I’m very sorry to hear that the seven-year-old Framingham Source is moving to a self-publishing model and will drop local reporting. Founder Susan Petroni cites burnout and financial woes. It’s tough out there.
Author: Dan Kennedy
GBH will keep tweeting
GBH is sticking with Twitter, at least for now. I just received this statement from spokeswoman Erin Callanan:
At this time, GBH is continuing to use Twitter as a platform for sharing trusted content with its audience. We strongly object to Twitter’s labeling of NPR and PBS as “government-funded” media. However, GBH continues to be the most trusted media in this market, and we have a responsibility to share our news and other programming with the broadest possible audience using the tools available to us.
This remains an evolving situation, and we will continue to monitor the changes as it moves forward.
Like all public media organizations, GBH is locally owned, operated, and governed. We receive the vast majority of our support from individual donors and members, as well as from foundations. We provide independent fact-based news, as well as other quality educational entertainment. We strongly believe that editorial independence and a free press are critical to our democracy.
In my earlier item, I mentioned GBH News specifically, as that is the local news division that competes most directly with WBUR Radio. GBH, of course, is a massive operation, comprising local and national programming on television and radio.
I was affiliated with GBH News for many years and still consider myself a friend of the station. But I think this is a mistake. As I noted earlier, GBH News is already on Mastodon, the leading Twitter alternative, though GBH as a whole is not. But neither is WBUR, and they took the hit rather than continuing to play in Elon Musk’s toxic garden.
Then again, there’s no particular reason why public media outlets are under any special obligation to leave Twitter just because they’re NPR affiliates. All news organizations should be packing up and moving, and that includes The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and all the rest. It’s the right thing to do, and it would make it that much easier for small players (like Media Nation, for example) to do likewise.
WBUR leaves Twitter. Will GBH News follow suit?
Update: GBH is staying on Twitter, at least for now.
Following NPR’s lead, WBUR Radio, one of Boston’s two major public media news outlets, is leaving Twitter to protest Chief Twit Elon Musk’s recent targeting of NPR as “state-controlled media.”
“NPR and WBUR believe recent actions by Musk seek to undermine the integrity of our news organizations,” WBUR chief executive Margaret Low said in a statement. “WBUR will stop tweeting from official WBUR accounts, effective April 12.”
No word yet from WBUR’s rival, GBH News, which was tweeting as recently as 5:40 a.m. today But GBH News already has a lively presence on Mastodon, and whoever runs the account reported on Wednesday that they had met with GBH executives to talk about Mastodon and the Fediverse, the underlying architecture upon which Mastodon is built.
“I’ll keep all of you filled in with what happens next,” they said.
At Gannett, those better days that are just around the corner never seem to arrive
Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory wrote Wednesday that he’d heard from Gannett chair and chief executive Mike Reed after his recent piece detailing the devastating cuts that the country’s largest newspaper chain had endured. Reed told McGrory that the worst was over and that happy days were almost here again. McGrory wrote:
“My full intention is to do more journalism, not less,” Reed said. “We’re so close to that inflection point that the major cuts are behind us.” Moments later, for emphasis: “The cuts are behind us.”
Is that a commitment, Mike?
He hesitated. I swear I could hear the loud warning beeps from a truck backing up. “What I’m saying is we’re near the end of the process on the reduction side,” he replied. Then this: “I wouldn’t say that I don’t know there’ll be one more cut.” And finally: “We’re in the ninth inning of the game.”
It sounded so familiar. I’ve written about Gannett and its predecessor company, GateHouse Media, many, many times over the years. For instance, after I wrote for GBH News in June 2019 that GateHouse seemed to be imploding, Reed contacted me to push back. He wouldn’t put any of our phone conversation on the record, but he didn’t need to. Because it’s been the same old song for a very long time.
