We visited Drumlin Farm in Lincoln for the first time earlier today. The weather was warm and clear — so clear that we could easily see Mount Monadnock from the top of the drumlin from which the farm takes its name.
Author: Dan Kennedy
A bit about Mastodon
I’ve opened an account on Mastodon in the hopes that it will prove to be a good alternative to Twitter, now in the midst of an astonishing implosion.
What I’m hoping for is something like Twitter pre-Elon Musk, only without the trolls and bots, the personal abuse and the piling-on. I don’t think any of us believed Twitter was a wonderful place before Musk lit it on fire. So far, Mastodon sort of fits the bill, but it’s also something different. The culture is more polite — maybe excessively so, though that might just be a first impression.
In any case, there doesn’t seem to be any going back. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter is essentially gone in a few weeks. You can follow me on Mastodon at @dankennedy_nu@journa.host. And for a really good explanation of Mastodon and how its decentralized governance works, I highly recommended this Lawfare podcast.
A federal appeals court rules that NH’s criminal libel law is constitutional
If we know anything about libel law, then we know that false, defamatory speech is not a crime. It’s a civil matter, to be worked out between the two parties in court. Right? Well … hold on.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that New Hampshire’s criminal-libel statute passes constitutional muster. The case was especially pernicious because the defendant, Robert Frese, was charged with claiming that the police chief in his town of Exeter was a coward who had “covered up for a dirty cop.” That statement may be entirely false; but the idea that someone could be charged with a misdemeanor for criticizing the police is chilling indeed.
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In 2019, I gave the Exeter Police Department a New England Muzzle Award for charging Frese with a misdemeanor, writing that the New Hampshire law amounted to “seditious libel, making it a crime to criticize the government.” It’s something we thought had faded away with John Peter Zenger, a New York printer who was acquitted nearly 300 years ago.
But Judge Jeffrey Howard, noting that the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 Times v. Sullivan decision does not protect knowingly false, defamatory speech directed at public officials, ruled that Frese did not have a case. Howard wrote:
Mindful of the Supreme Court’s guidance that “the knowingly false statement and the false statement made with reckless disregard of the truth, do not enjoy constitutional protection[,]” we conclude that Frese’s allegations fall short of asserting viable constitutional claims.
No one would be surprised that Howard would assert that Times v. Sullivan doesn’t protect knowingly false, defamatory statements. But his assertion that such statements may form the basis of a criminal case rather than a civil lawsuit is worrisome — especially at a time when there are rumbles coming out of the Supreme Court that it may be inclined to dial back libel protections, as I wrote for GBH News last year.
Judge Howard and his colleagues had a chance to stand up for freedom of speech. Instead, they chose something else.
A political theory that helps explain why not much changed this week
In light of the Democrats’ unexpectedly strong showing, I want to call your attention to a recent Ezra Klein podcast. Political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, who surveyed some 500,000 voters for their new book about the 2020 election, “The Bitter End,” with Chris Tausanovitch, makes what I think are three crucial arguments for understanding our political culture at the moment.
- Swing voters have all but disappeared as traditional issues such as the legacy of the New Deal have shifted to issues of identity — reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, racial equity and the like. Voters might change their minds from time to time on, say, taxes, but they’re not going to change their minds on matters of personal autonomy. Nor, in the end, were they especially swayed by inflation. That’s why this week’s predicted red wave is looking more like a red trickle — if that. Sides and Vavreck refer to this as “calcification.”
- Because the electorate is so closely divided, tiny swings in the election results can result in major changes. For instance, it appears likely that only a few seats will change hands in the House, yet that’s going to result in a Donald Trump-supporting speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and the empowerment of far-right fringe figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene. (But not, perhaps, Lauren Boebert.)
- Because the party out of power is never any more than a slight shift away from regaining the majority, there is no incentive for either major party to engage in any significant rethinking. Sides and Vavreck point out that the Republicans engaged in quite a bit of self-reflection after Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney for a second term in 2012. But after Trump lost in 2020, self-reflection was replaced with a doubling-down on Trumpism and an insistence that the election had been stolen.
More than any polls, the Sides and Vavreck thesis explains why President Biden’s popularity could be as low as it is (53.5% disapprove/41.4% approve, according to FiveThirtyEight) without it having much effect on House and Senate races. It also explains why the Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights was less potent than Democrats had hoped — voters were already lined up on both sides the blue-red divide. Finally, it explains why the pollsters can be wrong and not wrong at the same time — they’re dealing with differences that are just too small to measure.
