Author: Dan Kennedy

In Provincetown, a startup weekly newspaper is challenging Gannett

Launching a community news outlet at a time when local news is under siege might seem like a foolhardy risk. But journalists with an entrepreneurial spirit are taking that risk — and, for some, it’s paying off.

Take, for example, The Provincetown Independent. Founded in October 2019, the weekly competes with Gannett’s Provincetown Banner. According to co-founder and editor Ed Miller, the Independent already has more than 100 advertisers and a full-time staff of 10, including three editors and three and a half reporters, as well as a number of freelancers. He and the other co-founder, publisher Teresa Parker, are aiming for break-even and a staff of 20 by year five.

“The fact is that the majority of these legacy small-town papers are actually doing perfectly well,” Miller said last week at an event at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism via Zoom. He added, though, that “they’re not making anybody rich.”

The Independent covers four towns — Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet and Eastham. The paper has both a print and a paywalled digital edition. Although a number of local news startups are digital-only, Miller said he’s convinced that print is necessary for a for-profit enterprise such as his, since it’s a more effective way to attract advertisers. (The Independent is a public-benefit corporation, which means, according to its About page, that it is “committed to prioritizing the social and environmental benefits of our corporate decision-making.”)

The formula has worked, he said, noting that the current edition comprises 32 pages, 27% of which are advertising.

One type of advertising he’s not getting are legal notices, a problem he blamed on town officials who don’t like the tough coverage the Independent is providing. Instead, legals continue to go to the Banner and another Gannett weekly, the Cape Codder, whose coverage area overlaps with the Independent in Eastham.

Miller began his career as a small-town newspaper owner in the town of Harvard in 1973, an experience that led him to co-write a 1978 book called “How to Produce a Small Newspaper.” He worked for four years for the Banner before deciding to launch his own venture, saying that GateHouse Media, which later acquired Gannett and took its name, “pretty much systematically stripped it of all its staff and other capacities.”

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As for the Independent, he said the paper now has paid print circulation of about 3,200 (subscriptions plus newsstand sales), with another 450 digital-only subscribers, most of whom live far from Cape Cod.

The paper’s revenues last year were about $640,000, with $217,000 coming from subscriptions and $242,000 from advertising. Nearly $70,000 came in the form of government assistance related to the pandemic, and another $74,000 was from donations and grants to the Independent’s nonprofit arm, which it uses to pay interns and cover the cost of in-depth reporting on issues like climate change, affordable housing, health care and LGBTQ issues.

Although not every local news startup is as successful as the Independent, there has been an upsurge in recent years of independently owned community outlets. Some are for-profit, some are nonprofit. Some are online-only, some have a print edition. Some were launched to challenge a chain-owned newspaper, some were founded in communities with no news outlet. Later this week, LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers will release a study showing that the number of independents in the U.S. and Canada has risen by 50% over the past five years.

What all of these startups have in common is that, even with the challenges to local news posed by the likes of Craigslist, Facebook and Google, independents can succeed.

“We hear from people in various other places where their papers have really withered and they’ve heard about what we’re doing,” Miller said. “Every place is different. What we’re doing out here in Provincetown is geared to this place. People will need to find their own ways of making this work wherever they are.”

Correction. This post has been updated regarding the length of Miller’s tenure at the Provincetown Banner and the Independent’s total print circulation.

A possible savior emerges for Tribune’s newspapers

Stewart Bainum. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It sounds too good to be true. Stewart Bainum, the hotel magnate (why are they always magnates?) who is leading the transition of The Baltimore Sun and its sister papers to nonprofit ownership, may make a bid to buy all of Tribune Publishing, according to The New York Times.

As you may recall, the hedge fund Alden Global Capital has a deal to buy Tribune, a move that would almost certainly lead to the gutting of the Chicago Tribune and the rest of the chain’s already-diminished newspapers, including, semi-locally, the Hartford Courant. As part of that deal, Alden would spin off the Sun to a nonprofit.