How long? Let’s go back to August 2008, when GateHouse’s stock price was taking such a pounding that it could not longer be traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. In a conference call with investors, according to the Rochester Business Journal, Reed was full of assurances that the worst was over. “Our results, while below our estimates, are holding up quite well, and our capital assets put us in a position of strength going forward,” he said. And: “We believe our assets will continue to produce strong cash flows and when the economic cycle improves we are positioned in our small markets to grow.”
If that’s not enough déjà vu for you, consider that, around the same time, the website 24/7 Wall St. named Reed “The Most Overpaid CEO Of The Day,” noting that he was being paid a salary of $500,000 to preside over a company whose stock price was down 90%. As readers of Media Nation know, Reed was just getting started. He received $7.7 million in total compensation in 2021, and was rewarded with another $3.4 million in 2022. Meanwhile, Gannett newspapers are being shut down and journalists laid off by the score.
In October 2008, I wrote a piece for CommonWealth magazine about GateHouse’s operations in Eastern Massachusetts — around 100 community newspapers, mostly weeklies, that it had acquired from Boston Herald owner Pat Purcell, who had in turn purchased them from Fidelity Capital a few years earlier. The theme of the day, inevitably, was newsroom cuts. But Kirk Davis, then the president and publisher of GateHouse Media New England, was, to invoke an old cliché, cautiously optimistic:
“We feel that community newspapers have a very viable future and, juxtaposed against the trend overall, are performing very well,” says Davis, arguing that small, community newspapers have a competitive advantage over major metros because their locally focused content is not available elsewhere. “I believe in it, and I believe it’s going to stay strong.”
Five years later, the company sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection so that it could restructure $1.2 billion of the debt it had taken on in assembling its newspaper chain.
The cutting continued after GateHouse emerged from bankruptcy, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always with the same downward momentum. In late 2019, GateHouse merged with Gannett, a longtime publisher that was also notorious for running its papers on the cheap. The new Gannett was saddled with $1.1 billion in debt, and a lot of that has been financed by cutting the workforce in half, as Axios reported recently. Davis left shortly after the merger, but Reed continues to decimate newsrooms, just as he continues to insist that better days are just around the corner, as he told the trade publication Editor & Publisher last November.
The problem with Gannett, as always, is that better days for Reed never translate to better days for his newspapers, his journalists or the communities they serve. McGrory’s skepticism is warranted.
The Twitter logjam may be starting to break as NPR says: See ya, Elon
Despite Elon Musk’s best efforts, Twitter is still alive, more or less. From sending poop emojis in response to media requests to putting his dog in charge of the company (what company?), Musk has demonstrated massive contempt for his customers. He’s also allowed the site to be flooded with trolls and hate speech — not that those weren’t a problem even before he bought the company.
But now there’s a chance that the logjam will finally break. After Musk labeled NPR’s Twitter feed as “state-controlled media” and then, upon reflection, changed it to “government-funded media” (it is neither, though NPR does get a tiny percentage of its revenues from government sources), NPR’s leadership finally decided it had had enough. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes:
NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.
Unfortunately, NPR is going to allow its journalists to make their own decision. That’s a mistake. What’s needed is to push news organizations to leave Twitter behind in order to encourage the use of alternatives, the most prominent of which (so far) is Mastodon.
From November through February, I went cold turkey, taking to Twitter only to let my followers know where else they could find me. Twitter’s weird resilience, though, led me to come back on a limited basis. I continue to do most of my social media posting on Mastodon, and I hope you’ll follow me there.
Five years after the Denver Rebellion, local news is surviving in Colorado
Of all the alarms that have been sounded over the decline of local news, perhaps none was louder than the one in Denver, Colorado, five years ago this month. In what became known as the Denver Rebellion, editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett wrote a front-page editorial calling for the Post’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital, to sell the paper to local interests. Plunkett wrote:
We call for action. Consider this editorial and this Sunday’s Perspective offerings a plea to Alden — owner of Digital First Media, one of the largest newspaper chains in the country — to rethink its business strategy across all its newspaper holdings. Consider this also a signal to our community and civic leaders that they ought to demand better. Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom. If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will.
