A black-tailed jackrabbit. Photo (cc) 2006 by Jim Harper.
Now this is how you sell newspapers. I just finished reading Bill Hosokawa’s 1976 book “Thunder in the Rockies: The Incredible Denver Post.” Much of it focuses on the early days under the ownership of Harry Tammen and Frederick Bonfils, who bought the struggling daily in 1895 and ran it for its first several decades. This anecdote, though undated, would appear to be from the 1920s or earlier:
While every newspaper has its promotions, many of The Post’s were unique. Periodically jackrabbits would proliferate alarmingly on Colorado’s eastern plains, decimating what crops could survive drought and hail and threatening the livelihood of the farmers. With The Post’s encouragement these farmers would round up the rabbits in wintertime drives covering many square miles, clubbing them to death by the thousands. But the meat wasn’t wasted. The carcasses, quickly frozen by the cold, would be sent to Denver in donated railroad cars, trucked to The Post, and distributed free to queued-up lines of the poor. To stimulate the goodwill of ranchers, The Post also offered a bounty on mountain lions which preyed on sheep and cattle. Many a mountain man, smelling pungently of a hunting camp, would make his way to The Post with a dead lion in the back of his truck, there to be photographed claiming his bounty.
Given the proliferation of rabbits in Greater Boston, would some enterprising media entrepreneur here try a similar promotion?
This is an important story — not just because some crucial 9/11 coverage has been lost or even because the demise of Adobe Flash means that parts of the internet are now broken. Rather, it illustrates that the internet is, in many ways, an ephemeral medium, meaning that we simply can’t preserve and archive our history the way we could during the print era.
Clare Duffy and Kerry Flynn report for CNN.com that The Washington Post, ABC News and CNN itself are among the news organizations whose interactive presentations in the aftermath of 9/11 no longer work properly.
As they recount, Flash was a real advance in the early days of the web, as it was an important step forward for video and interactive graphics. But the late Steve Jobs, criticizing Flash’s security flaws, decreed that Apple’s iPhone and iPad would not run Flash. At that point the platform began to crumble, and Adobe pulled support for it at the end of 2020.
Duffy and Flynn write that some efforts are under way to use Flash emulators in order to bring some old content back to life. Adobe, which is worth $314 billion, ought to spend a few nickels to help with that effort.
More broadly, though, the problem with Flash illustrates how the internet decays over time. Link rot is an ongoing frustration — you link to something, go back a year or five later, and find that the content has moved or been taken down. Publications go out of business, taking their websites with them. Or they change content-management systems, resulting in new URLs for everything.
We’re all grateful for the work that the Internet Archive does in preserving as much as it can. Here, for instance, is the home page of The New York Times on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.
But what’s available online isn’t nearly as complete as what’s in print. For the moment, at least, we can still go to the library and look at microfilm of print editions for publications that pay little attention to preserving their digital past. It won’t be too many years, though, before digital is all we’ve got.
Ethan Strauss has written a really fine piece on the old and new Gawker. Never mind Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel. What they did to that female college student caught having drunken sex in a bathroom stall should shock anyone with a conscience. I particularly like this except:
Gawker’s bills were paid by its commodification of humiliation. Sure, it helped the brand that they occasionally posted lucid essays and broke meaningful stories. It helped in the way that the highbrow articles at Playboy allowed men of a different era to buy magazines, guilt free. But at bottom, prurient privacy invasion was the core of the business.
Yes, the manner in which Theil’s secret money was used to put Gawker out of business remains troublesome, as I wrote for GBH News in 2016. But let’s not pretend that the world was a lesser place when the site went under, or is a better place now that it’s back.
The Center for Spiritual Life, Dialogue and Service held a remembrance for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks earlier today. The service, marking the 20th anniversary, centered on the life of Candace Lee Williams, an accounting major who died on American Airlines Flight 11 at the age of 20.
“She was the best of us,” her brother Corey Gaudioso told News at Northeastern. “There’s never been anyone like Can. We all just knew she was going to do great things — she could’ve conquered Wall Street or something.”
