Dan Kennedy

How news outlets may benefit from a ruling that Google’s ad tech violates antitrust law

To the extent that news organizations have been able to overcome the collapse of advertising caused by the rise of giant tech platforms, it’s through two imperfect methods.

For-profits, especially larger newspapers, charge for digital subscriptions and try to maintain a baseline level of print advertising, which has maintained at least some of its value.
Nonprofits, many of them digital-only, pursue large gifts and grants while attempting to induce their audience to pay for voluntary memberships, often for goodies like premium newsletters.

At the same time, though, news publishers have continued to look longingly at what might have been. When journalism started moving online 30 years ago, the assumption was that news outlets would continue to control much of that advertising.

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Those hopes were cut short. And in large measure, that’s because Google — according to publishers — established a monopoly over digital advertising that news organizations couldn’t crack. Now we’re getting a glimpse of a possible alternative universe, because last week a federal district-court judge agreed, at least in part.

I’ve read several accounts of Judge Leonie Brinkema’s 115-page ruling on an antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department and eight states (but not Massachusetts). It’s confusing, but I thought this account by David McCabe in The New York Times (gift link) was clearer than some, so I’m relying on it here. I’ll begin with this:

The government argued in its case that Google had a monopoly over three parts of the online advertising market: the tools used by online publishers, like news sites, to host open ad space; the tools advertisers use to buy that ad space; and the software that facilitates those transactions.

In other words, the suit claimed that Google controlled both ends of the market as well as the middleman software that makes it happen. Judge Brinkema agreed with the first two propositions but disagreed with the third, saying, in McCabe’s words, that “the government had failed to prove that it constituted a real and defined market.”

Brinkema put it this way: “In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.”

Lee-Anne Mulholland, a Google vice president, said in response, “We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half.” I’m pretty sure that losing two out of three is two-thirds, but whatever.

Brinkema will now consider the government’s demand that Google’s ad business be broken up. But given that the company has already said it will appeal, it could be a long time — like, on the order of years — before anything comes of this. Same with an earlier ruling in a different courtroom that Google’s search constitutes an illegal monopoly, which is also the subject of hearings this week.

The News/Media Alliance, a lobbying group for the news business, praised Brinkema’s ruling, saying:

The News/Media Alliance has spent years advocating on behalf of news media publishers against Google’s unlawfully anticompetitive actions. We are strongly supportive of a similar lawsuit in Texas that will follow, as well as the Gannett lawsuit currently being litigated on the same issues. Much of this was prompted in the House Report that documented Google’s abuse in the ad tech ecosystem, the scope of which is wide-reaching.

As the organization observes, Google’s ad tech has been the subject of several suits by the newspaper business. One of them names Facebook as a co-defendant, claiming that the Zuckerborg chose to collude with Google rather than compete directly. Gannett’s suit, on the other hand, only names Google.

The News/Media Alliance also continues to push for passage of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a pet project of Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana.

The proposal, which never gained much traction and is surely all but dead with Donald Trump back in the White House, would force Google and Facebook to pay for the journalism they repurpose. The legislation is problematic for many reasons, not least that Facebook has made it clear it would rather remove news from its various platforms, as it has done in Canada, than pay for it.

Punishing Google for clearly defined legal violations is a much cleaner solution. Let’s hope Judge Brinkema’s ruling survives the appeals process — not to mention whatever idea starts rattling around Trump’s head to reward Google as a favor for CEO Sundar Pichai’s $1 million kiss. Perhaps this can be the start of making advertising great again.

Three if by Medford

We had a great time in Medford Square earlier today when Paul Revere made his annual ride through the city — which ended not with his arrest at the hands of the Redcoats in Lincoln but rather at the Paul Revere Restaurant in West Medford.

He and some suspiciously modern-looking soldiers and motorcycle officers stopped at the historic Captain Isaac Hall House, where they warned the captain and his wife, Abigail Hall, that the Redcoats were on their way. Today the building is home to the Islamic Cultural Center of Medford.

The first video is by my son, Tim Kennedy; I shot the second as well as the photos below.

Laura Duggan of Medford as Abigail Hall, wife of Captain Isaac Hall, a leader of the Minute Men. She’s standing in front of the Captain Isaac Hall House, today the Islamic Cultural Center of Medford.

Paul Revere addresses the crowd, using a historically accurate mic.

Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn greets a constituent.

Checking in with the Catholic press following the death of Pope Francis

Pope Francis. Photo (cc) 2016 by Long Thiên.

When a major world leader is elderly and and has been sick for as long as Pope Francis was, news organizations have a lot of time to prepare. And so it was with the Catholic press, which was ready when Francis died earlier today at 88.

NPR reporter Sylvia Poggioli, a legend in her own right, has written a lengthy obituary in which she observes:

The outspoken pope lent his voice to almost every modern issue facing the world, often taking the side of the marginalized and vulnerable. He spoke out against commercial exploitation of the environment, rich countries’ unwillingness to accept migrants, the alienation caused by technology and the lucrative sale of weapons of war.

Now for a roundup of some leading Catholic publications. I’ll start with Crux, the digital outlet launched by Boston Globe Media to take advantage of the initial excitement over the Francis papacy. The Globe cut it loose years ago, but Crux continues as an independent website. Editor John L. Allen Jr. writes:

This was the pontiff, after all, who took the name “Francis” in homage to Catholicism’s most iconic and beloved saint, the “little poor man” of Assisi; the pope who rejected the marble and gold of the Papal Apartments in favor of the Domus Santa Marta, a modest hotel on Vatican grounds; the pope who returned to the clerical residence where he’d stayed prior to his election to pack his own bag and to pay his own bill; and the pope who, 15 days later, spent his first Holy Thursday not in the ornate setting of St. Peter’s Basilica, but at a youth prison in Rome where he washed the feet of 12 inmates, including two Muslims and two women.

In a similar vein, Gerard O’Connell of America magazine stresses the pope’s humility. The magazine, by the way, is a Jesuit publication, and Francis was the first Jesuit pope. O’Connell says:

From the moment he took office, Francis astounded Vatican officials as he began to dispense with the trappings of worldly power and status that had been features of the papal court for centuries. He refused the gold cross and ring and the papal mozzetta, the short cape previous popes had worn. On his first morning as pope, he insisted on riding in a small economy car, not the papal limousine, and without police escort to the Basilica of St. Mary Major to pray before the revered icon of Our Lady, Protectress of the Roman People. Afterward, he went to pay his bill at the Vatican residence for clergy where he had resided before the conclave.

National Catholic Reporter, a liberal publication, notes that Francis did not make much progress on the position of women in the church despite his inclusive rhetoric. Joshua J. McElwee puts it this way:

A disappointment for many Catholics was Francis’ relatively slow movement with regards to opening leadership roles for women in the church. Although he made strides later in his papacy — opening all Vatican positions, including top posts, to women and allowing lay men and women to vote at synod meetings — Francis leaves the Vatican a thoroughly clerical, and male, environment.

At the official Vatican News service, Devin Watkins begins:

Pope Francis loved people being with other people. You could see it every Wednesday morning when he held his weekly General Audiences. It was even visible when he would appear at the window of his office in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace at noon on Sunday to pray the Angelus. Despite the physical distance to St. Peter’s Square below, he would wave heartily and greeted countless groups of visiting Catholics.

The Tablet, a Catholic publication from the U.K., adds a distinctly British touch, with Patrick Hudson writing:

Buckingham Palace released a message of condolence from the King, in which he said he and Queen Camilla, who visited the Pope on their wedding anniversary on 9 April, were “most deeply saddened” by his death.

“Our heavy hearts have been somewhat eased, however, to know that His Holiness was able to share an Easter greeting with the Church and the world he served with such devotion throughout his life and ministry,” he said.

Francis was a landmark pope, more progressive and modern than his predecessors, even if his actions didn’t always match his words on issues such as the role of women, the place of LGBTQ folks in the church, and the never-ending crisis over child sexual abuse at the hands of clergy members. Despite those shortcomings, he’s built an admirable, forward-looking legacy that his successor can expand on.

His funeral and the choice of the next pope are going to be enormous news stories in the days and weeks ahead.

No, Ross Douthat, a chain-owned ghost newspaper is not better than a community news website

Ross Douthat has a long, mildly worded anti-tech rant in today’s New York Times that I enjoyed, even if I didn’t take it too seriously. A lot of it read like Douthat’s Greatest Hits, hastily written and not especially well thought-through.

