Caro is an author (The Foie Gras Wars, The Special Counsel: The Mueller Report Retold) and former longtime Chicago Tribune culture reporter, columnist and critic. He talks with prominent creative people on his weekly Caropop podcast and writes for Chicago magazine and other outlets. He was a journalism Cherub at Northwestern’s National High School Institute a long time ago.
Articles by or about Mark Caro
Q&A |
In April 2024 the Local News Initiative, in conjunction with the Knight Lab at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Communications and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung USA, published a report titled, “Impact of AI on Local News Models: AI Is Disrupting the Local News Industry. Will It Unlock Growth or Be an Existential Threat?” Based on discussions with more than 25 local news and AI experts worldwide, the report explored the potential benefits and perils presented by...
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With the 2020 purchase of the Cook County News Herald in Northeast Minnesota, Jeremy Gulban launched the fast-growing CherryRoad Media chain of community newspapers. The company’s portfolio has ballooned to 94 newspapers—all but one print, most weekly—as CEO Gulban tries on the fly to make his business model sustainable for CherryRoad and a greater local news industry working in the shadows of Big Tech. CherryRoad Media is an offshoot of CherryRoad Technologies, the information technology...
research |
The old formula went like this: Journalism undergrads would learn in classes and maybe work on the school paper and then get professional experience via internships or summer jobs at news outlets. But with the local news industry reeling, this dynamic has flipped. Instead of news organizations giving boosts to students, students are supporting often-short-staffed outlets by providing coverage as part of their curricula. This shift is happening as an expanding network of universities step...
trends |
Alex Seitz-Wald was a high-profile NBC News national political reporter for 10 years when he made a dramatic shift in his professional life: He became deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, a digital-print outlet created from the combination of four coastal Maine community papers and an online site. Not only is the Midcoast Villager trying to show that a regional approach can improve local news coverage while sustaining a viable business model, but it also...
update |
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook is eliminating fact-checking may amount to a double whammy for people living in this country’s ever-expanding news deserts. Having lost their primary local news sources, these communities often turn to social media and other alternatives to try to stay informed. Now one of those key sources is removing safeguards against the spread of misinformation. “It’s absolutely correct that it’s in areas that are underserved by professional journalism that this move...
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PLYMOUTH, Mass. – Mark Pothier was wrapping up the young-adult phase of his music career, including a 1983 stint as keyboardist for the then-synthy band Ministry, when he took a $5 an hour job for the Pembroke Reporter, a recently launched community paper along Boston’s South Shore. Pothier rose through the ranks of the umbrella Memorial Press Group (MPG), a chain of suburban newspapers, and in 1986 was named executive editor of the flagship, the...
trends |
Blair Kamin ended his 28-year run as the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic with a Jan. 13, 2021 column that concluded: “Imagine Chicago without a full-time skyline watchdog. Schlock developers and hack architects would welcome the lack of scrutiny.” That kicker was Kamin’s way of urging the Tribune’s editors and owners to replace him, just as he had succeeded another Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, Paul Gapp. The job was a vital one in a...
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Public media funding has become so inadequate in supporting local news reporting that it needs a drastic overhaul, a report released Thursday by the Center for Study of Responsive Law concludes. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who founded the Center in 1968, supplies the lengthy, alarm-bell-ringing introduction for the report, which is written by Michael Swerdlow, a researcher for the Center and a Columbia University law student. “This lack of funding for public media, at a time...
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The homepage was the entry point, the digital equivalent of the front page, before social media and search engines became the dominant means for readers to find content. But now that X/Twitter, Facebook and Google are directing less traffic to news sites—all while AI summaries to online queries allow readers to bypass news links altogether—news organizations have rediscovered the value of keeping readers on their own platforms. Or as Local Media Association Chief Innovative Officer...
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The 2024 presidential election remains months away, yet a new Medill survey shows that as of May almost half of surveyed adults already were sick of hearing about it—a finding that could have significant implications not only for national news organizations but also local ones. The national poll, commissioned by the Medill School at Northwestern University and conducted in May by NORC at the University of Chicago, measured news fatigue and avoidance among American adults....
Q&A |
The Marion County Record in Marion, Kan., a city of fewer than 2,000 people, hit the national spotlight last August when the town’s police raided the small, weekly newspaper’s office and publishers’ home and, in the course of lengthy searches, seized computers and cell phones. Marion County Record Publisher/Editor Eric Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, was in her home during the police action and died the following day. During the raids Eric Meyer told officers,...
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The Illinois legislature has approved measures that provide $25 million in tax credits over the next five years for local news organizations to hire and retain journalists, becoming the second large state in two months to try to bolster the ailing local news industry with tax incentives. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the Illinois House gave final passage to two other components of a larger package designed to address the local news crisis....
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This text was adapted from the introduction of our report on the impact of AI on local news models. Download a full PDF version of the report. Journalism has experienced its share of revolutions, from Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press in 15th century Germany to the high-speed presses of the 19th century to the disruptions of radio, network television and cable television as primary sources for live, breaking news. Yet even as...
policy |
The ailing local news industry in Illinois would receive compensation from Big Tech companies and benefit from state tax incentives and a new journalism scholarship program under sweeping legislation introduced in the General Assembly this month. “It is the most ambitious package of local journalism policy that I’ve seen,” Anna Brugmann, policy director for the nonprofit Rebuild Local News, said of two bills introduced by State Sen. Steve Stadelman, a Democrat who chaired the bipartisan...
