Texas Tribune CEO Sonal Shah at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin last September
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sonal Shah, the CEO of The Texas Tribune, a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Shah, a Houston native and first-generation immigrant, took over as chief executive in January 2023 after co-founder Evan Smith decided to move on.
Shah is part of a major transition at the Tribune and brings broad experience in government, the private sector and philanthropy. She is a trained economist who worked on the Obama presidential transition team, worked in philanthropy for Google, and was national policy director for Pete Buttigieg’s run for president.
I’ve got a Quick Take about Advance Local, a local news chain in New Jersey that is ending its print editions — including the storied Star-Ledger of Newark — and going fully digital.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on The Minnesota Star Tribune’s editorial non-endorsement in the presidential race and an alternative endorsement of Kamala Harris written on a blog by former Strib staffers.
The Boston Globe’s Rhode Island edition has announced a partnership with WPRI-TV (Channel 12) in Providence. Globe columnist Dan McGowan, a longtime Rhode Island journalist, will appear on the morning newscast to talk about stories that the Globe is working on, while other Globe reporters will show up on the 4 p.m. program. Lifestyle and entertainment stories from the Globe will be featured on “The Rhode Show.”
It will be interesting to see how other Rhode Island media respond. Providence news consumers are also served by The Providence Journal, The Public’s Radio, WJAR-TV (Channel 10) and several smaller outlets.
12 News, the trusted source for local news in Southern New England, is proud to announce a new partnership with The Boston Globe Rhode Island. This collaboration brings together two powerhouse news organizations to provide Rhode Islanders with unparalleled, in-depth reporting on the issues that matter most to them.
In this unique partnership, viewers can expect award-winning columnist Dan McGowan to join the 12 News This Morning team to discuss stories impacting the Ocean State. McGowan, author of the popular daily newsletter Rhode Map will offer his unique insight into all things Rhode Island — including politics, education, the economy and more. On 12 News at 4, other members of The Boston Globe Rhode Island team will join 12 News live on air regularly to discuss some of the biggest news events in the state. In addition, lifestyle and entertainment stories from The Boston Globe Rhode Island team will be featured on The Rhode Show — Rhode Island’s long running lifestyle show.
“By collaborating with The Boston Globe Rhode Island, we’re elevating our commitment to delivering the highest quality journalism to local viewers and readers,” says Patrick Wholey, vice president and general manager of WPRI 12, FOX Providence, myRITV and the CW Providence. “Together, we will provide the most robust coverage of topics that matter to the people of southern New England.”
“Our media partnership with WPRI 12 serves as a real example of our mission at The Boston Globe to connect and convene local communities by extending the reach of our journalism in new ways,” said Nancy Barnes, editor of The Boston Globe. “Since its launch in 2019, The Boston Globe Rhode Island has established its significant role in the state’s media landscape, sharing award-winning stories that make a difference and implementing innovative products to engage new audiences.”
“The Boston Globe Rhode Island is thrilled to partner with WPRI 12 to bring readers and viewers in Rhode Island and Southern Massachusetts more in-depth coverage of the news that impacts their day-to-day lives,” said Lylah M. Alphonse, editor of The Boston Globe Rhode Island. “This initiative underscores the Globe’s deep investment in local and regional news, and the importance of accessible, dedicated, on-the-ground journalism in Rhode Island.”
Massachusetts is one of eight states with the weakest level of protection for journalists’ confidential sources and materials
Prosecutors in the Karen Read murder trial are asking that a judge order Boston magazine to turn over unredacted audio recordings, notes and other materials stemming from a story about the case written by reporter Gretchen Voss that was published in September 2023.
The request raises some uncomfortable questions about freedom of the press. Kirsten Glavin, reporting for NBC10 Boston, writes that the magazine’s lawyer has argued previously that journalists have a right to protect off-the-record information. But that right — known as the journalist’s privilege — is tenuous in Massachusetts.
According to Glavin, Judge Beverly Cannone had previously granted access to audio of Read’s on-the-record interviews with Voss. Now the prosecution is seeking the full, unredacted recordings, which would include off-the-record statements by Read.
