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

Tag: Portland Phoenix Page 1 of 2

The Portland Phoenix, revived in 2019, makes its final flight

Media Nation is back. It’s not quite where I want it to be yet, but it’s good enough to resume posting. Look for more improvements in the days to come.

Unfortunately, I’m here to report some sad news. The Portland Phoenix, the last of the Phoenix newspapers where I worked for many years, has ceased publication. Editor Marian McCue’s farewell editorial begins:

It was easy to have a sense of optimism in the spring of 2019. It was a different time, when former Forecaster publisher Karen Wood and I hatched a plan to launch a new version of the Portland Phoenix, which had folded in February of that year. We wanted to build a strong and independent news alternative to the media monopoly that controlled the Press Herald and many of Maine’s newspapers.

Our timing was not great. Five months after the launch, the pandemic struck with a vengeance. Few alive had seen such a cataclysmic event, much was unknown and everybody was fearful. The advertising relationships we had suddenly vanished. We tried to keep going, but the advertising was not there.

The flagship Boston Phoenix closed in 2013. At one time there were Phoenix papers in Providence, Portland, Worcester as well as Stuff magazine, Stuff@Nite and an alternative rock radio station, WFNX. The Portland Phoenix staggered on under new ownership until 2019, and was then relaunched by McCue and Wood. The new Portland Phoenix was redesigned and built a reputation for quality journalism. In the end, it wasn’t enough.

I hope someone else will give it a try. Portland is a medium-size, semi-isolated city with a strong arts community — exactly the sort of place where an alt-weekly can still find a niche. And let’s not forget that Portland recently got some very good news, as the state’s largest daily, the Portland Press Herald, and most of its affiliated papers will be acquired by the nonprofit National Trust for Local News.

Here are three new reasons to be optimistic about local news

Note: Make that four reasons. See update below.

The crisis in local news won’t be solved all at once. Rather, it will be solved community by community as entrepreneurial-minded journalists seek to fill the gaps left behind by corporate-owned chain newspapers. Here are three new reasons to be optimistic.

In Maine, the Portland Phoenix, the last of the great Phoenix alternative weeklies, is scheduled to relaunch this coming Wednesday under new ownership after ceasing publication earlier this year. The free paper and website are part of New Portland Publishing Co., headed by Marian McCue and Karen Wood.

The relaunch was announced Oct. 22 by Marian McCue and Karen Wood, principals of New Portland Publishing Co. McCue will serve as the editor and Mo Mehlsak, most recently executive editor of The Forecaster, American Journal and Lakes Region Weekly newspapers, will be managing editor.

“While we always admired the energy of the Phoenix, and the strong entertainment coverage, our focus will be more on news and analysis, and in-depth investigative stories that explore the challenges facing this area,” McCue said in a press release announcing the new venture.

Added Wood: “We’ve had a very positive response from early conversations with advertisers and people in the community. We are convinced that a free distribution newspaper will be successful, and provide an effective forum for our advertisers.”

The new Portland Phoenix has a stiff challenge ahead of it in the form of the daily Portland Press Herald, the flagship of a Maine-based chain. The Press Herald is considerably more robust than papers owned by the national chains, and the publisher — Lisa DeSisto — is an alumnus of The Boston Phoenix who knows how to put out a paper oriented toward arts and entertainment. (Note: I worked with Lisa at the Phoenix for several years.)

Still, it’s fantastic news that someone is going to try to revive the Phoenix in Portland, which is the sort of smaller city that ought to be able to support an alt-weekly.

***

Bill Wasserman is one of Eastern Massachusetts’ legendary local newspaper owners. Founder of the Ipswich Chronicle, he built that into a chain of about a dozen North Shore papers and sold them in 1986. Those papers eventually were acquired by GateHouse Media, and Wasserman has been grousing about what happened to them ever since. Earlier this year, GateHouse got rid of the Ipswich Chronicle as a standalone title, merging it with two other papers.

In an interview for CommonWealth Magazine in 2008, Wasserman told me the main problem with corporate ownership was a failure to understand that, even in the best of times, community journalism is little more than a break-even proposition. “I was paid a salary, which was modest,” said Wasserman. “The reward was not in the profit. The reward was having a lot of fun putting out a community paper.”

