Month: February 2024

The Somerville Wire shuts down, but its editor says that coverage in the city is growing

Near Davis Square in Somerville. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.

Nearly two years ago, Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and the Somerville Journal into one weekly paper called The Transcript & Journal. Even worse, nearly all local news was removed from the new paper, replaced with regional news from elsewhere in the chain.

In Medford, where I live, we now have nothing, although I’m optimistic that will change in the near future. In Somerville, though, there were several alternatives, foremost among them the weekly Somerville Times and a digital outlet called the Somerville Wire. Unfortunately, the Wire is shutting down. Jason Pramas, the editor, writes that the Wire got to be too much of a financial burden as well as a drain on his other work with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) and HorizonMass. (Pramas talked about both of those projects in a recent appearance on the “What Works” podcast.)

Besides, Pramas notes that Somerville has been getting more coverage lately, as the Cambridge Day has expanded into the city and The Boston Globe has begun a weekly “Camberville & beyond” newsletter. Pramas writes that “while Somerville is still in danger of becoming a ‘news desert’ (a community that no longer has a professionally-produced news outlet covering it), it’s now getting more news coverage than it was in 2021,” when the Wire launched.

Pramas and his colleagues Chris Faraone and John Loftus continue to do good and important work, and I wish them all the best.

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More news about our book

Photo (2012) by Dan Kennedy

I want to let you know about a couple of media hits this weekend for “What Works in Community News.”

First, Billy Baker of The Boston Globe quotes my co-author, Ellen Clegg, and mentions our book in a feature on The Local News, which covers Ipswich and Rowley and is one of a number of nonprofit startups founded to fill the gap left behind when Gannett abandoned its weekly papers in Eastern Massachusetts. “This is what the founders envisioned, which is a lot of little newspapers in all the little towns in New England,” Ellen told Baker. As Baker notes, Ellen doesn’t just write about it — she also does it, as she’s also the co-founder and co-chair of another startup, Brookline.News.

Second, Colorado College journalism professor Corey Hutchins writes about our book in his well-read newsletter, “Inside the News in Colorado.” I visited Colorado in September 2021, mainly to report on upstart Colorado Sun but also to learn more about how the Sun fits into the state’s larger journalistic community One afternoon I drove from Denver to Colorado Springs in order to interview Hutchins. “I don’t know of any other state where there’s such a focus and attention from folks here who want to support a thriving local news ecosystem matched with attention from funders, smart media thinkers from around the country,” he told me.

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GBH-TV takes on the Kevin Cullen controversy

Because of a schedule conflict, I had to turn down an invitation to discuss the Kevin Cullen story on GBH-TV’s “Talking Politics” Friday. But I would have agreed with guests Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute and journalist Susie Banikarim of the podcast “In Retrospect” that The Boston Globe made the right call in disclosing that Cullen had signed a document attesting to the mental fitness of Lynda Bluestein, whose quest to die via physician-assisted suicide he was reporting on. I also agree with them that the Globe was on solid ground in running the story anyway along with an editor’s note disclosing Cullen’s ethical breach.

Of note was their response to host Adam Reilly’s question about whether Cullen should have been disciplined. Both said that maybe he was, and that whatever sanction he might have received was handled privately.

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Did Patrick Soon-Shiong want to merge The Messenger with the LA Times?

If Patrick Soon-Shiong really did want to merge his Los Angeles Times with The Messenger, as Natalie Korach and Emily Smith write at The Wrap, then it’s just further evidence that he really, truly does not know what he’s doing.

“Patrick was very keen to do the merger – which is why the announcement to staff about The Messenger closing was delayed,” an unnamed source tells Korach and Smith. “Patrick had the money, and at that point, Jimmy [Finkelstein, The Messenger’s founder] would have taken anything,” said the first individual with knowledge of the negotiations.”

Their lead, though, tells a different story, asserting that “the Los Angeles Times insisted that there was no such deal on the table, only a desperate call from Finkelstein to owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, according to an insider there.”

Earlier:

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An Australian broadcaster tarts up a lawmaker’s photo and blames it on AI

The only surprising part of this story is that the Murdochs aren’t involved. While I was paging through The Boston Globe this morning, I came across a Washington Post story reporting that a television outlet in Australia had photoshopped an image of a female member of Australia’s parliament to make her outfit look more revealing and her breasts larger. BBC News reported on this outrageous example of sexism as well.

The lawmaker, Georgie Purcell, is young and has tattoos, which I guess makes her fair game in the minds of certain retrograde news executives. “I endured a lot yesterday,” she wrote on X/Twitter. “But having my body and outfit photoshopped by a media outlet was not on my bingo card.”

The media outlet, Nine News, apologized and blamed it on Photoshop. The BBC quotes Hugh Nailon, the head of Nine News Melbourne:

“As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs. During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original,” he said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to a tool which uses AI to expand pictures.

“This did not meet the high editorial standards we have.”

But in a statement, a spokesperson for Adobe — the firm which produces Photoshop — told the BBC: “Any changes to this image would have required human intervention and approval.”

It sure sounds like Nailon’s explanation is, well, wrong, but it may also not be far off. It wouldn’t surprise me if artificial intelligence were used in some part of the process, as a command to tart up an existing photo of Purcell would likely result in an image very much like the one at issue.

As for Nine News — well, if you thought Rupert Murdoch controlled every newspaper and television station in Australia (or at least the sleazy ones), that appears not to be the case. I didn’t do a deep dive, but according to Wikipedia, Nine News is part of Nine Entertainment, which was founded in 2006. It’s a publicly traded company whose holdings include several major newspapers such as  The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review.

I hope we find out the full story of what happened. If this was intended as a nasty joke by a low-level employee, that can be dealt with easily enough. But if it came from a higher level of the company, that needs to be revealed. And if AI — or, rather, a human being using AI — turns out to be the culprit, then we need to have a talk about the technology’s uses and abuses.

Update: The AI software may have been Adobe Firefly, according to Crikey. Of course, that changes nothing. Firefly didn’t do it. A person using Firefly did it, looked at the results and said, “This is great! My work is done.”

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The Messenger meets the Reaper

The short, predictably unsuccessful life of The Messenger was one of those media stories that I followed out of the corner of one eye. Observers I trust, like Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab, argued from the start that there was no business model in the 2020s for a free, large-scale national news outlet based on building a mass audience and selling advertising to them. After all, that’s what Facebook is for.

The end came Wednesday, less than a year after its debut. Josh Marshall, who’s built Talking Points Memo into a financially sustainable outlet for news and commentary through digital subscriptions, has an astute piece on what went wrong. He writes:

The Messenger was also a specific kind of failure. There is an uncanniness to it since it was perhaps uniquely predictable. In fact, it was so predictable it’s still a real mystery why the site was able to come into existence in the first place. This isn’t snark or crocodile tears. It’s a very strange story. This requires some explanation.

Marshall’s commentary is worth reading in full if you’re the sort who geeks out over this stuff, as I do.

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