Several of us spoke at the service, including Mary Kane, Candace’s co-op adviser and now an assistant dean in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Kane told News at Northeastern: “Candace was so smart, and beautiful on the inside and out. But I think what struck me most was her appreciation for everyday life. She had this amazing smile, and she appreciated the small things as well as the big opportunities.”
I spoke about my experience as a journalist that day and how the media have changed over the past 20 years.
It was a moving ceremony, organized by the center’s executive director, Alexander Levering Kern.
I wish I had known Candace, who would be 40 and in the prime of her life today.
Recently I wrote about “News Matters,” a documentary that tracks Alden Global Capital’s evisceration of The Denver Post and the rise of The Colorado Sun. Unfortunately, my post came just as Rocky Mountain PBS was about to take it down from its website.
This is Cerebrus, not Cerberus. Photo (cc) 2006 by Andrew Becraft
Public employee pension funds are investing — perhaps unwittingly — in the destruction of local news.
That’s the most important takeaway in a recent report by Julie Reynolds for the Nieman Journalism Lab. Reynolds writes that Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that has destroyed newspapers across the country, has financed a number of its deals with the help of Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm. That includes Alden’s acquisition earlier this year of Tribune Publishing, which owns major-market papers such as the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and, in New England, the Hartford Courant.
Cerberus’ top investor is the California Public Employees Retirement System, followed by the Public School Employees’ Retirement System of Pennsylvania. Eight of Cerberus’ top 10 investors are public employee pension funds. “Perhaps it’s time to demand that public pensions divest from shadow banks that aid and abet the aggressive dismantling of the free press,” Reynolds writes.
Cerberus turns out to have quite a track record, and it extends well beyond its role in helping Alden destroy local news. As Reynolds reports:
The firm has been accused of profiting from the Sandy Hook school massacre, because it promised to unload its ownership in gun manufacturers but then didn’t — at least not until its company Remington Arms went bankrupt in 2018. And Cerberus is the owner and founder of Tier 1 Group, the company that trained four members of the Tiger Squad that assassinated and dismembered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The role of public pension funds in newspapers isn’t new. CNHI, based in Montgomery, Alabama, owns 89 local news outlets in 21 states, including The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover and its affiliated papers north of Boston. CNHI, in turn, is owned by the Retirement Systems of Alabama.
But though CNHI has cut deeply over the years, its track record isn’t nearly as grim as that of Alden. At least in Massachusetts, its newspapers remain well-staffed enough to do a reasonably good job of covering their communities.
In the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, Gretchen A. Peck reports that Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, wonders if Alden’s purpose in buying up newspapers is to exert political influence aimed at staving off regulation:
Schleuss speculated whether there might be political play behind these newspaper acquisitions. The NewsGuild president also opined about legislative remedies that Congress might enact to force hedge funds like Alden to be “radically transparent” about their investors. That would allow the public to discern if investors are earnest and market-minded or if they’re bad actors attempting to hold sway over the press.
It’s a real concern, though to date I haven’t seen any signs that Alden has an agenda other than cutting its papers to the bone and squeezing out whatever profits remain.
Peck’s article is also accompanied by a “publisher’s note” that is interesting mainly because it represents one of the few occasions when Alden has deigned to address the way it’s running its newspapers:
Publisher’s Note: E&P reached out to Heath Freeman of Alden Global Capital, welcoming his comment and contribution. The company’s crisis manager responded, post-deadline, with the following remark he attributed to MediaNews Group’s COO, Guy Gilmore: “A subscription-driven revenue model, long overdue payments from tech behemoths including Google and Facebook for the use of our content and the modernization of non-editorial operations are some of the keys to ensuring local newspapers can thrive over the long term and serve the local communities that depend on them.”
Tomorrow’s Media Nation members newsletter includes some thoughts on The New York Times’ appalling story about Joe Biden’s grief, a round-up of the week’s posts, a Celtics-friendly photo and some music from the great Otis Redding. To become a member for just $5 a month, please click here.
I’m not familiar with the fine points of Australian libel law. But a decision this week by the High Court of Australia that publishers are liable for third-party comments posted on their Facebook pages demonstrates the power of Section 230 in the United States.
