Inside Scoop on Local News’ Future

• Spotlight DC: SpotlightDC is an independent, non-profit fund based in Washington, D.C. Spotlight raises charitable funds and award grants for groundbreaking, original, fair-minded, investigative, accountability and explanatory journalism projects focused on the District of Columbia and its surrounding region. 
• Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C.: Arguing that citizens of Washington, D.C., live without basic American rights, two respected Washington journalists show how the country’s capital contains huge and often vicious contradictions and devastating race, class, and power problems.
• Washingtonian Magazine: Washingtonian publishes information about local professionals, businesses, and notable places in Washington, D.C. Each issue includes information on popular local attractions, such as restaurants, neighborhoods, and entertainment, such as fine art and museum exhibits. There is a regular in-depth feature reporting on local institutions, politicians, businessmen, academics, and philanthropists. The magazine also has information about essential services and real estate listings within Washington.
• DCist: We cover what matters to the residents of this region, whether it’s politics in Northern Virginia, neighborhood restaurants in Prince George’s County, the affordable housing crisis in D.C., or the latest news in transportation.
• A Decade Ago, Jeff Bezos Bought a Newspaper. Now He’s Paying Attention to It Again.
• The Washington Informer: The Washington Informer is a weekly newspaper published in Washington, D.C. The Informer is female-owned and is targeted at the African-American population of the D.C. metropolitan area. The publisher is Denise Rolark Barnes, whose father, Calvin W. Rolark, founded the paper in 1964.
• Thousands Of D.C. Renters Are Evicted Every Year. Do They All Know To Show Up To Court?
• Hola Cultura: Hola Cultura is a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that serves as a bridge between the area’s Latino and non-Latinx communities, covering topics bilingually that affect D.C. residents’ everyday lives — from arts and humanities to environmental justice. The organization got its start in 2011 as an innovative series of artistic mini-documentaries featuring D.C.’s Latino arts, humanities and creative class. It’s the brainchild of Alberto Roblest, an award-winning artist, author, and educator. Since those early days, we’ve kept on growing—publishing more than 1,100 articles, interviews, videos and other media, as well as walking tours, festivals and other special events with the help of our talented youth and volunteer contributors. Together, we’re building an online archive.
• There is a Local News Crisis in the District, The Council Can Help Fix It
• Introducing Legislation to Create First-in-the-Nation Program to Fund Local News in DC: Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George introduced legislation to create a first-in-the-nation program to fund local news. After years of declining revenue, painful layoffs, and discontinuations, the bill would provide a stable source of funding for local journalism that is decided by the public.

Harry Jaffe:

I’ve dedicated my life to local coverage of Washington DC. Not my life, but my professional life. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it just die. I’m just not going to do it.

Reggie Rucker:

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power and our final episode in the DC stop on our multi-city series where we explore how to build local power from the experiences of people who are doing just that on the ground in their respective cities. We think these stories will be illuminating in their own right, but hope they also inspire you on your journey to build local power wherever you’re listening from. As always, I’m excited to be joined by my cohost today, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke?

Luke Gannon:

Hey, Reggie, how’s it going?

Reggie Rucker:

I’m doing great. So I have an idea. I feel like we should turn BLP into a drinking game. Hear me out, turn it into a drinking game, and every time I mention Modesto, the listeners should take a drink of water, their smoothie, whatever the beverage of choice is. What do you think?

Luke Gannon:

Okay, I’ll just say, Reggie, no shade, but people would probably be drinking a lot during this game. Okay, hold up. Does this mean you have another Modesto story for us?

Reggie Rucker:

Indeed, I do. So folks may know I moved to DC just a few years ago, but before that I was on a path to become Modesto’s Mayor. I’ll just put it out there, I’ll say it. But part of the reason it felt that way was because of how plugged in I was to the city, where people were in awe of what I knew about the city, what was going on, who the players were, et cetera, et cetera. And whenever I would talk to people who were fascinated by the insights I had, I just openly shared, I read the Modesto Bee. And sure it was a little more than that. I knew people, was connected, all of that, but my subscription to the Modesto Bee, my local paper was truly like my superpower, and it’s through that lens of the power of local journalism that I’m so excited to have today’s guest on the show.

Luke Gannon:

Our guest on the show today, Harry Jaffe is a longtime author and journalist who has lived in Washington DC for over 40 years. He’s the president of SpotlightDC, a nonprofit that raises funds for groundbreaking investigative journalism projects focused in the DC region. He has written multiple books and has always conducted detailed and honest reporting. Here’s Harry.

