Media Nation

How graffiti detracts from bike paths: A spray-painted ride along the Tri-Community Greenway

*The Tri-Community Greenway. Original here.*

If you ride your bike in the Boston area, you encounter graffiti pretty much everywhere. It’s obnoxious and unsettling, because it leads to a sense that civic-minded people are on the losing end while vandals are able to gain the upper hand.

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The Somerville Community Path from Davis Square to East Cambridge is particularly bad, with graffiti overwhelming the walls alongside the MBTA tracks and next to the path itself.

Today, though, I’d like to take a look at a different bike path — the Tri-Community Greenway from Winchester through Woburn and into Stoneham, along with a spur from Winchester to Horn Pond in Woburn. It’s 13.4 miles out and back, and it’s marked with numerous well-designed signs along the way — many of which have been smeared with graffiti.

As a bike path, the Greenway is more aspirational than it is reality, since much of it follows neighborhood streets. That’s especially true of the southern part of the route up to where you turn east off Central Street in Woburn onto an actual paved path. After that, you’re on a path, though with numerous street crossings.

Earlier this week I rode the entire Greenway, including the Horn Pond spur, and took photos to document what I saw.

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Ron Mitchell tells us how The Bay State Banner is serving Greater Boston’s communities of color

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Ron Mitchell, publisher and editor of The Bay State Banner. In 2023, Mitchell and André Stark, both seasoned television news journalists, purchased the Banner, a newspaper covering the Black and brown communities in Boston and beyond.

The Banner was started in 1965 by Melvin Miller. The print weekly is legendary for covering stories that were ignored by other publications, such as stories about the Black and Latino communities in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. Mitchell and Stark are expanding its digital footprint.

During his 27 years at WBZ-TV (Channel 4), Mitchell created news coverage focused on racism in elementary school textbooks in 2014 and a series chronicling an 11-year lawsuit that culminated in an $11 million award to a Black firefighter in Brookline.

Ellen and I also talk with Sanjana Mishra, who just received her bachelor’s degree from Northeastern in journalism and criminal justice. She’s worked in local news, communications and social media. In one of my classes last semester, she wrote a final paper on the role of private equity and corporate-chain ownership in creating and exacerbating the local-news crisis. Her paper, which we’ve published at What Works, focuses on Alden Global Capital and USA Today Co., known as Gannett until recently.

Ellen has a Quick Take on “North Star Stories,” a daily radio broadcast on local news carried by AMPERS, a network of 17 community FM stations across Minnesota. It’s by community, for community, and it’s funded partly by donors and partly by the state.

I’ve got a Quick Take about the latest on The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which announced earlier this year that it was shutting down in the face of mounting losses. What’s happened since is mostly good — but it comes with a sour aftertaste.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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.

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Why did Tulsi Gabbard resign? You can’t tell from the media’s dueling anonymous sources.

*Tulsi Gabbard. Photo (cc) 2022 by Gage Skidmore.*

I’m not one to break out the smelling salts when news outlets rely on anonymous sources. Important investigative stories are often based on unnamed insiders, as was the case with The Atlantic’s recent exposé of FBI Director Kash Patel’s drinking and erratic behavior. Reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick interviewed more than two dozen sources and sought comment from both the FBI and the White House.

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But I thought some of the sourcing around Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s announcement that she would resign was just plain shoddy. Let’s start with Jonathan Landay and Erin Banco of Reuters, who wrote on Friday: “A source familiar with the matter said that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House.”

Thus on the basis of one anonymous source did Reuters assert that Gabbard was lying when she claimed she was leaving in order to take care of her husband, who, she said, has been diagnosed with bone cancer.

Interestingly, The New York Times account, by Dustin Volz and Julian E. Barnes, directly contradicts Reuters, saying: “Mr. Trump did not force Ms. Gabbard to resign on Friday, according to people familiar with the matter, but her standing and influence within the White House had continued to erode in recent months.”

Now, I don’t know how many sources are covered by “people,” but it’s more than one.

Finally, there’s this Associated Press report, by Meg Kinnard, Will Weissert and David Klepper: “There had been rumblings that Gabbard would split with Trump after the president’s decision to strike Iran, which caused some division within his administration.”

Rumblings? OK. Actually, maybe we can let that go, since we’ve all seen reports in recent months that Gabbard wasn’t on board with the Iran war. Still, the passive-tense construction doesn’t give any indication of where these “rumblings” have been coming from. The White House? The Pentagon? Who knows?

