Media Nation

How The Baltimore Banner’s embrace of DC sports fits with its editor’s civic-minded mission

*The Washington Nationals will soon be covered by The Baltimore Banner. Photo (cc) 2022 by All-Pro Reels / Joe Glorioso.*

The gutting of The Washington Post may prove to be an opportunity for The Baltimore Banner. According to an announcement, the Banner, a digital nonprofit startup, will cover Washington teams, including beat coverage of the Nationals baseball team and the Commanders football team. The Banner’s editor-in-chief, Audrey Cooper, is quoted as saying:

This decision is part of our unwavering commitment to serve Maryland with honest, independent journalism. It builds on last week’s announcement that we are expanding our news coverage into Prince George’s County and represents another step in strengthening our statewide reach.

At a time when so much pulls communities apart, sports bring us together. The Washington Post’s decision to eliminate its sports section creates an opportunity for us to serve more Marylanders with The Banner’s distinctive mix of fearless accountability reporting, engaging storytelling and sharp analysis.

I found Cooper’s comments about sports bringing people together to be especially interesting because they parallel something she told Mike Blinder recently on the Editor & Publisher vodcast:

America is having a hard time having civil, civic conversations right now and I think the reason behind that is because of the shrinking local news ecosystem. If we spent more time worrying about whether our kids are being educated, whether our roads are paved, whether our water is safe to drink, and less time about these national culture fights that, to be honest, don’t affect our day-to-day lives, I think there’s a chance that local news has to re-teach Americans how to have civic conversations.

To me, saving the great American experiment means saving local news. And I think it’s difficult to find a place in America right now where that’s not, where Baltimore is like second to none. I mean, I think what’s happening here and what the banner is doing is the most interesting experiment in local news, and I wanted to be a part of it.

This echoes a theme that Ellen Clegg and I explore in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and on our podcast. The nationalization of everything has a lot to do with why we are so polarized. We live in communities, in neighborhoods, but the phony controversies that are ginned up in the national media — especially on Fox News — gain more resonance than they should when we lack reliable sources of local news to inform us about what really matters.

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The Jeff Bezos-owned Post’s decision to eliminate its sports staff and cut back on metro coverage was mind-boggling. As Poynter media columnist Tom Jones observed (second item), the Post’s sports section was “legendary,” and it “was once known for having some of the best sportswriters in the business with the likes of Shirley Povich, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Sally Jenkins and Thomas Boswell, just to name a few. And the sports department of today — well, of last week — also had a deep talent pool with brilliant journalists including Chuck Culpepper, Dave Sheinin and columnists Candace Buckner and Barry Svrluga.”

The Banner’s move follows a bid by Washington City Paper to purchase the Post’s sports and metro sections. Tina Nguyen reported in The Verge that though soon-to-depart publisher Will Lewis was receptive, the talks went nowhere, and the paper went ahead with massive cuts — initially reported as 300 of the paper’s 800 journalists, but which is now being revealed as even worse than that. (Former Post reporter Paul Farhi, writing for Washingtonian, places the number at 350 to 375 positions eliminated out of a total headcount of 790.)

If the Banner’s embrace of Washington sports and coverage of Prince George’s County is successful (previously the Banner started covering another Washington suburb in Maryland, Montgomery County), I hope it might lead to more — maybe even a Washington Banner. The Post is supposedly going to continue covering national politics. But when Bezos bought the paper in 2013 from the legendary Graham family, the Post was primarily a regional paper that had more in common with The Boston Globe or The Philadelphia Inquirer than it did with The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps the Banner, City Paper, Washingtonian and others can make up for that local news gap. It would also be nice if one or more of them amped up their book coverage, as the Post’s standalone book section was a casualty of the bloodletting. (And the entire photo staff. Good Lord.)

The Banner is quite a story. Earlier this week I wrote an article for The Conversation about five large regional newspapers that have achieved sustainability of a sort. Four of them are either owned by billionaires or owe their current success to billionaires. I could have mentioned the Banner as well. Hotel magnate Stewart Bainum founded and endowed the Banner after he was spurned in his bid to purchase The Baltimore Sun and then all of Tribune Publishing from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

The Banner launched in 2022 and, according to Cooper in her interview with Blinder, has 75,000 paid subscribers. As of last September, the newsroom staff comprised nearly 100 people. It’s won a Pulitzer Prize, and — Boston trivia alert — Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory serves on its board of directors.

