The Texas Observer, a highly regarded publication that was once the home of the late, great Molly Ivins, is shutting down and laying off its 17-person staff, which includes 13 journalists. The Texas Tribune has the story and notes:
The closing of the Observer raises questions about whether small progressive publications can survive the digital and demographic transformation of journalism and the information ecosystem during a time of rapid social and technological change.
Indeed, the Tribune, a nonprofit digital startup with more than 50 journalists, would be foremost among the new wave of publications that led to the Observer’s demise.
The Observer had been in turmoil for quite some time. My “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, talked about it on our podcast a year ago this week. Click here and go to 29:00.
Good story, bad headline. “The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend e-books like a library,” proclaims The Verge. In fact, U.S. District Court Judge John Koeltl ruled Friday that if the Archive wants to lend e-books, it must do so like a library — by purchasing a license and thus compensating publishers and authors for their work.
The only surprise is that Koeltl acted just a few days after a hearing in his New York courtroom. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. When an argument is so wrong-headed as the one advanced by the Archive, there is no reason for justice not to be swift and certain. It was ludicrous for the folks at the Archive to believe they could simply scan books they own and lend them out. I mean, why didn’t the local public library think of that?
Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society — owning, preserving, and lending books.
This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.
Good grief. Certainly there’s a critique to be made of the restrictive manner in which publishers make e-books available to libraries. But simply ignoring the law is not a smart strategy for dealing with that. I just hope the Archive is able to survive this incredibly wrong-headed gamble.
This bears watching. New England Public Media, which serves Western Massachusetts through WFCR Radio and WGBY-TV, is laying off 17 employees, or about 20% of its staff, according to Jim Kinney of MassLive. It looks like the cutting is mainly on the television side, with a Thursday evening magazine program called “Connecting Point” being canceled.
There’s also a relationship between the GBH Educational Foundation and New England Public Media: GBH holds the broadcast license for WGBY. In 2019, when WFCR and WGBY were merged, GBH said it would invest $6 million in the television station over the next six years, Adam Reilly reported at GBH News. Reilly wrote that the combined operation employed 78 people at that time.
Kinney reported that New England Public Media lost $4.6 million during the fiscal year that ended June 20, 2022, and that it “transferred $3.4 million from the WGBH Educational Foundation to its own balance sheet” during that same year. The operation is also in the midst of a $9 million renovation to its Springfield headquarters, again with GBH’s involvement.
I was a paid contributor at GBH News from 1998 until about a year ago, and I still have friends over there. I hope that New England Public Media can right its ship — and that its problems don’t spill over to GBH’s own local and regional news operations.
My friend Bill Mitchell sent along a bio of me that he asked Google’s Bard to write — proving, once again, that artificial intelligence may be artificial, but it sure isn’t intelligent. Throughout this short bio, Bard mixes me up with marketing guy Dan Kennedy. Here’s the whole thing, with the mistakes highlighted in blue.
Dan Kennedy is a media critic, marketing consultant, and author. He is a former media critic for the Boston Phoenix and is now a professor of journalism at Northeastern University. He is also the founder of Magnetic Marketing and the author of several books on marketing and business, including “The No B.S. Marketing Letter” and “The Magnetic Marketing System.”
Kennedy is a frequent media commentator and has appeared on CNN, CNBC, and Fox News. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes and The Huffington Post. [Note: Years ago I appeared a couple of times on CNN and once on Fox News. I don’t believe I ever wrote anything for Forbes, but I could be mistaken.]
Kennedy is a controversial figure in the media industry. He has been criticized for his outspoken views on the state of journalism and his willingness to criticize his colleagues. However, he is also respected for his knowledge of the industry and his ability to help businesses grow.
Kennedy is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Boston University School of Public Communication.[A bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northeastern University and a master’s in American history from BU, but not from SPC.]He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.[Not since 1980.]
