An alternative approach to public notices. Photo (cc) 2011 by Selena M.B.H.
Since Colonial times, state and local governments have been required to publish legal advertisements in newspapers about official proclamations, court citations, vital records, and the like. Also known as public notices, these agate-size ads inform the community of important public business — and provide the press with a crucial revenue stream.
Now, though, that system is under threat in Massachusetts. Two bills would allow legal ads to be published on government websites without any mandate that they be placed with news organizations.
Just a month ago, The Minnesota Star Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for “powerful stories marked by thoroughness and compassion” in its coverage of the Annunciation Church shootings last year. Who wasn’t moved by the photo of a mom running barefoot toward the church — a strappy summer pump in each hand?
This year, the newsroom’s coverage of ICE detentions and the ensuing local protests — a neighborly Minnesota Nice rebellion of sorts — was nothing short of stellar.
But what a difference a month can make in the volatile and unforgiving world of what media analyst Ken Doctor calls “newsonomics.” On Tuesday, Steve Grove, publisher, announced that it will cut its staff by 15% through layoffs and buyouts.
Nicholas von Hoffman and James Kilpatrick debate the fate of Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal in 1973.
I’m nearly 70, and I’ve never been a regular viewer of “60 Minutes.” I think of it as a show that my parents watched. Still, the dismantling of the highly rated program at the hands of David Ellison’s designated flunky, Bari Weiss, and her designated flunky, Nick Bilton, has been alarming for anyone who cares about investigative journalism — or, for that matter, democracy.
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I had to laugh at the clueless outrage of conservative commentators over Scott Pelley’s wonderfully hostile confrontation with Bilton. “When a child throws a tantrum, they’re punished,” clucked Isaac Schorr at Mediaite. “When a journalist throws a tantrum, they wait to be called stunning and brave.”
A promising idea to support local news has been dealt a major setback in Maryland, where Gov. Wes Moore has vetoed a bill that would direct state agencies to place at least 50% of their advertising in local news outlets. Even though the bill passed the state Senate unanimously and the House of Delegates by a margin of 129-7, Sean Curtis of WBOC reports that “a veto override is unlikely” because this year’s legislative session is about to expire.
Eight years after my book “The Return of the Moguls” was published, what is the state of newspaper ownership by civic-minded billionaires? Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) put that question to me on his “Keller at Large” program, which was broadcast Sunday morning.
My answer: not what I had hoped. John and Linda Henry have proved to be good stewards of The Boston Globe, and another billionaire sports owner, Glen Taylor, has similarly revived The Minnesota Star Tribune. But Jeff Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post has taken a disastrous turn after 10 good years, and other masters of the universe have failed to step up.
Jon and I talked about some other media-related topics as well, including:
◘ The rise of independent local-news projects, especially in affluent suburbs. News deserts, unfortunately, persist in rural areas and urban communities of color.
◘ A New England Muzzle Award I recently gave Gov. Maura Healey for proposing to prevent public access to birth, death and marriage records for many decades — overturning a tradition of openness that dates back Puritan times.
◘ A crisis at the Internet Archive, as more than 300 local newspapers have blocked access in order to prevent AI companies from scraping their content without compensation.
The closing paragraphs of The New York Times’ report on Graham Platner’s sexting-while-married problem are, uh, interesting.
The Democratic Senate candidate from Maine was speaking at an event in April, shortly after Gov. Janet Mills had dropped out, when he was asked a perfectly logical question: Other than the Nazi tattoo and the offensive social-media posts, is there anything else we should know? Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer write:
Toward the end of a town hall meeting in Sabattus, Maine, in April, the night before Ms. Mills dropped out, a Platner supporter named Carolyn Greeley asked him a blunt question.
“Is there anything you need to share with us?” she asked.
Ms. Greeley was bothered by his past comments about women, she said, and wanted assurances that there would not be more damaging revelations to come.