A copyright expert’s big idea: Force Google and other AI companies to pay news publishers

Journalism faces yet another tech-driven crisis: AI-powered Google search deprives news publishers of as much as 30% to 40% of their web traffic as users stay on Google rather than following the links. What’s more, users of other AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Claude, can search for clickless news as well. Now an expert on copyright and licensing has come up with a possible solution.

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Paul Gerbino, president of Creative Licensing International, writes that publishers need to move away from negotiating one-time deals with AI companies to scrape their content for training purposes. Instead, Gerbino says, they should push for a system by which they will be compensated for the use of their content on a recurring basis, whether through per-use fees or subscriptions. As Gerbino puts it:

Training is a singular, non-recurring event that offers only a front-loaded burst of revenue. It possesses no capacity to scale or recur at the level required to effectively sustain the complex and costly operation of the publishing industry….

The singular, non-negotiable strategic imperative for every publisher is to execute a complete and fundamental pivot from the outdated mindset of “sell content once” to the forward-looking, sustainable model of “monetize access forever.”

It’s a fascinating idea, although we should be cautious given that forcing Google and other platforms to pay for the news they repurpose hasn’t gone much of anywhere over the years. When such schemes have been implemented, they’ve been hampered by unexpected consequences, such as threats to remove all links to news sources. It’s not clear why Google would suddenly flip because it’s now using AI.

Gerbino acknowledges this, arguing that publishers should negotiate with the AI companies collectively, observing: “Individual publishers operating alone possess negligible leverage against the behemoths of the AI industry. Collective frameworks represent the only viable path to successful negotiation.” But that may require passage of a law so that the publishers don’t run afoul of antitrust violations.

Gerbino also says that publishers need to develop paywalls that are impervious to AI. Not all of them are.

The possibility that a substantial part of the news audience will never move beyond AI-generated results — no matter how wrong they may be — represents a significant threat to publishers, who are already dealing with the challenge of finding a path to sustainability in a post-advertising world.

Gerbino has laid out some interesting proposals on how to extract revenues from AI companies, which may represent the biggest threat to news since the internet flickered into view more than 30 years ago. It remains to be seen, though, whether his ideas will form the basis for action — or if, instead, they will simply fade into the ether.

As Jeff Bezos dismantles The Washington Post, five regional papers chart a course for survival

Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.

If The Washington Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, ever decides he wants to take journalism seriously again, then he might take a look at a handful of large regional papers that have charted a route to sustainability against the strong headwinds that continue to buffet the news business.

Perhaps the most important difference between these papers and the Post — and the hundreds of other shrinking media outlets owned by corporate chains and hedge funds — is that they are rooted in the communities they cover. Whether owned by wealthy people or run by nonprofits, they place service to their city and region above extracting the last smidgen of revenue they can squeeze out.

Although I could add a few to this list, I am mentioning five large regional newspapers as examples of how it’s possible to succeed despite the long-term decline in the economics of journalism.

Read the rest at The Conversation.

Alexander Russo of The Grade and I talk about journalism’s shaky present and uncertain future

*Click on the image to watch and listen.*

A lot of me flapping my gums this week, and here’s another one. I recently was interviewed by Alexander Russo for his vodcast, which is part of The Grade, a multimedia venture that also comprises weekly columns, a free newsletter featuring timely media commentary and an annual update on newsroom diversity in education journalism.

According to project’s About page, “The Grade provides independent analysis of media coverage of education, helping to promote and improve the quality of that coverage.” I hope you’ll have a look.

Charles Sennott talks about his journey from global correspondent to local news entrepreneur

*Charles Sennott interviews a Taliban leader while on assignment in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. Photo by Ben Brody. Used with permission.*

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Charles Sennott, a former foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe who left in 2008 to become a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded GlobalPost and The GroundTruth Project. GroundTruth, a nonprofit, was a partner to GBH News, PBS’s “Frontline,” public radio’s “The World,” and the “PBS NewsHour.” It focused on partnerships to amplify international and national news projects.

Now Charlie has turned his attention to local news. He teamed up with Steven Waldman to launch Report for America as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Dan and Ellen talked with Waldman on an earlier podcast.

Sennott’s newest creation is GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he leads a small staff and publishes and writes the GroundTruth newsletter on Substack. The nonprofit that was called The GroundTruth Project has recently rebranded to call itself Report Local, with Report for America and Report for the World as its flagship initiatives. Report Local and the University of Missouri School of Journalism did groundbreaking work on water issues in the Mississippi River Basin.

In a recent post on Substack, Sennott writes about this new branding. He also writes about why he officially stepped aside from the program but remains proud of the movement it has created.

