Dan and Ellen talk with Tracy Baim, a Chicago-based journalist who directed the recently published LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project, which tracks LGBTQ news outlets across the country.

The LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project was created in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Media Foundation, News Is Out and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. The project surfaced 107 LGBTQ media outlets in total, 80 of which responded to the survey. According to the accompanying report: “While they may have few similarities, there are several common denominators: Most are in need of additional resources to better cover their communities, and most are facing strong headwinds as advertising and sponsors reverse course, pulling back from diverse marketing efforts.”

She’s also the executive director of Press Forward Chicago, the local arm of a national philanthropic effort to address the community news crisis.

Dan has a Quick Take about the state of Kansas, where authorities have banned print newspapers, a ban that affects some 9,000 inmates in 20 correctional facilities.

Ellen's Quick Take is on a column in the Minnesota Star Tribune written by Steve Grove, the CEO and publisher. He writes about the "stabilizing power of quality journalism” and announces a new team in the newsroom devoted to investigative reporting. But he also announces the outsourcing of the Strib's print product, which means job losses.

Dan and Ellen are back from summer break and talk with Bill Marx, the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast and online outlets. He has regularly reviewed theater for the public station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He is a founder of Viva La Book Review, a new organization that aims to foster thoughtful, well-crafted book criticism in community news media across the country.

Bill created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. Until recently, he taught a class on writing arts criticism at Boston University.

Dan has a Quick Take about the funding crisis in public media and how that relates to the need to fund reliable sources of local news and information. It’s not just a matter of your local public television and radio station needing more support from its audience than ever before. It’s also a matter of the limits of philanthropy. Can we find the money to support hyperlocal nonprofits too?

Ellen dives into a recent update from Joshua Benton at NiemanLab on The Republican in Springfield and the MassLive website, which has become a web traffic powerhouse as it expands. A previous podcast discussion with MassLive's president, Joshua Macht, and editor Ronnie Ramos can be found here.

Dan and Ellen talk with Katherine Ann Rowlands, who runs Bay City News Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit that publishes journalism for the Greater San Francisco Bay Area at LocalNewsMatters.org and The Mendocino Voice. And by the way, this is the last podcast until September.

Bay City News Foundation acquired The Mendocino Voice and took it nonprofit a little more than a year ago. Dan reported on the Voice for our book, "What Works in Community News," and was visiting in March of 2020 when ... well, you know what happened then. Rowlands also is owner and publisher of Bay City News, a regional news wire supplying original journalism for the whole media ecosystem in her area, from TV to start-up digital outlets.

Dan has a Quick Take about the Muzzle Awards. Since 1998 he has been writing an annual Fourth of July roundup of outrages against free speech and freedom of expression in New England during the previous year. This is the 27th annual edition a couple of weeks ago.

Ellen reports on the death of Nancy Cassutt, a newsroom leader at Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” Nancy was a driving force in helping Mukhtar Ibrahim get Sahan Journal off the ground.