I’m excited to be giving the Sidore Lecture at Keene State College in New Hampshire today at 6:30 p.m. I’ll be talking about our book, “What Works in Community News.” Keene, as you may know, is the home of The Keene Sentinel, a great independent news organization. The event is free, so if you’re in the Keene area, I hope you’ll drop by.
Author: Dan Kennedy
Please join us for an all-day conference at Northeastern on the future of local news
Ellen Clegg and I want to share with you some news about a great upcoming event — a free, all-day conference that’s open to the public and will be held at Northeastern University on Friday, March 15. It’s called “What Works: The Future of Local News.” You can register and find more information by clicking here. You can come for all or part of it, and the day will include a light breakfast, a boxed lunch and a reception at the end of the day. Full details are in the flier below. We would love to see you there!
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The left’s angry revolt against The New York Times
If you spend any time on the Twitter alternative Threads, then you know there is a revolt taking place among liberals and progressives over the way that The New York Times is covering the presidential election. I’ve been writing about the Times’ propensity for both-sides-ism in its political coverage for years, but the current outburst strikes me as over the top. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has a good overview of the controversy.
How community-based entrepreneurs are solving the local news crisis
The local news crisis has led to no end of policy proposals, funding initiatives and angry denunciations of the harm done to journalism by the likes of Craigslist, Google and Facebook.
Ideas for responding to the crisis range from paying recent journalism school graduates with state tax revenues to cover underserved communities, as in California; mandating that state agencies direct half of their spending on advertising to community media, as has been proposed in Illinois; and creating tax credits that would benefit subscribers, advertisers and publishers, the subject of several federal and state initiatives.
And those are just a few.
Though all of these have some merit, they share a fundamental flaw: They are top-down solutions to problems that differ from one community to another.
There is an old saying that goes back a dozen years to the earliest days of hyperlocal digital news: Local doesn’t scale. In fact, I’d argue, the real solution to the local news crisis needs to come from the bottom up – from folks at the community level who decide to take their news and information needs into their own hands.
A New York Times story about Hamas and sexual violence comes under scrutiny
Like many of you have no doubt been doing, I’ve been tracking a story about a possible massive failure on the part of The New York Times. It’s about a story the paper published in December headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It is a harrowing and horrifying report on how Hamas terrorists sexually assaulted women in the most violent ways imaginable during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which claimed some 1,200 lives.
Parts of the story came under serious scrutiny on Feb. 28 in an investigative report published by The Intercept. It’s a complicated critique, because no one, including The Intercept, doubts that the terrorists engaged in sexual brutality. But the Times relied in part on a freelancer whose social media activity suggests that she is anti-Palestinian and who has little in the way of journalism experience. The Intercept has also called into question some key details in the Times story. The Times, it should be noted, stands behind its reporting.
The Intercept has also reported that the Times canceled an episode of “The Daily” concerning the sexual violence story after internal and external critics raised questions about its veracity. That, in turn, has led to an investigation inside the Times to determine who may have leaked that news. The NewsGuild of New York has accused the Times of targeting employees whose backgrounds are Middle Eastern or North African, which the Times denies.
This is a developing story. For now, I highly recommend this overview at Semafor by Ben Smith, which not only lays out the details but offers some valuable background and analysis.
Roger Fidler predicted the future of news delivery. But he missed a crucial piece.
The New York Times last week published a story by David Streitfeld on Roger Fidler, a digital journalism visionary who touted the idea of delivering news via tablet computers a good 20 years before such devices were even available. I wrote about Fidler in my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking News for the Twenty-First Century.” An excerpt follows. It’s fascinating to look back at what Fidler got right and got wrong.