Harry Jaffe:

I raised and educated three daughters here in the public schools and have just come to love the city and care about the city and to be concerned about the city. I’m originally from Philadelphia, so that colors a lot of how I think about politics and how I think about governing. Philadelphia, a much older city, obviously, a city that is much more politically developed than Washington DC. Philadelphia, part of a county, Philadelphia part of a state. Philadelphia has things that we don’t have here, voting rights. Philadelphia’s a very locally defined and bound, and some would say circumscribed city. If you want to get elected to something in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, you better be from Philadelphia. And Washington DC, I think people say that DC is a change in city. I don’t think that that is necessarily true of the politics. However, if you look on the council, you’ll find that a number of the people elected to the 13 member Council are not from DC.

Luke Gannon:

After Philadelphia. Harry moved to Vermont in the seventies where he had his first journalism job working for the Rutland Herald, where he fell in love with journalism.

Harry Jaffe:

I loved question authority. I came out of that ethic. I’m very inquisitive. I believe strongly in the First Amendment. The fact that I could as a journalist, ask publicly elected officials questions about why they did things. And I’m also just aggressive and pugnacious as a human being, so I had no problem asking questions that were sometimes probing, sometimes embarrassing, and sometimes maddening to public officials. As a matter of fact, I reveled in that. I had no fear of confronting people that I was writing about. I came down here like so many people who come to Washington DC when I was working for a senator, I came down here to work for Senator Patrick Leahy as his press person, and it was 1978. I had been at journalism in Vermont for four years. I came down here, I was dazzled by the chandeliers and the pinstripe suits and going up and down the elevator with Ted Kennedy and Lloyd Benson and all of these storied senators, and I loved that for six months. And then it wore off, self-loathing kind of wanted to take over and I quit.

I was there for less than a year. This is just, and part of it is ego. I mean, you can’t forget about the fact that journalists have egos and we have bylaws, and I would write these great essays and they would wind up coming out of Patrick Leahy’s mouth on the floor of the Senate. And I said, “Wait a second. I wrote that.” So I got out of that pretty quickly and went back into journalism, and that was the time when there was a business model for journalism. And I worked for a couple of wire services and covered Capitol Hill, covered the White House, covered the courts, covered the Pentagon, I covered everything. And what I found was I was corresponding for newspapers on the West coast, and I missed what I would call the bump and grind of local reporting.

I missed the, I’m going to use another cliche, kind of the contact sport of local reporting, where you lived you heard from your neighbors that something was amiss, you read the local news. I had three daughters in, well, I was about to have three daughters in the local public schools. Encountered the police, everybody encounters the police for good or bad reasons. And I realized that I was much more drawn to local reporting than I was to national reporting. Actually found national reporting boring. I found it pointless. I found that it was me and 30 other people writing about the same events, the same policies.

Luke Gannon:

In the early days of Harry’s reporting, he was nicknamed Scoop Jaffe, meaning that he got the news first and published it on the front page of a newspaper. Harry found local reporting to be both frustrating and rewarding.

Harry Jaffe:

It was rewarding because there were very few journalists and there still are very few journalists in the District of Columbia, the nation’s capitol who cover local Washington, the city behind the monuments. There is this fiction out in the rest of the country that nobody lives in Washington. That politicians come and go. The White House and the Congress are here, a couple of monuments. But do people actually live in Washington DC? Well, it’s a 67 and a half square mile city. We now have a budget of 21 billion, took the district and its residents a long fight to get home rule to get some local control.

The good part of being a journalist covering Washington DC was that there weren’t that many of us. The bad part was that there was a lack of care. There was a lack of interest because the people who, many of the people who do live in Washington DC are here for national, international advocacy reasons. When I came here, the majority of the population was African American. It was like hit close to 70, 80%. It was a hyper segregated city. It still is segregated, but less so. The racism affected the journalism. The majority of the journalists were white. I wrote about Black Washington and race always played into the situation.

Luke Gannon:

In the mid to late eighties, Harry started to write about Washington DC when Marion Barry was the mayor.

Harry Jaffe:

Marion Barry was the dominant political, social, racial force in this city. I saw him as a great character. I mean Marion Barry, he loomed so large over this city. He was mayor for life. Everybody knew him. Nobody had mixed feelings about Marion Barry, like him or didn’t, loved him or didn’t. His story coming up from sharecropper roots in Itta Bena, Mississippi. Smart man, Kansas State University, just about to get a degree in chemistry and got swept up in the Civil Rights movement and then wound up in the movement and working for SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and winds up in Washington DC and builds a political network from the street up. And I was fortunate enough to be able to write a book about that called Dream City.

