Media Nation

Local doesn’t scale: How community publishers can survive and thrive in the AI era

*The New Haven Independent newsroom. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.*

Folks who work at finding solutions to the local news crisis are understandably frustrated at what a difficult, frustrating slog it can be. Earlier this week, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the former executive director of the National Trust for Local News, gave Richard J. Tofel a preview of a report she’s written for Press Forward and said, “I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.”

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I’m looking forward to reading Hansen Shapiro’s report. (She’s featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and has been on our podcast.) And yet there really is no substitute for solving this problem one community at a time. For all the talk you hear about scale, that’s really not the way to go unless you’re talking about obvious things like finding a common tech platform so that every local news publisher doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the content management system. In the early days of the hyperlocal news movement, a group of publishers got together and formed an organization called Authentically Local. Its spot-on message: “Local Doesn’t Scale.”

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The Mass. public records law needs some teeth. Will 2026 be the year that it happens?

*The Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.*

Massachusetts has long been notorious for being one of the least progressive states with regard to government transparency. The state’s public records law is alone in exempting the governor’s office, the Legislature and the judiciary, leaving cities, towns, counties and the state’s executive agencies as the only government bodies that may be compelled to produce documents when requested to do so by journalists or members of the public.

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What’s worse, there are few penalties for failing to comply with the law. As John Hilliard observes (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe:

In Massachusetts, the state law’s deadlines for fulfilling records requests can be ignored, workers can conspire to overestimate costs, elected officials can spend years fighting requests in court, or not bother releasing records at all. No one tracks whether local governments like cities and school districts follow the law; state agencies self-report requests, but not the reasons why they refuse them.

Michael Morisy, the chief executive of Boston-based MuckRock, who’s been helping people file public records requests for years, told the Globe: “It’s among the worst states when it comes to public records access.”

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On the latest ‘Beat the Press,’ we look at war coverage, a Trump-friendly media monopoly, AI and more

On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.

In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.

“Beat the Press” is hosted by Scott Van Voorhis’ newsletter, Contrarian Boston. With Emily, Scott, Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe and me, expertly produced by Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.

I watched Fox cover the Iran war. It was straighter than I had expected — but woefully incomplete.

*Fox News anchor Will Caine, left, with retired Lt. Col. Allen West.*

With Donald Trump plunging us into a new war in the Middle East, I was curious about how it was being covered on MAGA-TV, also known as Fox News. I decided to watch the 8 p.m. hour on Sunday.

Overall, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The real problems weren’t what was said so much as what wasn’t. But since I spent the weekend keeping up on developments primarily with The New York Times, I’m not sure whether other television news outlets were doing a better job.

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If I’d tuned in Fox at 8 p.m. on a weekday, I’d have encountered the loathsome Jesse Watters, a racist misogynist who once “joked” about killing Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, the hour was hosted by Dallas-based Will Caine, about whom I know nothing, but who came across as a fairly conventional anchor. Apparently that was a last-minute switch; the hour is normally given over to “Life, Liberty & Levin,” helmed by right-wing zealot Mark Levin.

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Hegseth deceptively suggests that Scouting America has banned trans youth. Here’s the truth.

*Scouts visit with President Barack Obama in 2010.*

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a deceptive and disingenuous statement Friday to make it appear that Scouting America — formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America — had agreed to ban transgender teens.

He didn’t exactly lie. What he said was cuter than I thought he was capable of. But he did manage to produced content for Fox News in order to advance his hateful campaign against the LGBTQ community. Here’s the relevant section of Hegseth’s statement regarding trans youth, as reported by Alex Nitzberg of Fox News:

Scouting America will modify its policy to make clear that membership will be based solely on biological sex at birth and not gender identity,” he said.

“That means that the application, any application, will have only two sex designations, male and female, and the application must match the applicant’s birth certificate. Scouting will also make clear that biological boys and girls will not be allowed to occupy or share intimate spaces together. Toilets, showers, tents, anywhere like that.

Sounds like a ban, doesn’t it? Not so fast. Because, according to Ben Finley and Jamie Stengle of The Associated Press, Scouting America hasn’t made any changes at all with regard to trans members.

