A platform that makes sharing news stories easier was a big winner at Local Media Association’s 2025 Digital Innovation Awards, sponsored by Upland Second Street — and the director of a collaborative who brought it to market was named Innovator of the Year.

The awards were presented during an LMA livestream on May 20. In a conversation with Melanie Plenda a week later, Local Media Association learned much more about Plucky Wire, the award-winning tool that helps newsrooms share their stories for publication. Plenda is the director of the Granite State News Collaborative in New Hampshire.

“These are not random bets that she’s making. These are bets based on years and years of talking to editors and working with them,” Bassett said.

Johnny bassett / CEO, plucky works

We also heard from the platform’s developer, Johnny Bassett. He is the CEO of Plucky Works, a company founded because of this platform. Per his LinkedIn account, Bassett’s mission is to “help small newsrooms work more efficiently so they can better cover the issues their communities care about most.”

What is Plucky Wire?

Plucky Wire is a digital story-sharing platform designed specifically for local news organizations.

The platform allows participating newsrooms to upload and exchange stories, photos and other content, helping smaller organizations fill coverage gaps without adding staff. Rather than relying solely on national wire services for content, publishers can access reporting from nearby newsrooms on issues that may affect their audiences but fall outside their own reporting capacity.

According to the Plucky Works website, the Plucky Wire platform functions as a localized wire service, allowing editors to search for stories by topic, keyword and other criteria and republish them with proper attribution. 

The idea for Plucky Wire came about in 2024.

“I had been volunteering with the Granite State News Collaborative during COVID to help meet some basic needs,” Bassett said.

For example, he helped them with graphs showing daily COVID numbers, a staple of the era for newsrooms across the country.

Bassett has the tech skills to build tools for newsrooms, but his approach is that of a journalist. When he started working with Plenda, Bassett was earning a PhD in history, investigating and writing about the Philippine drug war.

He had worked with and for small newsrooms for more than three years before he and Plenda had ever thought about building their own infrastructure. Even then, Bassett said, their ideas for Plucky Wire came organically out of the work all the New Hampshire newsrooms did together.

The ideas came first, and then they learned the tech needed to build it.

The expectations initially weren’t high.

“The original scope for this was that we just needed something a little better than Google Drive and emails — because at that point, Melanie had 20,000 folders in the Google Drive,” Bassett said. 

Who is Plucky Wire for?

It’s built for newsrooms, especially small newsrooms, the ones that “don’t have time, don’t have people, and don’t have bandwidth to try to learn a new technology,” Plenda said.

Also, Plucky Wire has moved beyond New Hampshire, thanks to Plenda’s evangelizing.

“We honestly just pounded the pavement and tried to let everybody know that this thing was available and really worked. Now it’s in over 420 newsrooms across the country,” she said.

Bassett said that while Plucky Wire was initially built for two- and three-person newsrooms that “are really mission-driven, have no money and no technical expertise in-house,” larger newsrooms such as New Hampshire’s NPR and PBS and legacy newspapers have joined.

“There are loads of people who are way more tech-savvy than Melanie and I who are talking about journalism things and building really whizzy tools that do all these incredible things that Melanie and I could never build,” he said. “But there are, unfortunately, very few folks who are building for that really tiny, under-resourced, low-tech newsroom.”

Interest out-of-state has blossomed as well. Newsrooms in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Vermont and Washington are also using Plucky Wire. The New Jersey instance has been led by Montclair State University, and the Washington effort led by the Murrow Fellowship at Washington State University. The tool is soon to be free for all newsrooms, with paid options available for help with onboarding and trainings for single outlets or entire collaboratives.

How has Plucky Wire helped with newsroom sustainability?

The purpose of the Granite State News Collaborative has always been to help fill gaps in New Hampshire’s journalism ecosystem so that newsrooms can “start focusing on the stuff that they do really well and start building their audiences and building up their newsrooms,” Plenda said.

Plucky Wire adds to that mission by making newsroom workflows lean, mean and bigger in scope. It provides newsrooms:

• More content for their websites. 

• More amplification for their own stories.

• More time for deeper enterprise and investigative stories.

Bassett added:

“The biggest selling point for non-profit newsrooms is that we automatically track all views and downloads of the stories they share, which is helpful for funding impact reports.

Day-to-day, editors also appreciate that this tracking lets us send automated correction alerts, so they know that if they ever download a story from us, they’re guaranteed to always know about reporting changes.

Finally, outlets appreciate that our system works equally well for digital AND print, letting stories travel easily between CMSes. We want the tiny print weeklies to have access to the same editorial tools enjoyed by better-funded digital outlets.”

It also saves newsrooms money.

“Story sharing is a way to help fill in those gaps to buy yourself time to figure out exactly which original journalism you ought to be focusing on so that you can start rebuilding,” Bassett said.

It’s also making room for fundraising innovation.

Newsrooms that use Plucky Wire have access to collective fundraising through the Community News Fund from Granite State News Collective. In 2025, they raised $90,000 in donations and matches — helping to create a shared identity among the newsrooms.

Lessons for other newsrooms

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the creation of Plucky Wire is the embrace of experimentation.

“I’m really heartened to see that there are still people making weird small experiments to try things because I do not think that we have solved the problems that are facing the industry,” Bassett said.

And when those experiments hit, having a leader like Melanie Plenda to get newsrooms on board is huge.

“These are not random bets that she’s making. These are bets based on years and years of talking to editors and working with them,” Bassett said. “And I hope that, in the future, more people come to Melanie to bounce these ‘wacko’ ideas off of her because we need a stronger ecosystem of people making these small bets, trying different things that are actually innovative and focusing on editorial so that we can generate more original journalism, not just squeezing the stone of SEO or email marketing. We need more original journalism getting produced, and that’s what Melanie thinks about a lot.”

The 2025 Digital Innovation Awards Innovator of the Year said she wants to encourage newsrooms to work together.

“I think that anybody who hears this and is skeptical about collaboration absolutely should be, but also should know: it’s not as hard as you think,” Plenda said. “And it’s absolutely possible. You don’t actually need a Melanie. You can actually make a go of it.”

Beyond just helping individual newsrooms, she said collaboration can support local news overall.

“I hope more people try because it absolutely is a big, big piece of the puzzle for how we keep local news strong and healthy and going.”