Michael Coyne, NBC10’s legal analyst, is quoted as saying that the prosecution’s strategy appears to be aimed at finding contradictions in what Read has said about the circumstances surrounding the death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe. “The more information they gather, the more likely they’re going to start to uncover inconsistencies in the story and the like, and that’s all going to help them ultimately prove their case at trial,” Coyne said.
Read is accused of driving over O’Keefe while drunk and leaving him in a snowbank to die. She and her supporters contend that O’Keefe was beaten up in a nearby house and then dragged outside. Her first trial ended in a mistrial, and she is expected to be retried early next year.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1972 case of Branzburg v. Hayes that the First Amendment does not provide for a journalist’s privilege and that reporters, like ordinary citizens, must provide testimony in court if ordered to do so.
At the state level, 49 states recognize some form of a journalist’s privilege, either through a shield law or judicial rulings. In Massachusetts, the privilege is based on the latter, as efforts to enact a shield law over the years have not gone anywhere. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, that places the Bay State among the eight states with the weakest protections for reporters seeking to guard their anonymous sources and off-the-record materials.
Not even shield laws provide absolute protection for the press. Nevertheless, such a law in Massachusetts is long overdue.
That will be $176k, please
In another case that raises concerns about freedom of the press in Massachusetts, Kerry Kavanaugh of Boston 25 News reports that the State Police have told the station it will have to fork over some $176,000 for records about the State Police Training Academy — and that’s just so the scandal-ridden agency can review those records to determine if they are public or not.
“Again, please note that the majority of the responsive records may be exempt in their entirety from disclosure,” the agency told her in a response to her public records request.
Kavanaugh, an investigative reporter and anchor for Boston 25, writes that the station began seeking the records following the sudden death of Enrique Delgado Garcia, a recruit who collapsed while taking part in a boxing match that was part of his training.
She also quoted Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, as saying:
We shouldn’t have to pay almost $200,000 to get this information. These are our tax dollars that are being spent on the state police training program. And we have a right to know whether or not that program is operating safely or whether it’s just teeing up another tragedy to occur somewhere down the road.
The state’s public records law is notoriously weak. In 2017, though, Gov. Charlies Baker signed into law a reform measure that, according to the ACLU of Massachusetts, “set clear limits on how much money government agencies can charge for public records.”
By demanding nearly $200,000 merely to screen its records to make its own determination as to whether they are public or not, the State Police may be in violation of that provision.
Kavanaugh writes that rather than paying the outrageous fee, her station is working with the State Police and has filed an appeal with the secretary of state’s office.
Journalism in the Age of Trump II
What will be the fate of journalism in the Age of Trump II? Poynter Online media columnist Tom Jones asked several folks (including me) what role the press played in Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris and what the next four years may look like. I think this observation from NPR TV critic Eric Deggans is especially on point:
The bubble of conservative-oriented media has distorted what many people even believe is fair news coverage and increased the amount of misinformation and disinformation in the public space. But I think one of the biggest problems facing mainstream news outlets now is the belief among nonconservative consumers that coverage of this election cycle let them down by “sanewashing” and normalizing Trump’s excesses. Traditional journalists who have already lost the confidence of conservative consumers are now facing diminishing trust from the news consumers who are left, which is not a great combination.
Following Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday night, I’ve seen calls on social media to support independent news organizations like ProPublica and The Guardian rather than traditional outlets. It’s a good idea, though I value the work done by mainstream journalism as well.
But let me suggest a different approach to funding media: using your subscription money or tax-deductible donations to support news at the local level. I’ve been writing about the local news crisis for a decade and a half, and during that time I’ve come to believe that one of the reasons we’re so polarized is that low-quality national news has moved in to fill the vacuum created by the decline of community journalism.
Civic life depends on reliable news and information. Without it, you have people showing up at school committee meetings to complain about phony, Fox News-driven issues like transgender sports and critical race theory rather than test scores and the cost of funding a new teachers’ contract.
Academic studies have shown that a lack of local news leads to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization and what my research partner, Ellen Clegg, and I like to call the “corruption tax” — that is, lenders demanding a higher rate of return when municipalities in news deserts seek to borrow money for such worthy causes as a new middle school or fire station. The lenders, it seems, want a premium if no one is going to keep an eye on how their money is being spent.
Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.
The news desert problem is serious and getting worse. According to the latest State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School, some 3,200 print newspapers have disappeared since 2005. Most of them were weekly papers that provided exactly the sort of coverage needed to build and maintain a sense of community.
At the same time, though, hundreds of independent news projects have launched in recent years. Most but not all are digital-only; many are nonprofit, some are for-profit.
As it happens, this is the time of year when it makes the most sense to support local news, especially nonprofits. Every year, the Institute for Nonprofit News, through its NewsMatch program, provides funds to nonprofits to match some of what they are able to raise within their communities. This year’s campaign began Nov. 1. As INN explains:
Eighteen national and regional funders have pledged $7.5 million to NewsMatch, the largest grassroots fundraising campaign to support nonprofit news in the U.S. Since 2017, participating news organizations in the INN Network have leveraged $31 million in NewsMatch funding to help generate nearly $300 million in support from their communities. All of these newsrooms have met INN’s membership standards for financial transparency, editorial independence, and original public service reporting. Not every nonprofit news outlet meets those standards and is able to become an INN member.
Ellen and I wrote our book, “What Works in Community News,” to profile independent local and regional news organizations that are finding ways to serve the public despite the ongoing financial challenge of paying for journalism. We also talk with news entrepreneurs and thought leaders on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our hope is that the people and projects we highlight will inspire others to fill the information gap in their own communities.
Philanthropy will remain an important source of funding for some time to come. We should assume that long-stalled federal efforts to provide tax credits for local news aren’t suddenly going to start moving forward during the Age of Trump II. Efforts in states that include New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California are worthwhile but limited.
Ultimately the news desert problem will be solved, or not, without government assistance. If your community has an independent news outlet, please support it. And if it doesn’t, I suggest you look into what it would take to get involved in starting one.
Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos raised eyebrows, and hackles, when he logged on to Twitter/X on Wednesday and posted a congratulatory note to Donald Trump:
Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
The tweet immediately angered Trump critics, who were quick to point out that it came shortly after Bezos killed a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris that had been already written and was ready to go. Bezos claimed that decision was nothing more than a reflection of his belief that the paper should stop endorsing candidates, but the timing was suspicious, to say the least.
It didn’t help that Bezos failed to offer similar congratulations on Twitter to Joe Biden in 2020. One Twitter user, @WhiteHouseAMA, pulled up Bezos’ 2016 congrats to Trump and commented: “Jeff tweeted congratulations to Trump in 2016 and 2024. No tweet exists for Biden in 2020. He didn’t kill the WaPo endorsement of Harris because he wanted to be non-partisan, he did it because he is a partisan.”
But wait.
Writing in Newsweek, Alex Gonzales reported that Bezos did, in fact, congratulate Biden in 2020, except that he did it on Instagram rather than Twitter — and he did so rather fulsomely: “Unity, empathy, and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era. Congratulations President-elect @JoeBiden and Vice President-elect @KamalaHarris. By voting in record numbers, the American people proved again that our democracy is strong.” The message is accompanied by a black-and-white photo of Biden and Harris celebrating.
Newsweek added the Instagram update in a correction, showing how widely it was believed that Bezos had not congratulated Biden four years ago.
The immediate outrage among anti-Trump forces demonstrates the impossible dilemma that Washington Post journalists now face in proving to their audience that they remain independent. Though Bezos was within his rights to cancel the Harris endorsement, it was an unspeakably bad look for him to do so in the final days of the campaign, making it seem like he was truckling under in the event of a Trump victory — which now, of course, has come to pass.
It hasn’t helped that the cancellation followed months of controversy over the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. If Trump is the first convicted felon to be elected president, then surely Lewis is the first Post publisher to be under investigation by Scotland Yard. I continue to trust the independence of the Post’s newsroom, but I’m watching for any signs that I shouldn’t.
Meanwhile, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads on Wednesday to offer his own cheery greetings to Trump, writing, “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
Threads is just one of the many platforms Zuckerberg controls; the most prominent are Facebook and Instagram. Threads has also been by far the most successful of the would-be alternatives to Twitter that sprang up after Trump uber-influencer Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, acquired it and started taking a wrecking ball to it in late 2022.
