Media Nation

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will go nonprofit after being acquired by The Baltimore Banner’s owner

*Pittsburgh. Photo (cc) 2017 by Patrick Kinney.*

When the owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced earlier this year that the paper would shut down in May, it was widely noted that such a move would leave Pittsburgh as the largest city in the country without a daily newspaper. That said, it seemed unlikely. The very fact that the Block family decided to keep operating the paper until May all but guaranteed that some new ownership possibilities would emerge.

And today, that’s exactly what happened. The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which owns the nonprofit Baltimore Banner, will buy the Post-Gazette and operate the paper as a nonprofit. If I’m not mistaken, that will make the Post-Gazette the second metro daily to go the nonprofit route, following The Salt Lake Tribune. A few other large regional dailies, most notably The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Tampa Bay Times, are for-profits owned by nonprofits.

The Venetoulis Institute was established by Baltimore billionaire Stewart Bainum as his vehicle for launching The Baltimore Banner, a digital-only news organization that he started after he was spurned in his attempts to buy The Baltimore Sun. The Banner has grown into one of the most admired news outlets in the country, and it recently announced it would expand its coverage area and sports reporting in response to massive cuts at The Washington Post. Ted Venetoulis was a friend of Bainum’s and an advocate for local news in Baltimore.

The Post-Gazette has been riven in recent years by a long-running battle between management and the union as well as racial turmoil, so its acquisition by a public-minded institution like Venetoulis is good news indeed.

“Venetoulis is committed to solving a national problem, to providing high-quality local journalism where it’s most needed,” Venetoulis CEO Bob Cohn was quoted as telling the Banner. “That is our civic mission. And here is an opportunity to do that in a market where the 240-year-old incumbent is going out of business or could be sold.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Bainum said, “The Block family should be recognized for selling this at a huge discount for the price they could have received.”

The change will also lead to the return of former Post-Gazette executive editor David Shribman, whose previous stops include a Pulitzer Prize-winning stint as Washington bureau chief for The Boston Globe. Shribman, who was the Post-Gazette’s top editor from 2003 to 2019, will served on the Venetoulis board.

The Internet Archive faces a new threat: Wary publishers who opt out to stop scraping by AI bots

*Ruins of the Library of Pantainos in Athens, Greece. Photo (cc) 2018 by Michael Kogan.*

Has the Internet Archive reached the end of the line? The 30-year-old nonprofit, which has saved and made searchable more than a trillion webpages, has proved itself to be of enormous value over the years.

I’ve used it to track changes in reporting, including this blog post about The New York Times’ shifting coverage of an explosion at Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in the days after Hamas’ October 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. The Times and other news organizations initially reported that Israeli forces had bombed the hospital, but they later had to walk back that unverified claim.

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The Internet Archive is also home to The Boston Phoenix’s online digital and print archives thanks to an agreement that it made with Northeastern University, which acquired the Phoenix’s intellectual property after the legendary alt-weekly went out of business in 2013. (Note: I was a longtime staff columnist for the Phoenix, and I helped arrange the donation to Northeastern.)

Now, though, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, which reproduces web content from years past, are facing an existential threat. News organizations ranging from the Times to USA Today are inserting code into their sites that blocks the Archive from crawling their content, mainly to prevent AI companies from accessing their journalism without permission.

As Katie Knibbs reports for Wired, the irony is that USA Today recently published an important piece of investigative journalism documenting ICE detention statistics that wouldn’t have been possible without the Archive. Knibbs writes:

According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is helping to lead a signature drive in support of the Archive, compares the publishers’ actions to “a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper,” according to a recent EFF article by Joe Mullin, who writes:

For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.

This is not the first time the Archive has run into legal problems. One major challenge was of its own making: a project begun during the COVID pandemic to make books available for free without permission and without any compensation to publishers or authors. Not surprisingly, the Archive lost that case in a federal appeals court in 2024. As I wrote in describing that decision: “The Archive claimed that it was in compliance with copyright law because it limited e-book borrowing to correspond with physical books that it had in its collection or that was owned by one of its partner libraries. That’s not the way it works, though.”