Q&A |
Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy brought much hands-on experience and perspective to their quest to find, as their new book puts it, “What Works in Community News.” Clegg was a three-decade Boston Globe veteran who, as editorial page editor, oversaw Pulitzer Prize-winning work for editorial writing and commentary. More recently she helped launch and is a top executive at Brookline.News, a nonprofit hyperlocal outlet based in her Boston suburb. Kennedy is a Northeastern University journalism professor who...
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Veteran journalist Ken Doctor had been analyzing “Newsonomics” for many years when he jumped back into the game to launch a new local digital news outlet, Lookout Santa Cruz, which debuted in 2020. With the Santa Cruz Sentinel having been taken over and downsized by the Alden Global Capital-controlled Media News Group, Doctor declared that Lookout was entering a news desert, which rankled some journalists in town. But to Doctor the proof is in the...
trends |
The classic newspaper newsroom maintains a powerful mystique among journalists and non-journalists alike. You need not have set foot in one to conjure up vivid images of reporters working the phones, banging on typewriters or computer keyboards, smoking cigarettes (in the olden days) or chugging coffee and barking at colleagues while trying to nail down The Story. The grit, hard work and ink-stained glamor are tangible in movies such as “The Front Page” (originally a...
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Overseeing the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, Jeremy Gilbert has been exploring the intersection of technology and news media, a topic that has become urgent amid the rocket-like rise of artificial intelligence. Gilbert has worked with AI since 2009, when he and fellow Northwestern professors and their students created StatsMonkey, a tool to tell automatic baseball stories. During a subsequent stint at the Washington Post, Gilbert devised Heliograf to cover sports, politics and more. Now...
trends |
Every newspaper printing-press closure is another shoe dropping on the local news landscape, and a big one dropped in June. That’s when Gannett announced that it will shutter its Pueblo Chieftain printing operation in Pueblo, Colo. The plant is scheduled to print its final Chieftain issues this Sunday, Aug. 13. The following day the Denver Post, owned by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group and located about 110 miles north of Pueblo, will take over the...
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Marty Baron led the Washington Post through a period of dramatic change. Not only did billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos buy the newspaper months into Baron’s eight-year tenure as executive editor, but President Donald Trump declared the press to be “the enemy of the people” and, with allies outside and inside the media, worked to undermine trust in mainstream news outlets as well as in facts themselves. Yet while the economics of running an aggressive...
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As executive editor of the Washington Post, Marty Baron not only guided the newspaper through a transformative ownership change (with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos taking charge) and the turbulent Trump presidency, but he also oversaw an aggressive expansion of its journalistic mission, accompanied by significant growth in readership, revenues and influence. Rallying behind its slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Washington Post re-established itself as a national force in journalism at a time of rising...
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Block Club Chicago—a nonprofit newsroom that has been accumulating reporters, readers and accolades—hit one milestone last month and reaches another one Tuesday. Last month, Block Club Chicago officially outlasted its predecessor, DNAinfo, a Chicago online news startup that operated for four years and 11 months before billionaire owner Joe Ricketts abruptly shuttered it (and the Gothamist network of sites) in November 2017. Newly lacking funding and employment, DNAinfo editors Shamus Toomey, Jen Sabella and Stephanie...
research |
Fewer than one third of Americans believe that local news media hold public officials accountable, a finding that calls into question whether local journalism is fulfilling one of its primary missions, according to national poll commissioned by the Medill School at Northwestern University The survey, conducted on behalf of Medill by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, collected responses from more than 1,000 Americans about their consumption of and attitudes...
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The survey of 1,015 US adults was fielded by NORC’s AmeriSpeak® Omnibus panel from April 27 to May 1, 2023. The local news survey questions were developed by Medill undergraduate students in the class “J390 Collecting and Analyzing Audience Data.” The margin of sampling error based on the full, weighted sample is +/- 3.78%. The response rate (AAPOR3) is 2.4%, and the design effect is 1.51%. AmeriSpeak® is a probability-based panel designed to be representative...
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News organizations seeking to measure their websites’ success typically have focused on two metrics: page views and time spent on the site. But data collected and analyzed from the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index indicates that such an approach is misguided. The data, collected from 106 outlets in various-sized markets, shows that the most important factor in trying to get people to pay for news is reader regularity. What’s more, increases in page views and time...
research |
It sounds like an alarming equation: While local news outlets shutter and news deserts expand nationwide, so-called “pink slime” sites are filling the void with political propaganda disguised as legitimate news. For anyone who believes democracy is built on a foundation of truth, this is a disturbing trend. But most of the attention on pink-slime journalism has focused on its production, such as the “1,300 community news sites” that Metric Media, Chicago businessman Brian Timpone’s company...
Q&A |
Many journalists would prefer a tall wall separating the state from the fourth estate, yet with local news outlets disappearing at an alarming rate, there have been increased calls for journalism to receive public support in order to survive. The nonprofit Rebuild Local News advocates for public policies “to counter the collapse of local news and revitalize community journalism.” Founded in 2020 by Steven Waldman, former president and co-founder of Report for America, it includes...
update |
While local newspapers shutter at an alarming rate and news deserts expand, it’s important to seek out the emerging oases that may point to a brighter future. That was the theme of a webinar organized July 26 by the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung USA. The webinar highlighted creative approaches to deliver vital, useful news and information to a diversity of communities. These efforts are taking place in urban, suburban and rural...
trends |
The news about local news has grown bleak, with an alarming number of communities worldwide losing their newspapers and the reliable information they provide. In its recently published State of Local News 2022 Report, the Medill Local News Initiative found that two newspapers a week are shuttering in the U.S., creating ever-expanding news deserts. When legitimate news sources disappear, misinformation and disinformation campaigns often fill the vacuum, with dark implications for democratic societies. But bright...
Projects Mark Caro has worked on.