Now Wasserman has gone back to the future, lending his expertise as a consultant and ad salesman to a start-up called Ipswich Local News — a free paper and website that is seeking nonprofit status. The editor and publisher is John Muldoon.

***

Jenn Lord Paluzzi holds the distinction of being laid off by two national chains — GateHouse (at The MetroWest Daily News) and MediaNews Group (at The Sun of Lowell). Now she’s launched a community news site in her hometown of Grafton called Grafton Common that is loaded with local news.

Some years back, Lord Paluzzi was involved in a startup called Greater Grafton. But that venture ended up getting sold to a chain of local websites that ended up going out of business. Best of luck to her as she goes off on her own once again.

Update: And a fourth — how could I forget the recently launched Provincetown Independent?

Talk about this post on Facebook.

A downbeat media roundup: Buffett disappoints, startups falter and publications die

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Has there been a more disappointing newspaper owner than Warren Buffett? When Buffett bought 63 papers from the Media General chain in 2012 for $142 million, it looked like the billionaire investor might play a significant role in reinventing local journalism. A year earlier Buffett had bought his hometown paper, the Omaha World-Herald, along with six other papers for $200 million. He already owned The Buffalo News.

And Buffett liked newspapers — so much so that he even had a hand in winning a Pulitzer Prize: In 1973, when he was the owner of the Omaha Sun, he helped his reporters investigate a local charity by finding documents, providing financial analysis, and assisting with the writing, according to a 2014 account in The Wall Street Journal. He was also a trusted adviser to the Graham family back when they controlled The Washington Post and he was a shareholder. “By the spring of 1974,” Katharine Graham wrote in her memoir, “Personal Story,” “Warren was sending me a constant flow of helpful memos with advice, and occasionally alerting me to problems of which I was unaware.”

Yet Buffett has been talking down the newspaper business for years — and last week he was at it again. “They’re going to disappear,” he told Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer, citing the ongoing decline of advertising. He did allow that three national papers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, might survive. But everyone else was “toast.”

Certainly they’re going to be toast with owners like Buffett. As I wrote in my book “The Return of the Moguls,” Buffett has allowed his managers to cut hundreds of jobs from his newspapers in recent years, even as his fellow multibillionaire Jeff Bezos has overseen growth and profits at the Post.

Perhaps it would be too much to expect someone in his 80s to dedicate himself to figuring out the future of the newspapers he had acquired. But Buffett was ideally positioned to bring in the sorts of minds who might apply themselves to the task of saving smaller papers. Surely Buffett understands as much as anyone that readers and advertisers will put up with an ever-diminishing paper for only so long before an irreversible downward spiral sets in.

Buffett is by no means the worst owner a newspaper could have — not with hedge funds and corporate chains slashing and burning their way through the mediascape. But anyone who hoped he would establish himself as an innovative force in recalibrating the economics of journalism has to be disappointed.

Two high-profile startups misfire

The meltdown of two high-profile digital startups raises questions about not just what went wrong, but whether there were any warning signs we should have paid more attention to.

The more disheartening of the two is The Correspondent, a Dutch website that recently concluded a successful fundraising campaign to launch what we all thought was going to be a U.S. edition. The project, funded through a membership model, is free of advertising and is based on the idea of journalists and readers engaging in an ongoing conversation. Among the early enthusiasts was Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. And me: I wrote about the project two years ago, made a donation to the site last fall, and urged others to do the same.

Recently, though, we learned that there wasn’t going to be a separate U.S. edition after all. Instead, there would be an English-language edition, based in Amsterdam, and the New York office would be closed now that the fundraising campaign had concluded. The founders took to Twitter to explain that we had misunderstood them. Had we somehow gotten it wrong?

No, according to Zainab Shah, a former BuzzFeed journalist who was The Correspondent’s first U.S. hire. In a devastating piece last Friday by Laura Hazard Owen at Nieman Lab, Shah said she took the job after being told she would head up what would in fact be a U.S. edition headquartered in New York, and that she recently quit after the founders made clear that it wasn’t going to happen.

“They’re really good at the PR thing, and it really feels like gaslighting,” Shah said. “They were like, ‘Well, we never promised a U.S. newsroom.’ I was like: Wait, did I just imagine all this?”

