The newspaper world was rocked last week when two billionaire owners, Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times followed by Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post, killed endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris against the wishes of their editorial boards.
Harris supporters erupted in outrage, with many of them vowing to cancel their subscriptions and demanding to know how two wealthy men could be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of the editorial process. Aren’t media moguls supposed to be rarely seen and never heard?
Now, it’s true that Bezos’s and Soon-Shiong’s actions were outrageous, but that’s because of the high-handed, disrespectful manner in which they handled the endorsements. In fact, it is perfectly acceptable for newspaper owners to involve themselves in the editorial pages. The problem is that we journalists are not very good at explaining the ethics of our trade, and we too often act arrogantly toward the public we purportedly serve. As a result, endorsements are poorly understood.
Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
The fallout over Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris has been widespread and withering, according to Hadas Gold and Brian Stelter of CNN.
Internally, 15 Post opinion writers signed a piece calling the decision (gift link) a “terrible mistake.” (The tease says 16, so perhaps the number is still growing.) Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty have weighed in separately. Ann Telnaes has a gray-wash cartoon headlined, inevitably, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned. The legendary Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement called the decision not to endorse “surprising and disappointing.”
Externally, Max Tani of Semafor reports that some 2,000 Post subscribers had canceled by Friday afternoon.
If Bezos is still capable of shame, then the most wounding reaction had to be that of his former executive editor, Marty Baron, who took to Twitter and posted:
This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.
An increasing number of news organizations are becoming fearful in the face of a rising tide of fascism. The Washington Post today joined the Los Angeles Times in deciding not to endorse in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. David Folkenflik of NPR reports:
The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, would publish a note to readers online early Friday afternoon.
Shipley told colleagues the editorial board was told yesterday by management that there would not be an endorsement. He added that he “owns” this decision. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.
As with the LA Times, there has been no change in ownership at the Post, and both papers routinely have endorsed Democratic candidates in the past. The Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, courageously stood up to Trump in the face of threats during Trump’s rise in 2015 and ’16 and throughout his presidency. But the Post has been adrift in recent years, and the Bezos of 2018 is clearly not the Bezos of 2024.
In CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter cites the historian Timothy Snyder’s warning about “anticipatory obedience,” quoting Snyder as writing that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” That appears to be what has happened with Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Now, it’s true that the very notion of newspaper endorsements may have had their day. Newspaper chains such as Alden Global Capital and Gannett have moved away from them. The New York Times, weirdly, has given up on state and local endorsements, where the editorial board’s views might be welcome, while continuing to endorse in national races. Nonprofit news outlets can’t endorse without losing their tax exemption.
But for the LA Times and the Post to take a pass on the presidential race this late in the campaign smacks of giving in to the punishment they might be subjected to if Trump returns to office. Anticipatory obedience, in other words. A thoughtful, considered explanation months ago as to why they were ending endorsements would be another matter, but this is anything but that.
Meanwhile, the Times Union of Albany, New York, part of the Hearst chain, endorsed Harris today, writing:
For all Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about the weaponization of government, it’s Mr. Trump who has threatened to fire thousands of diligent career civil servants, fill the federal workforce with his loyal minions, use the Justice Department to hound political adversaries, and sic the military on citizens who protest against him.
This is not the talk of a person fit to be president for all Americans. On the issues and on character, it’s Ms. Harris who can be entrusted with the power and responsibility of the presidency.
This has been a shameful week for the LA Times and The Washington Post, and now it’s been punctuated by a much smaller paper’s willingness to step into the breach.
Merchants of death
One of the worst consequences of the local news crisis has been the rise of the oxymoronic paid obituary. Sorry, but obits are news stories with journalistic standards. If someone is paying for it, then it’s not an obit, it’s an ad — a death notice, in other words.
Bill Mitchell has a stunning piece up at Poynter Online about the venerable Hartford Courant, now owned by the cost-slashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital. It seems that a respected former staff reporter named Tom Condon died recently — and the Courant, rather than producing its own obit, picked up the one published in CT Mirror, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available for a fee to other news outlets. What’s more, the Courant has now slipped that obit behind a paywall.
