A few weeks ago, I got together with Chris Horne, the founder and publisher of The Devil Strip, a local culture and arts magazine serving the city of Akron, Ohio, for a conversation about the potential of news cooperatives like his to revive and strengthen local civic life. As we have become a “disinformation society” where tens of millions of Americans are highly susceptible to false news, conspiracies, junk information and spectacle, I’ve grown more convinced that quality news has to be supported and valued as a form of public infrastructure. The same way we invest public funds in things like schools and libraries, as well as roads, water systems, sewers, and emergency services, we have to recognize that quality information isn’t something that the private market is going to deliver on its own. There are lots of promising experiments underway that are trying to address this problem, and what fascinates me about The Devil Strip is how, as Horne describes, it is trying to use cooperative ownership not just as a potential business model but also as a way to ensure that the journalism and engagement work it does truly serves the Akron community.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Micah Sifry: I’m really interested in this problem of civic renewal. Today we live in places that are not just news deserts, but they may also be civic deserts, places where the social contract is pretty frayed. And what has struck me from my own experience in the last five years running a community center in New York is that there is a need for more deliberate community organizing. One of the vectors for that is coming from grassroots politics, in other words, a lot of people who decided to get more personally involved locally in a whole range of types of political organizing, be it electoral or around issues like Black Lives Matter.
Another vector for community civic renewal is coming from the world of journalism. But one of the things that I’ve noticed is that most journalists don’t think of themselves or even want to be community organizers. When blogging came along, Dan Gillmor, who was one of the very first mainstream journalists to, in effect, blog from his news column at the San Jose Mercury News, he opened it up to comments. He said my readers are smarter, collectively, than me. That’s a big admission, but it made his column a little bit of a community hub. So I think the Devil Strip is the first example I’ve come across of deliberately going further into forms of community engagement that we don’t usually see in journalism. You’re a co-op, which I really want to hear more about. When our paths first crossed a few weeks ago, at the New Media Ventures online summit, what got me excited was hearing that you were also trying to do things that were physically engaging the Devil Strip community. In other words, that you’re not just a magazine that lands on people’s doorsteps or that they access through the web but that there’s also a face-to-face component. So, tell me how you’ve come to the conclusion that in order to fulfill your mission that you need to be doing these kinds of things, whether it’s structurally the co-op model or physically the face-to-face community engagement.
Chris Horne: The way the magazine started was almost like a co-op itself, though we officially only became one last year. When we started and I realized that I couldn’t do all these jobs by myself, and didn’t have funding to hire a staff, I just started looking around the community and finding people who had interesting perspectives and voices and asked them to participate. And initially, they were all unpaid too. They volunteered. But I realized that it was unfair that I’m using all these people’s free labor to build this publication that I alone own when their work is making this a true community product. We were doing that, not with any intentional goal in mind, but it quickly became the ethos for the organization because you just recognize the opportunity to do something that could be reflective and representative of our community, without having to hire, 100 staff people to have the same kind of impact. So, eventually we did make enough money to pay people and slowly grew but that core part of it remains vital to who we are.
So, we have professional journalists now, but we also continue to use community contributors. About 250 people have come through the organization to contribute. Sometimes it’s one piece. And sometimes they’re there for years. An example of that would be Noor Hindi who’s one of our full-time reporters who joined us some time around the second issue. She was an 18-year-old poetry student who was doing profiles on local writers and business owners and stuff like that. Then she got her teeth into some topics and proved that she’s completely capable of doing deeper investigative and explanatory journalism, without spending a day in journalism school or even taking a journalism class.
What we’ve tried to provide are the skills and the standards and ethics of journalism, so that we can equip our community to tell their own story, so to speak. So, all this was born in a relationship with our community itself and so formalizing that process was the next logical step, to make sure that our incentives internally are aligned with our community’s well-being. Having come from a legacy newsroom background in local news, worked at a McClatchy paper as a daily reporter and worked at a TV station and a Scripps station, it became very evident that the reason why I was so dissatisfied with the journalism was because the incentive structure is around attention.
