Authors Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg will sit down for a conversation about their book What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate (Beacon Press) at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University on Tuesday, October 15 at 7 p.m.
Local news is essential to democracy. Meaningful participation in civic life is impossible without it. However, local news is in crisis. According to one widely cited study, some 2,500 newspapers have closed over the last generation. And it is often marginalized communities of color who have been left without the day-to-day journalism they need to govern themselves in a democracy. In this book, journalists Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy cut through the pessimism surrounding this issue, showing readers that new, innovative journalism models are popping up across the country to fill news deserts and empower communities.
Dan Kennedy
Dan Kennedy is a professor of journalism in the College of Arts, Media and Design and a nationally known media commentator. Professor Kennedy teaches news reporting, opinion writing, media ethics, and other journalism courses with an emphasis on how technology is changing the business of news. He has also been published in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Nieman Lab, Nieman Reports, Poynter Online, and other venues.
Ellen Clegg
Ellen Clegg spent more than 3 decades at The Boston Globe and retired in 2018 after 4 years of running the opinion pages. In between stints at the Globe, she was deputy director of communications at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is a member of the steering committee for the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship at the International Women’s Media Foundation. Ellen is co-founder and co-chair of Brookline.News, a nonprofit startup news organization in Brookline, Massachusetts.
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