The Courant’s website also carried an obit written by the Condon family for Legacy.com, according to Mitchell, who writes:
Paid obits, often written by and paid for by family members, have been boosting the sagging revenues of newspapers for a couple of decades. (The Courant charges about $1,200 for an obit the length of the one submitted by the Condon family, with an extra charge for a photo.) In 2019, Axios reported that more than a million paid obits were producing $500 million annually for newspapers, a small but significant chunk of overall advertising and circulation revenues then totaling about $25 billion a year.
It’s outrageous, and it’s not because newspapers are profiting from death. Rather, charging for obits is fundamentally no different from charging for any other type of news, and it corrupts what is supposed to be a journalistic endeavor.
The Courant and Alden are hardly alone in this. But for the paper to rely on another news organization to cover the death of one of its own really drives home just how far we’ve traveled down a very bad road.
Lessons from Billy Penn
Ten years ago, the digital journalism pioneer Jim Brady launched Billy Penn, a mobile-first news outlet covering Philadelphia. A few months later, I was in Philly to interview Brady and Chris Krewson, Billy Penn’s first editor, for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”
Billy Penn was eventually acquired by WHYY, Philly’s public radio station. Brady is now vice president of journalism for the Knight Foundation, and Krewson is executive editor of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers.
Krewson has written an informative and entertaining piece for LION on “10 things I’ve learned about independent publishing since launching Billy Penn in 2014.” Probably the most important of those lessons is that it took longer for Brady and Krewson to make a go of it than they were able to give — the project finally broken even in 2021, but by then WHYY was in charge.
That remains a problem for today’s start-ups, Krewson writes, although he’s hopeful that new philanthropic efforts such as Press Forward will give them the runway they need to build toward sustainability.
Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.
News that the Los Angeles Times would not endorse a candidate for president has quickly ballooned into yet another crisis for Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s feckless and irresponsible owner.
Mariel Garza, the Times’ editorials editor, quit on Wednesday, reports Sewell Chan in the Columbia Journalism Review. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
Chan, by the way, is a former editorial-page editor at the Times. He was recently named editor of the CJR after previously working as editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune.
Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon, responded to the criticism with a post on Twitter suggesting that he wanted to publish a side-by-side analysis of Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s strengths and weaknesses, but that the editorial board refused to comply:
In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.
Needless to say, the purpose of a newspaper’s opinion pages is to express opinions, not to offer “non-partisan information.”
Now, let’s back up a bit and look at the role of owners at large metropolitan newspapers like the LA Times. Ethically, owners should stay clear of news coverage, but Soon-Shiong reportedly violated that edict by interfering with a story about a friend whose dog had bitten someone, of all things. Natalie Korach reported in The Wrap earlier this year that the incident played a role (along with deep cuts in the newsroom) in executive editor Kevin Merida’s decision to quit in January of this year.
On the other hand, owners are free to exert their influence on the editorial pages. Indeed, at one time the lure of exercising political influence was one of the main reasons that rich people bought newspapers. So Soon-Shiong did not act unethically in killing an editorial endorsing Harris for president. Even so, his actions were high-handed and disrespectful, and by acting as he did at the last minute — instead of, say, announcing a no-endorsement policy earlier this year — he precipitated a crisis. In fact, as Max Tani noted in Semafor on Tuesday, the Times had endorsed in state and local races just last week.
Another consideration is the effect that endorsements actually have on political campaigns. A good rule of thumb is that the smaller and more obscure the race, the more that a newspaper’s opinion might actually influence the outcome. A presidential endorsement is the opposite of that, which Garza acknowledged in her resignation letter:
I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many “Trump is unfit” editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her.
But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.
Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state — and one of the largest in the nation still — declined to endorse in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.
Garza gets at something that is at least as important as influencing voters. An endorsement is how a news organization expresses its values. And what Soon-Shiong has expressed is that his newspaper is going to remain neutral at a time when a fascist (according to two generals who served under Trump, John Kelly and Mark Milley, language that Harris herself has now adopted) is seeking to return to office.
Newspapers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe have endorsed Harris. Yet, in a potentially ominous sign, The Washington Post so far has not.