Mr. Platner was unequivocal in his response. Republicans would certainly “make stuff up” about him, he said. He had dated, had girlfriends, “gone through life.” But everything had already been “dragged up,” he promised the crowd.
“In my past, there is not some big, dark secret,” he said.
Asked in an interview how he could be so certain that there was no other information that would come out about him after the event, Mr. Platner was terse.
“I lived my life,” he said. “That’s how.”
We now know not just about the sexting but that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had warned a campaign official about it just as the campaign was getting under way. In other words, Platner failed to tell Greeley the truth, and it’s pretty hard to imagine that he’d forgotten about the sexting.
Meanwhile, Michael Shepherd reports (sub. req.) in the Bangor Daily News that a Platner adviser “warned a former aide she would be accused of lying and sabotage if she cooperated with news outlets reporting on sexually explicit messages Platner sent to women.”
The former aide, an ex-state legislator named Genevieve McDonald, went to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times anyway.
The blood is really in the water now, and you can be sure that news outlets are scrambling to get ahead of whatever might be coming next. And it is absolutely incredible that Maine’s now-she’s-Trumper-now-she-isn’t Republican senator, Susan Collins, may be on the verge of getting another free ride.
The Washington Star building. Photo (cc) 2008 by dbking.
A complication has arisen in Robert Allbritton’s plans to rebrand his NOTUS project as The Star. The move, scheduled to take place next week, is aimed at giving Washington a robust second (albeit digital-only) daily newspaper to compete with Jeff Bezos’ diminished Washington Post.
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Why The Star instead of The Washington Star, the long-shuttered paper that his father had once owned? Adam Piore reported for the Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday that Allbritton doesn’t own “The Washington Star” trademark:
The name of this latest Allbritton venture is a slight misdirection, however: the trademark is owned by Dovid Efune, the owner of the New York Sun. Besides, Allbritton said, replicating the original would be too “backward looking.”
But now it appears that Efune has his own plans. Emma Uber, writing in City Cast DC, tells us that Allbritton was more interested in naming his project The Washington Star than he’d let on, even negotiating unsuccessfully with Efune for the rights. Efune, in turn, plans to launch his own Washington Star later this year — and that he’s suing to stop Allbritton from calling NOTUS “The Star.” In a statement to City Cast DC, Allbritton responded:
Six weeks after NOTUS announced that it was rebranding to The Star, a newly formed entity associated with Dovid Efune has sued NOTUS for trademark infringement. The entity does not and cannot own the word “Star,” which has been used by and associated with dozens of media publications for over 100 years. The entity itself only even claims to have recently adopted “The Washington Star,” decades after numerous other “Star” publications have been using “Star” marks.
Efune is the publisher of The New York Sun, a conservative outlet that has quite a bit of national news on its site. In other words, it wouldn’t take that much for him to run a couple of DC stories and slap a “Washington Star” logo on a second site. He’s already publishing a version of The Washington Star on Substack. Efune told Katie Robertson of The New York Times:
We’re reviving one of the great and epic rivalries of American journalism. For decades, The Star was The Washington Post’s fiercest competitor and an important editorial and ideological counterweight in the press in our nation’s capital.
Efune added that he’s aiming for a newsroom of about 50 journalists — about half of what Allbritton is planning for The Star, or whatever it ends up being called.
If you ride your bike in the Boston area, you encounter graffiti pretty much everywhere. It’s obnoxious and unsettling, because it leads to a sense that civic-minded people are on the losing end while vandals are able to gain the upper hand.
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The Somerville Community Path from Davis Square to East Cambridge is particularly bad, with graffiti overwhelming the walls alongside the MBTA tracks and next to the path itself.
Today, though, I’d like to take a look at a different bike path — the Tri-Community Greenway from Winchester through Woburn and into Stoneham, along with a spur from Winchester to Horn Pond in Woburn. It’s 13.4 miles out and back, and it’s marked with numerous well-designed signs along the way — many of which have been smeared with graffiti.