Luke Gannon:

Harry and Tom Sherwood co-authored a book called Dream City, Race, Power and the Decline of Washington DC, where they detailed Marion Barry’s rise to power.

Harry Jaffe:

I saw Marion Barry as a tragic character, not a good man or a bad man, but just a tragic character who in Shakespearean terms kind of was succumbed to his human frailties. We all have them. He had them pretty bad. So Marion was the main character of most of my reporting in Washington DC and I think that what’s important here is that I became very deeply involved and concerned about the wellbeing of the District of Columbia and its residents. I knew the city end to end, and it bothered me then, and it still bothers me now, that there is not just hyper segregation, but the economics are so wildly disparate. You have people in upper Caucasian Georgetown who live in $10 million homes and then east of the Anacostia River, you have people just trying to get to the dentist, trying to find a dentist, make it through the day. I find that heartbreaking, enraging. And so that became the focus of my journalism.

Luke Gannon:

In the late eighties and early nineties. Local journalism was in full swing in DC.

Harry Jaffe:

I would say perhaps ’86 to ’96 when local journalism was in full flower in Washington DC. By that I mean that the Washington Post, which was the dominant newspaper, had a city desk with probably 20 people on it. They had two people, two reporters covering the courts. They had four or five people covering city government. They had two or three people covering the cops. They had an investigative team of four or five people. And there was also, besides a great character in Marion Barry, the crack cocaine effect on Washington DC was horrendous. I mean different and worse than almost any other city. I covered it in granular detail. There was a year, I think it was 1989, it might’ve been ’90. There were 500 people killed in Washington DC on on many days, more than two a day. 500 people were killed in this city. It’s a small town. At that point I think we might’ve had a population of like 600,000 people. That’s nuts.

So if it bleeds, it reads. I mean, the news media came from all over the world to cover that. And one of Marion Barry’s famous lines was, “This is not Dodge City.” No, it was worse. There was a focus on local coverage, and there was a focus because we had a mayor who was good copy, who was never corrupt. My man, Marion Barry was uncorrupt and uncorruptible. He never took a dollar for any of his political actions. He never was rewarded for favoring one group as opposed to another. If it bleeds, it reads. There was a great character. There was a city that was awash in blood.

So there was, I would say from I’d say the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, the Washington Post, a ton of coverage. Every TV station was competing for scoops and news on local Washington. I was in the middle of it. I was working for a magazine called Regardies. It was a business magazine, but it was a business magazine focused on the regional business realm, which was essentially commercial property. Regardies, I had a column, it was a monthly magazine, believe it or not, a monthly column. It was column called Gravy Train. And Gravy Train was my monthly take on where the money and the power came together.

Luke Gannon:

In 1990, Harry was hired by the Washingtonian Magazine and was there for nearly 30 years.

Harry Jaffe:

I used to call myself the Bad News reporter of Good News Magazine because like any regional magazine, the cover of Washingtonian was best restaurants, best ice cream, best place to get your hair done, best Weekends, best this, best that. And you’d open it up and there’d be politics, crime, and blood on the page in my articles. And so I prided myself on writing about those kinds of stories.

Luke Gannon:

Back in the day, the anchor of local journalism was the Washington Post. The publisher of the Washington Post emphasized local matters including local sports, events, education, business, the economy and more. It won prizes both nationally and locally. But then the technological revolution took play.

Harry Jaffe:

The digital revolution starts to put pressure on newspapers that were used to 20% growth every year. The Washington Post is part of the Washington Post Company. It’s on the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street is saying, “What’s wrong with your profits here?” The Post starts cutting staff. It cuts local staff first. So I would say that the local reporting suffered by just cutting staff. This happened 10, 15 years ago, and the Post could not solve the business model compared to the New York Times, which did solve the business model. The Washington Post was out of gas and losing money, and Don Graham sold the newspaper to Jeff Bezos and Jeff Bezos lives in Seattle. Jeff Bezos could not find his way to northeast southwest Washington, DC unless maybe somebody drove him to the ballpark to see a Nationals game. He has no interest in local Washington. He’s not a journalist. He’s a businessman. He wants to make money, and he wanted the brand, and he didn’t want to lose any money.

