Dan Kennedy

Is San Francisco a local news oasis? Yes — but so are many other large cities.

Reading the papers in San Francisco. From one of the murals at Coit Tower.

Is San Francisco a local news oasis amid the desertification of community journalism across the country? That’s what The New York Times claims.

Eli Tan reports that news in the Bay Area is as strong as it’s ever been (free link), noting that the city is served by a healthy daily (the San Francisco Chronicle), a billionaire-funded startup with paper-of-record ambitions (The San Francisco Standard) and a wide range of hyperlocal nonprofits and radio stations.

With 27 news organizations in a city of 800,000, Tan writes, San Francisco has about the same number of local news outlets that it had a decade ago.

Now, my first reaction to Tan’s story is that you could say the same about the Greater Boston area. The media scene here may not be quite as rich as it is in San Francisco, but we’ve got a lot, and the rise of digital nonprofits in a number of suburban communities has helped offset moves by Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, to close or merge many of its weeklies and to slash its dailies to the bone.

But on further consideration, I think it’s worth noting that a number of large cities are reasonably well-served; it’s the exurbs, rural areas and urban communities of color that are struggling. That’s true even in places like Denver (which Ellen Clegg and I write about in out book, “What Works in Community News”) and Chicago, where the hedge fund Alden Global Capital has hollowed out the legacy dailies but where a number of other news organizations, many of them new, have risen up to fill the gap.

In general, cities and affluent suburbs have the people and the money needed to support local news. What’s happening in San Francisco may be something of an outlier — but not quite as much of one as the Times seems to believe.

Former Kansas police chief hit with felony charge; plus, some local news developments

Photo (cc) 2024 by Grace Hills / Kansas Reflector

File this under “the wheels of justice grind slowly”: The former Kansas police chief who ordered an illegal raid against a newspaper office and two private homes one year ago has been charged with felony obstruction of justice.

According to The Associated Press:

The single charge against former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody alleges that he knowingly or intentionally influenced the witness to withhold information on the day of the raid of the Marion County Record and the home of its publisher or sometime within the following six days.

For those of you who have been following this case from the start, the charge pertains to a restaurant owner whose driving records were obtained by the newspaper. The records were obtained legally, and the paper never actually wrote about them, but Cody claimed the paper violated the law because of a statutory quirk. It later turned out that the Record was investigating Cody’s wrongdoing at his previous job — something that was entirely unrelated to the restaurant owner.

Last month, former Record reporter Deb Gruver reached a $235,000 settlement in her federal lawsuit against Cody, whom she accused of grabbing her cellphone and injuring her hand.

Publisher Eric Meyer is suing local officials over the death of his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, who was stricken a day after officers entered her home and rifled through her property.

Here are a few other developments on the local news front:

In New York City, WCBS-AM is ending its 60-year run as an all-news station, a move that The New York Times reports will claim 23 jobs. The station’s owner, Audacy, will continue with an all-news format on WINS-FM. New York is also the home of WNYC-FM, a large public station devoted to news and information.
Times Media Group, a newspaper chain based in Tempe, Arizona, has gone on a rampage of cuts at four weekly papers and a semi-monthly that it acquired in Southern California recently. Thomas Corrigan, who writes the Inland Empire MediaWatch newsletter, reports that editors at three of the weeklies have been fired and that the new owner has cracked down on freelance expenses as well. Corrigan observes that the papers will “lose years of institutional and community knowledge.”
Michael Aron, regarded as the dean of New Jersey’s press corps, has died at the age of 78. Aron spent the latter part of his career as a political reporter at NJ Spotlight News, one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

The media rushed to publish the DNC’s hacked emails in 2016. So what about Trump?

Leaked emails from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign have made their way to major news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico.

Given what happened in 2016, when the press published a number of embarrassing emails that WikiLeaks had hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s email server, you might expect that the Trump files would be published as soon as they were vetted. Right? Well, no.

As Jon Passantino and Liam Reilly report for CNN:

But while the hacking incident, which occurred in June, set off a scramble in the Trump campaign, the FBI and Microsoft, the three news organizations that had received the files held off on publishing information from the trove. The decision marked a reversal from the 2016 election, when news outlets breathlessly reported embarrassing and damaging stories about Hillary Clinton’s campaign after Russian hackers stole a cache of emails from the Democratic National Committee, publishing them on the website Wikileaks.

The news media — especially the Times — have a long and mostly honorable tradition of publishing newsworthy documents regardless of how they obtained them, including the Pentagon Papers, the government’s own secret history of the Vietnam War, and reporting on the George W. Bush administration’s secret and illegal eavesdropping program.

So why the hesitance over the Trump files, which may have been hacked by Iran? As I told CNN:

News organizations should proceed with caution when dealing with hacked documents. As long as they’re verified and newsworthy, then they’re fair game, but motive is an important part of the story, too. In 2016, too many news outlets ran with stories about the Democratic National Committee’s emails without questioning why WikiLeaks, which had ties to the Russian government, had hacked them in the first place.

In other words, do two things at once. Report on the documents, and report on the motives of the leakers. It’s a standard that retired Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron espoused in his memoir, “Collision of Power,” in writing about his second thoughts regarding the Post’s decision to go big with the WikiLeaks files during the 2016 campaign:

There was a far more significant story taking shape, and it took the press too long to fully communicate it: Russia was aggressively interfering in a presidential election. A superpower adversary was doing what it could to propel Donald Trump into the White House. At The Post we learned a lesson: If there was a hack like this in the future, we would be putting greater emphasis on who was behind it and why, not letting the content of stolen information distract us from the motives of the hackers.

Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring told CNN: “Politico editors made a judgment, based on the circumstances as our journalists understood them at the time, that the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents.”

Let’s see for ourselves.

The Globe hired three people to produce a podcast — then canceled it

The Boston Globe hired three people to produce a new weekly podcast and then decided to cancel it. Jennifer Smith of CommonWealth Beacon reports:

The final hires quit their former jobs, packed up their bags and pets, and schlepped to Boston from across the country or prepared to make the move. In late July, however, Globe management communicated that the organization would not be moving forward with the project after all.

Yikes! Fortunately, Globe management is trying to find new jobs for the three. One will write for “a new flagship newsletter” that will launch this fall, editor Nancy Barnes told staff members at a town hall-style gathering on Monday.

Smith’s sources said that Barnes and Globe CEO Linda Henry stressed that the media business is moving away from podcasting. That’s true — like a lot of digital media innovations, podcasting has proved to be great for distributing your content but a lousy way to make money.

What’s unclear is why Globe executives let these hires go so far down the road before pulling the plug.

The Times’ decision to stop local endorsements is just the latest blow to a venerable tradition

Endorsements of political candidates are fading into history. The latest blow was struck on Monday, when The New York Times said it would no longer endorse in local races (free link), although it will continue to endorse in the presidential contest.

In terms of influence, this has it exactly backwards. May we presume that the Times will endorse the Harris-Walz ticket this fall? Yes, we may. Meanwhile, readers in New York City and across the state — admittedly a shrinking share of the Times’ 10 million-plus subscribers, most of them digital — might genuinely want some guidance in deciding whom to vote for in state and local contests.

But there’s no turning back. Increasingly, communities are served by nonprofit local news organizations, which risk losing their tax-exempt status if they endorse candidates or specific pieces of legislation. As Tom Jones notes at Poynter Online, papers owned by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund stopped endorsing in 2022. Those include some of the largest papers in the country, such as New York’s Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and The Denver Post. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, has cut back on opinion, including endorsements.

A newspaper endorsement is a recommendation to vote for a particular candidate written in the institutional voice of the news organization. At larger newspapers, editorial boards comprising the staff of the opinion section and sometimes some outside members make those decisions in consultation with the publisher. In many cases these boards interview the candidates before making their decision.

The opinion section of a newspaper is entirely separate from the news staff, with the editor and the editorial-page editor reporting directly to the publisher, who may or may not be the owner of the paper as well. Publishers have been known to overturn the editorial board’s recommendation — that’s their prerogative. At smaller papers these lines tend to get blurred. At now-defunct Boston Phoenix, where I worked for many years, the editorial board comprised publisher Stephen Mindich and the news staff. Then again, the Phoenix, as an alt-weekly, mixed opinion and reporting, so the wall separating news from commentary didn’t really exist.

There was a time when rich men bought newspapers mainly so that they could express their political views, with the news section taking a back seat to the editorial page. These days, though, endorsements are often regarded by political reporters as a hindrance in their efforts to convince candidates who were not endorsed by the opinion section that they will cover them fairly. My conversations with students over the years have led me to believe that they are skeptical of the whole notion of a news outlet speaking as an institution, and that they’re more comfortable with signed opinion pieces such as those that typically appear on the op-ed page.

When a local news organization chooses not to endorse, either on principle or to keep the IRS at bay, it loses an opportunity to share its expertise with its audience. For instance, the nonprofit New Haven Independent covers a city that is served a 30-member board of alders, as the city council is known. How is anyone supposed to keep track?

But there are other steps a news outlet can take. It can put together a guide to where candidates stand on the issues and link to that guide every time it publishes a story on that particular race. The guide can take the form of a series of articles or an issues grid — or both. And I should add that the Independent covers city politics with depth and fairness.

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, Ellen Clegg and I talked with Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby about endorsements on our “What Works” podcast back in 2022. Ellen, who’s a retired editorial-page editor for the Globe which continues to endorse in state and local elections, is pro-endorsement; Jeff is against them. I’m (uncharacteristically) in the middle.

Rachel Maddow’s ‘Ultra’ connects the dots from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump

Joseph McCarthy was even worse than I realized.

I knew about his reign of terror in the 1950s, when he falsely accused government officials, Hollywood figures and others of being communists, ruining lives and leading to the still-used ephithet “McCarthyism.”

What I didn’t know was that he consorted with and defended actual Nazis — that is, German war criminals and their surprisingly numerous supporters in the U.S. And that there are some echoes down to the present day.

That’s the main takeaway from the second season of “Ultra,” a podcast series hosted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. It’s good stuff, and you should listen to it if you get a chance. It’s a wide-ranging look at Nazis and their sympathizers in the U.S. after World War II — a follow-up to the first season, which examined the Nazi movement before and during the war.

And though “Ultra” features a wide cast of characters, the focus is on McCarthy, who defended German soldiers who massacred U.S. troops after they had already surrendered and whose entire Senate career was what you might call Nazi-adjacent.

Two interesting tidbits:

Although Richard Nixon graciously conceded after losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, behind the scenes both he and top Republican officials gave at least tacit support to efforts by extreme right-wing forces to overturn the results in several states and hand the election to Nixon.

And Trump thug Steve Bannon, currently behind bars, has favorably cited an Italian fascist who in turn wrote the introduction for “Imperium,” a Nazi screed written by American fascist Francis Yockey, a shadowy fugitive throughout “Ultra” who kills himself after he is finally taken into custody by the FBI.

The reference to Bannon is the only direct tie Maddow makes to Donald Trump and his ongoing efforts to subvert democracy. But the Trump parallels are clear throughout, as they were during the first season.

If there’s a hopeful takeaway from “Ultra,” it’s this: We’ve defeated fascism in the U.S. before, and we can do it again.

The nonprofit Swampscott Tides will water the news desert that Gannett left behind

1874 painting of Swampscott via the Boston Public Library.

For the past two years, the North Shore town of Marblehead has been a hotbed of local news experimentation, with two (and, for a while, three) independent community journalism outlets battling to fill the gap left behind by Gannett’s near-disappearance.

Yet neighboring Swampscott, a virtual twin of Marblehead, has remained a news desert. Now that’s about to change.

Four Swampscott residents, three of them with journalism backgrounds, plan to launch a new nonprofit digital news organization sometime in late autumn. The publication, Swampscott Tides, already has a website. Founding president Anne Driscoll tells Steve Marantz, writing in the Jewish Journal of Greater Boston, that she envisions “a fair and factual independent news outlet,” adding:

I think people in recent years have begun to recognize what a loss it is not to have a local paper. You can’t have a functioning democracy if you don’t have functioning journalism. You can’t get information on what’s going on, events, local politics, how municipal government is functioning.

The story in Swampscott is a familiar one. In the spring of 2022, Gannett closed or merged a couple of dozen weekly newspapers in the Boston suburbs. Although the Swampscott Reporter continues as a standalone weekly, it was purged of virtually all local news, with content from across the chain filling the news hole.

The same thing happened with Gannett’s Marblehead Reporter, which led to the establishment of the nonprofit Marblehead Current and the for-profit Marblehead Weekly News. A third for-profit, digital-only project, the Marblehead Beacon, is now on hiatus, and it’s not clear whether it will be back.

Driscoll told the Jewish Journal that the Swampscott folks approached the Marblehead Current about the possibility of forming a partnership but that the Current decided against it.