So while we sell ads and we do grant access to our readers’ attention, that’s not the engine driving revenue either. And so we needed to be able to align our revenue goals with our mission, just the way that our journalism is. The way that we think about it is we’re leveraging access to community as opposed to access to our content, so all of our journalism remains free. We’re not doing this for attention, we don’t do the crime reporting and things like bad weather and scandals. What we’re trying to do is help more people care more about Akron, so they’ll get more involved. And some of that is enlightened self-interest because we want to make sure that the work we do, the serious journalism we do on the difficult conversations and topics, resonates with people. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of statistics about how news turns people off, like now, they’re just tuned out especially over this past year with everything being so stressful as it is, which just makes it worse. And so, we realize that there’s a tremendous opportunity to not only do community good but choose our audience, people who don’t have a regular news habit. So, instead of thinking about the Mavs, we’re thinking about community.
You know the “1000 true fans” concept. In one of my past lives I was a music promoter for local stuff. That kind of bonding makes sense in this journalism context, too. So, we don’t need the same fan base as The Rolling Stones or Rolling Stone magazine as we need a small, dedicated group of people who care deeply about where they live, so they’ll be interested in the work that we do. And it takes longer to do that, and it takes longer to get to a critical mass where you’re financially solid, but I think long term this model is not only going to take care of us as an organization but it produces more community goods, more public goods. I could give two shits about saving local news, pardon my French. Local news can live or die but if local news can be a vehicle or a vector as you put it to civic renewal, now I’m interested.
Local news could be like the horse and buggy for all I know, and we’re in the way of Ford’s new vehicle, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If the point is to save the horse and buggy, that’s stupid, but if the point is to help people get around to where they need, that makes more sense to me. And so that’s what we try to focus, and that’s the commitment we’re trying to make to our members. We say to them, ‘We need you, not just to be co-owners of this publication but partners in our civic renewal.’
I got one life. I live in Akron Ohio. I want it to be a better place, not just for me and my family and friends but for other people and their family and friends, right? And so we can’t stop at just informing the community, or just engaging the community. I do think that it requires a certain amount of organization and participation. If we’re going to tackle these big problems that we’ll report on — even a small operation like ours surfaces dozens of problems every year. You might have some great organizations and institutions working on these issues, but they still need more people to get involved. And so we’re all collaborating, whether it’s creatively in sharing ideas or it’s putting people to work helping. Whatever it is I think that that the role that local news can play, the role of the Devil Strip itself is trying to play, is to be that hub that can connect people to their city, in an engaged way.
Micah Sifry: I did a deep dive recently with a professor of journalism up at Michigan State University, Kjirsten Thorson (see “The Facebookification of Local Life”) who studied the local news ecosystem of Lansing. She was studying how the rise of Facebook as a factor in the news ecosystem warped how political topics were dealt with, because when we lose the local news function, the independent newspaper, other institutions, elected officials, community organizations, the police, the libraries, some nonprofits, they all can get their word out, they can use the web or tools like Facebook, to promote what they’re doing. But the role of an independent journalistic enterprise is it stands apart from that and can critique those things. It’s not like any of those other community players are going to do investigative journalism on themselves. So you lose the accountability function, which is really a troubling thing. Another thing which is separate and I don’t want to spin off on that topic just yet is what the rise of local Facebook groups, and the kind of unmoderated polarizing effects that that can have on a local community.
I want to stay on the core thing for a second longer. So you have a governing board. Are you a nonprofit? How did you go from being the publisher, and I guess hiring the editor and setting policies, to the way you make policy now?
Chris Horne: The short answer to how are we governed, and how we got there, has been slow and painful, especially since this pandemic. Our governing board has never met in person, because their first retreat was scheduled for a week after everyone was ordered to stay at home. So we’ve been doing this on video and emails, and it’s taken so much longer to get some of the core things done. I think if I were advising a group of people who want to do a co-op, no matter how it functions, I would suggest getting the group together and having the bylaws done before you launch. We didn’t.