So that further diminished the importance of local journalism at the Washington Post. And the same forces of, I mean, if you think about it in cold terms, valuable internet readership is measured by numbers, sheer numbers, sheer numbers. Google is successful because it has extravagant millions and billions of hits. Apple, millions and billions of people tap on that. Well, local Washington DC is not interesting to that huge number of people. And by that measure, purely by that measure, there was less value in covering local Washington DC. And that became true for the radio stations. It became true of TV stations.

The most horrible blow for covering local Washington happened relatively recently. There was an internet journalism project called the DCist. It went under, but the person who was running DCist in Washington DC convinced WAMU, the local radio station to take it on. And so a little money changed hands, but DCist became, for the past five or six years, a really vibrant source of local news. People loved it, thirsted for it. And in February, a few months ago, WAMU, which is the most successful and largest NPR affiliate in the country, closed it. Summarily, shut it down, shut it down in kind of a mean-spirited, vicious way. Shut it down, closed people, reporters out, didn’t give readers access to archives.

And there was a public outcry. I mean, it was a political event. The mayor spoke up, the city council spoke up, and it didn’t revive DCist, but at least WAM said, “Okay, we will free up the archives.” Because it was just really important local reporting done there. And so the economics and the business models failure has had a devastating effect in local coverage in Washington DC as it has across the country. But because we had such a small universe of journalists and readers, a small loss had big impact.

Luke Gannon:

But Harry thinks that in DC and even around the country, there is a thirst for local news.

Harry Jaffe:

The Washington Informer, which is an African American Weekly in Ward 8 in Congress Heights, which has been in the Rolark family for this is second generation, Denise Rolark Barnes is now the publisher. They’re doing well. I think that there is a thirst for news. The evidence of that is that the Washington Post in its latest reshuffling of publishers, they apparently, they’ve announced that they’re going to have a new local unit, a new local publishing platform. But I have to remind you that it’s going to be a paid platform. So I think that in the next year or two, we are actually going to see evidence.

Luke Gannon:

We hope that the trend bends toward funding local news, original investigative reporting, and small journalism outlets that are impacting readers. This is exactly what Harry’s organization SpotlightDC funds.

Harry Jaffe:

In about 2018, I became concerned, I would say, angry at the lack of coverage of Washington DC, in particular what’s called accountability journalism. Holding the powerful to account, holding the government to account holding business people who intersect with the public to account. And there was just a total absence of that. And so I got together with Colbert I King, who is still probably the, if not the most longstanding, successful, impactful African American journalist writing columns in the country. Colby King and I, Colby’s a native Washingtonian. I’ve known Colby for decades. I ran into him and he said, “What are you up to?” I said, “I’m thinking of starting this nonprofit, SpotlightDC.” And Colby said, “Count me in.”

So Colby’s support, we got support from people like Don Graham, who was the former publisher of the Washington Post and many other people. And we formed SpotlightDC Capital City Fund For Investigative Journalism with the sole purpose of supporting, funding, mentoring, but not publishing, supporting, funding, mentoring journalists who were pursuing what we thought were worthy, impactful investigative accountability journalism in Washington. We’re a lean organization. We have two volunteer boards. One is an advisory board of journalists. The advisory board of journalists evaluates proposals that we seek from journalists around the region, and then we have an executive board that actually approves funding. Our executive board is an unbelievable array of accomplished, brilliant journalists and professors in Washington DC.

Luke Gannon:

SpotlightDC launched in 2020 and the second journalist that they mentored and funded exposed the blatant fraud in DC’s eviction system and won a number of investigative reporting awards.

Harry Jaffe:

We funded a young journalist that I plucked out of the community named Josh Kaplan and Josh Kaplan and I worked together on this story. It was published in DCist, which no longer exists. Josh Kaplan just got a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation of Clarence Thomas and Alito and other Supreme Court justices. He got his first, he won his first awards and did his first investigative journalism supported by SpotlightDC. I say support because we don’t publish, we fund. We fund projects by Hola Cultura, which is a Latino based nonprofit here in Washington. They have focused on environmental journalism. They’ve won awards for the climate effects on Black and Brown communities.

And so we continue to fund journalists working on consequential journalism that affects people here in the local Washington DC region. And we have a half a dozen stories that are in process right now, and I think that we have been successful and hopefully we’ll continue to be successful. Losing DCist was a huge blow for us. They had capable journalists. They published work that we funded by these capable journalists. And the loss of DCist was a terrible blow for us, helping a young promising journalist achieve his or her journalistic goal, investigatively and accountability journalism, it’s very hard raising funds. The pool of local journalists who are capable of this kind of reporting is small. It’s challenge both to raise funds and to find journalists who can do the kind of work that we will fund.