Unlike the public manner in which the LA Times’ non-endorsement has played out, there’s no indication of what’s going on at the Post. Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that the Post’s silence is starting to raise eyebrows, as well as new questions about its ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. Darcy writes that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, “has repeatedly been targeted by Donald Trump over the years” and “is not alone amongst the rich and powerful who may prefer to stay as far away from politics as possible this election cycle.”
Let’s hope the Post is heard from soon.
The Sun is shining
A little over a year ago, The Colorado Sun announced it was switching from a hybrid for-profit/nonprofit ownership model to nonprofit governance. At the time, co-founder and editor Larry Ryckman (now the publisher) said that whatever misgivings he might have about the nonprofit model, it gave the Sun an easier story to tell to prospective funders.
“Whether I agree with it or not, whether I even like it or not, the reality is that many individuals, many institutions and philanthropic groups, have concluded that journalism should be nonprofit,” Ryckman told me in an interview for Nieman Lab. “I have my own thoughts on that, but that is reality.”
Well, now the switch has paid off. Ryckman announced earlier this week:
The Colorado Sun has been awarded a $1.4 million grant from the American Journalism Project. AJP is a national nonprofit whose purpose is to boost nonprofit journalism around the country, and it has thus far committed $62.7 million to 49 news organizations across 35 states.
The grant will be spread over three years, and the funds will be used to strengthen the long-term sustainability and future expansion of The Sun. This will include growing our fund development efforts and bolstering our business operations to allow us to deepen our impact in Colorado, while laying the foundation for the next era of high-quality, nonprofit journalism in our state — ensuring that Coloradans have the news they deserve for generations to come.
Before becoming a nonprofit, the Sun was a public benefit corporation, a for-profit that operates under certain restrictions and requirements. It also had a relationship with a nonprofit organization, which allowed donors to support the Sun’s journalism with tax-deductible contributions.
The Colorado Sun’s good news notwithstanding, the local news crisis continues unabated and may be getting worse. That was the message at a webinar Wednesday to mark the release of the third annual State of Local News report from the Medill School at Northwestern University.
“The crisis in local news is snowballing,” said Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. Franklin said that more than 3,000 newspapers have closed since 2005, about a third of the total, with a concomitant decline in newspaper jobs, which he called “a staggering loss.”
Zach Metzger, who runs the project now that founder Penelope Abernathy has retired, added: “News deserts are continuing to expand.”
I plan to look more closely at the data and write a follow-up at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a thorough overview of the new report.
What does it mean to “publish” something? In the pre-social media era, that question was easy enough to answer. It became a little more complicated in 1996, when Congress passed a law called Section 230, which protects internet providers from liability for any third-party content that might be posted on their sites.
But those early online publishers were newspapers and other news organizations as well as early online services such as CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. None of them was trying to promote certain types of third-party content in order to drive up engagement and, thus, ad revenues.
Today, of course, that’s the whole point. Algorithms employed by social media companies such as Meta (Facebook, Instagram and Threads), Twitter and TikTok use sophisticated software that figures out what kind of content you are more likely to engage with with so they can show you more of it. Such practices have been linked to, among other things, genocide in Myanmar as well as depression and other mental health issues.
So again, what does it mean to “publish”? I’ve argued since as far back as 2017 that elevating some third-party content over others could be considered publication rather than simply acting as a passive receptacle of whatever stuff comes in over the digital transom.
A print publication, after all, is legally responsible for everything it encompasses, including ads (the landmark Times v. Sullivan libel decision involved an advertisement) and letters to the editor. It would be neither practical nor desirable to hold social media companies responsible for all third-party content. But again, if they are boosting some content to make it more visible because they (or, rather, their unblinking algorithms) think it will get them more engagement and make them more money, how is that not an act of publishing? Why should it be protected by federal law?
Earlier this week, investigative journalist Julia Angwin wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times (gift link) arguing that the tide may be turning against the social media giants, in part because of TikTok’s aggressive use of its algorithmic “For You” feed, which has been emulated by the other platforms. A showdown over Section 230 may be headed for the Supreme Court. She writes:
If tech platforms are actively shaping our experiences, after all, maybe they should be held liable for creating experiences that damage our bodies, our children, our communities and our democracy….
