In case you haven’t heard, local news is in trouble. Since 2005, about 2,200 local newspapers have closed. You might even know someone who worked at a newspaper owned by Gannett (like USA Today or the Detroit Free Press), and that person probably does not work at that newspaper anymore because a private equity group acquired Gannett and gutted it. This is all very bad news for democracy, but there are also some interesting projects all over to do local news in a different way — nonprofits like the Baltimore Banner, for example, run by my former colleague Kimi Yoshino.
When we first moved to Beacon, N.Y., I was really interested in finding out more about our adopted home and the people who lived there, but in more depth than the stories about taxes and roads and funding that appeared in our local newspaper. No shade to those stories, they’re important too, but I wanted to know who lived in our city and what they did all day and what drove them. I wanted to connect with them too.
I stumbled across a podcast called Beaconites! that helped me connect in a new way that I think could be an interesting experiment in local news. Beaconites! essentially interviews one Beacon resident every episode for about 30 minutes, finding out about their backstory, what they do all day, what brought them to Beacon, and what they think about all of this. It’s kind of like a feature profile that would run in a newspaper or magazine, but you can listen to it while you’re hiking the beautiful mountains of Beacon, which is what I do. I heard an interview with a member of the historical society about the Revolutionary War cannons on Mt. Beacon as I was hiking there, and heard from the captain of Pete Seeger’s wooden ship about he and Pete rowing down the Hudson as I drove by the dock. It gave me a really sense of place and connection to where I lived, which I think can be really hard to get today, especially if you work from home or in an office faraway.
I contacted Zach Rodgers, who conceived of and runs Beaconites!, to express my admiration, we got coffee, and he invited me to host an episode. Which I now have. I interviewed Håkan Mårtensson, a Swedish chef who runs Håkan, a really great chocolate shop and bakery and gathering place in Beacon. He’s also the dad of one of Benjy’s daycare classmates, and a really interesting guy. Here’s the link to the episode, you can get it on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts:
Chocolatier Håkan Mårtensson (Interviewed by Alana Semuels)
Outside of podcastland, I forgot to publish a Substack I meant to run in February apparently didn’t publish. (It seems like if you press the ‘Send to everyone now’ button, that should be it, but apparently not, thanks Substack. I’ve also been working on a big project at TIME that will hopefully publish soon, and a few other things, including a story about there are no homes to buy in the housing market today, and about whether American consumers are less price sensitive than they used to be.
Why There Are No Homes To Buy In the U.S. in Many Metro Areas
Maybe Americans Don’t Mind High Prices Anymore
The top of the unpublished Substack:
Maybe it’s just because in 2020 I lived in San Francisco, epicenter of rich tech companies, but for a while there, companies were being really nice to their employees. Yes, they had an underlying motive — they were really worried their workers would quit or drown of despair or move to a beach in Thailand. Yes, they were making money hand over fist at the time. But they were also sending employees gift baskets of chocolate and coffee, launching programs to hire more diverse employees, and even pushing company-wide days off so that people could take a break. That is all over, as I wrote in a recent story.
No More Mr. Nice Boss: Flexible Employers Were a Pandemic Blip
This is related to my piece about how return to office mandates are a disaster for working parents, but it goes deeper than just RTO mandates. Employers are pushing workers back to grueling hours, jettisoning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and switching over to ‘unlimited’ vacation time, which is actually a bad system for employees.
They also seem to care a lot less about becoming more equal and empathetic places, which was something they seemed to talk about a lot in 2020 in the wake of the death of George Floyd. One of the most depressing anecdotes I found was a Black woman who was running a DEI consulting firm during the pandemic. It was thriving until recently—one company, in ending her contract, said they were going to do DEI internally going forward, and that it would be run by a white person with no experience in the field. You can read more in my story, but suffice it to say that all the people who predicted that a new way of working would emerge from the pandemic now seem a little too optimistic. (I wrote about those people in October 2020: It’s Time To Radically Rethink How We Work.) We saw utopia and we chose the cubicle.