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Two celebrated hyperlocals in N.J. will merge; plus, a 2009 visit with Baristanet’s founder

Rooster mural in Montclair, N.J. Photo (cc) 2016 by Rob DiCaterino.

If you felt some distant rumblings coming from the general direction of New Jersey a few days ago, I’m here to tell you why. A pioneering local blog in that state, Baristanet, will merge with a six-year-old community news organization, Montclair Local. Liz George, the editor and publisher of Baristanet, will served as publisher of the combined outlet.

This is a huge development in the world of hyperlocal news. I was especially struck by the news that the Local will drop its print edition, which had been a key part of its business strategy. The Local’s digital content is free, but the print weekly has served as an extra goodie for donors. Last year, when I was in Montclair to report on the media ecosystem in New Jersey, ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg, who serves on the Local’s governing board, joked that the print edition was the Local’s “tote bag.”

Now that will be going away, with the final print edition coming out this Thursday. According to the announcement, published in both the Local and Baristanet: “Putting out a print edition consumed more than 40 percent of the Local’s revenue from donors and advertisers, and trustees concluded it was better to spend the Local’s funds to generate more stories.”

The two outlets will continue separately through the summer while George works on a new website that will bring together both sites, according to the announcement. Baristanet was a for-profit, but the new, expanded Local will continue to be a nonprofit.

The spring of 2022 was actually my second visit to report on local news in Montclair. I also paid a visit in 2009 to meet with Debbie Galant, who founded Baristanet in 2004 and who at that time was regarded as a leader in DIY local journalism. George joined Baristanet several months after the founding. I wrote about Baristanet in my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” and I’m including an excerpt below.


Baristanet, founded in May 2004, was among the first successful hyperlocal sites. It was an inspiration for Paul Bass, who keeps a frisbee from a Baristanet anniversary party on the wall of his office at the New Haven Independent. Centered in the New York City suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, Baristanet in 2011 covered seven communities — six of which had their own Patch sites. AOL reportedly chooses communities based on an algorithm comprising 59 factors, including advertising potential, voter turnout and household income. Clearly the affluent, well-educated suburbs served by Baristanet were exactly what AOL was looking for.

Despite the threat posed by Patch, Baristanet continued to do well, according to Galant. When I interviewed her in 2009, she told me that revenues for the site were between $100,000 and $200,000 per year. Two years later, she said revenues were “a bit higher than $200,000, but our expenses have gone way higher too.” She did not specify what those expenses were. Unlike Howard Owens at The Batavian, Galant and her business partner, Liz George, had always treated Baristanet as a sideline, doing much of the work themselves but hiring part-time editors and designers as needed to accommodate their other projects — which, in Galant’s case, includes having written several published novels.

I met Galant on a rainy day in June 2009 at a Panera — a then new advertiser — just outside Montclair’s downtown. At the time, it was covering only three communities, and had just recently incorporated a parenting site that was renamed Barista Kids. Galant said she got the inspiration for starting Baristanet after losing her freelance position as a local columnist for The New York Times and then meeting Jeff Jarvis, an online-news expert and the author of the blog BuzzMachine. “He was talking a mile a minute about this idea of hyperlocal blogging and hyperlocal journalism. And the idea just really clicked in my head,” Galant said. “I thought it would be a fun thing to do. I’d been freelancing for years and years, and I saw that you could be vulnerable as a freelancer. I’d rather be a publisher.” The name of the site was based on the idea of “a virtual coffee shop,” she said, explaining, “In the old days you used to go to your bartender and talk to your bartender. These days, everybody’s at the coffeeshop, so you talk to your barista.”

The tone of Baristanet is conversational, fun and a bit snarky, and Galant is adept at involving readers. For instance, during an outbreak of swine flu just a few days before our meeting, she quoted from a news release issued by the Montclair public schools promising that students would not be punished if they were absent because of illness. “Does the usual policy for staying home sick from school include reprisals and punishment?” Galant asked. The brief item attracted 37 comments. “A traditional journalist would have taken the same tip, would have gone to the schools, interviewed the superintendent, interviewed the high school principal, and attempted somehow to find a whole bunch of representative parents and students to get their input,” she told me. “But they wouldn’t have actually gotten it nearly as efficiently or with as widespread a response from parents as from just having put it on the website.”