As his own act of community service, Sennott is also serving as the publisher and editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Times. He and his wife, Julie, who has an extended family on the Island, now live there year-round.

We’re also joined by Alexis Algazy, a Northeastern journalism and political science student who has written a compelling story about why politicians need to engage in storytelling on social media.

I’ve got a Quick Take about public support for local news. Politico recently published an in-depth story on what’s gone wrong with a program in California that was supposed to provide $250 million to help fund local news over a five-year period, with the money to come from the state and from Google. The deal seems to be coming apart. And yet there are reasons to be optimistic — as you will hear.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the role of video in recording the violent acts of ICE agents in Minneapolis and the protests all over the Twin Cities. Video by bystanders has played an important role in exposing what’s happening on the ground. But video and social media in general also pose a challenge for reporters covering the story for The Minnesota Star Tribune. Editor Kathleen Hennessey spoke about it in a brief interview with Semafor.

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

There’s little new that can be said about Jeff Bezos’ gutting of The Washington Post

I’ve written about Jeff Bezos’ defenestration of The Washington Post multiple times over the past two-plus years, and I’m not going to rehash it in any great detail today.

Suffice to say that today’s gutting of the Post, reported here by NPR’s David Folkenflik, is just the latest outrage that began when Bezos refused to do anything after his hand-chosen publisher, Will Lewis, turned out to be a terrible choice. Lewis was enmeshed in ethics scandals stemming from his time as a Murdoch lieutenant in the U.K., but Bezos remained silent. Later came the most visible sign that Bezos had turned — his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 election.

Retired Post executive editor Marty Baron has a withering essay up on Facebook that you should read in full. After acknowledging the very real challenges facing the Post, Baron writes:

The Post’s challenges … were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top — from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity. Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands.

The owner, in a note to readers, wrote that he aimed to boost trust in The Post. The effect was something else entirely: Subscribers lost trust in his stewardship and, notwithstanding the newsroom’s stellar journalism, The Post overall. Similarly, many leading journalists at The Post lost confidence in Bezos, and jumped to other news organizations. They also, in effect, were driven away. Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.

It seems like a lifetime ago that I was at the Post interviewing Baron and others for my book “The Return of the Moguls.” In those days the Post was profitable and growing, and Bezos had developed a reputation for standing up to Donald Trump’s threats and bullying. Bezos has since transformed into a Trump toady, spending $75 million to make that ridiculous Melania Trump biopic for — for what? I guess to get the White House on board with his ambitions for the Blue Origin rocket company that he owns.

I can’t imagine why Bezos would want to be associated with what the Post has become — what he’s turned it into. He certainly shows no sign of interest in it. From 2013-23, he was a model owner. But people change. Bezos has changed, much for the worse. If there’s any chance that he might donate it to a nonprofit foundation, as the late billionaire Gerry Lenfest did with The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016, I hope he’ll do it sooner rather than later.

Northeastern journalism faculty members condemn the arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort

As current and former faculty members at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, we condemn the unconstitutional arrests of independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. We are instructors, mentors and colleagues of young journalists, and we believe it is imperative that we stand up for the vital role of a free and unfettered press in a democratic society.

The Justice Department has filed charges against Lemon and Fort for the crime of committing journalism when they accompanied activists who entered Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 18. The activists were there to protest the pastor’s alleged employment by ICE. The journalists were there to observe, to live-stream the proceedings and to interview participants, church members and the pastor before leaving the church. In so doing, they engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment with the goal of informing the public about the Trump administration’s deadly and illegal occupation of the Twin Cities.

As Amnesty International put it: “Journalism is not a crime. Reporting on protests is not a crime. Arresting journalists for their reporting is a clear example of an authoritarian practice.” We call on the Justice Department to drop all charges against Lemon and Fort and to acknowledge the centrality of journalism in holding the government and other powerful institutions to account.

Note: Our statement was published earlier this morning by The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper.

Belle Adler
Rahul Barghava
Mike Beaudet
Matt Carroll
Myojung Chung
Ellen Clegg
Charles Fountain
John Guilfoil
Meg Heckman
Carlene Hempel
Marcus Howard
Jeff Howe
Dan Kennedy
William Kirtz
Catherine Lambert
Laurel Leff
Peter Mancusi
Meredith O’Brien
Jody Santos
Alan Schroeder
Jeb Sharp
Dan Zedek

Note: The list of signatories has been updated.

