Author: Dan Kennedy

Sahan Journal’s founder to step down; plus, news from Mendo County and New Jersey

Sahan Journal’s 2021 Impact Report

With the January 2024 publication date of our book, “What Works in Community News,” drawing ever closer, we want to keep you up to date on new developments at the projects that we track.

The big news today is that Mukhtar Ibrahim, the founder of Sahan Journal, is stepping down as chief executive officer. Ibrahim launched the nonprofit (relaunched, actually; it’s complicated) five years ago to cover Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color. He writes:

I am proud of the remarkable success story that our dedicated staff has built. We have grown from a four-person newsroom to an amazing and talented team of 20, covering a wide range of essential topics and producing innovative multimedia content. We have built an equitable, transparent, and responsive work culture that supports the professional development and well-being of every staff member.

Kate Maxwell, the publisher and co-founder of The Mendocino Voice in Northern California, has written a useful guide for the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri aimed at newsrooms looking to put together a kit to be used when covering emergencies. It’s a need that the Voice is experienced with, given that it covers an area frequently hit by wildfires. Maxwell begins:

For newsrooms preparing to cover emergencies, there are a range of material and operational considerations to examine such as necessary equipment, staff support and schedules, and how to stay safe in the middle of a disaster. Planning the practical ways you will communicate with each other and community members, and how to get crucial information out to the people who need it, is an essential part of preparing your newsroom and your community for an emergency.

Finally, Joe Amditis of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey, tells us about a collaborative effort to put together ahead of next week’s legislative elections. The guide, NJ Decides 2023, was put together by the center; NJ Spotlight News, one of the media organizations that we profile in our book; and the NJ Civic Information Consortium, a publicly funded effort to bolster local news in New Jersey.

A number of other news outlets assisted with reporting, and the guide is available not only in English but also in Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu and Korean. According to Amditis:

The collaborative then split the races up, with journalists from each news organization claiming the candidates they would commit to chase down.

Collaborative members sent hundreds of emails, social media messages, text messages and phone calls trying to convince candidates to fill out the form. Many did so immediately; others needed to be reminded multiple times.

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The Boston Globe hires a managing editor for local news

Cristina Silva (via LinkedIn)

The Boston Globe has hired a managing editor for local news, according to a memo to the staff from editor Nancy Barnes. I received the memo earlier today from a trusted source. Cristina Silva, currently managing editor for national news at USA Today, will start work at the Globe toward the end of November. A reporting fellow at the Globe in 2005 and ’06, she has also worked at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), The Associated Press, the International Business Times and Newsweek.

According to a job description posted at LinkedIn, Silva will be in charge of business, metro, the express desk and the Rhode Island and New Hampshire bureaus. According to her LinkedIn bio, she is active in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, co-founding and serving as president of  the Los Angeles chapter.

The move comes at a time when the Globe is expanding its local and regional news footprint, adding a New Hampshire bureau to its several-years-old Rhode Island bureau and beefing up coverage in the suburbs, especially in Cambridge and Somerville.

The full text of Barnes’ memo follows:

Dear all,

I am pleased to announce that Cristina Silva, a veteran journalist currently with USA Today, will join our newsroom at the end of November in the newly created role of Managing Editor for Local News.

In that position, she will report to me, and work closely with the Metro, Business, Express, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire teams.

Some of you may be familiar with Cristy from her time as a reporting fellow here in Boston from May of 2005 to August of 2006. Since those early days, she has gone on to do exceptional work as a reporter and editor, with reporting stints at the St. Petersburg Times and the Associated Press. Her editing experience ranges from serving as Managing Editor of the International Business Times, News Director for Newsweek, and several enterprise roles at USA Today before being promoted to her current position of Managing Editor for National News.

During her tenure at the USA Today Network, she has overseen a wide range of coverage: the Surfside condo collapse in Miami, the Astroworld Festival disaster, the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the Ukraine War. She has managed major projects that examined the failures of schools across the country during the COVID crisis, and ground-breaking work examining the discriminatory effect of COVID on communities of color.

Cristy has been a fierce advocate for promoting diversity in reporting and hiring not just in her own newsroom, but through her work with myriad national journalism associations. At Gannett, she helped create and run a Latino Leadership Academy and a Diversity Leadership Academy aimed at retaining top talent. Her colleagues told me repeatedly that she is valued as a generous mentor to her staff and peers alike.