My hope is that the erection of new legal guardrails would create incentives to build platforms that give control back to users. It could be a win-win: We get to decide what we see, and they get to limit their liability.
I don’t think there’s a good-faith argument to be made that reforming Section 230 would harm the First Amendment. We would still have the right to publish freely, subject to long-existing prohibitions against libel, incitement, serious breaches of national security and obscenity. And internet providers would still be held harmless for any content posted by their users. But it would end the legal absurdity that a tech platform can boost harmful content and then claim immunity because that content originated with someone else. (Ironically, those third-party posters are fully liable for their content if they can be identified and tracked down.)
As Angwin notes, Ethan Zuckerman of UMass Amherst, a respected thinker about all things digital, is suing Meta for the right to develop software that would allow users to control their own experience on Facebook. Angwin also touts Bluesky, a Twitter alternative that allows its users to design their own feeds (you can find me at @dankennedy-nu.bsky.social).
We should all have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But the platforms that control so much of our lives should should have the same freedoms that the rest of us have — and that should not include the freedom to boost harmful content without any legal consequences because of the fiction that they are not engaged in an act of publishing. It’s long past time to make some changes to Section 230.
Olivia Nuzzi departs
Olivia Nuzzi’s separation agreement with New York magazine was heavily lawyered, according to reports, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. But the magazine’s statement that its law firm found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” in her work needs to be placed in context. Liam Reilly and Hadas Gold of CNN report on Nuzzi’s departure.
Nuzzi, you may recall, was involved in some sort of sexual (but not physical) relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that may have encompassed sexting and nude selfies — we still don’t know.
But as I wrote last month, after Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy became public, she wrote a very tough piece about President Biden’s alleged age-related infirmities while Kennedy was still a presidential candidate and an oddly sympathetic profile of Donald Trump after Kennedy had left the race, endorsed Trump and made it clear that he was hoping for a high-level job in a Trump White House.
Maybe Nuzzi would have written those two stories exactly the same way even if she had never met Kennedy. But we’ll never know.
Media notes
• Billionaire ambitions. Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times reports (gift link) that a Florida billionaire named David Hoffmann has bought 5% of the cost-cutting Lee Enterprises newspaper chain, and that he hopes to help revive the local news business. “These local newspapers are really important to these communities,” Hoffman told Mullin. “With the digital age and technology, it’s changing rapidly. But I think there’s room for both, and we’d like to be a part of that.” Lee owns media properties in 73 U.S. markets, including well-known titles such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Buffalo News.
• Silent treatment. Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose ownership of the Los Angeles Times has been defined by vaulting ambitions and devastating cuts, has stumbled once again. Max Tani of Semafor reports that the Times will not endorse in this year’s presidential content, even though it published endorsements in state and local races just last week. The decision to abstain from choosing between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Tani writes, came straight from Soon-Shiong, who made his wealth in the health-care sector. Closer to home, The Boston Globe endorsed Harris earlier this week.
• Reaching young voters.Santa Cruz Local, a digital nonprofit, has announced an ambitious idea to engage with young people: news delivered by text messages and Instagram. “We want to reach thousands of students with civic news and help first time voters get to the ballot box,” writes Kara Meyberg Guzman, the Local’s co-founder and CEO. The Local’s Instagram-first election guide will be aimed at 18- to 29-year-olds in Santa Cruz County, with an emphasis on reaching local college students; Guzman is attempting to raise $10,000 in order to fund it. Santa Cruz Local was one of 205 local news organizations to receive a $100,000 grant from Press Forward last week. Guzman was also interviewed in the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” and on our podcast.
Nick Daniloff, right, and his family meet with President Ronald Reagan at the White House after his release from Soviet captivity. Official White House photo.
I met Nick Daniloff for the first time in either the late 1980s or ’90s. I can’t remember the circumstances exactly, but it was a Northeastern University event, and I recall that it was at the Boston Public Library. We had an active Northeastern journalism alumni group back then, so it may have been related to that.
