people of what it feels like to live there."