https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/media/good-news-media-sites.html

5 Pieces of Good News About the News

By Ben SmithJuly 11, 2021, 6:03 p.m. ET

My great predecessor in this column, David Carr, wrote at a time when the conventional wisdom was that the internet was destroying journalism.

But David’s eye was drawn to the interesting and the new, like Gawker and The Huffington Post or Twitter and WikiLeaks. Those of us who worked in the thrilling new world of online journalism were pleased to receive the gruff visitor, his head at a tilt, as he took in the exploding media world.

This is a very different time in the news business, with giant companies including The New York Times leading a wave of consolidation and many of the start-ups that Mr. Carr loved long gone. Around the world, digital news outlets that shattered the status quo, from Manila to Moscow, are hanging on for dear life. And yet in the United States, there’s also a generation of ventures growing up in the cracks in the sidewalk, fueled by a new sense of mission in American journalism and by the sheer quantities of money, private and nonprofit, floating around.

I’ve been writing this column through a pretty dark year, and even before I started I had a long Google doc full of story ideas. Now, 16 months in and heading out for my first weeks off, I realize I’ve erred on the side of revealing messy conflicts and damaging decisions. Only occasionally have I highlighted people and companies doing things that are really new and interesting — but which you may not have heard of — in some of the hardest parts of media: local news, investigative journalism and even finding common ground. It is, to me, an inspiring list, and a suggestion that there’s a lot of open space to be filled in.

Sarah Alvarez, a former public radio reporter and producer in Detroit, contends that local news needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, beginning with simple text messages to residents that tell them how to get help with their gas bills. The idea is compelling in theory but just incredibly hard work. Until the pandemic, her Outlier Media was a bit of a curiosity in nonprofit media circles and she said she had resigned herself to finding a larger organization to merge with.

But when the coronavirus hit, she, Outlier’s executive director, Candice Fortman, and two other colleagues suddenly found themselves drowning in texts, responding directly to about 200 Detroit residents a day, on everything from unemployment payments to vaccines. This is not what most of us think of as journalism — Ms. Alvarez calls it “pre-news.” And her theory is that a new public media — she has no interest in the for-profit business of media — can rebuild trust and a connection. She says it can grow from a text service that tells you where to find government programs into a digital outlet that seeks to answer bigger civic questions....

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/media/good-news-media-sites.html