Month: September 2010

An undercovered gubernatorial debate

On September 10, 2010

Old friend Mark Leccese has an interesting blog post at Boston.com about the first televised gubernatorial debate, hosted Tuesday evening by another old friend, WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller.

Leccese — God bless him — took in all of the local television coverage to determine how much attention the debate got. And he concludes that the debate was all but ignored, with the exception of NECN and, of course, WBZ.

The city’s two dailies, Leccese adds, gave it plenty of coverage.

Leccese wonders whether the lack of coverage was due to television executives’ wanting “to play down the story of the debate because it was on a rival station” — or if, instead, “local TV newscasts don’t find debates among the four people from whom the voters will choose the most powerful person in state government particularly newsworthy.”

My suspicion is that it’s a little bit of both.

If you missed the debate, you can still watch it online here. It’s also being broadcast in Spanish.

I caught about two-thirds of it in my car, and then watched the last 20 minutes. With the exception of a weird question about President Obama’s aunt, dropped in toward the end, I thought Keller turned in his usual fine job. He got out of the way and let Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick and Republican challenger Charlie Baker really mix it up, while still giving Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Tim Cahill a chance to make their case.

The debate was a ratings hit, too, writes the Herald’s Jessica Heslam — it came in third during the 7 p.m. time slot, not far behind the Red Sox and “Chronicle.”

Who won? I thought Patrick came off as by far the most personable of the four, and Baker scored some points on substance. As Michael Levenson reported in the Globe on Thursday, Patrick was wrong in claiming that Harvard Pilgrim Health Care was bailed out with “state aid” when Baker was its chief executive, an overreach that could come back to haunt the governor.

Perhaps the key was that Cahill, the state treasurer, proved to be a more effective debater than the substantive but sound-bite-challenged Stein. Since the conventional wisdom is that Cahill takes away votes from Baker and Stein from Patrick, perhaps Patrick (who really overdid it in sucking up to Cahill) was the winner by default.

Photo from wbztv.com.

Hudak freezes out Republican opponent

By Dan Kennedy

On September 9, 2010

In Politics

Extremist North Shore congressional candidate William Hudak, who may/may not be/have been a birther, is refusing to debate Robert McCarthy, his opponent in next Tuesday’s Republican primary, according to Nelson Benton of the Salem News.

As Benton observes, keep that in mind when Hudak — the all-but-certain primary winner — starts demanding that Democratic Congressman John Tierney debate him. (Via David Bernstein.)

A fishy tale about science and political muscle

By Dan Kennedy

On September 7, 2010

In Society

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the FDA’s decision to give preliminary approval to genetically modified salmon is potentially dangerous — not just to human health, but to the very idea of what is food.

Paul Conrad’s grin of affirmation

By Dan Kennedy

On September 7, 2010

In Media

The director of our School of Journalism, Steve Burgard, was an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times before coming to Northeastern. He passes along an anecdote about Paul Conrad, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who died on Saturday at the age of 86:

I was a newly minted editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times in the early 1990s, camped at a pod in the secluded second-floor editorlal page spaces at the desk of somebody who was out on vacation. While I had high hopes for the work I might later do at the page in the coming years, I was certainly a new kid on the block in every respect at that time.

One afternoon while laboring over a draft editorial, I felt a woosh of air behind my head as a drawing plopped down in the desk in front of me. The great cartoonist was looming up behind over my shoulder. He didn’t give a hoot about my stature, and I’m not sure he yet knew my name. He was looking for reaction to something he’d just drawn, and for that important purpose anybody would do. A nod and a grin of affirmation later, he picked it up and moved on.

Like Daniel Schorr, who died earlier this summer, Conrad was a member of Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” which, according to his obituary, he considered one of his greatest honors.

The newspaper business is greatly diminished from what it was when Conrad was at his peak. His passing diminishes it a little more.

In New Haven, seeking non-profit sustainability

By Dan Kennedy

On September 6, 2010

In Media

The challenge for non-profit news sites is that national and local foundations may be willing to help them get off the ground, but at some point they want them to be self-sustaining. Will readers of a site like the New Haven Independent give money on a continuing basis — a model well-established in the world of public television and radio stations?

Independent founder and editor Paul Bass intends to find out. Late this afternoon he posted a fifth-anniversary message, asking readers to choose a voluntary subscription of $10 or $18 a month (or more) in order to support an operation that has grown to a nearly $500,000 annual budget with six full-time reporters, several part-timers, affiliated sites covering Branford and the Naugatuck Valley and a State House reporter. Bass writes:

Five years ago today, the New Haven Independent hit the net with a new idea: completely local multimedia online-only professional news reporting focused on city news and issues, with reporting used as a springboard for wide-ranging community discussion. Not a “newspaper.” Not a radio or TV news program. A journalism-driven online urban community….