Nick had joined the faculty after a long and distinguished career in journalism, capped off by his being imprisoned by the Soviet Union in 1986 on false espionage charges while working for U.S. News & World Report. I was sitting next to the then-director of our School of Journalism, the late LaRue Gilleland. Nick delivered a lecture that was informed by his deep learning and his calm but focused delivery. LaRue and I looked at each other. “He’s good, isn’t he?” LaRue said. Nick ended up succeeding LaRue as director.
Later I became a colleague of Nick, who died last Thursday at 89. He was someone we all looked up to as a role model. The students revered him, and so did we. He used to show up to our spring reception for graduating seniors every year in full academic regalia, partly as a joke — Nick had an exceedingly dry sense of humor — but partly to inject a note of seriousness into what was otherwise an informal and celebratory occasion.
In 2013, Nick earned the Journalism Educator of the Year Award from the New England Newspaper and Press Association, a well-deserved honor that was reported at the time by Debora Almeida in The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper. “I try to bring the real world of journalism into the classroom,” Nick told Debora. “A good journalism professor has real journalistic experience and didn’t just read about it.” He had some plans for his impending retirement, too: “I want to keep learning, read more Shakespeare, specifically his sonnets.”
Nick played a role in my being hired at Northeastern in 2005. He actually called my editor at The Boston Phoenix, Peter Kadzis, to inquire about me, which left me speechless when Peter told me about it because I hadn’t let him know that I might be leaving. Uh, oh. It all worked out, though.
Today I teach the journalism ethics course that Nick taught for many years. It’s an honor, and yet at the same time I know it’s impossible to live up to his high standards.
Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel, the co-hosts of “Morning Edition” on GBH Radio (89.7 FM), are transitioning to new roles, with Alston taking over a revived “Basic Black” and Siegel becoming transportation reporter for GBH News and a correspondent for “The World.” Both Alston and Siegel will be taking on other projects as well. Reporter Mark Herz will serve as interim anchor.
The return of “Basic Black” in early 2025 means that GBH is moving back into local public-affairs video programming after canceling that show as well as “Greater Boston” and “Talking Politics” earlier this year.
The changes also represent the biggest moves so far from Dan Lothian, who became editor-in-chief of GBH News and “The World” after GBH News general manager Pam Johnston left earlier this year. Johnston is now president and CEO of Rhode Island’s merged public television and radio operations.
The full announcement from GBH is below:
GBH News today announced a slate of new and expanded programs that reinforce its commitment to covering stories that matter across Massachusetts, from hyperlocal conversations informed by community stakeholders to regional reporting across the Commonwealth.
Paris Alston will transition from co-hosting “Morning Edition” to hosting a reimagined “Basic Black,” GBH’s longstanding television program that centers topical issues that matter to communities of color. The program will premiere under a new name in early 2025.
Alston also will expand her focus statewide on a program that she hosts called “A Walk Down the Block,” an original, multiplatform series that won the Regional Edward R. Murrow Award this year in the Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion category. The series has covered topics ranging from how big events for Boston’s Black communities resonated in Roxbury’s Nubian Square; LGBTQ+ Pride past and present in the Sound End; reimagining the Charles River Esplanade for better accessibility; and Boston’s busing crisis history through a citywide tour. Through collaborations with community organizations and leaders, Alston aims to get to the heart of underreported issues and use “A Walk Down the Block” as a connector for citizens to the changemakers in their neighborhoods. New episodes of “A Walk Down the Block” will air across GBH News platforms, including GBH 89.7, gbhnews.org, the GBH News YouTube channel, and social media.
“Morning Edition” co-host Jeremy Siegel is taking on several new roles, including hosting a new one-hour radio program and podcast that will take listeners all across Massachusetts to hear stories about what makes the Bay State unique. He will seek out perspectives that reflect both the challenges that face residents in rural and urban centers, and shine a spotlight on the dynamic growth, creativity, and entrepreneurship that often flies under the radar in a fast-paced news cycle. The show, which begins production in 2025, will air across all “Connecting the Commonwealth” partner stations: New England Public Media (NEPM) in Springfield; GBH, and CAI, the Cape and Islands NPR.