Baristanet is tracked by Quantcast, which found that the site attracted between 27,000 and 35,000 unique visitors a month for the first half of 2011. Galant told me her internal count was about double that, between 50,000 and 70,000 uniques per month.

As with The Batavian and its competition, The Daily News of Batavia, Baristanet could not compete head-to-head with the weekly Montclair Times or other newspapers in its seven communities, even though Galant said she had sometimes beaten the Times on breaking news. Times editor Mark Porter told me he had 12 full-time and one part-time editorial employees working for him, a startlingly high number for a weekly newspaper. Porter was dismissive of his online competition, saying, “Baristanet’s skill is getting press releases and people throughout the community who email or text-message breaking news to people who sit in front of computers.” Despite his rather caustic assessment of the competition, there was no doubting his dedication or sincerity as he described the hours he and his staff put in and the local meetings and events they covered. [Note: The Montclair Times today is part of the Gannett chain. When I visited Montclair last year, the Times appeared to be slightly more robust than the hollowed-out remains of Gannett’s weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts, though it was a shadow of the paper that Porter had presided over.]

When I asked Galant in 2009 how long she wanted to keep doing Baristanet, she replied, “I really don’t know.” She surprised me by saying that she wished The Star-Ledger’s parent company, New Jersey Media, had tried to acquire Baristanet before its own business problems became so acute that they precluded such a move. “I think that’s every startup business’s dream — somebody coming in and offering a whole big pot of money,” she said. “It would have made tremendous sense. Of course, no newspapers have any money anymore, so that’s not going to happen.” Two years later, when I asked about her battle with Patch, she replied, “Competition is no fun, but we’re hanging in there.” (In the summer of 2012 Galant left Baristanet in order to accept a position at Montclair State University, with Liz George continuing as the editor.)

More: Here are a couple of video interviews I conducted with Galant and Porter all those years ago.

A conversation about the local news crisis in a time of polarization

I’d like to let you know about a special program coming up on the crisis in community journalism. Titled “The Decline of Local News and the Rise of Polarization,” the event is part of the Masterman Speaker Series and the Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk Law School. It will be held next Thursday, Sept. 29, at 5 p.m. in Sargent Hall, 120 Tremont St., in the Blue Sky Lounge on the fifth floor.

I’ll be moderating, and I promise to inject some optimism into the proceedings. We’ve got a great panel:

  • Joshua Darr, associate professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Darr earlier this year on the “What Works” podcast about his research into polarization and local opinion.
  • Renée Loth, an opinion columnist for The Boston Globe and a former editorial-page editor of the Globe.She is currently an adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
  • Charles St. Amand, practioner in residence in Suffolk’s communication and journalism department and a 31-year veteran of community journalism, most recently as editor of the Sentinel & Enterprise in Fitchburg.

The program is free, but you do need to register. Just click here.

Ethan Zuckerman on truth, trust and what it means for journalism

Ethan Zuckerman

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, communication and information at UMass-Amherst. He’s also founder of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, which is studying how to build alternatives to the commercial internet. And Ethan co-founded a local news initiative with global reach, a blogging community called Global Voices. 

An alum of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and the MIT Media Lab, he is the author of two books. The latest is titled “Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.” It’s a powerful look at the rise of mistrust in institutions, especially media, and how that mistrust is provoking a crisis for representative democracy.

Ethan will be visiting Northeastern’s campus later this fall, so stay tuned for details.

I’ve got a Quick Take on Brian McGrory’s announcement that he will step down as editor of The Boston Globe to become chair of the journalism program at Boston University. Ellen checks out The Daily Catch, a hyperlocal news outlook covering Red Hook, New York.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

‘Beat the Press’ takes on Putin’s U.S. media enablers

Putin admirer Tucker Carlson. Photo (cc) 2018 by Gage Skidmore

On the latest “Beat the Press” podcast, we talk about Putin’s media pals in the U.S.; TikTok influencers getting the White House treatment; right-wing lies and libel; that New York Times editorial on free speech; and media outlets that adopt the language of advocacy. Plus our Rants & Raves.

Hosted, as always, by Emily Rooney, with Experience magazine editor Joanna Weiss, media strategist Susie Banikarim and me. Available on Apple and wherever fine podcasts are found.