Cities like New Haven are returning to the “good old days” of multiple local media outlets where readers can find news, weigh in, and obtain different takes on what’s happening at home. No longer can a corporate monopoly control and choke off the flow of news and debate in one community.

Unlike, say, WGBH or WBUR in Boston, the Independent serves a poor, largely minority urban community. Bass’ challenge is very different from that of a public broadcasting executive appealing to affluent, well-educated viewers and listeners.

The Independent will celebrate its fifth birthday at a party on Sept. 15. I plan to be there. It will be interesting to see how many people turn out (57 have already said via Facebook that they’re coming) — and what level of support Bass is able to attract as he begins his sixth year.

Arthur Brisbane’s example-free critique

By Dan Kennedy

On September 6, 2010

In Media

The New York Times’ new public editor, Arthur Brisbane, follows up his not-too-promising debut with a piece in which he expresses concern about analytical stories that straddle the line between news and opinion.

What’s odd about it is that though he quotes a variety of people on the subject, ranging from annoyed readers to Media Nation favorite Dan Gillmor, he only offers one partial example — a piece by an outside contributor, Jonathan Weber, who edits a non-profit news site in San Francisco called the Bay Citizen. Brisbane notes that Weber wrote about “‘vituperative’ union attacks and ‘scorched-earth’ tactics,” but he doesn’t tell us anything about the circumstances that led Weber to use such language.

Brisbane also cites a Matt Bai column about Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul Republican congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, but fails to give us even a hint of what Bai wrote.

The Times links to the Weber and Bai columns, of course, but I’m not going to bother following those links. I want to know precisely why Brisbane is concerned about those columns, and since he doesn’t tell us, clicking isn’t going to help — I’d just be guessing. Besides, what about print readers? That’s how I first read the column, as the Sunday Times is one of our few remaining print indulgences.

In an age of information overload, it’s essential that quality papers such as the Times provide analysis, interpretation and context. Just-the-facts is no longer good enough, if it ever was. Some readers may be driven away by such an approach, but I suspect even more will be drawn in.

Is it possible to go too far with this approach? Sure. Did Weber and Bai go too far? I have no idea.

Hyperlocal news and civic engagement

By Dan Kennedy

On September 2, 2010

In Media

Writing in the American Journalism Review, Barb Palser argues that the new breed of hyperlocal news sites may fall short of expectations because there just isn’t enough demand:

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, only 20 percent of American adults reported using digital tools to communicate with their neighbors or stay informed about community issues at least once in the past year. Only one in 10 reported reading a community blog at least once in the past year.

Palser’s pessimism intersects nicely with an observation I (and others) have been making for some time: that disengagement from civic life is among the most persistent problems plaguing the news business. It doesn’t matter how good a job your local weekly newspaper or website does of covering your community if you fundamentally don’t care about what’s going on in your community. Thus, in order to succeed, a news organization must foster civic engagement in a way that actually builds an audience for its coverage of governmental meetings, neighborhood events and routine police-blotter news.

Palser is right that community journalism is not a big-money business. It never has been. Two or three generations ago, local newspapers were marginal businesses owned and operated by people who were rooted in the community. We see the same phenomenon today with grassroots news sites, whether they are for-profit, like Baristanet and the Batavian, or non-profit, like the New Haven Independent.

In Eastern Massachusetts, we have an interesting battle under way involving hyperlocal sites operated by the the New York Times Co. ( the Boston Globe’s Your Town), GateHouse Media (Wicked Local) and AOL’s Patch.com. The competition is good for readers and good for job-seeking journalists. Yet I suspect that the ones who are in it for the long haul are those who are passionate about their communities, and are trying to figure out how to transform that passion into a business. A good example of this is the network of sites operated at CentralMassNews.com, which aren’t beautiful, but which are chock full of news and advertising.

Palser’s argument, essentially, is that hyperlocal is not a promising strategy for large media corporations to return to the glory days of yesteryear. I agree. But that’s not what hyperlocal is or should be about. It should be about finding news ways of doing community journalism and making a living.

And though local ownership is not necessarily the key ingredient, I think it’s much more likely that grassroots sites will foster the civic engagement they need to build readership than those operated by large, out-of-state media companies.

Further thoughts from Steve Safran at Lost Remote.

B-minus Barack does no harm

By Dan Kennedy

On September 1, 2010

In Media, Politics

In my latest for the Guardian, I survey morning-after punditry following President Obama’s speech on Iraq, and discover that even some of his critics were mildly impressed. The problem is that no one, including his supporters, was particularly wowed, either.