Covered railroad bridge in Hardwick, Vt. Photo (cc) 2010 by John Rife.
The Hardwick Gazette, a weekly paper that serves several communities in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, is selling its building, going nonprofit and getting rid of its print edition. Volunteer citizen journalists are being recruited as well. Owner and editor Ray Small tells Mary Engisch of Vermont Public Radio:
I think that the key to the survival of the Gazette is it’s not necessarily a new approach — but it’s a new approach for the Gazette and it’s something that we tested several years ago — having the communities in essence cover themselves, partially because of local demand, partially because of looking forward to this day, which has now arrived.
I’m skeptical of the volunteer model, not because it can’t work — it can — but because it can take a long time to build up. But good for Small for coming up with new ideas to keep the Gazette going rather than just walking away.
We all have our favorite movies about journalism. Best known are the heroic films, which portray reporters as indefatigable warriors on behalf of truth, justice and the American way. At the top of that particular heap are “Spotlight,” “The Post” and — at the very pinnacle — “All the President’s Men,” which inspired a generation of young journalists. For those who like a bit more nuance, there’s “Absence of Malice.” And if you prefer pure entertainment to instruction or uplift, there’s “His Girl Friday,” a romantic romp starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
I’ve enjoyed all these movies. But I have to admit that my favorite film about journalism is “Shattered Glass,” a docudrama about a troubled young man named Stephen Glass, who concocted an increasingly outlandish series of articles while he was working at The New Republic in the 1990s. Exposed at last, he was drummed out of the business. It was the sort of scandal that proved defining for a small publication like TNR.
Indeed, I was somewhat startled over the weekend when I saw the magazine described as “at the time an influential journal of the center left.” At the time. It’s been a long decline for a magazine co-founded by Walter Lippmann; I understand it’s doing better these days. And though there are multiple factors responsible for its marginalization, most of which have to do with the explosion of digital opinion journals, it was the Glass scandal that provided the magazine with its first swift kick down the stairs.
“Shattered Glass” never made the big time, but it’s long since become a staple of journalism ethics classes. (I don’t know why; “don’t make stuff up” can be dispensed with during the first 10 minutes of the first meeting of the semester.) People in journalism have long been passionate about it as well. I was once asked to take part in a panel discussion and found myself sitting next to Marty Peretz, then TNR’s owner and editor-in-chief, who, of course, is portrayed in the film. I remember telling him something like, “I agree with you about the commas.” (If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know what I’m talking about.) I don’t think he laughed.
All this is by way of my introduction to a story that you must read if you haven’t already. Titled “Loving Lies,” the piece — by Bill Adair, the creator of PolitiFact and no thus coddler of journalists who fabricate — appears in a digital publication called Air Mail, which has been around for a couple of years even though I hadn’t previously heard of it. (Since I first published this in the Members Newsletter, I’ve learned that it was co-founded by former New York Times journalist Alessandra Stanley and former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.) The quality looks to be quite high, as I would expect of an outlet able to commission a piece from someone as accomplished as Adair.
If it seems like I’m dancing around the main topic, it’s because I am. I don’t want to write any spoilers here. I will tell you that it’s one of the most moving stories about love and redemption that I can remember reading in a long time, and even that’s more than I ought to say. Just read it. You’ll need to provide your email address, but it’s absolutely worth doing so.
This post was first published as part of last week’s Media Nation Members Newsletter. To become a member for just $5 a month, please click here.
Every time I open a window, in floats another end-of-the-year memo from a Boston Globe Media executive. This one is from Tom Brown, vice president for consumer revenue, who reports that the Globe’s digital-only subscriptions now stand at 226,000 — a remarkable accomplishment given that the Globe was at just 95,000 in mid-2019.
For those of you who keep telling me that the Globe is going to drop its print edition, let me call your attention to this observation by Brown: “The print paper remains at the core of what we do and at 55% of consumer revenue, the largest component of revenue.”
That’s true even though print circulation according to the most recent report filed with the Alliance for Audited Media was just 128,000 on Sundays and about 73,000 on weekdays. The Globe, like other newspapers, will shut down its printing presses once costs exceed revenues — but not a moment before.
