Ibram X. Kendi. Photo (cc) 2019 by Tony Turner Photography.
The Emancipator, a digital magazine covering racial justice that was launched with great fanfare four years ago, is leaving Boston.
The project was originally a joint venture of The Boston Globe’s opinion section and the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The Globe ended its involvement two years later. The Emancipator will now be based at Howard University, the leading historically Black university.
The move was actually announced back in February, but it will formally take place on Monday, the last day of the academic year. Co-founder Ibram X. Kendi, the well-known antiracism scholar, is leaving BU to take a position at Howard, and The Emancipator is following him to Washington.
Amber Payne, The Emancipator’s publisher, announced on Thursday that she’ll be stepping down, writing:
After June 30, The Emancipator will transition from Boston University to Howard University as part of our co-founder Ibram X. Kendi’s Institute for Advanced Study, which will be dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of racism in the global African Diaspora. The Emancipator will be part of the institute’s larger mission to enhance the general public’s understanding of racism and evidence-based antiracist solutions through academic and publicly accessible research, public lectures, events, workshops, and outreach programs.
Payne was originally hired as co-editor along with Deborah Douglas, who now teaches journalism at Northwestern’s Medill School and is director of Medill’s newly created Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub.
Three journalists from the Boulder Reporting Lab at a news conference held by Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn hours after a recent antisemitic terrorist attack. Founder and publisher Stacy Feldman, arms folded, is wearing a green cap. Next to her, wearing a striped blue shirt, is reporter Brooke Stephenson. Senior reporter John Herrick is wearing a tan T-shirt and holding a notebook. Photo courtesy of Stacy Feldman.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Stacy Feldman, founder and publisher of the Boulder Reporting Lab, a nonprofit newsroom covering Boulder, Colorado. She launched the Lab in late 2021 to fill critical gaps in news coverage in a state where newspapers have been gobbled up by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund. Alden is known for gutting papers, not growing them.
Stacy was co-founder and executive editor of Inside Climate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the climate crisis. She developed her plans for the Boulder Reporting Lab during a fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her newsroom has provided crucial reporting on the recent antisemitic terrorist attack in Boulder.
I’ve got a Quick Take later on a huge threat to one of the most important cogs in the regional news ecosystem — public radio and television, which face huge cuts after the Republican-led House voted recently to cancel $1.1 billion in funding over the next two years that it had previously approved. Now the measure moves to the Senate, which has to take a vote on it by mid-July. Regardless of what happens, this is the closest public media has ever come to an extinction-level event.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on local news coverage of the assassination of a Minnesota legislator and her husband. Minnesota news consumers have a lot of great media options, and these newsrooms stepped up big-time to cover this crisis.
Every year around this time, I take note of Independence Day by writing about outrages against freedom of speech that unfolded in New England during the previous year. It’s something I started doing in 1998 for The Boston Phoenix, and then later moved to GBH News after the Phoenix folded in 2013. (Here’s the complete archive.)
For the past several years I’ve been writing up Muzzles as they come in rather than waiting to do an annual roundup. I skipped writing a roundup altogether in 2023, so I guess this is the 27th annual edition of the New England Muzzle Awards.
This year’s Muzzle winners include Plymouth’s town manager, for attempting to intimidate and silence the nonprofit Plymouth Independent; the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for muzzling the police chief and playing favorites with the press; and the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, for planning to install two religious statues on public property at the city’s new public safety building.
I’m especially pleased to be able to award a Muzzle to Trump’s shadowy top aide, Stephen Miller, for enabling the arrest of a Tufts Ph.D. student who helped write an op-ed piece for the student newspaper that he didn’t like.
Kudos, as always, to my friends Harvey Silverglate, who conceived of this annual feature all these years ago, and Peter Kadzis, who edited all 25 editions that appeared in the Phoenix and at GBH News. They were inspired by the Jefferson Muzzles, which no longer are awarded. Here in New England, though, their spirit lives on.
At a time when democracy itself is under threat, defending the First Amendment is more important than ever. The envelopes, please.
Take, for a recent example, The Washington Post. Vince Morris of Washington City Paper reported last week that Metro, Sports and Style are going to be merged into one print section on most days, depriving residents of the DC area of a standalone section comprising local news. Morris called the announcement “grim,” even though he noted that executive editor Matt Murray said in a memo to readers that the move will not mean less coverage. Morris also writes:
According to data provided to City Paper by the Alliance for Audited Media, the Post’s paid average daily circulation is now down to just 97,000, with roughly 160,000 on Sundays. That’s a fraction of the 250,000 average daily circulation five years ago, when the Post was one of the largest newspapers in the country by circulation.
Piling on is Andy Meek of Forbes, who writes of those print numbers: “To put that in perspective: 97,000 is the sort of figure you’d expect to see from a mid-size regional paper like The Minnesota Star Tribune or The Seattle Times. Not from a globally recognized newsroom with multiple Pulitzers to its name.”
Now, it’s true that paid print has held up much better at The New York Times (244,000 on weekdays, 606,000 on Sundays) and The Wall Street Journal (449,000 on weekdays, 506,000 for its weekend edition). But print has long since ceased to matter. The Times, after all, has 11 million digital-only subscribers and the Journal has around 4 million.
And therein lies the true crisis for The Washington Post.
As Morris writes, the Post stopped reporting its paid digital circulation some time ago. Last fall, when owner Jeff Bezos began taking a wrecking ball to the paper’s opinion section by killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election, paid digital was thought to be around 2.5 million. About 200,000 vanished overnight. And who knows what it is today after further damage caused by high-profile resignations such as that of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes and Bezos’ announcement that he planned to transform the opinion pages into some sort of cheerleading free-market hellhole.
Bezos’ ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, has had exactly one good idea since he was hired in late 2023: to start a premium newsletter of local and regional coverage for readers who live in Washington and its suburbs. But if that’s ever been mentioned again, word of it somehow escaped me.
The Washington Post is in deep, deep trouble. After 10 years of sterling sterling stewardship, Bezos has transformed himself into the owner from hell, damaging the reputation of a still-great news organization that he did so much to build up.
Evidence of the destruction is all around. But you won’t find it in the paper’s irrelevant print circulation numbers.
The MBTA is a miracle most of the time. Just the other day I was telling friends who used to live here how much better it’s gotten under general manager Phil Eng. Then there was today.
I had no trouble getting to BU for a conference. But when I left a few minutes after 6, the fun began. The Green Line car I was on stopped moving almost immediately. We were told there had been some sort of emergency, and that we needed to to get out and take a shuttle bus. We walked to the bus stop, and no one could tell us whether a shuttle was showing up or not. A Boston police officer who was there saw someone in a T maintenance truck. He ran over to the guy (in 93-degree heat), came back, and told us the shuttles were leaving from Kenmore Square.
So I walked to Kenmore, broiling the whole way. At this point a large crowd had gathered to take the shuttle. The T workers who were there weren’t sure what was going on. Finally, we were told that we should get back on the Green Line to Arlington Station and pick up the shuttle there.
I got off at Copley and walked to the Orange Line, which proved to be a smart move. I got to North Station in time to take the commuter rail home. A trip that should have taken an hour or less had taken two hours, but it could have been worse.
Things happen. What upset me was the lack of communication and no accommodations for riders who had already paid. Everything should have just been opened, as it sometimes is in such circumstances. Instead, we all paid over and over whenever we switched lines.
The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo of mural in the city of Qom (cc) 2013 by David Stanley.
I think the most rational response to President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is to hang back a bit — that is, to acknowledge that he’s the wrong leader to do this, that he was more likely acting on ego and personal pique than out of any strategic vision, but that it’s too soon to tell whether this will be a disaster or might actually accomplish some good.
One starting point is that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Another starting point is to understand that what led to this really is all Trump’s fault. President Barack Obama painstakingly negotiated an agreement with Iran that significantly slowed Iran’s race to get a nuclear bomb, and Trump undid that in his first term for no discernible reason other than to disrespect Obama.
Pew’s “News Media Tracker.” Click on the image to access the interactive version.
Surveys in which people are asked whether they trust the media invariably come to two conclusions: (1) Despite findings that show widespread distrust, people actually do trust the news sources they use; and (2) Democrats avail themselves of a far wider range of sources than do Republicans.
Those verities were reconfirmed by a study published earlier this month by the Pew Research Center. Titled “The Political Gap in Americans’ News Sources,” the researchers found that a majority of Republicans and Republican “leaners” rely on Fox News, with smaller percentages also consuming other right-wing sources such as Breitbart, the Tucker Carlson Network and Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Democrats and Democratic leaners, meanwhile, get their news from a variety of mainstream sources such as The New York Times, NPR, the three big broadcast networks, CNN and MSNBC, with some delving into The Atlantic, The Guardian and Axios.
Interestingly, more Democrats (16%) than Republicans (12%) rely on The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the Murdoch family. The Journal’s opinion section is extremely conservative but increasingly unsympathetic to President Trump’s agenda on tariffs and other economic issues, while its news pages are superb.
One aspect of the Pew report that I found fascinating was an interactive graphic called the “News Media Tracker,” which shows how popular and trusted 30 media outlets are with Democrats and Republicans as well as with different age groups. I don’t see any way of embedding it, but you can access it by clicking here or on the graphic above. It’s a fantastic tool, though it would be even better if you could track party affiliation and age group; as it’s set up, you have to choose one or other other.
The phenomenon that Pew tracks is sometimes called “asymmetric polarization,” meaning that our deeply polarized political culture is more a consequence of Republicans moving far to the right than it is of Democrats moving left — although that has happened too.
In 2017 I wrote about a similar study for GBH News. The study, which was published by the Columbia Journalism Review, was based on social-media sharing habits rather than a survey, so Breitbart actually did much better among Republicans than Fox News, whose website was wretched back then. (It looks a little better now.)
The challenge is that Fox and its ilk are purveyors of weaponized propaganda, cheerleading for Trump rather than reporting the news fairly and truthfully. Mainstream outlets, for all their many faults, are dedicated to reporting the truth, verifying their facts and correcting their mistakes.
Thus we end up with asymmetric news coverage as well, in which the mainstream reports critically on Republicans and Democrats while the right-wing outlets are critical only of Democrats. It’s a huge factor in understanding our broken politics.
Cynthia Tu of Sahan Journal. Photo (cc) 2025 by Lev Gringauz / MinnPost
Like it or not (and my own feelings are mixed), artificial intelligence is being used by news organizations, and there’s no turning back. The big question is how.
The worst possible use of AI is to write stories, especially without sufficient human intervention to make sure that what’s being spit out is accurate. Somewhat more defensible is using it to write headlines, summaries and social-media posts — again, with actual editors checking it over. The most promising, though, is using it to streamline certain internal operations that no one has the time to do.
That’s what’s happening at Sahan Journal, a 6-year-old digital nonprofit that covers immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota. It’s one of the projects that Ellen Clegg profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.” And according to Lev Gringauz of MinnPost (one of the original nonprofit news pioneers), the Journal has embarked on a project to streamline some of its news and business functions with AI. (I learned about Gringauz’s story in Nieman Lab, where it was republished.)
Bolstered with $220,000 in grant money from the American Journalism Project and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, the Journal has employed AI to help with such tasks as processing financial data of the state’s charter schools, generating story summaries for Instagram, and adding audio to some articles.
The real value, though, has come in bolstering the revenue side, as the Journal has experimented with using AI to retool its media kit and to understand its audience better, such as “pulling up how much of Sahan Journal’s audience cares about public transportation.”
“We’re less enthusiastic, more skeptical, about using AI to generate editorial content,” Cynthia Tu, the Journal’s data journalist and AI specialist, told Gringauz. Even on internal tasks, though, AI has proved to be a less than reliable partner, hallucinating data despite Tu explicitly giving it commands not to scour the broader internet.
And as Gringauz observes, OpenAI is bleeding money. How much of a commitment makes sense given that Sahan Journal may be building systems on top of a platform that may cease to exist at some point?
Two other AI-related notes:
➤ Quality matters. In his newsletter Second Rough Draft, Richard J. Tofel has some useful thoughts on the panic over Google’s AI search engine, which has been described as representing an existential threat to news organizations since it will deprive them of click-throughs to their websites.
Tofel writes that clickbait will be harmed more than high-quality journalism, noting that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been hurt less than HuffPost, Business Insider and The Washington Post. “If there is one overriding lesson of publishing in the digital age,” Tofel writes, “it remains that distinctive content remains the most unassailable, the least vulnerable.”
Though Tofel doesn’t say so, I think there’s a lesson for local news publishers as well: hyperlocal journalism should be far less affected by AI search than national outlets, especially for those organizations that emphasize building a relationship with their communities.
➤ Here’s the pitch. Caleb Okereke, a Ph.D. student at Northeastern, is using AI to screen pitches for his digital publication Minority Africa. He writes that “we are receiving 10x more pitches than we did in our early days after launch,” adding: “With a lean editorial team, we faced a challenge familiar to many digital publications: how do you maintain depth, fairness, and attention when the volume scales but the staff doesn’t?”
He and his colleagues have built a customized tool called Iraka (which means “voice” in the Rutooro language) and put it to the test. As he writes, it’s far from perfect, though it’s getting better.
“As of now, editors are using Iraka individually to provide a first-pass on submissions, testing its utility alongside regular human review,” Okereke reports. “Every pitch is still manually read, and no editorial decisions are made solely based on the model’s output. This staged integration allows us to observe how the tool fits into existing workflows without disrupting the editorial process.”
In his 2010 book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” Nicholas Carr argued that our immersion in digital media is rewiring the way we think, turning us into distracted skimmers who are losing the capacity for deep concentration.
Yet social media was in its infancy back then. His lament in those days was aimed at a panoply of online distractions such as email that needed to be written, blogs that cried out to be read, streaming videos, downloadable music — in other words, anything but the task at hand. He mentions Facebook, but only in passing. Over the years, I’ve sometimes wondered what he would make of the explosion not just of Facebook but of Instagram, TikTok and their ilk now that they’ve taken over so much of our lives.
Well, my question has been answered. Earlier this year Carr published what is essentially a follow-up to “The Shallows.” Titled “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart,” the book surveys the mediascape of algorithmically driven tech platforms and finds that it is not just driving us to distraction but is creating a less happy, more polarized and more dangerous world.
Lincoln led not just the birth of a new nation but of a new political party as well.
We are awash in terrible news, so this morning I’d like to address something completely different. On Saturday, Nate Cohn of The New York Times asked, “Is There an Opening for a Third Party?” (gift link). My answer is an emphatic no, with a caveat.
Cohn is a smart guy who understands numbers. But he omits some important reasons for why the rise of a real alternative to the Democrats and Republicans will remain a fantasy unless it is accompanied by a thorough-going change in the way we hold elections.
Cohn’s reasoning for why there might be an opening is solid, though I think that opening is much smaller than he imagines. He argues that as the two major parties have both embraced different forms of populism, the neoliberals and globalists who were ascendant as recently as 20 years ago have been left behind. He writes:
What’s the group? It doesn’t have a name, but it favors things like deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade and high-skilled immigration. It may be recognizable by the labels its critics on both the left and right have already assigned: “neoliberals” or “globalists.” (Though, to be fair, this new group doesn’t necessarily idealize markets or oppose government spending.)
So essentially Cohn is talking about Never Trump conservatives plus Joe Manchin. You could fit them all in a phone booth. (For you young ’uns, here’s a phone booth.) Cohn pays lip service to past examples of third parties like the Progressives of the early 20th century and the Republicans in the 1850s. But he misses some vital context.
A two-party system is baked into our politics not because anyone likes it but because we have winner-take-all elections in which the candidate who comes in first is the victor, even if they get less than 50% of the vote. Yes, I realize there are some exceptions, such as jurisdictions that hold runoffs or have embraced ranked-choice voting. But that’s how it works for nearly all of our major-office elections such as the House, the Senate and gubernatorial races. (Let’s not get started on the Electoral College.)
Now, I don’t want to take credit for an idea that I read somewhere else recently. I can’t seem to find it, but I thought it was something that Josh Marshall wrote for Talking Points Memo. But the examples of the Republicans and the Progressives actually show why third parties flop.
First, the Republicans couldn’t succeed unless they replaced the Whigs, which were one of the two major parties along with the Democrats. The Whigs were conflicted on slavery while the Democrats were all for it. Thus there was an opening for a party that was staunchly anti-slavery. Within just a few years’ time, the Whigs fell apart and were replaced by the Republicans, maintaining the major-party duopoly. So that’s my caveat, and it’s not much of one.
The Progressives actually ran a popular former president, Theodore Roosevelt, as their standard-bearer in 1912. Roosevelt managed to come in second, with the incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft, finishing in third and getting swamped in the Electoral College. Roosevelt’s challenge succeeded only in getting Democrat Woodrow Wilson elected, and he proved to be a racist warmonger with an unparalleled contempt for civil liberties.
Progressive ideas started to permeate into the two major parties, especially the Democratic party. And Roosevelt’s distant cousin Franklin embraced a progressive agenda once he became president in 1933.
So how would we have to change the system in order to give a third party a chance to emerge as a significant force? With congressional and state legislative races, the surest route to new parties would be multicandidate districts and proportional presentation, as explained in this data-rich opinion piece (gift link; trust me when I tell you this is well worth your time) published by The New York Times earlier this year. The piece even anticipates the emergence of five parties under such a system. (I’d be a New Liberal with some New Populist sympathies.)
Massachusetts has nine U.S. House members, so imagine dividing the state into two districts, one with five members and the other with four. Let’s say that in the five-member district 60% of voters chose the New Liberal Party (traditional Democrats, more or less), 40% chose the Growth and Opportunity Party (traditional Republicans) and 20% chose the Progressive Party. The district would send three Democrats, two Republicans and one Progressive to Washington. The other two parties under this scheme: the Patriot Party (Trumpers) and Christian Conservatives.
Such a system, the Times essay argues, would encourage coalition-building and would give voters the opportunity to feel like there’s a party that represents their beliefs and interests — something that is entirely missing today.
All of this is why talking about a third party is a waste of time unless it’s accompanied by deep, systemic change. Given our slide into populist authoritarianism and the emergence of millions of Americans who oppose that slide, either we’re further than ever from trying something completely new — or we’re closer than we’ve ever been before.
This year’s Muzzle winners include Plymouth’s town manager, for attempting to intimidate and silence the nonprofit Plymouth Independent; the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for muzzling the police chief and playing favorites with the press; and the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, for planning to install two religious statues on public property at the city’s new public safety building.
In his 2010 book “
