By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
My Northeastern University colleague (and former “Beat the Press” co-panelist) Dan Lothian has been named executive producer of “The World” after serving in an interim position since last March. Lothian has a long and distinguished broadcast career, including a stint as CNN’s White House correspondent. “The World” is a collabortion between GBH and PRX. Congratulations, Dan!
We’ve got a great guest for the “What Works” podcast this week — Art Cullen, the editor of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times, who is at the center of the documentary “Storm Lake.” Please listen to the podcast, then watch the film, which will be shown on most PBS stations (including GBH-2) in Boston, tonight at 10. The documentary, which I previewed last week, tells the story of the Times’ fight for survival at a time when local papers across the country are cutting back and shutting down.
Later in the podcast, we hear from Northeastern University graduate student Zhaozhou Dai about what he and fellow grad student Maaisha Osman learned when they visited the New Haven Independent and its community radio station, WNHH-LP, on Election Night.
In Quick Takes, Ellen Clegg has some fun with a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit about local school boards — and reminds us of the importance of covering local politics. And I kick around the McClatchy newspaper chain, which recently ended its relationship with Report for America, apparently because RFA co-founder Steven Waldman hurt the feelings of its hedge fund owner.
As I noted earlier this week, Gannett is ending print publication of The Middleboro Gazette in favor of digital-only distribution. It turns out the Gazette is not alone. Here is a list (which may or may not be comprehensive) of other Gannett papers in Eastern Massachusetts that are also abandoning print.
Ironically, Ipswich does have a print newspaper — the nonprofit Ipswich Local News, co-founded by the late Bill Wasserman, who sold his Ipswich Chronicle in the 1980s to a chain that ultimately morphed into Gannett. Several other communities on this list have independent local papers as well.
As I wrote the other day, this isn’t necessarily the worst move Gannett could make as long as the company is serious about not cutting back on news coverage. Ending the cost of printing and distribution is smart as long as the money saved is invested in journalism. But Gannett executives are going to have to prove that they mean it.
Big announcement from GBH News: A replacement has been named for morning radio anchor Joe Mathieu, who left to take a job in Washington with Bloomberg earlier this year. And Mathieu’s replacement will be a team. The new co-anchors are Paris Alston, who’s currently across town at WBUR Radio, and Jeremy Siegel, who hosts a podcast for Politico.
I don’t know Siegel, but I do know Alston, who helped edit my column during an earlier stint at GBH. I enjoyed working with her, and I’m glad she’s coming back. According to the press release, “The duo will step into the role of co-hosts in early 2022, after spending time with local news audiences all across Massachusetts, listening and learning about the issues people care about most.”
Congratulations to both. The full announcement follows.
Signaling a new era for its popular local morning program, GBH has named Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel as the new co-hosts of Morning Edition at GBH News. The two journalists will bring a fresh and contemporary energy to the show, reinventing GBH’s morning news experience while welcoming new voices and perspectives into a daily multiplatform news conversation.
Alston will rejoin GBH from WBUR, where she is a host of the NPR podcast Consider This, produced in conjunction with GBH. Siegel is currently the host and producer of the Washington, DC-based daily news podcast POLITICO Dispatch.
“Our audiences have told us that mornings matter most when it comes to news. They look to us to get the information they need and set the tone for the day ahead,” said Pam Johnston, General Manager of News at GBH. “With Paris and Jeremy as co-hosts of Morning Edition at GBH News, our audiences will get local stories from different perspectives. They’ll engage with a pair of dynamic, smart and accomplished journalists who possess a real knack for understanding and dissecting the complex stories of our time.”
The duo will step into the role of co-hosts in early 2022, after spending time with local news audiences all across Massachusetts, listening and learning about the issues people care about most.
NPR’s Morning Edition is the most listened-to radio program in the country, delivering in-depth reporting about stories that break overnight and set the agenda for the day. As the local hosts of this national broadcast, Alston and Siegel will bring audiences into the center of these stories by adding local context and depth. Morning Edition airs on weekdays from 5 am – 10 am on 89.7 FM. The show also can be streamed online at gbhnews.org and via smart speakers globally.
Alston held several roles at GBH earlier in her career, most recently as host of GBH’s digital series Keep it Social. Prior to that, she worked at UNC-TV in North Carolina and NBC10-Philadelphia. Before his time at POLITICO Dispatch, Siegel was an anchor and award-winning reporter at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco.
The co-hosts join a dedicated morning news team that is led by Morning Edition producer Karen Marshall.