The current threat involves the right of publishers’ to make the content available as they see fit, which they have a legal right to do. They are under no obligation to let the Internet Archive repurpose it. Ideally, they will come to understand the incalculable damage they are doing.

As EFF’s Mullin puts it: “There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.”

A Muzzle for Teresa Riley, the chief immigration judge, for her silence over a censorious firing

*ICE goons grab Rümeysa Öztürk near Tufts.*

Eleven months ago, I handed a New England Muzzle Award to Donald Trump’s thuggish immigration czar, Stephen Miller, for the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk. The Tufts University Ph.D. student’s only offense was to help write an op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel and sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian cause.

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Now Roopal Patel, the Boston immigration judge who ended deportation proceedings against Öztürk, has been fired. And thus I’m awarding another New England Muzzle, this one to Teresa Riley, the chief immigration judge who was appointed to her position by the Trump regime. I don’t know whether she was involved in Patel’s firing. What I do know is that Riley has neither resigned in protest nor raised her voice in outrage since Patel was dismissed on Friday.

Patel was actually one of two immigration judges fired Friday who had been involved in high-profile immigration cases. The other, Nina Froes, had ruled similarly that Trump officials had no right to detain Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who’d been involved in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. There’s another New England angle as well — Froes’ court is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. The New York Times reports:

Ms. Patel, like many immigration judges interviewed by The Times, said the Trump administration had made it clear that it wanted more immigrants ordered deported.

“It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist,” she said in an interview. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.”

According to The Boston Globe (sub. req.), Patel “was nearing the end of her two-year probationary period” when she was fired. “Even though I was expecting it, it was still sort of shocking,” Patel told the Globe. “The consequences are immediate.”

The Globe reports that 113 immigration judges out of more than 700 have been fired since January 2025. The paper quoted Patel as saying:

It’s creating this climate of fear where judges are worried that if they misstep and do something that’s out of line with what the administration wants, they’re more subject to firing. That can erode judicial independence, it can erode due process, and it can make people more likely to be ordered removed from this country.

Unlike most judges, who are part of the independent judiciary, immigration judges are considered members of the executive branch and are appointed by the attorney general. “The judges there need more judicial independence,” Patel told the Times in speaking about her former colleagues.

This is the way repression works. Just as international students learned from the Öztürk and Mahdawi cases that the price of avoiding arrest and detention is to refrain from their First Amendment-protected rights to write and to protest, immigration judges have learned from Patel and Froes that they should place Trump’s agenda above the law if they want to hold onto their jobs.

A ‘NewsHour’ exchange highlights the endless debate over Biden’s and Trump’s mental acuity

Like Hillary and Bernie in 2016, or Grady Little’s decision to send Pedro Martinez back out for the eighth, the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s decline in 2024 is going to be litigated forever.

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The latest example came Friday night on the “PBS NewsHour,” when Geoff Bennett asked Jonathan Capehart why coverage of Donald Trump’s mental state hasn’t matched similar coverage of Biden’s decline two years ago. Here’s how it went down:

Continue reading “A ‘NewsHour’ exchange highlights the endless debate over Biden’s and Trump’s mental acuity”

Celebrate the first annual Local News Day by supporting journalism in your community

*Art Cullen in a scene from “Storm Lake.”*

Today is Local News Day — the first of what we can hope will become an annual reminder of the importance of community journalism. Organized by the nonprofit Montana Free Press, the event “is a national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news. Our mission is simple: reconnect people to trusted local outlets, empower newsrooms to grow, and spark a national movement that sustains local news for generations.”

We gave Local News Day a plug on the latest episode of “What Works,” our podcast about local news that I host with Ellen Clegg. The day is sponsored by a number of heavy hitters, including Press Forward, a major philanthropic effort that supports community journalism; and The New York Times; the American Journalism Project, another large philanthropy.

