Dan Kennedy

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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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 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:

Globe columnist is called out for facilitating an assisted suicide he was writing about (Jan. 26)

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Talking ‘What Works’ with Medill’s Mark Caro

Thanks to Mark Caro, editor of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School, for a great conversation with Ellen Clegg and me about our book, “What Works in Community News.” The interview has been picked up by Poynter Online as well.

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Eugene Weekly to resume print publication after raising $150,000

Eugene Weekly, which shut down in late December after an ex-employee was charged with embezzling tens of thousands of dollars, is back. Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be anything about it on the paper’s website, which continues to lead with a story that was posted a month ago about the crisis. But Livia Albeck-Ripka reports in The New York Times (free link) that the free print paper will resume publication on Feb. 8 after raising “at least $150,000” in donations.

“Every time I walk by one of our little red boxes, there’s no paper in it, it stabs me in the heart,” editor Camilla Mortensen is quoted as saying. The previous weekly press run had been 30,000, but she said that would be cut to 25,000 so that it can remain financially sustainable.

The alt-weekly, founded in 1982, is an important source of local news in Eugene. EW has continued to post stories on its website with what the Times describes as donated labor. The homepage currently includes new and recent articles about a school superintendent who’s being investigated on allegations of discriminating and retaliating against an employee; how animals were affected by a January ice storm; and a fundraising concert for EW starring “the self proclaimed scream queens of Eugene.”

If you’d like to donate to keep EW alive, just click here.

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An old tale of local corruption — with a modern twist

When we lived in Medford in the early 1980s, the city and neighboring Somerville were both down at the heels. When we returned in 2014, Somerville was vibrant and growing, with Medford not too far behind. So I was fascinated to read Gin Dumcius’ story in CommonWealth Beacon about a politically connected Somerville lawyer’s attempt to bribe Medford’s police chief to help him establish a marijuana business. As Dumcius writes, it was a last hurrah for the old Medford and Somerville.

Unfortunately for the lawyer, Sean O’Donovan, Medford Police Chief Jack Buckley is an honest cop. Buckley’s brother Mike, whom O’Donovan tried to use as the go-between with Chief Buckley, agreed to wear an FBI wire, and O’Donovan was busted after he delivered $2,000 in cash, intended as a down payment on a $25,000 bribe. Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn, Dumcius adds, handled the license for the weed shop in a properly arm’s-length manner.

Times had changed, even if O’Donovan didn’t realize it. He faces sentencing on Feb. 7.

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A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis

St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in 2012. Photo (cc) by John Phelan.

If you haven’t seen The Boston Globe’s story about a mother who died shortly after giving birth, perhaps because the hospital lacked a device it needed to stop her bleeding, then you have to stop what you’re doing and give it a read. Globe reporter Jessica Bartlett’s 2,800-word story is both riveting and incredibly disturbing. It’s also so well-crafted that I asked my intermediate reporting students to read it in class so we could talk about how it was put together.

Bartlett skillfully shifts back and forth between the frantic attempts to save Sungida Rashid’s life and the larger crisis at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the Brighton hospital that Rashid and her husband, Nabil Haque, had chosen for the birth of their first child. We learn that St. Elizabeth’s did not have the device, known as an embolism coil, because the hospital’s supply had been repossessed. It turns out that Steward Health Care, a for-profit company that owns St. Elizabeth’s and eight other hospitals in Massachusetts, hadn’t been paying its bills.

Incredibly, Haque didn’t know that devastating fact until the Globe informed him about it after he and his daughter had moved back to Bangladesh.

The major question a reader might have after reading the story was how St. Elizabeth’s and Steward had fallen into such a financial mess. That story is laid out in an earlier story by Bartlett and in a column by Globe business columnist Larry Edelman, who explain that a private equity firm known as Cerberus Capital Management had bailed out the hospitals in 2010. According to Edelman, Cerberus quadrupled its money and flipped the hospitals in 2017.

As Edelman points out, Cerberus is “named after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades in Greek mythology.” The firm is also deeply involved in the destruction of the newspaper business. In 2021, Julie Reynolds reported for Nieman Lab that Cerberus was the financial backer for the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital when it acquired Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. Cerberus gets much of its money, in turn, from investments made by public employee pension funds, especially in California and Pennsylvania.

