Author: Dan Kennedy

A new group in Maine would reorganize the Portland Press Herald as a nonprofit

The Maine Sunday Telegram is the name of Sunday’s Portland Press Herald

Last month we learned that Reade Brower was getting ready to sell Maine’s Portland Press Herald and several other newspapers. Today we received good news: a nonprofit organization is hoping to acquire those papers and run them for the benefit of the public.

Retired Press Herald columnist Bill Nemitz, president of the newly formed Maine Journalism Foundation, writes that the nonprofit aims to buy Brower’s five daily and 25 weekly newspapers, known collectively as Masthead Maine, to “sustain and nurture Maine’s reputation as a bastion for independent local news.” Nemitz adds:

We at MaineJF want to be the next to carry the Masthead Maine banner. Our goal initially is to acquire the company and operate the various publications as a nonprofit. Beyond that, we will seek ways to enhance all journalism in Maine through targeted support for and collaboration with our media colleagues. Maine Public, for one, comes to mind.

In recent years, several papers have been acquired by nonprofit foundations, but the papers themselves continue to be for-profits. The most prominent example of that is The Philadelphia Inquirer. By contrast, Nemitz’s description sounds like the Press Herald and its sister papers will themselves be nonprofits, joining the Salt Lake Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, both of which have been reorganized as nonprofits.

Nonprofit status removes the pressure of having to satisfy investors, but it does come with some disadvantages as well: a nonprofit newspaper can’t endorse political candidates or specific pieces of legislation. Last fall the Press Herald published endorsements on ballot questions but not for candidates. As a nonprofit, it wouldn’t be able to do either.

Nemitz said that the new foundation is seeking to raise $15 million from large and small donors to buy all of Brower’s papers.

Brower, by all accounts, has been a good steward of the Press Herald. When he announced last month that he was seeking to offload his papers, he said he wanted to leave them in good hands, and he specifically mentioned a nonprofit organization or a public benefit corporation. Now it looks like he’ll get his wish — provided MaineJF can accomplish its fundraising goals.

The Globe and the Times publish remarkably similar stories about a troubled chef

It’s the end of the semester at Northeastern, so you’ll have to forgive me for weighing in rather late about the remarkably similar stories that The New York Times (free link) and The Boston Globe published about Barbara Lynch, a celebrity chef whose abusive behavior has finally caught up with her.

Although I’m speculating, what happened seems fairly obvious: Tim Dearing, the former lead chef at Menton, almost certainly contacted both papers after he told Lynch he was going to “drag” her when she fired him at a particularly volatile meeting following the overdose deaths of Dearing’s beloved predecessor, Rye Crofter, and a younger chef Crofter had mentored. No doubt both stories were close to being ready when one paper learned that the other was about to publish. Both stories were published Thursday within about a half-hour of each other.

Still, I’ve never seen anything like the structural similarities in two long stories like this. The Globe’s Janelle Nanos and the Times’ Julia Moskin open the same way, repeat many of the same anecdotes, reproduce the same sorry-not-sorry statement from Lynch (OK, that’s not surprising) and reach the same conclusion: that Lynch is out of control, and her chain of restaurants is in serious trouble. Please understand that I’m not suggesting any ethical violations here — it was just striking to see two good reporters approach the story in exactly the same way.

There was, though, one difference. The Times noted that Lynch is the first cousin of U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, a powerful South Boston Democrat, and has connections to the influential lobbyist Tom O’Neill, a former lieutenant governor. As my old colleague Adam Reilly of GBH News tweeted:

Adam’s implication is that the Globe should have included that fact as well, and I agree with him. Perhaps editors at the Globe decided not to pull Lynch’s connections into the story given that they are not responsible for her behavior. Still, readers may reasonably wonder if that had something to with why she got away with her act for as long as she has.

