Camden, Maine, home of the Midcoast Villager. Photo (cc) 2020 by Paul VanDerWerf.
The Midcoast Villager, an innovative weekly newspaper based in Camden, Maine, got The New York Times treatment last week. But though the Times lavished attention on the high-profile journalists who’ve been recruited to work there as well as the café it’s opened to extend public outreach, it missed entirely the Villager’s long history as a tech innovator — a history that extends all the way to the present.
The Times article and visuals, by Steven Kurutz and Cig Harvey, are certainly entertaining enough, starting with their portrayal of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald, who left a job covering Washington for NBC News to come to Maine. “I did an insane thing,” he tells the Times. “I left one of the last stable jobs in media and took a job in the worst sector of media — and possibly in the economy.”
Donald Trump is wreaking so much havoc and engaging in so much corruption that it’s hard to stay focused. But I urge all of us to keep our eye on this: He is killing civilians from Venezuela and Colombia in the Caribbean and, now, in the Pacific. The number is up to 43 victims.
Charlie Savage, who is one of The New York Times’ most perceptive reporters, has written a news analysis that places Trump’s actions in perspective. With Trump’s apologists perpetually engaging in whatabout-whatabout-whatabout, Savage notes that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush went out of their way to come up with legal justifications for drone strikes against Al Qaeda (in Obama’s case) and for torturing terrorism suspects (in Bush’s).
You may not like what Obama and Bush did (I certainly don’t), but the point is that they understood the rule of law had to be asserted, even if they were paying it little more than lip service. By contrast, Trump is just killing people who may or may not be drug smugglers and who have the right to be arrested and tried, not “blown apart, burned alive or drowned,” as Savage puts it. He writes:
Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.
Savage adds: “In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime.”
Trump might ponder that one of his favorite former dictators, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, is on trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for accusations that he was involved in dozens of killings in an attempt to crack down on illegal drugs.
You don’t have to draw a convoluted analogy. Trump is doing exactly the same thing that Duterte is accused of doing, and he’s reveling in it publicly. It is the worst thing he’s done as president, and that’s saying a lot.
A well-known Boston Globe byline will soon be appearing in The New York Times. Mark Arsenault, who came to the Globe in 2010, has been hired by the Times to report on education. He’ll leave the paper on Oct. 30.
An email to the staff from editor Nancy Barnes and deputy managing editor Francis Storrs, forwarded to me by a trusted source, says in part:
Mark started at the Globe’s DC bureau in 2010, and has been based in the Boston office since 2011. Amazingly prolific and adaptable, he’s covered Congress and politics, teen suicide, the rise of the state casino industry, national parks, and the US-Canada trade war, to name just a few subjects. He worked for years on the Spotlight Team, including on projects about men imprisoned for life, the housing crisis, an ousted MIT professor, and about patients who died amid the Steward Health Care collapse. He reported on the Marathon Bombing, as part of the Globe staff that won a Pulitzer, and was on the Steward team that recently won a Loeb, among many other honors.
Arsenault’s recent Globe stories include a report from the border (sub. req.) between Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick, on how residents in both communities were faring during Donald Trump’s second term, and a story on the long-running battle (sub. req.) between Trump and the Pritzker family. Penny Pritzker, a senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, has helped lead that university’s fight against Trump’s depredations.
Boston.com, a free service of Boston Globe Media since its launch 30 years ago, is adding a paywall. According to a memo sent to the staff Wednesday afternoon and provided to me by a trusted source, the site is moving to a metered paywall that can be tailored “as we learn more.” I take that to mean Boston.com will offer a certain number of free shares per month that may be moved up or down depending on what the data show.
The cost is $5 a month for a combined subscription to Boston.com and Boston magazine, which Globe Media acquired in January of this year. Strangely enough, the cost is the same even if you only want Boston.com. Those are introductory offers; the site is also offering a non-discounted annual subscription fee of $90 that leaves out BoMag. It’s a little confusing — and don’t get me started on the completely different subscription offers you’ll find at BoMag. I’d say some unsnarling needs to be done.
Map via “The State of Local News 2025.” Click here for the interactive version.
Finding news in the annual State of Local News report from Northwestern University’ Medill School can be a challenge because, frankly, it’s always the same depressing thing: newspapers keep closing; digital startups are rising, but not by enough to fill the gap; and be sure to tune in again next year, when the situation is likely to be even worse.
Still, there are a few interesting nuggets in the latest update, which was released Monday. In particular, I was drawn to some observations in the report about rural areas, which is where news deserts tend to be concentrated. News deserts, as defined by the project’s now-retired founder, Penny Abernathy, are counties without any locally based news organizations.
