Month: June 2023

Former Globe president Vinay Mehra sues, alleging the Henrys owe him $12 million

Vinay Mehra (via LinkedIn)

Former Boston Globe Media Partners (BGMP) president Vinay Mehra has filed an explosive lawsuit against the company, charging that he was fired in 2020 because Globe owners John and Linda Henry didn’t want to pay him the commissions and other compensation he’d earned for transforming the newspaper into a profitable operation. Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub has all the details as well as a copy of the suit.

Mehra was hired in 2017 from Politico, where he was executive vice president and chief financial officer. Before that, he worked as chief financial officer at GBH in Boston from 2008 to 2015.

According to the lawsuit, BGMP owes Mehra more than $12 million in lost commissions, wages and other compensation. Gaffin writes:

In his suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Mehra charges that despite returning the Globe to profitability, John Henry and his corporate minions decided to cheap out — and then ousted him after threatening and lying about him with an unquenchable “thirst for vengeance” sending him a termination letter alleging “fraud, misappropriation, embezzlement or acts of similar dishonesty.”…

At this point we’re only getting one side of the story, as BGMP has not yet filed a response. But if Mehra’s numbers are accurate, then the lawsuit provides some insight into how the Globe transformed itself into one of the country’s most financially successful large regional newspapers. In 2019, for instance, Mehra claims that the Globe implemented $10 million in cuts “through a combination of targeted layoffs, reduction in vendor costs, reduction in distribution costs, and other measures.”

The result, Mehra claims, was a turnaround from a money-losing operation to one that was enjoying a positive cash flow of “tens of millions of dollars” by the time he left. Indeed, it was at the end of 2018 that John Henry told me, unexpectedly, that the Globe had achieved profitability. “As our digital growth continues the sustainability of a vibrant Boston Globe is coming into view,” he said at that time. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Mehra apparently expects BGMP to flesh out its accusations of fraud and embezzlement as the case moves forward, as he offers some details in what might be regarded as a pre-emptive strike. The lawsuit also includes a statement that I suspect former Globe editor Brian McGrory might disagree with: “He [Mehra] also shifted the focus of the Globe’s reporting to be more strategic, to prioritize the Globe’s strengths, and to drive viewership.”

That sounds a lot like McGrory’s January 2017 memo to the staff in which he talked about repositioning the Globe’s coverage, which I wrote about in “The Return of the Moguls”:

The most important takeaway was that the Globe would no longer attempt to be a “paper of record,” publishing obligatory stories about the minutiae of city and state government, the courts, and the like. Rather, it would seek to become an “organization of interest,” developing enterprise stories out of those traditional areas of coverage that made more of a difference to readers’ lives.

But Mehra didn’t join BGMP until six months after McGrory wrote that memo. No doubt he and McGrory had conversations about how to make the Globe more compelling to its audience. The shift in focus that the lawsuit talks about, though, had already taken place, and in any case fell under the purview of the editor, not the president.

It will be interesting to see how the Globe responds — and, of course, whether this goes to trial or is instead settled out of court.

Three recent developments show how AI is already changing journalism

Public domain illustration via Pixabay

I don’t want to come off as a total Luddite when it comes to artificial intelligence and journalism. Well, OK, maybe I do. Because even though I have no problem with using AI for certain mindless, repetitive tasks, such as transcribing interviews and finding patterns in public records, I think we need to be cautious about using such tools to actually produce journalism — whether it be reports about real estate transactions (thus missing the opportunity to dig more deeply) or stories about high school sports. With that in mind, I want to call your attention to three troubling developments.

For those who thought the notion of robot reporters was still quite a ways off, the first development is the most alarming. According to a recent article at Nieman Lab by Sophie Culpepper, an independent publisher has been experimenting with just that in his spare time, and the results are, well, not bad.

Mark Talkington, who runs a hyperlocal start-up called The Palm Beach Post in California, has been feeding governmental meetings that are available on YouTube into an AI system designed by a friend of his. Importantly, it’s not an off-the-shelf product like ChatGPT or Google Bard. Rather, it’s been trained on reliable news and information from his coverage area, which reduces if not eliminates the likelihood of “hallucinations,” the term for false but plausible-sounding output produced by AI.

