Surely it’s a good thing that new CNN chief Mark Thompson is going to replace the network’s morning show with — well, with news.
Author: Dan Kennedy
Wisconsin legislators consider three measures aimed at bolstering local news
Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin are considering three pieces of legislation to bolster local news that are borrowed from California, New Jersey and a federal proposal that hit a dead end several years ago. Erin McGroarty of The Cap Times breaks down the Local Journalism Package:
• One bill would fund 25 journalists to be placed in local newsrooms across the state. The reporting fellows would be chosen by University of Wisconsin journalism professors and outside experts, and would be paid a $40,000 salary for a year. This bears some resemblance to a program at UC Berkeley, where a $25 million appropriation is paying for reporting fellows to work at news organizations that cover underserved communities for five years.
• A proposed Wisconsin Civic Information Consortium would award grants aimed at “addressing communities’ information needs, bolstering media literacy and civic engagement, and supporting access to high-quality, consistent local journalism, especially among underserved communities.” The bill appears to be based on the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, which has awarded some $5.5 million to support 81 news and information projects over the past several years.
• Wisconsin residents would be able to claim a tax credit for up to $250 in annual subscription fees to local news outlets. Several years ago such a provision was part of a federal bill that also included tax credits for local advertisers and for publishers who hired and retained journalists. That bill went nowhere, but Congress is currently considering a new version that includes the advertiser and publishers credits but not the subscriber credits.
All in all, the Wisconsin measures are modest steps that could help ease the local news crisis, although they are no substitute for the hard work of news entrepreneurs on the ground. With Congress seemingly unable to do much of anything constructive, it’s encouraging to see some leadership at the state level.
The Somerville Wire shuts down, but its editor says that coverage in the city is growing
Nearly two years ago, Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and the Somerville Journal into one weekly paper called The Transcript & Journal. Even worse, nearly all local news was removed from the new paper, replaced with regional news from elsewhere in the chain.
In Medford, where I live, we now have nothing, although I’m optimistic that will change in the near future. In Somerville, though, there were several alternatives, foremost among them the weekly Somerville Times and a digital outlet called the Somerville Wire. Unfortunately, the Wire is shutting down. Jason Pramas, the editor, writes that the Wire got to be too much of a financial burden as well as a drain on his other work with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) and HorizonMass. (Pramas talked about both of those projects in a recent appearance on the “What Works” podcast.)
Besides, Pramas notes that Somerville has been getting more coverage lately, as the Cambridge Day has expanded into the city and The Boston Globe has begun a weekly “Camberville & beyond” newsletter. Pramas writes that “while Somerville is still in danger of becoming a ‘news desert’ (a community that no longer has a professionally-produced news outlet covering it), it’s now getting more news coverage than it was in 2021,” when the Wire launched.
Pramas and his colleagues Chris Faraone and John Loftus continue to do good and important work, and I wish them all the best.
More news about our book
I want to let you know about a couple of media hits this weekend for “What Works in Community News.”
First, Billy Baker of The Boston Globe quotes my co-author, Ellen Clegg, and mentions our book in a feature on The Local News, which covers Ipswich and Rowley and is one of a number of nonprofit startups founded to fill the gap left behind when Gannett abandoned its weekly papers in Eastern Massachusetts. “This is what the founders envisioned, which is a lot of little newspapers in all the little towns in New England,” Ellen told Baker. As Baker notes, Ellen doesn’t just write about it — she also does it, as she’s also the co-founder and co-chair of another startup, Brookline.News.
Second, Colorado College journalism professor Corey Hutchins writes about our book in his well-read newsletter, “Inside the News in Colorado.” I visited Colorado in September 2021, mainly to report on upstart Colorado Sun but also to learn more about how the Sun fits into the state’s larger journalistic community One afternoon I drove from Denver to Colorado Springs in order to interview Hutchins. “I don’t know of any other state where there’s such a focus and attention from folks here who want to support a thriving local news ecosystem matched with attention from funders, smart media thinkers from around the country,” he told me.