Could public access cable TV help solve the local news crisis? It’s a question that we put to Chris Lovett on this week’s “What Works” podcast. Lovett recently retired as the longtime anchor of Boston’s “Neighborhood Network News,” a first-rate daily newscast he produced along with journalism students from Boston University.
Lovett was skeptical. Funding for public access has been drying up in recent years as increasing numbers of viewers cut the cable cord and watch video exclusively on the internet. Donald Trump’s FCC took steps to reduce the amount of money public access received as well. And as Lovett observed, public access lacks the political support that it once had when, for example, the late Boston Mayor Tom Menino saw it as a way to reach his constituents. By contrast, incoming Mayor Michelle Wu is a master of social media, where she can control her own message.
Now Antoine Haywood and Victor Pickard have weighed in with some ideas, published at Nieman Lab, built around the possibility of mobilizing the country’s 1,600 public access operations. They write:
Instead of letting PEG [public, educational and governmental] channels wither due to commercial market fluctuations, we should publicly fund and expand the precious communication infrastructure that access media offers. A national fund that distributes local journalism grants, based on demonstrated community need, could benefit public access media centers interested in building collaborative, solutions-oriented types of journalism programs. Modest grants in the range of $100,000 to $300,000 would enable small operations to hire editorial staff, train and compensate community reporters, and forge collaborative partnerships with other news organizations.
It’s an interesting idea. Traditionally, with a few notable exceptions like “NNN,” public access has seen its mission mainly as a platform for training members of the community, carrying such events as governmental meetings and school plays, and providing a forum for someone who might want to host their own talk show. What public access has not done is provide reported, vetted journalism.
But maybe that can change. With community newspapers under siege, public access might prove to be a worthwhile alternative.
This one hurts. Gannett today announced that it is shutting down The Middleboro Gazette, and it did so with an insulting message that included every cliché you can imagine short of “in order to serve you better.” The company’s message suggests that it will not cut back on coverage, which will be available online at The Standard-Times website. I hope they’re right. We’ll see.
I grew up in Middleborough. (People spell it both ways, but “-borough” is correct, damn it.) I remember touring the weekly’s offices, which included its own hot-lead press, when I was in elementary school. Later, I wrote a column of high school news for the Gazette.
Here’s part of Gannett’s announcement:
This business decision reaffirms The Middleboro Gazette and Middleboro Gazette Extra’s commitment to the sustainable future of local news. The Middleboro Gazette, the Middleboro Gazette Extra and their parent company, Gannett, understand many readers value and depend upon the news and information they find weekly in their print products. The company’s focus on digital news presentation helps ensure continued delivery of valuable community journalism and effective platforms for advertisers.
Over the summer Gannett closed about a half-dozen weeklies in the Greater Boston area. I had hoped they were done. Not to repeat myself, but if the chain is truly committed to transitioning to digital while providing the same amount of local news coverage, then I think that’s fine. The company has done nothing to earn anyone’s trust, though. That will have to be earned.
Previously published at GBH News.
Dolores Cullen is scanning through photos she’d taken at a local elementary school where Abby Bean, the reigning Iowa Pork Producers Pork Queen, had enthused over the finer points of hog production. The kids were encouraged to oink. There was a piglet wearing a diaper. It was the sort of event that oozes cute.
But that’s not what was on Cullen’s mind. While driving through Albert City, she was hit with an odor so foul that she couldn’t stop talking about it. “It was so putrid I almost gagged, from hog confinement,” she says. When she commented on the smell during a visit to the post office to deliver newspapers, she was told it was from corn that had been put out to dry.
“No,” she says she responded. “This is not the smell of drying corn. This is hog shit.”
Welcome to The Storm Lake Times, a 21-year-old twice-weekly newspaper with a circulation of about 3,000 that covers Buena Vista County, Iowa. The paper is the subject of a documentary, “Storm Lake,” that will be broadcast on most PBS stations this coming Monday, Nov. 15, at 10 p.m., including GBH-2 in Boston.
The film, by Jerry Risius and Beth Levison, tells the story of a small rural newspaper’s fight for survival at a time when local papers across the country are cutting back and shutting down. At the center of that story are the Cullens, a remarkable family who persevere through calamities such as the rise of agribusiness, which wiped out much of the local advertising that had once sustained the paper; the spreading tentacles of the internet, which grabbed another big chunk; and, finally, the insidious invasion of COVID-19.