According to the Times’ Marc Tracy, though, Bainum and Alden have been unable to come to an agreement on the details of that transition — and Bainum may now put together a group of investors who would buy the entire chain. Tracy writes:

If Mr. Bainum manages to reach an agreement to buy Tribune, he would be likely to seek local owners for its other newspapers, which also include The Hartford Courant, The Orlando Sentinel and The South Florida Sun Sentinel, the people said.

“The people” is a reference to Tracy’s unnamed sources.

Who knows what will happen? But this is well worth keeping an eye on, as it could lead to a renaissance for some of our most important newspapers — just as it appeared that they were being led to the slaughterhouse.

Previous coverage.

The Globe pays tribute to a classic New York Post headline. It didn’t quite work.

The Boston Globe today published an editorial admonishing the state for directing COVID relief to restaurants that have violated pandemic rules — including a strip club in Springfield that has run afoul of the FBI. When it came time to write the headline, though, someone decided to have some fun — and that’s where things went awry.

We begin with the inspiration for the Globe’s headline, the classic New York Post headline “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” so famous that when the editor who wrote it, Vincent Musetto, died in 2015, his genius was celebrated far and wide.

The Globe print headline: “Heedless bodies in topless bar.” Huh? Not quite sure that gets at it.

Click on it, though, and you get “Heedless bounty in topless bar,” which I’m guessing is what was intended.

The online headline, “State needs to hurry up with restaurant aid,” is serviceable but lacks panache.

So credit to the Globe for taking some chances. But I’m not sure it quite worked.

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An ethical dilemma in Maine as a police officer pretends to be a reporter

Image (cc) 2008 via the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center

Now here’s an ethical dilemma. In Livermore Falls, Maine, a man who had taken four people hostage in a home called a television news reporter who was outside covering the standoff. Police asked the reporter to hand them his phone. He complied, and an officer continued the conversation with the hostage-taker while pretending to be the reporter.

It would seem to violate any sense of journalistic ethics — and yet it was a life-or-death situation. What would you have done? I think I would have done exactly what the reporter, Taylor Cairns of CBS 13, did, and then wondered later if there might have been a better way to handle it. I definitely believe Cairns did the right thing in the moment.

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Earlier this week, University of Maine journalism professor Michael Socolow and I talked with Nick Schroeder of the Bangor Daily News. As I told Schroeder, “You can see what a difficult situation everybody was in. Lives were at stake here.” But I also told him that maybe this should lead to training for both reporters and police officers aimed at coming up with a better solution if a similar situation should arise in the future.

The story came to a gruesome ending. Though none of the hostages was harmed, the hostage-taker, Donald White, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after having been shot by a state police officer, according to police.

Amazon outrage of the week

From The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler:

The tech giant … won’t sell downloadable versions of its more than 10,000 e-books or tens of thousands of audiobooks to libraries. That’s right, for a decade, the company that killed bookstores has been starving the reading institution that cares for kids, the needy and the curious. And that’s turned into a mission-critical problem during a pandemic that cut off physical access to libraries and left a lot of people unable to afford books on their own.

And good for the Post, which, as we all know, is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The day classes were canceled, the NBA shut down and Trump freaked us out

Office building in Minneapolis. Photo (cc) 2020 by Chad Davis.

When was the first day you realized that COVID-19 was going to disrupt our lives — even though we didn’t know until later how long and hard that disruption would be?

In its anniversary package, GBH News decided on March 10, 2020, the day that Gov. Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency. I wrote about covering a COVID news conference in Mendocino County, California, on March 5.

For me, though, the real anniversary is today. On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, we learned at a faculty meeting that classes would go remote the following day. That evening, the NBA shut down and Tom Hanks announced that he had COVID.

And in what would prove to be our final in-person meeting, my graduate ethics students and I watched Donald Trump deliver an Oval Office address that night about the coronavirus that was so unnerving it sent the Dow futures tumbling.