You may be seeing messages in your inbox and on social media asking you to support your local news organization. You should.

Poynter media columnist Tom Jones reports that MS NOW, newly freed from NBC, is investing in local news in a big way, lending support to investigative and local reporting by partnering with the Pulitzer Center, States Newsroom and The Marshall Project. “Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the announcement comes today, which is Local News Day,” Jones writes.

On Wednesday evening, I showed my students a documentary I never tire of watching — “Storm Lake,” about the Storm Lake Times’ struggle to stay afloat in rural Iowa despite the demise of local businesses at the hands of corporate agriculture. (The paper is now known as the Storm Lake Times-Pilot following a 2022 merger.) We follow Pulitzer Prize-winning publisher-editor Art Cullen and his family as they report on everything from the precarious corn crop to a member of the Latino community who’s competing in a Spanish-language talent competition on television; from the 2020 Iowa caucuses (do we know who won yet?) and into the early months of the COVID pandemic, which is where the film concludes.

Local news is the lifeblood of democracy. Not to sound defeatest, but there’s not much we can do about Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime, enabled by a supine Republican Congress, other than to vote. But we can work with our neighbors to support each other and solve problems in our own communities. We need reliable news in order for that to happen.

Rachel White tells us how an AP initiative is helping state and local news outlets

*Rachel White speaking at the 2025 International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Photo (cc) 2025 by Ascanio Pepe.*

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Rachel White, CEO of the Associated Press Fund for Journalism. Rachel joined the nonprofit AP Fund for Journalism in 2024, after a 10-year run with The Guardian, the one-time print newspaper in the U.K. that has become a global digital powerhouse.

In 2016, White became president of  theguardian.org, a nonprofit organization she helped create that raises tax-deductible funds to support The Guardian’s journalism. The AP Foundation has a similar mission but is laser-focused on state and local news outlets all over the U.S. The AP Fund is expanding. Fifty news organizations have just joined, for a total of 100 newsrooms. The foundation aims to increase that number to 150 by the end of 2026. News outlets get help with reach and strategy to achieve financial stability.

Note: We asked White about financial pressures facing the AP following decisions in 2024 by the Gannett and McClatchy newspaper chains to drop their membership in order to save money. And earlier this week, after this podcast was recorded, the AP announced that it would seek buyouts as it pivots away from newspaper journalism to visual journalism, new revenue sources and AI.

Dan has a Quick Take on Local News Day, which is this Thursday, April 9, and billed as “a national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news.”

Ellen’s Quick Take is on an opinion column apocalypse in Fargo, North Dakota. The Fargo Forum, a locally owned news outlet, has forced out three long-running columnists. Why? Take a wild guess. Here’s one headline on a recent column by journalist Jim Shaw: “Our local leaders oppose free and fair elections.” He’s now an ex-columnist.

And a big hat-tip to Alex Ip, a Gen Z publisher and editor at thexylom.com, which explores how communities are influenced and shaped by science. Alex broke the news about Fargo on social media.

A summary of our conversation

We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 600-word summary, which was then read by us for accuracy. The results are below. Do you find this useful? Please tell us what you think by using the Contact form linked from the top of our website.

Continue reading “Rachel White tells us how an AP initiative is helping state and local news outlets”

On the new ‘Beat the Press,’ we look at war coverage, fetish non-coverage and CNN’s GenZ ploy

*Click on image to watch the show at Contrarian Boston.*

On the latest edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we examine criticism from the left and the right of how the war in Iran is being covered by the media.

Plus: Why the mainstream media have shied away from showing fetish photos of Bryon Noem, husband of Kristi Noem; how CNN is trying to reach a younger audience with a show featuring online influencers; and our panel’s Rants and Raves.

With Emily, Contrarian Boston publisher Scott Van Voorhis, Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe, and me, with production by Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Production.