He also will be the transportation correspondent for both GBH News and “The World,” public radio’s longest-running daily global news program produced by GBH and PRX. Siegel will report on transit issues in Greater Boston, and travel abroad with The World to explore what drives the biggest, most efficient, and unique transportation systems globally, from railways, to shipping, cars, bicycles, and beyond. Listeners will hear Siegel’s local transportation reporting regularly on GBH News’ “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” His first international reporting for “The World” will start with a trip to Tokyo later this year.
“Paris and Jeremy are both accomplished storytellers, and we hope listeners will join us as we explore new topics and geographies together,” said Dan Lothian, Editor in Chief of GBH News and The World.
On Oct. 28, GBH News reporter Mark Herz will step in as interim host for GBH News’ Morning Edition. The show will air weekdays at a new time, 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. ET, on GBH 89.7 and stream at gbhnews.org.
Jill Stein is back, running for president for the third consecutive election — and this time members of her own family don’t even want her to run, according to a profile (gift link) by Matt Flegenheimer in The New York Times.
Stein’s Green Party candidacy in 2016 may have cost Hillary Clinton the presidency, and in 2024 it could happen again given how close the margin is between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. “Forget the lesser evil,” Stein told the Times. “Fight for the greater good.” I guess she sees the greater good as Trump’s return to the White House.
Eight years ago I wrote a piece for GBH News on my encounter with Stein during her third-party run for governor in 2002, which I was reporting on for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon). With Stein once again in the news, I’m recyling that 2016 column.
Jill Stein In 2002: Passionate, Independent, And ‘Yelling On The Mountaintop’
GBH News | Sept. 13, 2016
To the extent that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is known at all, it’s mainly for her ambiguous semi-embrace of the anti-vaccine movement, her Harambe tweet (and her subsequent criticism of how the media covered it), and her video confrontation with my WGBH News colleague Adam Reilly at the Democratic National Convention.
But long before Stein began her quadrennial, quixotic campaigns for president, she was a quixotic candidate for governor of Massachusetts. And I was there.
In April 2002, I was working on a story for CommonWealth Magazine about how much attention the media should give to that year’s third-party candidates for governor: Stein, a Lexington physician making her first run, and Carla Howell, whose respectable showing in her campaign for the US Senate two years earlier had given the Libertarians “major party” status under Massachusetts law.
In 2000, while I was on staff at The Boston Phoenix, I had spent a pleasant day on the campaign trail with Howell as she barnstormed through Western Massachusetts. In 2002, though, she refused to speak with me, even running away at a campaign rally outside the Park Street MBTA station. Her complaint was that I shouldn’t be lumping her with a newcomer like Stein.
By contrast, I found Stein to be charming — warm, sincere, intelligent, and, though far to the left, no more so than any number of state legislators. What she couldn’t explain (at least not to my satisfaction) was why she wouldn’t work within the Democratic Party, where she might have had some hope of success. That’s the calculation that the independent socialist Bernie Sanders eventually made. Stein has remained the perpetual outsider; to this day, the only elected governmental office she lists on her website is her stint as a member of Lexington’s town meeting.
I recently found my notes from my interview with Stein. I found nothing earth-shattering. But I thought anyone who is intrigued by her candidacy might be interested in what kind of a politician she was back then.
Our day began with her giving an Earth Day talk to about 60 people at Simmons College that she had titled “The Hijacking of Environmental Health Care in America: A Doctor’s Call for Reclaiming Our Democracy.” Her address, complete with PowerPoint, touched on subjects such as the skyrocketing rate of asthma, the effects of environmental dioxins on breast milk, and the benefits of wind power.
Looking back, some of her remarks seem strikingly similar to her current talking points. For instance, she told the audience about her efforts to lobby government officials as an activist with organizations such as Physicians for Social Responsibility only to discover that those officials were in thrall to special interests. “The system ties their hands,” she said. “In order to get into office you’ve got to cut the backroom deals.”
