Dan and Ellen talk with Rachel White, CEO of the Associated Press Fund for Journalism. Rachel joined the nonprofit AP Foundation in 2024, after a 10-year run with The Guardian, the one-time print newspaper in the UK that has become a global digital powerhouse.

In 2016, White became president of  theguardian.org, a nonprofit organization she founded that raises tax-deductible funds to support The Guardian's journalism. The AP Foundation has a similar mission, but is laser-focused on state and local news outlets all over the US. The AP Fund is expanding. Fifty news organizations have just joined, for a total of 100 newsrooms. News outlets get help with reach and strategy to achieve financial stability.

Dan has a Quick Take on Local News Day, which is on April 9 and billed as "a national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news." Ellen's Quick Take is on an opinion column apocalypse in Fargo, North Dakota. The Fargo Forum, a locally owned news outlet, has forced out three long-running columnists. Why? Take a wild guess. Here's one headline on a recent column by journalist Jim Shaw: "Our local leaders oppose free and fair elections." He's now an ex-columnist.

Dan and Ellen talk with Zuri Berry, the executive editor of The Banner in Montgomery County, Maryland. He's also a Boston Globe colleague of Ellen's from days of yore. Zuri is one of those journalists who's done a little bit of everything. We're talking reporter, columnist, video producer, digital editor, radio host, audio editor — over more than two decades in this business. And he's got an MBA from the McColl School of Business at Queens University of Charlotte on top of all that, which is a combination you don't always see in a newsroom leader.

He was deputy managing editor at the Boston Herald, and managing editor for two NPR member stations. The accolades speak for themselves — he was part of the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning team for breaking news coverage of the 2013 Marathon bombings. At The Banner, he supported last year's Pulitzer-winning series on Baltimore's overdose crisis.

Dan has a Quick Take for later on in the podcast about a journalist who's run afoul of ICE and who faces deportation to Colombia. Estefany Rodríguez, a reporter for a Spanish-language newspaper called Nashville Noticias in Tennessee, was arrested by ICE even though her lawyers say she entered the U.S. legally. It may be a case of retaliation, as Rodriguez has reported on ICE activities in the Nashville area.

Ellen has a Quick Take is about a small newspaper in Wyoming that ditched its police blotter — and almost nobody misses it. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle made the change after taking a course at the Poynter Institute on deepening crime coverage. Dropping the blotter gave the staff more time to do actual reporting.

On this episode, Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy talk with Barbara "Bob" Allen, an LA-based journalist, trainer and consultant who founded CollegeJournalism.org in 2025. The site provides resources and news for journalism educators and student media advisers across the country.

Allen is also the editor of the Student Press Report, a brand-new national news desk covering the state of the college press. The debut piece — "Cash-starved and censored, America's student press is in crisis" — lays out the financial and free-press challenges facing campus newsrooms. Allen also writes the weekly College Journalism Newsletter.

Allen brings decades of experience mentoring student journalists. She was adviser to the student newspaper at Oklahoma State University and most recently served as director of college programming at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She holds a master's degree from the University of Missouri, home to both a campus paper — The Maneater — and the Columbia Missourian, a lab newspaper covering the city of Columbia.

Allen has also led an ambitious project to map every college newspaper in the country, in collaboration with the University of Vermont's Center for Community News. That effort found more than 1,100 college newspapers, with 766 located in or adjacent to counties with little or no local news access.

Dan's Quick Take stays close to home. The Huntington News, Northeastern's independent student newspaper, just celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Ellen's Quick Take is about a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Provincetown. The Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that partners with the Provincetown Independent, raised money from more than 100 donors to buy the condo to house reporters. Ed Miller, editor and co-founder of the Indie, told Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher that housing was a major barrier to attracting staff to his well-regarded newspaper on the Outer Cape.