Today we're talking with Alison Bethel, chief content officer and editor-in-chief for State Affairs. State Affairs is a digital-first media company that is focused on covering state governments throughout the country.

She was vice president of corps excellence at Report for America. She was also executive director of the Society of Professional Journalists, where she was only the second woman and the first person of color to serve in that capacity in 110 years.

Dan has a Quick Take on a harrowing situation in Grand Junction, Colorado. A young Colorado television reporter was reportedly chased by a taxi driver who then attempted to choke him. The driver also reportedly yelled “This is Trump’s America now!”

Ellen has a Quick Take on an app called WatchDuty that is providing lifesaving information to people in Los Angeles who are threatened by wildfires.

Dan and Ellen talk with Bill and Linda Forry, co-publishers of the award-winning Reporter Newspapers in Boston. Bill serves as editor, and Linda focuses on business development and strategic partnerships.

The Reporter Newspapers include the weekly Dorchester Reporter as well as Boston Irish and BostonHaitian.com. The publications and their websites are part of a media business owned and operated by the Forry family since 1973.

The Forrys were recently in the news. The Reporter is one of 205 news organizations in the U.S. to win an inaugural Press Forward grant to expand coverage of Boston’s underserved communities. Dan has a Quick Take on public radio. Put bluntly, public radio is in trouble, and not just NPR, which may be our leading source of reliable free news, but also public radio stations across the country. An important recent essay in Nieman Reports argues that the way forward for public radio stations may be to double down on local news.

Ellen's Quick Take is on the NiemanLab predictions for the media industry in 2025. Every year, NiemanLab asks a select group of people what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Sam Mintz, the editor of Brookline.News, a digital outlet Ellen helped launch, is one of the prognosticators.

Ellen and Dan talk with Jeffrey Schwaner, executive editor of Cardinal News, a nonprofit digital news outlet covering Southwest Virginia. It also covers something called Southside Virginia, which is an area south of the James River, near Richmond. Since we're taping this in Boston, we'll ask him to explain their coverage area in more detail.

Jeff joined Cardinal News in September after nine years as a storytelling and watchdog coach — including five years as editor — of Gannett’s two Virginia newsrooms, the News Leader in Staunton and The Progress-Index in Petersburg.

Dan has a Quick Take that explores a key question: Does a lack of local news correlate with support for Donald Trump? A new study by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School finds that it does, although the writers caution that correlation is not causation.

Ellen's Quick Take is on a mysterious website that popped up in Oregon after a 147-year-old paper called the Ashland Tidings folded. Called the Daily Tidings, it recently published story after story by a reporter named Joe Minihane, who supposedly skiied, hiked and ate his way through Southern Oregon. Except Minihane is based in the UK and doesn't know how his byline got hijacked. The stories are made up, perhaps by AI.