Also, I thought it was interesting that the Globe’s paid digital circulation kept rising this year even as overall traffic shrank following the end of the Trump era. (It’s over, right? Please tell me it’s over.)
“We had a strong start in 2021, but in the post-election/post-inauguration spring news audiences around the country began to wane,” Brown wrote. “We saw about a 25% decline in our non-subscriber audience during this period — something that was widely seen throughout the industry, yet our overall subscriber numbers grew modestly.”
The full text of Brown’s memo follows.
Dear Colleagues,
The past two and a half years have been a period of exceptional subscriber growth at the Globe. In mid-2019, we were thrilled to have the leading digital subscription business among major metros with 95,000 digital-only subscribers. From the launch of Globe.com in the fall of 2011, it took us over 7 years to get to that number of digital-only subs. It took less than a year to more than double that number as we continued to refine, invest, and innovate to develop the sophisticated approach that we have today.
This note is intended to share an update of how we have evolved since that time and what the current state of our subscription business looks like.
The consumer team has disciplines in:
Analytics
Testing
Pricing
Database/campaign management
Email operations
Customer insights and market research
We work with so many of you across the organization on a wide array of projects. Our main focus is growing subscriptions and related revenue. Our team is in service of the incredible journalism that is created here every day. We feel a responsibility to recommend and enact strategies that help to continually attract new subscribers and retain existing subscribers. We focus on analytical techniques and approaches that can improve our ability to draw in, acquire, engage, retain and maximize yield of subscribers. We believe in the rigorous testing of new ideas and letting the data and analytics guide us as we refine our approach.
A Brief history – mid 2019
With support and guidance from leadership we set out to accelerate the growth of our digital subscription business. After a period of testing that began in the fall of 2018, we embarked on a major shift in our acquisition strategy in mid-2019. Encouraged by the early results of the testing we switched the core introductory offer (the offer most commonly seen on the paywall and in email). The rigorous outreach, tracking, sampling, and testing combined with our consistently excellent journalism led to our acquisition rate increasing by more than 500% and remarkably, engagement increased and the retention rate stayed the same. This propelled a sharp increase in subscribers beginning in the summer of 2019 — we passed the 100,000 subscriber mark in mid-June 2019! As 2019 continued, so did the strong results, and we felt more encouraged with each passing week that we had tapped into a new audience that saw great value in a Globe subscription once they had a chance to spend time with our content.
The effect of the pandemic on subscriptions
As the pandemic began in March 2020, we became even more relevant to our subscribers and to new readers. Many of the subscribers already acquired on the new offer were moving off their introductory rate in the early days of the pandemic, which caused an increase in retention. At the same time we were acquiring new subscribers at a record pace. Going into 2020, we planned for a record year with growth to 178,000 subscribers by the end of the year. This goal was surpassed in early April. By early May we had over 200,000 digital only subscribers. While it took over 7 years to grow to 100,000 we had added the next 100,000 in less than one year!
Earlier in 2021
We had a strong start in 2021, but in the post-election / post-inauguration spring news audiences around the country began to wane. We saw about a 25% decline in our non-subscriber audience during this period — something that was widely seen throughout the industry, yet our overall subscriber numbers grew modestly.
Where are we now — Q4 2021
Over the past 5+ months traffic has increased and so have subscriptions. We have reached a new all-time high of 226,000 digital-only subscribers.
We are a leader among U.S. major metro newspapers and one of only a few that have surpassed 100,000 digital only subscribers. Our strategy is being widely adopted across the industry and we are proud to be innovators in this approach and thrilled that it is even possible thanks to the incredible journalism, investment across the company to consistently improve what we do, and the support of the entire organization.
New England is the core for digital subscribers, accounting for 76% of total subscribers, but there are subscribers in all 50 states and more than 3,000 international subscribers!
A sampling of what we have planned for 2022
Continue to monitor acquisition results and test other offers to make sure we are always following an approach that nets us the best results for the long term health of the business.
