Media Nation

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

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.

Hur lied

Special counsel Robert Hur. Photo (cc) 2021 by Maryland GovPics.

I’m not sure how else we can characterize what happened. Special counsel Robert Hur all but called President Biden senile recently in describing him as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur declined to recommend charges against Biden for keeping classified information in his possession, essentially arguing that it would be cruel to do that to an 81-year-old man in the early stages of dementia. And, of course, the media fell for it.

Now we know that Hur’s report grossly mischaracterized the reality, revealed in the transcripts of Biden’s deposition with prosectors. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has a good roundup of the media mea culpas, writing:

The acknowledgement from some, but not all, news outlets on Tuesday about the true nature of Biden’s deposition marked another embarrassing moment for the national press, which has floundered at pivotal moments in the lead up to the crucial 2024 presidential election.

The deposition transcripts not only indicated that Biden appeared fairly sharp during his testimony, joking with investigators and retelling stories with granular detail, but that Hur was misleading in how he presented some of the information included in his report.

It’s like a rerun in reverse from 2019, when then-Attorney General Bill Barr put out a summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties that falsely declared Donald Trump had not obstructed justice. It became clear that’s not what Mueller was saying once his full report came out, but truth, boots, etc.

I especially enjoyed this account of Biden’s deposition, from Charlie Savage’s report Tuesday in The New York Times:

“I don’t remember how a beat-up box got in the garage,” he [Biden] said, speculating that someone packing up must have just tossed stuff into it. He added that he had “no goddamn idea” what was in a tranche of files shipped to his house and “didn’t even bother to go through them.”

Who among us?

Now, it has to be said that it was Attorney General Merrick Garland who named Hur, a one-time Trump appointee, as the special counsel. Given Hur’s predictably mendacious performance, I’d say that chances of Garland’s serving in a second Biden administration, should there be one, are nil. And they should be.

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A chain of radio stations is launching online newspapers in 18 (or more?) markets

Photo (cc) 2014 by Robert Ashworth

This one comes in via former WBZ Radio (AM 1030) news director Peter Casey, who’s now a communications consultant and part of the team at the local startup Winchester News. Saga Communications, a Michigan-based company that owns radio stations in 27 secondary markets, is launching digital newspapers in 18 markets by the end of the second quarter, according to the website Inside Radio. Another story says that the outlets will be unveiled “across its entire footprint.” Despite the lack of clarity, it sounds like Saga’s eventual goal is to have an online newspaper anywhere it has radio stations.

Those stations include a number of New England markets: Brattleboro, Vermont; Greenfield, Northampton and Springfield, Massachusetts; Keene and Manchester, New Hampshire; and Portland, Maine. A quick scan of the stations shows that they mostly broadcast music, with formats including country, oldies and adult contemporary. I found a few news-and-talk stations in the mix as well, but they appear to be focused on local issues.

The stations will be based on a pilot that Saga is already publishing in Tennessee called Clarksville Now. A quick glance shows the site is newsy and community-oriented. Katie Gambill, who developed the site and who will be in charge of the rollout, is quoted as saying:

I am excited for the opportunity to spearhead this local online news and community connection site launch in other Saga markets. I honestly believe these local online news sites will help us to better serve and connect with our communities, especially when partnered with the power of radio. I am passionate about this endeavor and dedicated to the success of these sites, in fact, the Brand message for these sites is, “your community connection.”

Saga is a publicly traded company with annual revenues of about $114 million. Although there’s no substitute for local ownership, I think its Clarksville Now-modeled sites will be welcome in most communities. It’s also a great example of how a company that’s successful in one type of media can leverage that success and use it connect with its audience via news and information.

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Can both sides lose?

The infighting is so fierce because the stakes are so small: Far-right talk-show host Jeff Kuhner, embroiled in a feud with Trump-friendly Howie Carr, calls for a boycott of the Boston Herald. This story at Boston Broadside is unreadable, but Scott Van Voorhis summarizes it nicely at Contrarian Boston.

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COVID at 4

It was four years ago today, a Wednesday, that COVID-19 became the central reality of our lives. I had spent the previous week on a reporting trip in Mendocino County, California. Nationally, the news was getting more ominous by the day. We attended a college assembly in a packed, windowless hall, with the usual buffet replaced with boxed lunches as some sort of appeasement to the Gods of Disease.

Word finally came down during our faculty meeting that classes would be canceled starting the next day. That evening, in my graduate ethics seminar, came the triple-header: the NBA suspended its season and sent everyone home from a game in Oklahoma City; Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, announced they’d caught COVID while in Australia; and Donald Trump delivered a speech from the Oval Office that was so unnerving the stock market crashed.

We watched Trump in class. I remember telling my students we’d probably be back in few weeks. Little did we know.

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Talking about ‘What Works in Community News’ with Mike Blinder of ‘E&P Reports’

Ellen Clegg and I are thrilled to be the guests on the new episode of “E&P Reports,” a vodcast hosted by Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher, a venerable magazine and website that covers the news business. We’ve had Mike on our “What Works” podcast, and he is a hoot — witty, engaging and passionate about the future of journalism. You’ll hear those qualities in the questions he asks us about our book, “What Works in Community News.” You can subscribe to the audio-only version of “E&P Reports” on any of the major podcast platforms.

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