Reynolds talked about the Alden-Cerberus connection on our “What Works” podcast back in November 2021.

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Wendi Thomas talks about her work at MLK50, a nonprofit covering social justice in Memphis

Wendi C. Thomas. Photo (cc) 2022 by Ellen Clegg.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, we talk with Wendi C. Thomas, the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, which is based in Memphis, Tennessee. Thomas founded MLK50 in 2017 as a one-year project designed to focus on the antipoverty work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King had traveled to Memphis in April of 1968 to support striking sanitation workers who were fighting for safer working conditions and a living wage.

But MLK50 became much more than a one-year project. Thomas and her staff have gone on to produce journalism that has changed the dialogue, and changed lives, in Memphis. Her work has garnered numerous awards. In 2020, she was the winner of the Selden Ring Award for her groundbreaking investigative series, “Profiting from the Poor,” an investigation of a nonprofit hospital that sued poor patients over medical debt. The series, co-published with ProPublica, had major impact: the hospital erased $11.9 million in medical debt. MLK50 is one of the projects that we profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Ellen Clegg has a Quick Take on the situation at the Houston Landing, a highly anticipated and well-funded nonprofit newsroom that launched in 2023. The Landing is in turmoil after CEO Peter Bhatia fired the editor and the top investigative reporter for reasons that remain mysterious.

My Quick Take is on The Baltimore Sun, the venerable 186-year-old daily newspaper that at one time was home to the infamously caustic writer H.L. Mencken. Earlier this month, Alden Global Capital sold the Sun to a right-wing television executive who hates newspapers. But not to fear — public interest journalism is alive and well in Baltimore, as I explain.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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Globe columnist is called out for facilitating an assisted suicide he was writing about

Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen is the subject of an extraordinary editor’s note that reveals he helped facilitate the physician-assisted suicide of a terminally ill woman he was writing about. Cullen and photographer Jessica Rinaldi documented the death of Lynda Bluestein, a Connecticut woman who traveled to Vermont to take advantage of that state’s so-called “aid in dying” law.

Cullen describes a meeting with Bluestein and Dr. Diana Barnard, a Vermont physician who was helping Bluestein with the process. Present at the meeting were Cullen and members of a team that was making a film. “At one of the meetings in July with Barnard,” Cullen writes, “Lynda asked a Globe columnist [see editor’s note] and also a member of the documentary team following her story to sign the form saying she knew what she was doing and wasn’t under duress.” Cullen agreed to sign, which prompted this editor’s note from the Globe’s executive editor, Nancy Barnes:

From the editor:

The right to die has long been a controversial issue in many societies, and especially in some religious communities.

Last year, Globe reporter and columnist Kevin Cullen and photographer Jessica Rinaldi set out to chronicle Connecticut resident Lynda Bluestein on her mission to die on her own terms in Vermont, which has a “medical aid in dying” provision. Our intent was not to advocate for this issue, but to share an important perspective and a very personal, albeit wrenching, story.

Vermont’s law required two witnesses to sign a form attesting that Bluestein was in a clear state of mind when she made this decision, and they could not be family members, doctors, any beneficiaries, a nursing home owner or employee, etc.

Bluestein, with the support of her doctor, asked two people who were with her on July 10 to attest to this for her. Reporter Kevin Cullen was one of those people and he agreed to do so — a decision Cullen regrets. It is a violation of Globe standards for a reporter to insert themselves into a story they are covering. That it was intended primarily as a gesture of consideration and courtesy does not alter that it was out of bounds.

After reviewing these details, we have concluded that this error did not meaningfully impact the outcome of this story — Bluestein died on Jan. 4 and she likely would have found another signatory in the months before then. For that reason, we chose to publish this powerful story, which includes exceptional photojournalism, while also sharing these details in full transparency.

Nancy Barnes
Boston Globe executive editor

This is not the first time that Cullen has run afoul of the Globe’s ethics policies. In 2018, he was suspended for three months following an investigation that determined he had fabricated details about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings in radio interviews and at public appearances. A review of his work for the Globe revealed no problems beyond a few minor errors of fact.

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