Month: July 2023

Former Globe editor Matt Storin looks back 50 years after a horrific plane crash

Fifty years ago Monday, a Delta airliner crashed at Logan Airport, killing 88 of the 89 people on board; the only survivor died several months later. The Boston Globe reports on how the families of the victims are getting by those years later. Below is an email I received from former Globe editor Matt Storin on what it was like to cover those tragic events — and how the accident and its aftermath changed the rules of media access.

I was city editor at the time and when we learned of the crash, we of course scrambled everyone available. Some reporters were dispatched to hospitals (to no avail, since there was only one survivor that day), and others were sent to Logan. We even looked into chartering a boat to have [photographer] Bill Brett arrive by crossing the bay. But this wasn’t necessary. Unlike any other airline tragedy I’ve seen covered, there was no attempt by Logan officials to secure the crash site from the press. Our photographers got ON THE RUNWAY even as first responders were working. You wouldn’t believe some of the photos, bodies shown still in their seats (as I recall there were no signs of injuries from fire). Of course we didn’t publish those, but the ones we did publish were shot from short distances. I noted that today’s Globe story did not include a photo of the Aug. 1 morning paper. I wondered if there was a feeling that the photos would be too painful even at this late date.

I thought we did a good job of coverage. John Burke came in from the North Shore and assembled his team of suburban correspondents. They worked diligently through the late afternoon and early evening to get the list of victims with, where possible, bio information. To this day I’ve never forgotten what they accomplished on deadline. But to give you an example of how close our reporters got, I received a call on the city desk that evening from someone at the Pentagon. One of the deceased had been a Navy intelligence officer traveling with classified documents. They somehow knew that one of these documents had been picked up by Frank Mahoney, one of our reporters on the scene. Frank had not mentioned anything to us about this. When I called him at home, he confirmed that he had the document. I believe we got it into the right hands the next morning. I never inquired about what was on it. Under the circumstances, especially since we should have reported the find to the authorities, I decided not to draw any further attention to what happened.

As memory serves from half a century ago, I believe that within weeks Logan Airport advised news media of new guidelines for covering any incidents at the airport. Reporters and photographers were advised they should report to a media center in one of the terminals.

This is probably of little interest today, but today’s story brought back memories…. I’m not sure what happened to those shocking photos but I have a vague recollection of ordering that they be destroyed. In light of the lawsuit in the Kobe Bryant case, that would have been prudent.

The Boston Globe announces it will seek to fill a void by hiring a media reporter

The Boston Globe is hiring a media reporter, a position that has gone vacant for many years. It sounds like a great job, though so broad you have to wonder who could possibly keep up with so much:

Part tech beat, part culture writing, part buzzy local scoops, this job calls for a journalist who’s eager and able to explore the many ways that media shapes modern life, in Boston and beyond. They will cover our region’s advertising and publishing industries and keep an eye on the bold-faced names of local TV, yes. But they’ll also dive into the endless evolution of social media, debates over digital privacy, and the roiling challenges of misinformation in all its forms, from Twitter and Threads to TikTok and new platforms using artificial intelligence.

The Globe has not had a full-time media reporter since Mark Jurkowitz, who left in 2005 and took over the media column at The Boston Phoenix after I left for Northeastern. Mark, who had also been my predecessor at the Phoenix, is now at the Pew Research Center.

This is good news, as we really have a dearth of media reporting in Boston. That dearth has been especially acute since GBH-TV canceled “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” in the summer of 2021, but there really hasn’t been much in terms of in-depth reporting since the Phoenix closed in 2013. The Globe has taken a couple of stabs at it but did not make a full commitment until now.

The Portland Phoenix, revived in 2019, makes its final flight

Media Nation is back. It’s not quite where I want it to be yet, but it’s good enough to resume posting. Look for more improvements in the days to come.

