2023 photo of Gaza war damage via Wikimedia Commons
Poynter media columnist Tom Jones has a thorough roundup of how news organizations covered Israel’s killing on Sunday of six Al Jazeera journalists, observing that Anas al-Sharif, who was apparently the target, had predicted his death.
As Jones writes, Israel claims that al-Sharif had been actively involved in Hamas’ terrorist attacks. Al-Sharif had denied the allegation, and the killings were condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which issued a statement saying, “Israel is murdering the messengers.”
Al Jazeera called the killings a “targeted assassination,” as they surely were. The right-wing Jerusalem Post ran a headline that said “Israeli military kills Hamas terrorist doubling as Al Jazeera reporter near Shifa Hospital,” claiming: “Documents shared by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] included personnel rosters, lists of terror training courses, phone directories, and salary documents for Al-Sharif.”
Ironically, the Post’s story is attributed to its own staff and to Reuters, the international wire service for which al-Sharif shared in a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2024.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz runs a straightforward account of the killings. The Times of Israel’s live blog currently leads with a story about media organizations that have condemned the attacks as well as a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that he is “gravely concerned.”
CPJ reports: “With Sunday’s killing of six journalists, 192 journalists have been killed since the start of the Israeli-Gaza war on October 7, 2023. At least 184 of those journalists were Palestinians killed by Israel.”
The Mayflower II, docked in Plymouth Harbor. Photo (cc) 2025 by Dan Kennedy.
Less than two years after its founding, the Plymouth Independent has established itself as one of the larger and more stable hyperlocal news startups in Massachusetts. Now it’s moving on to a new phase.
Founding executive editor and CEO Mark Pothier announced this morning that he’s stepping aside as soon as a successor is named. Pothier’s not going anywhere, explaining that he plans to stick around as a reporter, bringing the size of the news staff from three full-timers to four. A chief development officer will be hired as well, all the better to raise funds for an anonymous $1 million matching grant that will be used to start an endowment. Pothier writes:
My promise to the board was that I would build the site and organization over at least two years. My two-year anniversary is in September. There’s always more to do that we can’t get to. My email in-box seems to have a life of its own. This job has been all-consuming. I’m glad I signed up for it.
Mark Pothier
Plymouth is among the largest towns in the state, with a population of about 66,000. Nevertheless, a four-person staff is unusual these days, and it’s a lot for a digital-only nonprofit. The Independent’s staff is also unusually high-powered, as both Pothier and staff reporter Andrea Estes are Boston Globe veterans and the other staff reporter, Fred Thys, worked for prominent news outlets such as WBUR and VTDigger. Globe reporting legend Walter Robinson, a Plymouth resident, is among its board members.
The Independent’s aggressive reporting has also been the subject of two New England Muzzle Awards I’ve given out to town officials for stonewalling and threatening the news site.
The Independent’s search for an executive editor to replace Pothier is now under way. You can view the job listing here. As you’ll see, it’s a good-paying job with decent benefits. What follows is the full text of Pothier’s announcement.
Terrible news from The Associated Press. Media Nation correspondent J.A. passes along this note from Anthony McCartney, the AP’s global entertainment and lifestyle editor.
AP to end its weekly book reviews
Dear AP book reviewers,
I am writing to share that the AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1. This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews. AP will continue covering books as stories, but at the moment those will handled exclusively by staffers.
I want to thank you for your time and commitment to reviewing books for the AP. All current review assignments through Aug. 31 will be honored and your invoices will be paid. (Please submit those as you normally would, and file final invoices by Sept. 15.)
I want to take a moment to thank Carolyn, who has coordinated reviews and made sure relevant titles were covered, and Mark, who has edited the reviews and incorporated best practices for trying to get reviews to appear in search results and get as many readers as possible.
Thank you again for your diligence and work on reviews. I wish you all the best.