I don’t know if that’s putting the cart before the horse, though what we did is we went and tried to rally members first, to make sure that people were interested enough to do this. We had the bylaws for the Banyan Project and Haverhill Matters [an effort to set up a news cooperative in a small city north of Boston that folded last year-MS]. Of course, Ohio’s laws are different. The way that we put this together is also not the ideal for how we do things in the future. It’s just how we wanted to start. So, to keep moving forward in a timely fashion, the staff nominated nine board directors and the membership voted to approve them as the representatives to facilitate this transition. The board has control over the budget.
Micah Sifry: How many shareholders do you have?
Chris Horne: Almost 1000. I haven’t checked this week what our number is, but it’s somewhere in there.
Micah Sifry: And those are people who can start out at a very low level, but the idea is you’re ultimately vested, when you’ve given $330 in total.
Chris Horne: For $1 a month you have the right to vote to run for the board, to serve on a committee, and you have access to the member benefits, and then you are fully invested for a lifetime at $330.
Micah Sifry: How much is that meant to be a sustaining piece of your budget? That doesn’t seem like that much money unless you get thousands and thousands of people to sign up.
Chris Horne: This is part of aligning our revenue with our mission. Once a member is vested, they then are considered member donors. We are building the membership. It’s not the NPR model where it’s like ‘hey we do this free journalism, will you support it because you love us,’ because that’s not sustainable, financially, because we’re only gonna get our diehards. We are aiming for a model where we have more standalone value. Think about something like Goodwill. They do job training but the stuff that people know them for is the thrift stores. That money then funds the job training, which is sort of the core of their mission.
In a similar sense we want there to be a standalone value to the membership where it is a direct path to that civic engagement that we’re talking about. This is the easiest and the best way for you to connect with your community to find people around shared interests and to get your hands dirty. I’d love to get to 10,000 members or 20,000 members, because I think that’s still possible. The Akron Beacon Journal when it was most recently acquired had 50,000 subscribers and the price points are similar for us. And if we had that kind of saturation, we’d be swimming.
The goal is to have a membership that can scale the sort of intimacy that we’re talking about, which we want to do through what we’re calling a small groups strategy, where we facilitate members connecting with each other over shared interests. This means leveraging our community partnerships, so people that really love indie films, we’ll call the local indie cinema and we’ll set up a speaker for you and a space for you to talk after the movie. Or you want to go on a guided hike? We’ll call the park system and we’ll have somebody set up something with you. Along the way we’re enabling them to connect with their neighbors and with the institutions that make this place unique.
That’s one aspect of it. There will be other parts that are a little bit more along the organizing lines, but again our first thought is, ‘Can we can we help more people care more about this place?’ And that’s how we’re viewing the membership.
Micah Sifry: Right, and I see you have a community partners program, which is for institutions rather than individuals, I presume. That is, they are paying to both get recognition but also to then get access to your broader base. Is the community partner program working?
Chris Horne: We just started this about a month ago. But the response so far has been really positive. We’ve got a pilot with the Habitat for Humanity chapter here. They gave us a grant to do advertising and marketing for small businesses in the neighborhood where they concentrate their work. I’m working with the greater Akron Chamber of Commerce on a proposal like that, but the goal is recognition, or hey you support our reporting. But we actively want partnerships. We’re trying to build a database of community assets and resources, and understanding community needs at the same time, so that we can actively connect institutions and individuals to those resources when they have those needs.