Here are some of his notable works:
* The No B.S. Marketing Letter (2009) * The Magnetic Marketing System (2012) * The Renegade Challenge (2016) * The No B.S. Inner Circle (2017)[LOL.]
Way back when, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam wrote about me, the other DK and yet another DK. At least he was trying to be funny. And I should add that I’ll be smiling all week about being called “a controversial figure in the media industry.”
Barnes told the historian H.W. Brands, above, about his Connally claims for a 2015 biography of Reagan, but no one took much notice. Photo (cc) 2022 by Larry D. Moore.
I got off the phone a little while ago with Tom Johnson, the former top executive at the Los Angeles Times and CNN who, along with several other people, confirmed that Ben Barnes had once told him that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign interfered with efforts to bring home 52 American hostages from Iran.
Barnes told The New York Times in a story published Saturday that he had accompanied his mentor, John Connally, a former Texas governor and Reagan supporter, on a mission to Middle Eastern capitals aimed at trying to prevent the hostages from being released until after the November 1980 election. The crisis was a significant factor in President Jimmy Carter’s loss to Reagan. The Reagan camp’s fear that Carter would find a way to bring the hostages home just before the election is often referred to as “the October surprise.”
What prompted Johnson to contact me was that I had expressed shock that he’d kept this story to himself until the Times’ Peter Baker spoke with him to confirm that he’d heard it from Barnes. “Unconscionable,” I called it. Johnson wanted me to know that there was more to the story. “This is not a cover-my-ass kind of call,” he said, adding: “I care about my reputation.” I thought Johnson made some worthwhile points, and I’ll lay them out here.
Johnson said he did not learn about Barnes’ account until 2017, some 16 years after his retirement. He, Barnes and several other people were attending a dinner when Barnes told his story, he recalled. Johnson also said that he considered the dinner to be off the record. Still, he added, he should have found a way to get the story to journalists without breaking that agreement, saying, “Clearly this is a serious ethical issue here…. Am I feeling terrible about not finding a way? Yes.”
Johnson also said that he urged Barnes to tell Carter, and that Barnes said he would. “I think everybody at the table felt that it reflected incredibly badly on Gov. Connally,” Johnson told me. “I encouraged Ben to tell President Carter before he dies, and he said he planned to.” Apparently, though, Barnes kept his silence (or not; see below) until he spoke with the Times recently.
The historian H.W. Brands actually interviewed Barnes and wrote about his claims some years earlier in his 2015 biography of Reagan. Brands responded to questions about that conversation with Barnes several days ago with the History News Network. “Connally conveyed to governments and influential people in the Middle East that it would ‘not be helpful’ — Barnes’s characterization — to the Reagan campaign if the hostages were released before the election,” Brands told HNN. He also said he was “surprised” that Barnes’ comments received little attention after his book, “Reagan: The Life,” was published.
All of this provides valuable context as to how and when Johnson learned of Barnes’ claims and why he didn’t say anything after he learned about them. I think it’s significant that he did not know about them until recent years. Johnson said he thought Barnes was going to speak with Carter, and that would have led to a major national story. Most important, Barnes’ claims had already been published in a book just two years earlier, and no one took much notice.
For some time now, Boston Globe insiders have known that the Globe opinion section was going to cease co-publishing The Emancipator, a digital publication on racial justice. Now the Globe is making it official: Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research will continue to publish The Emancipator without the Globe’s involvement.
The following message to Globe staff members, from chief executive Linda Henry and editorial page editor Jim Dao, went out a little while ago. It was provided to me by a trusted source.
Hi team,
In March 2021, we embarked on an ambitious new media collaboration with Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research to build and launch The Emancipator, a non-profit, solutions-focused multimedia newsroom that would help drive the national conversation on racial justice and equity with deep journalism grounded in current research
The partnership between Globe Opinion and BU was designed to draw from the strengths of our two institutions, each of us committing two years of time, expertise, and resources to help lay the groundwork from which The Emancipator would grow. This helped the initiative to launch quickly, providing essential startup resources so that the editorial team could focus on incubating ideas and pursuing ambitious projects during critical moments in the national discourse on race.