The example Culpepper quoted from reads like what journalism professors disapprovingly tell their students is an “agenda story” — that is, it begins with something like Members of the board of sewer commissioners began their meeting by saluting the flag rather than with a lead grounded in the most interesting thing that happened. Nor has Talkington actually published any AI-generated stories yet. He said in his interview with Culpepper that he’s concerned about AI missing out on body language and, of course, on the ability to snag an elected official in the hallway during a break in the meeting.

But he said he could see using it to take notes and, eventually, to cover meetings that his thinly stretched staff can’t get to. And that’s how it begins: with a sympathetic hyperlocal publisher using AI to extend his reach, only to see the technology adopted by cost-cutting newspaper chains looking to dump reporters.

My second example might be called “speaking of which.” Because Gannett, whose 200 or so daily newspapers make it the largest corporate chain, announced recently that it, too, is experimenting with generative AI. Helen Coster of Reuters reports that, at first, AI will be used to generate content like bullet points that summarize the most important facts in a story, and that humans will check its work. That feature will be rolled out in the chain’s flagship newspaper, USA Today, later this year.

Gannett is hardly the only news organization that’s playing with AI; The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and others are all looking into ways to make use of it. But Gannett is notoriously tight-fisted and, as Coster notes, has slashed and burned its way to tenuous profitability. “Gannett’s journalists are fighting to ensure that they aren’t replaced by the technology,” she wrote. “Hundreds walked off the job over staff cuts and stagnant wages on June 5. Generative AI is a sticking point in some negotiations with the company, the union said.”

The third warning sign comes from Sebastian Grace, who passed along a truly disturbing item that the German tabloid Bild is laying off about 200 journalists while ramping up its use of AI. (Seb recently wrote a fine piece on journalism and AI for our website What Works: The Future of Local News.) Although those two developments at Bild are said to be unrelated, Jon Henley of The Guardian writes that Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Bild’s corporate owner, Axel Springer, has said that ChatGPT and its ilk could “make independent journalism better than it ever was — or replace it.”

Axel Springer, by the way, also owns Politico, an important U.S. outlet for news about politics and public policy.

Do I think AI will soon replace reporters who do the hard work of going out and getting stories? No — at least not right away. But we’ve been losing journalists for 25 years now, and it seems certain that AI will be used, misused and abused in ways that accelerate that trend.

How ‘Freaks’ helped normalize people with disabilities: An excerpt from ‘Little People’

Nicolas Rapold has a fascinating essay in The New York Times (free link) about “Freaks,” a rarely seen 1932 horror movie directed by Tod Browning and  starring a troupe of sideshow performers — people with dwarfism, microcephaly, missing limbs and other conditions. As Rapold writes, “Freaks” has been embraced by some disability activists, as it conveys a “sense of both community and agency among the characters.” It’s also become such a cult classic that a friend of ours shows it at his birthday party every year.

In my 2003 book about dwarfism, “Little People,” I wrote about several artistic depictions of dwarfism, from “Freaks” to an Argentine film called “De eso no se habla” to “CSI.” Unfortunately, “The Station Agent,” starring the soon-to-be-well-known actor Peter Dinklage, was not released until shortly after the book was published, and that remains the gold standard in depiciting someone with dwarfism.

Here’s an excerpt from “Little People” in which I discuss “Freaks.”

***

For anyone who’s part of what the sociologist Erving Goffman calls a “stigmatized group,” identity as part of that group can all too easily take precedence over individual identity. Our changing attitudes toward dwarfism can be seen through artistic representations. Mini-Me and the late Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf aside, these representations are considerably more enlightened than they used to be. But the individual within is rarely shown, and even when he is, it is strictly within the confines of a group context.

Not long ago I rented the 1932 film “Freaks,” directed by the horror-movie pioneer Tod Browning. “Freaks” is a monumentally bad movie, and it was considered so offensive in its day that it was virtually impossible to see for many decades, excoriated in the United States and actually banned in Britain. Yet what fascinated me most was not its exploitive nature, which I had expected, but Browning’s apparent good intentions. At the beginning of the film, we are told that “freaks” — that is, the disabled freak-show actors who made up much of the cast — are as human as anyone else. And in fact, the first two-thirds of the movie consists of such folks as proportionate dwarfs, an achondroplastic dwarf, mentally retarded* microcephalics (“pinheads,” as they were known; think of Bill Griffith’s cartoon strip “Zippy the Pinhead”), and people without any limbs, all of them going about their business as normally as possible. It’s voyeuristic yet progressive at the same time.