On the other hand, the Globe’s story, unlike the Times’, observes that the food has gone downhill at Lynch’s restaurants as her behavior has spiraled out of control. Nanos — with contributions from the paper’s food critic, Devra First, as well as reporter Dana Gerber — writes:

What’s more, restaurants have changed, in part reshaped in part by both the #MeToo movement and the pandemic. Long overlooked behavior is no longer being tolerated. Workers are demanding fairer treatment. And Lynch’s world of fine dining is shifting beneath her feet amid staffing shortages and rising food costs, particular challenges for the pricey, labor-intensive model of haute cuisine.

And indeed, on a recent evening, Menton seemed to have lost the luster of its early days, when the food was plated like precious jewels, both delicious and beautiful, and customers were cosseted by multiple servers at once. Menton now serves one $180 six-course chef’s tasting menu each night, but the dishes feel less inventive and refined than they did a decade ago when it first opened. Flavors are less precise, portion sizes are small, and the lag time between courses can be overly long. It was fine dining in the most literal sense of the word.

This is not an insignificant part of the story, and it’s telling that it appears in the local paper rather than in the outlet from out of town. The Globe also has some cringey details missing from the Times about crude T-shirts that Lynch wanted her employees to wear.

I have never eaten at any of Lynch’s restaurants as the prices are well out of my range. The food scene in Boston, though, is a vital part of our local culture, and the Globe has devoted a lot of resources to covering it over the years. It will be interesting to see whether Lynch’s problems are isolated, or if they represent the first cracks in that culture.

Linda Shapley talks about journalism, leadership and the power of diversity

Linda Shapley. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

On the new episode of the “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I speak with Linda Shapley, the publisher of Colorado Community Media, who describes herself as a longtime denizen of the state’s media ecosystem. Indeed, she was at Colorado Politics and worked for 21 years for The Denver Post. “I’ve been a lieutenant for a lot of really great generals,” she once said. “This is my opportunity to be a general.”

CCM is a group of about two dozen weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. They were saved from chain ownership two years ago when they were purchased through a deal led by the National Trust for Local News. Last August we spoke with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the trust.

Shapley has talked about the power of representation as a visible Latina leader in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by white men. She says she hopes to use her position to encourage more diversity in journalism. Her mentor at the Post, Greg Moore, was a previous guest on What Works. You can listen to his episode here.

Shapley grew up in northeastern Colorado, in a rural county. Her father had a dairy farm. When I was in Colorado doing research for our book-in-progress, “What Works in Community News,” she told me that dairy farming is a lot like newspapers, because cows don’t know it’s Christmas.

Also this week, we talk with Madison Xagoraris, a graduate student in the Media Advocacy Program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Xagoraris recently reported on KefiFM, a Boston-based Greek music outlet dedicated to serving the Greek and Greek American communities in the Boston area and throughout New England.

Ellen has a Quick Take about retired journalists who are busy launching startup newsrooms. Nieman Reports has a piece by Jon Marcus that looks at the Asheville Watchdog in North Carolina, and the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts. These journalists say they want to help bolster the profession they gave their lives to by setting up nonprofit community news sites and mentoring younger reporters and editors. They aren’t playing pickleball.

I’m in a Colorado state of mind: My Quick Take is on the fifth anniversary of the Denver Rebellion, when the staff of The Denver Post rose up against further newsroom cuts being imposed by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. That rebellion sparked a revolution in Denver journalism.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Cambridge Day takes on an advisory board and seeks to raise $75,000

Cambridge City Hall. Photo (cc) 2007 by Thomas Steiner.

Over the course of several months, I’ve talked with a few people in Cambridge about the dearth of local news in that city. Its only newspaper, Gannett’s Cambridge Chronicle, has been without a reporter since last year. The leading news outlet, Cambridge Day, does good work, but it was essentially a one-person operation headed by Marc Levy on a volunteer basis. I encouraged Marc and two members of a group seeking to start a nonprofit, journalists Mary McGrath and Susanne Beck, to try to work together.