I should note that the founders continue to defend themselves and that Shah’s experience is just one data point. Still, this is bad news for those of us who hoped that The Correspondent represented a new way of doing journalism — “optimized for trust,” to use Rosen’s phrase.

Also running off the rails last week was The Markup, intended as a source of data-driven journalism about the largest technology companies. Months before its scheduled launch, co-founder and editor-in-chief Julia Angwin, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, was fired by chief executive Sue Gardner, whom Angwin had helped recruit, and replaced by another co-founder, Jeff Larson. Five of the seven editorial employees quit in support of Angwin, and Craig Newmark, the Craigslist billionaire who provided much of the funding, is said to be involved in getting the project back on track.

What exactly went wrong is too convoluted to get into here. For that, I recommend Mathew Ingram’s detailed overview at the Columbia Journalism Review. (Although I salute Angwin if it proves true that her sins included refusing to take a Myers-Briggs personality test.)

The larger issue with both The Correspondent and The Markup is whether there are any lessons in these two very different situations. I wish I could say there was — but at least in the case of The Correspondent we could see trouble brewing from some distance. Last fall, for instance, the site was involved in a nasty public dispute with Sarah Kendzior, a contributor to the Dutch-language site. The facts remain murky, though it was clear that something was amiss.

And then, as I’ve noted, The Correspondent’s founders not only reneged on their promise to launch a U.S. edition in the United States, but they claimed they had never said any such thing. That was gently disputed by none other than Rosen himself at his blog, Press Think, back in March.

“Through 2017 and much of 2018 we shared a default assumption that The Correspondent would be based in New York,” he wrote. “I call it a ‘default’ because we never sat down to decide it, and there was no real cost study or strategic analysis behind it. Rather, we had opened a campaign office in New York (with borrowed office space) and it seemed like that would evolve into The Correspondent’s newsroom.”

My only takeaway is that startups can be problematic. I’ll be watching The Correspondent closely and hoping its English-language edition proves to be worthwhile — although it will be a long time before I make another donation.

As for The Markup, I can only trust that Newmark, having already stepped in, will do the right thing. I assume that means bringing back Angwin in some top role, even if Gardner is not completely wrong about her alleged shortcomings as a manager.

The end of the road

New England lost two venerable publications in recent weeks.

Last week The Improper Bostonian, a free glossy magazine covering lifestyles, entertainment, and the arts, announced that its current issue would be its last after 28 years. “It was ultimately a family decision, that was really the bottom line,” owner and publisher Wendy Semonian Eppich told Folio, which covers the magazine business. “It was heavily based on finances, but it goes bigger than finances and that is critical and that is the truth.”

Several weeks earlier The Portland Phoenix, the last of the Phoenix newspapers, was shut down by its current owner, according to the Bangor Daily News. The Phoenix traces its roots to the Boston After Dark, founded by the late Stephen Mindich in 1966. At one time the papers included editions in Boston, Providence, Worcester, and Portland. I was on staff at The Boston Phoenix for many years, and I wrote the cover story for the Portland paper’s debut in 1999 — a profile of Maine’s then-senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both moderate Republican women.

The fortunes of free publications with free websites have diminished to the vanishing point as advertising revenues continue to crater. We’re lucky that we still have DigBoston, a for-profit alternative weekly allied with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

Talk about this post on Facebook.

Can The Portland Phoenix avoid the fate of its siblings?

The Portland Phoenix of Maine may be on the verge of joining its Boston and Providence siblings in Alt-Weekly Heaven, according to Edward Murphy of the Portland Press Herald and Seth Koenig of the Bangor Daily News. Owner Stephen Mindich was reportedly poised to sell the Portland paper to one of its employees (unnamed), but the deal has fallen through.

I suppose it would be naive to say that I’m surprised. But I am, at least a little bit. As recently as this past summer an insider told me that the Providence paper was struggling but that Portland was doing well. And Portland is the sort of small, insular, arts-rich city where alt-weeklies are still hanging on. In fact, as Koenig observes of The Portland Phoenix:

It long appeared from the outside to be the most financially stable of the Phoenix papers, always keeping enough advertising to fill out around 50 pages of content (newspapers get thinner when there aren’t enough ads to justify printing as many pages) and never needing to follow the Boston Phoenix’ desperate, last moment reinvention as a glossy magazine.

