Hello there. Happy Wednesday. I am coming to you from Detroit, Michigan, where I spent part of my Tuesday afternoon participating in a local news summit where the local folks here believe it is a crisis when it comes to the

problem of local news. You've heard me talk about this quite a bit, so wherever I can help

evangelize about the issue, I believe that the ultimate problem in trust in media began with

the gutting of local news, and we're not going to fix the reputation of national media.

We're not going to be able to fix any of that until we fix the foundations of journalism in this country, and that's local news.

And what was great about this conversation, you had people from the Detroit Free Press,

you had Michigan Public Radio participated, the Graham Media Company, the parent company of one of the

larger affiliates here, WDIV, the NBC affiliate. So I was very, folks I was pretty close with.

And it is, what's fascinating is that this is local news organizations don't compete against

each other anymore.

They're all trying to figure out how they can help each other.

They have their unique audiences.

Can they help each other?

And I think there is this, you know, it's what is the best way to try to fix this, right?

Is it trying to figure out ways to subsidize local news?

Is it try to figure out philanthropists or is it try to find a new business model?

How do you build audiences?

How do you add audiences?

I was very happy to hear a couple of the news organizations, particularly the woman who runs the Graham media companies, talk about the importance of local sports and how it's really helped. First of all, people do care about local sports in their community. Because there's always been this question, is there demand for local news? I think this idea that there's not demand for local news is bull hockey.

There has always been demand for more local. What does social media teach us? We're all bit

narcissistic. And we've all decided what's happening around us is so important we need to share

it. That's local news. is so important we need to share it.

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