Unfortunately, I’m here to report some sad news. The Portland Phoenix, the last of the Phoenix newspapers where I worked for many years, has ceased publication. Editor Marian McCue’s farewell editorial begins:

It was easy to have a sense of optimism in the spring of 2019. It was a different time, when former Forecaster publisher Karen Wood and I hatched a plan to launch a new version of the Portland Phoenix, which had folded in February of that year. We wanted to build a strong and independent news alternative to the media monopoly that controlled the Press Herald and many of Maine’s newspapers.

Our timing was not great. Five months after the launch, the pandemic struck with a vengeance. Few alive had seen such a cataclysmic event, much was unknown and everybody was fearful. The advertising relationships we had suddenly vanished. We tried to keep going, but the advertising was not there.

The flagship Boston Phoenix closed in 2013. At one time there were Phoenix papers in Providence, Portland, Worcester as well as Stuff magazine, Stuff@Nite and an alternative rock radio station, WFNX. The Portland Phoenix staggered on under new ownership until 2019, and was then relaunched by McCue and Wood. The new Portland Phoenix was redesigned and built a reputation for quality journalism. In the end, it wasn’t enough.

I hope someone else will give it a try. Portland is a medium-size, semi-isolated city with a strong arts community — exactly the sort of place where an alt-weekly can still find a niche. And let’s not forget that Portland recently got some very good news, as the state’s largest daily, the Portland Press Herald, and most of its affiliated papers will be acquired by the nonprofit National Trust for Local News.

Threads hits a speed bump

Mark Zuckerberg may soon have reason to regret pushing Threads out the door before it was ready. Lindsey Choo reports for The Wall Street Journal (free link, I think; apologies if it doesn’t work) that user engagement has fallen by 70% since its July 7 peak.

No doubt Zuckerberg wanted to take advantage of Elon Musk’s Fourth of July weekend freakout, when he limited the number of posts you could read on Twitter (especially if you weren’t a paid subscriber), cut off access to individual tweets for non-members (thus blowing up our news feed at What Works), and killed off classic TweetDeck in favor of a new, lesser update.

But Threads is frustrating to use. The biggest problem is that you can only access it on a mobile device. Also missing: a reverse-chrono tab of accounts you follow, thus clogging up your feed with brands and celebrities you don’t care about, as well as no lists and no hashtags.

Mastodon has been my first stop since Musk took over Twitter last fall, but its decentralized nature presents problems of its own. It’s difficult to find what you’re looking for, there are parts of the unfortunately named Fediverse that are invisible to you, and most of the people and accounts I need to follow just aren’t there. Bluesky is still invitation-only and has had problems of its own.

I realize this is of little interest to most people, but for those of us whose work depends on social media to some degree, it’s been an interesting — and frustrating — nine months.

A new bill would boost local news with tax credits for advertisers and publishers

The U.S. Capitol. Photo (cc) 2013 by Mark Fischer.

I’ve written quite a bit here about the possibility of government assistance for local news. Though it’s not an idea I’m enthusiastic about, I think the indirect assistance laid out in the Local Journalism Sustainability Act is worth trying. The LJSA, which would provide tax credits for subscribers (or donors), advertisers and publishers, died at the end of the last congressional session despite having some bipartisan support.

Now a new, similar measure has surfaced. The Community News and Small Business Support Act would create five years’ worth of tax credits for advertisers and publishers, but not for subscribers. The bill is being sponsored by Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., and co-sponsored by Suzan DelBene, D-Wash. The trade publication Editor & Publisher has gone all out in covering the story, and I emailed a few of my thoughts to E&P’s Gretchen Peck.

As I told Peck, the new bill, like the LJSA, is worth supporting for two reasons: the tax credits are indirect enough not to interfere with the independence that news organizations need to hold government to account; and the publishers’ tax credit for hiring and retaining journalists gives even the giant chain owners like Gannett and Alden Global Capital some incentive to do the right thing.

That said, it’s hard to imagine the bill emerging intact from a House that just this week featured Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene waving around revenge porn starring Hunter Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., indulged by the Republican leadership, denying that he made the antisemitic and racist comments we had all heard him make.

