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.
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.
We’re looking forward to seeing you at our all-day free What Works webinar next Thursday, May 21. If you’re a local news publisher, journalist or volunteer, our hands-on workshops will help you hone your skills. Just click here or on the image for more details and to register.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Photo (cc) 2023 by BruceSchaff.
Donald Trump and his acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, are targeting The Wall Street Journal in an effort to learn the identity of sources who leaked information to its journalists about internal dissent over the war in Iran, according to CNN reporters Hannah Rabinowitz and Kaitlan Collins. Trump himself has reportedly told Blanche that reporters for the Journal and other news organizations committed “treason.” More about that below, but first: How did we get here?
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In October 2022, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland issued guidelines that severely restricted the conditions under which the Justice Department could seek to force journalists to identify anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents.
Garland’s action was intended as a response to the discovery that Justice had secretly obtained phone records of three Washington Post reporters during Trump’s first term. In fact, though, presidents had been pursuing reporters over leaks for years. Journalists were threatened with jail under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Garland’s order reversed actions taken during the early months of Joe Biden’s administration as well.
Joe Kriesberg and Laura Colarusso of CommonWealth Beacon.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Joe Kriesberg, the publisher of CommonWealth Beacon, and Laura Colarusso, the editor. Ellen Clegg is off the air this week but edited this episode behind the scenes.
CommonWealth Beacon is a digital nonprofit that’s part of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, better known as MassINC, and Joe is the CEO. CommonWealth Beacon covers politics and public policy at the state level and has increasingly been branching out into local coverage as well. And it happens to be celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
Joe has been with MassINC since 2023 and has overseen the expansion of CommonWealth Beacon’s staff and mission. Before that, he was president and CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, where he was a leading advocate for affordable housing. He brings decades of nonprofit management experience and an extensive background of working with news organizations. He has raised millions of dollars for mission-driven organizations.
Laura is an award-winning editor and reporter who combines digital media expertise with a commitment to old-school reporting. Before coming to CommonWealth Beacon, she was the editor of Nieman Reports, a magazine and website published by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation that covers issues related to journalism. She has also worked as the digital managing editor at GBH News and the digital opinion editor at The Boston Globe, and is a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly.
Some disclosures: I’m a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory board and write occasional opinion pieces for the publication. I also worked with Laura at both GBH News and Nieman Reports.
I’ve got a Quick Take on the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, published recently by the international organization Reporters Without Borders. It shows that the United States has fallen to 64th, coming in just behind Botswana and just ahead of Panama.
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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.
The Mystic River, looking north toward the Lower Mystic Lake in Medford, Mass. Photo (cc) 2026 by Dan Kennedy.
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Julia Angwin argues in The New York Times today that Facebook is dying. The first thought that comes to mind is “good riddance.” But even though the number of Facebook users is declining, I question her premise — though she concedes that the platform will be with us for many years to come, even as it fades into irrelevance.
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Angwin compares Facebook to AOL and Yahoo, two other services that persist essentially as zombie platforms. But AOL had no real uses after broadband internet came along, and Yahoo was eclipsed by Google, whose search engine was far superior. For that matter, Facebook displaced MySpace, a similar service that wasn’t nearly as good.
Despite the Trump regime’s ongoing attempts to dismantle the First Amendment, there are important checks that remain in place. Libel protections against frivolous lawsuits remain strong — as long as news organizations use them rather than caving in to Donald Trump’s threats. Prior restraint is almost unheard of.
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One aspect of press freedom that has been left outside the walls of the First Amendment, though, is a recognition that journalists need to protect their anonymous sources and confidential documents. Forty-nine states, including Massachusetts, provide some protection. But the federal government does not. And one of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first actions after Trump returned to the White House was to weaken Justice Department guidelines put in place by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, to make it easier for the government to demand access to that information.
Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
By honoring The Washington Post with its most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize Board appeared intent on sending a message to two people: Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos.
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On Monday, the Post received the Public Service Award for its reporting on the chaos unleashed by Elon Musk and his DOGE assault on the federal government. One of the lead reporters in that effort was Hannah Natanson, the target of an extraordinary raid by the FBI last January.
Last Thursday I had an opportunity to take part in a panel on the state of community journalism. I was struck by the nostalgia for print expressed by two editors who are many decades younger than I am, which is why I’m revisiting this still-relevant issue.
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The event, titled “Peril and Promise,” was a fundraiser for The Local News, a print-and-digital nonprofit founded a decade ago in Ipswich, Massachusetts. (Its print edition, as you can see, has a slightly different name: the Ipswich Local News.) The panel comprised Local News editor Trevor Meek; Taylor Ann Bradford, the editor of the H-W News, a fairly new nonprofit covering Hamilton and Wenham that offers print with a minimal digital presence (here is its Instagram page); Joel Barrett, news editor of The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, a chain-owned daily; and me. Moderating was retired editor Richard Lodge.
