Media Nation

By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Book excerpt: How Sahan Journal covers Minnesota’s immigrant communities

Photo (cc) 2019 by Ellen Clegg

We’re thrilled to let you know that Nieman Lab has published an excerpt from “What Works in Community News” based on Ellen Clegg’s reporting from Minneapolis on Sahan Journal, a nonprofit digital project that covers the state’s burgeoning immigrant communities. Thanks to Nieman Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen for her help in getting our work out before a wider audience.

Read the excerpt at Nieman Lab.

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In Colorado, a used press will help preserve print papers

Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy

Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins reports that the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that works to keep newspapers alive and out of the hands of corporate chain owners, has purchased a used printing press that will serve the two dozen papers it owns in the Denver suburbs as well as papers owned by other publishers. The trust bought those papers, known collectively as Colorado Community Media, back in 2021.

Ellen Clegg and I interviewed National Trust CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro and CCM publisher Linda Shapley for our book, “What Works in Community News.” They have both appeared on our podcast as well. When I met Shapley in her newsroom in the fall of 2021, she was in the midst of trying to pivot her papers to digital — but she acknowledged that print remained an important part of the mix for readers and, especially, for advertisers.

“I totally get that there are advertisers out there who don’t necessarily see digital as a way forward,” Shapley said. “But they recognize the fact that this is going to be how people find you. So I don’t see them as playing against each other but as something that can work in tandem.”

Now those papers — as well as papers owned by other publishers who’ve been hurt by the disappearance of Colorado’s printing presses — can continue to be offered in print as well as online.

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Gannett is doing business with a notorious purveyor of pink slime

Photo (cc) 2023 by Ruth Hartnup.

Just when Gannett was making some good news for itself by going on something of a modest hiring spree, splat! Investigative reporter Steven Monacelli has found that our largest newspaper chain, with about 200 daily newspapers, is working with Advantage Informatics, a well-known purveyor of so-called pink slime news sites.

Pink slime is the name given to websites that masquerade as legitimate local news projects but that are actually produced from distant locales. The meaning has morphed over the years. What I call Pink Slime 1.0 arose about a dozen years ago in the form of sites whose writers appeared to be based in local communities but were actually some distance away — in some cases, as far away as the Philippines. Pink Slime 2.0 has an ideological cast, mainly but not exclusively on the right. Pink Slime 3.0 adds artificial intelligence to the mix.

What most of these sites have in common is Brian Timpone, a Chicago-based conservative businessperson who is the founder of something called Metric Media, a network of some 1,200 right-wing sites. These projects tend to be pretty inept; my favorite covers the imaginary community of North Boston.

The Gannett-Timpone connection was exposed last week in a major report for Nieman Lab written by Monacelli on Advantage Informatics, a Timpone venture that produces advertorial content. Monacelli found that, in years past, newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle (owned by Hearst since 1987) and The San Diego Union-Tribune (recently acquired by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital) have taken advantage of Timpone’s services. (The Chronicle told Monacelli that it has no record of such a  relationship.) Gannett is the one newspaper company he found that has a current, ongoing relationship with Advantage. He writes:

A Gannett spokesperson told me that the company works with Advantage Informatics on “advertorial” content. When asked about Advantage Informatics’ relationship with the broader Metric Media network, the spokesperson said, “Ethics and our values are priority for us.”

Monacelli has written quite a tale that includes a Tennessee journalism professor who used to work for Advantage and Advantage’s ambition to offer “dedicated beat reporting” of local sports, governmental meetings and “keeping a close eye” on statehouses and Congress.

On the one hand, I’m not sure it’s that big a deal who produces advertorial content. On the other, the fact is that Gannett is working with the pink slimiest company in the country. Despite Gannett’s recent good news on the hiring front, it would hardly be surprising if company executives played around with having Advantage try its hand at community coverage as well. After all, it was just a few months ago that Gannett was caught using AI to write local sports stories, to hilarious effect.

A final note: If you’d like to learn more about pink slime, Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Pri Bengani, an expert based at Columbia University who’s quoted in Monacelli’s article, on the “What Works” podcast last fall.

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A Muzzle to a CT police department that kept a murder probe under wraps

Call it a slow-breaking homicide.

In New Britain, Connecticut, a woman whose obituary said she had died on March 1 was revealed more than a week later to have been the victim of a possible murder. The woman, 71-year-old Lauren “Laurie” Gualano, a retired educator, died from blunt trauma to her “head, neck, torso and extremities, with neck compression,” Hearst Connecticut reporter Christine Dempsey wrote on March 11, citing the state medical examiner’s office, which said it was treating Gualano’s death as a homicide.