Now it looks like that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Cambridge Day, which Levy founded in 2009, has published a story announcing that the nonprofit group is going to head up a fundraising campaign with a goal of raising $75,000. “The fundraising is not only to ‘save’ Cambridge Day, but to help it take a leap forward in quality and comprehensiveness,” according to an article published by the Day on Tuesday. The campaign will be headed up by an organization called Cambridge Local News Matters. It’s not clear what Marc’s role will be moving forward, but it’s surely a good sign that he wrote the article announcing the changes.

You could go back several decades, to when the Chronicle was independently owned and competed with the Cambridge Tab, and even then it was often said that Cambridge was the largest city in the country (population: 118,000) without a daily newspaper. The Day has been indispensable since its founding, and I wish Marc and his new partners all the best.

Despite the letdown, Tuesday was a very bad day for Rupert Murdoch and Fox News

Rupert Murdoch. Photo (cc) 2015 by the Hudson Institute.

For those of us who had hoped that Fox News would be publicly humiliated in the courtroom, Tuesday’s announcement that a settlement had been reached was disappointing but not surprising. The purpose of lawsuits is to resolve disputes, not to provide justice.

And what a settlement Dominion Voting Systems got: $787.5 million, or about 19% of the cash or “cash equivalents” held by Fox Corp. at the end of 2022, according to The New York Times. No, not even Rupert Murdoch has that kind of money sloshing around in a spare pants pocket. It also amounts to half the $1.6 billion in damages Dominion said it had suffered as a result of on-air lies that the company’s machines had switched votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Still, it would have been lovely to watch the 92-year-old mogul take the stand and be confronted with internal communications that showed he and other Fox executives and talk-show hosts knew Donald Trump and his supporters were lying about the election being stolen by Dominion and other dark forces but promoted those lies anyway. I also wish that Fox were being forced to apologize for its lies, over and over again, but that was probably never in the cards.

On the other hand, Fox News faces more legal troubles, including a $2.7 billion lawsuit brought by yet another voting technology company, Smartmatic. So unless Fox settles that case as well, this saga is a long way from being resolved. Good.

Some media observers were breathing a sigh of relief that the First Amendment protections for libel would not be put to the test. I’m not among them. As I wrote earlier, this was really a textbook example of “actual malice” — that is, publishing or broadcasting false information despite knowing that it’s false, or demonstrating reckless disregard for the truth. It was not a “landmark case.” I talked about that before the settlement was announced with WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller, who provides a good overview of Tuesday’s events and what they mean.

I’ll close with a post on Mastodon by M.S. Bellows Jr., a lawyer and commentator who gets to the heart of it in a way that’s both illuminating and entertaining:

I’m a former trial lawyer, former prosecutor, and current mediator. I have both represented and sued some of the largest companies in the world. I am very experienced, and VERY good, at what I do.

At trial, Dominion would not and could not have received an apology. Period. The vanishingly rare circumstances in which a court could order a retraction do not exist here.

At trial, Dominion would not have received $787.5 million, which is 45x its highest annual earnings. If a jury awarded it that much, the court almost certainly would have reduced it on remittitur.

This is a superb and stunning settlement. Dominion has hurt Fox badly, exposed Fox’s lies, and done the American public a massive service. If you feel otherwise, fine – but that’s all it is: a feeling. Factually, you are incorrect, and to soothe your feelings you should take recourse to bourbon or cannabis, not social media.

Thank you.

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Oklahoma sheriff’s office responds by blaming the messenger

Old analog stereo tape recorder
Photo (cc) 2012 by Nenad Stojkovic

The sheriff’s office in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, has responded with the alacrity you’d hope for when wrongdoing is exposed. Oh, wait. They’re going to charge the journalist who recorded their nausea-inducing tirade of racism and violence with a felony for taping county officials without their knowledge. The Associated Press passes along a statement made by the sheriff:

There is and has been an ongoing investigation into multiple, significant violation(s) of the Oklahoma Security of Communications Act … which states that it is illegal to secretly record a conversation in which you are not involved and do not have the consent of at least one of the involved parties.

The AP also quotes a local journalism professor who says that the recording would be illegal only if the officials had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Now, I have to say that I’m confused. Laws regarding audio recordings generally define “one party” as “either party.” The journalist, Bruce Willingham of the McCurtain Gazette-News, obviously gave his consent, and that would normally be regarded as sufficient. Let me return to the guide published by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which I referred to in my earlier item.

In Oklahoma, “An individual who is a party to an in-person, telephone or electronic conversation, or who has the consent of one of the parties to the conversation, can lawfully record it or disclose its contents, unless the person is doing so for the purpose of committing a criminal or tortious act.” And: “The consent of at least one party to a conversation is required to record any oral communication.”

Obviously there’s more to it than that, and it’s possible that Willingham ran afoul of the law by leaving the room rather than participating in a “conversation.” (Then again, he was kicked out.) But contrast that with what the guide says about our state: “Massachusetts prohibits the recording, interception, use or disclosure of any conversation, whether in person or over the telephone, without the permission of all the parties.” If you are old enough and obsessive enough, you may recall that Linda Tripp was in the clear when she secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky while they were in Virginia, which, like Oklahoma, is a one-party state — but she broke the law when she recorded Lewinsky in Maryland, a two-party state.

Anyway, it’s good to see that McCurtain county officials have their priorities straight by going after the press rather than dealing with their own hateful dysfunction.

One more thing: The Washington Post story I referenced earlier described Willingham as a reporter for the Gazette-News. And so he is. But it turns out that he’s also the publisher. Probably the delivery guy and custodian as well. Anyway, he’s performed a tremendous public service, and he ought to be considered a candidate for a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.

Local reporter catches Oklahoma county officials in a racist, hate-filled tirade

McCurtain County Courthouse. Photo (cc) 2013 by Billy Hathorn.

See follow-up.

Whenever I’m asked why local news matters, I generally give a rather bloodless answer about democracy, journalism’s watchdog role and the like. But now the McCurtain Gazette-News, in southeastern Oklahoma, has provided considerably more graphic evidence.

According The Washington Post (free link), Gazette-News reporter Bruce Willingham surreptitiously left his recorder behind when he and members of the public were ordered to exit a meeting of McCurtain county officials. Willingham told a local television station that he was hoping to find evidence that the officials were violating the state’s open meeting law.

What Willingham found was considerably more horrifying than that, as the commissioners proceeded to mock a woman who had died in a recent house fire, reminisced about the good old days when young Black men could be lynched with impunity, and suggested that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if Willingham himself turned up dead.

The Gazette-News does not appear to have a website, but the paper has been posting snippets on Google Docs and Dropbox. Here’s the exchange about lynching:

Jennings: It’s like somebody wanting this job, they don’t realize, like your job. I heard it the other day, said I heard 2 or 12 people were going for sheriff. I said fuck, lets get 20. They don’t have a goddamn clue what they’re getting into. Not this day and age. I’m gonna tell you something. If it was back in the day, when that when Alan Marshton would take a damn black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell? I’d run for fucking sheriff.

Sheriff: Yeah. Well, It’s not like that no more.

Jennings: I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.

Jennings is county commissioner Mark Jennings. The sheriff’s name is Kevin Clardy.

In case you’re wondering, Willingham was on the right side of the law in making a secret recording. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Oklahoma is a one-party state when it comes to audio recordings, which means that only one party needs to give their consent — in this case, Willingham himself. Massachusetts, by contrast, requires the consent of all parties.

The Gazette-News, meanwhile, says it has more audio and that follow-up stories are in the works. And CNN reports that Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has called on Clardy, Jennings and two other officials who were involved in the exchanges to resign.

It bears repeating: If the McCurtain Gazette-News didn’t exist, and if its reporter hadn’t been assigned to cover the county, then these racist hate-mongers would not have been exposed.

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Landmark case? In fact, Dominion’s libel suit against Fox News is pretty simple

White van labeled Fox News Channel
Photo (cc) 2011 by (vincent desjardins)

We’ve been told many times that the Dominion voting machine libel suit against Fox News could be a “landmark case.” I want to push back against that.