While many non-profit newsrooms don’t make it, The Emancipator has thrived as its journalism and mission has resonated with local and national audiences. They have published hundreds of original pieces and welcomed thousands of readers online and at events, including a community celebration for Juneteenth in Boston and with prominent members of Congress, both virtual and live in Washington, D.C. They have cultivated a strong and dedicated newsletter following. Their thoughtful explainer videos have been shared widely across social media.
Having successfully completed our two-year partnership with BU in getting this newsroom launched, The Emancipator will transition to be fully integrated at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research starting this week. The move to BU will streamline its operations and fundraising efforts and will unite the editorial team under one organization. During the transition, we will continue to publish The Emancipator on Globe.com.
The Emancipator’s Globe-based employees will be carrying forward with their roles as part of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research.
Amber Payne, co-editor in chief, will transition into the role of Publisher and GM, shifting to focus on strategic operations and development. She will lead the search for The Emancipator’s next editor in chief. It has been inspiring to witness her leadership and creative vision and we wish her continued success in her new role.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr, who anchored the editorial team for The Emancipator and helped launch its newsletter, Unbound, will be dedicating 100% of her time to Globe Opinion. We congratulate her for the incredible work she produced with The Emancipator, particularly her powerful racial wealth gap series, and we look forward to seeing her column more frequently in the Globe.
We are proud of the role that The Boston Globe has played in launching and growing this innovative newsroom, and will continue to support their solutions-focused journalism and research. We expect to continue highlighting their work through op-eds and to serve as a media partner for future events.
So many of our colleagues across the company helped to launch this initiative, and we want to acknowledge and congratulate them on the success of The Emancipator.
Our Globe Opinion team provided support across the board, from editorial guidance, digital production, design, and operations. A special thanks to Marjorie Pritchard, Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Abbi Matheson, Heather Hopp-Bruce, Abi Canina, and former editorial page editor, Bina Venkataraman, who conceptualized and helped launch The Emancipator’s early framework and design.
Our IT, engineering, product and development teams helped build The Emancipator’s website and integrated their editorial teams on our publishing system, providing front and backend technical support. A special thanks to Abraham Doris-Down, Todd Dukart, Briana Boyington, Lynda Finley and their teams.
Our legal, finance, and HR teams have supported the initiative from its earliest days, ensuring administrative and operational support to structure the team, onboard new employees, and manage resources and expenses. To Dan Krockmalnic, Katie Lazares, Dhiraj Nayar, Chris Zeien, Vinne Ferlisi, Alan Li – thank you.
Our marketing and creative teams have promoted The Emancipator brand across brands and our newsletters with unique print and digital ad campaigns. Thank you to Peggy Byrd, Erin Maghran and their team for supporting this initiative within the BGM family of products.
Our communications and PR teams developed strategies for announcing and launching editorial initiatives, securing interviews with national press. Together with our newsletter, social and audience engagement teams, we helped grow a tremendous following for The Emancipator’s work across multimedia channels. Thank you to Heidi Flood, Devin Smith, LaDonna LaGuerre and their teams for their support.
Our ad sales and events team helped secure one of The Emancipator’s first major event sponsors and has been working to provide the team with guidance to continue growing its sponsor networks. Huge thank you to Kayvan Salmanpour, Erin Kimball, Kazi Ahmed, Erika Hale and their teams.
The Globe’s newsroom has been incredibly supportive in providing access to its resources from photo to video to publishing support and more. Our journalists have championed The Emancipator’s work within their own initiatives, including A Beautiful Resistance and Black News Hour. Thank you to Jeneé Osterheldt for providing counsel and ideation and to Jason Tuohey, our homepage team, and so many across the newsroom for your ongoing support.
