2023 was a rough year in local news. But good, important and needle-moving things have also happened. For our second-to-last newsletter of the year, I decided to turn things over to a handful of very smart people and see how they viewed the good and bad this year in local news.

Those very smart people are:

• Darryl Holliday, co-founder of City Bureau and one of the authors of “The Roadmap for Local News”
• Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism and the force behind “The State of Local News Project”
• Katherine Kokal, education reporter at The Palm Beach Post, unit chair, Palm Beach News Guild, and a former Poynter-Koch fellow
• Michael Bolden, CEO of the American Press Institute
• Angela Fu, Poynter’s media business reporter

Here are their thoughts. Next week I’ll share what they’re expecting to see in 2024. I’d also love to hear what you saw from this last year. Just hit reply and talk to me!

What’s the best thing that happened in/to/for local news in 2023?

Darryl Holliday: The local news crisis went mainstream. I think the J-school choir is great at singing the same tune — I’m a card-carrying member — but it’s so important that we reach new non-journalism allies and the broader public about the impact independent local news has on governance and community building. Democracy Fund compiled the best rundown on this that I’ve seen back in 2018’s “How we know journalism is good for democracy” but I think 2023 set the stage for these (mostly theoretical) proof points to be proven out in practice in 2024. So this is a great time to articulate a clear vision for the local news revival, not just the local news crisis. When I look at the local news ecosystem I see a field that’s ready for growth and serious investment. That’s why I consider Press Forward to be a result of over a decade of local news field leadership. We should celebrate wins like that — and then leverage them for even bigger wins. I’d say the best thing to happen in local news in 2023 was that the level of ambition went up. More people understand that we can’t afford a miss.

Katherine Kokal: The addition of beats in new places and new initiatives to right our industry’s past wrongs have really put wind in my sails. Bright spots for me include the first full year of NPR’s Gulf States newsroom, the Los Angeles Times’ De Los platform that centers Latinidad and the More Than A Number initiative launched by Georgia journalist Justin Baxley to reframe how broadcast journalists approach families of murder victims.

Penelope Muse Abernathy: Two things. One is the announcement of Press Forward and the fact that it is a second round and an investment by a number of philanthropists who want to take it into the community levels and are focused on sustainability. The second thing is the move that we’ve had among policymakers at the local, state and national levels to realize that we may need to do something to support the transformation of legacy and startup news organizations and to ensure that we have local news in the future.

Angela Fu: This isn’t unique to 2023, but it definitely feels like there’s a growing awareness of the financial issues local news is facing. Policymakers and journalism advocacy groups have continued to discuss and push legislation to support local outlets. On the philanthropic side, there’s been the Press Forward initiative, which has pledged $500 million to local news over the next five years. I’m curious to see how these efforts pan out in the coming years.

Michael Bolden: The announcement of Press Forward and the leadership by the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation in increasing support for local news. While many questions remain about the funding itself, and the equity of distribution, this most certainly is driving momentum in the right direction at a critical time for journalism and freedom of the press in the United States. That said, we can’t see Press Forward as a panacea, but it should be a catalyst for action and for important conversations about the state of journalism and what that means for our country and meeting the information needs of a growing, diverse populace.

What’s the worst thing that happened in local news in 2023?

Fu: The layoffs and cutbacks. The pandemic was brutal, but job cuts eased up a bit in the last two years. They’re back up again now, and hundreds of workers in local news have lost their jobs this year. Gannett, for example, has shut down several printing plants, and Lee Enterprises has furloughed its staff, held layoffs and reduced print days at many of its papers. A reporter at The Buffalo News recently noted that Lee shed more than 1,000 jobs in the past year.

Kokal: You already know what I’m going to say. It’s layoffs. This year we lost journalists at Vox, The Washington Post, NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Reveal, CNN, The Texas Tribune, Insider, National Geographic and dozens of local news sites and newspapers. This approach to cutting labor costs is robbing us of decades of institutional knowledge and also robbing us of future generations of news leaders. As a journalist in my late 20s, it’s hard to picture what a newsroom will look like 20 years from now.

Bolden: Press freedom is increasingly under attack at the local level in the United States. It is a reminder to us that we can’t take it for granted and we must help our fellow residents understand why a free press is a necessary component to our way of life.

Holliday: Two things come to mind and I think they’re two sides of the same coin: a lack of field organizing that leads to policy losses. We can move money around through philanthropy all day but I just don’t think there’s a world where philanthropy alone funds the kind of media movement we need.

To me, what’s needed is a new independent, noncommercial media movement, and that requires organizing around policy and legislation that will last beyond our individual efforts. We’ve had the U.S. Postal Service subsidizing civic communication for over 200 years because we fought for it. We have LPFM and public access stations training people and providing platforms for community voices at thousands of sites across the country because media organizers made local information a collective action issue.

I think journalists and people who care deeply about equitable local information systems should care about things like broadband internet access for all (i.e. how are people going to read all of your great stories online?) and Section 230. I think it’s important that people building a future of local news organize and understand policy issues. If we don’t we’ll see bad policies pass supported by entrenched lobbies, legislation like the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act and, now, the CJPA in California. We need a policy agenda for news as a public good, and we need to get good bills passed in 2024. Polices that benefit informed communities and civic information not just hedge funds, commercial media and corporate broadcasting. So I appreciate groups like the Alliance for Community Media, Media Power Collaborative and Rebuild Local News for leading the way here.

Abernathy: Two things. One is the uptick in the loss of newspapers that occurred in 2023 and what that bodes for 2024. And the fact that when a community loses a newspaper, they most likely will not get a replacement. That is leading to a divide in the country not only politically and economically, but also journalistically.

This originally appeared in Local Edition, our weekly newsletter that covers what’s happening in local news. Subscribe here.