As newspapers continue to close, independent startups are filling the gap. But it’s uneven at best, with most startups concentrated in urban and suburban areas. The report puts it this way:
Over the past five years, we have tracked more than 300 startups that have emerged across the country. Support for both these new startups, which have opened in almost every state, as well as existing legacy outlets has come from a surge in philanthropic investment as well as public policy initiatives. Over the past year, such efforts have boosted a wide variety of news outlets. Overall, however, philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.
The report also finds that fewer than 10% of digital-only news organizations are in rural counties, and that the demographics of counties that do support digital projects “tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Of course, internet connectivity tends to lag in rural areas as well.
Surveillance footage of ICE goons grabbing Rümeysa Öztürk near Tufts last March.
Fifty-five student news organizations have signed on to an amicus brief challenging the Trump regime’s use of federal immigration law to revoke the visas of international students and deport them for speech that is protected by the First Amendment.
The brief was filed by a coalition led by the Student Law Press Center and joined by the Associated Collegiate Press and the College Media Association. Among the student news outlets lending their support to the brief are nine from New England, including our independent student newspaper at Northeastern, The Huntington News. The others:
The Dartmouth, at Dartmouth College
The Harvard Crimson
The Heights, at Boston College
The Mass Media, at UMass Boston
The Mount Holyoke News
The Trinity Tripod, at Trinity College
The Tufts Daily
The Yale Daily News
In addition, 11 student newsroom leaders, including one from Bates College in Maine, have signed as individuals.
Photo taken from the George Santos for Congress Facebook page via Talking Points Memo.
Weeks after the 2022 congressional elections, The New York Times exposed George Santos as a world-class fraudster, documenting a trail of deceit that eventually led to prison. The Times is still bragging about it today, and the Santos saga is sometimes held up as an example of the rot that can fester when local journalism fails.
But as I wrote in December 2022, it was the Times that failed — and, to an even greater extent, Newsday, a daily newspaper that purportedly covers Long Island, including Santos’ district. Both papers ignored reporting by a local news outlet, The North Shore Leader, showing that there were massive plumes of smoke emanating from Santos’ campaign headquarters and that maybe someone ought to take a look and see if there were any flames coming out as well.
Jay Rosen. Photo (cc) 2017 by the Moody College of Communication.
Jay Rosen has been one of the major thinkers in journalism since the 1990s. Younger followers may think of him mainly as a media critic, and there’s no doubting his influence in that field. Through his blog, PressThink, and his social media presence (especially back in Twitter’s heyday), Rosen showed an uncanny ability to frame issues in a way that made a lot of us think about what we were doing.
The “production of innocence” was his phrase for “a public showing by professional journalists that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of — and here we enter the realm of dread — political bias.”
South of Boston folks: I’ll be speaking on “News and Democracy in a Time of Crisis” at the Stoughton Public Library in Stoughton, Massachusetts, on Monday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. This free and open event is sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Sharon-Stoughton. Hope to see you there!
The surveillance state has come to Brookline, Massachusetts. Sam Mintz reports for Brookline.News that Chestnut Hill Realty will set up license-plate readers on Independence Drive near Hancock Village, located in South Brookline, on the Boston border. The readers are made by Flock Safety, which is signing an agreement with the Brookline Police Department to use the data. The data will also be made available to Boston Police.
Two months ago I wrote about a campaign to keep Flock out of the affluent community of Scarsdale Village, New York. The story was covered by a startup local website, Scarsdale 10583, and after a period of months the contract was canceled in the face of rising opposition. Unfortunately, Scarsdale Village is the exception, as Flock Safety, a $7.5 billion company, has a presence in 5,000 communities in 49 states as well as a reputation for secretive dealings with local officials.
Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub reports that the state’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2020 that automated license-plate readers are legal in Massachusetts. Gaffin also notes that, early this year, police in Johnson County, Texas, used data from 83,000 Flock cameras across the U.S. in a demented quest to track down a woman they wanted to arrest for a self-induced abortion. Presumably Texas authorities could plug into the Brookline network with Flock’s permission.
Mintz notes in his Brookline.News story that Flock recently opened an office in Boston and that its data has been used by police in dozens of Massachusetts communities. He also quotes Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts as saying that though such uses of Flock data as identifying stolen cars or assisting with Amber Alerts isn’t a problem, “Unregulated, this technology facilitates the mass tracking of every single person’s movements on the road.”
The cameras could also be used by ICE in its out-of-control crackdown on undocumented (and, in some cases, documented) immigrants. This is just bad news all around, it’s hard to imagine that members of the public would support it if they knew about it.
