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On the all-new “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze the microscopically brief tenure of White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, who lasted just 0.45 Scaramuccis before she was unceremoniously tossed overboard.
In other topics, we look at the debate over whether television should be allowed to cover executions following Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s on-again, off-again plan to livestream the death of the Fort Hood shooter by firing squad; and we check in on two very different AI projects — Mass Daily News, a right-wing propaganda site whose anonymous author recently revealed himself (sub. req.) in a Boston Globe story, and South Shore News, which covers local government in nearly 20 communities. Plus our panel’s Rants and Raves.
Emily was joined by Scott Van Voorhis, the publisher of Contrarian Boston as well as our host; Cosmo Macero, a partner at Seven Letter and a former columnist and editor at the Boston Herald; and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.
Boston.com has been a free news site from the time that The Boston Globe launched it in 1995. Today, after experimenting with a soft paywall for the past year, the site will be converting to a mostly paid outlet. The change is indicative of how digital advertising has lost much of its value and of how the rise of AI search has deprived news organizations of click-throughs.
“It’s going to be a lower-price option,” Boston Globe Media chief executive Linda Henry told me in an interview. “It [Boston.com] is a much smaller newsroom than the Globe, but we still think it provides an important service to our community, and we want to continue providing it. And without consumer revenue, the numbers don’t work.”
Current Globe subscribers will be charged $32 a month if they opt for digital access to the Globe, Boston.com and Boston magazine, which Globe Media acquired in January 2025. Boston.com will cost $10 a month as a standalone product. And if readers are looking only for digital access to BoMag, the price will be $24 a year, although that’s in the process of being raised to $30.
I hope you’ll join Lara Salahi and me this Thursday, Oct. 22, for a conversation about her new book, “News-Academic Partnerships: The Great Experiment Powering Local Journalism’s Comeback.” The 7 p.m. event will take place at Belmont Books, which is located in downtown Belmont at 79 Leonard St.
Salahi, an associate professor of broadcast and digital journalism at Endicott College, has been on our “What Works” podcast about the future of local news. In she was named the New England Journalism Educator of the Year by the New England Newspaper and Press Association and the Journalism Education Foundation of New England.
Drawing on a political economy framework, Salahi examines the power dynamics between media, academia, and the public. She shows how these partnerships emerged as a strategic response to the collapse of community news ecosystems.
Grounded in case studies, research, and her own practical experience, Salahi offers a nuanced analysis of how these collaborations work. She demonstrates how they supplement dwindling local news coverage, bridge gaps in civic information, andserve as vital training grounds for aspiring journalists. At the same time, she does not she away from its challenges. Salahi also exposes the economic, technological, and ethical tensions that can challenge the long-term sustainability of these efforts.
Ultimately, Salahi argues that news–academic partnerships are more than temporary fixes. They are transformative experiments with the potential to revitalize community-centered journalism, strengthen democracy, and empower the next generation of storytellers.
From E. Benjamin Andrews’ “History of the United States” (1912), via Wikimedia Commons.
Tanner Stening of Northeastern Global News asked me Friday whether we could still trust the polls. I talked instead about why the media should move on from its obsession with polling and horse-race coverage. As Jay Rosen says, “Not the odds, but the stakes.”
Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy said the media has become too attached to polling and the political “horse race” it attempts to forecast — often at the expense of reporting on the issues and the candidates themselves….
“We should be reporting on the genuine desires of the public and which candidate is speaking best to those desires — or, rather than making that value judgment, how candidates are responding to those desires,” Kennedy said.
Just a day after CommonWealth Beacon employees announced they were forming a union, the board of MassINC — the nonprofit that publishes CommonWealth — has voted in favor of recognition.
“We respect the rights of members of the newsroom to unionize and we look forward to working with the CommonWealth Beacon Guild and the entire CommonWealth Beacon team to build an impactful and sustainable public service news organization,” according to a statement by Joe Kriesberg, MassINC’s CEO, who serves as CommonWealth’s publisher.
CommonWealth Beacon is a nonprofit digital news outlet that was launched in 1996 as a quarterly print magazine and that now publishes news about state politics and public policy on a daily basis.
“This is the exact outcome for which we were hoping,” according to Chris Lisinski, a senior reporter at CommonWealth Beacon, who was quoted in a release issued by the union. “We’re honored that MassINC recognizes the hard work of our newsroom and our desire to collectively bargain to make it an even better place, both for ourselves and for all future employees.”
Eileen O’Connor, who is chair of the MassINC board, has passed along a statement about the union organizing drive that employees of CommonWealth Beacon have announced. MassINC, the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, is the nonprofit group that publishes CommonWealth Beacon. (Note: This is not the board that I’m on; rather, I’m on the CommonWealth Beacon editorial advisory board.)