We are grateful to our partners at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research for incubating this project with us. Congratulations to everyone involved in this impactful new initiative, and we look forward to seeing The Emancipator continue to grow.
Simply as a matter of copyright law, I’m afraid that the Internet Archive — one of the most valuable corners of the internet — is about to fall off a cliff, taking with it our access to countless old websites, newspapers and other content.
Let me explain. On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan heard opening arguments in a lawsuit brought by four major book publishers who argue that the Internet Archive is violating copyright law by digitizing books in its possession and lending them for free. Blake Brittain reports for Reuters that the proceedings did not appear to go well for the Archive, with U.S. District Judge John Koeltl asking “pointed questions.”
“You avoid the question of whether the library has the right to reproduce the book that it otherwise has the right to possess, which is really at the heart of the case,” Koeltl reportedly told the Archive’s lawyer, Joe Gratz. “The publisher has a copyright right to control reproduction.” Yikes.
The Archive ramped up its lending during the COVID-19 pandemic and has not cut back even though life has more or less returned to normal. The Archive argues that it’s doing what any library does — it’s lending books that it owns, and it’s controlling how many people can borrow a book at any given time. In other words, it’s not simply making electronic versions of its books available for mass download. That may show some desire to act responsibly on the Archive’s part, but that doesn’t make it legal.
By contrast, a library typically buys one or more hard copies of a book and lends them out, or buys the right to lend e-books to its patrons. The operative word in both cases is “buys.” Money changes hands. Publishers and authors are compensated. Buying a hard copy of a book, digitizing it without any additional payment, and then lending it out is illegal, regardless of whether the lending is controlled or not. I find it kind of stunning that the Archive would put its entire free service at risk over such an obviously wrong stand.
“If this conduct is normalized, there would be no point to the Copyright Act,” Maria Pallante, chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, told (free link) Erin Mulvaney and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, the Journal story notes that Google won its own legal battle over Google Books only by limiting what you can find to snippets of books, not the entire text.
I should point out that the Archive is not without some powerful friends of its own. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is providing legal assistance. In addition, Inside Higher Ed published a commentary written by a number of Archive supporters who argue that the Archive is a legitimate library, and that its “controlled digital lending” system, which limits lending to one user at a time, is covered by the fair use provision of copyright law.
“The argument that the Internet Archive isn’t a library is wrong,” according to the Inside Higher Ed essay. “If this argument is accepted, the results would jeopardize the future development of digital libraries nationwide.”
Oh, and by the way: Inside Higher Ed limits users to five free articles a month before you have to pay for a subscription — which, of course, it has every right to do.
I looked up my own books and found that two of the three, “Little People” (2003) and “The Wired City” (2013), are available for borrowing. I don’t mind. Whatever economic value they had has long since expired, and if someone would like to read them for free without using a traditional library, that’s fine. But I certainly would have objected during the first couple of years after they were published. Rodale paid me a decent advance for “Little People,” which funded the time off I took in order to research and write it. “The Wired City” was published by the University of Massachusetts Press, an academic publisher that survives from sales to libraries, both in hard copy and electronic form.
The Internet Archive is a godsend. Just recently I used it to look up the original version of a New York Times editorial that prompted Sarah Palin’s unsuccessful libel suit. The Archive has also digitized nearly every print edition of The Boston Phoenix through an arrangement with Northeastern University, which holds the copyright thanks to the generosity of Stephen Mindich, the late publisher. Along with Wikipedia, the Archive is one of the last uncorrupted places on the internet.
Ideally I’d like to see the Archive work out an arrangement with the book publishers that might limit but not shut down its book-lending program. My fear, though, is that this is headed for a very bad end.
Tom Johnson, the former top executive at the Los Angeles Times and CNN, knew about Barnes’ allegations, believed them — and never said a word. Photo (cc) 2016 by the LBJ Library.