Dempsey also said on Twitter/X: “This is probably the first time in my career that a police department did not release any information about a homicide. Not even where it happened, or when.” According to her story:

New Britain police did not release any information about the homicide and did not return phone or emailed messages Monday, and in a written response to a call and text message Monday morning, [Rachel] Zaniewski [a spokeswoman for the mayor] said, “this situation is still being actively investigated, so unfortunately, I don’t have any additional updates on my end at this point.”

The city has a policy of directing the media to the mayor’s office, instead of the police or fire departments, for information about public safety matters.

This morning, Hearst reported that Gualano’s son, Nicholas Legienza, 39, was in custody and was under investigation for his possible involvement.

Under public records laws in most states, including Connecticut, the police are not required to release detailed information about a crime if that would impede their investigation. But sitting on a possible murder for more than a week and not confirming it even after the state medical examiner called the death a homicide is a violation of the public trust. For that, the New Britain Police Department has earned a New England Muzzle Award.

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A couple of book notes

A couple of notes about our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Larry Gennari has a review in the Boston Business Journal, writing: “Clegg and Kennedy present an impressive number of media business startup models in such places as California, Iowa, New Jersey, Minnesota and Tennessee, all centered on quality local news, which they argue enhances community, transparency and, ultimately, self-governance.”

And Dorothy Bergin, The Bedford Citizen’s 90-something copy editor, who we interviewed for the book, has featured it in her regular column, “Dot’s Reading Room.” She writes: “As the authors say, they are optimistic about the future of hyperlocal journalism. This is the spirit that has kept and still keeps The Bedford Citizen’s paid employees and volunteers from writers and reporters on the job!”

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How two Northeastern journalism professors are reinventing local TV news

Thanks to everyone who attended our Northeastern University conference Friday on “What Works: The Future of Local News.” We’ll be posting more in the days ahead, but we wanted to begin by sharing some information from Professors Mike Beaudet and John Wihbey on the Reinventing Local TV News Project. They weren’t able to show videos, so we’re sharing them here.

Above is their “Meet the Fellows!” video, an introduction to the content producers for the third phase of their project. And here’s a piece that was published by Storybench, our School of Journalism digital publication covering media innovation. It links to links the first three underreported stories produced by project fellows in New York, Chicago and Boston.

The project’s video library is available for your perusal as well. And there are written reports for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

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The proposed TikTok ban: Justified? Or a bad move based on ‘weird, xenophobic fear’?

I’m conflicted on whether it’s a good idea for the U.S. to ban TikTok unless the Chinese government agrees to sell it. On the one hand, there are important First Amendment principles at stake. On the other, it doesn’t strike me that we’re required to allow China to direct propaganda at American users lest we somehow fall short in our dedication to freedom of expression.

That said, Mike Masnick of TechDirt has weighed in with a hot-blooded commentary arguing that banning TikTok would be a grotesquely wrong move. Here’s the heart of it:

The US has dealt with foreign propaganda for ages. And we don’t ban it. Part of free speech is that you have to deal with the fact that nonsense propaganda and disinformation exists. There are ways to deal with it and respond to it that don’t involve banning speech. It’s astounding to me how quickly people give up their principles out of a weird, xenophobic fear that somehow China has magic pixie dust hidden within TikTok to turn Americans’ brains to mush.

I’m sympathetic to Masnick’s argument and have yet to be convinced that the ban is a good idea. And I’m definitely not going to be convinced because House members have been shown secret information that the rest of us aren’t privvy to.

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Reminder: Our conference on the future of local news is tomorrow

A final reminder about our conference on the future of local news — a free, all-day event that will be held tomorrow (March 15) at Northeastern University. We’ll have sessions on topics ranging from data visualization to university-community partnerships, as well as a book talk by Ellen Clegg and me. We hope you can attend. Registration and more information is online here.

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A smackdown over programmatic ads and why reader revenue is crucial

We are having a smackdown over an unlikely topic — programmatic ads, those low-quality ads fed to websites by a third party, nearly always Google.

At one time they were fairly lucrative and supported news organizations like The Huffington Post. But their value diminished over time. Indeed, it seemed anachronistic when The Messenger launched last year with a pretty substantial newsroom, offering free access in the hopes that it would attract a mass audience and thrive on programmatic. Its quick demise was as predictable as it was depressing.

Anyway, last week Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of the political news site Talking Points Memo, wrote a post explaining what had happened to programmatic ads over the years. He included a chart (above) showing that revenue from such ads had collapsed at TPM, from nearly $1.7 million in 2016 to just $75,000 in 2023. “As I think is pretty clear, if this is your business, you’re dead,” he wrote. “You don’t have a business.” He added that TPM had successfully pivoted to reader revenue, which was how his project had survived the programmatic meltdown.