GBH-TV takes on the Kevin Cullen controversy
Because of a schedule conflict, I had to turn down an invitation to discuss the Kevin Cullen story on GBH-TV’s “Talking Politics” Friday. But I would have agreed with guests Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute and journalist Susie Banikarim of the podcast “In Retrospect” that The Boston Globe made the right call in disclosing that Cullen had signed a document attesting to the mental fitness of Lynda Bluestein, whose quest to die via physician-assisted suicide he was reporting on. I also agree with them that the Globe was on solid ground in running the story anyway along with an editor’s note disclosing Cullen’s ethical breach.
Of note was their response to host Adam Reilly’s question about whether Cullen should have been disciplined. Both said that maybe he was, and that whatever sanction he might have received was handled privately.
Did Patrick Soon-Shiong want to merge The Messenger with the LA Times?
If Patrick Soon-Shiong really did want to merge his Los Angeles Times with The Messenger, as Natalie Korach and Emily Smith write at The Wrap, then it’s just further evidence that he really, truly does not know what he’s doing.
“Patrick was very keen to do the merger – which is why the announcement to staff about The Messenger closing was delayed,” an unnamed source tells Korach and Smith. “Patrick had the money, and at that point, Jimmy [Finkelstein, The Messenger’s founder] would have taken anything,” said the first individual with knowledge of the negotiations.”
Their lead, though, tells a different story, asserting that “the Los Angeles Times insisted that there was no such deal on the table, only a desperate call from Finkelstein to owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, according to an insider there.”
Earlier:
- “The Messenger meets the Reaper” (Feb. 1)
An Australian broadcaster tarts up a lawmaker’s photo and blames it on AI
The only surprising part of this story is that the Murdochs aren’t involved. While I was paging through The Boston Globe this morning, I came across a Washington Post story reporting that a television outlet in Australia had photoshopped an image of a female member of Australia’s parliament to make her outfit look more revealing and her breasts larger. BBC News reported on this outrageous example of sexism as well.
The lawmaker, Georgie Purcell, is young and has tattoos, which I guess makes her fair game in the minds of certain retrograde news executives. “I endured a lot yesterday,” she wrote on X/Twitter. “But having my body and outfit photoshopped by a media outlet was not on my bingo card.”
The media outlet, Nine News, apologized and blamed it on Photoshop. The BBC quotes Hugh Nailon, the head of Nine News Melbourne:
“As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs. During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original,” he said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to a tool which uses AI to expand pictures.
“This did not meet the high editorial standards we have.”
But in a statement, a spokesperson for Adobe — the firm which produces Photoshop — told the BBC: “Any changes to this image would have required human intervention and approval.”
It sure sounds like Nailon’s explanation is, well, wrong, but it may also not be far off. It wouldn’t surprise me if artificial intelligence were used in some part of the process, as a command to tart up an existing photo of Purcell would likely result in an image very much like the one at issue.
As for Nine News — well, if you thought Rupert Murdoch controlled every newspaper and television station in Australia (or at least the sleazy ones), that appears not to be the case. I didn’t do a deep dive, but according to Wikipedia, Nine News is part of Nine Entertainment, which was founded in 2006. It’s a publicly traded company whose holdings include several major newspapers such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review.
I hope we find out the full story of what happened. If this was intended as a nasty joke by a low-level employee, that can be dealt with easily enough. But if it came from a higher level of the company, that needs to be revealed. And if AI — or, rather, a human being using AI — turns out to be the culprit, then we need to have a talk about the technology’s uses and abuses.
Update: The AI software may have been Adobe Firefly, according to Crikey. Of course, that changes nothing. Firefly didn’t do it. A person using Firefly did it, looked at the results and said, “This is great! My work is done.”
The Messenger meets the Reaper
The short, predictably unsuccessful life of The Messenger was one of those media stories that I followed out of the corner of one eye. Observers I trust, like Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab, argued from the start that there was no business model in the 2020s for a free, large-scale national news outlet based on building a mass audience and selling advertising to them. After all, that’s what Facebook is for.