If you were part of media and political circles in the early 1990s, then you were certainly aware of sensational accusations by Gary Sick, a top national security official in the Carter administration, that Ronald Reagan’s campaign had sabotaged efforts to bring the Iranian hostage crisis to a close during the waning weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign.
Jimmy Carter suffered a landslide re-election defeat at Reagan’s hands — an outcome that might have been different if he’d been able to celebrate the return of the 52 American hostages. Indeed, it was the prospect of such an “October surprise,” Sick argued, that led Reagan operatives to intervene with the Iranians and promise them weapons from Israel if they would agree not to release the hostages until Reagan was in office.
Sick’s charges could not be proven. But, on Saturday, The New York Times published a startling account (free link) about Ben Barnes, a former aide to the late Texas Gov. John Connally, who says that he and Connally were directly involved in working to delay the release of the hostages. Connally, a Democrat-turned-Republican who had served as treasury secretary under Richard Nixon, had run unsuccessfully for president himself in 1980 and was hoping for a plum appointment from Reagan. The Times’ Peter Baker writes of Barnes:
Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Why now? Barnes is 84; Carter, who’s 98, has entered hospice care. In Barnes’ telling, he was suffering from pangs of conscience. “History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes told Baker. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”
Now, my apologies for leading with the background, which is something I always tell my students not to do. Buried deep within Baker’s story is a massive media scandal. Get a load of this:
Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.
All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.
Yes — Tom Johnson, a former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN, has known about Barnes’ story for years, believes it and sat on it. This is an unconscionable act on Johnson’s part. Barnes’ story can’t be entirely verified, but it tracks with what we already know and is the closest thing we’ve had to proof that the Reagan campaign deliberately prolonged the hostages’ agony for political gain. I mean, this is really shocking stuff.
It also fits with a pattern of Republican candidates for president interfering in American foreign policy and cutting deals with our adversaries in order to gain political advantage.
During the 1968 campaign, Nixon’s henchmen secretly threw a wrench into U.S. peace talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War and also took a half-million-dollar bribe from the right-wing junta then running Greece. As we all know, Donald Trump was happy to benefit from a Russian influence campaign in 2016, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had ties to Russian intelligence. Trump’s 2020 campaign featured his threat to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless officials there announced they were investigating Hunter Biden — an act that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Barnes has filled in an important missing piece of history and cast serious doubts on the legitimacy of Reagan’s presidency. Reagan kicked off more than 40 years of right-wing economics that have left us with declining wages, widening income inequality and the toxic belief that private interests should come before the public good. It’s disheartening to receive confirmation that it never should have happened.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mark Histed, a researcher at the Democracy Policy Network. DPN is a network of policy organizers who have a simple mission: sustaining democracy. That work takes place largely at the local level. Mark and others at DPN do research and provide deep-dive policy kits that help local citizens and legislators champion big ideas.
Mark leads the Local News Dollars effort and recently wrote a report on how states can establish a system where residents are issued vouchers they can use to subscribe or donate to the local journalism outlet of their choice.
In our Quick Takes, I discuss Ralph Nader — remember him? The consumer advocate-turned-presidential political spoiler got a lot of favorable attention late last month when it was learned that he would help launch a nonprofit newspaper in his hometown of Winsted, Connecticut. The paper, the Winsted Citizen, was the town’s first in a couple of years, although the daily Republican-American covers the area, too. But now people are wondering what exactly is going on — and if Nader is really going to come through with enough money for the Citizen to achieve liftoff.
Ellen tunes in to the new “Boston Strangler” movie on Hulu. In the movie, Keira Knightley portrays the late, great Loretta McLaughlin, who paired up with reporter Jean Cole at the Boston Record American to write a series of stories about the murders of women in Boston in the 1960s. Loretta moved on to The Boston Globe, where she did groundbreaking work on the AIDS crisis and became editorial page editor. She was a mentor to many, and an especially fierce advocate for the advancement of women in journalism.
