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Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. During the pandemic, more than 100 local newsrooms closed due to layoffs, furloughs, or complete shutdowns, but according to the most recent report by the Institute for nonprofit news, there is the potential for growth in the nonprofit news sector. I wanted to talk with someone at the center of one of the most exciting nonprofit news organizations out there today.

Richard Kim: My name is Richard Kim, and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of the TheCity.NYC.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Full disclosure, Richard Kim was my very first editor ever way back when I was writing at The Nation. His new position at The City, he runs an independent newsroom covering New York City. I asked Richard how he motivates his team to create meaningful journalism.

Richard Kim: When I think of a role as an editor, I think the person I actually work for is the reader. The editor is really the only person in the newsroom who is really truly accountable to the reader, we're accountable to making the information clear and accurate. We're accountable to readers for making the story gripping and something you want to get through. To hear that I was motivating to you also, Melissa, as a writer is interesting because I often think of my relationship with my reporters as not quite adversarial, but as working for a different person and coming at it from a different perspective, and really getting the reporter and writer to think about their audience and why they're doing the reporting they're doing and to make it stick and make it matter.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's a good point. There is undoubtedly with writers and editors a little bit of that creative tension. I think that's right, not quite adversarial, but everybody rolls their eyes at their editor here and there or has those tussles, but part of the value of that as you're pointing out is that presumably, then leads to something that is greater than what either the editor or the writer, reporter could have done on their own, but it takes time. I guess I'm interested in how you see that precious commodity of time, in the context of reporting, and whether or not we have enough time to do that work anymore.

Richard Kim: One of the reasons why I moved to The City was specifically to do news in a local context. I think that just automatically connects you to your audience, and to doing work that matters and shows up where your readers are. One example, people across New York, were getting hit with these astronomical content bills. We were hearing from readers whose bill had gone from like $100 a month to $300, $400, sometimes $500. As you know, that spike for someone who is living paycheck to paycheck, as many people are, could be really catastrophic.

When we dug into it, we found that the root of this were the supply charges that ConEd was charging. This is not the delivery charge, but this is the price they were paying for fossil fuels. 70% of electricity in New York is generated by fossil fuels. It's not set by the federal government or by the state. As we know, the US is increasingly exporting natural gas to other countries, there's a global commodity market around that, less than 30% of our energy here comes from renewables. Then, all of this was happening even before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, which as we know has set oil prices soaring.

One of the things that was fascinating to me about covering that story is that this is a story that's about federal energy policy. It's a story about global commodity markets. It's a story about geopolitical conflict now. It's a story about literally the largest force changing our world today, which is climate change, but where do these forces show up for everyday New Yorkers, that's in your bill. That to me really was a demonstration of the power of local reporting. It can explain how the biggest forces in the world are impacting your life as you live it, in your bills, in your quality of life, in your neighborhood, and built environment.

For me making the move to local has really connected me with the forces that shaped the world as we experienced them and that's something that my whole newsroom feels very strongly about, and it's just been a pleasure to edit in that environment.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I wonder though, even as you're describing this, if the local versus national or local versus big story, even your point about Ukraine, in certain ways, they're all local stories and all nationals. As you were making this point about the rising utility bills, I was raising my hand but FYI, I live in North Carolina, so I nonetheless though experience, have recently experienced something similar. I guess I'm wondering if there's a power to telling this specific story as a way of telling the more universal.

Richard Kim: Absolutely right. That's the frame that we are trying to put on it. These huge forces are happening, but this is how it impacts your life. In that telling, there is an understanding that we hope to achieve about these global and national forces, and then what people can do about it. The other thing I kept thinking about as I made this move from national news to local news is the way increasingly local news in the mainstream media has been picked up and put in a very polarized cable news framework.

The example I'm thinking of is recently San Francisco recalled three school board members. This was a story that was just immediately set in a hyperpolarized national context. London Breed, the mayor had to go and meet the press and apologize for how politicized the school board had become. Fox News called it a repudiation of wokeness, pundits blamed it on the squad, which last time I checked were members of Congress, not people on the San Francisco School Board. Everyone was predicting was a bloodbath for Democrats in the midterms, but like, where was the actual coverage of how this is going to impact kids in San Francisco, parents in San Francisco? Why was this story dominated the morning talk shows, the weekend shows for that whole period of time?

That is one thing that I'm thinking through. Like, what does it mean to cover local for local in ways that matter versus picking up a local story and blowing it up into something that's national? We see this around coverage of critical race theory that the way sixth graders in one city are taught about the history of slavery becomes something that Fox News wants to cover day in, day out, but we also see this in this progressive media ecosystem where video after video, so when freaking out at a Walmart over mask mandate, or like the latest Terran caught melting down at store becomes like a real strain of coverage. Partly I made my move because I wanted to think about doing local news in ways that matter and not putting it immediately in this hyper-polarized partisan national framework.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've talked about this as local national, but there's another big piece and that hyper-partisan National Framework also has a bottom-line piece to it. Part of how that happens. There's an incentive structure that leads to our news sounding and looking like that and reading like that. I guess here's the other piece. How do you do news in the current environment as a nonprofit?

Richard Kim: We're really lucky at The City to be a nonprofit newsroom. We have generous funding from foundations and individuals, and we have a growing membership base. We have thousands and thousands of New Yorkers who are paying us $5 a month, $10 a month to sustain us and support our journalism. They consistently write in things like, "Thank you, you're a lifeline. I couldn't understand my city or my borough without you." That's a real privilege.

When you look at the other side for-profit media and the way it covers local, I think you see some real gaps and some deficiencies that have created an opening for something like The City and other nonprofit newsrooms, like the Texas Tribune, or the Baltimore Banner, or what have you to really fill in need, which is that they're covering local. Take the New York Times, for example, I think they're covering local for global, is one of their slogans. It's writing stories that may have a local origin or local impact, but casting them and framing them for a very elite global audience. That's not what The City is doing.

You saw the Wall Street Journal completely shatter their greater New York section of the New York Post, which has a long history as a fighting tabloid here in New York City, I think it's become increasingly partisan and focused on outrage journalism. There is an incentive structure there for all these outlets that are actually chasing clicks on the one hand or chasing subscriptions from people who have the means. The City is in a very fortunate position because of its members and because of its donors to pursue the journalism that we think matters for New Yorkers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Richard Kim, Editor-in-Chief of The City, thank you so much for joining us.

Richard Kim: Thank you, Melissa. It's great to be here with you again.

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