Outrage by the white leadership over Alexis Johnson’s tweet marked a key moment in the Post-Gazette’s downward trajectory. Credit: Simone Perez via thealexisjohnson.com.
Block Communications announced Wednesday that it will shut down the storied Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in May. Writing at Nieman Lab, Joshua Benton confirms what I told Charlie Wolfson of Pittsburgh’s Public Source — that an actual closure would make Pittsburgh the largest city in the U.S. without a daily newspaper.
Benton, though, expresses optimism that with the feuding Block family out of the way, the path is clearer for someone else to step in. One possibility he cites: the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit foundation that already owns and operates the for-profit Philadelphia Inquirer on the other side of the state.
The Post-Gazette was once a great paper, winning its most recent Pultizer Prize in 2019 for its coverage of the mass shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue. That’s when the distinguished Boston Globe alumnus David Shribman was executive editor of the paper. After he retired, though, the paper increasingly went MAGA under one faction of the Block family.
I wrote about a particularly ugly incident in 2020 for GBH News. If you’d like to know some background about what went wrong at the Post-Gazette, here is my commentary.
The first two panels of this past Sunday’s “Doonesbury.”
I got a tip on Monday that The Boston Globe had lopped off the first two panels of the “Doonesbury” comic that appeared in this past Sunday’s paper. A quick check revealed that, indeed, the original comic consisted of eight panels, and the Globe ran just the last six. Given that the first panel depicted Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller letting loose with a Nazi salute and proclaiming “Heil!,” it seemed that maybe someone got it in their head to err on the side of inoffensiveness. Here is the complete eight-panel “Doonesbury” from this past Sunday.
But it turns out there’s a lot less to this than meets the eye.
In an attempt to find out what was going on, I posted a question on social media asking if this had happened anywhere else. I immediately heard from journalist Joshua J. Friedman, who wrote on Bluesky:
You'll also have to do a survey of whether the given paper always omits the first two (optional) panels! (But you very likely know this.)
I did not! Somehow I had made it to the age of 69 without realizing that many Sunday comic strips, including “Doonesbury,” make the first two panels optional so that newspapers can omit them in order to save space and, thus, money. So no, the Globe did not engage in any censorious editing. It did what it always does, and what many other papers also do. I went back in the archives for both “Doonesbury” and the Globe for several weeks, and in every instance the original consisted of eight panels and the Globe ran just the last six.
Those first two panels invariably consist of a quick and dispensable gag before moving on to the main part of the strip. In the case of last Sunday’s “Doonesbury,” it’s unfortunate that the two-panel gag was a particularly caustic jab at the loathsome Miller. That’s one that shouldn’t have ended up on the cutting-room floor.
My social media respondents told me that The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Portland Press Herald of Maine (which runs “Doonesbury” in its opinion section) were among the dailies that deleted the first two panels from their print editions. Don’t @ me about the Post. One of my correspondents found that the Post had eliminated the first two panels of “Doonesbury” the previous week as well, and presumably does so every week. And by the way, my understanding is that Sunday comic sections are generally not put together by the papers themselves but by syndication services they subscribe to.
Comics have always been regarded as an indispensable part of the Sunday paper, but they have succumbed to cost-cutting just like every other part of the newspaper business. It’s not censorship, but it’s a shame nevertheless.
Front and center: The New York Times reports on the imminent invasion of Cuba on April 7, 1961.
The New York Times and The Washington Post learned about U.S. plans to attack Venezuela shortly before the raid began, according to Max Tani and Shelby Talcott of Semafor. But they declined to run with the story “to avoid endangering US troops, two people familiar with the communications between the administration and the news organizations said.”
The decision was reminiscent of the legend over how the Times reported on an imminent U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba in 1962, which I’ll get to in a few moments.
But first, regarding the Venezuela decision: Right call or wrong call? As the Semafor story notes, the decision was “in keeping with longstanding American journalistic traditions.” Independent media commentator Margaret Sullivan writes that she’s torn and asks her readers to weigh in. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Jem Bartholomew leans toward yes they should have on the grounds that the Times and the Post knew the raid would violate international law.
Claremont, N.H., in 1877. Illustration via Snapshots of The Past.
Last July, I noted that the Eagle Times in Claremont, New Hampshire, had shut down. I also observed that Todd Bookman of New Hampshire Public Radio had produced an unusually harsh story on the former owner, venture capitalist Jay Lucas, which suggested there might be more to the story.
Indeed there was, and thanks to Media Nation reader Christian Avard for tipping me off. Last month Lucas was indicted on federal fraud charges. Arielle Mitropoulos reports at WMUR.com:
New York investigators have accused Jay Lucas, 71, of Newport, of scamming investors out of $50 million by lying to them and saying that their money would be invested in health and wellness companies when it was actually being used to cover personal expenses, promote unrelated ventures and make Ponzi-like payments to other investors.
A Republican politico who ran for governor in 1998, Lucas purchased the Eagle Times in 2022. As Damien Fisher writes for inDepthNH, Lucas said he would “would focus on positive, uplifting stories.” Fisher adds:
Lucas didn’t mention that he bought the paper with other people’s money, as alleged. Instead, he presented it as part of his Sunshine Initiative, a vaguely defined venture to revitalize the local area through happiness.
Lucas allegedly took millions from people to be invested in startup health and wellness companies. But the investment money he took instead went to pay alimony, rent, fund his purchase of the Eagle Times, and hire political consultants.
This is a pretty wild story; unfortunately, it’s also left a community without local journalism. Jonathan Phelps reports in the New Hampshire Union Leader that The Granite Eagle a digital publication that Lucas helped found, continues to publish without his involvement, but it appears to be an aggregation site that pulls together mostly statewide stories. In an editor’s note published Dec. 22, Granite Eagle editor-in-chief Chris Thompson wrote that Lucas had not been involved “for some time,” adding: “We are excited about the future of the publication and remain committed to providing our readers with quality local journalism. We thank our dedicated readership for their continued support.”
As I noted earlier this year, the Eagle, later the Eagle Times, had been a star-crossed publication for many years. It was purchased in 1946 by John McLane Clark, a former editorial writer for The Washington Post who’d lost out in a bid to buy the Union and the Leader in Manchester; instead, those papers fell into the hands of the notorious right-wing hate-monger and pedophile William Loeb.
Clark died in 1950, drowning while canoeing in Sugar River, according to Steve Taylor of The Valley News in nearby Lebanon, New Hampshire. The Eagle Times closed in 2009, but was revived at some point by an out-of-state chain.
As Bookman wrote for NHPR last summer:
In the wake of the collapse, staff have claimed that Lucas repeatedly failed to pay overdue bills, and on occasion requested workers hold off on cashing their paychecks due to a lack of funding…. [T]he local boy who had made good, and decided to invest in his hometown, appeared to have harmed the very community he was aiming to help.
If the federal charges against Lucas are to be believed, now we know the rest of the story.
Reminder
As I wrote last week, I’m repositioning Media Nation away from national commentary (I’ll weigh in when I just can’t resist) and making more use of Bluesky for shorter items and to call your attention to journalism you should be aware of. You can follow my Bluesky feed on the Media Nation website (scroll down the right-hand rail) or directly on Bluesky by clicking here.
Protesters in Raleigh, N.C. Photo (cc) 2026 by Laura Leslie / NC Newsline
All news is local. Following the deadly U.S. raid to pluck President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, out of Venezuela, local news organizations reported on the reaction in their communities. This morning I’m taking a look at how three of the outlets that Ellen Clegg and I profile in our book, “What Works in Community News,” are handling the news.
Jose Lara, a Venezuelan expat living in West Haven, Connecticut, told Breen he was hopeful that Maduro’s arrest would lead to better days for his home country. “I’m feeling excited,” Lara said at a gathering outside New Haven City Hall. Breen writes:
Like Lara, many who showed up on Saturday night were optimistic that this time is different.
“Excitement, first and foremost,” Laura Almeyda said when asked how she is feeling today. Also, “confusion. Uncertainty. But hope. We’re faithful and joyful. This is a huge step towards change, hopefully a positive one.”
Breen observes, though, that others, such as U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., are warning that Trump’s action was “a fundamental violation of the Constitution” that could lead to “endless conflict.” And he links to another indy digital outlet in Connecticut, CT News Junkie, where Karla Ciaglo reports on the (mostly) negative reaction from Democratic officials and left-leaning activist groups.
As with the New Haven Independent, The Daily Memphian — supplemented with coverage by The Associated Press — focuses on the Venezuelan diaspora community in Memphis, Tennessee. Here’s part of the Memphian story:
“We have been dreaming of these days for so long. We have been hopeful of a day when we see [these leaders] out of the country and really democracy back in our country,” said Daniel Bastardo Blanco, who works in communications in Memphis. “We remain incredibly hopeful that freedom is about to restart in our country.”
But Venezuelan natives living in Memphis also said that their euphoria was also mixed with fear for friends and relatives still living in the South American country, where some citizens were killed in the strikes, as well as tremendous uncertainty about what happens next.
“It was a little bit of a shock,” said Pedro Velasquez, whose family runs nonprofit medical clinics in both Memphis and Venezuela. “As I read about how it was executed, and that there weren’t as many civilian casualties, that it was more localized and over in 20-30 minutes, it sort of made me breathe a little easier.”
Jackson leads with Andrew Josefchak of the Minnesota Peace Action Coalition and a left-wing supporter of the Maduro government, who joined with more than 200 others to protest Trump’s action on Satuday. “The peace movement in this country, in Minneapolis at least, wasn’t going to let that [military action] go by without organizing an emergency demonstration against it to show that people in the U.S. don’t want this,” Josefchak was quoted as saying. “They don’t want war.”
The Strib also quotes Democratic opponents of Trump’s action like U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Republican supporters like U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer. And we hear from a Venezuelan expat who supports the raid despite concerns about her mother’s safety:
Soleil Ramirez watched footage of explosions across Caracas moments after the strike began, worrying for her mother, who lives near a military base.
Ramirez, chef and owner of the Crasqui restaurant in St. Paul, said her mother is fine — and the military operation was reason to celebrate.
“Let us celebrate this victory because we haven’t been celebrating anything in the last 26 years,” she said.
A note on the photo:NC Newsline, which covers North Carolina, is part of States Newsroom, a network of 50 nonprofit news outlets covering politics and public policy. Its journalism is available for republication under a Creative Commons license. Ellen and I recently hosted publisher and CEO Chris Fitzsimon on our “What Works” podcast.
For quite a few years I used WordPress’ indent feature for blockquotes rather than the actual blockquote command. The reason was that blockquotes in the theme that I use (Twenty Sixteen) were ugly, with type larger than the regular text (the opposite of what you would see in a book or a printed article) and in italics.
But then I noticed that indents didn’t show up at all in posts that went out by email, leading to confusion among my subscribers — that is, my most engaged readers. I decided to find out if I could modify the blockquote feature. WordPress allows you to add custom CSS to your theme, but I know very little about how to use CSS. I could have asked in a WordPress forum, but I tried to see if I could get an answer from AI instead.
Northeastern has given us all access to the enterprise version of Claude, Anthropic’s AI platform. It’s a mixed blessing, although I’ve found that it’s very good as a search engine — often better than Google, which is now also glopped up by AI. I simply make sure I ask Claude to add the underlying links to its answer so I don’t get taken in by hallucinations. But Claude is also known for being quite good at coding. What I needed was low-level, so I thought maybe it could help.
Indeed it could. I began by asking, “In the Twenty Sixteen WordPress theme, how can I change the CSS so that blockquotes do not appear in italics?” Claude provided me with several options; I chose the simplest one, which was a short bit of custom CSS that I could add to my theme:
blockquote{
font-style: normal;
}
It worked. A subsequent query enabled me to make the blockquote type smaller. Then, just last week, I noticed that any formatting in the blockquote was stripped out. For instance, a recent memo from Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry contained boldface and italicized text, which did not appear when I reproduced her message. The formatting code was there; it just wasn’t visible. Claude produced CSS commands that overrode the theme. You can see the results here, with bold and italic type just as Henry had it in her message.
I make some light use of AI in my other work. When I need to transcribe an audio interview, I use Otter, which is powered by AI. I’ve experimented with using AI to compile summaries from transcripts and even (just for my own use) an actual news story. Very occasionally I’ve used AI to produce illustrations for this blog, which seems to draw more objections than other AI applications, probably because it’s right in people’s faces.
Just the other day, someone complained to me on social media that she was not going to visit a local news outlet I had mentioned because she had encountered an AI-produced illustration there. When I asked why, she replied that it was because AI relies on plagiarism. Oh, I get it. Sometime this year I’m hoping to receive $3,000 as my share of a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic because one of my books, “The Return of the Moguls,” was used to train Claude.
And let’s not overlook the massive amounts of energy that are required to power AI. On a recent New York Times podcast, Ezra Klein and his guests observed that AI is deeply unpopular with the public (sub. req.), even though they’re using it, because all they really know is that it’s going to take away jobs and is driving up electricity costs.
But AI isn’t going anywhere, and if we’re going to use it (and we are, even if we try to avoid it), we need to find ways to do so ethically and responsibly.
Happy New Year to everyone, and best wishes for peace, prosperity and good health in 2026. As always, thank you for reading. Go Sox!
Part of the Snow Village model train exhibit by William F. Meagher on display recently at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Wellesley. Photo (cc) 2025 by Dan Kennedy.
At the Pistachio Café in New Haven, Conn. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
I launched Media Nation in 2005. If you count two predecessor blogs that I wrote solo and for The Boston Phoenix dating back to 2001, then Media Nation is among the oldest such projects in the country. It was also part of a dying breed until the past few years, when the rise of newsletters — blogs by another name — gave an enormous boost to independent media reporting and commentary.
Over the years, I’ve made several changes, and I’m planning to reposition Media Nation again in 2026. I had considered a hard reset but decided instead on a change of emphasis, which I can ignore as the news and my interests dictate.
First, I hope to cut way back on politically oriented media commentary. Nothing drives clicks like a post slamming Donald Trump, or slamming some failure in the way the media are covering him. But you can get that anywhere. My goal is write fewer such posts in favor of solutions to the local news crisis (my research specialty, after all); Boston- and New England-oriented media news (note to Boston Globe staffers: Keep those internal memos coming!); and music, books and whatever quirky stuff catches my eye.
Second, I plan to write less frequently. Counting this post, I wrote 306 blog posts in 2025, which adds up to nearly six per week. When I started doing this, I never intended to write so often. A lot of that comes from feeling like I’m obliged to write about every major news development that’s at the intersection of media and politics. As I said, I’m going to cut back on that. I think that two or three posts per week, more or less, is the right number, and I’m going to try not to feel guilty if I write only once. In exchange, I’ll aim to lean into substance and topics that you won’t find elsewhere.
Third, the collapse of social media led me to write a number of multi-item posts so that I could post short updates and observations as I used to do on Twitter. With the rise of Bluesky, I don’t feel like I need to do that. Bluesky is tiny, but that’s OK; you can use it without joining. I’ve embedded my Bluesky feed in the right-hand rail on Media Nation, which is easy to access if you’re reading on a laptop. On a phone, just scroll all the way down. You can also follow my feed without actually registering for Bluesky by clicking here — although if you do register, you can follow other worthwhile feeds as well.
Finally, a note about commenting: I have not changed my policy. You can still post comments here. But if you look at my revised policy, you’ll see that I’m emphasizing Facebook as the place where the deepest, most interesting conversations are taking place. For some reason, people are much more likely to weigh in on Facebook about something I’ve written than they are here. So why scream into the void? I post links to all of my Media Nation content on my public (that is, we don’t need to be “friends”) Facebook feed, which you can access here.
And if you’d like to support my work for just $6 a month, you can do so by visiting my Patreon. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive commentary, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and music. Media Nation itself will remain free.
Fare gates are coming to South Station, as they did to North Station several years ago. The way it works is that you tap your ticket (on paper or on your phone) at a gate to gain entry to the waiting area for commuter rail. If you’re arriving, you simply reverse the procedure and tap it to leave. It’s convenient and helps prevent scofflaws from evading fares. But there is one massively annoying aspect to this, and it could easily be solved.
As Michael P. Norton reports for State House News Service, “Conductors will also still check tickets on board trains to verify travel zones.” That makes sense. Let’s say you ride the Lowell line out of North Station. It costs just $2.40, one way, to travel between West Medford and North Station. By contrast, a one-way ticket between the end of the line in Lowell and North Station costs $10.50.
(Let me pause here and observe that the longer your train commute, the more you’re helping to ease traffic congestion and air pollution. Given that, a flat rate would make more sense. But I digress.)
Now, here’s the aggravating part. I commute between West Medford and North Station. A lot of riders get on or off at that final (or first) stop, so the train is often overcrowded. Yet the conductors — always friendly and helpful — have to squeeze their way through so that they can inspect our tickets.
Why? West Medford commuters are already paying the cheapest fares. There is no reason to check our tickets. Thanks to the fare gates, we could not have gotten on unless we’d already paid and scanned our way in. If the conductors did their job before the train arrived in West Medford, or after it left, the train would be much less crowded, and it would be a lot easier for them to do their work.
This is not a big deal except that it’s completely unnecessary. With South Station fare gates coming online, this would be a good time for MBTA general manager Phil Eng and commuter rail contractor Keolis to eliminate a minor annoyance for those of us who take the train.