Threads has proved to be especially popular with liberals fleeing the extreme right-wingers and white nationalists whom Musk enabled on Twitter. And yet Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive who runs Threads and Instagram, has gone out of his way to play down political news in Threads’ algorithm, leading to frustration and anger among a number of users. Messages have been removed for no reason, too, as Washington Post technology reporter Will Oremus has noted.
Even before Zuckerberg’s congratulatory post, some Threads users were leaving and setting up shop on Bluesky, the most prominent short-form platform after Twitter and Threads. Bluesky is owned by a public-benefit corporation and as such is not subject to the whims of a billionaire owner. It also has much better personalization tools than either Twitter or Threads.
Bluesky, though, has only a fraction of the users that its larger rivals have — about 12 million total versus more than 600 million active monthly users at Twitter and 175 million at Threads. Personally, I’m trying to give equal attention to Threads and Bluesky, but it’s hard to know whether Bluesky will ever break through.
After all, it’s a billionaires’ world, and we’re just living in it.
I got up early this morning after a restless night to see that our fears had become reality. There is no sugar-coating this. Democracy was on the ballot, and democracy lost. The rule of law is giving way to an era of authoritarianism.
No recriminations. As I wrote Tuesday, Kamala Harris proved to be a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. Do I have quibbles? Sure. I was surprised and disappointed that her running mate, Tim Walz, proved not to be an asset. After he performed poorly in his debate with JD Vance, he pretty much disappeared. But no one votes for running mates. I also thought Harris spent a bit too much time with Liz Cheney and not enough with actual Democrats.
But every candidate has to make choices; some work out, some don’t. It wouldn’t have mattered. Voters who ultimately went with Trump decided they want a racist, insurrectionist strongman who hates who they hate. I could go on, but not this morning.
By far the highlight of my Election Day was spending time with our Northeastern journalism students involved in producing a half-hour newscast as part of a national project organized by Student News Live. The students were either part of our fledgling Society of Professional Journalists student chapter, NUTV or both.
Also doing a great job were Northeastern students who covered Election Day for The Scope, our digital social justice publication, and for The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper. I expect their coverage will keep rolling in throughout today.
Northeastern students after Tuesday’s newscast at NUTV
A few other observations:
• It was a big night for poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight and its founder, Nate Silver, who has moved on and now runs a similar project. For the past month, they’ve had the race in a dead heat with Trump given slightly better odds of winning most of the time. Also: That Iowa poll meant nothing.
• Too early to tell how big a factor the Electoral College played in this. In 2016 it carried Trump to victory even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. Four years ago Joe Biden barely squeaked through despite a decisive victory in the popular vote. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time, but we just don’t know yet.
• Living in Massachusetts, or in any Deep Blue state, will give us some protection from what’s to come. But my heart goes out to people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, immigrants, the people of Ukraine and anyone else who is going to be hit with the full force of what’s to come.
No matter how this apocalyptic election turns out, I think it’s important for all of us to recognize that Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. If Donald Trump somehow manages to pull out a victory, that won’t be on Harris; rather, it will be on voters who’ve decided they’d like to give authoritarianism a try, decency and the rule of law be damned.
I hope that by tonight, or at least within a day or two, we can call her Madam President-elect. If that doesn’t happen, I fear for the future of our country. But we’ll also know that Harris did everything she possibly could. We owe her a debt of gratitude.
Earlier today I asked my First Amendment students to fan out across the Northeastern campus and interview students about whether they had faced any voting obstacles. They posted their findings on Instagram. Most of those interviewed were from out of state and had tried to vote by mail.
Many of them reported an easy experience, but that wasn’t universal. One student from North Carolina, for instance, reported that in addition to having to pay for postage — not a big deal, but really? — she was required to have two witnesses sign her ballot and print out a photo of her driver’s license.
A Tennessee student said she registered to vote in Massachusetts after running into insurmountable obstacles in her home state. “To register for a mail-in ballot, I had to actually be in Tennessee and show my ID,” she said. “They told me that if I can’t come into the county office with an ID, I can’t vote which is just crazy.”
You can find most of my students’ interviews here. We had some technical difficulties, so you’ll find a slightly different mix here.
