Month: September 2025

How our What Works project tracks solutions to the local news crisis

Photo by Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke via Pixabay

Nearly four years ago, Ellen Clegg and I began tracking solutions to the local news crisis with our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our first guest was Lori Ehrlich, at that time a state representative who was working to launch a commission to study the state of community journalism in Massachusetts and make some recommendations.

The commission has twice failed to achieve liftoff, but Ellen and I have built a multidimensional project. We wrote a well-received book, “What Works in Community News,” which was published by Beacon Press in 2024. And we are involved in other ways as well.

Today the What Works project, which is part of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and affiliated with the university’s Center for Transformative Media, comprises several different initiatives:

    • Our website, where we post updates to the projects that we write about in our book, new episodes of our podcast, and news and commentary about other developments in local news.
    • Our podcast, on which we interview enterpreneurs and thought leaders on an every-other-week basis. We’ll be back later this month with our 105th episode following a summer hiatus.
    • Our Bluesky feed, where we link to coverage and smaller items that don’t quite meet the criteria for a full blog post. If you’re not interested in joining Bluesky, you’ll find our news feed embedded on the website. If you’re reading What Works on your laptop, just cast your eyes to the right.
    • A database of independent local news organizations in Massachusetts. Although much of our work is national in scope, we also believe we can offer unique value to the grassroots journalism community right here at home. Look for links to “Mass. Indy News” in the upper right corner of this blog and at the What Works website. You can also bookmark it at tinyurl.com/mass-indy-news.
    • Speaking appearances at which we talk about our book and evangelize about the future of local news. We also engage in ad hoc consulting with the leaders of news projects that are either startups or moving in new directions.
    • Gatherings for local news leaders both in person and via webinar. We’re already planning our second in-person conference, which will be held next year on Friday, March 13.

Ellen and I are trying to build something of lasting value and to push back against the narrative that local news is dead. Through independent community control and innovative nonprofit and for-profit business models, we believe the local news crisis is being solved one community at a time.

CBS News hits bottom as anti-anti-Trumper Bari Weiss is groomed for a leadership role

What would Walter Cronkite say? The legendary CBS News anchorman at the 1976 presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Public domain photo.

Is there a media organization that’s fallen harder or faster in the Age of Trump II than CBS News? You might point to The Washington Post, but Jeff Bezos has thus far left its news coverage alone, contenting himself with taking a wrecking ball to the opinion section.

By contrast, CBS’s corporate overlords earlier this year settled a bogus lawsuit brought by Donald Trump against the network’s premier news program, “60 Minutes,” for $16 million in order to grease the skids for a sale to Skydance Media, headed by the Trump-friendly David Ellison.

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And now comes the next act in this tragedy. According to a story first broken by Puck and since confirmed by other news outlets, Ellison is on the verge of acquiring The Free Press, a prominent right-leaning opinion outlet founded by Bari Weiss, the celebrity former New York Times opinion editor. The price tag could be somewhere between $100 million and $200 million. The idea is to bring Weiss inside the CBS tent and give her a major leadership role over CBS News.

What a revolting development. I’m not a regular reader of The Free Press, but its reputation is not so much right-wing as it is anti-anti-Trump. As CNN media reporter Brian Stelter wrote in July, when talk of a Weiss-Ellison alliance was starting to bubble up: “Earlier this year New York magazine described The Free Press as a media organ that ‘both wants to excoriate liberals but not fold fully into the MAGA wing.’”

Perhaps The Free Press’ most notorious piece was a takedown of NPR by one of the network’s former top editors, Uri Berliner. As I wrote at the time, Berliner’s screed was shot through with intellectual dishonesty, as he built his argument that NPR had fallen victim to liberal bias on a scaffolding of mischaracterizations and outright falsehoods. Look at its homepage this morning and you’ll see clickbait such as “How Zohran Mamdani Could Kill New York’s Schools,” “Is There a Dumber Housing Policy Than Rent Control?” and “The Democratic Socialists of America Don’t Know If They Should Condemn Murder.”

Media reporter Oliver Darcy on Wednesday wrote an excoriating takedown of the pending deal and the absurd notion that The Free Press is somehow worth $100 million or more, saying in part:

Ellison appears determined to replicate the John Malone playbook at CNN: nudge the newsroom into a posture more deferential to Trump, launder that shift as “balance,” and hope the MAGA crowd will suddenly reward him. But this formula is already tired and simply doesn’t work. Meddling at CNN, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times has only destabilized those institutions. It chases away the core audience, while failing to win over the right-wing demographic, which has no interest in embracing legacy news brands no matter how many concessions are made. These audiences celebrate the destabilization of news institutions, not because they will ever turn to them for information, but because they despise them and want to see them burn to ash.