Section 230, part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, does two things. First, it carves out an exception to the principle that publishers are legally responsible for all content, including advertisements and letters to the editor. By contrast, publishers are not liable for online comments in any way.
Second, in what is sometimes called the “Good Samaritan” provision, publishers may remove some third-party content without taking on liability for other content. For example, a lawyer might argue that a news organization that removed a libelous comment has taken on an editing role and could therefore be sued for other libelous comments that weren’t removed. Under Section 230, you can’t do that.
The Australian court’s ruling strikes me as a straightforward application of libel law in the absence of Section 230. Mike Cherney of The Wall Street Journal puts it this way:
The High Court of Australia determined that media companies, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content on that page, facilitated and encouraged comments from other users on those posts. That means the media companies should be considered publishers of the comments and are therefore responsible for any defamatory content that appears in them, according to a summary of the judgment from the court.
Over at the Nieman Journalism Lab, Joshua Benton has a markedly different take, arguing that the court is holding publishers responsible for content they did not publish. Benton writes:
Pandora’s box isn’t big enough to hold all the potential implications of that idea. That a news publisher should be held accountable for the journalism it publishes is obvious. That it should be held accountable for reader comments left on its own website (which it fully controls) is, at a minimum, debatable.
But that it should be held legally liable for the comments of every rando who visits its Facebook page — in other words, the speech of people it doesn’t control, on a platform it doesn’t control — is a big, big step.
I disagree. As I said, publishers are traditionally liable for every piece of content that appears under their name. Section 230 was a deviation from that tradition — a special carve-out providing publishers with immunity they wouldn’t otherwise have. If Benton is right, then we never needed 230. But of course we did. There’s a reason that the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls 230 “the most important law protecting internet speech.”
I also don’t see much difference between comments posted on a publisher’s website or on its Facebook page. A Facebook page is something you set up, add content to and manage. It’s not yours in the same way as your website, but it is part of your brand and under your control. If you should be liable for third-party content on your website, then it’s hardly a stretch to say that you should also be liable for third-party content on your Facebook page.
As the role of social media in our political discourse has become increasingly fraught, there have been a number of calls to abolish or reform 230. Abolition would mean the end of Facebook — and, for that matter, the comments sections on websites. (There are days when I’m tempted…) Personally, I’d look into abolishing 230 protections for sites that use algorithms to drive engagement and, thus, divisiveness. Such a change would make Facebook less profitable, but I think we could live with that.
Australia, meanwhile, has a dilemma on its hands. Maybe Parliament will pass a law equivalent to Section 230, but (I hope) with less sweeping protections. In any case, Australia should serve as an interesting test case to see what happens when toxic, often libelous third-party comments no longer get a free pass.
In one sentence: Politico provides insider gossip at a time when democracy faces an existential threat. Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. explains:
The Politico approach is probably fine if you are covering parties and politicians who share some values and norms. And the election of Barack Obama looked like it could usher in a politics that was less divisive than George W. Bush’s presidency and a full break from the conflicts over race and identity that had in many ways defined U.S. politics since the 1960s.
But early in the Obama years, it became clear that the fights of the past weren’t over; they were, instead, perhaps becoming even more tense.
You would think such a commonplace observation hardly needs to be said out loud. In recent years, though, Apple has tried to market itself as the great exception.
“Privacy is built in from the beginning,” reads Apple’s privacy policy. “Our products and features include innovative privacy technologies and techniques designed to minimize how much of your data we — or anyone else — can access. And powerful security features help prevent anyone except you from being able to access your information. We are constantly working on new ways to keep your personal information safe.”
All that has now blown up in Apple’s face. Last Friday, the company backed off from a controversial initiative that would have allowed its iOS devices — that is, iPhones and iPads — to be scanned for the presence of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. The policy, announced in early August, proved wildly unpopular with privacy advocates, who warned that it could open a backdoor to repressive governments seeking to spy on dissidents.Apple cooperates with China, for instance, arguing that it is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates.
What made Apple’s efforts especially vulnerable to criticism was that it involved placing spyware directly on users’ devices. Although surveillance wouldn’t actually kick in unless users backed up their devices to Apple’s iCloud service, it raised alarms that the company was planning to engage in phone-level snooping.