Iowa reporter is acquitted

USA Today reports:

Andrea Sahouri, the Iowa journalist who was arrested as she reported on racial justice protests last summer, was found not guilty in a case that drew widespread condemnation from journalism and free press organizations.

Her former boyfriend, who was arrested with her, has been acquitted as well.

Earlier:

How independent local news survived the COVID pandemic

I hope you’ll take some time with GBH News’ special coverage of the anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. Called “A Year Apart: How COVID Changed Us,” the package comprises stories, commentaries and conversations, including an audio documentary called “How the Disaster Unfolded.”

I’ve got two pieces in the package — a reminiscence about experiencing the earliest phases of the pandemic while I was on a reporting trip in Mendocino County, California, and a conversation with GBH’s Arun Rath on how the pandemic has affected local news.

Short answer: Although it’s been a bad year for community journalism, especially in places served by newspapers owned by corporate chains and hedge funds, it hasn’t been quite as bad as many of us thought it would be. After a sickening plunge last spring, some newspapers — especially those that are independently owned, such as The Boston Globe and the Dorchester Reporter — stabilized, and early cuts were partially reversed.

Chris Krewson, the executive director of LION (Local Independent Online News), Publishers, even told me that some of the organizations members did better in 2020 than they did in 2019, partly as a result of government assistance, partly because their audiences developed a new appreciation for what they do.

The Trump campaign lost its libel suit because it really did collude with Russia

Michael Flynn. Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore.

A New York state judge Tuesday tossed a libel suit filed by Donald Trump’s campaign against The New York Times. The suit claimed that a 2019 column by former executive editor Max Frankel was false and defamatory because Frankel wrote that the 2016 Trump campaign had colluded with Russian interests.

Two-thirds of Judge James d’Auguste’s ruling is not especially interesting. He ruled that the campaign lacked standing to bring such a suit, and that Trump would be unable to prove Frankel knew or strongly suspected that what he was writing was false — the “actual malice” standard that pertains to public officials and public figures.

So that leaves us with the third leg of d’Auguste’s decision — that Frankel was merely expressing his opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment. The standard was set in a U.S. Supreme Court case called Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., in which Chief Justice William Rehnquist ruled that labeling a piece of writing as “opinion” provides no protection if that piece contains assertions of fact that could be proven true or false.

The way Rehnquist explains it is that to say “In my opinion Mayor Jones is a liar” would be unprotected speech (that is, if Jones could prove he’s not a liar, he might be able to bring a successful libel suit) whereas “In my opinion Mayor Jones shows his abysmal ignorance by accepting the teachings of Marx and Lenin” would be considered pure opinion and thus beyond the reach of a libel suit.

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So what did Max Frankel do? If you read his commentary, you’ll see he looked at a number of public actions and statements by Trump and people close to him to show that they were toadying to Russian interests, and that not only did the Russians expect something in return, but that Trump and his allies moved in that direction both during and after the 2016 election. We all know this. We all watched it unfold in real time. (It’s important to note in this context that “collusion” is not a legal term anymore than “toadying” is. In other words, labeling such behavior as “collusion” is protected opinion as long as the underlying facts are accurately stated.)

Among other things, Frankel cites the infamous Trump Tower meeting as well as incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn’s lying to the FBI about his discussion with the Russian ambassador before the 2017 inauguration about the possible lifting of sanctions. Those actions led to criminal charges against Flynn, to which he pleaded guilty twice before Trump, as president, pardoned him in the final days of his administration. Frankel writes:

Candidate Trump made no secret of his intention to forge a warm relationship with the Kremlin. But pledges of sanctions relief and other specific moves while not yet in office were unseemly at best and clearly offensive to the American convention that we have only one president at a time. Mr. Flynn especially had to lie because though already in transition to power he was directly undermining Mr. Obama’s still active and punitive diplomacy against Mr. Putin.

Frankel didn’t libel Trump, not just because of the technicalities of defamation law, but because he wrote the truth. Trump might as well sue Robert Mueller while he’s at it.