Later, though, the movie transforms itself into the nightmarish vision of disability that the earlier images seem designed to counteract. When the average-size trapeze artist and her strongman boyfriend attempt to poison the dwarf she had married for his inheritance, the “freaks” murder the boyfriend and mutilate the bride, turning her into a monster that is part-woman, part-chicken. (Like I said, it’s a bad movie.) As the critic Joan Hawkins observes, the dénouement “directly contradicts the argument for tolerance that we are given at the beginning of the film. Having been initially reminded by the barker that physical difference is an ‘accident of birth,’ not the visible sign of some inner monstrosity, we are ultimately presented with a woman who has been turned into a freak as punishment for her immorality and greed.” Browning tells us that difference is morally neutral; then he shows us that it’s anything but.

One night when Becky was still a baby, we rented an Argentine film called “De eso no se habla” (“I Don’t Want to Talk About It”), a 1994 movie directed by Maria Luisa Bemberg. One of the stars is an achondroplastic woman named Alejandra Podesta, who marries a mysterious stranger played by Marcello Mastraoianni. We’d heard good things about it, and for the most part we were rewarded with a well-rounded coming-of-age portrait of a young woman with dwarfism. At the end, though, she runs away from the carefully constructed life that her overbearing mother (Luisiana Brando) has built for her so that she can discover her own individuality — which she accomplishes by joining the circus. We see her being greeted by a circus dwarf as she embarks on her new life. The message is muddled but unmistakable: despite being well-educated, happily married, and apparently accepted by her community, she can’t truly discover herself except by being with her own kind.

The modern version of this attitude was portrayed on television not too long ago, on the popular CBS show “CSI.” A murder has taken place at a Little People of America conference, and the crime-scene investigators have been called in to solve it. In the course of the next hour, we are treated to an earnest, politically correct, if not entirely accurate, seminar on the world of dwarfs and dwarfism. The dwarf actors themselves play characters who come across as capable and competent, yes, but also as prickly, defensive, bitter, even angry at their lot in life. The murderer turns out to be a dwarf who didn’t want his average-size daughter to marry a dwarf man — a rather nasty bit of self-hatred that was so predictable I’m surprised it made the final cut.

I don’t mean to be overly critical. The “CSI” episode stood out in many ways because of how good it was. We’ve certainly come a long way since “Freaks.” But I was struck by how even the most well-intentioned scriptwriters manage to fall into the trap of portraying dwarfs as associating mainly with other dwarfs (the LPA conference setting, after all, was an artistic decision, not a necessity) and as profoundly damaged by the mere fact of their dwarfism.

The one dwarf who might have been able to assert his individuality was the man who had been carrying on an affair with an average-size woman. And he was dead before the opening credits had finished rolling.

The group identity portrayed in “CSI” is clearly more progressive than that in “Freaks,” or even in “De eso no se habla.” But true individual identity is reserved for the average-size people who direct the dwarfs’ lives. For the most part, the dwarfs are not actors; they are acted upon. And when they do act, it is in negative, even horrifying ways: to kill and mutilate, to join the circus, to plan and carry out a complicated murder in a twisted effort to negate one’s own dwarfism.

* In 2003, the word “retarded” was not considered an offensive description for people with developmental disabilities; that came later. In fact, I also go into quite a bit of detail in “Little People” of how the word “midget” morphed from an accepted term for someone with proportionate dwarfism to an epithet on par with the n-word. Times change.

 

Two Alden papers, the Boston Herald and The Denver Post, will end commenting

Royalty-free photo via Wallpaper Flare

At least two daily newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group will end reader comments on July 1.

The Boston Herald announced the move earlier today, saying that the change was being made to “dramatically speed up the performance of the website” as well as on its mobile platforms. The Denver Post took the same action last week, although editor Lee Ann Colacioppo cited bad behavior rather than technology, writing that the comment section has become “an uncivil place that drives readers away and opens those trying to engage in thoughtful conversation to hateful, personal attacks.”