Desperate? Maybe. I think you could also make the case that if the Boston paper had gone the glossy route two or three years earlier, it might still be around.

In any case, I’m hoping that this time the story turns out differently. The mere fact that someone wants to buy the paper suggests that, from a business point of view, there’s something worth saving.

The Providence Phoenix, 1978-2014*

Screen Shot 2014-10-10 at 7.20.05 AMAs you may have already heard, The Providence Phoenix is shutting down, about a year and a half after The Boston Phoenix closed its doors. Ted Nesi of WPRI covers it here. Awful news, but not entirely unexpected. As recently as a few months ago, I was hearing that The Portland Phoenix of Maine was doing well but that Providence was lagging financially.

What happened? It’s hard to say. But Portland is a smallish city, insular and self-contained — the sort of place where alt-weeklies seem to be surviving. An example: Seven Days of Burlington, Vermont, which appears to be thriving. Providence, by contrast, is a fairly large city within the orbit of Greater Boston.

The demise of The Providence Phoenix would be bad enough on its own. What makes it even worse is that the Providence Journal is in the midst of downsizing following its sale to a company affiliated with the GateHouse Media chain. There is a real gap in Providence, and it’s not immediately clear what will fill it. Perhaps Rhode Island Public Radio can beef up its online local coverage. Maybe the online-only news site GoLocalProv will rise to the challenge. Or something new might come along.

The Providence Phoenix has produced some fine journalists over the years, including Ian Donnis of RIPR and David Scharfenberg of The Boston Globe. And best wishes to editor Lou Papineau, a veteran who started at the paper back when it was known as the NewPaper, and news editor Phil Eil, a more recent hire.

Best wishes, too, to publisher Stephen Mindich, who kept the Boston and Providence papers alive for as long as he could. I hope the future is brighter for The Portland Phoenix — now the only remaining alt-weekly in what was once a vibrant regional chain.

And yes, I plan to rant about this later today on WGBH’s “Beat the Press.”

(Note: I was a staff writer and editor for The Boston Phoenix from 1991 to 2005, and last wrote for the Providence and Portland papers this past July.)

*Correction: The headline originally gave the incorrect year for the founding of The Providence Phoenix, which began life as The NewPaper. As founder Ty Davis writes in the farewell issue, he began the paper during the Blizzard of 1978.

Public media trade site takes note of Muzzles’ new home

Peter Kadzis, senior editor of WGBH News, with Web producers Abbie Ruzicka and Brendan Lynch.

Peter Kadzis, senior editor of WGBH News, with Web producers Abbie Ruzicka and Brendan Lynch.

Current, the trade website for people in public media, has posted a nice feature on the New England Muzzle Awards’ newish home at WGBHNews.org. I do want to point out that though The Boston Phoenix is no more, the Muzzles continue to be published at The Providence Phoenix and The Portland Phoenix. Also: my friend and co-conspirator Harvey Silverglate deserves all the credit for the Campus Muzzles, which are also mentioned in the article.

Photo by WGBH News.

Presenting the 17th Annual New England Muzzle Awards

Muzzles logo

Click on image to read the Muzzle Awards.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz (again) might consider running the other way when we try to present them with our coveted statuettes for dishonoring the First Amendment.

The 17th Annual New England Muzzle Awards are now online at WGBHNews.org and The Providence Phoenix. They should be up soon at The Portland Phoenix as well. This is the second year that WGBH has served as home base following 15 years at the late, great Boston Phoenix.

As always, the Muzzles are accompanied by an article on Campus Muzzles by my friend and sometime collaborator Harvey Silverglate. There are a couple of new touches this year as well: the WGBH design is responsive, which means it looks just as great on your tablet or phone as it does on your laptop; and WGBH reporter Adam Reilly, WGBHNews.org editor Peter Kadzis and I talk about the Muzzles on “The Scrum” podcast, which of course you should subscribe to immediately.

Peter, by the way, is a former editor of the Phoenix newspapers, and has now edited all 17 editions of the Muzzles.