And this is not just like, if someone is homeless and need shelter you go to this place. We’re at a much deeper level. For example, it can be that we’re doing a community cleanup with our members in a neighborhood where we have limited infrastructure to distribute our work. This is in part a way for us to introduce ourselves to more people in that community, but it’s also a way for us to leverage in our partnership with feedback. We’re inviting you to be part of the family, to build a reciprocal relationship with us that is a little bit more like mutual aid. This is still in its infancy, a lot of stuff that I know that we’re going to run into that we have to figure out, but the basic idea is, again, we want to align our revenue with mission. The same way we do our journalism. And so, instead of focusing on how we get people to click on ads and how we get more people to see ads, we’re putting the same effort into how do we build more connections in our communities so that we can improve social capital here and I think in particular, the bridging type of social capital, between groups and sectors and neighborhoods,
Micah Sifry: I see on your site that there is a way to become a member, which is I guess different than being a shareholder.
Chris Horne: Actually, it’s the same but the caveat is if you don’t live in the state of Ohio, you have no binding vote. In that case, you’re a supporter and you’ll have access to a lot of the same stuff that the other members have but you can’t have a binding vote.
Micah Sifry: What’s interesting, just staying on the website for one more second, is that you have a lot of obviously local content, but it doesn’t look to me like you’re spending a lot of effort on trying to build a lot of conversation on the site. There’s a metric that shows how many comments and how many reads, but it doesn’t really look to me like this is a place where people are yammering away at each other. Is that by design or you want more of that?
Chris Horne: That’s definitely in the works. Technologically we have failed in a number of ways and this is one. We had other plans for our website and they just haven’t worked out, in part because of the pandemic.
Micah Sifry: Well, I don’t immediately look at the site and say, “Oh, what a terrible site.” It’s more that to me this is a symptom of a different problem which is the challenge of actually getting critical mass to engage when people are distracted by all kinds of other content. Are you familiar with Front Porch Forum, a neighborhood forum platform based in Vermont? What’s interesting to me about them is so they came at the same problem that you’re looking at, but from a slightly different origin point. They’ve been around almost 20 years now. They started with a couple who had just moved to Burlington and wanted to get to know their neighbors, and after doing the thing where you bake some brownies and introduce yourself, they discovered that people were busy. And so what they did is they put up flyers, just in a couple of block radius of where they lived, saying, “Would you be interested in joining an email list where we could share information with each other about things that are going on right in our neighborhood or if somebody needs a babysitter. The very hyper local needs. And that was the first forum.
The founders spread this neighborhood by neighborhood across Burlington, and then beyond Burlington to the rest of the state. Along the way they turned it into a small business. It’s advertiser supported and every forum is maxes out at about 1000 households. It’s hyper local by design, you have verify your address, and every forum has a moderator who is paid to review posts before they get shared. What you receive on a daily basis is a digest of what your neighbors have sent into the forum in the last 24 hours. The hyperlocal element with the moderation means that you get a lot of the sort of mutual aid content. I think they have a staff of about a dozen or more and they are sustaining themselves. What they haven’t done yet is figure out whether they should be proactively creating content rather than just curating the content that people themselves want to share. But they reach roughly two thirds of the households in Vermont. People spend about 10 minutes a day on their local forum. It has increased people’s trust in their neighbors, it has increased people’s interest in local community as well as state government, and it has genuinely improved civic trust.
Chris Horne: That looks just amazing,
Micah Sifry: The thing that is interesting to me about it and where it relates to Akron, is that Akron is a big city of about 200,000. When you say you’re trying to foster small groups, which I think is an awesome idea, the challenge is how much curation you can do. When we were running Civic Hall, we also had individual members and organizational members. And we’re sitting in the middle of Manhattan. So we’re drawing people from all over the city. And I think one of our biggest challenges which we never really solved was everybody’s there for good reasons, but how do you curate meaningful connections. Because people don’t organize themselves by magic. Our website, which was designed off of coworking software, didn’t do that particularly well. I don’t think there is a software platform that quite gets to what we probably need. What I think you have which is potentially quite good is the engine of engagement of local news and local culture. The challenge obviously is distraction, and that you also have competitors. How do you deal with the fact that there’s other news resources locally, and Facebook and the other kinds of ways that people connect? Does that help you or do you find that it’s hindering you?
