This article was originally published by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and is republished here with permission.
Few people have as much experience in political media as Chuck Todd, who hosted NBC’s public affairs program “Meet the Press” for nine years and worked at the network for almost two decades.
He stepped down as anchor of “Meet the Press” in 2023 following a change in management at NBC News and left the network earlier this year. In 2024, he’d criticized NBC on the air for hiring former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor. The network soon backtracked on the hire.
He’s now the host of “The Chuck ToddCast,” and he’s turned much of his energy toward addressing America’s local news crisis and the collapse of its business model.
His idea: Local youth and high school sports could help resurrect the local news ecosystem.
Medill’s Local News Initiative spoke with Todd last week about why he’s made this a priority of his and how he’s seen the landscape shift through his time covering politics.
Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Eric Rynston-Lobel: When you first started in politics and media, what do you remember the local news ecosystem looking like?
Chuck Todd: I started professionally in the world of media in 1992. Started working for a publication called The Hotline. What it was was a compendium, or an aggregation — we weren’t using that word then. We were locally sourced political information written for a professional audience here in Washington. I was probably as big of a consumer of local news as anybody in D.C. We tried to get our hands on every Sunday paper we could get, even if it was a day late.
Fast forward to today, if you’re trying to figure out who’s running in a swing congressional seat in Kansas, you might be better off subscribing to Cook Political Report or one of the insider publications in D.C. because there’s nobody who’s a beat reporter for the third congressional district in Kansas anymore. There was a time where there were probably 50 people I would’ve rattled off and said, “Oh, that guy’s the expert in politics in Iowa, in South Carolina.”
Rynston-Lobel: As you’ve seen this infrastructure crumble, what impact have you seen it have on the way politics gets covered as well as the issues people care about and how they’re interacting with their government?
Todd: If the conversation is, “Do you feel like you know what’s going on in your community?” or when you ask people, “How do you find out?” What you end up finding out is, “Well, I got a Facebook group,” or, “There’s a listserv.” “I follow this.” If you want to know what’s happening in your community, we’ve made it where people have to find out on their own. We don’t work the other way. It doesn’t get pushed to them.
The first three hires I would make starting a local news organization would be a lead high school sports reporter, a micro weather forecaster and a consumer/food reporter, somebody who every day lets you know where stuff was cheaper — groceries, restaurants to take your kids. The newspaper was such an elegant delivery system. It had news for news junkies; that’s nice. But it was also the place where you went for commerce, to buy and sell stuff, to find a job, to follow your favorite sports team, maybe to do some puzzles, maybe to entertain yourself. So how do you recreate that experience in this more modern, digital era?
Rynston-Lobel: I want to dive more into this local sports idea. From what I’m understanding, your argument is basically that you see local high school and youth sports as the way to get people to build up that trust, and through that, then you can start delivering other types of information that’s going on beyond sports?
Todd: I view it as the most sustainable stream. I think the nonprofit model has a lot of limitations to it, including the fact that to some people, “nonprofit” is code for “leans left” if you’re not careful. With the whole NIL thing that’s happening in college sports, you have the expansion of opportunities in sports to pay for college, so what’s that going to mean? We’re about to see an explosion in youth sports participation. I have a friend of mine whose kid is getting NIL money for beach volleyball. These universities are all expanding their bandwidth of what sports they want to specialize in. Look at softball: Texas Tech spent $1 million to get the best pitcher (NiJaree Canady), and it allowed them to get to the Women’s College World Series, and they ended up having their best attendance they’ve ever had for softball in Lubbock, Texas. That is going to trickle down.
Think about the demographic of the parents of a kid in youth sports. They’re all under the age of 45, which is a demographic that nobody in the news business has right now. That’s why I think it’s a lucrative base to start from. Too many local news start-ups start with trying to get the news junkies to pay for subscriptions to pay for it, but I think you’re a closed audience there. That instead, you start with the widest-possible pool of people to begin with and also are desirable for advertisers so you can have an ad-based system.
Rynston-Lobel: So what are you envisioning?
Todd: I don’t want news behind a paywall. I think a paywall is for tiers, but the basics should be available to everybody. And then if you want more of something, you pay a little bit extra for that.
My vision is that the local news organization, they hold all the rights for all the youth sports. So if you can’t make it to your kid’s game, you’re watching the livestream on the local news site. They are your conduit.
One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve been doing my own fact-finding to see what publishers are needing, what’s missing out there and all that stuff is a lot of local businesses hate the Google ad network, but there’s really no other alternative. I think if you can build a locally-sourced ad network that doesn’t feel like you’re just having some algorithms decide where your ad shows up, that there’s also opportunity there. But the basic premise is that local sports and youth sports, if you could get that audience, that’s the better audience. It’s a better glue for a community. The red families and the blue families all want to see their kids play. It’s a safe space for advertisers.
Rynston-Lobel: What else have you found as you’ve done more research into this idea?
Todd: If you can find a way to fund journalism indirectly, then maybe you will also do what’s missing in local news right now, which is, the coverage that accidentally informs people who are not looking to be informed. That’s been the missing piece.
There’s a great study that a couple of academics did about 20 years ago. There’s always been this correlation between newspaper delivery to your house and voting. So these academics wanted to see if being forced to have a paper delivered to your house, would that increase the likelihood you would vote in the next local election? And sure enough, it did. Just the act of someone taking that paper off their doorstep and throwing it away, putting it in the recycle bin at least informed them when the election was. There were always members of the community that never intended to read the top stories in the paper, but because they went to the paper looking for something else, they accidentally got informed.
We’ve lost that, and I think the reason why there’s this complete disconnect sometimes between what people know or don’t know is that we’ve lost that one thing that we all looked at; we were all looking at the same headline. The people that didn’t want to be informed got informed of something, too. Now, if you don’t want to be informed, it’s a lot easier to stay away. To me, it’s on the local news organization to provide enough potential ways to get that person to consume something you produce.
If I were The Texas Tribune, I’d hire the best hunting columnist in America and only have them do reviews of new hunting rifles, how to build a better duck blind. What’re you going to do? You’re going to attract that audience that normally doesn’t interact with your news, and maybe over time, that audience, they trust that, “Oh, they hired this person, I trust this person, I really like their advice on what to purchase to make my hunting experience better. Maybe I’ll read their news stories too.” That’s the whole thesis on why local sports is a tentpole.”
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