Twenty-three-mile-plus ride, mostly along the Minuteman.
A simple step to ease the transition of ex-prisoners returning to society
The lack of an official ID isn’t necessarily the first thing you’d think of when it comes to the challenges facing ex-prisoners returning to society. In fact, though, the lack of an ID can prevent them from starting work or getting an apartment — key steps in moving forward with their lives. As Alexis Farmer writes for CommonWealth Magazine:
Removing the time lag between leaving a correctional facility and restarting one’s life with the necessary documents in hand is critical to a successful transition. During a global pandemic, the urgency to remove bureaucratic hurdles to re-entry is more important.
This past summer and fall I had the privilege of serving as Farmer’s mentor through the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. I serve on the board of advisers at the institute, which places brilliant young graduate students at state and local government agencies for summer internships in the hopes that they’ll consider public service as a career.
Farmer, a master’s student in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, was an intern in Boston’s Office of Returning Citizens (ORC), which supports formerly incarcerated citizens in their transition to the community. Her commentary is a significant contribution to our thinking about criminal justice.
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Everything you know is wrong (Facebook edition)
Like many observers, I have often cited Facebook, along with Fox News, as one of the most dangerous forces promoting disinformation and polarization. Its algorithms feed you what keeps you engaged, and what keeps you engaged is what makes you angry and upset.
But what if most Facebook users don’t even see news? Nieman Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen conducted a real-world experiment. And what she found ought to give us pause:
Even using a very generous definition of news (“Guy rollerblades with 75-pound dog on his back”), the majority of people in our survey (54%) saw no news within the first 10 posts in their feeds at all.
Moreover, the top three most frequently seen news sources weren’t the likes of Newsmax, Breitbart and Infowars — they were CNN, The New York Times and NBC News, which epitomize the mainstream.
I asked Owen to clarify whether her definition of news popping up in people’s feeds was restricted to content that came directly from news organizations or whether it included news stories shared by friends. “It was ALL news,” she replied, “whether shared by a news organization or a friend.”
Is it possible that we all misunderstand the effect that Facebook is having (or not having) on our democracy?
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HuffPost hasn’t died, but it sure did fade away. Here are three reasons why.
Maybe BuzzFeed will save The Huffington Post. Frankly, though, it feels more like the end than a new beginning. Who has given much thought to HuffPost in recent years? Even with a sharp editor, Lydia Polgreen, at the top until recently, the site hasn’t seemed relevant for a long time.
So what happened? Your guess is as good as mine. But I’d argue that HuffPost was built on three pillars, and all of them are gone:
• Unpaid contributions. For a long time, HuffPost was a blogging platform as much as it was a publisher. The site took a lot of heat for not paying its writers, but I always thought that critics were making a category error. If you’re going to blog and not get paid for it, why not do it at a site where you’re more likely to be seen rather than on your own?
Maybe eight or so years ago, when I was between paid column-writing gigs, I wrote a few free pieces for HuffPost just to keep my hand in. There was a huge variety of contributions to HuffPost, some great, some terrible. They gave the site a vibrancy that it has lacked ever since such content was discontinued.
• Abusive aggregation. The Huffington Post originally made its mark with extremely aggressive aggregation — it would, for example, summarize a 5,000-word investigative piece published by another news organization in so much detail that you really didn’t need to click through to the original. As Jeff Bezos lamented shortly after announcing he would buy The Washington Post, HuffPost could rewrite a story “in 17 minutes” that had taken the originating media outlet weeks or months to report and write.
Over time, HuffPost’s approach to aggregation became more conservative even as it added more original reporting. That may have been the ethical thing to do, but I’m sure it cost them a substantial part of their audience.
• Social over search. HuffPost absolutely nailed search back when that mattered above all else. Remember the infamous “What time does the Superbowl start?” headline, which the rest of the internet reacted to with a mixture of rage and awe?
Well, search-engine optimization has long since given way to social-media engagement as the metric that really matters. And BuzzFeed perfected the latter, which is why it’s the senior partner in this particular deal. What the two sites have in common is BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, who helped HuffPost master SEO before founding BuzzFeed and embracing social.
All of this is why I’m not particularly optimistic about HuffPost staging a comeback. It was hugely influential for about a half-dozen years after Arianna Huffington launched it in 2005. But it was a creature of its time, and that time may have expired.
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3 reasons why it matters that Linda Pizzuti Henry was named CEO of the Globe
Surprising though the news may have been, there was a certain inevitability to Linda Pizzuti Henry’s being named chief executive officer of The Boston Globe’s parent company.
Read the rest at GBH News. Comments are open. Please include your full name, first and last, and speak with a civil tongue.
Globe union rips management for using Trump law firm in contract negotiations
In a press release sent out earlier today, the Boston Newspaper Guild rips John Henry, Linda Pizzuti Henry and Boston Globe management for using the controversial law firm of Jones Day in contract negotiations.
This is not a new complaint, as Jones Day is sometimes characterized as a union-busting operation. But now the firm has been called out for representing President Trump in his efforts to overturn the election results.
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Why the crisis within the Boy Scouts of America could lead to a scouting revival
Could the Boy Scouts of America be heading into its final days? It sure looks that way. After decades of horrendous and widespread sexual abuse, documented in secret reports known as the “perversion files,” it appears that the moment of reckoning has arrived.
Read the rest at GBH News. Comments are open. Please include your full name, first and last, and speak with a civil tongue.
In 2016, moving comments to Facebook seemed like a great idea. Now it’s a problem.
A little more than four years after turning off comments and directing everyone to Facebook, I’ve turned them back on. The move comes at a time when we’re all questioning our dependence on Facebook given the social-media giant’s role in spreading disinformation and subverting democracy across the world.
I will continue to post links on Facebook, and readers will be able to comment either there or here. But if you’d like to reduce your own use of the platform, I urge you to sign up for email delivery of Media Nation (click on “Follow This Blog” in the right-hand rail) and post your comments here. Your real name, first and last, is required.
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COVID Diary #12: The ongoing devastation
I messed up the time and missed the train this morning, so I took a Lyft instead. The driver, Dave, told me that his business is down 40% since the start of the pandemic. He hasn’t been called to Logan in months. It’s also been quite a while since he picked up a student.
These are the costs of COVID-19 — and it’s going to get worse, and there’s no sign that Prime Minister Mitch McConnell will deign to bestow upon us another round of stimulus spending.
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