CBS News was never quite the “Tiffany network” of legend. Edward R. Murrow was gradually sidelined during the years after he publicly called out Red Scare-monger Joseph McCarthy. Dan Rather, still going strong at 93, was eased out as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and producer Mary Mapes was fired after the short-lived “60 Minutes II” aired a report in 2004 about then-President George W. Bush’s sketchy service in the Air National Guard that was, admittedly, based in part on phony documents.

Never, though, has CBS News fallen as far as it has this year. Giving Bari Weiss some sort of oversight role may represent a new low, but I have a feeling that will soon be eclipsed by some other outrage. Walter Cronkite weeps.

Here are three ideas for Boston Globe Media’s new vice president of product

It’s time for the Globe to ease up a bit on the metered paywall. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kali Norby.

Boston Globe Media has named a vice president of product. Jim Bodor “will help define and implement our product vision and strategy, ensuring our products are customer-centric, innovative, and market-leading,” according to an email to the staff forwarded to me by a trusted source. And I could give him an earful. Here are three ideas I hope are on his to-do list:

    • Clean up the homepage. Overly busy homepages are epidemic among leading newspaper websites, including those of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — not to mention large regionals like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Minnesota Star Tribune. Still, the Globe takes it to another level. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
    • Offer some gift links. The Times and the Post give subscribers 10 links a month that they can share on social media or with friends. The Journal and The Atlantic offer unlimited sharing. Giving non-subscribers some grazing privileges can turn them into paying customers. Why not start with five or six shares a month and see how it goes?
    • Fix the social connection. Sometimes I’ll be scrolling Bluesky or Facebook and I’ll see a link to a Globe story that I want to read. I’m a paying subscriber. I’m logged in. Yet if I try to come in from an external link, more often than not I’ll hit the Globe’s paywall. The Globe isn’t the only publication that has that issue, but it’s time to repair it once and for all.

What follows is the full text of the memo announcing Bodor’s appointment. Dhiraj is Dhiraj Nayar, the president and chief financial officer of Globe Media. AB is Anthony Bonfiglio, the chief technology officer.

Team,

We are excited to share that Jim Bodor joined us today in the new role of VP of Product at Boston Globe Media. Jim will help define and implement our product vision and strategy, ensuring our products are customer-centric, innovative, and market-leading.

Jim will partner closely with the newsrooms, sales, business, technology, and marketing to achieve key business outcomes focused on furthering our product-led culture of innovation, experimentation, and audience-first thinking.

Jim brings extensive experience as a digital product leader in the media and learning industries. Most recently, he served as vice president of product management at Harvard Business Publishing (HBR), where he led HBR’s first generative AI initiatives, directed the relaunch of the HBR.org mobile app, and championed the company’s first virtual events program, among other things.

Early in his career, Jim held leadership roles at WGBH and The Boston Globe, where he launched subscription products, scaled digital platforms, modernized content strategy, and led redesigns of award-winning programs.

Across all of these roles, Jim has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to balance strategic vision with operational excellence, blending business acumen, customer focus, and product innovation.

Please join us in welcoming Jim back to the team.

Thank you,

Dhiraj & AB

Disability-rights activists oppose physician-assisted suicide. We need to listen to them.

Not Dead Yet “is a national, grassroots disability rights group that opposes legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia as deadly forms of discrimination.”

Jeff Jacoby has a sharp column up at The Boston Globe on the dangers of physician-assisted suicide, writing that “a decent society does not enlist physicians to end lives; it strives to relieve suffering while upholding life’s inestimable worth.”

I wrote about the same topic a couple of weeks ago in my supporters newsletter. Like Jeff, I was motivated by a deep investigation published by The Atlantic (gift link). Here’s what I had to say:

***

At some point, the Massachusetts Legislature is expected to take up the matter of physician-assisted suicide, and when that time comes, I intend to pull together something more coherent than today’s newsletter.

Suffice it to say that I am extremely skeptical, and I don’t like efforts to relabel it as “medical aid in dying,” a euphemism piled on top of a euphemism in an attempt to play down the reality. As an auxiliary member of the disability community, I’m deeply concerned that physician-assisted suicide could be a way of encouraging people to kill themselves as a way of saving money for the health-care system. As the disability-rights organization Not Dead Yet puts it, “assisted suicide and euthanasia” should be regarded as “deadly forms of discrimination.”