Finally, great work by WGBH Web producers Abbie Ruzicka and Brendan Lynch, who hung in through technical glitches and my whining to make this year’s edition look fantastic.

Hartford Courant to absorb last vestiges of Advocate alt-weeklies

cover_image_3_330_410_88_sha-40Long before I decided to write a book about the New Haven Independent, I knew who Paul Bass was. The New Haven Advocate, like The Boston Phoenix, was one of the crown jewels in the world of alternative weeklies. Bass, who spent much of his long stint at the Advocate as its chief political columnist, was something of a legend in that world.

The first time we met, in 2009, he told me he had decided to launch the Independent, an online-only nonprofit news site, in part because he was unhappy with what had happened to the Advocate under the ownership of the Hartford Courant and its various corporate overlords. (I wrote about the sale of the Advocate papers for the Phoenix in 1999.)

This week, about eight months after The Boston Phoenix died (survived by its sister papers in Portland and Providence), the Advocate breathed its last. In this case, there isn’t even a body to mourn, as the Courant absorbed the Advocate into a weekly supplement called CTNow. The Hartford Advocate and the Fairfield County Weekly are being subsumed into CTNow as well, according to this account by blogger and former Advocate writer Brian LaRue.

Bass has written a heartfelt tribute to the Advocate and what it meant to New Haven — and to him. Among other things, he gets at something I’ve been thinking about: whether community news sites like the Independent are, in a sense, the new alt-weeklies — not as opinionated, not as profane, not nearly as far to the left, but nevertheless representing a type of journalism that is engaged with the community in a way that few daily newspapers are.

The 16th annual New England Muzzle Awards

Previously published by WGBHNews.org, the Providence Phoenix and the Portland Phoenix.

For anyone who’s been paying attention, President Barack Obama’s disappointing record on free speech, civil liberties, and governmental transparency is old news.

This year, though, is special. Obama’s longstanding lack of respect for the role of a free press in a democratic society reached new depths when it was revealed that his Justice Department had snooped on the Associated Press and Fox News’ James Rosen in trying to ferret out leakers.

Then came the überleaker — Edward Snowden, who provided The Guardian and The Washington Post with documents showing that the National Security Agency was monitoring our phone traffic, our emails, and other communications on a scale more massive than previously imagined.

“I welcome this debate and I think it’s healthy for our democracy,” Obama said after the NSA revelations. Yet his administration has already begun the process of bringing criminal charges against Snowden that could put him behind bars for decades.

It is against that chilling backdrop that Harvey Silverglate and I present the 16th Annual Muzzle Awards — a Fourth of July round-up of outrages against free speech and personal liberties in New England during the past year.

Launched in 1998, the Muzzles’ home was the late, great Boston Phoenix, which ceased publication in March. This year we are pleased to bring the Muzzles to WGBH.org, and to continue publishing them for readers of The Providence Phoenix and The Portland Phoenix.

The envelopes, please.

US Attorney Carmen Ortiz: Prosecuting — and persecuting — a fragile Internet visionary

 Last January, Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old computer prodigy and an activist for open information, hanged himself in his New York City apartment. Swartz suffered from depression and was reportedly despondent over a criminal case that Carmen Ortiz had brought against him for downloading millions of academic articles at MIT without authorization.

Swartz, who co-founded Reddit and helped develop the RSS standard, had done nothing with the articles. JSTOR, the company whose servers he had targeted, declined to press charges. But Ortiz pursued him zealously, putting out a public statement threatening him with 35 years in prison. After his death, she let it be known that he faced “only” six months behind bars if he’d pled guilty.

Ortiz may have decided to make an example of Swartz because of his outspokenness about oppressive copyright enforcement and related issues, which his MIT stunt was meant to illustrate. It wouldn’t be the first time she had demonstrated her contempt for free speech. Last year Ortiz received a Muzzle for her successful prosecution of Tarek Mehanna, a vile propagandist for Al Qaeda whose activities should nevertheless have been protected by the First Amendment.

Yet even after his death Swartz succeeded in advancing the cause of openness. In May, The New Yorker unveiled Strongbox, software that would allow whistleblowers to deposit leaked documents without being traced. Bradley Manning might never have gotten caught if it had been available to him, nor Edward Snowden if he’d chosen to use it.