Enter Ben Smith, the co-founder of Semafor. Smith called Marshall’s numbers “a dramatic oversimplification,” arguing that the reason TPM’s programmatic ad revenues had fallen so much was that Marshall had put much of his content behind a paywall — and even charged a higher rate for an ad-free experience, meaning that of course ad revenues were going to drop significantly. “The drop in ad revenue is a feature, not a bug, of that strategy,” Smith wrote. “Meanwhile programmatic ad rates, for instance, have actually increased — modestly — over the period that Marshall’s chart covers.”

Smith also quoted Foster Kamer, the editor-in-chief of Futurism, as calling Marshall’s post “sensationalist bs.”

Well, now! I’ve been waiting to write until Marshall responded, and on Tuesday he did. Essentially his counter-argument is that his programmatic revenues didn’t drop because of TPM’s paywall; rather, he implemented a paywall because programming revenues were dropping. He writes:

[W]e didn’t just decide this was money we didn’t need anymore. The changes we made that played a direct role in the decline were entirely in reaction to reductions in potential revenue which we knew we couldn’t sustain. While we were making those changes we still fought for every dollar we could get out of the rapidly diminishing programmatic advertising pie. The results are what you see in that chart, which not surprisingly got a lot of people’s attention.

Now, there’s no way of knowing exactly how much programmatic revenue TPM would be earning if Marshall had left the site wide open and had tried to get as much money as possible from such ads. But he guesstimated that it might be about a third of what TPM was getting in 2016 — in other words, maybe around $570,000, a significant decline from $1.7 million. “Needless to say,” Marshall adds, “no company can withstand a 2/3rds drop in a primary revenue stream.”

Noting that Kamer and Futurism really are making a go of it with programmatic, Marshall points out that certain categories such as tech and science are still able to generate decent revenues from Google ads. “There are no industry sectors for cultural polarization and societal decay, where we operate,” Marshall writes. “They also don’t face the negative premium that news publishers — in the sense of news about daily events and politics — face in a polarized age.”

My own take on all this is that Marshall’s initial post was only a little bit deceptive, and only for readers who weren’t paying attention. He laid out his paywall strategy quite clearly. It’s obvious that if your response to the cratering of programmatic is to start charging for your journalism, then your programmatic revenue is going to drop even more quickly than it otherwise would.

This is relevant, too, to local news. There’s a reason that some 2,900 newspapers have closed since 2005, and that reason is the ad revenues publishers were hoping for to support what were initially free websites never materialized. For-profit local news has become extraordinarily difficult. A few large regional newspapers, like The Boston Globe and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, have achieved profitability through digital subscriptions, but that strategy has proven to be a pretty much a non-starter at smaller outlets. That’s why we’re seeing a major shift to nonprofit for local news.

As Marshall puts it, “who are we trying to kid here? Does anyone think that advertising — direct or programmatic — still sustains digital news organizations, especially independent ones? Really? I think the almost weekly lists of bankrupt and shuttered news outlets tells the story pretty clearly.”

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Startup news leaders tell journalism students how to get that first job

Maya McFadden of the New Haven Independent interviews Victor Joshua, founder of the youth basketball program Respect Hoops. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

I’ll be part of a panel tomorrow discussing job opportunities for new and recent journalism graduates. My role will be to talk about opportunities at the rising generation of local and regional news startups. I am not quite sure what to tell them, but more than anything I want them to know that they need to be resourceful.

About a dozen years ago, Thomas MacMillan told me how he got hired at the New Haven Independent, one of the original nonprofit digital-only local news sites. He was working at a non-journalism job and started doing some interning. He asked the editor, Paul Bass, how he could turn that into a staff job, and Bass’ unconventional answer was that MacMillan should write a grant to fund his position. MacMillan did it, got hired and, in my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” talked about the rewards.

“It’s really fun for me to feel like we’re on a rising star rather than a sinking ship,” MacMillan said. “There’s just something exciting about feeling like you’re working on the new paradigm, where you can experiment and try different things and people will occasionally take notice of what you’re doing.”

What I will tell students is that jobs at these startups are few and far between, but if you can land one, they come with great mentoring and, in some cases, surprisingly good pay. From my conversations with people, I’ve found that nonprofit boards and independent operators take their obligation to provide a living wage and benefits seriously. At the very least, journalists at these organizations are often making more than they would at a chain-owned newspaper.

Students can’t just expect jobs to open up, because that doesn’t happen all that often. Identify two, three or five that you’d like to work at. Get in touch and stay in touch. Cover some news for them — not for free, of course, but in most cases they’re not going to hire someone they don’t have a prior relationship with.

To prepare for the panel, I contacted an array of startup news folks to see what advice they would give to students. I present their lightly edited answers in full.

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