Both papers emphasized that readers will still be able to talk back at them through social media platforms.

Wondering if this were a MediaNews-wide action, I tried searching about a half-dozen papers in the 60-daily chain and could find no similar announcements. I found something else interesting as well. The eight larger dailies that comprise the Tribune Publishing chain, which Alden acquired a couple of years ago, are now included as part of MediaNews Group, although they are still listed separately as well. (A ninth, the Daily News of New York, was split off from Tribune and is being run as a separate entity.)

The moves by the Herald and the Post represent just the latest in the long, sad story of user comments. When they debuted about a quarter-century ago, they were hailed as a way of involving the audience — the “former audience,” as Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen put it. The hope was that comments could even advance stories.

It turned out that comments were embraced mainly by the most sociopathic elements. Some publishers (including me for a while) required real names, but that didn’t really help. The only measure that ensures a civil platform is pre-screening — a comment doesn’t appear online until someone has read it and approved it. But that takes resources, and very few news organizations are willing to make the investment.

The best comments section I know of belongs to the New Haven Independent, where pre-screening has been the rule right from the start. Keeping out racist, homophobic hate speech opens up the forum for other voices to be heard. The New York Times engages in pre-screening as well.

So kudos to the Boston Herald and The Denver Post — and I hope other news outlets, including The Boston Globe, will follow suit.

Sue Cross of INN tells us why this is a golden age of news innovation

Sue Cross at the recent INN Days gathering in Washington. Photo by Will Allen-DuPraw and used with permission.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sue Cross, the veteran journalist who will step down as executive director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) by the end of 2023. Sue has led INN since 2015, and has overseen a period of tremendous growth. There were 117 nonprofit newsroom members listed in the INN’s 2015 annual report. This year, INN has 425 member newsrooms.

She has also been a driving force in the NewsMatch program, a collaborative fundraising project that has helped raise more than $270 million for emerging newsrooms since its launch in 2016. Before joining INN, Cross was a journalist and executive at The Associated Press. Cross says we are in a golden age of news innovation, and she hopes to continue to lend her support. She also says she hopes to spend time on personal projects.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the launch of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit digital site serving Greater Houston. I provide an update on efforts to extract money out of Google and Facebook in order to pay for news.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

OMG, this quote

From The New York Times:

The conversation between Mr. Lukashenko and Mr. Prigozhin was “very difficult,” said Mr. Gigin, who this month became the director of the National Library of Belarus. “They immediately blurted out such vulgar things it would make any mother cry. The conversation was hard, and as I was told, masculine.”

From Walter Lippmann, a cautionary tale about seeing what we wish to see in Russia

As we wait to see how Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion against the Russian government turns out, it’s worth remembering that Walter Lippmann conceived of objectivity as a response to the Western press’ — and especially The New York Times’ — being guided by wishful thinking in its coverage of the Russian Revolution. And here we are again.

As Lippmann disparagingly observed more than 100 years ago, the thrust of Western coverage was that the Bolshevik forces and, later, the nascent Soviet state were bound to fall. In “Liberty and the News” (1920), Lippmann and his co-author, Charles Merz, wrote:

In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see…. From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all.

We don’t know what’s going to happen in the hours and days ahead. Prigozhin has come out against Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, and so of course we hope Prigozhin might somehow prevail, even though his venality is at least the equal of Putin’s. If nothing else, it seems logical that chaos in Russia is good news for Ukraine.

As a number of observers have lamented, the days when you could curate a reliable news feed on Twitter are over — although Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has put together a good list of analysts tweeting about the Ukraine crisis. I’m also following live coverage at the Times (which is behind a paywall) and at BBC News (which is free). And hoping for the best.

Dam work complete in the Middlesex Fells

First time in the Middlesex Fells in a few months, and I was happy to see that the restoration of the North Reservoir dam is finally complete. The road has been reopened and the water level has been restored to its normal level. Also: The Mosquito Rapture must have taken place, because there wasn’t a single one that I could detect. I’m not complaining.