The Times was already among our better-known rural newspapers by virtue of a Pulitzer Prize that it won in 2017 for a series of editorials written by Art Cullen, the editor. As the Pulitzer judges put it, the paper “successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.” Cullen’s editorials so enraged those interests that the Iowa Senate refused to approve a resolution of congratulations, a tidbit that did not make it into the film.
Cullen later wrote a book about his life as a small-town newspaperman, but his notoriety appears not to have been of much help to the Times’ bottom line. Indeed, “Storm Lake” is a story of struggle. At one point the publisher, Art’s older brother, John, explains how he spent months listening to readers in order to pare the television listings down from 80 channels to 31 without sparking too much outrage, thus saving about $10,000.
Art Cullen is the narrative center of the film. Rail thin, with a shock of unkempt white hair (less unkempt after he submitted to a haircut administered by Dolores, his wife), a bushy horseshoe mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, we see him interviewing a range of characters, from a farmer talking about how a surplus of rain has stunted the corn crop to then-presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren on stage in front of hundreds during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. We’re treated to several samples of his lyrical writing as well.
The caucuses provide a welcome break from the monotony of rural life. Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg drops by, and he’s not allowed to leave until he’s autographed an enormous “Storm Lake Times” sign that adorns the newsroom. Art takes part in an MSNBC panel moderated by Chuck Todd. Art and his son, Tom, report from the scene on caucus night, their disappointment palpable as it becomes clear that problems with the app used to tally the results mean that there would be no results for quite some. The Times’ headline: “Who Won the Caucuses? Not Iowa.”
“Everybody thinks this is going to kill the Iowa caucuses,” Art says. “It shouldn’t, but it will.” A short time later he adds: “It’s not the process that broke down. It’s the app. It’s kind of too bad that we just can’t be more patient with democracy.”
The COVID-19 pandemic followed the caucuses by just a few weeks, and it nearly put the Times out of business. Advertising was down 50% in March 2020. Art and John muse about walking away rather than piling up more debt, or selling the Times’ building.
But they prevailed. We learn at the end that the paper held a successful GoFundMe campaign, signed up more than 100 new subscribers and unveiled a redesigned website that was attracting 1.2 million page views per month. The paper would survive.
Risius and Levison have provided a fascinating close-up look at the local news crisis, which has claimed some 2,100 U.S. newspapers over the past 15 years. At a moment when corporate chains control thousands of papers, squeezing out profits while cutting back on news coverage, the Cullens stand out as notable — and noble — exceptions.
“The pay is lousy and the hours are terrible,” says Art. “But you can change the world through journalism.”
In our latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I speak with Chris Lovett, the just-retired anchor of Boston’s Neighborhood Network News. Topics we discuss include highlights from Lovett’s long career and his views on whether local access cable could help solve the community journalism crisis.
A Dorchester native, he’s interviewed local activists, politicos (including Tom Menino when he was a district city councilor) and neighborhood stalwarts. Lovett had a front-row seat as the changing media landscape shaped Boston, and he connects the dots between Menino’s early days as a frequent broadcast guest and Michelle Wu’s strategic use of social media. He has also shared his expertise with any number of Boston University students. And he’s not done with journalism yet, so stay tuned.
We also kick around the latest on the Local Journalism Sustainability Act and the NewsMatch program, introduced by the Institute for Nonprofit News, which matches donations to nonprofit news organizations and has proved to be an important source of revenue.
Please give us a listen — and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever fine podcasts are found.
In April 2020, I questioned whether Report for America should be placing journalists at newspapers owned by cost-cutting corporate chains.
RFA is a program that enables news organizations to hire young journalists for about two years at a fraction of the cost, with a grant from RFA and additional fundraising covering 75%. The dilemma is that though these news organizations clearly need help, and the communities they cover benefit from that help, there is at least a theoretical chance that their chain owners will take it as an incentive not to hire someone at full cost.
At the time, RFA co-founder Steven Waldman defended those placements, saying in part that “half of our placements are in nonprofit, and others are in locally owned commercial entities. But we do indeed have some placements in newspapers that are owned by chains. Our primary standard is: Will this help the community?” (His full answer, as well as comments from the other co-founder, Charles Sennott, are here.)
Now Report for America has encountered an unexpected hazard to doing business with chain owners. McClatchy, owned by Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund, has decided not to apply for any RFA journalists next year. The apparent reason, according to Feven Merid at the Columbia Journalism Review: Waldman hurt their feelings in an op-ed piece he wrote for the Los Angeles Times earlier this year. Merid writes:
Sources tell CJR that McClatchy’s decision came in response to Waldman’s hedge-fund criticism. Kristin Roberts, McClatchy’s senior vice president of news, would not confirm the company’s plans, and did not respond to questions concerning the company’s reaction to Waldman’s hedge-fund critiques.
McClatchy owns several dozen papers in 14 states, including important outlets like the Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee and The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina. The chain staggered under piles of debt for many years before finally collapsing into bankruptcy a few years ago. Chatham bailed them out and has thus far proved to be a more benevolent owner than, say, Alden Global Capital, the most notorious of the hedge-fund owners. Indeed, Waldman’s op-ed specifically mentioned Alden.
But if Merid’s sources are correct, then it seems that Chatham executives have a bad case of rabbit ears.
Waldman’s op-ed, headlined “How to Stop Hedge Funds from Wrecking Local News,” calls on Washington to take steps that would encourage chain-owned newspapers to divest their holdings and make it easier for independent local owners to step up. He wrote:
It could offer incentives for owners to sell these papers to local interests by waiving capital gains taxes if the acquirer is a local nonprofit organization or public benefit corporation. It could give a time-limited payroll tax break to the acquiring organizations. Congress could also, through the Small Business Administration or Commerce Department, provide loan guarantees for low-interest financing for such transitions or special tax credits, similar to those available to businesses operating in enterprise zones.
Antitrust action to break up the chains could be in order as well, according to Waldman.
At the moment, 31 RFA journalists work at 21 McClatchy news outlets. The chain’s decision to spurn future RFA journalists won’t hurt the prospects of young reporters and photographers, since there will no doubt be plenty of other newsrooms that participate. But it will hurt the communities that those papers serve unless the chain suddenly decides to go on a hiring spree.
It’s an absurd situation, and I hope the folks at Chatham and McClatchy come to their senses.
The Washington Post last week published a massive investigative report on the insurrection of Jan. 6 and its aftermath. The story is filled with horrifying details, but there’s little that we didn’t already know — that Donald Trump incited the deadly violence both before and during the attack, and that the people around him as well as nearly all Republican members of Congress didn’t dare to challenge him. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell comes off as deeply cynical, a soulless shell. His House counterpart, Kevin McCarthy, is depicted as a worthless tool. Again, nothing new.
Then came the elections this past Tuesday and the triumph of Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in Virginia over Democrat Terry McAuliffe. We all sensed it might be coming, but it left me with a feeling of something approaching despair. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I don’t like McAuliffe, a Big Money ally of the Clintons who represents a lot of what’s wrong with his party. I’m not a Democrat. I don’t live in Virginia.
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As I thought about it, I concluded that my reaction was connected to Jan. 6. There’s been a lot of stupid talk about how Youngkin is charting a new course for the Republicans by showing that you can distance yourself from Trump and win. The problem, though, is that he didn’t distance himself from Trumpism. He appealed to racists with his false claims that critical race theory, an obsession on the right, is being taught in public schools and by running an ad in which a white supporter talks about how her precious child was so, so disturbed at having to read Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” He also benefited from a story circulating in right-wing circles that a boy in a skirt sexually assaulted a girl in a school bathroom. The story was false, but it fanned the flames of hatred toward transgender people.
More to the point, Youngkin isn’t a Republican who’s trying to tear down Trumpism and build something new, like U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney. He’s a Trumper. And that wing of the party — which, let’s face it, is most of them — should be banished, shunned, defeated, consigned to the dustbin of history. Instead, voters are treating them as normal politicians, and the media can’t resist their primal urge to get back to business-as-usual, both-sides political coverage. It’s nauseating. As Jon Allsop wrote in his newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review:
Youngkin was too often characterized as a passive actor who deftly rode abstract culture-war forces rather than driving them himself, and hailed for his political savviness more than scrutinized for the substance of his message. As many media watchers have argued, that lens has failed much coverage of racial issues, in particular.
We all know that democracy is in crisis. Authoritarianism looms. It doesn’t matter whether you like the Democratic Party or not. At this point, it is the one major party that, for all its flaws, is dedicated to small-“d” democracy. The Republican Party, sadly, is seeking to tear everything down. The public should consider all but the most anti-Trump Republicans to be disqualified from public office until further notice. Instead, they’re voting for them. And the media are more interested in what that means for the politics of the reconciliation bill and the midterms than for the future of the country.
