Ken Doctor is the CEO and founder of Lookout Local in Santa Cruz, Calif. He has had a long career in the media industry, including 21 years at Knight Ridder newspapers and more than a decade writing the “Newsonomics” column. He joined the Local Media Association board of directors in early 2024. In this Q&A, Ken tells us what keeps him up at night and also what gets him up in the morning with regard to the local media industry.

Q: How has the local media industry transformed since you started working on it?

Doctor: It’s really been an unimaginable transformation, if we can call it that. What is clear is what has been lost. It still remains what we will have in 2027 or 2037 at this point. So we are in that period – really one we haven’t seen in more than a century – where we get to create the next.

Let’s take the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, where I served from 1986-1997, last as managing editor of a newsroom of 225 FTEs! (That’s down to a tenth or so of that today, a metric that stands for much of the industry’s loss – 90%). The Pioneer Press’ fourth building housed the newsroom on the sixth and seventh floors, and the rest of the building was like a Wes Anderson wedding cake.

HR on the first floor, plus lots of dead space that created the most unwelcoming-to-the-public space. Finance – the lucrative counting house – on the second floor. “Circulation” on the third, “Production”, which had moved to cold type, on the fourth, advertising on the fifth, and the publisher’s suite on the eighth. That segmenting and sheer size of operation says it all about what was. In that layer cake of publishing, we can see what produced such great steady 18%+ profit margins, and what then collapsed in on itself, as times rapidly changed. And reminds us of the metric I found in my days as an analyst: On average, only 12.5% of a newspaper company’s expenses went to paying the newsroom.

In short, it was an industrial process mindset rather than one focused directly on community betterment and serving readers and communities.

Q: What initiatives or areas of focus do you think will have the most positive impact on your organization’s future?

Doctor: We’re bullish on AI and ML and will launch our first “powered” product this spring. I commend this article about Ippen Digital’s work in Germany, both for its innovation approach and how it is bringing the whole company/culture into this big adventure. Someone is going to flood the local zones with “local news”, and it should be those of us who can harness AI to produce lots more useful, segmentable-for-diverse-audiences content and products. We need to bring our trustworthiness to this battle, and it will be a battle. In essence, smartly used, AI is a force multiplier.

Secondly, I’ve seen the power of local people, family foundations and community foundations in rallying support, financial and spiritual, for rebuilding local news, a topic that’s driven the Knight Media Forum for years. Lookout Local is now poised to expand. In what will be our second market, I’ve witnessed a hunger for what’s been lost, as independent, community-oriented dailies have been gobbled up by financially driven interests. The hunger is there: What we must do is make communities a real offer: Support us and we’ll give you as good – or better – trusted local news that is built to last.

Lastly, I’m constantly impressed by the work of Rebuild Local News, and its leader Steve Waldman. Rebuild is endlessly pragmatic, looking for the kinds of public policy that support local news. A number of independent publishers in California have worked with Rebuild over the last year, and the collaboration is working. Better local news-supporting public policy is another leg in the local news model: multiple revenue streams, better supported by public policy.

Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges and opportunities in the local media industry today?

Doctor: In a word: Talent. Not only have the financial players eviscerated the local press, they’ve largely de-professionalized it. With Lookout Santa Cruz, I set out to prove a model that necessitates raising sufficient capital to hire and retain professionally paid editors and reporters and business/community side people who build the business with them.

We have a huge opportunity to rebuild and reinvent in front of us. But we need highly skilled, mission-oriented professionals. You don’t get them by paying the minimums, but by meeting the market. I hear so little discussion of this fact. To me, it’s as big an issue as “infrastructure,” on which the Knight Foundation and the Google News Initiative have smartly identified and funded solutions. (We recently moved to Newspack and are replacing our Piano access system with Newspack’s Reader Activation System – saving money and increasing flexibility, a great twofer.) Let’s put transformation-capable “talent” right up there as the next big industry-wide issue for publishers and funders, like Press Forward, to solve.

Q: Why are you excited to join the LMA board of directors? 

Doctor: It’s a diverse group in so many ways, and that’s what should power all of us at this point. It sounds trite, but it is what unites us – the revival of robust, trustworthy journalism across North America’s localities that is much more important than what defines us differently. At LMA, it’s not endless, useless debates about “non-profit vs. profit” or print vs. digital. It’s 2024. It’s execution time for all of us. Learning the best we can from each other, and rapidly adapting, is the mandate of the day.

Doctor: The fact is we are still probably – who is really tracking numbers, and the quality of the journalism at this point? – losing more local news origination than we are gaining. Misinformation and disinformation are feeding the hungry maw of polarization, and that weakens our whole country. We can’t quite call it a news emergency, can we, for something that’s been going on since 2008, when the local news industry began its forever recession, can we? But in too many communities, people, even the more civically involved, have become inured to the lack of substantial, trusted local news. And the impact on local democracy is deepening, but unmeasured. That’s what worries me the most.

I see all that is in progress to address this societal issue. And I wonder about two things: capital and timing. As MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey has himself laid out clearly, his group’s formation is only a start. $500 million + is a down payment. Where will the rest of the capital needed to form the kinds of robust, not-just-sustainable-but-growing local news organizations come from? And, importantly, when? Timing is an issue, and we’ll see in the year(s) ahead whether the too-long cycles of funding approval can be shortened. Time keeps me up at night.