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The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student paper, celebrates its 100th anniversary

The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper, is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The paper — now mostly digital — began life in 1926 as The Northeastern News, a university-supported outlet formed by the merger of two other campus newspapers.

The News went independent in 2008, changing its name and ending its dependence on funding from the administration. Yet its mission has remained the same: comprehensive coverage of Northeastern, supplemented with reporting from the surrounding community.

This week the News published an overview of the past 100 years as well as profiles of folks who were editors back in their student days. I was honored to be one of them. There’s even merch.

The Huntington News is a vital resource on campus. The News today is better than the News I was part of in the 1970s — more professional and serious-minded, with more measured judgment. Plus there’s just much more journalism than we were able to offer in our weekly print paper 50 years ago. Congratulations to all!

A reporter’s home is raided, and the Justice Department is admonished for withholding information

*U.S. Justice Department. Photo (cc) 2006 by Coolcaesar.*

Should a judge be expected to know when a prosecutor’s request is illegal? I would have thought so. But that turns out to be not the case with regard to a Washington Post reporter whose home was raided by the FBI last month as part of a leak investigation targeting a Pentagon contractor.

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New York Times reporter Charlie Savage reported recently that the Justice Department had failed to tell a judge that a 1980 federal law prohibited the government from seeking a journalist’s reporting materials in most instances. Because of that failure, the judge issued a warrant to search the home of Post reporter Hannah Natanson — a shocking move given that journalists are generally summoned to court and given an opportunity argue against being forced to turn over their documents.

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Dale Anglin tells us how Press Forward is leveraging local news to build community

*Dale Anglin at the recent Knight Media Forum in Miami.*

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Dale Anglin, the inaugural executive director of Press Forward, a philanthropic effort that is dedicated to funding local news initiatives nationwide.

Before she was named as the leader of Press Forward, Anglin served as a vice president for grantmaking at the Cleveland Foundation. She also led the foundation’s journalism strategy. Then and now, she focuses on local news and information as a way to restore a sense of community.

I’ve got a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, one of the most prominent nonprofit digital startups. It looks like readers of The Washington Post who live in the DC area may not be deprived of local news and sports after all despite the recent deep cuts ordered by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. The Banner is expanding, and it’s part of executive editor Audrey Cooper’s mission to build civic engagement through community journalism.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on a bill in New York state that attempts to put some guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Among other things, it would require disclosures and mandate supervision and fact-checking by actual human editors. It received a hearty endorsement from journalism industry unions. But there’s a lot of catching up to do to rein in the robots.

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

The Blizzard of ’26 hits the Mystic Lakes

This afternoon I got out for the first time since Sunday and stomped around the Mystic Lakes a bit. I didn’t get too far. Someone had helpfully cleared a path through the snow, but it was pretty rough, and I didn’t want to spend too much time walking along Mystic Valley Parkway. Fortunately the entrance road to the Upper Mystic Lake Dam was cleared and open.

*Along the eastern shore of the Lower Mystic Lake.*

*Looking south toward the Lower Mystic Lake near the Medford Boat Club.*

*Looking north toward the Upper Mystic Lake at Tufts’ Bacow Sailing Pavilion.*

*Looking west toward the Upper Mystic Lake.*

The Boston Globe’s print edition gets snowed out, invoking memories of the Blizzard of ’78

The Boston Globe calls its decision not to print a paper today “unprecedented.” But as Aidan Ryan reports (sub. req.), it depends on your definition of unprecedented: “Even during the historic Blizzard of ’78, the Globe printed a few thousand copies of the Feb. 7, 1978, edition, though its delivery trucks couldn’t get through the piles of snow around its old offices on Morrissey Boulevard.”

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Moreover, Ryan notes that today’s edition will be printed and delivered with Wednesday’s paper. It strikes me as an odd move given that the Globe’s website is up and running, including the daily e-paper. But maybe there are a few print customers who really don’t want to read the paper online and who will appreciate having today’s paper — perhaps to commemorate the Blizzard of ’26.

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