Last week, in a commentary for CommonWealth Beacon, I compared the outrage that greeted The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times over their non-endorsements with the relative calm with which a similar decision at The Minnesota Star Tribune was met.
I wrote that the problem with the Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and his counterpart at the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, was their last-minute cancellations of editorials endorsing Kamala Harris — and that the Strib had escaped similar opprobrium by announcing its decision back in August.
Well, not so fast. Because as Ellen Clegg reports at What Works, 15 former Star Tribune opinion journalists were so offended by the paper’s failure to endorse Harris that they wrote their own and published it online under the headline “The endorsement editorial the Star Tribune should have published.”
Ellen profiled the Strib in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Like the Post, the LA Times and, for that matter, The Boston Globe under John and Linda Henry, the Star Tribune is owned by a billionaire: Glen Taylor, who has received praise for building up the paper and transforming it into a profitable enterprise.
Earlier this year, the Star Tribune’s new editorial page editor, Phillip Morris, put an end to endorsements as part of a wide-ranging rethink of the opinion section. But Ellen writes that it’s unclear what role Taylor or publisher Steve Grove may have had in that decision.
Ellen also notes that Grove is writing a memoir and says: “Let’s hope that along with chapters about ‘reinvention, love, community, and what holds us together,’ he explains how he’ll stand up to powerful people who would prefer that the independent press heed their whims, and to the dark forces that want to extinguish it altogether.”
Correction: It’s Grove who’s writing a memoir, not Taylor, as I incorrectly wrote earlier.
A huge and encouraging outlier for Kamala Harris on Saturday night. Some more sobering numbers today.
First, the encouraging news. As you may already know, the new Iowa Poll from Ann Selzer, which gets high marks from FiveThirtyEight, shows Harris with a three-point lead over Donald Trump. It’s hard to know what to make of this. But Iowa has gone deep red in recent elections, and virtually every other survey has put Trump well in the lead — including earlier samples taken by the same poll.
The margin, 47% for Harris and 44% for Trump, is being driven by voters over 65, especially women, who say they are supporting Harris by 63% to 28%. But Harris also has a slight edge among older men, 47% to 45%.
What does this mean? I’m not a polling expert. I can tell you that the latest Emerson Poll, which also gets very high marks, continues to show Trump with a nine-point lead in Iowa. On the other hand, a new Miami University poll shows Trump with just a three-point lead in deep-red Ohio, and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown with a two-point lead over his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno. I should add that FiveThirtyEight does not rate this poll.
If the Iowa and Ohio results are picking up something real, then Harris may be headed not just for a victory, but for one larger than anyone expects. My own totally unscientific, vibe-based sense of the race is that there are three possible outcomes: (1) a narrow Trump win; (2) a narrow Harris win; (3) a surprisingly substantial Harris win. I’m going for somewhere between (2) and (3). Needless to say, Harris will win the popular vote with ease.
Finally, The New York Times this morning came out with its last poll before Election Day, and it is simultaneously worrying for Harris yet showing some unexpected opportunities. The Times-Siena poll sits atop the FiveThirtyEight rankings, so we can’t ignore it — although, as Josh Marshall has observed, it also relies on a different understanding of the electorate from what most other pollsters are using, and that understanding may be right or wrong.
*Based on the barest of margins in the Times poll (something you really can’t do given that all these numbers are well within the margin of error), Harris would lose the Blue Wall state of Michigan and win Pennsylvania. Wisconsin seems a little safer. But she also has small leads in North Carolina and Georgia.
One other possible good sign for Harris: the Times-Siena poll goes all the way back to Oct. 24 (through Nov. 2), and Harris seems to have built momentum in recent days. In any case, I played around with the map, above, and awarded Harris every state in which the Times poll has her ahead, even by less than 1% (again: don’t try this at home) It shows Harris with 293 electoral votes, 21 more than the 270 needed. I also flipped Pennsylvania to Trump, and Harris would still win, with 274 electoral votes.
Corrections: My map is an accurate reflection of the Times-Siena poll, but an earlier version of this post said that Harris was ahead in Arizona. She’s not. I’ve also corrected the number of Electoral College votes needed to win.
Finally, The New York Times this morning came out with its