Why Phil Balboni has turned his attention to local news

Phil Balboni. Photo (cc) 2016 by Sylvia Stagg-Giuliano.

Phil Balboni is a journalistic legend. His latest venture is DailyChatter, a nonpartisan newsletter that covers international news. The newsletter’s staff of experienced journalists based in Europe, Asia and the United States searches for “meaning and context in this immensely complex world.”

Before creating DailyChatter, Balboni was the founder, president and CEO of GlobalPost, the highly acclaimed international news site he launched in 2008. He was also the founder and president of New England Cable News, and was vice president of news and editorial director for WCVB-TV (Channel 5) in Boston. He has been awarded almost every major honor in broadcasting, including the Peabody, Murrow and Emmy.

In our latest “What Works” podcast, Balboni talks with Ellen Clegg and me about his passion for local news as well as his hopes for a newly created professorship at the Columbia School of Journalism that was endowed in his honor.

In Quick Takes, I analyze the danger to the First Amendment posed by a New York court judge who ordered The New York Times to stop publishing confidential documents it had obtained about the notorious right-wing organization Project Veritas.

Ellen weighs in with news from Texas, where a right-wing activist named Frank Lopez Jr. is flooding the zone with disinformation about immigration, taking advantage of the void created when the local newspaper shut down.

You can listen here or on your favorite podcast app.