Luke Gannon:

There are other positive steps toward funding local strong investigative journalism on the horizon. Council member Janeese Lewis George introduced the local news funding act to fund media outlets that report local news. Each DC registered voter would receive news coupons to allocate to their preferred news outlets, and the number of news coupons each outlet receives would determine its share of funding.

Harry Jaffe:

Councilmember Janeese Lewis George’s legislation is an absolute game changer. It’s a lifeline for us. I can’t tell you what its prospects are within the politically and within the council and the execution by the executive branch, but I can tell you the first time in my life I’m going to lobby, I’m going to advocate for it. We desperately need that as a base to fund what we, there are efforts nationwide to use public funds to help local nonprofit journalism enterprises. I think Colorado, I think of California. I think there’s one in Washington. So this is not groundbreaking. It’s been done before, but if we can pull it off here, I think it will have a nationwide effect because anything that happens in Washington that’s successful will often get replicated around the country.

The actual operational way it would work was, and this would be a readership run fund, Washingtonians, I think residents, voters, I don’t know how they’re going to split it up, actually get tokens. And the tokens are valuable, have value. And so I would think that it would be a tremendous help to the Washington Informer, which has a dedicated readership. It would be a struggle for SpotlightDC, we’re relatively new, we’d have to make sure that people knew who we were and the value of what we do. I think that the council member’s legislation, if it’s passed, would be a huge help to local news coverage in the nation’s capital.

I’m skeptical of almost everything the government does. So I applied my skepticism to this because as a journalist, this is a bad idea. Who’s going to benefit? Where’s the money going to go? How much is going to be wasted? I come with all those questions. This legislation, first of all, I mean, if you think about it, the price of Councilmember Janeese Lewis George’s legislation to fund local journalism is $11.5 million, which seems like a lot of money except when you compare it to the $21 billion DC government budget. And it would have a resonating amplifying effect on local journalism. And it would also acknowledge the value of local journalism. I mean, there’s too much that goes on in every government that is not, where there’s no oversight, no accountability, nobody’s watching.

And so I’ve dedicated my life to local coverage of Washington DC, not my life, but my professional life. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it just die, I’m just not going to do it. And running SpotlightDC has been a challenge, difficult. It becomes harder all the time. Money goes away, money comes, money goes away. Right now, money is kind of lurking. But if SpotlightDC and other local news outlets and other local Washington DC, local journalism organizations could depend on government funding as a basis, I think it would enshrine local journalism. It would give local journalists the ability to examine and to report on the government and the politics. And I think that that’s essential. But I think that information about your local government ghouls, your cops, public health is essential. It needs to be examined. It needs to be reported on, what’s working, what’s not working. I don’t trust public officials to do it themselves.

Luke Gannon:

The nation’s capitol looked at as a gleaming symbol of peace. And hope is often the setting for vicious contradictions and devastating conflicts over race, class, and power. Harry Jaffe book covers just this.

Harry Jaffe:

Washington DC and local Washington DC is not like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, it doesn’t engender that many books. And the best account of local journalism and local government and local finance and development is still Dream City, book by Tom Sherwood and Harry Jaffe.

Luke Gannon:

Harry, thank you for your insight into the history and present state of DC’s Press. Now, if you are a journalists in DC reporting on holding the government and leaders accountable, and you have a scoop checkout SpotlightDC.

Reggie Rucker:

Great job. Luke, as always, thank you for incredible work in putting this episode together. And Harry, what a wealth of knowledge and insight into DC and the local journalism scene here for the last several decades. Your continued efforts are indeed essential to the health of the city or nation’s capital. And similarly in cities across the country that are looking for ways to rebuild and maintain an industry that keeps residents informed, engaged, and holds the leaders accountable. Please keep it up. And thank you. And thanks to all of you, our listeners for tuning in. We’ll be back again in two weeks. We’re going to take a break from the City series to prepare for the next stop. And while we prepare, we’re going to dust off some episodes from the archives and revisit some discussions that are especially timely today with some fresh takes from our team. Think of your favorite movie or music remake, rebooted and remixed. That’s what’s in store, so stay tuned.

But in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into what we discussed today. And as always, you can visit ilsr.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. And as always, we love your emails. So send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org to let us know what’s on your mind. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Taya Noel. The music for the season is also composed by Taya Noel. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power.