Program transcription:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Chris Libonati. He's the managing editor of Central Current an online media outlet in Central New York. He also has experience as a crime and politics reporter at the Syracuse Post-Standard. Chris, welcome to the program, it's good to have you on.

Chris Libonati: Well, thanks for having me. It's good to talk to you, Grant.

GR: You bet. So let me just start with some real basic stuff. We'll get into Central Current in a second, but let's just start with the context and the landscape that things like Central Current are entering into. Remind our listeners what's happened to local news coverage of public issues in recent years in Syracuse, but all over I think the same phenomenon has happened, just bring us up to date on that.

CL: Yeah. All over the country, I mean, you know, for decades now, local newspapers have closed, or shrunk. You know, it can be the Syracuse Post-Standard, but it's also Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Buffalo News and, you know, it's not just in New York, it's everywhere. And there are communities all over the country, often smaller communities who are losing, you know, just simple local papers, that, you know, even had only 3 or 4 reporters before, and now you have none. Central Current, you know, kind of grew out of a national effort. Well, it grew from locally, but out of a national effort to expand reporting in communities that need more of it. And then, frankly, all communities need more reporting. This is not just a Syracuse issue, this is a nationwide issue, local newspapers are closing nationally.

GR: Yeah. I have a couple colleagues that study the media and they've really driven this point home when I have heard them speak. So, in fact, you know, you hear this phrase, 'food desert' a lot, but then you have these small towns that you were talking about that are being called 'news deserts', and I think what you spoke to illustrates that. So I'm going to go now to Syracuse, and I'm going to make a, I guess I'm going to make a confession here publicly, but one of my slight irritations over the years, is the Post-Standard's apparent reluctance to acknowledge that they've cut back on their local and regional news coverage in recent decades. Instead, they often point to, hey, we've got added content on our website and, you know, this is really it's better somehow. It seems a bit misleading to me. But anyway, you had some experience at the Post-Standard before you took on this position. I would be very interested to hear your views more specifically on how, because they're the, you know, they're the big players in our market, obviously, how their local news, especially public and political affairs news coverage has changed in recent years.

CL: You know, honestly, so I started there in late December of 2017.

GR: So a lot of this stuff had already happened.

CL: Yes, yes, absolutely. So, I came in kind of, I think I was at Syracuse University, and Newhouse while it was changing and honestly, you know, I think I kind of, I missed out on it in the way that, like, the local reader got to see it, right? Because, you know, during layoffs and cutbacks, I just wasn't as avid of a reader of the Post-Standard, and I was probably more reading the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, because that's, I'm from Rochester. And I used to take the newspaper to school every morning with me while I was in elementary school. So.

GR: Oh, wow.

CL: Yeah. So, and I think though, like, what has happened at the Post-Standard, you know, the Post-Standard cut early, right? They cut or they saw the tide coming and not the Post-Standard really advanced media and the Newhouse family. In some ways they were ahead of the curve in cutting, right? Because now newspapers are, you know, you see it at the Buffalo News, right? They're doing they're cutting now and I think in some ways it's like, it was take your medicine then or take your medicine now. And that's not to say that, yeah, it's just unfortunate that that's happened. And I think that the truth is, you know, in some ways what you, you don't necessarily, very obviously lose like common council coverage or legislature coverage, you lose issues coverage in some ways, right? Like, you think about, you know I was talking to someone, like, the Post-Standard years and years ago had a labor reporter, you know, well before, probably before I was born, honestly. And someone was complaining to me about that at one point. You know, obviously we have Sean Kirst and, you know, that wasn't a cut, you know, but Sean did leave and it was a loss to the community. I think that it's not necessarily the people that work there and the reporters that work there, but just in aggregate resources. And I think that, yeah, I can tell more of a broad story than a specific one, but I think, though I will say, and one of the benefits of the Post-Standard, I do think things have been very consistent since 2017, and that is the benefit of having taken kind of the medicine, so to speak, in the early 2010's, I'd say, is that it has steadied. And, you know, there is, I guess there's something to be said for that, right?

GR: Yeah, no, it makes sense, I hadn't really thought about it that way, but you're right. I didn't know that the Post-Standard had done this earlier than everybody else but, and you know, and then they cut back to the three days of sort of a genuinely new paper paper, and, yeah, but it's been steady since then. Well, so, let's then transition from that into Central Current. So give us a brief history of Central Current, you were present at the founding. What do you see as Central Current's place in the local media landscape, and what was the history of its story and its founding?

CL: Yeah. So the organization started with the board. So, you know, a couple of our founders, Tony Malavenda, Larry Bousquet got together, and I guess, Tony was like, you know, Tony Malavenda was somewhat unaware of the movement in nonprofit news, and he had kind of gone to a group of people that he knew, and he was like, you know, maybe this could be a nonprofit. And lo and behold, there's nonprofits all over the country, all over the place. And it gave them a bit of a blueprint, right? It made it a little more simple to kind of get that started. They hired Julie McMahon, former editor, you know, also a colleague, former colleague at the Post-Standard to kind of get it rolling.

GR: And I spoke to her when it was just starting up. So you're kind of like the second chapter now, but go ahead.

CL: And so we, I came over because, you know, what I told one of my editors when I was leaving, one of my editors at the Post-Standard was, you know, I was just kind of like, I want a bit of a feel like a college newsroom and not in all the college age, you know, activities or whatever, but trying things out. You know, that was what, when I was at the Daily Orange, you know, it was like, can we just do a story this way, because we we say so, you know? And I think in legacy media, you get locked into, well, we are the paper of record and we need to look and act like the paper of record. And that is not to say that we don't hold ourselves to a very high standard, but that is to say that that very high standard does not have to be a barrier to creativity. And to exist and to succeed, we have to be creative. And I think it was both freeing and backing myself into a corner where, no, I have to be creative. It is innovate or kind of die out, right? That is the mentality. And I wanted that, you know? That was a challenge to me. There is something to being the first reporter somewhere and that's what I was. I was going to set the tone for who we wanted to be even without editing power, right? Or editing responsibility. And that was, that's how I got here. And I think probably telling people that I wanted a feel of a college newsroom, and maybe it was not the way I should have said it, because, like, back then, because it's just a hard feeling to capture if you haven't been there recently. And, you know, when I left, I guess I'd been out of the D.O. for five-ish years and I thought that there were things that we did there that could apply to a professional, I mean, they are a professional newsroom, but, you know, something like a nonprofit.

GR: Yeah, no, it's interesting. And you're still here, and you don't look too hung over to me,

CL: (laughter)

GR: So I don't think you that you've gone in the bad direction there. I'm Grant Reeher, and you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. My guest is Chris Libonati, he's the managing editor of the media outlet, Central Current. So, you mentioned Malavenda and Bousquet. Where does your funding come from now?

CL: Yes, we have a bunch of different places, but so it's about, we think about, on the business side, Maximilian Elye, our executive director thinks about it in about four pillars. So it's a grant funding, a sponsorships, major donors, and then grassroots donors, which is like membership, or we don't have subscriptions, necessarily, but that would be the small dollar donors, however you want to frame it.

GR: And what would be the relative size of these pillars? And, you know, and where does some of that grant funding come from?

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Chris Libonati on the Campbell Conversations