The developer was Aaron Swartz.

Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis: Strong in a crisis, but he also spied on antiwar and Occupy left

Ed Davis and other law-enforcement officials have been justly praised for their handling of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath. Though the voluntary “shelter in place” order may have been excessive, a chaotic, frightening chain of events was handled with competence and courage.

The problem is that, in non-emergency situations, the authorities have a habit of demonstrating a grotesquely misplaced sense of priorities. Such was the case last October, when the ACLU of Massachusetts and the state chapter of the National Lawyers Guild unearthed documents showing that the Boston Police Department had been spying on antiwar and Occupy protesters. Among the BPD’s targets: the late Howard Zinn, an elderly Boston University professor and World War II hero. According to a report by Jamaica Plain Gazette editor John Ruch, also targeted was a 2007 antiwar rally featuring activist Cindy Sheehan, then-city councilor Felix Arroyo Sr., and Carlos Arrendondo, who memorably came to the aid of a badly injured spectator, Jeff Bauman, at the marathon bombing.

The police shared that information with the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), the so-called fusion center comprising federal and state authorities that was supposed to be tracking terrorist threats — yet apparently never received information provided by Russian intelligence about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Michael Isikoff of NBC News (here) and Chris Faraone, writing for DigBoston (here), offer worthwhile analysis.

Let’s hope that Davis, who also won a Muzzle in 2010, now realizes he was looking in the wrong places all along — and violating the civil liberties of patriotic Americans.

Max Kennedy: Still stonewalling after all these years on RFK’s official papers

It was bad enough that the Kennedy family had refused to release what were described as the private papers of the late Robert Kennedy. But then, last August, Boston Globe reporter Bryan Bender revealed that many of the papers were actually official documents from RFK’s time as attorney general, including some that may have pertained to assassination attempts against Cuban president Fidel Castro.

Yet the papers have still not been released. And thus RFK’s son Max Kennedy, who has acted as the family’s spokesman, earns his second Muzzle for stonewalling on the RFK papers (the first came in 2011).

According to an index obtained by Bender, the 62 boxes of files may contain crucial insights into such matters as the Kennedy administration’s anti-Castro activities, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam War. Max Kennedy said the family hoped to release all the papers. But one of the hold-ups, according to the Globe, was the family’s desire to get a tax deduction for the papers before turning them over to the public domain.

As a Globe editorial put it, the Kennedy family “never should have been granted control over official documents in the first place. And they certainly shouldn’t feel entitled to a tax deduction for them.”

It’s time to see what’s in those files.

Governor Paul LePage: Maine’s pro-gun governor tramples on the public’s right to know

Editors at the Bangor Daily News must have known their request for public documents about concealed-gun permits last February would be controversial. After all, The Journal News of White Plains, NY, had already set off a firestorm by publishing an interactive map of gun owners on its website.

But the reaction to the BDN was so intense that it called into question the very nature of “public” records. State legislators, especially Republicans, denounced the newspaper. A “Boycott Bangor Daily News Dont [sic] Tread on Us” page popped up on Facebook.

And our Muzzle winner, Governor Paul LePage, demagogued the issue, posing for a photo in which he’s seen holding up his own concealed-gun permit. He also called on the state legislature to the remove the data from the public realm as quickly as possible. (The legislation was passed and signed in April, according to the New England First Amendment Coalition.)

“If newspapers would like to know who has concealed weapons permits, then they should know the governor has his,” LePage was quoted as saying. “I have serious concerns that BDN’s request will incite fear among gun owners and nongun owners alike regarding their safety.”

It was all too much for the newspaper, which ended up withdrawing its request — even though, in an “Editor’s Note,” the paper said it “never would have published personally identifying information of any permit holder.”

This is LePage’s third Muzzle, with his previous awards coming in 2011 and 2012. His earlier antics leaned toward the buffoonish. This time, he acted as a thug, leading an unruly mob to trample on the public’s right to know.

Former New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien: Playing unfavorites with the press

 William O’Brien is not one to brook much in the way of back talk. When a protest broke out in the House gallery during a budget hearing in the spring of 2011, he ordered state police to kick everyone out.