Cristy will join the newsroom Nov. 28, when she will be here in Boston, and will commute between here and Los Angeles until Jan. 2, when she will relocate permanently. She is thrilled to be joining us.

“I am deeply honored to rejoin The Boston Globe, this time as Managing Editor for Local News. The Globe’s legacy of excellence and its commitment to serving the community have long shaped who I am as a journalist,” she said. “I look forward to supporting this talented newsroom and working closely with the community to deliver the exemplary news coverage Boston and New England deserve.”

Please join me in welcoming Cristina Silva back to Boston.

Nancy

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Two daily newspapers in Rhode Island will merge

Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy

Sad news coming out of Rhode Island, where two daily papers are being merged into one. Ian Donnis of The Public’s Radio reports that The Call of Woonsocket and The Times of Pawtucket will become The Blackstone Valley Call & Times as of Nov. 1. “Our commitment to being a daily news provider for Northern Rhode Island has not changed,” according to a story Donnis cited that was on the front page of The Call. The article referenced “current business trends and increases in printing costs” as the reasons behind the merger.

In addition, The Call’s Sunday edition will be discontinued, to be replaced with a Saturday weekend edition in the merged paper. And get this: Donnis writes, “Between them, The Call and The Times have two news reporters, two sports reporters and a photographer.” Now that is small. The papers are owned by Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers, which acquired them in 2007.

As I’ve written here before, I was a Northeastern co-op student at The Call from 1976-’78, working full-time for about a year in three- and six-month stints. The way co-op works is that you’re replaced by another student when the semester ends and it’s time to return to school. I alternated with Karen Bordeleau, a future executive editor at The Providence Journal who’s now at Arizona State University.

The Call was excellent, a place where I learned a lot under great mentorship. It’s sad to see what’s become of the paper, as well as The Times, but Woonsocket and Pawtucket are economically depressed cities, and they no longer reach out into the more affluent suburbs to the extent that they did at one time. According to U.S. Census data, the median household income in Pawtucket is $56,427, and in Woonsocket it’s $48,822. Both of those figures are well below the state median of $74,489.

In the mid-’70s, The Call covered what we referred to as “Call Country,” which comprised more than a dozen communities in northern Rhode Island and southern Worcester County. I don’t know what the circulation area is today. Nor do I know how many paid subscribers the papers have because the Alliance for Audited Media has ended instant access to those numbers.

Donnis doesn’t mention any layoffs, and it’s hard to see how they could get much smaller. I just hope the Call & Times will be able to at least do as good a job of serving their communities as the two separate papers do now.

Note: Ian has posted a correction on the ownership of the two papers, and I’ve updated this post accordingly.

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How I’ve tried to help my journalism students protect themselves from harassment

Photo via Pikist

One of the most vexing, and even dangerous, issues facing journalists these days is harassment, both online and in real life. Among the best-known examples is New Hampshire Public Radio, whose reporter Lauren Chooljian, along with her editor, Dan Barrick, and her parents were the targets of vandalism to their homes, apparently in retaliation for Chooljian’s reporting. Four New Hampshire men have been indicted by federal authorities and face long prison terms and heavy fines if they are convicted.

Harassment has been emerging as an issue in journalism education as well. I’ve been trying to find ways of dealing with it in my undergraduate and graduate ethics classes. A year ago, I devoted just part of one 100-minute class to the subject. Now I set aside a week — two full classes.

Because I know other journalism instructors are dealing with this, I thought I’d lay out how we handled it in my class just recently. This is ever-evolving, of course, so please consider this one instructor’s attempt to wrestle with a difficult issue.

Read the rest at Poynter Online.

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One year later, calculating the damage Elon Musk has done to Twitter

Elon Musk. Photo (cc) 2017 by Steve Jurvetson

This past Friday marked one year since Elon Musk purchased X/Twitter and took a wrecking ball to it. Twitter was far from perfect — we all called it “the hellsite” long before he arrived. But he’s done everything he could to drive it into the ground, empowering trolls, restoring extreme-right and neo-Nazi accounts, and enabling disinformation on a widespread scale.

Musk took specific actions to degrade the experience as well. He ended a modest paid-subscription service that allowed you to edit your tweets. He got rid of the blue checks for verified accounts and replaced them with blue checks for anyone who was willing to pay, thus greatly amplifying hate and falsehoods. He blocked access for anyone who didn’t have a Twitter account, which blew up embedded news feeds. And he proved that he himself was among the most sociopathic users of the service he’d purchased, engaging in such behavior as amplifying an online wilding campaign against a young journalist and putting her life in danger.

