Team of former Wall Street Journal employees help to support smaller news organizations in U.S.

Photo by Scott Graham, Unsplash

A team of former Wall Street Journal employees is helping “small legacy and start-up news organizations around the country whose news teams have been depleted by shrinking revenue and cutbacks,” reports Jeff Rowe in the Connecting newsletter, which is distributed to many former and current Associated Press employees, and other journalists.

According to Rowe’s report: “Dubbed Pro News Coaches (PNC), the WSJ alums currently are at work in eight small news organizations scattered around the nation. The Journal alums typically help young reporters and their editors plan stories, conceive and manage projects, and edit. Journal alums are coaching in, among other places, Olney, Texas, Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and Signal Hill, California.”

“PNC offers its initial coaching services free but intends to segue into collecting modest fees,” Rowe reports. “PNC is based in New York but has no connection with The Wall Street Journal or its parent News Corp. Most of the coaching is done via Zoom, phone calls or email . . . .”

The support comes at a time when the number of journalists in U.S. newsrooms is in sharp decline. According to the 2023 State of Local News Report by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, “Newspapers are continuing to vanish at an average rate of more than two a week. Since 2005, the country has lost almost 2,900 newspapers, including more than 130 confirmed closings or mergers over the past year. All but about 100 were weeklies, which are often the sole provider of local news in small and mid-sized communities.”