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In the early 1990s, a Knight Ridder executive named Roger Fidler developed an idea that was stunningly close to the tablets and smartphones of the 2010s. I attended a conference at Columbia University at which Fidler outlined his vision for a digital tablet on which we would read newspapers and magazines — something he had been thinking about for the previous dozen or so years. The screen would have the same resolution as a glossy magazine; the devices would be flexible so you could roll one up and take it with you; and they would be so cheap that newspapers would give them away to eliminate the money-burning tasks of printing and distribution. How far ahead of his time was Fidler? Even as of 2017, we were nowhere near achieving any of those three goals.
Fidler also anticipated the choice and interactivity that would come with digital newspapers. For instance, he said that a subscriber might purchase a subscription to The New York Times’s international news, The Washington Post’s political news and her local paper’s regional news. And the tablet would have interactive capabilities so that you could, for instance, click on a restaurant ad to make a reservation. “It was not quite like Roger had descended from another planet, but he was saying some things that were simply very hard to believe at the time,” John Woolley, who worked with Fidler, said in 2012. “He had conjured up this idea of a tablet at a time when laptops were revolutionary. He was clearly a futurist. And he didn’t care what anyone believed. He never backed down.”
I have no notes from that conference, so I’m relying largely on my memory, as well as a video that Fidler put together when he was head of the Knight Ridder Information Design Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. The prototype in the video was simultaneously retro in that the display looked exactly like a printed newspaper and futuristic in its capabilities, which included better, faster interactive graphics than we generally see today as well as sophisticated voice controls.
But keep in mind Marshall McLuhan’s admonition that the medium is the message. Fidler envisioned a revolutionary leap forward in the way we interact with text, photography, graphics, audio and video. What he did not envision was that the digital future would be altogether different from what had come before and that we would use it in ways he could not imagine. In his talk at Columbia, he said that we’d download the content we had paid for by plugging our devices into, say, our cable television box before going to bed. In the video, he also raised the possibility of something that looked like a credit card that you could take with you and use to load more content onto your device if you were away from home. What he missed was that digital newspapers would be distributed via the open web rather than a closed system controlled by publishers. Fidler could see into the future in ways that were remarkable. But in 1994, he did not mention what would turn out to be the most revolutionary change of all. Even though he brilliantly anticipated the technological revolution that was to come, he failed to foresee the cultural revolution that would accompany it.
“For most people a newspaper’s like a friend,” Fidler says in the video. “It’s somebody you know who you have come to trust. Over the last 15 years there have been many attempts to develop electronic newspapers, and many of the technologists who have been pursuing these objectives assume that information is simply a commodity, and people really don’t care where that information comes from as long as it matches their set of personal interests. I disagree with that view.”
In fact, Fidler was wrong. Most news turned out to be so generic that it is difficult to imagine anyone would ever pay for it. As I am wrapping up this chapter in late March 2017, one of the big news stories of the day is the fate of President Donald Trump’s tax proposals following the Republican Congress’ failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act — a major plank in Trump’s platform. Entering “Trump taxes” at Google News brings more than 7.3 million results — the very definition of commodity news. More than 20 years after the narrator of Fidler’s video assured viewers that people wanted “a specific newspaper with a branded identity,” there are very few types of content that readers might be persuaded to pay for: certain types of local and investigative stories that no other news organizations are publishing; personalities that distinguish a paper from its competitors, such as popular columnists; and the intelligent judgment of editors regarding what news is the most important, what’s less important, and what can be left out of the paper altogether.
A coda to The Boston Globe’s reporting on the Stuart case
I just finished listening to the 10th episode of the podcast “Murder in Boston,” produced by The Boston Globe and HBO, which revisits the infamous 1989 Charles Stuart case. The podcast and the Globe series had concluded, but Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who narrates the podcast, explains that the decision was made to release one more episode after Mayor Michelle Wu publicly apologized to the Black community for the city’s and the police department’s racist response. And here’s a good overview of the Globe’s reporting by Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab. Both are well worth your time.
Cooperatively owned local news outlets are still an unfulfilled dream
Good to see that some journalists are trying cooperatively owned news projects, as Lauren Mechling reports for The Guardian. One of our frustrations in finding news organizations to write about in “What Works in Community News” was that there were no examples we could find of a successful local news co-op.