The results for Twitter as a business have been devastating. The Washington Post reports (free link):

The number of people actively tweeting has dropped by more than 30 percent, according to previously unreported data obtained by The Washington Post, and the company — which the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX has renamed X — is hemorrhaging advertisers and revenue, interviews show.

The Post also reports that Musk has succeeded in moving Twitter far to the right. My own experience is that a number of conservatives who I’d like to follow on one of the new platforms that have sprung up or grown in response to Musk’s actions have stayed put, almost as a sign of tribal loyalty. Not everyone — certainly a lot of the Never Trump conservatives have moved elsewhere. But it’s enough that the old sense you had on Twitter that everyone was there has fractured, probably forever.

After Musk bought Twitter, I went all-in at Mastodon, which had already been around for several years. But though I was able to build a decent list of followers and have found engagement to be quite good, most news organizations and prominent people are missing. Bluesky, co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, seems like the closest thing to a direct Twitter replacement, but it’s falling behind because of its incredibly aggravating invitation-only scheme.

Which leaves us with Threads, part of the Zuckerborg. It’s definitely the fastest-growing of the alternatives, and it’s where I spend most of my social-media time these days. It’s also adding features quickly in an attempt to catch up. Threads got off to a fast start when it was launched during the summer, lagged, and now seems to be taking off again. Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Threads now has 100 million monthly users — no doubt well behind Twitter (Musk took the company private, so he’s free to lie about metrics), but impressive nevertheless.

Yet I find that there are three buckets of Twitter users that I need to connect with who aren’t going anywhere: friends who are not extremely online; Massachusetts politics folks; and people and organizations involved in the future of local news. For some reason, they’re still firmly planted on Twitter.

Twitter was far from perfect — very far indeed. It had become a frequently ugly place, and a lot of us were already using it differently compared to, say, 10 years ago. But Musk has made it much worse.

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Talking about the future of local news on ‘Left, Right & Center’

I had a chance to talk about the future of local news on KCRW’s “Left, Right & Center” podcast — as well as offer some analysis of the media’s failures in reporting on that hospital explosion in Gaza. We recorded in front of a live audience last Thursday at WBUR Radio’s CitySpace. Please give us a listen. The host is David Greene, joined by Mo Elleithee, Sarah Isgur and (this week) me.

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Book review: Marty Baron has written a plea for journalism that isn’t afraid to tell the truth

Photo (cc) 2017 by Álvaro García Fuentes

For more than eight years, The Washington Post experienced a second golden age. From late 2013, when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the storied paper for $250 million, through the early months of 2021, when Donald Trump left the White House and a new administration began to settle in, the Post was firing on all cylinders. Thanks to Bezos’ strategic investments in technology and an expanded news report, the Post emerged as a real competitor to The New York Times for the first time since the 1970s.

That second golden age also overlapped with Martin Baron’s time as executive editor of the Post. In his new book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” Baron tells the story of those years, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the end of the legendary Graham era; how Bezos quickly transformed a shrinking, mostly regional newspaper into a national digital media outlet; and the challenge of covering Trump, whom Baron frankly, and repeatedly, calls an “authoritarian.”

I’ve covered Marty Baron off and on for years, back when he was editor of The Boston Globe and I was the media columnist for The Boston Phoenix, and later when I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century.” Baron is both accessible and accountable, but he can also be intimidating and a bit defensive. He deserves his reputation as the best editor of his era, not just at the Times but at the Globe and, before that, the Miami Herald. Continue reading “Book review: Marty Baron has written a plea for journalism that isn’t afraid to tell the truth”

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I have a question for Media Nation readers. When I switched from WordPress.com to a hosted service a few months ago, I discovered that my posts no longer have “Leave a Comment” automatically embedded at the top. It’s part of the WordPress theme that I use, and there’s no fixing it short of switching to a different theme, which I don’t want to do, or delving into the code, which — uh, no.

As a result, I’ve been typing “Leave a Comment | Read Comments” at the bottom of each post when I publish it. Do you think it’s necessary, or is it’s so obvious that you can leave a comment that I can omit that step? I’d like to know what you think, so please comment on comments.

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