News and Posts
The Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media is proud to host original article series, reports from faculty and researchers, and events promoting collaboration among researchers, journalists and universities. Browse our library of articles, videos, interviews, announcements, upcoming events and more.
Our Chatham holds Sept. 11 community conversation
Our Chatham was recently in the news thanks to a community conservation the student-staffed Reese Innovation Lab news venture held on poverty’s effect on education in Chatham County Sept. 11. Both the Chatham News + Record, which co-hosted the event, as…
Penny Abernathy named as 2019 Welles Memorial Prize winner for News Deserts research
The Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business at the Columbia Journalism School today awarded Penny Abernathy, Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina, the 2019 Christopher J. Welles Memorial Prize, for her unparalleled…
Our Chatham community conversation set for Sept. 11 in Siler City
Our Chatham, the student-staffed Reese Innovation Lab news service that delivers news to Chatham County, North Carolina, via a website and newsletter, uses audience-driven reporting as one way to reach readers. Events are another. On Sept. 11, Our Chatham will host…
King to help find (hidden) stars of science with Morehead Planetarium
Steven King, chief innovation officer for the Reese Innovation Lab, will lend his virtual reality expertise to a five-year $2.86 million grant project recently awarded to Morehead Planetarium & Science Center by the National Science Foundation. The Morehead Planetarium project,…
Better News profiles UNC Table Stakes participant The Daily Tar Heel’s collaboration with Duke University’s The Chronicle
How the UNC-Duke rivalry helped two nonprofit student newspapers collaborate — and make revenue
Competing in a networked world: How newsrooms are joining forces
Through formal partnerships news organizations can produce in-depth, investigative and analytical pieces that they would not have been able to do on their own. These two case studies explore two different journalistic collaborations between very different news organizations. In the…
Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur
Revolutionary new technologies are compelling news organizations to recreate their business models or be left in history’s wake. The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur is packed with practical insights and guidance on all aspects of the business of media. Explore case…
Newspaper closures increase as sales slow
The pace of newspaper closures, mergers and bankruptcies appears to be accelerating as both chains and independent newspaper owners face unrelenting economic challenges, and the largest companies shed underperforming assets. Since publication of the 2018 report, The Expanding News Desert, UNC researchers have uncovered an additional 200 shuttered papers. Almost…
Penny Abernathy’s news deserts research cited in USA Today article
CISLM’s Penny Abernathy’s research is cited in this USA Today article about the decline of local media. Read the full article.
Reese Innovation Lab initiative brings audience-driven news to Chatham County
How do you know what your audience wants? You ask them. Online, at community meetings or in the middle of a farmers’ market with a clipboard in your hand—that’s where Alexis Allston stood last summer in Chatham County, as she…
How do “news deserts” affect communities?
In this interview, Penny Abernathy tells television station WBTV Charlotte how the growing expanses of the U.S.—often rural, often poor—without newspapers risk the compromise of the very basics of democracy and civic engagement. “We’re missing out on the vital information…
Welcome our 2019 Media Innovation Fellows
The Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media would like to welcome Reese Innovation Lab’s Media Innovation Fellows for summer 2019. The fellows will work on projects ranging from augmented and…