In a separate lawsuit, Gannett joins antitrust effort aimed at Google (and Facebook)

Photo (cc) 2010 by John Marino

Since early 2021, Google has faced legal challenges over its control of digital advertising. Essentially, the tech giant stands accused of violating antitrust law by controlling all aspects of the ad market. As Paul Farrell, the lawyer for a group of seven newspapers in West Virginia, told Gretchen A. Peck of the trade publication Editor & Publisher:

They [Google] 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. Google is the broker for the buyer and gets a commission. Google is the broker for the seller and gets a commission. Google owns, operates and sets the rules for the ad exchange. And they are also in the market themselves.

The suit filed by Farrell on behalf of the West Virginia papers was later joined by about 200 papers and included Facebook, which was accused of colluding with Google in order to receive preferential treatment. Attorneys general in Texas and several other states filed a separate suit, with BuzzFeed News reporting that the CEOs of Google and Facebook “personally signed off on a secret advertising deal.” The Justice Department got involved, and the European Union is suing Google on similar grounds.

On Tuesday, Google’s legal woes grew that much more complicated as Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, filed its own lawsuit against Google in federal district court. Writing in USA Today, Gannett’s flagship publication, chair and CEO Mike Reed accused Google of “monopolization of advertising technology markets and deceptive commercial practices.” He added:

The core of the case and our position is that Google abuses its control over the ad server monopoly to make it increasingly difficult for rival exchanges to run competitive auctions. Further, Google’s exchange rigs its own auctions so Google’s advertisers can buy ad space at bargain prices. That means less investment in online content and fewer ad slots for publishers to sell and advertisers to buy. Google always wins because it takes a growing share of that shrinking pie.

In addition to USA Today, Gannett owns about 200 daily papers and other publications across the country, including local papers such as the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham and The Providence Journal.

So why did Reed decide to file his own lawsuit rather than joining antitrust efforts that are already under way? It’s a good question, and it’s one that Editor & Publisher’s Mike and Robin Blinder asked him about in their vodcast, “E&P Reports.” Reed’s answer: “You know, as far as us going by ourselves, we just felt like we had the right size, we had the right legal counsel, and we felt like we didn’t want to wait.”

Jeff Jarvis, a well-known digital media observer and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, was critical of the Gannett suit, telling E&P:

It is tragic that once-great Gannett is resorting to protectionism and retribution against its competitors rather than have a strategy for innovation and growth in a changed marketplace. There are legitimate questions to be addressed regarding Google’s power in both sides of the advertising market and authorities in both Europe and the U.S. are investigating them. But for Gannett to blame Google’s alleged monopoly for its present troubles is just sad.

But you can disparage Gannett for decimating its newspapers while still supporting legal efforts to hold Google to account. Few media observers have been more critical of Gannett than my What Works partner Ellen Clegg and I. Greed and crushing debt have led the chain to cut its journalistic capacity far more deeply than would have otherwise been necessary. Yet it’s simply a fact that very little digital advertising money has flowed to the news business, and that lack of innovation on the part of the news business is only partly to blame. If news publishers and government investigators are able to show that situation is either partly or wholly the result of illegal practices on the part of Google (and Facebook), then there’s no reason why Gannett shouldn’t be one of the beneficiaries, regardless of the company’s otherwise loathsome behavior.

Moreover, the antitrust route strikes me as far more promising than congressional efforts to force Google and Facebook to pay for the news they repurpose. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act on a bipartisan 14-7 vote, according to Ted Johnson of Deadline. The JCPA would allow the news business to bargain collectively with Google and Facebook for a share of their revenues. Even if the JCPA passes the full Senate, though, it seems unlikely to prevail in the Republican-controlled House. A similar law in Australia has served mainly to enrich press baron Rupert Murdoch, and there’s no guarantee that the JCPA would bolster journalism at the local level.

Regulating a monopoly often leads to unintended negative consequences. Breaking one up, as Gannett and its numerous co-plaintiffs would like to do, can spark innovation. Local news today is getting by through a combination of paywalls, low-value programmatic ads and — in the nonprofit sector — foundation grants, membership fees and events. Nothing would be more welcome than to see that bolstered by a reinvigorated ad market.