A year later, a fellow Republican legislator became so upset with what he saw as O’Brien’s attempts to silence him that he directed a toxic remark at the Speaker: “Seig Heil.” The legislator was ejected from the chamber and forced to apologize.

It was the Hitler reference that led to O’Brien’s Muzzle. Because Mike Marland, a cartoonist for the Concord Monitor, followed up by depicting O’Brien with a Hitler-like mustache, accompanied by the caption “If the mustache fits …”

O’Brien got his revenge. Last July, he scheduled a news conference to be held in his Statehouse office — and banned two Monitor journalists who tried to enter. An O’Brien spokeswoman explained: “When the Concord Monitor proves they have chosen to become a responsible media outlet, we’ll be happy to invite them to future media events.” (Tony Schinella of Concord Patch shot video of the journalists being held at bay, and of O’Brien responding noncommittally when asked about it.)

Trouble is, though public officials are under no obligation to give journalists special treatment by (for instance) granting interviews, under the First Amendment they must give them equal treatment when holding official events such as a news conference on public property.

O’Brien, no longer Speaker after voters returned Democrats to the majority in the last election, is now running for Congress.

Rhode Island Public Schools: ACLU filtering study reveals widespread Internet censorship

Over the past two decades, the Internet has become a crucial tool in public education, opening schoolchildren to the broader world. Yet concerns about sex, violence, and other inappropriate content has led many school districts to impose draconian restrictions limiting kids’ access to even the most innocuous material.

The ACLU of Rhode Island set out to document online censorship in the schools — and what it found should chill all of us. It turns out that filtering software used in the Rhode Island Public Schools has blocked students from accessing websites such as PBS Kids, National Stop Bullying Day, a video clip of The Nutcracker, and information about global warming. Also blocked were educational resources for gay and lesbian teens.

There is no reason to believe that Internet censorship is worse in Rhode Island than it is in other states. Under the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act, all schools and libraries that receive federal funding must filter “obscene” content, child pornography, and material that’s considered “harmful to minors” — the last being a dangerously fuzzy standard. The ACLU study, by policy associate Hillary Davis, documents problems in Rhode Island but includes findings and recommendations that should be applied nationally.

“In trying to prevent students from visiting ‘inappropriate’ websites, school officials have instead taken advantage of technology to implement an unjustifiable scheme of censorship,” according to Davis’s report. “This must change, for it is only through the free exchange of ideas that students can truly experience a full education.”

Plainridge Racecourse: A citizen journalist fights off a lawsuit aimed at silencing him

Last September the owners of the Plainridge Racecourse in Plainville, MA, SLAPP’d Thomas “T.J.” Keen hard. In the end, he slapped them back harder.

Keen, a Plainville resident and gambling opponent, set up a website called No Plainville Racino to fight a proposed slots license at the track. As Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham described it, Keen’s troubles began after someone broke into his home and he gave a webcam image to the Plainville Police. The picture made its way onto a related Facebook page that another gambling opponent had started. An anonymous commenter wrote, “I wonder if they checked over at the racetrack, lol.”

Ourway Realty, which owns the track, sued Keen for defamation on the basis of that anonymous comment. Keen countersued, arguing that Ourway’s legal action had been filed for the sole purpose of stifling public debate and thus violated the state’s anti-SLAPP law. (SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.”)

In the end, Keen — and the right of citizens to speak out — prevailed. Judge Patrick Brady of Norfolk Superior Court tossed aside the suit and awarded Keen nearly $25,000 to cover his legal costs, according to The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro.

“I’m happy that the court has affirmed affected citizens’ right to petition and make their voice heard in these community-changing debates,” Keen said in a statement released by the ACLU of Massachusetts, which helped represent him. “Residents should not be intimidated or bullied by deep-pocketed firms looking to quash their dissenting voice.”

Maine Department of Transportation: Keeping records about a controversial highway from the public view

A private developer has proposed a $2 billion, 220-mile highway connecting Calais to the east and Coburn Gore to the west — and all documents pertaining to the project are under seal. That’s because of a 2010 exemption to Maine’s right-to-know law that, as the Portland Press-Herald editorialized, “you could drive a truck through.”