But I do want to offer a brief comment on this, plucked from his long list of ways in which the real is better than the virtual: “Online sources of local news are generally lousy compared with the vanished ecosystem of print newspapers.”

Like I said, the whole thing read like he wasn’t putting a lot of thought into it. But we all know that the digital local news outlets that have sprouted in recent years are often better and more comprehensive than the chain-owned ghost newspapers they replaced.

Many of them are nonprofit. Some also have print editions; most don’t. But the idea that a community news website is “lousy” compared to a corporate print product filled with so-called news from anywhere except the community it purports to cover is laughable.

If Douthat would like to go back, say, two or three generations, to a time when many communities had locally owned newspapers with full-time staff members and their own printing press, well, yes. But like I said, he’s produced a once-over-lightly for a day when few people will be spending much time with the Sunday paper.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Sewell Chan’s abrupt firing as editor of the CJR raises a lot of questions. So far, there are no answers.

Sewell Chan, right, with USA Today’s Susan Page at an event at the LBJ Library in 2024. LBJ Library photo by Laura Skelding.

I hope we learn more soon about why Columbia Journalism Review executive editor Sewell Chan was abruptly fired on Friday. In the immediate aftermath, he has been portrayed as the boss from hell, while Chan himself has claimed he was the victim of a toxic workplace culture.

I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about either Chan or Columbia Journalism School dean Jelani Cobb, who fired him. Like Chan, Cobb is a high-quality, serious journalism leader, and social-media posts suggesting that Chan was done in by the mishegas into which Columbia has descended can’t be right. But what was it?

I’m sharing this New York Times story because it does a good job of laying out what we know, which isn’t much.

Earlier this week, Chan wrote what struck me as an exceptionally fine analysis of what went wrong at Houston Landing, which announced on Tuesday that it was ceasing operations. Chan also sent a friendly email to my What Works collaborator Ellen Clegg and me after Ellen wrote a story about Sonal Shah’s announcement that she would leave as CEO of The Texas Tribune at the end of the year. (Chan is a former editor of the Tribune.)

There was no indication in Chan’s email that there was anything amiss at the CJR. And now this.

Rumbles on the right: David Brooks calls for an ‘uprising,’ while Bill Kristol and Lisa Murkowski speak out

David Brooks. 2022 LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin.

Today is going to be a big grading day. But before I get started, I want to share with you a remarkable column by David Brooks of The New York Times (gift link) as well as a couple of eye-opening statements from the political right.

Moderate in his politics, deeply conservative by nature, Brooks is a longstanding anti-Trumper, but he leans toward the rhetorical rather than advocating any sort of specific action beyond voting. Now, though, he’s calling for a “comprehensive national civic uprising,” and closes by alluding to Karl Marx: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” He writes:

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault.

Earlier this week, another prominent anti-Trump conservative, Bill Kristol, posted a photo on Bluesky of ICE thugs detaining Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk and wrote: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology?”

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the last remaining moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill, spoke frankly about the fear that she and other members of her party feel about what might happen to them if they speak out against Trump. Just to say that out loud is an important step, although of course it needs to be followed by action. At a public forum she said:

We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.

I don’t want to get carried away. Over the past decade, there has been no group less influential and consequential than the tiny band of Never Trump Republicans and conservatives. But we may be starting to see the stirrings of — well, of something.

John Mooney tells us how he built NJ Spotlight News into an innovative digital-broadcast hybrid

John Mooney. Photos (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.

On our new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with John Mooney, the founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, a digital nonprofit that’s part of NJ PBS, the state’s public broadcasting network. Mooney, who covered education for The Star-Ledger in Newark, took a buyout in 2008, put together a business plan, and launched NJ Spotlight in 2010 under the auspices of the nonprofit Community Foundation of New Jersey.

While Spotlight was making a mark journalistically, it wasn’t breaking even, and its sponsor, the Community Foundation of New Jersey, was getting impatient. After extensive talks, Mooney affiliated with NJ PBS. The name changed to NJ Spotlight News, and the merger means true collaboration between the newsrooms. Both the broadcast and digital sides take part in news meetings, and there are considerable synergies between the website and the daily half-hour newscast. (In a previous podcast, Northeastern University professor and TV journalist Mike Beaudet discussed his initiative aimed at reinventing TV news for a vertical video age.)

NJ Spotlight News anchor Briana Vannozzi, right, interviews U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman.

As we wrote in “What Works in Community News,” the story of NJ PBS and NJ Spotlight News suggests that public broadcasting can play a role in bolstering coverage of regional and statewide news. It’s a question of bringing together two different newsroom cultures. There’s also a Yo-Yo Ma angle to our conversation, so you won’t want to miss that.

Ellen has a Quick Take about the death of John Thornton, a venture capitalist who helped launch The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Austin, in 2009. He also was a founder of the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country. Thornton, who had struggled with mental health issues, took his own life. He was 59.

I’ve got a Quick Take about our webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News,” which was held the evening of April 3. Panelists gave great advice about what board members and donors need to know. You can watch the video and read a summary generated by Northeastern’s AI tool, Claude, on our website.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

What went wrong at Houston Landing? Maybe it never clearly defined its mission.

There was something about Houston Landing that never quite made sense.

It was a large digital startup in a city already served by the Houston Chronicle, whose corporate owner, Hearst, enjoys a reputation for strong journalism. It attracted a stunning amount of philanthropic funding — $20 million — before its launch two years ago, and somehow managed to burn through much of it. It was beset by tumult after its second CEO, veteran journalist Peter Bhatia, fired the Landing’s editor-in-chief, its top investigative reporter and, later, another top editor for reasons that have never been fully explained.

And on Tuesday, the Landing reached the end of the line, announcing that it would close because, despite “significant seed funding, it has been unable to build additional revenue streams to support ongoing operations.” The site will shut down in May, and 43 employees will lose their jobs.

Bhatia agreed to come on our “What Works” podcast last June after he emailed me to complain about something I’d written. My co-host, Ellen Clegg, and I found him to be charming, as candid as he could be when talking about internal personnel matters, and dedicated to creating a first-rate news outlet.

When I asked him about competing with the Chronicle, he emphasized that he didn’t see that as the Landing’s mission.

“There is so much opportunity to do journalism here,” he said. “And the people who founded Houston Landing and who ultimately recruited me here wanted more journalism for this vast community. They wanted journalism that was hard-hitting and performed traditional watchdog and accountability roles, but also to create a new kind of journalism, if you will, that is accessible to traditionally undercovered communities, which make up such a huge percentage of the population here.”

As for the firings of editor-in-chief Mizanur Rahman, investigative reporter Alex Stuckey and editor John Tedesco, Bhatia said: “I came in here after things were established and in place, and I gave things a year to develop and go in the right direction. I have nothing but respect for the people that you mentioned. They are good human beings and fantastic journalists, but we were on a path that was not sustainable, and as the leader, I felt I had to make changes in order to get us in a position to be successful for the long term.”

In any case, the people Bhatia brought in, editor-in-chief Manny García and managing editor Angel Rodriguez, are well-regarded journalists. Unfortunately, they’re also now out of work.

Columbia Journalism Review editor Sewell Chan, who had an opportunity to watch Houston Landing up close during his own stint as editor of The Texas Tribune, has written a nuanced and perceptive take on what went wrong. “In hindsight, money was both a blessing and a curse for the Landing,” Chan writes, observing that the leadership team may have been tempted by that early bonanza to spend beyond its means.

“The Landing also suffered from a lack of focus,” Chan adds, explaining that it was never clear whether its mission was to cover the city or the broader region; whether it saw itself as a traditional news outlet holding the powerful to account or if, instead, it sought to empower the community by providing them with the tools to be their own storytellers, like Documenters or Outlier. Chan also delivers this verdict on Bhatia:

I’ve known Bhatia for close to thirty years. The son of an Indian father, he has been a pioneering Asian American newsroom leader and has the utmost integrity. However, Bhatia had not run a digital-only operation, hadn’t worked extensively in nonprofit fundraising, and didn’t know Houston well.

Bhatia, in his farewell message, writes:

We are immensely proud of the work we’ve done and the impact we’ve made. Houston Landing has shown what’s possible when a news team commits itself to truth and transparency. Our stories highlighted voices that too often go unheard, sparked conversations that matter and helped inspire positive change throughout the city we love.

It’s a shame. Houston may not have been a news desert before the Landing landed, but more coverage is always better, and the focus on underrepresented communities that Bhatia talked about with Ellen and me will not be easy to replace.

It’s important, too, to recognize that what happened at the Landing says little about the nonprofit news movement in general. Chan quotes Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer of the American Journalism Project (one of the Landing’s funders), as saying that the closing is “not part of a broader trend,” and that nonprofit local news outlets remain on a growth trajectory.

Indeed, many of the nonprofits that Ellen and I track have proved to be remarkably resilient, with a few about to embark on their third decade. Unfortunately, Houston Landing will not join that charmed circle, and will instead close just a little more than two years after it was launched amid a wave of optimism.

The Texas Tribune, once a model of stability, loses another big name as Sonal Shah will step down as CEO

Texas Tribune CEO Sonal Shah at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin last September.

Instability in the top ranks of The Texas Tribune continues, as Sonal Shah has announced that she’ll step down as CEO of the nonprofit in December. My What Works partner Ellen Clegg, who profiled the Tribune in our book, “What Works in Community News,” has all the details, writing:

Her impending departure marks yet another jolting transition for a news outlet that launched in November 2009 with a sweeping ambition: to prop up democracy by transforming news coverage throughout the Lone Star State. But nonprofit news sites, which are usually supported by a mix of revenue streams, are not immune to challenging market forces and workplace issues like layoffs and union drives.

The Tribune is among the largest and most respected digital nonprofits to be founded in the second wave of such projects, following such pioneers as Voice of San Diego, MinnPost and the New Haven Independent several years earlier. The site was launched by venture capitalist John Thornton and veteran journalist Evan Smith, and it appeared to be a rock of stability in a rather tumultuous environment.

But Smith moved on from the CEO’s position, and now Shah, citing family reasons, has announced her departure after less than three years. (Shah was a guest on our podcast last November.) Editor-in-chief Sewell Chan cycled through before taking the top job at the Columbia Journalism Review; he was replaced by Matthew Watkins, who’s been at the Tribune in 2015.

Thornton himself had moved on to co-found the American Journalism Project, which seeks to fund local news organizations across the country; he died late last month.

The turmoil at the Tribune could just be one of those things. Here’s hoping that the project can settle down, fix its business challenges and continue providing the Lone Star State with top-notch journalism. Its work is vitally important.

Chuck Todd says he wants to invest in local news — and Ben Smith asks, Why not Nextdoor?

Chuck Todd. Photo (cc) 2015 by Gage Skidmore.

Former NBC News journalist Chuck Todd may be moving into local news. In a recent interview with Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times (gift link), Todd said he was “eager to find a business solution to a problem that had vexed investors for decades: the collapse of local news.”

So what would that look like? Mullin continued:

Mr. Todd’s business plan calls for a constellation of local sites owned by their communities — like his beloved Green Bay Packers — and anchored by coverage of local youth sports. The growing popularity of athletics and their importance to families who view them as a gateway to college make them an ideal subject to build around. No matter your politics, Mr. Todd said, you care about local coverage of your child’s latest game.

So far, so good. But then Mullin writes that Todd is prepared to invest up to $2 billion, though he didn’t identify any backers or say what company they were looking to buy other than ruling out major newspaper groups.

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I wish Mullin had pressed Todd on what he meant by “sites owned by their communities,” because a $2 billion investment sure doesn’t sound like local control. Meanwhile, at Semafor, Ben Smith offers a guess: Nextdoor, the network of local sites known, at best, for updates on missing cats and at worst for posts warning about suspicious-looking people in the neighborhood. (Our local Nextdoor happens to be the news source of record for helicopter sightings.)

Well, that sure doesn’t sound like local control, either, but I suppose it makes sense. Smith notes that Semafor media reporter Max Tani wrote nearly a year ago that Nextdoor co-founder CEO Nirav Tolia, was looking to reposition the site, with Tolia admitting it “hasn’t had a great product in the last couple of years.”

Smith says that Todd wouldn’t comment on his guesswork. Of course, it would be much better if Todd and his investors were to help fund truly local news organizations. After all, $2 billion is four times the initial pot assembled by Press Forward, a philanthropic collaborative aimed at reviving community journalism.

On the other hand, we really do need some new ideas in for-profit local news. If Todd can contribute to that effort, it would be a real contribution. But if he’s thinking about reviving Nextdoor, or creating any sort of centralized “economies of scale” monstrosity, then he’s likely to learn what so many others have before him: Local doesn’t scale.