Driscoll has a long background as a journalist at The Boston Globe, Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Reporting and other stops. Her three colleagues are Robert Powell, a financial journalist; Tim Dorsey, a corporate lawyer; and Peter Masucci, who has worked in various roles in television journalism.

The organizers are aiming to raise $200,000 to $400,000 so that they can hire a managing editor and one or two reporters.

50 years after Nixon’s resignation, some eerie parallels with Trump and the Egypt story

A week ago today, The Washington Post reported (free link) that Donald Trump may have helped fuel his 2016 presidential campaign with an illegal, last-minute infusion of $10 million from the Egyptian government.

The FBI investigated the money trail but was called off the case by Attorney General Bill Barr — the same Bill Barr whose lies about the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia helped warp public perceptions.

So far, there has been very little follow-up — not by the Post and, most significant, not by The New York Times. I have to assume that the Post, at least, is still digging. But this story, if all the dots can be connected, amounts to a massive scandal that in saner times would drive a candidate out of the race.

Of course the media are to blame for not pushing this story. But so is the Democratic Party, which is guilty of malpractice for not opening an investigation in the Senate immediately. What makes a story stick is repetition — and without prominent Democrats coming out every day and giving journalists something to report on, it quickly withers away.

Today is not just the one-week anniversary of the Post’s Egypt story. It’s also the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as president, a consequence of the Watergate scandal, which was pushed relentlessly by the press (especially the Post), elected officials and the courts.

And here’s a parallel that is worth pondering. Four years ago, Boston lawyer and journalist James Barron wrote that the Watergate break-in may well have been an attempt to steal documents from Democratic Party headquarters showing that Nixon had taken $549,000 from the Greek government in order to help finance his 1968 campaign.

Barron tells the story in his book “The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate.” Demetracopoulos, a liberal Greek journalist, tried to warn people in the U.S. that the right-wing junta then running his country had paid off Nixon, but his efforts came to naught.

In shades of today’s somnolent Democrats, Barron writes that party chair Larry O’Brien didn’t tell President Lyndon Johnson what he knew and turned down frantic requests from Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s campaign to use it in political ads. The Boston Globe tried to get at the story, but then-Globe reporter Christopher Lydon was unable to pierce the veil. In an interview for GBH News, Barron told me:

Watergate is a metaphor for abuse of power during the Nixon years. The scandal didn’t begin with the planning for the June 1972 break-in. Its roots are in the illegal financing of the 1968 election, the potential disclosure of which caused, in the words of the historian Stanley Kutler, the “most anxiety” in the Nixon administration “for the longest period of time.”…

There is strong circumstantial evidence that at least part of what the burglars were directed to find was whatever derogatory information the Democrats had on Nixon, especially financial documents related to foreign contributions.

These days, of course, Trump would just go running to Sean Hannity, and what should be a campaign-ending scandal, if proved, would simply degenerate into another muddle over the mainstream media and “fake news.” But that doesn’t mean journalists and Democrats shouldn’t be pounding away at this every day.

I’ll be talking about the future of local news this Monday in Fitchburg

I’ll be speaking this Monday, Aug. 12, from 1 to 2 p.m. on “What Works: The Future of Local News” as part of the Summer Institute for Journalism Education at Fitchburg State University. The event will be held at the Fitchburg Historical Society at 781 Main St. and is free and open to the public.

I’ll discuss what caused the local news crisis as well as “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about possible solutions. The three-day conference features a great lineup of speakers from journalism, public access television and academia, so I hope you’ll check it out. Please register here.

Oliver Darcy leaves CNN and starts a newsletter

Oliver Darcy, who had ably helmed CNN’s media newsletter, “Reliable Sources,” after Brian Stelter was fired by the short-lived Chris Licht regime in 2022, is striking out on his own.

Darcy’s new venture, Status, promises to provide “the new, definitive nightly briefing that informs readers about what is really happening in the corridors of media power.”

It will be interesting to see whether he can succeed. Darcy is excellent, but he’s blown past the $5-a-month fee charged by nearly all solo newsletter authors. To read more than his Sunday edition and limited previews, you’ll need to fork over $14.95 a month — as much as most daily newspapers charge.

I wish Oliver luck, but I’m going to hang back for a while and see whether he’s able to establish Status as a must-read. Meanwhile, “Reliable Sources” will be back this fall with a new lead writer, according to Variety.