Unfortunately, Alden did not sell; after all, there were still profits to be squeezed out. At one time, the Post employed a newsroom of about 300 people, and its competitor, the Rocky Mountain News, had another 300. But the Rocky was shut down by a different chain owner years ago, and by the time that Plunkett wrote his manifesto, Alden was in the process of downsizing the Post again, from about 100 journalists to 60.
But journalism in Denver survived. Earlier this month, Plunkett wrote an opinion piece for The Colorado Sun looking back on the past five years. The Sun grew out of the Post: 10 senior people left after the rebellion and launched a digital-only news project that has grown to a couple of dozen people. This time around, Plunkett, now at the University of Colorado in Boulder, took a more optimistic view:
So much new talent has bubbled up around us as a result it’s difficult to keep track. The legislature’s got more reporters than you shake a stick at. Who could deny the excellence and the ambition of presenting and covering Denver’s recent mayoral debates?…
Hey, it’s heartening to see media companies banging around like they want to fight. Think of how bad off we’d be if we didn’t have such energy.
What’s happened in Colorado led Ellen Clegg and me to include it in our book, “What Works in Community News,” which will be published by Beacon Press early next year. I visited the Denver area in September 2021 and learned that the metro region is being well served. The Sun, the Post, Colorado Public Radio and another startup, The Denver Gazette, were all doing good work.
The problem, though, was in those places that weren’t within commuting distance of Denver. The news deserts that exist in the rural parts of the state were why The Colorado Sun was trying to provide some statewide coverage rather than merely focusing on Denver. So it was heartening to see that several papers whose owners wanted to move on have been acquired by a small chain. The indefatigable Corey Hutchins of Colorado College reports that O’Rourke Media Group, based in Arizona, is the new owner of Colorado papers in Salida, Buena Vista, Leadville, Park County and Fairplay.
“I feel like I’m taking over newsrooms that are well resourced,” the chain’s CEO, Jim O’Rourke, told Hutchins. “I like that, because that gives us an opportunity to come in and work with this team on things that we can do differently moving forward — things that we could do to help. And it’s better starting from a position like this versus going into a totally distressed situation where the previous company gutted the place.”
The news desert problem is real. But what’s happened in Denver and, now, in rural Colorado demonstrates what I’ve seen since I started reporting on the local news crisis some 15 years ago: Where there is failure there is also opportunity.
More: Ellen and I recently interviewed former Denver Post editor Greg Moore on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” And in June 2021, I wrote about how 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs were saved through an effort that included The Colorado Sun.
Catching up with Lesley Stahl’s semi-tough profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene
Happy Easter, everyone! We attended the vigil service at our church early this morning, so I’m only now getting my bearings. We’ll have a family dinner later today, but otherwise things will be pretty quiet.
Right now I’d like to catch up in a piece of overdue media-critic business. Last week “60 Minutes” profiled Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist congresswoman from Georgia who was stripped of her committee assignments under the previous Democratic leadership after urging that the then-speaker, Nancy Pelosi, be executed for “treason,” and who is now a confidant of Pelosi’s successor, the loathsome, spineless Kevin McCarthy.
“60 Minutes” took a lot of criticism for providing someone like Greene with a platform. I did not watch it at the time but decided instead to watch it with my graduate ethics students on Wednesday evening. I want to see if their reactions and mine were the same.
I think most of us came away with the view that interviewer Lesley Stahl did an OK job of holding Greene to account. Stahl wasn’t as bad as some of her critics had claimed, although she wasn’t great. I’d give her a “B.” Stahl took a lot of heat for rolling her eyes and responding “Wow. OK.” when Greene doubled down on her horrific libel that Democrats promote pedophilia, but I thought her understated contempt was fairly effective. I also liked the use of Greene’s tweets to show that she was lying when she denied having said things that Stahl cited. Naturally, Greene threw her staff under the bus by claiming someone else wrote the tweets.