Chris Horne: I want to answer that real quick, but I also want to take a moment on the previous part of the conversation. Editorially I’ve been playing with what’s called neighborhood network, and it is a similar sort of idea. Definitely a little different, but I would love to learn more from what Front Porch Forum is doing, because that sounds extremely powerful to be able to create that kind of a group of people at that level of engagement. We want to be the place where you can have those conversations, and like you said, there isn’t a lot of software that makes it easy. We’re working with a developer to create a WordPress plugin for membership.
Micah Sifry: You may need a completely different software package. Mighty Networks might be the right one to look at because that’s designed for individual engagement, but it also supports things like clubs, events, and there’s a way to make it subscription-based, so you can have an open part and a closed part.
I know we don’t have a ton of time, and I want to be respectful of your time and you were going to say something as well about the sort of the competitive environment you are in.
Chris Horne: In Akron, we have the daily paper the Akron Beacon Journal. It was the Knight brothers’ first paper. It’s now a shell of its former self. We have an NPR affiliate nearby, which is part of the Akron region but doesn’t exclusively cover Akron, and the three TV stations that cover Akron are all based in Cleveland. So unless LeBron is doing something or 15 people have been murdered, they don’t really pay a whole lot of attention to us. Part of the reason I started the magazine with arts and culture, was in part because I love it, but also because no one’s doing it. And so that was how we got our foothold.
Our first big investigative series was on the University of Akron, because it wasn’t being covered. Then the others jumped in, and they had the resources that we didn’t have to be able to do some deeper work and reach a broader audience and so that’s kind of how we view it, we’ll try to fill gaps. Our five year plan is to be the preferred source for local news and community information for most adults in this area, which is just a long way of saying we want to replace the Akron Beacon Journal, not out of competition as much as it is a sense of civic duty. I got serious about the co-op when they got bought by GateHouse. I knew that the Beacon Journal’s days were sort of numbered as a community institution. While they have really wonderful journalists working there, their hands are tied by corporate in terms of what they actually can produce.
I never want to be a daily paper. I don’t want to feed the beast. We publish stuff every day, and I’d like to publish more stuff every day, but I don’t ever want to feed the beast. Not only are we trying to fill the gaps, but we’re able to differentiate ourselves, because of that. You talk about people having a hard time making meaningful connections. I think the same is true for information just because there’s so much of it. And to touch on the Facebook stuff for a minute, the more that we’ve done this, the more I believe that local news really was social currency, and that is the bigger danger that social media has posed. We’ve ceded our relevance to people, because once upon a time before the internet if you wanted to have water cooler conversation or you wanted to be up to date on what’s happening in the city, even if it didn’t affect the way you voted or lived or stuff is just for conversation, you would turn to the local paper or watch the local news and then you would be able to talk about sports and entertainment, politics or whatever else. That was place-based and we all had that common ground. And now if I want to know what everybody else is thinking, I just turn to Facebook or Twitter and now I know what everyone’s thinking, so to speak.
Micah Sifry: Well, it’s a distorted version of what they’re thinking.
Chris Horne: Yes, 100%. But the psychological need that you’re feeling is, in order for me to be relevant to a community, I need to know what they’re thinking and that’s fundamentally what news does, and it is the part that we haven’t paid any attention at all. What really hurts local journalism is that we’re not socially relevant anymore. You don’t need to come to us to find a job or to buy or sell a car, or to find a mate or a place to live. And you used to have to do all those things in the classifieds and we lost that and I think that has a bigger impact on who we are as an industry than the loss of money. So if, if we can figure out ways to regain that social currency and that social relevance, then I think we’ll cook.