Steven Waldman, president of the Rebuild Local News coalition, has written an op-ed for E&P endorsing the Tenney-DelBene bill and hailing its emphasis on local news outlets and advertisers. “This will directly help the small businesses, many of which had to cut back on their marketing spending because of COVID and then inflation, to get customers in the doors,” Waldman writes. “It makes sense because saving local news should not be about saving journalism jobs per se. It should be about strengthening communities.”

The bill is also far better than the misguided Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would extract revenues from Google and Facebook as compensation for the news content they repurpose.

There is no substitute for news entrepreneurs on the ground, for-profit and nonprofit, doing the hard work of building sustainable local news organizations. But a little bit of indirect assistance from the government wouldn’t hurt.

Marty Baron’s forthcoming book on Bezos and the Post gets a boost from Kirkus

The first review of Marty Baron’s forthcoming book is out, and I’m relieved. According to Kirkus Reviews, The Washington Post that Baron describes in “Collision of Power” is the same one I saw on display when I was visiting the Post and conducting interviews — including with Baron — in 2015 and ’16.

In “The Return of the Moguls,” I wrote about a news organization that had been reinvigorated by new owner Jeff Bezos (by his money, of course, but also by his energetic work on the consumer and technology side) and executive editor Baron, whose staff was relentless in exposing the truth about then-candidate Donald Trump’s fraudulent charity and, later, the existence of a tape on which he’s heard boasting about sexual assault. Most important, Bezos was described by everyone, including Baron, as respecting the independence of the newsroom and not interfering with editorial decisions.

So why am I relieved? Although it seemed unlikely, I harbored some worry that Baron was being overly diplomatic with me, and that now, after he’s retired from the Post, he was going to tell the world what it was really like to work for Bezos. The  Kirkus review, though, makes it clear that there’s little distance between what Baron told me and what he’s written in “Collision of Power,” subtitled “Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post.” According to Kirkus:

Although focused on metrics and finances, Bezos staunchly supported editorial independence and journalistic integrity, a stance that put him on a collision course with Donald Trump, who expected Bezos to rein in the Post’s coverage of him and his administration. When that did not happen, he unleashed the “raw abuse of power” for which he was notorious.

The review concludes that Baron has written “an impassioned argument for objective journalism.” This is going to prove controversial at a time when objectivity is under attack. But in an address at Brandeis University earlier this year, Baron defined objectivity in its truest, most Lippmann-esque form. It is, at its best, fair-minded, independent truth-seeking. It’s not quoting “both sides” and letting the poor reader try to figure it out.

“The idea is to be open-minded when we begin our research and to do that work as conscientiously as possible,” Baron said at Brandeis. “It demands a willingness to listen, an eagerness to learn — and an awareness that there is much for us to know.”

I’m not sure whether Baron would agree, but I’m going to take it a step further and argue that even opinion journalism can be objective if it’s undertaken in the right spirit. I tell my students that if they’re producing an opinion piece, they need to acknowledge differing views and inconvenient facts and address them. If they do that, then they’re being objective. After all, Walter Lippmann himself worked the opinion side of the street for most of his career.

Baron’s book comes out Oct. 3.

Here’s a free link to that New York Times story on Trump’s plan for one-person rule

Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore

I’m spending a few days in Graceland with my daughter, an Elvis fanatic who’s wanted to visit for many years. But I want to make sure you’ve read The New York Times’ astonishing report on Donald Trump’s explicit, publicly stated plan to convert the presidency into authoritarian one-person rule. Here is a free link.

As you’ll see, Trump would eliminate any meaningful congressional oversight on the grounds that such oversight would somehow violate the separation-of-powers provision in the Constitution. At the same time, the president would be free to ignore spending directives passed by Congress. I would call it a path to dictatorship except that we would presumably still have elections. Oh, wait.

Trump has a non-trivial chance of being elected president in 2024. Everyone who’s concerned about the future of our country needs to read this.