Advance to go digital-only at four of its papers in Alabama and Mississippi
When I speak to audiences about the future of local news, inevitably I’m asked if I think newspapers at some point will end their print editions once and for all. I always respond that I’m not a good person to answer that question — 25 years ago, I assumed they’d be long gone by now. Not only are they still here, but even as digitally focused a news outlet as The Boston Globe was still making more than half of its money from print as recently as a year ago.
I do think that we’re going to see newspapers cut back on print days, eventually moving to one big weekend print paper with digital distribution the rest of the week. But that’s not going to happen as long as publishers believe there’s still money in print advertising and circulation, both of which command a premium compared to digital.
Which is why I was intrigued by an announcement by the Advance chain last week that its three Albama and one Mississippi newspaper will end their print editions altogether by early 2023.
“We remain deeply committed to serving our local communities and are producing high-quality journalism and reaching more people than ever before,” said Tom Bates, president of Alabama Media Group, in a statement published by AL.com. “At the same time, we’re adjusting to how Alabama readers want their information today, which increasingly is on a mobile device, not in a printed newspaper.”
I’m not going to snark. Advance is a privately held company owned by the Newhouse family, and I think they are genuinely trying to find a way forward. In Massachusetts, Advance owns The Republican of Springfield and MassLive.com, which are run more or less as separate operations.
A better analogy to Alabama and Mississippi, though, is Advance’s New Jersey properties. Advance publishes the largest daily newspaper in that state — The Star-Ledger of Newark — and two smaller dailies, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey News, as well as several smaller publications. All of them operate under the NJ.com banner, and the emphasis is on digital subscriptions. There’s a unified newsroom of about 115 journalists who feed stories to both NJ.com and to the print editions. It’s similar to what Hearst is doing in Connecticut with one newsroom serving the New Haven Register, the Connecticut Post, several smaller papers and the digital-only CTInsider.
The difference in Alabama is that Advance is ending the print editions and focusing on its digital-only operations, shutting down three Alabama papers — The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times and the Press-Register of Mobile — and The Mississippi Press.
Is this smart? In 2012, Advance cut The Times-Picayune back to three days of print at a time when broadband penetration in New Orleans and the surrounding area lagged behind other parts of the country. An outcry resulted, and the move was reversed the following year. But the damage had been done; The Times-Picayune, a once-great paper that had served as a lifeline following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, ended up being acquired in 2019 by an independent daily, The Advocate of Baton Rouge.
Even so, 2012 was a long time ago. Today, according to the Alabama Media Group, AL.com is in the top 10 of local news websites in the U.S., reaching about 11 million users each month. Statista reports that broadband penetration in 2019 was about 81% in Alabama and about 76% in Mississippi; no doubt those figure are higher today. (By comparison, that number was 88% in Massachusetts.) Still, Alabama and Mississippi are among our poorest states, and the move away from print is going to leave some people behind.
“The print side of our business does not make economic sense in Alabama,” Bates told Alexandra Bruell (free link) of The Wall Street Journal. Bruell reported that the circulation of Advance’s three Alabama papers is down to around 30,000, a drop from 260,000 a decade ago.
So this seems like a good time for Advance to try moving into a digital-only future. If it enhances the bottom line, then other publishers can be expected to follow suit. And if that, in turn, provides a boost to Advances local journalism, then that will be good news for everyone.
Summer in November
A walk around the Middle and South Reservoirs in the Middlesex Fells on a summer-like afternoon.
The Globe is hit with a subpoena despite new rules protecting journalists
Well, that didn’t last long.
Late last month, supporters of a free press were celebrating when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new guidelines aimed at protecting journalists. As Hadley Baker and Katherine Pompilio wrote at Lawfare, the rules — codifying a policy that Garland had put into effect early in his term — would prohibit “the use of compulsory legal process — the use of subpoenas, search warrants, court orders, and other investigatory practices — against ‘newsgathering’ individuals who possess and/or publish classified information.”
The rules were specifically aimed at protecting journalists in leak investigations involving classified information. But surely the guidelines would inform the Justice Department’s behavior in lesser matters, no? No. Today The Boston Globe reports that one of its editors, Joshua Miller, has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors who are demanding that Miller testify on Dec. 5 in a case involving the Harvard admissions scandal. Miller broke that story in 2019.
