Two new developments in the ongoing brouhaha at NPR over Uri Berliner’s essay accusing the network of left-wing bias in its news coverage:
• NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that Berliner has been suspended without pay for five days for failing “to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists.”
This strikes me as the worst of all possible outcomes — making Berliner a martyr while keeping him on staff. At least in theory, an NPR editor ought to be able to voice concerns about the network’s ideological direction while remaining employed. But by running to Bari Weiss’ conservative opinion outlet, The Free Press, and by voicing his complaints as loudly and as frequently as possible, Berliner has made it extremely difficult to do his job. How can he edit his underlings’ work, especially if they are people of color or members of another underrepresented community?
• The New York Times reported Monday that NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, posted some provocative tweets, including one calling Donald Trump a racist (editor: he is a racist), before coming to the network. Awkward? Yes. But this is her first job at a news organization, and she’s on the business side rather than the editorial side.
Naturally, Berliner can’t stop running his mouth, telling Folkenflik: “We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about. And this seems to be the opposite of that.”
I don’t know what we thought was so damn funny, but Ellen and I enjoyed having a chance to talk recently with G. Wayne Miller and Jim Ludes, the hosts of “Story in the Public Square,” about our book, “What Works in Community News.” The program is produced by Rhode Island PBS and the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.
The hedge fund Alden Global Capital, notorious for hollowing out its newspapers, is shutting down eight weekly newspapers in Minnesota. Louis Krauss of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune reports that six of the papers are part of the Southwest News Media group and two are under the auspices of Crow River Media.
“The closings will leave the communities without their long-time local papers,” Krauss writes. “Two of the papers, the Shakopee Valley News and Chaska Herald, have been published for more than 160 years, while the Jordan Independent was founded 140 years ago.”
Alden owns 68 dailies and more than 300 weekly publications through its MediaNews Group as well as another seven larger-market dailies through Tribune Publishing. Tribune recently sold The Baltimore Sun to David Smith, the head of Sinclair Broadcasting; Smith’s first act was to meet with his staff and berate them. Alden also owns New York’s Daily News but for some reason has separated it from its Tribune holdings. In Massachusetts, Alden owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.
A number of startup projects that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about in “What Works for Community News” were founded by people who quit an Alden-owned paper rather than continue to put up with round after round of cuts. Examples include relatively large outlets like The Colorado Sun and small projects like The Mendocino Voice and Santa Cruz Local.
Now it looks like some opportunities are about to open up in Minnesota for entrepreneurial-minded journalists.
Citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor is moving on to a new phase of his career. Gillmor, whose 2004 book, “We the Media,” inspired a generation of activists, is retiring from Arizona State University, and will be working on a project aimed at promoting democracy and freedom of expression. He writes:
I am absolutely convinced that journalism’s most essential role at this critical moment goes far, far beyond what it’s doing. The status quo in political (and related) coverage consists of sporadically noting that gosh-maybe-there’s-a-problem, while sticking mostly to journalistic business as usual. The status quo is journalistic malpractice.
If I’m not mistaken, Gillmor was the first to refer to the public as “the former audience,” a phrase later picked up by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen and many others, to describe the idea that the internet enables members of the public to communicate easily with journalists and among themselves. This idealistic vision was later corrupted by the giant tech platforms, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful — and maybe at some point we can get back to that.
Gillmor inspired not just non-journalists but journalists as well. Boston newspaper veteran Bob Sprague, the retired founder of the nonprofit digital news organization yourArlington, in the Boston suburbs, told Ellen Clegg and me on our “What Works” podcast that he decided to start covering his community shortly after reading “We the Media.”
In 2006 I wrote a profile of Gillmor for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon) after he founded the Center for Citizen Media at Harvard Law School, a project that has since ended. Here’s what he told me about his vision for citizen media:
If the right people join in the conversation, it will inevitably get richer and richer. The practical problems are many. How do you get knowledgeable people to join? How do you moderate things, if it’s a large conversation, [in a way] that pushes forward the subject? How do you elevate the signal out of the noise? I happen to think that’s one of the core issues we need to address in citizen media. How do you address the fact that most people don’t have the time to read every comment on every relevant blog?
We still see the spirit of Gillmor’s original ideas here and there. One of the projects that Ellen and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News,” is The Bedford Citizen, yet another project in Boston’s suburbs. Unlike Bob Sprague, who was already a longtime journalist, the Citizen was started by three volunteers, only one of whom had any journalism experience. Since then the nonprofit website has growing into a professional news organization with a paid editor.
There’s also the Documenters project, which pays members of the public to cover public meetings — a key ingredient that was missing from the original notion of citizen journalism.
Congratulations and good luck to Dan Gillmor on his latest venture.
Everybody’s talking about that New York Times poll (free link) showing that President Biden has more or less caught up with Donald Trump. But I think the results of a Wall Street Journal poll (free link) published Friday evening are a lot more significant. It shows that abortions rights are by far the most most important issue for suburban women who live in seven swing states: 39%, with immigration coming in second at 16% and the economy at 7%.
