Knight Winners Focus on Local, Government Data

By: Justin Ellis | Nieman Journalism Lab

Sharing news stories wasn’t invented with the retweet button. Thanks to funding from the Knight Foundation, Tom McDonald will be expanding his news-sharing network across rural independent newspapers in New Mexico — in print.

It’s a small-batch wire service for mostly weekly newspapers, one that carries news on similarly sized communities from all across New Mexico. These are the papers you may find exclusively in city halls, restaurants, gas stations, and grocery stores. “I’ve got newspapers that don’t have functional websites — they’re small, rural, newspapers, independently-owned,” McDonald said.