The for-profit Mendocino Voice in Northern California considered it but got overwhelmed during the COVID pandemic. As I was wrapping up my reporting, publisher Kate Maxwell told me she was more likely to shift to the nonprofit model rather than pursue a co-op. I spent years following efforts to start a co-op in Haverhill, which were eventually wound down because of fundraising problems. And The Devil Strip in Akron, Ohio, fell apart.
It’s still an interesting idea. Co-author Ellen Clegg and I believe that we need diversity in ownership models. For-profit startups tend to be tiny, and most of the ones with much in the way of reporting capacity are nonprofits. A news outlet owned by the staff and the community would be an interesting alternative. Maybe someday.
A longtime investigative nonprofit may be nearing the end of the road
I was sorry to hear that the Center for Public Integrity is in danger of shutting down. Although some observers are going to portray the center’s woes as further evidence that we are in the midst of a news meltdown, I suspect the answer is simpler than that. There’s only so much room for a nationally focused nonprofit investigative reporting organization, and ProPublica has sucked up most of the oxygen. ProPublica was founded in 2007; the lower-profile CPI dates back all the way to 1989.
CPI’s editor-in-chief, Matt DeRenzio, has already left, according to Benjamin Mullin’s account in The New York Times. I got to know Matt about a dozen years ago, when he was editor of the New Haven Register. He’s a good guy, and I hope he lands on his feet.
My friend and former Boston Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi, the finest reporter I’ve ever worked with, was on staff at CPI for a number of years, where she helped to report a series of stories about sexual abuse on college campuses. When Rolling Stone’s infamous story about an alleged rape victim at the University of Virginia fell apart, the Columbia School of Journalism conducted an in-depth post-mortem — and interviewed Kristen on how to do such sensitive reporting the right way. Kristen now runs Columbia’s postgraduate reporting program.
The full story of what happened to CPI may be yet to come out. According to the Times, the just-departed chief executive, Paul Cheung, has been accused by an employee of financial misbehavior, which Cheung has denied. According to tax records I looked up at GuideStar, Cheung received about $318,000 in total compensation in 2022 — maybe in line with a nonprofit of CPI’s size, but a lot of money given that the organization was already spending more than it was taking in.
A federal judge’s civil contempt ruling threatens a free and independent press
A federal judge reminded us all this week that journalists have no First Amendment right to protect their confidential sources. What is disturbing about the case at issue, though, is that it involves a civil case brought against the government rather than an alleged crime.
According to Alanna Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press, investigative reporter Catherine Herridge must pay a fine of $800 a day, although that fine will not be imposed until she has an opportunity to appeal. The case involves a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but not charged with any wrongdoing. That scientist, Yanping Chen, is suing the government and demanding to know who leaked damaging information about her to Herridge.
Herridge reported a series of articles about Chen for Fox News in 2017 and was recently laid off by CBS News.
Journalists in 49 states enjoy some level of protection in being required to give up their confidential sources. The two exceptions are Wyoming and the federal system. But even federal judges generally weigh the importance of the information sought against the chilling effect created by forcing reporters to break promises they made to their sources. A breach of national security resulting in criminal charges, for instance, would be considered a much higher priority than Chen’s civil lawsuit under the Privacy Act
Nevertheless, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, according to the AP account, ruled that though he “recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society,” the legal system “also has its own role to play in upholding the law and safeguarding judicial authority.”
Earlier this year, the U.S. House passed a bill on a bipartisan basis that would create a strong federal shield law called the PRESS Act. The bill awaits an uncertain fate in the Senate, according to Gabe Rottman, writing for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In any case, it strikes me that demanding that a reporter give up her confidential sources so a plaintiff can advance her breach-of-privacy lawsuit against the government is an abuse of the idea that the press ought to be free and independent, even if it doesn’t specifically violate the First Amendment.