What prompts today’s essay is an article in The Atlantic by Elaina Plott Calabro on Canada’s experience with physician-assisted suicide. If you are interested in this issue at all, then I urge you to read it in full. Calabro is rigorously fair, even going along with Canada’s absurd acronym for medical aid in dying, MAID, as though a kindly woman was going to enter your room and blissfully whisk you off to another dimension.

But what comes through is that a system that began with allowing terminally ill people in their final days of life to opt out of the pain and suffering they were experiencing has devolved into something entirely different, with people choosing to die because they are depressed, because they’re burdened with high medical bills, or just because the Canadian law places patient autonomy ahead of all other values. Calabro writes:

Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

Physician-assisted suicide rears its head in Massachusetts every so often. The Boston Globe has editorialized in favor of it, and in 2024 was embarrassed when it was revealed that staff member Kevin Cullen had actually signed papers to hasten the death of a woman whose journey he was chronicling. If we begin moving toward legalization here, I’ll have more to say. At the very least, we need stringent protections to make sure that this extraordinary remedy is reserved for extraordinary circumstances. Then again, the Canadian example shows that once physician-assisted suicide is normalized, then protections that had been put in place quickly fade away.

How two-tier Disney is helping to fuel the rise of middle-class anger and resentment

Walt Disney World. 2023 public domain photo by Tech. Sgt. Andrew Burdette.

The most profoundly depressing piece of journalism I engaged with last week wasn’t about war, public health or the rise of authoritarianism. It was about Disney World — or, rather, what Disney World says about how our culture has split in two, one for the shrinking middle class, the other for the rich.

Daniel Currell and photographer Paola Chapdelaine put together an opinion piece for The New York Times (gift link) that told the story of Scarlett Cressel, a 60-year-old disabled school-bus driver from Virginia who saved for years so that she and her family could visit the resort.

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What they encountered was a two-tier system that Disney and other corporations have been embracing for many years, and that has been accelerating since the COVID pandemic began to ease. You have to pay massive fees to avoid standing in line for top attractions. You have to stay at an expensive Disney hotel or other Disney-owned accommodations even to get access to the best deals.

Cressel and her family couldn’t afford any of that. Essentially Disney has morphed into a playground for the wealthy, with the masses left to press their faces up against the window to see what’s going on inside. Currell writes:

For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.

That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.

Cressel is a perpetually optimistic sort. By the end of the piece, she pronounces herself pleased with her trip, despite the restrictions and indignities she encountered, and is already planning her next visit.

What really drove home the inequities that Disney now encourages, though, was the very different experience of Shawn Conahan, an affluent tech executive from California who took his 13-year-old daughter to Disney World, paying hundreds of extra dollars to skip lines and get into attractions that ordinary people might not have even been able to access.

I found myself feeling surprisingly emotional, not resenting the easy access that Conahan and his daughter enjoyed (“the best day ever,” she said) but, rather, resenting how the Disney experience has deteriorated from what it used to be. I’ll close with a couple of personal anecdotes.

When our two kids were younger, we were able to visit Disney World three times. We couldn’t afford it, but my in-laws belonged to a Disney vacation club, and we were able to stay for free at a time-share that was not only lovely but that gave us access to some of the perks that Conahan and his daughter were able to enjoy and that Cressel couldn’t. This was in the late 1990s and early ’00s, so the disparity wasn’t as great as it is today. Still, our kids were incredibly lucky to be able to enjoy that kind of access.

Then, two years ago, my now-adult daughter and I visited Graceland. She’d always been a huge Elvis Presley fan, and she’d saved for several years in order to be able to pay her way. For the Graceland tour, I encouraged her to pay for premium access, figuring this would be her one and only trip. I’m glad we did. Among other things, we were able to get into a special museum where Elvis’ sequined jackets and boots were kept. She was smitten, and it didn’t seem unfair to pay more in order to get more.

While we were walking the grounds, though, several other tourists saw us and joined our group. Our guide sternly told them to leave because we had paid extra for our tour and they were part of the unwashed masses. I was embarrassed and appalled.

But this is where we are at in 2025. Increasingly, folks in the shrinking middle class are being shut out of experiences that we once took for granted as part of our common culture. It’s no wonder that we’ve become so angry and resentful. You might even say that it’s one of the ingredients that has helped fuel the rise of authoritarianism.