We believe CommonWealth Beacon, the nonprofit journalism arm of MassINC, is a core part of our organization and we appreciate the outstanding work done by a small team of reporters. Their work covers complex policy issues facing Massachusetts and is central to the broader nonprofit mission. MassINC management was informed on Wednesday of their intention to unionize and needs time to engage the full Board of Directors before responding. Both MassINC management and the Board take this process seriously and look forward to working together with the staff to advance CommonWealth Beacon’s mission of public service journalism.
Employees of CommonWealth Beacon, a digital nonprofit news organization that covers statewide politics and public policy, has announced a union organizing drive, according to a statement that hit my inbox a short time ago. CommonWealth is part of MassINC (the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth), a nonprofit policy organization.
“Every single eligible staff member enthusiastically supports forming a union,” says the statement, adding: “Should management force us to go through a formal National Labor Relations Board election, we are certain the outcome will be unanimous support.”
Disclosure: I’m a member of the CommonWealth editorial advisory board, which was recently reorganized to assist with fundraising ideas. In light of that, I’ll leave this here and go right to the announcement. And of course I’ll add a statement from management should I receive one. (And now I have. Please take a look.)
One recent Friday morning I picked up both of New York’s tabloids. The contrast was instructive.
The Daily News featured a grotesque murder on the front page. Inside was a mixture of local political news, more crime, and a smattering of national and international coverage from The Associated Press. The New York Post led with a goofy photo of state attorney general Letitia James, who — at least according to a whistleblower — had pursued a prosecutorial crusade against Donald Trump despite having no evidence. That was followed by page after page of celebrities, MAGA-friendly content zeroing in on familiar targets like Abdul El-Sayed, and manufactured outrages such as the rising price of Halloween candy and private-school teachers who must be getting paid too much because they wear expensive clothes.
As for which formula is more successful, that was settled a long time ago. The Daily News on the day I looked at it comprised 48 pages, whereas the Post was a relatively robust 68. The News’s print circulation is a paltry 29,000 on weekdays and 48,000 on Sundays, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. The Post’s: 112,000 on weekdays and nearly 125,000 on Sundays. But in this post-print era, it’s online where the comparison is the starkest. The Daily News’s website receives fewer than 5 million visits each month, reports the analytics firm SimilarWeb. The Post, meanwhile, has grown into a behemoth, with nearly 96 million visits a month — good for a spot in the top 10 among news websites, says Press Gazette, a British-based publication that reports on digital journalism.
The story of how the Daily News grew into a phenomenon only to fall apart at the hands of cultural and demographic change, bad ownership, and more nimble competition is told by Matthew Pressman in “The People’s Paper: The Rise and Fall of the New York Daily News,” a history of the News from its founding in 1919 to its current enfeebled state. Pressman, an associate professor of journalism at Seton Hall University, has written a rollicking tale that’s loaded with details ranging from the significant to the merely entertaining. It was all I could do to refrain from dog-earing and taking notes on every one of its 250 pages.
Donald Trump Jr. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.
It’s always the cover-up.
Status and Semafor are both reporting that a claim by ABC News as to why it pulled an error-laden story about Donald Trump Jr.’s ties to a defense contractor is simply not true. The network says it deleted the story because it had accidentally been “published prematurely” before it was finished. Those damn content-management systems.
But Natalie Korach writes for Status (sub. req.) that a spokeswoman for 1789 Capital, which lists Donald Trump Jr. as one of its partners and which invested in the defense contractor, says she spent the better part of last Wednesday going back and forth with ABC News as they vigorously defended the story. The article was finally pulled on Wednesday night with no explanation, only to reappear on Friday with some significant edits. “That narrative of incomplete reporting didn’t match up with the defense the editor gave me,” 1789 spokeswoman Alexa Henning told Korach.
If you take a look at Mass Daily News right now, you’ll see a lead story about nearly $50,000 in campaign donations from Eversource executives to Gov. Maura Healey.
It’s hardly a match for Jordan Wolman’s CommonWealth Beacon story suggesting that Healey’s public criticism of Eversource is just an election-season ploy (he’s got the receipts), and it’s merely a rewrite of a Republican Party press release. But it’s not nothing, either. Some press releases deserve to be amplified.
Other stories on the Mass Daily News homepage feature crime, critical stories about undocumented immigrants and a commentary claiming that Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue bested Healey, a Democrat, during their debate moderated by WBZ-TV’s Jon Keller earlier this week.
So what is Mass Daily News? Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has learned that the man behind the anonymous site is named Simon Pacheco — a former Florida man who registered his company in Wyoming in order to flood the Massachusetts political mediascape with rightwing, AI-enhanced pink slime.
It’s quite a story, and kudos to Ryan for figuring out Pacheco’s role.
Update: Simon Pacheco tells his side of the Mass Daily News story. Naturally, it’s accompanied by an AI image. He says it’s not “pink slime,” and no, it doesn’t meet every criteria. But it’s partly AI-written, and until Saturday it was anonymous. So … pinkish slime? And yes, less pink today than it was before Aidan Ryan identified him.
Employees of 