Decisions over when it’s acceptable to rely entirely on anonymous sources are always fuzzy, but the real reason that Gabbard is leaving isn’t important enough to try to report it on the basis of light sourcing in real time. A story based on multiple sources reporting on what really happened would be welcome — and there was no need to try to break that story in the immediate aftermath of her resignation.

Did you miss our What Works webinar on ‘Audience, AI and Events’? Here are the videos.

Thursday’s webinar on “Audience, AI and Events” was a rousing success. We want to thank all of our presenters as well as the local-news publishers, journalists and volunteers who gave up part of their day — and, in a few cases, their entire day — to pick up ideas and learn new skills.

We recorded all of our sessions, and you’ll find them below. For our three workshops, led by Emily Turner, Dr. John Wihbey and Iris Adler, we used breakout rooms so that participants could work on projects assigned by the facilitators. Those have been edited out of the videos.

We kicked off the webinar with a welcome from What Works’ co-leaders, Professor Dan Kennedy of Northeastern’s School of Journalism and Ellen Clegg, a retired top editor at The Boston Globe and a co-founder of Brookline.News, a digital nonprofit. We provided a brief update on the nine major local- and regional-news projects that we profiled in our 2024 book, “What Works in Community News.” Spoiler alert: They’re all alive and well, though some have changed in significant ways.

Our first workshop, on “Audience Development and Engagement,” was led by Emily Turner, deputy editor of community at Boston.com. Emily was a student of Dan’s back in the day.

Our second workshop, on “AI Skills for Local News Organizations,” was led by Dr. John Wihbey, a professor of media and technology at Northeastern and the author, most recently, of “Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech — and What Comes Next.”

Our keynote address featured Dan Lothian, editor-in-chief and general manager of local news at Boston’s public media organization GBH and professor of the practice in Northeastern’s School of Journalism, and Lee Hill, executive editor of GBH News. They were introduced by Professor Jonathan Kaufman, director of Northeastern’s School of Journalism.

Our third and final workshop, on “Event Planning for Building Community,” was led by award-winning veteran broadcaster Iris Adler. She is also a board member at Brookline.News, and just a week earlier she organized a successful storytelling event to benefit the news outlet at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

A new financial crisis may be brewing — and, this time, there isn’t a Barney Frank in sight

*Barney Frank. Photo (cc) 2012 by U.S. Department of Agriculture.*

The devolution of our political culture is perhaps best summed up in this passage from David Shribman’s Boston Globe obituary of Barney Frank, the legendary progressive congressman who died Tuesday evening:

Mr. Frank was involved in two bailout efforts to battle the 2008 economic crisis, first for foundering financial services institutions and then for the nation’s automobile companies.

“If Barney had not been chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the financial crisis, I shudder to think what would have happened to our economy,” said Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who served as President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary during the meltdown. “He was in the right spot at the right time.”

Now we are dealing with what looks a lot like a tech bubble plus mounting economic pressures from Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran — and there isn’t a Barney Frank in sight.

I also found this Shribman sentence particularly graceful:

Through more than a half-century of political activism, political agitation, political campaigning, and political maneuvering, his presence on the left in Massachusetts politics exceeded the combined left field tenure of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski in Fenway Park.

Today Frank is probably best known as the first member of Congress to come out as gay voluntarily. But there was a lot more to his career than that. His work stretched back many decades, and it was consequential.

I’m old enough to remember when Frank was a top aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White and, later, a member of the state legislature. He was elected to Congress for the first time in 1980, when he succeeded Father Robert Drinan, himself a progressive legend. Two years later, he defeated moderate Republican Margaret Heckler in a battle of incumbent House members, a situation forced by reapportionment. He continued to serve until 2013, when he was succeeded by Joe Kennedy III.

I think I only interviewed Frank once, briefly, while I was at The Boston Phoenix. Frank was notoriously abrupt with reporters, so I tried to steel myself — but he must have been in a good mood that day. What I remember is that I’d asked for his thoughts on a story I was writing, and he called me back from outside a committee hearing. I’m paraphrasing, but he began something like this: A Democrat’s talking, so I’ve got a few minutes. I only have to pay attention when it’s a Republican.

There won’t be another one like Barney Frank.

Brian McGrory announces some big changes at the top of The Boston Globe’s masthead

Five months after returning as editor of The Boston Globe, Brian McGrory has announced changes that will reshape the top of the masthead.