The Boston Globe ends its use of the AI tool Nota after Poynter reports that it plagiarizes

Angela Fu of Poynter Online published a story on Thursday that’s been rocketing around media circles. Her lead: “Artificial intelligence company Nota — whose clients include organizations like The Boston Globe and the Institute for Nonprofit News — is scrapping its network of local news sites after learning that they contained dozens of instances of plagiarism.”

You should read Fu’s story in full. The gist of it is that the AI tool was supposed to scrape press releases and official information but has been grabbing news content in addition to that. “Poynter found more than 70 stories dating back to October that included reporting, writing and photography from local journalists without attribution,” she writes. “Some of the copied material came from outlets owned by Nota’s own clients.”

Earlier today, several trusted sources sent along a memo sent to the Globe’s newsroom assuring the staff that the paper was not part of the specific experiment at issue and that everyone should stop using Nota.

Here is text of the email, which is from editor Brian McGrory; Shira Center, vice president for innovation and strategic initiatives; Cynthia Needham, deputy managing editor for innovation and strategy; Matt Karolian, vice president of platforms and AI; and Heather Ciras, deputy managing editor for audience.

Poynter published a report yesterday about Nota, an AI tool used by the Globe and many other newsrooms across the country. The story said that a Nota experiment involving AI-driven hyperlocal news resulted in stories that were clearly plagiarized from other local news organizations.

The Globe was not part of this experiment, which was aimed at small counties in other states. We’ve worked with Nota on SEO, headline recommendations, related metadata, and social platform suggestions for Globe stories. The Globe’s contract with Nota prohibits it from using our journalism to train its AI model.

That said, what happened here does not fit with our values, and we are asking everyone to stop using this product while we wait for Nota to turn off the service and end our contract. We have other strong options for this work that we’re exploring.

Trouble in nonprofit paradise: Low pay, AI worries and a restive union lead to turmoil at VTDigger

The Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier. Photo (cc) 2015 by Dan Kennedy.

On Monday, Joshua Benton reported for Nieman Lab that VTDigger was the 17th-most-trafficked nonprofit news website in the U.S., with about 800,000 visits in January, the most recent month for which figures were available. That’s quite an accomplishment for a media outlet operating in a state where, as legend has it, there are more cows than people. (Not actually true.)

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On Wednesday, Digger itself reported that its current fundraising campaign was proving to be a roaring success. The headline: “Donations tripled during final days of VTDigger Spring Drive.”

But all is not well at Digger, founded in 2009 by Anne Galloway after she was laid off by the Rutland Herald. Galloway left Digger in 2022 under circumstances that have long been understood not to be entirely happy. And now Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has checked in with a detailed story (sub. req.) of turmoil at the widely admired project. “I knew we weren’t doing everything perfectly,” Galloway told Ryan, “but I had tried to do what I could.”

Continue reading “Trouble in nonprofit paradise: Low pay, AI worries and a restive union lead to turmoil at VTDigger”

My media ethics students express some surprisingly skeptical views about AI and journalism

*1930 photo (cc) via the German Federal Archives.*

My colleagues and I are engaged in the convoluted, ever-shifting process of figuring out how to use artificial intelligence in journalism in ways that are both productive and ethical. Somewhere between “Let students use AI to write their stories” and “We should forbid all uses of AI,” there is a reasonable approach, and we’re all trying to figure out what that is.

Our students learn from us. We learn from our students. Keep in mind, though, that we have not yet seen what you might call “AI natives” in our classrooms. Young people in their late teens and early 20s were part of the before times. In the not-too-distant future, though, we’ll start seeing students who can’t remember a world without ChatGPT, Claude and the rest.

Recently I devoted a class to AI in my graduate ethics seminar. It’s a small group of five students, one of whom is an advanced undergrad. I was surprised to learn that they are as skeptical of AI as I am.

Read the rest at Poynter Online.