If Fox wins, then yes, it will be a landmark case, but that particular outcome seems unimaginable. That’s because we know from Fox’s own internal communications that top executives and hosts knew they were lying when they repeated the claims advanced by Donald Trump and his minions that Dominion’s machines stole votes from Trump and awarded them to Joe Biden.

In order to show libel, a plaintiff must prove that a media outlet published or broadcast false, defamatory statements about them. The Supreme Court’s 1964 Times v. Sullivan case added a third element for public officials who wish to win a libel suit: “actual malice,” which is defined as a knowing falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth. Several years later, the actual malice standard was extended to public figures, including a corporation such as Fox.

This really shouldn’t be difficult. In the unlikely event that Fox wins, it would mean that actual malice as a legal concept no longer exists. In reality, Dominion v. Fox is a pretty ordinary case in the sense that it presents no new issues at all. Fox defamed Dominion with false claims and, in private conversations, admitted that they were lying. The network’s defense will be that it was merely reporting newsworthy statements — but it didn’t just report them, it promoted them, and its hosts agreed with them on the air.

It is, in a way, the flip side of Sarah Palin’s 2022 libel case against The New York Times, when it was obvious to any observer that the Times had simply made a careless error in claiming that the man who shot then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords and several others had been incited by a map put together by Palin’s policial action committee showing gunsights over several congressional districts, including Giffords’. In fact, there was no evidence that the mentally ill shooter was even aware of such a map. There was no actual malice, and Palin lost.

It’s hard to imagine that any combination of money awarded to Dominion as well as punitive damages will add up to any more than a rounding error for Fox. What I’d really like to see is for the jury to require Fox to apologize in prime time, over and over, for lying to its viewers. How about nothing but apologies for a week? Now, that would be some must-see TV.

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Leak suspect and his online friends are big fans of Putin

Vladimir Putin. Photo (cc) 2014 by Global Panorama.

Here’s a data point to keep an eye on. From The Wall Street Journal (free link):

The people in the online spaces where Airman First Class Jack Teixeira spent his time and allegedly leaked highly classified documents had many things in common. In obscure game forums and private online chat rooms, his friends posted slurs against minority communities, Ukrainians and pretty much everyone else.

Everyone, that is, except Russians.

Members of that small community, hosted on the social-media app Discord, admired President Vladimir Putin’s regime and its war on Ukraine.

Muzzle follow-up: A settlement is reached in a Worcester public records case

A final price tag has been set on the city of Worcester’s years-long campaign to withhold public records pertaining to police misconduct from the Telegram & Gazette, the city’s daily paper, and its reporter Brad Petrishen. Open government watchdog Andrew Quemere writes that the T&G and the city reached a settlement in February for $180,000 to cover most of the paper’s legal fees plus $5,000 in punitive damages.

Last summer I gave former Worcester city manager Edward Augustus a New England Muzzle Award, published by GBH News, for leading the effort to keep residents of his city in the dark about what their police department was up to. District Court Judge Janet Kenton-Walker awarded the T&G $101,000 in legal fees in addition to the punitive damages, ruling that such a harsh penalty was justified because the city had misrepresented aspects of the case in its dealings with the court.

Not harsh enough, as it turned out. The T&G’s lawyer, Jeffrey Pyle, appealed Kenton-Walker’s ruling, arguing that the paper’s legal fees of $217,000 should have been covered in their entirety given the city’s misconduct. The state Appeals Court agreed, overturning Kenton-Walker. That led to the February settlement.

“The Telegram & Gazette spent more than three years fighting for the right to have access to documents of considerable public interest,” T&G executive editor Michael McDermott was quoted as saying in Quemere’s post. “I’m proud of reporter Brad Petrishen for pursuing these records and thankful to our lawyers for successfully defending the public’s right to know.”

And, finally, my disclosure: David Nordman, who was the T&G’s editor until this past summer, is now a colleague of mine at Northeastern. We work on opposite sides of the campus, literally and figuratively: he’s the executive editor of Northeastern Global News, part of the university’s communications operation, and I’m a faculty member at the School of Journalism.