The Christian Science Monitor seeks to reposition itself in a cacophonous media landscape

*The Christian Science Church. Photo (cc) 2025 by Dan Kennedy.*

The Christian Science Monitor is going through yet another rethink. Once one of the finest newspapers in the country, the Boston-based Monitor has been shrinking for two generations. Its journalism remains world-class, but there just isn’t nearly as much of it as there used to be.

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According to Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan (sub. req.), the Monitor today has 25,000 paid subscribers and about 60 journalists, both down considerably from its peak. Under editor Christa Case Bryant, a longtime Monitor staff member, the paper — a digital pioneer back in the day — is planning to unveil an app and make more use of distribution platforms like Apple News. “What I’m trying to do is to just be true to our original founding mission, but in a way that’s adapted for 2026,” she told him. Ryan writes:

The Monitor is also seeking to double down on its founding mission “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind” and capture a broader range of perspectives in its reporting, including conservative voices that its editor said are often left out of mainstream coverage.

The changes led some staffers to take buyouts in December, and the Monitor cut several other positions, but is hiring for new roles.

I’m a longtime subscriber, and though I don’t read it every day, I appreciate its calm, optimistic approach and its embrace of solutions journalism. I wrote about a previous reinvention for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon) in 2009. It’s telling that the subhead all those years ago was “The Christian Science Monitor reinvents itself for the digital age.” Seventeen years later, if you search for Ryan’s story on Google, a teaser pops up that reads “The Christian Science Monitor tries to adapt to the digital age.”

The Monitor’s most essential product is a daily email comprising news briefs and a few stories. Monday’s newsletter covered European reaction to the occupation of Minnesota, high-tech glasses, an editorial on Kevin Warsh (Donald Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve) and a religious reflection from a Christian Science point of view — a requirement laid down by church founder Mary Baker Eddy.

The daily paper is long gone, although its website is deep and well-designed. The Monitor’s best journalism is aggregated in a weekly print newsmagazine that is sent to subscribers.

Founded in 1908, the Monitor thrived in the decades when there was no such thing as a national newspaper. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post were virtually unavailable outside their regional bases, and most city papers were abysmal. The Monitor provided a quality alternative, even if it arrived in the mail a day or two late.

The paper’s headquarters are at the Mother Church, right down the street from Northeastern. I hope this latest reinvention gives a boost to a great institution that continues to excel despite its small numbers.

Correction: Updated because my first version misspelled Christa Case Bryant’s name.

On the new ‘Beat the Press,’ we look at the week in media, starting with Don Lemon’s arrest

*Don Lemon reporting from Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn.*

On the new “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we look at Don Lemon’s arrest, when journalists should (and shouldn’t) use the word “murder,” looming cuts at The Washington Post, and transitions for Scot Lehigh, who’s retiring from The Boston Globe, and David Brooks, who’s moving from The New York Times to The Atlantic. With Emily, Scott Van Voorhis and me — plus a big assist from producer Tonia Magras.

Before Minneapolis, there was the Boston Massacre. My 1983 thesis on how the press covered it.

*Paul Revere’s famous engraving. Via the Yale University Art Gallery.*

All of a sudden, the Boston Massacre is in the news.

Journalists and historians such as Josh Marshall, Radley Balko and Ted Widmer have all written essays in recent days arguing that the uprising against thuggish federal agents in Minneapolis has similarities to the events of Monday, March 5, 1770. That’s when a company of British soldiers who were occupying Boston fired on an angry mob, killing five people.

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In 1983, while I was an American history student at Boston University, I wrote my master’s thesis on “The Boston Massacre and the Press.” In it, I documented how the local newspapers covered “the Horrid Massacre in Boston.” It was a one-sided affair, as the Patriots had driven out Loyalist printers in the years leading up to the Massacre.

One example: In 1769, John Mein of the Boston Chronicle published the names of Patriot merchants who were secretly violating an agreement not to important British goods. Among those merchants was John Hancock. A Patriot gang descended on Mein, and he was forced to flee to England. The Chronicle continued to publish under Mein’s more cautious business partner, John Fleeming, but it lost readers and influence, shutting down a few months after the Massacre.

For some time I’ve wanted to make my thesis available, but I also wanted to convert it into text and do some editing. I didn’t get around to it, but I did scan it as a PDF, and the text is searchable. And here’s a technical note: I wrote it on a Radio Shack Color Computer using a word-processing program called VIP Writer, which was a WordStar clone. I printed it on a daisy-wheel printer. Those were the days.

You can download my thesis here.