We’ve posted the video of the opening two-hour session of the NC Local News Summit, a virtual event on Wednesday that drew about 150 people together via Zoom.
The video features our speakers (in order of appearance), and reports back from each of the breakout sessions.
- “The NC Local News Workshop and the Power of Many” — Melanie Sill, interim executive director, NC Local News Workshop
- “The Power of Diverse Collaborations” — Ju-Don Marshall, WFAE chief content officer and executive vice president
- What we’re learning about nonprofit news success — Fran Scarlett, Institute for Nonprofit News chief knowledge officer and business strategy coach, in conversation with Melanie Sill
- “Local News and Local News Research (including the growth of partisan ‘pink slime’ sites”) — Philip Napoli, Duke Sanford School of Public Policy professor and journalism researcher, with research assistant Asa Royal
- Local news philanthropy: “Renewed Urgency and Glimmers of Hope,” Lizzy Hazeltine, fund coordinator for the NC Local News Lab Fund
- “Abolishing the Fourth Estate: What’s possible when we remember we are members of our communities” — Cierra Hinton, co-director of strategy and operations for Press On, publisher and executive director, Scalawag magazine
- “Transforming the Community Newspaper” — Les High, publisher of the Whiteville News Reporter
- “A New Push on Local News Entrepreneurship ” — Anika Anand, deputy director of LION Publishers, in conversation with Melanie Sill
Also, Cierra Hinton of Press On Media and Scalawag has turned her Summit talk into a piece for Scalawag. In the piece, Hinton describes a “disconnect between the press, the people, the news, and the communities we report on” and argues that journalists “need to cover people-power like it is the power that drives our democracy—because it is.”
In the context of political violence in Washington, she writes: “When we fail to name whiteness in our reporting we are at best complicit in the active practice of white supremacy, and at worst, we are upholding the spread of values that lead to events like those that took place.”
Check back next week for more materials and takeaways from the NC Local News Summit.