On the other hand, Stahl let Greene deny that she’s a QAnon adherent, even though the Democrats-are-pedophiles lie is a key part of QAnon ideology. Stahl also betrayed her establishment bias by asking Greene why she wouldn’t agree to some sort of compromise over the debt ceiling. “The two sides have to come together and hammer it out,” Stahl said. No. What she should have said was that the debt ceiling is a phony issue, and that Greene and other Republicans are refusing to approve borrowing to cover spending that was approved by Congress and has already taken place. What Greene and her ilk are engaged in is hostage-taking, and Stahl should have pointed that out.
Stahl also failed to challenge Greene when she whined that she has been falsely described as a racist and an antisemite. She is, in fact, both, and let’s not forget that she once went so far as to blame the California wildfires on Jewish space lasers.
The real problem with the piece, though, was the framing. Some of my students were put off by scenes of Greene mingling with enthusiastic supporters back in her district, where she’s very popular. I didn’t like the friendly stroll around Greene’s estate.
Greene has emerged as a powerful and influential government official as well as a malignant force in American society. She was eminently worthy of a story by “60 Minutes,” but she shouldn’t have been treated to a profile, even one as semi-tough as the one presided over by Stahl. Instead, it should have been a no-holds-barred look at a dangerous figure in U.S. politics. Greene would have been invited for an interview, but her participation would not have been necessary.
What “60 Minutes” and Stahl gave us wasn’t terrible, but they blew an opportunity to give us something much better.
Following a journalist’s arrest by Putin’s thugs, Nick Daniloff offers his hard-earned wisdom
My friend and colleague Nick Daniloff has an important op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal about his time in a Soviet prison in 1986, comparing his ordeal to that of Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was recently arrested by Vladimir Putin’s thugs. At the time of his own arrest, Daniloff was a reporter for U.S. News & World Report. Later he joined Northeastern University’s School of Journalism as a faculty member and director, which is how I got to know him. He writes (free link):
Reporting in Russia has always been risky. The authorities there have never been comfortable with the open flow of information, and they have recently imposed new restrictions on public protests. Several Western news organizations pulled their correspondents to protest recently passed laws that essentially ban independent reporting about the Ukraine invasion. Much of Russia’s independent media have been forced to shut down or to persevere outside the country.
We need to protect and honor the bravery of foreign correspondents, photographers and stringers all over the world, reporting in difficult and dangerous circumstances. And to my fellow Russian correspondent Evan Gershkovich: Courage.
Nick’s memoir, “Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent,” is a terrific look back told by a journalist who made a difference.
The MBTA’s Medford/Tufts restrooms are a real pisser
Phillip Eng, the new head of the MBTA, is going to quickly find out that it’s not just the big things, it’s the little things, too.
Earlier today I made the mile-and-a-half walk from my house to the new, underused Tufts Green Line station. I’d had a big cup of coffee before I left the house, but I figured I could use one of the two restrooms that are right next to the ticket machine. They were locked.
It wasn’t that long ago that they were unlocked. Then, the last time I needed to use one, an employee saw me and unlocked it so I could use it. Remembering that, I knocked on the door of the employees’ lounge. Oh, those aren’t for the public, I was told. What?
Then I saw one of the doors open, so I tried to enter. An employee grabbed the door and prevented me from using it. I let it go — I didn’t want to get charged with assault. Fortunately my bladder calmed down, though I didn’t.
What is this crap? Davis Square has public restrooms. It’s a much more crowded station, and they can get kind of disgusting. But when you gotta go, you gotta go. By contrast, Tufts is a clean, underutilized station with two restrooms, and you can’t use them.
The MBTA’s contempt for the riding public knows no bounds.
A remarkable set of front pages mark Trump’s day in a New York courtroom
Tuesday was, as we keep being told, historic. We don’t know what will happen to Donald Trump next, and he may be faced with more serious charges in Georgia and Washington. These front pages, though, tell quite a story about the former president’s arraignment on felony charges in New York. (From the Freedom Forum’s indispensable Today’s Front Pages website.)
