Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Month: April 2020

Forging a new source for local news in Longmont, Colorado

By

On April 21, 2020

In My Work, The Compass Experiment

A global pandemic probably seems like a bad time to be building a new local news website.

Economies both global and local are in precarious positions, unemployment is soaring, advertising has disappeared and nobody is up for in-person events. And yet, the need and demand for local news and information has never been greater.

The circumstances call for some bold action in local news. If now isn’t the time to show up for our communities, then when?

This is why The Compass Experiment will soon be launching our second local news website in Longmont, Colorado. We hope to have this new publication, The Longmont Leader, ready to go by the end of May.

Our team learned a lot in launching our first Compass site, Mahoning Matters, last year. We had to rush to build and launch a new local news site in the wake of the closure of Youngstown’s local newspaper. We managed to get it up just 40 days later. To do that, we had to cut some corners and improvise a few things. For the second site, we had big plans to take our time and do everything just right.

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Six months in and everything is still changing

By

On April 12, 2020

In The Compass Experiment

In a time when nothing is close to normal, Mahoning Matters is planning for the future, whatever it brings.

The Mahoning Maters team got me this team photo for Christmas.

It’s been six months since we launched Mahoning Matters and in that time, everything has changed.

Last October, we were hustling to get our site launched just 40 days after the Vindicator closed its doors to ensure that Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley still had accountability journalism. Today, we are finding ourselves in the middle of an unprecedented news event that will have untold implications for our community, our business and our very existence.

In the past 30 days, we’ve seen our traffic rise and our priorities shift to meet the needs of our readers. We’ve lost a member of our team to the virus that has been driving all of this change, and have been unable to mark his passing in any of the usual ways. We haven’t been able to stop.

This is simultaneously a terrible and inspiring time to be working in local news.

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Treading water in a plague

By

On April 1, 2020

In Surviving

hoto/Birger Hoppe

A year ago today, I was diagnosed with cancer. In the days and weeks that followed, the news got progressively more frightening.

First, my doctor told me the variety of breast cancer I have, triple negative, is more aggressive, harder to treat and more likely to return than other types.

Then I found out the pain in my neck that had developed the weekend before was not, in fact, because I slept wrong, but was a swollen lymph node pushing up under my collarbone, indicating the disease had already spread beyond my chest.

Later, a genetic test would reveal the BRCA1 gene mutation that had been hiding in my DNA all my life, like a ticking time bomb.

Those weeks of terror are not unlike the news cycle we are all living in now.

Every day reveals new horrors and challenges brought on by the spread of COVID-19. As time passes, we find out someone else from our overlapping social circles has it, or has died from it. Much like the cancer support groups I joined after my diagnosis, the attendance in our daily lives is slowly decreasing.

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