I don’t disagree with any of the research on disinformation and misinformation and how these social networks do that. I’m a huge fan of Yochai Benkler’s book Network Propaganda. It’s brilliant, it is exactly what you thought it was and nice to have someone to do the hard work on that. All of that makes a ton of sense to me but then when I think about how that applies to what we do, we can stop disinformation and misinformation when people in our community trust us more than they trust the random bullshit they see on the social networks. Frankly, my goal is to get people off of those networks and into ours. And if it were just Chris Horne, owner of the Devil Strip, this is where I think it causes a problem. But if that platform is owned by the community itself then I feel a lot better about it. There are pitfalls, potentially, but I think of the safety valves and the accountability that we want to apply to other organizations — the accountability for us will be in that our owners are the people in this community that we’re supposed to serve.
Micah Sifry: The challenge you have, it seems to me, is the tension between serving the community and pandering to the community. Your community members, even if they’re organizations and not just individuals have to also recognize that you perform a valuable social function if you hold them accountable, as opposed to their buying protection from you, that that it becomes a form of boosterism. It’s a very delicate kind of balance to perform.
Last question because we didn’t really get into it which is just the degree to which you’re thinking about physically engaging people in place. What does that look like for you? My friend Joaquin Alvarado was doing a little bit around this with creating places like news cafes. I don’t think that if that was his term for it, but the example he gave me was Fresno in California, a midsize city that is that has a lot of local news creators, but they don’t have a home base. And so the notion was create a kind of studio, where all those people could get together, have some shared equipment, maybe facilities for podcasts or video type of stuff that is expensive to maintain individually, but throw in a bar and a cafe.
Chris Horne: Right.
Micah Sifry: When he was running the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, one of their experiments was commissioning plays that would be performed in tandem with big investigative stories as a different way being involved with the community around the journalism. So, how does that resonate for you — do you see that playing out for you locally?
Chris Horne: All of that! So we have a space that we share in a kind of business incubator but for creative people, like artists, musicians, sculptors, etc. It’s called Summit Art Space. It’s owned by the county and coincidentally enough in the first home for the Akron Beacon Journal. We envisioned the space we’re in as a place to welcome in members to have conversations, to have readings, and to do things that brought the journalism off the page, which is a phrase that we use a lot. A lot of those times went sideways with the pandemic. My ultimate goal is to have our own building, where we can do a café.
A phrase everyone around here uses is, “Akron is a big little city.” It’s big enough to really get a good sense of your experiment working or not and it’s small enough that you can throw things against the wall. We don’t have a bookshop here, which drives me bananas. I would love to have our welcoming space basically be a bookshop, where we can host events and maybe our offices are upstairs and then our contributors can come in and use it and then this gets into towards the neighborhood network idea. Part of it is facilitating more community journalism, stuff that we’re not necessarily equipped to do. I can’t afford to hire right now and not for the foreseeable future reporters for all 26 neighborhoods in Akron. So, I’m fascinated by Front Porch Forum as a way to connect those dots where what we want is to help support people who are doing their own, who want to build their own beat so to speak, and it could be around niche too.
We have someone who works with us on parenting issues and I’m trying to develop this idea, as a pilot with them. I can’t hire a parenting reporter right now but I think it’s an important issue, especially given this past year. So, I try to think as holistically as I can and try to use all the parts of the buffalo. I’m old enough to really love print, but also young enough to appreciate its limitations. Everybody has a different way of understanding stuff, and sometimes you need to kind of get your hands in it and so sometimes it might be having a panel conversation with some of the sources and the writer and having our members and readers be able to ask these questions directly.
We also are experimenting with a software platform for this that we’re calling the Commons. The idea is to have conversations that are built around trust. So it’s almost like a private Twitter, where you click a hashtag and you see all the stuff, but it’s filtered so there’s not a ton of crap and there’s not spam, these are people that you want to have a conversation with. So we’re experimenting with that. Because we’re an arts and culture publication, we are connected to all the people who can do other creative projects with us. So, the sky’s the limit. It’s mostly trying to get the basics done right now and give us a good foundation for being able to accomplish this stuff because I don’t think we’ll ever lacked for opportunities with new ideas. It’s more: can we execute the ones that are in front of us.