“Apple has put in place elaborate measures to stop abuse from happening,” wrote Tatum Hunter and Reed Albergotti in The Washington Post. “But part of the problem is the unknown. iPhone users don’t know exactly where this is all headed, and while they might trust Apple, there is a nagging suspicion among privacy advocates and security researchers that something could go wrong.”
The initiative has proved to be a public-relations disaster for Apple. Albergotti, who apparently had enough of the company’s attempts at spin, wrote a remarkable sentence in his Friday story reporting the abrupt reversal: “Apple spokesman Fred Sainz said he would not provide a statement on Friday’s announcement because The Washington Post would not agree to use it without naming the spokesperson.”
That, in turn, brought an attaboy tweet from Albergotti’s Post colleague Christiano Lima, complete with flames and applauding hands, which promptly went viral.
“We in the press ought to do this far, far more often,” tweeted Troy Wolverton, managing editor of the Silicon Valley Business Journal, in a characteristically supportive response.
Even though the media rely on unnamed sources far too often, my own view is that there would have been nothing wrong with Albergotti’s going along with Sainz’s request. Sainz was essentially offering an on-the-record quote from Apple.
(Still, it’s hard not to experience a zing of delight at Albergotti’s insouciance. Now let’s see the Post do the same with politicians and government officials.)
Apple has gotten a lot of mileage out of its embrace of privacy. Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, delivered a speech earlier this year in which he attempted to position Apple as the ethical alternative to Google, Facebook and Amazon, whose business models depend on hoovering up vast amounts of data from their customers in order to sell them more stuff.
“If we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, we lose so much more than data, we lose the freedom to be human,” Cook said. “And yet, this is a hopeful new season, a time of thoughtfulness and reform.”
The current controversy comes just months after Apple unveiled new features in its iOS operating software that made it more difficult for users to be tracked in a variety of ways, offering greater security for their email and more protection from being tracked by advertisers.
Yet it always seemed that there was something performative about Apple’s embrace of privacy. For instance, although Apple allows users to maintain tight control over their iPhones and iMessages, the company continues to hold the encryption keys to iCloud — which, in turn, makes the company liable to a court order to turn over user data.
“The dirty little secret with nearly all of Apple’s privacy promises is that there’s been a backdoor all along,” wrote privacy advocates Albert Fox Cahn and Evan Selinger in a recent commentary for Wired. “Whether it’s iPhone data from Apple’s latest devices or the iMessage data that the company constantly championed as being ‘end-to-end encrypted,’ all of this data is vulnerable when using iCloud.”
Of course, you might argue that there ought to be reasonable limits to privacy. Just as the First Amendment does not protect obscenity, libel or serious breaches of national security, privacy laws — or, in this case, a powerful company’s policies — shouldn’t protect child pornography or certain other activities such as terrorist threats. Fair enough.
But as the aforementioned Selinger, a professor of philosophy at MIT and an affiliate scholar at Northeastern University, argued over the weekend in a Boston Globe Ideas piece, there are times when slippery-slope arguments, often bogus, are sometimes valid.
“Governments worldwide have a strong incentive to ask, if not demand, that Apple extend its monitoring to search for evidence of interest in politically controversial material and participation in politically contentious activities,” Selinger wrote, adding: “The strong incentives to push for intensified surveillance combined with the low costs for repurposing Apple’s technology make this situation a real slippery slope.”
Five years ago, the FBI sought a court order that would have forced Apple to provide the encryption keys so they could access the data on an iPhone used by one of the shooters in a deadly terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. Apple refused, which set off a public controversy, including a debate between former CIA director John Deutsch and Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain that I covered for GBH News.
The controversy proved to be for naught. In the end, the FBI was able to break into the phone without Apple’s help. Which suggests a solution, however imperfect, to the current controversy.
Apple should withdraw its plan to install spyware directly on users’ iPhones and iPads. And it should remind users that anything stored in iCloud might be revealed in response to a legitimate court order. More than anything, Apple needs to stop making unrealistic promises and remind its users:
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