Testing of new acquisition approaches and getting more dynamic with our subscription offering.
Working with the Product Development and Engineering teams to implement new tests and a redesigned checkout flow.
Taking a data driven approach to increasing engagement and retention through a series of initiatives designed to address churn both proactively and reactively — working closely with Marketing and Customer Service.
Home Delivery
The print paper remains at the core of what we do and at 55% of consumer revenue, the largest component of revenue. While print subscriber volume has declined as more people choose a digital option, we still have a dedicated base of home delivery subscribers. We are continuing to invest in Home Delivery acquisition and will increase that investment in 2022. Our Home delivery subscribers consist of a very loyal base with an average tenure of over 20 years! We continue to use analytics to make sure we can deliver the best experience possible to every subscriber.
Print newsstand sales
Another important piece of the consumer business is the revenue generated from sales of single copies on the newsstand. The single copy business was hit hard at the beginning of the pandemic as the foot traffic to stores, especially in the city of Boston, collapsed suddenly. 2021 has been a bounce back year though and sales have remained relatively flat year over year since the spring, indicating that there is still a consistent demand for print single copy.
I hope this gave you a good glimpse into our consumer business. Please feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions to any of us on this entrepreneurial consumer team.
Chris Wallace. U.S. Army photo (cc) 2010 by Staff Sgt. Jim Greenhill.
Chris Wallace has finally stopped providing undeserved cover for Fox News, announcing at the end of his show today that he was leaving. He’ll host a show on CNN’s new streaming service.
Wallace deserves some credit for remaining a bastion of sanity on a network that’s embraced the hardcore Trumpist right and all of its lies and fantasies. But he’s 74 and has made a lot of money at Fox; let’s not get carried away.
Thomas Edsall’s latest, on what the Democrats need to do to regain power (I suppose I should say “maintain,” but it feels like they’ve already lost it), is filled with valuable insights from a variety scholars, many of them built around the theme of moving to the center and appealing more to working-class voters.
But I want to call your attention to this section, from Harvard’s Steven Levitsky, the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” which to my mind is one of the most important books of recent years. As Levitsky points out in a message to Edsall, there’s more wrong with our constitutional structure than there is with the Democratic Party:
“The Democrats have been amazingly successful in national elections over the last 20 years,” Levitsky wrote in an email.
They have won the popular vote in 7 out of 8 presidential elections — that’s almost unthinkable. They have also won the popular vote in the Senate in every six-year cycle since 2000. You cannot look at a party in a democracy that has won the popular vote almost without fail for two decades and say, gee, that party really has to get it together and address its “liabilities.”
Instead, he argued,
the liabilities lie in undemocratic electoral institutions such as the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate (where underpopulated states have an obscene amount of power that should be unacceptable in any democracy), gerrymandered state and federal legislative districts in many states, and recent political demographic trends — the concentration of Democratic votes in cities — that favor Republicans.
“Until our parties are competing on a level playing field,” Levitsky added, “I am going to insist that our institutions are a bigger problem for democracy than liberal elitism and ‘wokeness.’”
You really have to wonder how long a majority of the country is going to accept being relegated to minority status.
YourArlington, a venerable community news site that’s been pretty much a one-man operation throughout its 15 years of existence, is going nonprofit and ramping up. Founder Bob Sprague now has a board, and he’s begun searching for his successor, writing:
I plan to continue to be the chief guardian about what is posted on this site and am very pleased to have more help from those knowledgeable about the town. I am seeking an experienced journalist to take over the day-to-day operation of the site, which had record internet traffic in August and September.
YourArlington will no longer accept advertising but is accepting grants, donations and underwriting from local businesses.
“I have lived in Arlington since 1989, and I know it is a town whose residents crave good journalism,” Sprague told me in an email. “The news YourArlington provides remains free, but the cost to produce it continues. It’s exciting to think that residents will step up and support it.”
Bina Venkataraman. Photo (cc) 2019 by TED Conference.
On Thursday a trusted source sent me an internal memo from Boston Globe editorial page editor Bina Venkataraman offering her take on the opinion section’s accomplishments in 2021. (Thanks, source!)