All photos (cc) 2026 by Dan Kennedy.
As a bike path, the Greenway is more aspirational than it is reality, since much of it follows neighborhood streets. That’s especially true of the southern part of the route up to where you turn east off Central Street in Woburn onto an actual paved path. After that, you’re on a path, though with numerous street crossings.
Earlier this week I rode the entire Greenway, including the Horn Pond spur, and took photos to document what I saw.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Ron Mitchell, publisher and editor of The Bay State Banner. In 2023, Mitchell and André Stark, both seasoned television news journalists, purchased the Banner, a newspaper covering the Black and brown communities in Boston and beyond.
The Banner was started in 1965 by Melvin Miller. The print weekly is legendary for covering stories that were ignored by other publications, such as stories about the Black and Latino communities in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. Mitchell and Stark are expanding its digital footprint.
Ron Mitchell
During his 27 years at WBZ-TV (Channel 4), Mitchell created news coverage focused on racism in elementary school textbooks in 2014 and a series chronicling an 11-year lawsuit that culminated in an $11 million award to a Black firefighter in Brookline.
Ellen and I also talk with Sanjana Mishra, who just received her bachelor’s degree from Northeastern in journalism and criminal justice. She’s worked in local news, communications and social media. In one of my classes last semester, she wrote a final paper on the role of private equity and corporate-chain ownership in creating and exacerbating the local-news crisis. Her paper, which we’ve published at What Works, focuses on Alden Global Capital and USA Today Co., known as Gannett until recently.
Ellen has a Quick Take on “North Star Stories,” a daily radio broadcast on local news carried by AMPERS, a network of 17 community FM stations across Minnesota. It’s by community, for community, and it’s funded partly by donors and partly by the state.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the latest on The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which announced earlier this year that it was shutting down in the face of mounting losses. What’s happened since is mostly good — but it comes with a sour aftertaste.
We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 600-word summary, which was then read by us for accuracy. The results are below. Do you find this useful? Please tell us what you think by using the Contact form linked from the top of our website.
I’m not one to break out the smelling salts when news outlets rely on anonymous sources. Important investigative stories are often based on unnamed insiders, as was the case with The Atlantic’s recent exposé of FBI Director Kash Patel’s drinking and erratic behavior. Reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick interviewed more than two dozen sources and sought comment from both the FBI and the White House.
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But I thought some of the sourcing around Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s announcement that she would resign was just plain shoddy. Let’s start with Jonathan Landay and Erin Banco of Reuters, who wrote on Friday: “A source familiar with the matter said that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House.”
Thus on the basis of one anonymous source did Reuters assert that Gabbard was lying when she claimed she was leaving in order to take care of her husband, who, she said, has been diagnosed with bone cancer.
Interestingly, The New York Times account, by Dustin Volz and Julian E. Barnes, directly contradicts Reuters, saying: “Mr. Trump did not force Ms. Gabbard to resign on Friday, according to people familiar with the matter, but her standing and influence within the White House had continued to erode in recent months.”
Now, I don’t know how many sources are covered by “people,” but it’s more than one.
Finally, there’s this Associated Press report, by Meg Kinnard, Will Weissert and David Klepper: “There had been rumblings that Gabbard would split with Trump after the president’s decision to strike Iran, which caused some division within his administration.”
Rumblings? OK. Actually, maybe we can let that go, since we’ve all seen reports in recent months that Gabbard wasn’t on board with the Iran war. Still, the passive-tense construction doesn’t give any indication of where these “rumblings” have been coming from. The White House? The Pentagon? Who knows?
Decisions over when it’s acceptable to rely entirely on anonymous sources are always fuzzy, but the real reason that Gabbard is leaving isn’t important enough to try to report it on the basis of light sourcing in real time. A story based on multiple sources reporting on what really happened would be welcome — and there was no need to try to break that story in the immediate aftermath of her resignation.