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Miller would most likely not have to testify in 49 states or the District of Columbia because they either have a shield law or, as is the case in Massachusetts, a ruling from their highest state court that journalists are protected from being dragged into court at the whim of prosecutors. The only places that do not have shield protections are the state of Wyoming and the federal government. The courts, though, are supposed to balance the interests of the criminal-justice system against the importance of a free press. As Mike Damiano writes in the Globe:
In a memorandum supporting a motion to quash the subpoena, Globe counsel Jonathan M. Albano cited extensive legal precedents protecting journalists from subpoenas and referred to “the widespread recognition that the First Amendment protects journalists from the needless disclosure of sources, investigative techniques, and both confidential and non-confidential work product.”
The judge in the case may rule against the prosecution, but it shouldn’t get even that far. This is an outrage against the First Amendment. If U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins didn’t know about it, she needs to step in immediately and put an end to it. And if she did know, then she needs to undergo the “comprehensive training” that the Garland memo refers to as soon as possible.
Nancy West talks about her entrepreneurial journey and the state of journalism in N.H.
On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Nancy West, executive editor of InDepthNH.org.
Nancy was an investigative reporter during her 30-year career at the New Hampshire Union Leader. Nancy founded the nonprofit New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism in 2015, and has taught investigative reporting at a summer program for students at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
Ellen has a Quick Take on a recent article by Dan Froomkin in Washington Monthly. Froomkin, who is now editor of Press Watch, used to work for The Washington Post and has been critical of owner Jeff Bezos. Froomkin is taking aim at the content management system developed by the Post under Bezos. The Post licenses this system to other news outlets around the country. That kind of market power worries Froomkin.
My Quick Take is on the state of journalism in Vermont, a subject we talked about on a recent podcast with Anne Galloway, the founding editor of VTDigger, a well-regarded digital startup. Dan’s topic is about a good piece of media criticism. Bill Schubart, a journalist who writes a column for VTDigger, wrote a column critiquing a recent New Yorker piece by Bill McKibben on Vermont journalism. But Schubart also looked inward and wrote that Digger itself is having problems.
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Seismic change comes to the New Haven Independent as Tom Breen moves up
There is huge news today in the world of independent community journalism. Paul Bass, the founder of the New Haven Independent, is stepping aside as editor while Tom Breen, currently the managing editor, moves up to the top position. Bass has been talking about making this change for a while, and on Tuesday he made it official.
Bass, 62, isn’t going anywhere. He’ll continue as executive director of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization he set up to oversee the Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel in New Haven’s northwest suburbs, and WNHH Radio, a low-power FM station that specializes in community programming. He’ll also continue to report the news for the Independent and host a show on WNHH.
Breen, 34, joined the staff of the Independent as a reporter in 2018 and later became managing editor. Breen is a dogged journalist; last November, I accompanied him as he knocked on the doors of houses that had been foreclosed on, a regular practice of his that has yielded important stories.
The Independent is one of the oldest and still among the best nonprofit local news startups in the country. It was the primary subject of my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” and it will also be featured in “What Works: The Future of Local News,” a book-in-progress by Ellen Clegg and me.
Congratulations to Paul and Tom. This is a big change for a news organization that has been remarkably stable over the course of its 17-year existence.
Jackie Kucinich of The Daily Beast will be the Globe’s new DC bureau chief
The Boston Globe has hired a new Washington bureau chief — Jackie Kucinich, who currently holds that position at The Daily Beast. Kucinich replaces Liz Goodwin, who left the Globe during the summer in order to cover Congress for The Washington Post.
Before starting at the Beast in 2014, Kucinich worked for the Post, USA Today, Roll Call and The Hill, and is a regular contributor to CNN.
“This is a big get for the Globe,” said Brian McGrory in a memo to the staff, which a trusted source forwarded to me Tuesday. “Jackie is heralded around Washington, rightly so, for her fresh eye and her appropriately skeptical view, for knowing the intricacies of the city without ever allowing herself to be part of the press pack within it.”
Kucinich, who lives in Washington with her husband and daughter, is the daughter of former Cleveland mayor and congressman Dennis Kucinich. She’ll begin her new job on Nov. 21.