Iowa reporter is acquitted

USA Today reports:

Andrea Sahouri, the Iowa journalist who was arrested as she reported on racial justice protests last summer, was found not guilty in a case that drew widespread condemnation from journalism and free press organizations.

Her former boyfriend, who was arrested with her, has been acquitted as well.

Earlier:

‘Evil Geniuses’ traces the 50-year march of the American right

Kurt Andersen’s newest book, “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History,” tells the story of our political culture’s long march to the right, from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign to Donald Trump.

I finished the audio version of it earlier this week — read by Andersen, a welcome touch. You can’t properly review an audio book, of course. You’re not bookmarking pages or making notes. So my observations here are impressionistic, and I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out that struck me as important at the time but that I’ve since forgotten.

First, Andersen deals a blow to my Richard Nixon Unified Theory of Everything. Andersen rightly points out that Nixon governed as a liberal on domestic policy, even embracing the left-wing notion of wage-and-price controls. Nixon wasn’t as liberal as the Northern Democrats of his era, but as someone who didn’t really care about anything except Richard Nixon, he was willing to go with the flow as long as it helped him maintain power.

I’m not sure that Andersen assigns Nixon enough blame, though, for his vicious prosecution of the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, a prelude of what was to come, or of beginning the transformation of the Republican Party into an amoral force for destruction, as it clearly is today. Ideologically, however, he is right that you can trace a direct line from Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Trump. Nixon was an outlier; George H.W. Bush was only a partial outlier given the role of Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, in fostering climate denialism, something I didn’t know about until I heard Andersen describe it.

Second, this move to the right has had important intellectual underpinnings, starting in 1970 with an essay by the economist Milton Friedman in The New York Times Magazine arguing — as Andersen puts it — that it was actually Mr. Potter, not George Bailey, who was the hero of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Another important contribution to the movement was made by Lewis Powell in his pre-Supreme Court days. All of this has been extremely well funded by the Koch brothers and their ilk, thus moving fringe right-wing ideas into the mainstream.

Third, and to my mind most controversially, this long move back to the past has been accompanied by a cultural embrace of nostalgia, starting in the 1970s with the ’50s revival and continuing to the present. The idea is that we’ve turned to the political and economic norms of pre-New Deal America as a wistful yearning for old values, just as we have with music and fashion, and are only now beginning to realize just how toxic those times really were. There’s something to this, but I think Andersen pushes it too hard.

I can’t say that Andersen offers much in the way of solutions except that we need to re-energize ourselves and start electing left-leaning politicians. (He tells us repeatedly that Bernie Sanders nearly defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, but saying it over and over doesn’t make it so.) He also favors a universal basic income as a counterbalance to the decline of decent full-time work fueled by artificial intelligence.

“Evil Geniuses” provides an exhaustive — and, at times, exhausting — overview of what’s gone wrong in these United States over the past 50 years. If Andersen’s ideas on how to get out of this mess are inadequate, it may be because the challenges are so daunting.

As I write this, Joe Biden seems likely to be elected president and the Senate to flip to the Democrats. That may staunch the Trump-induced bleeding of the past four years. But it’s going to take a lot more than that to solve political polarization, economic inequality, climate change, racial injustice and all the rest.

We can’t begin that work until we understand how we got here, though. Andersen has provided a useful guide.

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Want more local news? Contact your legislators to support a proposed study.

Photo via Pixabay.

As the Legislature heads into its final days, a proposal to study the decline of local news in Massachusetts has been revived. A bill filed by state Rep. Lori Ehrlich, D-Marblehead, would create a special commission “to research and propose policy solutions.”

The 23-member commission would include legislators, academics, journalists and news-industry experts. As currently drafted, I would be a member of the commission. I wrote about the idea last year for WGBH News.

For many years, Greater Boston’s local-news ecosystem, though far from optimal, was nevertheless in better shape than was the case in other parts of the country. Now, though, corporate chains such as Gannett and Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group are decimating the state’s community newspapers. Though challenges created by technology and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic would be difficult to overcome in any case, corporate greed is compounding the collapse of local newspapers.