More shades of Stein’s 2016 rhetoric: At one point a member of the audience told her, “Ralph Nader gave us the gift of George Bush,” and asked why she wasn’t running instead for a seat in the legislature. Her response: “It’s not as though we’re looking at markedly different agendas between the two parties.”
After her talk, I interviewed Stein in the Simmons cafeteria and asked her what she saw as the media’s responsibility to cover her campaign.
“It would be absurd to think of the media as a gatekeeper,” she told me. “The media is people, and responsible and thinking people. They ought to be able to use their judgment to engage the democratic process, and that means to open up dialogue to candidates that they think are serious.” She added that she’d had a “very good experience” with the media in her work as an activist, saying, “I’ve had great relationships with a lot of press.”
Stein also favored reforms to give non-major-party candidates a chance to have more of an impact. We discussed the instant runoff, which she still supports. The way it works is that a voter can designate her first, second, and third (or more) choices—allowing her to pick, say, the most left-wing candidate first and then a mainstream liberal second.
“It’s very hard to get beyond the two-party system, because any challenger stands to split the progressive party and bounce the election to the third-favored candidate,” Stein said. The instant runoff, she added, “would be an enormous breakthrough, and it could allow us to really open up the dialogue.”
It all sounded very reasonable, if unlikely to become a reality. But it was when I asked her why she chose a campaign for governor that was almost certain to end in defeat rather than continue her work as an activist that I got some insight into what would be driving her all these years later.
“I jumped because I felt there was no choice,” she said. “Personally I’m looking at the irreparable unraveling of the fabric of society and the globe and the planet. And I know too much to do anything but stand up and yell on the highest mountaintop that I can get on. So I didn’t have a choice. When the offer was made [by the Green Party], I could not in good conscience say no, come hell or high water.”
The Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mitt Romney, defeated Democrat Shannon O’Brien that fall, with three others trailing far behind: Stein, Howell, and an independent candidate, Barbara Johnson. Stein did considerably better than Howell or Johnson, and her 3.5 percent was good enough to establish the Greens (now the Green-Rainbow Party) as a major party in Massachusetts. Since then she has attracted a devoted following. But I don’t see how that translates into any actual effect on government policies.
The first presidential debate of 2016 will be held on September 26. Stein won’t be on stage, and neither, we may assume, will the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, since both are currently well short of the 15 percent margin in the polls that they need to earn an invitation.
If it were up to me, I’d let Stein and Johnson participate in the first debate and only then use polling to decide whether they should be allowed into subsequent debates. That’s not going to happen, though. Stein is still yelling from the mountaintop. But she’s no closer to breaking through than she was 14 years ago.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with April Alonso, co-founder and digital editor of Cicero Independiente outside of Chicago. The nonprofit bilingual news outlet covers the communities of Cicero and Berwyn in Illinois.
Cicero Independiente and MuckRock, a Boston-based investigative news organization that specializes in public records and investigative reporting, won the 2024 Victor McElheny Award for Local Science Journalism, given by MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program, for an investigation of air quality called “The Air We Breathe.”
April has an extensive background as a multimedia content creator. She was a multimedia fellow for The Chicago Reporter, and served as a multimedia content creator for “La Verdad,” a bilingual podcast.
I’ve got a Quick Take about a town north of Vancouver, in British Columbia, that has learned a bitter lesson about Canada’s law forcing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to pay for news. The law has led to a rise in disinformation with fewer effective ways to combat it. Meta’s greed is at the heart of this, of course. But so, too, is the failure of government officials to realize that their proposed solution to help local news outlets would backfire in an ugly way.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on a new philanthropic effort created by The Minnesota Star Tribune. It’s called the Local News Fund, and it is soliciting donations supporting statewide journalism that will be matched by a $500,000 grant from a Minnesota foundation.
We have some exciting news about one of our sister projects at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Scope, a professionally edited digital publication that covers “stories of hope, justice and resilience” in Greater Boston, has received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a major philanthropic initiative funding local news.
“Since its launch in late 2017, The Scope has become a national leader in leveraging university resources to help solve the news desert crisis. This grant is a vote of confidence in our model,” said Professor Meg Heckman in the announcement of the grant. “Rebuilding the local information ecosystem is a big job, and we’re thrilled Press Forward sees the School of Journalism as a vital part of the solution.”