Probably the newsiest part of the memo is that The Emancipator, a racial justice collaborative involving the Globe and Boston University that’s been slow to get off the ground, is ramping up and “will begin publishing regularly” in the near future. Venkataraman also takes note of the paper’s 2020 editorials on housing in Newton, which won a Pulitzer finalist nod.
Her full memo follows.
Dear BGMP colleagues,
It’s a delight to be able to share with you some updates from the Globe Opinion team as we near the end of the year.
Thanks to our leadership, the company has made significant investments in growing and diversifying the Opinion team and the editorial board since 2019, helping us launch a pioneering partnership with Boston University, and allowing us to to do truly digital-first, innovative projects like our endorsement of Joe Biden and our editorial series Future-proofing the Presidency. This has raised the profile of our work nationally, where Globe Opinion content and voices are often featured in major broadcast venues, and has deepened our connection with local and regional communities. The growth has also allowed us to have a closer eye on and hold accountable the institutions and political leaders in Greater Boston and New England responsible for serving the public interest.
2021 has been busy and productive in Opinion and Ideas. Here are a few of the highlights that made our year extraordinary:
*Editorial board meetings with mayoral and municipal election candidates across Greater Boston, which culminated in our publishing a spate of endorsements.
*A significant and innovative project, the aforementioned “Future-proofing the Presidency,” extensively covered in national broadcast media, influenced proposed Congressional reforms.
*Our ongoing op-ed series on longevity, in collaboration with MIT’s AgeLab, which sparked a conversation about Boston’s role as a city for innovation in aging.
*The launch of a hot new Ideas newsletter that already has thousands of subscribers and is engaging readers and driving them back to our section.
*The announcement of a new non-profit publication, The Emancipator, our groundbreaking collaboration with BU to reimagine 19th-century abolitionist newspapers for today’s conversation on racial justice. We started with the hiring of a great editor-in-chief and the launch of the Unbound newsletter.
*Globe Letters packages featuring our readers’ voices on the major issues of the day, from geoengineering to Mass. & Cass to Thanksgiving-season gratitude.
*Our popular Op-Talk event series and Now What? (formerly known as Don’t Look Back) newsletter, which offer new entry points to our journalism and expand our reach.
*Ideas features on artificial intelligence, race and mobility, the future of work, and urban schools led the conversation online and in the community.
* Columnists’ ongoing smart takes on pressing local, regional, and national topics — often featured in local events and on national broadcast, raising the profile of Globe Opinion.
*A new social media strategy featuring different voices of our editorial board and innovations such as Instagram cards and reels, that has significantly grown our online audience and presence.
*Expert opinions weighing in on the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow and the threats to America’s democracy via the war on voting rights.
Looking ahead, The Emancipator will begin publishing regularly under the leadership of its co-editors in chief, Amber Payne and Deborah Douglas, while growing their editorial team and launching a new Web presence. Ideas will be publishing an exciting package on reenvisioning the US Constitution on the anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Our pandemic and political coverage will continue in editorials and op-eds, with a special focus on the gubernatorial election. Globe Opinion also aims to look back at some of the Globe’s coverage of communities of color to reckon with the past as the paper celebrates its 150th birthday. Watch for new ways we’ll engage with letter writers, more point/counterpoint op-eds, further experiments with our social media presence, and new deep dives in Sunday Ideas.
We’re always eager to find new ways to showcase evidence-based opinion and break through polarized, simplistic debates with original, reported, and nuanced perspectives. We welcome your ideas as we scan the horizon and are grateful to collaborate with our colleagues across BGMP on many of these efforts. Let us know if you see a way we might conspire in the new year!
All the best,
Bina
Bina Venkataraman
Editorial Page Editor
The Boston Globe
Brian Williams. Photo (cc) 2011 by Anthony Quintano.
Today is Brian Williams’ last day at NBC News, where he’s been hosting a program on MSNBC. Back when he was exposed for his fabrications, and lost his position as anchor of the NBC nightly newscast, I thought he should be fired. I stand by that.
That said, Williams worked hard to rebuild his career, never complained, and earned back much of the respect he’d lost. Good luck and best wishes to him.
Some 200 newspapers are engaged in legal actions claiming that Google and Facebook exercise Godzilla-like dominance of digital advertising. Photo (cc) 2009 by Dr Zito.
A lawsuit filed by newspapers against Google and Facebook that claims the two tech giants violated antitrust laws is gaining momentum. Sara Fischer and Kristal Dixon of Axios report that more than 200 papers across the country have joined the effort, which is aimed at forcing Google and Facebook to compensate them for what they say are monopolistic practices that denied them advertising revenue.
I don’t see any New England newspapers on this list. But the papers that are involved in the lawsuits in some way represent about 30 different owners in dozens of states, according to Fischer and Dixon. About 150 papers owned by 17 different groups have actually filed suit so far.
What’s interesting about this is that it has nothing to do with the usual complaint about Google and Facebook — that they repurpose journalism from newspapers, and that the newspapers ought to be compensated. By contrast, the current lawsuits are aimed at practices that the plaintiffs claim are clearly illegal.
The Axios story doesn’t get into the weeds. But I did earlier this year shortly after the first lawsuit was filed by HD Media, a small chain based in West Virginia. Essentially, the argument is twofold:
Google is violating antitrust law by controlling every aspect of digital advertising. Paul Farrell, a lawyer for HD Media, put it this way in an interview with the trade magazine Editor & Publisher: “They have completely monetized and commercialized their search engine, and what they’ve also done is create an advertising marketplace in which they represent and profit from the buyers and the sellers, while also owning the exchange.”
Facebook is complicit because, according to a lawsuit filed by several state attorneys general, Google and Facebook are colluding through an agreement that Google has code-named Jedi Blue. The AGs contend that Google provides Facebook with special considerations so that Facebook won’t set up a competing ad network.
The two companies have denied any wrongdoing. But if the case against them is correct, then Google is profiting from a perfect closed environment: It holds a near-monopoly on search and the programmatic advertising system through which most ads show up on news websites. And it has an agreement with Facebook aimed at staving off competition.
“The intellectual framework for this developed over the last three to four years,” Doug Reynolds, managing partner of HD Media, told Axios.
The lawsuit also comes at a time when the federal government is beginning to rethink antitrust law. A generation ago, a philosophy developed by Robert Bork — yes, that Robert Bork, and yes, everything really does go back to Richard Nixon — held that there can be no antitrust violations unless consumers are harmed in the form of higher prices.
President Joe Biden’s administration, by contrast, has been embracing a more progressive, older form of antitrust law holding that monopolies can be punished or even broken up if they “undermine economic fairness and American democracy,” as The New Yorker put it.
The newspapers’ lawsuit against Google and Facebook is grounded in the Biden version of antitrust — Google and Facebook are charged with leveraging their monopoly to harm newspapers economically while at the same time hurting democracy, which depends on reliable journalism.
One president lied about COVID-19 (the country’s and his own), embraced white supremacists and tried to overturn the results of an election that he lost. Another president has hit a few bumps in the road as he attempts to persuade Congress to pass his agenda. Can you guess which one received more negative news coverage?
If you guessed President Joe Biden, then come on down. According to an analysis of 65 news websites, Biden’s treatment by the media was as harsh or harsher from August through November of this year than then-President Donald Trump’s was during the same four-month period in 2020.
On one level, it’s inconceivable. On another, though, it’s all too predictable. Large swaths of the media simply cannot or will not move beyond both-sides journalism, equating the frustratingly hapless Democrats with a Republican Party that has embraced authoritarianism and voter suppression.
“My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy,” wrote Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who ordered up the study. He concluded: “Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand.”
As I’ve written before, and as many others have said, we’re in the midst of a crisis of democracy. The Republican Party, already disproportionately empowered because of the Constitution’s small-state bias and the Senate filibuster (the latter, of course, could be abolished tomorrow), is working to strengthen its advantage through partisan gerrymandering and the passage of voter-suppression laws. The result could be white minority rule for years to come.
The situation has deteriorated to the point that the European think tank International IDEA now regards the United States as a “backsliding democracy.” To quote from IDEA’s report directly, “the United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”
And the media remain wedded to their old tropes, covering political campaigns as though they were horse races and treating the two major parties as equally legitimate players with different views.
It’s a topic that was discussed at length recently on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen and guest host Nicole Hemmer, a scholar who studies right-wing media. Their conversation defies easy summary (the whole episode can be found here), but essentially, Rosen argued that the political press falls back on its old habits because breaking out of them is just too difficult.
“The horse race absorbs a lot of abuse from people like me,” he said. “But it can take that abuse, because it is such a problem-solver. It checks so many other boxes that even when people know it’s kind of bankrupt, it stays on.” As an alternative, Rosen proposes coverage based on a “citizens agenda,” which he has written about at his blog, PressThink. But he admitted to Hemmer that we may lose our democracy before his ideas are adopted by more than a fraction of journalists.
What I find especially frustrating is that the media have not been ignoring the Republican threat to our democracy. Far from it. As just one small example, the Times on Sunday published a front-page story by Nick Corasaniti on a multitude of actions being taken at the state level to suppress the vote and put Trump loyalists in charge of the election machinery.
“Democrats and voting rights groups say some of the Republican measures will suppress voting, especially by people of color,” Corasaniti wrote. “They warn that other bills will increase the influence of politicians and other partisans in what had been relatively routine election administration. Some measures, they argue, raise the prospect of elections being thrown into chaos or even overturned.”
So why am I frustrated? Because this sort of valuable enterprise reporting is walled off from day-to-day political coverage. We are routinely served up stories about the congressional Republican leaders, Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell, going about their business as though they were latter-day versions of the late Bob Dole, sharply partisan but ultimately dedicated to the business of seeking compromise and governing. In fact, whether through cowardice or conviction, they are enabling our slide into authoritarianism by undermining the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection as well as by failing to call out Trump and the excesses of their worst members.
Earlier this year, Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan endorsed the idea of a “democracy beat,” which would look closely at attempts to subvert voting rights. Sullivan would go further than that, too. “The democracy beat shouldn’t be some kind of specialized innovation,” she wrote, “but a widespread rethinking across the mainstream media,” permeating every aspect of political and governmental coverage.
If Trump runs again, he may very well end up being installed as president even if he loses both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Who would stop him? In the aftermath of the 2020 election, there were still enough Republican state and local officials with integrity who refused to go along with Trump’s demands that they overturn the results. That is not likely to be the case in 2024. As Barton Gellman wrote in a new Atlantic cover story, “The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.”
Meanwhile, the media go about covering President Biden and his travails as though our politics hadn’t changed over the past 40 years. Of course Biden needs to be held accountable. The ugly withdrawal from Afghanistan, confusing White House messaging about COVID and his inability to bring Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to heel are all worthy of tough coverage. (But not inflation because, please, don’t be stupid.) But it needs to be done in a way that we don’t lose sight of the big picture. And the big picture is that we are in real danger of losing our country.
As the Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan put it on Twitter, “The problem is the media failing to distinguish threats to democracy from normal negative coverage (an important form of democratic accountability!).”
The problem is the media failing to distinguish threats to democracy from normal negative coverage (an important form of democratic accountability!).
In other words, the fundamental problem isn't the Biden coverage (however imperfect); it's the Trump coverage. https://t.co/Qw7Z1ntfZC
— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) (@BrendanNyhan) December 4, 2021
Five years ago Thomas Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School issued a report showing that coverage of Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 general-election campaign had been equally negative — a finding that he found disturbing. Patterson wrote that “indiscriminate criticism has the effect of blurring important distinctions. Were the allegations surrounding Clinton of the same order of magnitude as those surrounding Trump? It’s a question that journalists made no serious effort to answer during the 2016 campaign. They reported all the ugly stuff they could find, and left it to the voters to decide what to make of it.”
Well, here we go again. Next time, though, it’s the future of democracy that is likely to be at stake.
