Dan Kennedy

Welcome to What Works, a podcast about the future of local news, coming to you from Northeastern University School of Journalism and the Center of Transformative Media.

I'm Dan Kennedy.

I'm flying solo this week because my co-host, Ellen Clegg, is feeling under the weather.

But she'll be editing this episode, and she will be back on our next podcast.

Margaret, six or seven years ago, you took a detour from your work as a high-profile critic of national news outlets in order to write a book about the local news crisis called Ghosting the News.

Could you give our listeners an overview of what you found at that time?

Thanks, Dan.

I was very interested in this subject because even though I have spent the last 10 years in national outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post and now the Guardian and now Substack, I spent most of my career at my hometown newspaper, the Buffalo News.

[laughs]

However, I haven't yet asked friends for favors.

I've announced it on our podcast.

I've announced it on our Substack, but I haven't yet really, really leaned into to my friends who are in the media.

Well, guess which friend in the media, without me asking, wrote a beautiful story about the book.

Guess who? Donnie Meacham.

You're the best, Donnie.

Okay, let's jump into the show.

He found her in a very vulnerable state, and now what we know about her death is, well, there's been obviously an apparent overdose is what has been reported, and there was Narcan distributed.

What's very interesting, I wanna point, highlight a report that my colleague Dana Kennedy did for the Daily Mail exclusively.

She spoke to Leslie Vogel, Hayden Panettiere's mother, who has had conversations with the police, who have informed her about what Brian has also told the police about what happened before Zach got there to the apartment.

Now, this is very interesting, Nancy.