Heckman has been the guiding force behind The Scope for several years now. Joining her in putting the grant application together were the school’s director, Professor Jonathan Kaufman, and Professor Matt Carroll.
The Scope was one of 205 local news outlets that will receive $20 million in grant money, according to an announcement by Press Forward on Wednesday. Several of the projects are connected in one way or another to What Works, our project on the future of local news:
• The Boston Institute for Nonprofit News, an investigative project that publishes stories on its own website as well as in other outlets. Co-founder Jason Pramas has been a guest on our podcast. Several other Boston-based outlets received grants as well: the Dorchester Reporter, a 40-year-old weekly newspaper; Boston Korea, which serves the Korean American Community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and El Planeta, a venerable Spanish-language newspaper.
• The Maine Monitor, a digital project that covers public policy and politics. Now-retired editor David Dahl has been a guest on our podcast.
• InDepthNH, published by the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. The site focuses on public policy and politics, and its founder, Nancy West, has been a podcast guest.
• Montclair Local (New Jersey), a hyperlocal website that is one of the projects we write about in “What Works in Community News.” In 2009, the Local merged with Baristanet, one of the original hyperlocal news startups, which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City.”
• Eugene Weekly (Oregon), an alternative weekly that suffered a near-death experience earlier this year after a former employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. I wrote about that here and at our What Works website.
More on the shrinking Herald
Earlier this week I wrote about the latest paid circulation figures for the Boston Herald based on its recent filings with the U.S. Postal Service. I lamented that the numbers weren’t as complete as I would have liked because the Alliance for Audited Media was no longer providing its reports for free to journalists and researchers, as it had done in the past.
Well, it turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door. I now have recent reports for both the Herald and The Boston Globe. The AAM figures don’t significantly change what I reported about the Globe, but they do fill in some gaps for the Herald.
For March 2024, the most recent AAM report that’s available, the Herald’s average weekday paid print circulation for the previous six months was 12,272, a decline of 2,247, or nearly 15.5%, compared to its March 2023 totals. Sunday paid print circulation, according to the March 2024 report, was 15,183, down 2,690, also 15%.
As I explained earlier, AAM tallies up paid digital circulation differently from a newspaper’s internal count; among other things, AAM allows for some double-counting between print and digital. Nevertheless, its digital figures are useful for tracking trends.
In the March 2024 report, according to AAM, the Herald’s total average weekday paid digital circulation was 30,009, which actually amounts to a decrease of 2,250, or about 7%, over the previous year. Sunday paid digital in March 2024 was 29,753, down 1,952, or about 6.1%.
Needless to say, that’s not the direction that Herald executives want to be moving in — although I should note that, in its September 2024 post office filing, the Herald reported a slight rise in its seven-day digital circulation compared to the previous year.
What fresh hell is this?
The Boston suburb of Melrose is not a news desert. It has a newspaper, the Melrose Weekly News. But, like many communities, it would benefit from more news than it’s getting now, especially after Gannett shuttered the venerable Melrose Free Press in 2021.
So … artificial intelligence to the rescue? In CommonWealth Beacon, Jennifer Smith introduces us to the “Melrose Update Robocast,” which uses fake voices, male and female, to talk about local issues based on information that’s fed into it to produce an AI-generated script. (Note: Smith interviewed me for the piece, though I didn’t make the cut. I’m also on CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)
“In a way, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” “Robocast” creator Tom Catalini tells Smith.
Yet all across Massachusetts, independently operated news sites with real human beings are springing up to cover local news. Community journalism is how we connect with each other, and an AI-generated podcast can’t do that.
In Medford, where I live, we haven’t had a local news source for two years. But we do have a podcast, “Medford Bytes,” hosted by two activist residents who convene important conversations about what’s going on in the city, including a recent interview with the mayor about three contentious ballot questions that would raise taxes in order to pay for schools, road repairs and a new fire station.
That’s the sound of community members talking among themselves.
We have some exciting news about one of our sister projects at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. 