Where is The Washington Post heading? Certainly from outside the paper’s walls, the situation looks grim, as staff members are streaming toward the exits in droves, especially but not exclusively from the opinion side. But as disgusted as I am by Jeff Bezos’ shift from model owner to boss from hell over the past couple of years, I’ve held out hope that all may not be lost — as long as he doesn’t mess with the news operation. So far, he hasn’t.
Which is why I want to call your attention to this Jon Allsop piece from the Columbia Journalism Review. He recounts the devastation in minute detail, but he offers more nuance than I’ve seen elsewhere. He also buries the lead. The key is his wrap-up:
[J]ournalism is more of a team sport than the industry focus on its stars sometimes acknowledges, and the Post is clearly retaining a corps of incredibly talented journalists. In their departure notes, [chief political reporter Dan] Balz and [sports columnist Sally] Jenkins both emphasized this fact, with the latter writing that she sees “the glimmer of a new Washington Post — one that moves”; it will have “to be right-sized,” she added, “and young trees planted, but when the clocks all start chiming at the same time, it will be glorious.” Chelsea Janes, who covers baseball for the Post, and is staying, reacted to news of Jenkins’s exit with a different metaphor — that of a sports team that has been torn apart for unclear reasons — but added that there’s “plenty of talent still on the roster, and everyone on that roster plays to win.” I can sympathize with Janes’s analogy: my English soccer team is currently in the process of a full-scale rebuild, and a lot about it sucks. But it also feels like a moment of opportunity. That is, if the owners and management know what they’re doing. The same is true in journalism.
The challenge is finding an audience for the Post now that Bezos’ feckless leadership has allowed the paper to be caricatured as a mouthpiece for Donald Trump, even though it’s not, and even though its news coverage remains superb. It also doesn’t help that he’s stuck with Will Lewis as his publisher despite Scotland Yard’s ongoing interest in Lewis’ possible involvement in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. I would love it if Bezos returned to the generous, hands-off owner I wrote about in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” but that’s not likely to happen.
Even so, we still have three great national newspapers — the Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. If the Journal can survive and thrive despite Murdoch family ownership (by the way, here’s a terrific profile of Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker by The Guardian’s Michael Savage), then the Post can overcome Bezos. That is, assuming Bezos wants it.
Media Nation on semi-hiatus
We’re heading out later today for the rest of the week, and I’m not planning on writing anything unless there’s huge media news. I’ll try to send out an abbreviated supporters newsletter sometime on Thursday. Behave yourselves.
Update, Aug. 7: The Institute for Justice reports that Scarsdale Village has canceled its contract with Flock Safety in response to community opposition. Local activist Josh Frankel tells Media Nation: “Local journalism + grassroots advocacy for the win.”
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Among the more harmful effects of the local news crisis is that it empowers elected officials to engage in dubious behavior without anyone keeping an eye on them. But what happens when important public business is moved out of view of the watchdog?
That’s what happened in the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale Village, New York, where the board of trustees surreptitiously approved a $2.1 million contract in April that places the community under surveillance in the name of public safety.
The story was laid out over the weekend in Drop Site, an investigative newsletter founded by Intercept veterans Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill and Nausicaa Renner. According to reporter Ka (Jessica) Burbank, the trustees used vaguely worded language about “public safety equipment” on an advance agenda and then went into executive (closed) session to approve a contract with a company known as Flock Safety.
As resident Josh Frankel told Burbank, “I don’t think that anybody who looked at the agenda in advance would have thought that public safety equipment involved live cameras, license plate readers, drone technology, basically a mass surveillance system.” Frankel added that “maybe you’re thinking public safety equipment is a traffic light, a crosswalk, a yield sign, something along those lines, but not mass surveillance.”
Flock Safety, a $7.5 billion company, has a presence in 5,000 communities in 49 states as well as a reputation for secretive dealings with local officials. “Flock’s technology has been used to assist with everything from ICE investigations in Illinois to abortion investigations in Texas,” Burbank writes. Flock’s website says: “Protect your community, business or school 24/7 with coverage that never sleeps.”
The story is long and detailed, but there’s a wrinkle that I want to call your attention to. Because even though the legacy newspaper, the Scarsdale Inquirer, closed in 2024, the community is served by an independent journalist, Joanne Wallenstein, who runs a 26-year-old digital news project called Scarsdale 10583. And she was very much there when the Flock deal was struck behind closed doors. Burbank writes that Wallenstein “has produced countless articles since April 8th, covering her own correspondence with the board, press releases, and board meetings.” Wallenstein is quoted as saying:
Village officials blamed the lack of notice on the demise of the Scarsdale Inquirer. However, Scarsdale 10583 has been covering the news and published weekly since 2009. In this case, the reason no one knew about the Flock contract was because no advance notice was given. The resolution was not included in the agenda and there was no public hearing. It had nothing to do with the loss of the local newspaper.
The story was also covered by local television in June as well as by a website called Scarsdale Insider, although the latter has not published new material of any kind since June 24.
This is often the way it works. A local news outlet covers something suspicious and keeps hammering away at it. With repetition, it draws the attention of larger media organizations such as a television newscast and, in this case, a small but nevertheless national project like Drop Site. Finally, it breaks through to the mainstream.
So good for Joanne Wallenstein and Scarsdale 10583. Without her, this story might never have seen the light of day.
Miles Davis at the Nice Jazz Festival. Photo (cc) 1989 by Oliver Nurock.
If you love to listen to music and your hearing isn’t what it used to be, especially on the high end, I have a life hack for you. I have moderate hearing loss in both ears, and before you start in on me, yes, I listened to very loud music occasionally when I was young, and was in a band, but every older member of my family had significant hearing loss. So in my case it’s more genetic than environmental.
The two loudest concerts I ever attended, by the way, were John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana at the Music Hall (now the Boch Center) in 1973 and Miles Davis’ comeback concert at Kix Disco in 1981, where we had the misfortune of being parked directly in front of a speaker column. In both cases I felt the after-effects for days. (You can hear Miles’ great show from that night, mixed in with some material from New York and Tokyo, at a comfortably lower volume on the album “We Want Miles.”)
Anyway, last fall I got hearing aids, and it’s been a life-changer. Immediately I could hear what my students were saying without having to run around the classroom to get closer to them (I told myself it helped me appear energetic), and I could hear my colleagues at faculty meetings (a mixed blessing; just kidding!). When listening to music live, through a Bluetooth speaker or in my car, I’ll adjust the EQ on my hearing aids to boost the bass and turn down the treble, which as best as I can tell approximates what it ought to be for a person with normal hearing.
I can also listen to music directly through my hearing aids, but that proved to be a non-starter. They’re fine for a phone call, but for anything more than that the sound is tinny. Worse, there’s no noise cancellation. So what to do?
I have a pair of Apple Airpods Pro 2, which I love, and so I would remove my hearing aids and use the Airpods. But now that I had a better basis for comparing the sound to what it should be, I discovered that the Airpods were muddy and bassy, even if I chose “Treble Booster” in the EQ. They would OK for podcasts, but audio quality was a disappointment. Theoretically I could wear good-quality headphones over my hearing aids, but that didn’t seem like a smart solution. For one thing, I’d have to buy headphones, and I had my Airpods sitting right there.
So at the suggestion of some Facebook friends, I started exploring the hearing aid option on my Airpods. Problem solved. Here’s what you do if you use an iPhone: Go into the Bluetooth settings and tap on the circled “i” for information next to your Airpods. Choose “Take a Hearing Test.” I took the test, but you also have the option of entering the results from your most recent hearing test. The graph turned out to be pretty much the same as from my last real test.
After you’ve done that, enter “Hearing Assistance” and make sure that “Hearing Aid,” “Media Assist” and “Adjust Music and Video” are all toggled on. You can do the same with “Adjust Calls and FaceTime” if you like. (See the image.)
It turned out to be transformative, as I was hearing music with a brightness and clarity I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. One of the first things I did was listen to the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” all the way through while I was on a walk, with noise cancellation on. I chose “Abbey Road” because I knew it was exceptionally well produced, and I was blown away by the clarity. I’ll tell you, those boys could play! Podcasts sound much better, too.
A couple of weeks ago I listened to Duke Ellington’s first sacred concert and loved it — but it was muddy. Now I can’t wait to listen to it again.
Ellen Clegg and I are excited to report that Rozzie Bound Co-op, an independent bookstore in Roslindale, Massachusetts, is hosting a GBH Listening Session on Thursday, Aug. 21 — and it’s designated our book, “What Works in Community News,” as the recommended read.
“Magdeila Matta, a community producer with GBH News, is looking to engage with folks and learn how they engage with the media, as well as open up space for people to share what’s going on in their communities,” according to the announcement. “Come to this session to talk to Magdeila about what news matters to you.”
“What Works in Community News,” a close-up look at successful independent news in nine different parts of the country, has been longlisted for a Mass Book Award by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Rozzie Bound Co-op is located at 739 South St. The listening session will be held from 5:30 to 7 p.m. And here’s a GBH News article on the story behind the bookstore.
Duke Ellington performs for patients at Travis Air Force Base in 1954.
Whether you’re a major news organization like NPR or a solo blogger like me, you know that converting readers into paid supporters is a major challenge. Since starting Media Nation in 2005, I have offered it as a free source of news and commentary, and that’s not going to change. I think folks working in academia have an obligation to freely distribute at least some of their work, and I’d lose a lot of reach if I put up a paywall.
But generating some income from this blog has proved to be an uphill climb. Nearly 2,500 readers have signed up to receive new posts by email for free, and nearly 108,000 visitors have accessed more than 186,000 pages so far in 2025. I don’t disclose my number of paid supporters, but I’ll just say that it lags well behind those numbers.
This afternoon I’ll be sending out my weekly newsletter to paid supporters in which I recommend a terrific book about how Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie overcame racism and helped create the culture we live in today. There are other goodies as well: a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week. For just $6 month, you can become a supporter as well. I hope you’ll consider it. Just click here.
Sugar River in Claremont, N.H. Photo (cc) 2015 by Mark Bonica.
Recently I took note of the demise of the Eagle Times in Claremont, New Hampshire, observing that the paper had also closed in 2009 and that it had apparently been operating on a shoestring for some time. Well, it turns out there may have been more to it than that. Or not.
Todd Bookman of New Hampshire Public Radio has produced a deep dive into the odd reign of former owner Jay Lucas, a venture capitalist with degrees from Harvard and Yale who grew up in nearby Newport. According to Bookman, Lucas bought the paper from an out-of-state chain in 2022 with big plans to revive local news in the area, but he fell short on the financial side. He shut down the paper in June after failing to make payroll.
“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,” Bookman writes, adding that “the 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.”
It’s a harsh assessment, and Lucas comes across as an easy target, spouting optimistic aphorisms while letting the paper wither and die. Yet I came away from the story wanting to know more. As Bookman describes it, Newport is a low-income community that has been dealing with an opioid epidemic. Claremont, too, is struggling, with a median household income of $54,520, just a little more than half the statewide median of $95,628.
From the sounds of it, I’d say that any local newspaper owner would have a tough time making a go of it in such circumstances. Lucas says he hasn’t given up the idea of reviving it; he’s launching a nonprofit, and perhaps a new iteration of the Eagle Times will be part of that.
Earlier this month, Steve Taylor of the Valley News, based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, noted that the Eagle had been star-crossed since 1950, “when its publisher, John McLane Clark, drowned while canoeing in a flooded Sugar River.”
Clark, a former editorial writer for The Washington Post, had purchased the Eagle in 1946 after losing out to the incestuous pedophile William Loeb on a bid to buy Manchester’s two papers, the Union and the Leader. Those papers continue as the New Hampshire Union Leader. Meanwhile, Taylor writes, the Eagle lost money for much of its existence.
To paraphrase the science fiction writer William Gibson, the future of local news is here, but it’s unevenly distributed. Affluent communities across the country are hosting hundreds of independent start-ups, both nonprofit and for-profit, while news deserts are spreading in urban communities of color and rural areas.
The Claremont-Newport area needs quality news and information, but traditional market economics simply don’t work in such places. I hope someone — perhaps Lucas, perhaps not — comes through with a philanthropic model rooted in the community.
Note: I made a copy-editing fix after this post was published.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, has rescinded a gag order that had prevented the city’s police department from issuing press releases without the approval of her office. The contentious order was one of two reasons that the mayor, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, was given a New England Muzzle Award earlier this year.
The original, restrictive executive order was enacted on January 10, under former Police Chief Jon Murad, who did not seek reappointment. It required all BPD press releases, including emergency alerts, to be submitted to the mayor’s office for approval before public dissemination.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
What sealed the Muzzle, though, was that the mayor then called an invitation-only news conference without letting at least two outlets that had been critical of her know about it. Those outlets were Seven Days and Vermont News First. Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, who writes for Vermont News First, told me last winter that he believed only local television newscasts had been invited.
• Good/bad/good news in Dallas. Last week I wrote that the notorious cost-cutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital was ready to swoop in and upset the pending sale of The Dallas Morning News to the Hearst chain, a privately held company known for quality regional and statewide journalism. Now Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab that the sale to Hearst is back on track. “This morning,” Benton wrote Monday, “the DallasNews Corporation (formerly A.H. Belo) announced that its board had ‘reviewed and rejected’ Alden’s offer. (It also added a ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan, just in case Alden tries anything funny.)”
• An overdue Globe update. Last week The Boston Guardian and Contrarian Boston reported that two Boston Globe journalists, along with two South End residents who were accompanying them, had been attacked while on assignment as they were reporting in the notorious Mass and Cass area of Boston. The story was subsequently picked up by Universal Hub, Hub Blog and Media Nation. But there was no mention of it in the Globe until this morning, as part of a larger story by the two journalists, reporter Niki Griswold and Barry Chin. Griswold wrote:
While reporting this story, two Globe journalists were confronted by at least three men on the Melnea Cass bike path as they toured the area on a July afternoon with [Brian] McCarter and another longtime South End resident. The men approached and threatened the group after spotting the Globephotographer taking pictures from a distance. The men, two holding hammer-like tools, followed the group, which took shelter in a nearby building.
The incident prompted Globe editor Nancy Barnes to issue a memo to the newsroom about security precautions.
• The wages of sin. Paramount wasted no time in making up for some of the $16 million it paid to Donald Trump in order to settle a bogus lawsuit the president had brought against “60 Minutes” — a settlement widely believed to pave the way for a merger with Trump-friendly Skydance Media. Last week WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in Boston announced that a number of employees had been offered buyouts, while longtime reporter Beth Germano said she’d retire and health reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall said she’d been laid off, according to Ross Cristantiello of Boston.com. “I gotta believe it has something to do with the merger,” union official Fletcher Fischer was quoted as saying. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, local television news stands out as an exception. Moves like this, though, erode that trust.
• Here’s some fresh AI hell. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain as well as a steady source of terrible news about layoffs, closures and other cuts, is offering buyouts to many of its journalists so that it can replace them with artificial intelligence. Sean Burch of The Verge quotes a memo from Mike Reed, who writes in his characteristically inimitable style: “Given our static revenue trends, we need to adjust our organization to effectively meet the needs of our business today and position ourselves for sustainable growth in the future as we continue to use AI and leverage automation to realize efficiencies.”
Gannett’s weeklies are pretty much gone, but it still publishes several dailies in New England, most notably The Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, as well as about 200 dailies across the country, anchored by USA Today.
Correction: Sorry for rushing this. I’ve fixed a few botched names.
I can also listen to music directly through my hearing aids, but that proved to be a non-starter. They’re fine for a phone call, but for anything more than that the sound is tinny. Worse, there’s no noise cancellation. So what to do?
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
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