Cristina Silva, currently the managing editor for local news, will become managing editor for operations and standards, “focused on the future of this newsroom rather than daily journalism.” She’ll be replaced by Cynthia Needham, currently deputy managing editor for innovation and strategy, who McGrory called “an uncommonly strong editor with a fresh eye for what makes a great story.”

Finally, Jason Tuohey, a longtime Globe digital editor who’s currently editor-in-chief at the Encyclopedia Britannica, will return to the paper as managing editor for digital strategy. Tuohey is also an audience engagement consultant with Boston University’s local-news program. McGrory wrote that Tuohey “is coming back to a newsroom that is brimming with digital leaders who are among the best in the industry.”

McGrory’s full memo, sent to the staff earlier this afternoon and forwarded to me by a trusted source, follows.

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‘Beat the Press’ takes on that explosive Nicholas Kristof column. Plus, Spencer Pratt, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

On the latest edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we examine the fallout over an explosive New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof alleging that Israeli prison guards sexually assaulted Palestinian prisoners. Was his sourcing shaky, as critics claim? Although the Times issued a statement supporting Kristof, why hasn’t the news side followed up?

We also take a look at former reality star Spencer Pratt’s gadfly campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles — fueled by an over-the-top AI-generated ad and by a distinct lack of interest by the news media about who Pratt is and whether he’s qualified.

Plus: Two Florida police officers sue the production company behind “The Rip,” a movie starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck based on a true story. In the film, the officers help themselves to part of a $21 million jackpot they discovered inside a suspected drug dealer’s home — something they were not accused of doing in real life.

And stick around for our panel’s Rants and Raves. With Emilyl our host, Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston; Jon Keller of WBZ-TV, and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.

Religious-right House members to public schools: Ban these books or lose your funding

I want to call your attention to a bill in the U.S. House that would severely restrict the books that are available to students in public schools, either in the classroom or in school libraries. I don’t know whether there’s a serious chance of its being enacted into law, but it’s bad news, and it needs to be quashed at the earliest opportunity.

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The proposal, H.R. 7661, is called the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act. It would “prohibit the use of funds provided … to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.” It’s cosponsored by 22 House members, all Republicans.

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A Muzzle Award to Michelle Wu for declining a request to produce official text messages

*Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. Public domain photo taken in 2022 by Joshua Qualls.*

Are text messages to and from government officials public records? You might think it’s complicated. On the one hand, texts are in written form, like emails, and those are unquestionably a matter of public record. On the other hand, texts resemble conversations in that they tend to be informal, used to express fleeting thoughts.

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In fact, though, it’s not complicated. Text messages are public records, period. And so I’m handing out a New England Muzzle Award to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, whose office claims it can’t comply with a request by The Boston Globe to produce text messages that she says she’s exchanged with developers. As the chief executive of the state’s largest city, Wu and her staff surely know better.

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The Lexington Observer’s unusual revenue stream: acting as a conduit for other news outlets

*The Adams Building, in Lexington Center, is named for Alan Adams, who published the Lexington Minuteman on its premises. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.*

The Boston Globe has just published a fascinating story (sub. req.) about The Lexington Observer, a hyperlocal digital nonprofit through which flows a surprising amount of money. Media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that the Observer isn’t just covering its affluent community of 34,000. It also serves as a conduit for other news operations across the country.

As Ryan puts it: “The news organization has handled millions of dollars in donations in recent years, something many small nonprofit newsrooms could only fantasize about. Only a small share of the Observer’s operational revenue comes from local donors and ads. The outlet instead survives largely on fees it collects by helping other news organizations across the country raise money.”

Between 2023 and 2024, the Observer reported in tax filings that its expenses rose from $640,000 to nearly $5 million — most of which ended up in the hands of other local news outlets.

“You see other nonprofit or local newsrooms do other weird things to make money. This just happens to be ours,” Co-founder and board chair Nicco Mele is quoted as saying. Mele is a former executive director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Also involved in the Observer’s fundraising effort, known as the Local News Hub, is Lauren Feeney, a journalist who is executive editor of both the Observer and the Hub, and Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, an Observer board member who’s the co-founder and former chief executive of the National Trust for Local News.

The Lexington Observer — like a number of startups in Greater Boston — was launched in 2021 in response to the Gannett chain’s hollowing out of the town’s longtime weekly newspaper. In this case it was the Lexington Minuteman, whose history I wrote about here.

The Trust is a nonprofit that owns and operates newspapers in Maine (including the Portland Press Herald), Colorado and Georgia. Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Hansen Shapiro for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and our podcast.