Under the exemption, records about the proposed “east-west highway” will remain secret until the Maine Department of Transportation (DOT) decides whether to move ahead. This lack of accountability is an outrageous breach of the public trust. By rights, the officials responsible for writing and passing the 2010 exemption deserve the Muzzle. We’ll award it to the DOT as their proxy.

Fortunately, advocates of open government succeeded in undoing the worst of the 2010 exemption. On June 5, Governor Paul LePage signed legislation that maintains the legitimate need to protect confidential business information and trade secrets while subjecting most aspects of such partnerships to public scrutiny.

“Decisions about whom the government enters into partnership with and how officials spend our taxpayer money are certainly matters of public importance,” wrote Rachel Healy, communications director for the ACLU of Maine, in a commentary for the New England First Amendment Center.

The east-west highway is a controversial idea. According to the Associated Press, business owners this spring told the legislature’s transportation committee that the highway would cause them significant harm. They — and everyone in Maine — deserve to be treated with respect. A transparent process will provide that.

Rhode Island prison chief A.T. Wall: Prisoners have free-speech rights, too

Does a prison inmate forfeit his First Amendment rights? Yes, to an extent. But as US Magistrate Lincoln Almond patiently explained last September, an inmate who criticizes a prison policy that is applicable to other inmates and who provides them with relevant information — unlike a “personal matter of purely individual interest” — may indeed be engaging in protected speech.

Almond was aiming his words at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections (DOC), whose director, Ashbel T. “A.T.” Wall II, was fighting a lawsuit brought by Jason Cook, an inmate at the Adult Correctional Institute in Cranston. Cook claimed that after he complained to The Providence Journal in 2007 about a new policy that restricted reading materials an inmate could receive (which itself raised First Amendment issues and was later rescinded), prison authorities retaliated by taking away his kitchen job, trashing his cell, holding him in segregation, and subjecting him to strip-searches. The resolution of Cook’s lawsuit is still pending.

In defending itself against Cook’s lawsuit, the DOC argued, among other things, that Cook had no First Amendment right to speak to the Journal, thus prompting Almond’s finding. The DOC appealed. In February, US District Judge William Smith upheld most of Almond’s recommendations, including his finding that Cook did indeed enjoy some First Amendment protections.

“The DOC’s position that inmates could be disciplined simply for bringing prison conditions and policies to the public’s attention was extremely troubling,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island ACLU.

Convicted criminals, understandably, give up many of their rights when they are sentenced to prison. But it doesn’t and shouldn’t put them beyond the protection of the Constitution. A.T. Wall may not like it — but at least now he presumably understands it.

Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Peter Lauriat: Twitter emerges as a vital news tool — but not in this courtroom

 The courts remain our least open institution. Twitter has helped change that, as reporters are able to send updates throughout the day from inside the courtroom. For instance, a phalanx of media is now live-tweeting every moment of the Whitey Bulger trial.

Then there is Judge Peter Lauriat, who last winter presided over the case of Nathaniel Fujita, convicted in March of murdering his girlfriend. Lauriat had no problem with television cameras or even live-blogging — but he drew the line at Twitter.

According to Robert Ambrogi, a lawyer who is also executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, Lauriat initially banned Twitter from anywhere inside the Middlesex Superior Courthouse in Woburn. He later backed off and allowed tweeting from a separate media room, but not from the courtroom itself.

“The ban on tweeting drew the unavoidable question: What’s the difference?” asked Ambrogi. The answer is unclear.

David Riley wrote at the Wicked Local Blog that Lauriat was concerned that jurors were more likely to run across a tweet by accident than another form of media.

Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project, reported that Lauriat expressed doubts about the quality of journalism when reduced to 140-character updates, and about his inability to prevent attendees who had not registered as journalists from firing up Tweetbot on their smartphones.

None of these were good enough reasons to ban what has become a vital news medium. Lauriat acted as he did because he could. He shouldn’t have had that option.

Another year of outrages against free speech

The 16th annual Muzzle Awards are now online at WGBH News, as well as at The Providence Phoenix and The Portland Phoenix. A New England tradition continues.

Page 1 of 2

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén