Dan Kennedy

CJR was said to be working on a story about Wesley Lowery. It finally drops — and it is horrifying.

Wesley Lowery, left, speaking at a panel discussion. Photo (cc) 2016 by New America.

When Sewell Chan was fired by the Columbia Journalism Review last month for reasons that have not been adequately explained, he wrote on social media about a sensitive story that was in the works. He said he had what he described as “pointed conversations” with three staff members. Here’s how he described one of those conversations:

[It] was with an editor who has been working for weeks on a sensitive MeToo investigation I launched about sexual harassment by a prominent investigative reporter. Following a legal review of that story, I urged her to share her draft to the dean so that we could move expeditiously toward publication. She asked for more time, to which I reluctantly acceded. The story remains unpublished.

Those of us who are media obsessives assumed he was referring to former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize winner. In March, Lowery was the subject of a tough article in his former paper (gift link), written by Will Sommer, alleging that he had left his job at American University over allegations that he’d made “inappropriate sexual comments in private meetings with students and unwanted sexual advances and actions toward journalists.”

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On Wednesday, the story that Chan had alluded to finally dropped. And it is truly the stuff that nightmares are made of. Betsy Morais, named interim editor of the Columbia Journalism Review after Chan’s firing, reports that Lowery engaged in a pattern of serious sexual misconduct while he was at American University, with several women saying that Lowery had pressured them into sex or sexually assaulted them after he plied them with alcohol. It is a deeply disturbing story. Lowery would not speak with CJR, but he did give Morais a statement that I can only describe as unparseable. It says in part:

CJR’s portrayal of these periods in my personal life is incomplete and includes false insinuations about complicated dynamics. Still, I respect the women who have shared their experiences and take their perspectives seriously. As a young professional, I did not always recognize the power imbalances that surfaced as personal relationships evolved into professional ones, and vice versa.

He adds that he has since “committed to sobriety.”

This would be a tragedy in any case, especially for the women he allegedly victimized. But it’s also a tragedy because of what Lowery represents. He is a prominent Black journalist who has been outspoken about the ways that traditional notions of objectivity have served to reinforce the status quo with regard to race and gender — both within media organizations and in how the news is covered.

I know Lowery slightly and, until recently, counted myself among his admirers. I interviewed him briefly for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.” I’ve emailed back and forth with him about which of his books I should assign my ethics students. I’ve assigned his essays on objectivity as well as the video of a panel discussion he took part in on that topic hosted by the Columbia Journalism School, which is the home of CJR.

It is a real loss that his voice will no longer be heard. And no, I won’t be assigning his work anymore. There are times when it’s just too difficult to separate the writer from what they have written.

Lowery worked for The Boston Globe about a dozen years ago, and when editor Marty Baron left to become executive editor of The Washington Post, Lowery followed not long after. He wrote an important book about the first wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” and he helped the Post build a widely praised database of people who had been killed by police officers.

But it is Lowery’s critique of objectivity that was uniquely valuable. I don’t agree with him entirely — as Walter Lippmann originally conceived of objectivity, it is the fair-minded, evidence-based pursuit of the truth, not mindless balance, which is the way it is often caricatured. And I don’t really think Lowery disagrees with Lippmann.

At the beginning of each semester, I’ve asked my ethics students to read an op-ed piece (gift link) that Lowery wrote for The New York Times in 2020 headlined “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” and to watch an address that Baron delivered at Brandeis in 2023 called “In Defense of Objectivity.”

What’s striking is that Lowery’s and Baron’s views aren’t really that far apart, even though their clashes over Lowery’s outspokenness on social media led to Lowery’s departure from the Post.

Now Lowery has been silenced — has silenced himself. The debate over journalistic ethics, objectivity and race will be poorer without his contributions. I am not saying he deserves any special treatment for the terrible behavior of which he’s been accused. I am saying that his critique of how journalists do their work will be missed.

I realize that, in lamenting the loss of Lowery’s voice, I haven’t given voice to any of the women quoted in the CJR story. So I’m going to close with a thread on Bluesky written by Olivia Messer, the editor-in-chief of Barbed Wire, who told CJR a harrowing tale of being sexually assaulted by Lowery.

Messer also says that she was interviewed, on the record, for the article that Sommer wrote for The Washington Post and that her comments did not make it into print. Sommer has since left the Post for The Bulwark. So it sounds like there are still some loose ends to be tied up.

Here is what she posted last night:

Some of y’all noticed I’ve been uncharacteristically offline. This is why, and I remain on leave for a few weeks to handle a PTSD relapse. CJR was dogged in its pursuit of my story. Because of what I do and who I am, I felt that I had to answer their questions honestly.www.cjr.org/feature-2/we…

— Olivia Messer (@oliviamesser.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T17:17:28.955Z

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but I also believe it was a chance to prove that I mean what I say to the women who have trusted me with theirs. I have to believe that there’s power in telling the truth — and in journalism.

— Olivia Messer (@oliviamesser.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T17:17:53.850Z

I’m really really overwhelmed by the messages of support — and the multiple journalists who’ve DMed me about their similar experiences with him. It’s going to take time to get back to everyone, but I deeply appreciate it and am filled with just immense gratitude and relief.

— Olivia Messer (@oliviamesser.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T19:43:02.150Z

That AI-generated list of fake books was published by a Hearst subsidiary, 404 Media reports

We now know more about the AI-generated slop that was published in the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

According to Jason Koebler of 404 Media, the 64-page summer guide called “Heat Index” was produced by King Features, part of the Hearst chain. As Koebler reported earlier, a freelancer named Marco Buscaglia used AI to write a guide to summer books. He admitted that he did not check his work, and it turned out that most of the books don’t exist.

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Marina Dunbar reports in The Guardian that other articles in “Heat Index” may also contain AI hallucinations, including one on food and another on gardening. The Sun-Times addressed the fiasco on Tuesday but put its statement behind the paper’s paywall. That’s unacceptable, so here’s a link where you can find it. The paper says in part:

Our partner confirmed that a freelancer used an AI agent to write the article. This should be a learning moment for all of journalism that our work is valued because of the relationship our very real, human reporters and editors have with our audiences.

The Sun-Times statement also says that subscribers won’t be charged, that “Heat Index” is being removed from its e-paper version, and that various steps are being taken to improve transparency.

The Chicago Sun-Times News Guild issued a statement as well:

The Sun-Times Guild is aware of the third-party “summer guide” content in the Sunday, May 18 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. This was a syndicated section produced externally without the knowledge of the members of our newsroom.

We take great pride in the union-produced journalism that goes into the respected pages of our newspaper and on our website. We’re deeply disturbed that AI-generated content was printed alongside our work. The fact that it was sixty-plus pages of this “content” is very concerning — primarily for our relationship with our audience but also for our union’s jurisdiction.

Our members go to great lengths to build trust with our sources and communities and are horrified by this slop syndication. Our readers signed up for work that has been vigorously reported and fact-checked, and we hate the idea that our own paper could spread computer- or third-party-generated misinformation. We call on Chicago Public Media management to do everything it can to prevent repeating this disaster in the future.

It’s interesting that most of the focus has been on the Sun-Times rather than the Inquirer, even though “Heat Index” appeared in the Inquirer last Thursday, three days before the Sun-Times, according to Herb Scribner of The Washington Post (gift link). Axios reported that the Inquirer’s publisher and CEO, Lisa Hughes, called the screw-up “a violation of our own internal policies and a serious breach.” Mostly, though, the focus has been on Chicago, where the mistake was first caught.

It’s worth noting, too, that the Sun-Times and the Inquirer are both owned by mission-oriented nonprofits — the Sun-Times by Chicago Public Media and the Inquirer by the Lenfest Institute. It shows that anyone can get caught up in this. And I don’t really blame editors at either paper for not checking, since “Heat Index” is outside content produced by a respected media organization.

Speaking of Hearst, we have not yet heard from them as to how this was allowed to happen. Because even if it was acceptable for the Sun-Times and the Inquirer not to edit the supplement, it certainly should have been thoroughly edited by King Features before it was sent out to client newspapers.

This is a story about the hazards of AI, but, even more, it’s a story about human failure.

How an AI-generated guide to summer books that don’t exist found its way into two newspapers

Well, this is embarrassing. The Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer have been caught running an AI-generated guide to summer books that don’t exist. I saw some hilarious posts about it this morning on Bluesky, but I wanted to wait until there was news about what had happened.

Now we know. Jason Koebler reports for the tech site 404 Media that the feature was written (or, rather, not written) by someone named Marco Buscaglia as part of a 64-page summer guide. The section was not specific to the Sun-Times or the Inquirer but, rather, was intended for multiple client newspapers. “It’s supposed to be generic and national,” Buscaglia told Koebler. “We never get a list of where things ran.”

Buscaglia pleads guilty to using AI, too, saying, “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses. On me 100% and I’m completely embarrassed.”

And now it’s being reported that The Philadelphia Inquirer ran the supplement, too.

The Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid, merged several years ago with Chicago Public Media, creating a nonprofit hybrid that could compete with the larger Chicago Tribune, which has labored under cuts imposed by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Media.

The merger hasn’t gone particular well, though. In March, the Sun-Times reported that it would lose 20% of its staff under buyouts imposed by Chicago Public Media, which is dealing with its own economic woes. According to an article by Sun-Times reporter David Roeder, the cuts were aimed at eliminating 23 positions in a newsroom of 107.

As for the AI fiasco, the Sun-Times said on Bluesky: “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously.”

If it wasn’t approved by the newsroom, that suggests it was an advertising supplement.

At Colorado Community Media, the optimism of 2021 has given way to bitter reality

Ann and Jerry Healey. Photos (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

When I wrote last week that the nonprofit National Trust for Local News had sold 21 of its Colorado newspapers to a corporate chain called Times Media Group, I observed: “I honestly don’t know what kind of reputation the company has. But it’s ironic that a nonprofit founded as an alternative to chain ownership has found it necessary to cut a deal with one of those chains.”

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Well, now. According to Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab, the chain, which owned some 60 papers in California and Arizona before the Colorado deal, has reputation for “gutting” its properties. Scire writes:

The Times Media Group is, to put it mildly, an odd choice of buyer for the mission-driven National Trust for Local News. The Trust is a nonprofit that has emphasized the importance of local control for local newspapers and describes community newspapers as “vital civic assets.” The Times Media Group is an out-of-state, for-profit media company with a history of reducing local newsrooms.

Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins calls Scire’s article “the Nieman Lab story heard ’round Colorado.”

The papers that the Trust sold off are in the Denver suburbs; the nonprofit is retaining seven other papers in more rural areas, where it says the news desert problem is more acute. Among those laid off was Linda Shapley, the editorial director of Colorado Community Media (CCM), the umbrella group for the Trust’s papers before the selloff. I interviewed Shapley for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and she’s been a guest on our podcast.

Last week I tried unsuccessfully to connect with Jerry and Ann Healey, who sold CCM to the Trust in 2021. Jerry Healey did talk with Hutchins, telling him that he “kind of bought into their [the Trust’s] vision,” adding, “But after a while, I realized that it wasn’t working.”

In September 2021, I interviewed the Healeys at a coffee shop just outside of Hartford, Connecticut. They were there to visit their daughter, who worked for ESPN. They had sold their papers to the National Trust just a few months earlier, and at that time they were hopeful they had left their legacy in good hands. I interviewed Shapley at CCM’s headquarters in Englewood, Colorado, the following week.

What follows is an except from “What Works in Community News,” which I co-wrote with Ellen Clegg.

***

David Gilbert, a reporter with Colorado Community Media (CCM), was summoned into publisher and co-owner Jerry Healey’s office one day in the spring of 2021. “I’ve got news for you,” Healey told him. “I’ve sold the papers.” Healey wanted Gilbert to write the story about the transaction. CCM published 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in Denver’s suburbs. Gilbert, who’d been on staff for four years, imagined the worst — namely, a corporate chain owner was coming in that would slash costs and eliminate jobs. His first thought, he said, was “Oh, crap, time to pack up my things. I wonder if I can get my job back driving a truck.”

Continue reading “At Colorado Community Media, the optimism of 2021 has given way to bitter reality”

Find the missing stories in The New York Times’ sloppy Today’s Paper listings

The print newspaper, anachronistic though it may be, is one of the most reliable antidotes to news overload. Once a day, editors decide what the most important news is and, even more crucial, what isn’t. This fixed object is a welcome relief from the endless scroll of a news website or app.

But The New York Times consistently fails to get it right. We take Sunday delivery, but I often prefer to read it on my iPad, because the type’s bigger, the background’s brighter and the photos are better. I use the Today’s Paper view, both in the app and on the web. And, frustratingly, it usually doesn’t entirely match what’s in print.

Take today. The print edition has six stories on the front page. Two of them, one about efforts to revitalize George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, the other about the effect of tariffs on iron miners in northern Minnesota, are omitted from the online list of front-page stories. (Do the editors have something against Minnesota?)

Scroll through the list and you won’t find those stories anywhere. But searching the site reveals that they were indeed published online. The story about the iron miners appears on the homepage, barely noticeable; the George Floyd Square story is currently invisible, although I imagine it will have a star turn on the homepage later on.

To add to the frustration, the Times does not have a decent replica edition — that is, a PDF of the print paper through which you can easily navigate. It does offer one through PressReader, but it’s difficult to get to and the experience is worse than mediocre. By contrast, The Boston Globe offers several good replica options.

Perhaps Times executives are finding that so few people want the digital Today’s Paper offering that they just don’t put much effort into it. I mean, it’s not even available anymore in the mobile app, though it persists in the iPad version and on the web.

But all we’re talking about is a list of stories in that day’s paper. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask that they get it right. Otherwise, why bother?

A disappointing end for the Celtics — and a tough road ahead

What a disappointing end for the Celtics. I’m no basketball expert, but it does seem that their biggest problem is they’re a finesse team built for the regular season, and when the playoffs roll around they get out-muscled.

They need to build a team that’s much more physical, able to rebound in traffic and force the other team to pay a higher price when they drive to the basket. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are plenty physical enough, but the rest of them aren’t.

By most accounts, Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday won’t be back. It would be good if they could be replaced with bigger, stronger players, even if they’re not as talented. That said, they’re not going anywhere without Tatum next year, so Brad Stevens will probably sit back for a year and reassess. The owners are going to want to save money on a team that can’t compete for a championship.

Although I didn’t hear too much talk that the Celtics play better without Tatum, I did hear a little of it. If you were among them, what do you think now? He makes everyone better, and even when his shot isn’t falling he’s a rebounding and assists machine.

Should Joe Mazzulla stay? I’m guessing yes. I trust Brad to make the right call, but it seems significant that we haven’t heard one word of criticism about him from the players. Of course, we’d all like to see him develop a Plan B for when the threes aren’t falling, but that brings me back to their lack of physicality.

A Muzzle Award for a judge who tried to stop a Muslim witness from testifying while covering her face

It was a decision oblivious to religious and cultural differences. Roxbury Municipal Court Judge Kenneth Fiandaca ruled recently that a Muslim woman would have to remove her niqab, a religious head scarf that covered most of her face, when she testified against her ex-boyfriend, who was on trial to face charges of domestic violence.

As Sean Cotter reported in The Boston Globe, the Suffolk County district attorney’s office said the ruling was “tantamount to a dismissal” since the woman had no intention of violating her religious beliefs by complying. And thus we present a New England Muzzle Award to Judge Fiandaca for his insistence on following the letter but ignoring the spirit of the Constitution.

Fiandaca was relying on the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees that a criminal defendant has the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” In nearly all cases, that means a face-to-face encounter. Fiandaca was of the opinion that the accuser’s niqab, which covered all of her face except a slit for her eyes, amounted to a denial of the defendant’s rights.

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If Fiandaca’s ruling had stood, the defendant would have immediately walked free without the jury having a chance to hear the woman’s testimony that “he was drunk and invaded her house, grabbed her by the throat, and punched her in the face while her current partner tried to fend him off,” as Cotter reported.

Fortunately a more legally astute mind prevailed. A single justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, Serge Georges Jr., ruled against Fiandaca, writing, “The right to confrontation is not absolute,” explaining that other courts have “recognized limited and exceptional circumstances in which a defendant’s rights under the Sixth Amendment … appropriately yield to competing constitutional interests.”

The woman was thus allowed to testify while wearing her niqab, and a jury found the defendant not guilty. But that’s not the point. The point is that her right to practice her Muslim faith should not have prevented her from appearing in court to give her version of what happened. Thanks to Justice Georges, her religious liberties were recognized, and justice was done.

Northeastern professor develops map to help local news outlets track nearby protests

Imagine that you run a local news site and a protest breaks out in your community. You cover it, but you’d like to place it within a broader context. How many other protests are taking place near your city and town? What are they about?

Our Northeastern colleague Rahul Bhargava, a professor in the School of Journalism, has come up with a way of tracking demonstrations. He’s developed a map that can be embedded so community news outlets can show their readers what’s taking place nearby. You can set the map so that it depicts protests anywhere from within five to 100 miles. Rahul writes for Storybench, our media-innovation publication:

[I]t appears that local reporters are covering protests in their area, but not often connecting them to larger movements. That might be because coalitions like #50501 aren’t as well known as unions and long-standing activist groups; they don’t have communications people with long-standing relationships to journalists.

One approach to help reporters make those links for readers, and put individual events in a broader context, is to use data about local protests. Connecting this weekend’s rally to events over the last few weeks might connect dots for audiences that are seeing public displays of resistance. I wondered if I could quickly map protests in my area based on existing data sources.

The map is based on data compiled by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), a nonprofit, and the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), part of the Harvard Ash Center.

The map is free, so give it a try.

The National Trust for Local News sheds papers in Colorado, while a former Maine Trust exec re-emerges

At CCM headquarters in Englewood, Colo. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

The National Trust for Local News is shedding papers in Colorado, while in Maine a former top executive with the Trust is taking on a new role. The Trust, a nonprofit that buys newspapers to save them from falling into the hands of corporate ownership, has some 50 titles in Colorado, Maine and Georgia.

I’ll deal with Colorado first. The Trust made its debut in the spring of 2021 when it purchased Colorado Community Media, a chain of 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver area. The Colorado Sun, a digital startup based in Denver, was brought in to help run the papers and was given an ownership stake. Ellen Clegg and I wrote about all that in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

A lot has happened since then, including the Sun’s decision to unwind its relationship with the papers. Now CCM is breaking up, with 21 publications in the Denver metropolitan area being transfered to Times Media Group, a Tempe, Arizona-based chain whose owner has ties to Colorado. Seven other papers will be retained by the National Trust.

Continue reading “The National Trust for Local News sheds papers in Colorado, while a former Maine Trust exec re-emerges”

Northeastern’s Carlene Hempel and Harrison Zuritsky tell us about the Flint Unfiltered project

The Flint Unfiltered team. From left: Claire Adner, Emily Niedermeyer, Alaa Al Ramahi, Professor Carlene Hempel, Steph Conquest-Ware, Mary Raines Alexander, Alexa Coultoff, Harrison Zuritsky and Asher Ben-Dashan.

On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Carlene Hempel and Harrison Zuritsky. Our colleague Carlene, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, recently led a reporting trip to Flint, Michigan. Harrison and other students produced a stunning internet magazine called Flint Unfiltered that takes a deep dive into the causes and effects of Flint’s economic downturn and toxic water crisis.

Since 2009, Carlene has been leading students on reporting trips, where they work as part of a traveling press corps. She has taken groups to many countries, including Egypt, Syria, Cuba and Panama. Harrison, a second-year student with concentrations in journalism and data science, joined her on the Flint trip.

Click on image to access the digital magazine.

Like so many at Northeastern, Carlene has a background that includes academic achievement as well as wide-ranging professional experience. She has been a professor for 20 years and holds a Ph.D. from Northeastern. She started her career reporting for The Middlesex News in Framingham, Massachusetts, now the MetroWest Daily News, and The Boston Globe. She then moved to North Carolina, where she worked for MSNBC and The News & Observer of Raleigh.

I’ve got a Quick Take from Maine. Reade Brower, the former owner of the Portland Press Herald, is going to have three of his weekly papers printed at the Press Herald’s facility in South Portland, giving a boost to the National Trust for Local News, the nonprofit that now owns the Press Herald and several other Maine papers. Brower’s also followed through on a plan to open a café at one of his weeklies, the Midcoast Villager, in a unique effort to boost civic engagement.

Ellen weighs in on a new study of local news by Professor Joshua Darr of Syracuse University, a friend of the pod. Darr teamed up with three other researchers to do a meta analysis of surveys on media trust. They made a number of findings, but the headline is that Americans trust local newsrooms more than national news outlets. This is especially true if the local news outlet has the actual name of the community in its title. But there’s a downside: that automatic trust also allows pink slime sites to take hold.

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