As the Journal puts it in its lead: “Abortion is the most powerful issue driving suburban women who could decide the presidential election.”
Given that the election is almost certainly going to come down to turnout, the Journal poll bodes well for Biden. Of course, if Democrats fail to take back the House and hold on to the Senate, it will be for naught, since the party won’t be able to codify Roe v. Wade as it has promised. But abortion rights will be the major issue in House and Senate races as well, so who knows what might happen?
New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2012 by AlexiusHoratius
The Boston Globe published a story Friday about a New Hampshire state representative named Jonathan Stone, an ex-police officer who — according to recently released records that he tried to keep secret — “spoke of killing police and raping the chief’s wife and children.”
As the Globe notes, the story was broken on April 5 by Damien Fisher of InDepthNH, a nonprofit news organization that covers politics and public policy in the Granite State. Fisher’s story begins:
Republican Rep. Jon Stone’s New Hampshire law enforcement career ended when he threatened to kill fellow police officers in a shooting spree, and murder his chief after raping the chief’s wife and children, all while he was already under scrutiny for his inappropriate relationship with a teen girl, according to the internal investigation reports finally released this week.
Yikes. Fisher writes that he first filed a right-to-know request in 2020, and that the records were ordered released last month by New Hampshire’s Supreme Court. InDepthNH executive editor and founder Nancy West was a guest on our “What Works” podcast in November 2022.
In Ohio, DIY pink slime
Jack Brewster of NewsGuard, a project that tracks the rise of pink slime news sites, has written an essay for The Wall Street Journal (free link) that is at turns harrowing and hilarious. Spending just $105, he put together a website powered by artificial intelligence that’s designed to look like a local news outlet. Per his specifications, the site, which he called the Buckeye State Press, was designed with a right-wing bias, favoring Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno over the Democratic incumbent, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Brewster used an Israeli-based service called Fiverr.com to build the site, which in turn was programmed by a Pakistani freelancer named Huzafa Nawaz. Brewster writes:
From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total. The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it.
I’ve been following developments in pink slime off and on for the past decade, and what I’ve found is that they are pretty inept. That proved to be the case with Brewster’s experiment as well — at one point his site hallucinated Brown’s attendance at a local fig festival. At some point, though, these projects are going to evolve into effective sources of political propaganda, which we all need to be concerned about.
Google plays hardball in California
As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m skeptical of legislative attempts to force Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for the journalism that they repurpose. If anything, the notion has become more nonsensical over time, as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has made it clear that it would just as soon eliminate news content on platforms like Facebook and Threads.
Google is a different matter, but no less complicated. News publishers want money from Google, but at the same time exactly none of them add the necessary code to their sites which would make them invisible to Google, because they’re dependent on traffic from the giant search engine, too.
Still, it’s hard not to be outraged by Google’s latest tactic. According to Jeremy B. White of Politico, Google is blocking access to some local news content in parts of California as it fights against state legislation that would force them to pay news organizations. White writes:
“We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism,” Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, Jaffer Zaidi, said in a Friday blog post. Zaidi warned the bill could “result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”
Well, I guess so. These are the tactics of a thug, and yet another sign that the tech giants have amassed way too much power.
I’m genuinely surprised to learn that Robert MacNeil — who died today at the age of 93 — was still alive. I wasn’t watching the “PBS NewsHour” back when he was on the air and only started to tune in when the late Jim Lehrer was anchoring. I think they’ve done a good job of transitioning to a younger team without losing their seriousness. I’m also glad that Judy Woodruff still weighs in occasionally, and I really miss Gwen Ifill.
These newsroom culture stories are coming fast and furious. Today The Wall Street Journal weighs in (free link) with a detailed look at angst and turmoil inside The New York Times, encompassing everything from current controversies over its coverage of the war in Gaza and transgender issues all the way back to the 2020 defenestration of James Bennet. Not much new here, but it’s nicely pulled together.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Josh Stearns, the senior director of the Public Square Program at Democracy Fund.
The Democracy Fund is an independent foundation that works for something very basic and increasingly important: to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges. Josh leads the foundation’s work in rebuilding local news. The Democracy Fund supports media leaders, defends press freedom, and holds social media platforms accountable. (Ellen Clegg was stuck in traffic somewhere on the Zakim Bridge in Boston for the duration of this show, but she’ll return for the next episode!)
In our Quick Takes, I poach on Ellen’s territory and reports on a development in Iowa, the Hawkeye State. When two local weekly newspapers near Iowa City recently got into trouble, their owner found an unusual buyer: The Daily Iowan, the independent nonprofit student newspaper. Now there are plans to supplement local coverage with contributions from student journalists.
It’s not something I’d like to see everywhere — after all, we want to make sure there are jobs for student journalists after they graduate. But at least in this case, it sounds like the Iowa solution is going to be good for the weekly papers, good for the students and good for the communities they serve.
Michael Dukakis is not only a national treasure, he’s been a treasure at Northeastern University since the early 1990s. On Thursday he was honored by three of his successors.