If you’re so inclined, I hope you’ll consider contacting your state representative and senator to urge them to support the legislation, which takes the form of an amendment to the state budget. It’s called “Amendment #40, An Act establishing a commission to study journalism in underserved communities.”

Below is the text of Ehrlich’s letter to her colleagues, followed by the language of the legislation:

Dear Colleagues,

I respectfully request your consideration for cosponsorship of Amendment #40, An Act establishing a commission to study journalism in underserved communities. This amendment would create a commission of experts, industry members, academics, and elected officials to research and propose policy solutions related to the state of local journalism in Massachusetts and the future sustainability of the industry.

Journalism is critical to a healthy democracy, and local journalism is an important part of the fabric of our communitie. In the last decade and a half, two trends of out-of-state corporate consolidation and layoffs have led to the disappearance of 1 in 5 newspapers nationwide while countless others have become shells of themselves. A new report from UNC found that since 2004 there has been a net loss of 1,800 local newspapers.

Newsrooms across the country and right here in Massachusetts have been subject to layoffs, asset selloffs, hedge fund takeovers, and cuts in coverage, a trend that is plaguing news organizations across the country. In some parts of the country, “news deserts” are popping up where there is little to no reporting on local issues and stories. Additionally, the journalism industry has faced significant layoffs – according to the Pew Research Center, “Newsroom employment dropped nearly a quarter in less than 10 years, with greatest decline at newspapers.”

The impact of COVID-19 on the newspaper industry is already worse than the toll of the 2008 financial crisis, which saw newspapers experience a 19% decline in revenue.While larger newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have a large subscription base to curtail damage, local newspapers, many of which are owned by publicly traded companies saddled in debt even before COVID-19, are unlikely to survive.

This commission presents a vehicle for a public discussion allowing Massachusetts to lead a national conversation about journalism and how best to support it in a changing world. Establishing this commission and the report they will produce will be a critical step forward in revitalizing our state’s local news media and ensuring their sustainability as an essential part of our democracy.

If you would like to cosponsor, …

Sincerely,

Lori Ehrlich
State Representative
8th Essex District

The text of the bill follows:

Ms. Ehrlich of Marblehead moves to amend the bill by inserting after section 122 the following new section:

SECTION X. (a) Resolved, that a special legislative commission, pursuant to section 2A of chapter 4 of the General Laws is hereby established to: (i) conduct a comprehensive, non-binding study relative to communities underserved by local journalism in Massachusetts; (ii) review all aspects of local journalism including, but not limited to, the adequacy of press coverage of cities and towns, ratio of residents to media outlets, the history of local news in Massachusetts, print and digital business models for media outlets, the impact of social media on local news, strategies to improve local news access, public policy solutions to improve the sustainability of local press business models and private and nonprofit solutions, and identifying career pathways and existing or potential professional development opportunities for aspiring journalists in Massachusetts.

(b) The commission shall consist of the following 23  members: 2 of whom shall be the house and senate chairs of the joint committee on community development and small business; 1 member of the house of representatives appointed by the speaker of the house; 1 member of the senate appointed by the president of the senate; 1 of whom shall be a professor at the Northeastern School of Journalism; 1 of whom shall be a member of the Boston Association of Black Journalists; 1 of whom shall be a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists; 1 of whom shall be a member of the Asian American Journalists Association of New England; 2 of whom shall be representatives of public colleges or universities of the commonwealth with either a journalism or communications program jointly appointed by the house and senate chairs of the joint committee on community development and small business; 1 of whom shall be a representative of a private college or university of the commonwealth with either a journalism or communications program jointly appointed by the house and senate chairs of the joint committee on community development and small business; 3 of whom shall be representatives of journalism unions or associations appointed by the governor provided further that the appointees are selected from the following unions and associations: the NewsGuild – Communication Workers of America, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians – Communications Workers of America, the Association of Independents in Radio, the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, the New England Newspaper and Press Association, or the New England Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists; 8 of whom shall be currently employed or freelance journalists, editors, or producers from independent community news outlets from across the commonwealth jointly appointed by the house and senate chairs of the joint committee on community development and small business provided further that the appointees represent communities underserved by professional news organizations, rural communities, immigrants communities, working-class communities, and communities of color; and 1 of whom shall be a representative from the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. All appointments shall be made no later than 30 days following the effective date of this resolve.

(c) The commission shall hold public information sessions in order to explain the work of the commission and to solicit public comment pursuant to the work of the commission. The commission shall hold at least one public information session in each county of the commonwealth and shall provide at least one weeks notice from the date in which the public information session is occurring. The notice shall include, but not be limited to: (i) the date of the public information session; (ii) the time in which the public information session will take place; (iii) the location in which the public information session is occurring; (iv) a description of the format in which the commission will be accepting public comment; and (v) a point of contact. The public notice shall be sent by the commission to the clerks of each municipality of the county in which the public information session will occur and the commonwealth’s director of boards and commissions. In the case of a cancellation or postponement of a public information session, the commission shall provide at least 48 hours notice to the clerks of each municipality of the county in which the public information session will occur and the commonwealth’s director of boards and commissions.

(d) The commission shall accept written and oral comment from the public beginning at the first meeting of the commission.

(e) The commission shall meet a minimum of 5 times to review, study and analyze existing literature, quantitative and qualitative data on the status of journalism in the commonwealth , and submitted oral and written public comment.

(f) The commission shall submit its findings, along with recommendations for legislation, to the governor, the speaker of the house, the president of the senate, and the clerks of the house of representatives and the senate no later than 1 year after the effective date of this resolve.

(g) The special commission may make such interim reports as it considers appropriate.

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Together, we can do something about local news coverage in Medford

Last fall I asked the lone full-time reporter for the Medford Transcript if he would take part in the mayoral debate I was helping to organize for the Medford Chamber of Commerce. He told me that he would have liked to, but that he couldn’t because he’d be covering it. A reasonable answer, although it also spoke to the Transcript’s lack of resources.

Not long after, he left the paper. The debate was covered by a part-time stringer. And today, more than a year and a half later, that full-time position still hasn’t been filled.

The Transcript does assign stringers to cover a few stories. They do a good job, and nothing I write here should be taken as denigrating their work. But in a city of nearly 58,000 people, we have enough news for a staff of two full-time reporters. Or four. Even when we had one, the young journalists who filled that position managed to write some important stories before moving on to bigger and better jobs. Zero, though, is just untenable.

Today Medford is very close to being a news desert, joining hundreds if not thousands of communities across the country that have so little coverage that they lack the reliable news and information they need to participate in local affairs in a meaningful way. Instead, we rely on Facebook, Nextdoor, Patch (which does have a little bit of original reporting), email lists, messages from the mayor, texts from the police department and reports by citizens who have the time and the inclination to sit through public meetings on Zoom and write them up. (Update: Since publishing this essay, I’ve learned about a free paper called the Medford News Weekly. Despite its name, there’s a lot of Somerville news in it, and the content is mostly press releases. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.)

As a longtime journalist and academic who studies the business of news, I want to share some thoughts on what might be done to solve the problem. Over the past few years, I’ve had several conversations with people in Medford about how to fill the gap created by the hollowing-out of our local newspaper. But solving the problem is a daunting task and, frankly, those conversations didn’t lead anywhere. First, though, a bit on how we got here.

A beautifully told story that offers nostalgia about local news but not much hope

The New York Times has published an article about Evan Brandt, the last reporter covering Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His paper, The Mercury, has been decimated by its owner, the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital. It’s a great story, beautifully written by Dan Barry, with superb visuals by Haruka Sakaguchi.

And yet the air of inevitability bugs me. Barry offers nostalgia, not hope. I’m not going to suggest that Brandt quit and start his own local news project — he’s in his 50s, has a kid in college and his wife his sick. But why doesn’t the community get together, start a news project and make Brandt the first hire?

Better yet: Why can’t LNP, the newspaper in nearby Lancaster, which is independently owned and reportedly doing well, hire Brandt for a Pottstown edition? Lancaster is probably a bit too far away to justify firing up the printing presses and the trucks. But a digital edition wouldn’t cost much, and would allow them to expand their paid subscription base — much as The Boston Globe did in Rhode Island.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

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Margaret Sullivan has written a useful guide to the horrifying decline of local news

What’s happened to local news in our medium-size city north of Boston is a story that could be told in hundreds of communities across the country.

Read the rest at Nieman Lab. And talk about this post on Facebook.

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