The end came Wednesday, less than a year after its debut. Josh Marshall, who’s built Talking Points Memo into a financially sustainable outlet for news and commentary through digital subscriptions, has an astute piece on what went wrong. He writes:
The Messenger was also a specific kind of failure. There is an uncanniness to it since it was perhaps uniquely predictable. In fact, it was so predictable it’s still a real mystery why the site was able to come into existence in the first place. This isn’t snark or crocodile tears. It’s a very strange story. This requires some explanation.
Marshall’s commentary is worth reading in full if you’re the sort who geeks out over this stuff, as I do.
Despite cuts, there’s no shortage of DC coverage
News organizations ranging from the Los Angeles Times to The Wall Street Journal are cutting their Washington bureaus. Will that detract from public knowledge about the 2024 presidential campaign? I told Mark Stenberg of Adweek that it would not — and we’d be better off if we’d focus on areas where there are real reporting deficits. Stenberg writes:
The internet has eliminated the geographical monopolies these publishers once had, and readers can now turn to any number of D.C. outlets for their political coverage, said Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy.
Local outlets still need to ensure that their readers have access to reporting about how federal legislation affects their local government, but there are dozens of publishers covering the presidential election. Voters looking for insightful coverage of national races have, still, more coverage than they can make sense of.
“Does anyone believe there are too few people covering the election?” Kennedy said. “If anything, some of these reporters could be reassigned to cover other stories that are going untold.”
Poynter’s Tom Jones renders a nuanced verdict on Kevin Cullen’s ethical lapse
Poynter media columnist Tom Jones has weighed in with a lengthy commentary about Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen’s decision to sign a legally required form that a terminally ill woman needed in order to proceed with her physician-assisted suicide — a story that he was reporting on, and that was published by the Globe last Friday.
Jones’ conclusion is reasonable, and it’s helped me think through my own conflicted beliefs about what has unfolded. Jones’ bottom line: Cullen committed a serious breach of ethics in going along with Lynda Bluestein’s request, which I’m sure we can all agree on; and Globe executive editor Nancy Barnes made the right call in publishing the story anyway and appending a detailed editor’s note to it. Jones writes:
Two things can be true at the same time: We can acknowledge that Cullen certainly crossed journalistic lines. He should not have signed the form. Even the Globe and Cullen don’t disagree.
But we can also acknowledge that Globe readers benefited from this compelling story and, more importantly, that it would have been a shame had the piece been dropped. The Globe essentially owed it to Bluestein and her family to publish their deeply personal story.
I’m think I agree, but what a mess. Sadly, Cullen’s lapse of judgment has cast a pall over the story, which features not just strong reporting and writing by Cullen but also vibrant photography by Pulitzer Prize winner Jessica Rinaldi. What should have been a triumph of narrative storytelling and photojournalism that helped our understanding of a difficult topic has instead turned into a case study of journalistic ethics. After all, one of the four principles of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics is “Act Independently.” The code explains: “Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.”
One question I’ve had from the start is when Barnes found out about Cullen’s actions. According to the Globe, Bluestein asked Cullen and a member of a documentary film crew to sign the document last August; Bluestein died Jan. 4. Without citing a source, Jones writes that “it’s believed that senior editors, including Barnes, weren’t aware of that fact until months later — when Cullen turned in his story after Bluestein’s death in January.”
Cullen declined Jones’ request for comment, but Barnes talked with him, saying in part: “We considered the fact that Lynda and her family opened their homes to us, opened their lives, gave themselves to us for months on end, and trusted us with an incredible amount of access. So that weighed on us, too.… She trusted us to tell her story.”
What makes the entire situation especially fraught is that Cullen was suspended for three months in 2018 after it was learned that he’d made up details in public comments — but not in his work for the Globe — about his involvement in covering the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
Cullen has been a welcome voice in the Globe for many years, but all any of us can say about this latest ethical lapse is: What could he have been thinking?
Earlier: