In Atlanta, a corporate owner bets on growth; plus, lying about lying, and a social-media meltdown

Martin Luther King Jr. House in Atlanta. Photo (cc) 2019 by Warren LeMay.

The list of major metropolitan daily newspapers that are doing reasonably well is short and dominated by independent owners. There are The Boston Globe, The Minnesota Star Tribune and The Seattle Times, all under family ownership. Next up: The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit paper owned by a nonprofit foundation. (The Tampa Bay Times has a similar arrangement but is struggling.) And there’s The Salt Lake Tribune, which has gone fully nonprofit.

What generally doesn’t come to mind are chain-owned newspapers. One exception, though, is The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is in the midst of a buildup overseen by its corporate owner, Cox Enterprises. David Folkenflik of NPR reports that Cox is spending $150 million over the next several years in the hopes that publisher and president Andrew Morse can figure it out.

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Cox isn’t Gannett or Alden Global Capital. At one time it owned a fairly significant newspaper empire, these days it’s down to the AJC, as the Atlanta paper is known, and a handful of papers in Ohio anchored by the Dayton Daily News. Nevertheless, the privately held conglomerate has major holdings in cable television and broadband services, claiming more than $13 billion in revenues in its communications division. In other words, it would seem to be the sort of bottom line-oriented company whose leadership holds few romantic views about the struggling newspaper business.

But Morse, a former top executive at CNN, is pushing ahead. According to Folkenflik, Morse hopes to build the AJC’s paid print and digital circulation from about 100,000 to 500,000 by doubling down on political coverage and reaching out to the city’s Black community, among other initiatives. A downtown newsroom is opening this week after years of being stranded in the suburbs. The AJC is expanding its staff, too.

“Instead of reading story after story about the futility of this, why don’t we grasp onto notions of, ‘How do we build for the future?'” Morse told Folkenflik, adding: “Our mission is to be the most essential and engaging source of news for the people of Atlanta, Georgia, in the South.”

As Folkenflik observes, Georgia is home to several papers owned by the cost-cutting Gannett and McClatchy chains. If Cox can show that there’s another way to do business, maybe the executives at those chains will realize that there’s more money to be made by offering quality than through endless rounds of downsizing. But probably not.

Pants on fire

Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, is on something of an apology tour as he promotes his book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”

The problem is that neither PolitiFact nor other prominent fact-checking projects, including FactCheck.org or The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, have been especially willing over the years to admit that Republicans lie more than Democrats. Donald Trump’s gusher of lies has changed that equation to some degree, although anyone who reads those sites knows that Trump is often treated as a particularly noxious exception to their otherwise both-sides-lie orientation.

Adair spoke with public radio’s “On the Media” over the weekend, telling co-host Brooke Gladstone that, well, he lied about lying. Here’s part of what he said:

In 2012, I was on C-SPAN, national television, live, taking calls. And Brian from Michigan calls in. And Brian says, Mr. Adair, I read in The Nation that when you add up the fact checks, that Republicans lie more and they lie worse. And I answer Brian and I lie. You know, I can honestly say I don’t keep score.

Well, we did keep score. We kept score by person. We didn’t reveal the party total. But I knew that Brian was right. And instead, I gave him this dodge that I always gave people when they asked this. I said, asking me that question is sort of like asking an umpire who’s out at home more, you know, the Yankees or the Red Sox.

I don’t know. I look at every play independently. And I think it’s important that we do that. I want to find Brian so that I can apologize to him because Brian was right then and Brian is even more right now. But I was trying to show that I was impartial.

Adair is now teaching at Duke University and is no longer involved in PolitiFact. But I find it interesting that he’s making this admission just a few months after the fact-checkers strained so hard at the two national political conventions to be “impartial” that they nearly gave themselves a hernia.

PolitiFact is perhaps best known for its “Pants on Fire!” rating for especially egregious lies. Well, Adair may not be able to sit down again for quite some time. He owes an apology not just to Brian but to all of us.

Career on fire

Add Laura Helmuth to the long list of journalists who’ve blown up their career for the sake of a momentary cheap thrill on social media. Helmuth, the editor — make that the former editor — of Scientific American, resigned last week after posting a series of F-bomb-laden posts on Bluesky in which she expressed her outrage at Donald Trump’s election.

Among her posts, according to Maya Yang at The Guardian: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” She later deleted the offending posts and offered up the proverbial boilerplate that they “do not reflect my beliefs.” Apparently it wasn’t enough.

Now, you might think this wasn’t a big deal, but Scientific American is a pretty buttoned-down institution as well as an important part of the scientific establishment, which has been targeted by Trump and the people around him.

As I tell my students, your social-media posts should stay within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do in your day job. Helmuth clearly went well beyond that.

Bluesky is having its moment; plus, Soon-Shiong reverses himself, and a local-news event in Ipswich

Photo (cc) 2014 by Mike Mozart

From the moment that Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022 and took a wrecking ball to it, millions of appalled users have sought alternatives. Mastodon, a decentralized nonprofit, got some early buzz, though it failed to gain mass traction. Threads, part of the Meta universe, has enjoyed some success, attracting 275 million users; but many of those users are also disenchanted with an algorithm that plays down news and politics.

Now Bluesky is having its moment. The most Twitter-like of the new platforms, Bluesky has experienced a surge of a million new users since the election, attracting the attention of The New York Times, The Associated Press, Slate and others. Its current user base of about 15 million makes it far smaller than Threads, but its customizable feeds, lists and starter packs, as well as its lack of an algorithm, have led many of us to conclude that it’s a better tool for sharing and discussing journalism.

As media writer Oliver Darcy puts it: “But while the masses might be joining Threads, power users in media and politics seem to now be preferring Bluesky. That is where the conversation is now forming. Even on Threads, one of the biggest topics of discussion this week is Bluesky.”

Bluesky got off to a slow start because for quite a long while you could only join by invitation. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s involvement was a poison pill for some, though he has since moved on. Today Bluesky is owned by a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company that nevertheless must adhere to some nonprofit-like principles such as “extending benefits to stakeholders like communities and employees,” as Kiplinger puts it.

In other words, Bluesky, unlike Threads and Twitter, is not under the control of an erratic billionaire.

Twitter/X still has nearly 500 million users worldwide, but it has been overrun by trolls, bots and various right-wing extremists, including Musk himself. The Guardian created a stir Wednesday when it announced that it was mostly leaving Twitter, calling it a “toxic media platform.” But many news outlets continue to make heavy use of Twitter.

Six to 10 years ago, when Twitter was at its most useful, it was a gathering place for liberals, conservatives and moderates. Unfortunately, neither Threads nor Bluesky has been able to replicate that vibe, as their user bases are overwhelmingly liberal and progressive. And thus our national discourse continues to become more polarized.

Soon-Shiong comes clean

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the other billionaire newspaper owner who killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the election, is now saying that his daughter was right all along when she cited Harris’ pro-Israel position in the war in Gaza as the reason that his Los Angeles Times did not weigh in on the presidential race.

“Somebody had asked me, ‘was that the reason?’ I said, ‘well, that wasn’t the only reason.’ Clearly, that was one of the reasons, and there are many other reasons, but I think that should be exposed really transparently about all the reasons,” he told CNN reporters Liam Reilly and Hadas Gold.

Soon-Shiong had previously denied a claim in The New York Times by his daughter, Nika, that the family had decided not to endorse because of Gaza. Instead, he said that he wanted his paper to move away from endorsements, and that he killed the Harris endorsement because the editorial board had ignored his directive to put together a nonpartisan guide to Harris’ and Donald Trump’s stands on the issues.

Now it appears that Soon-Shiong was being less than candid — or, as former LA Times journalist Matt Pearce writes, “Well, Patrick Soon-Shiong lied.” Pearce adds:

If you own large newspaper and have strong opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza, and those opinions about Gaza directly affect how you influence the newspaper’s engagement with politics and the public during an election, then you should probably print your opinion about Gaza in the newspaper you own instead of publicly dumping on your employees and claiming you’d asked them to do some other nonsense that you hadn’t actually asked them to do, and then lying to reporters about your opinions on Gaza not having influenced your political decisionmaking while publicly scolding your daughter for telling the New York Times hey my dad did this because of Gaza, which you followed by writing an internal email to your chief operating officer and executive editor to more or less elaborate at length that hey I did this because of Gaza (feelings which themselves have already gotten watered down in the only-sort-of-coming-clean interview with CNN).

The other billionaire non-endorser, of course, is Jeff Bezos, who canceled a Harris endorsement in The Washington Post at the last minute and claimed he had decided the Post should stop endorsing candidates.

There is a third billionaire non-endorser as well: Glen Taylor of The Minnesota Star Tribune, whose opinion editor announced back in August that the paper would no longer endorse. As my co-author and podcast partner Ellen Clegg wrote for What Works, that was enough to prompt outrage among former Strib opinion journalists, a group of whom published their own Harris endorsement independently.

Please come to Ipswich

If you’re on the North Shore, I’ll be moderating a panel of local-news leaders today at 6 p.m. at the True North Ale Company in Ipswich. The event is free, although donations are requested. Please register here.

The panel is being held to mark the fifth anniversary of Ipswich Local News, whose publisher, John Muldoon, will be a panelist. He’ll be joined by Kris Olson of The Marblehead Current, Erika Brown of The Manchester Cricket and Jack Lawrence of the soon-to-be-launched Hamilton-Wenham News.

The ProJo will shut its printing plant; plus, Google News exec quits, and healthier news habits

Illustration c. 1902 via the Internet Archive Book Images

The Providence Journal is shutting down its printing plant next March because its previous owner bet on a technology that is no longer supported. As a friend who’s now retired from the Journal put it on Facebook, “I didn’t realize we had the Betamax of printing presses.

The closure could have serious consequences. The Journal, which is owned by the Gannett chain, is where a number of other Gannett papers are printed, including the regional edition of USA Today, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Cape Cod Times and others. The plant also earns money by printing non-Gannett papers such as the Daily News of New York, the Boston Herald and the Hartford Courant, all owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

According to Journal reporter Jack Perry, the closure will result in the loss of 136 jobs. He reports that some of the printing will move to Gannett’s facility in Auburn, Massachusetts, which, he writes, should result in no significant effect on delivery — but that some will move to a plant that the company owns in New Jersey. Perry explains what happened:

In 1987, The Providence Journal opened its $60 million production plant and began printing with a technology, flexography, that was new to newspapers, although the packaging industry had used it for about six decades. In relying on water-based, rather than oil-based ink, flexography was considered better for the environment, and cleaner for readers in that it wouldn’t leave ink smudges on their fingers.

Despite those and other perceived advantages, flexography didn’t catch on in the newspaper industry and replace offset printing as some expected. The English company that makes the printing plates for Providence’s flexo presses decided to stop making the plates because it wasn’t cost effective, since the Providence facility is its only remaining customer, according to Mike Niland, senior director of manufacturing, Gannett Publishing Services New England. It is the only company that makes the plates, he said.

A news industry source told me Tuesday via email that the printing quality should actually improve after the papers move from flexo to offset, though that would seem like small consolation given the early deadlines that will no doubt be imposed in order to truck papers north from New Jersey.

This is not the first time that Gannett has closed a New England printing plant. In January 2023, the company announced that it would shut down its facility in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That closure affected two New Hampshire papers, the Portsmouth Herald and Foster’s Daily Democrat of Dover, as well as the Burlington Free Press of Vermont, located not far from the Canadian border. The printing at that time was parceled out between Gannett’s plants in Providence and Auburn, Massachusetts. Now only Auburn remains.

Digital giant quits Google

One of the giants of digital news has quit Google. Shailesh Prakash, a vice president and general manager of Google News, has quit after just two years, reports Alexandra Bruell (gift link) in The Wall Street Journal, writing: “The high-profile departure comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets over how the search engine drives traffic and uses their content.”

Prakash came to Google from The Washington Post, and I interviewed him for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls.” Like then-executive editor Marty Baron, Prakash was a holdover from the Graham family regime, though Jeff Bezos had the good sense to hold on to both of them when he bought the paper in 2013.

Though the Journal story provides little insight into why Prakash decided to leave Google, it does describe the increasingly challenging environment in which he found himself:

At Google, he brought an understanding of publishers’ frustrations as they have grappled with traffic declines and seek compensation for the Alphabet unit’s [i.e., Google’s] use of their content. While he oversaw product and engineering for the News group, he also communicated with leaders at news publishers regarding changes related to search and generative AI.

Solving those news blues

The election of Donald Trump to a second term in the White House has led a lot of us to wonder how we might change our news-consumption habits. I’m thinking about less news of the day, more deep dives into topics that may not be directly related to national politics.

Nieman Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen has some good ideas as well: print newspapers, which are better than digital at packing their journalism into a finite space; cutting back on social media, including getting rid of Twitter; recommitting to RSS; and not reading news after hours.

“I’m still a working journalist and a huge part of my job is to read and follow the news,” she writes. “I’ll still do both those things because I love them. But sometimes it’s healthy to do something you love a little less, and differently.”

Texas Tribune CEO Sonal Shah tells us what’s next for the pioneering news project

Texas Tribune CEO Sonal Shah at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin last September

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sonal Shah, the CEO of The Texas Tribune, a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Shah, a Houston native and first-generation immigrant, took over as chief executive in January 2023 after co-founder Evan Smith decided to move on.

Shah is part of a major transition at the Tribune and brings broad experience in government, the private sector and philanthropy. She is a trained economist who worked on the Obama presidential transition team, worked in philanthropy for Google, and was national policy director for Pete Buttigieg’s run for president.

I’ve got a Quick Take about Advance Local, a local news chain in New Jersey that is ending its print editions — including the storied Star-Ledger of Newark — and going fully digital.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on The Minnesota Star Tribune’s editorial non-endorsement in the presidential race and an alternative endorsement of Kamala Harris written on a blog by former Strib staffers.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

We need a renewal of civic life — and that has to start by supporting local journalism

Photo (cc) 2008 by personthingmanuser

Following Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday night, I’ve seen calls on social media to support independent news organizations like ProPublica and The Guardian rather than traditional outlets. It’s a good idea, though I value the work done by mainstream journalism as well.

But let me suggest a different approach to funding media: using your subscription money or tax-deductible donations to support news at the local level. I’ve been writing about the local news crisis for a decade and a half, and during that time I’ve come to believe that one of the reasons we’re so polarized is that low-quality national news has moved in to fill the vacuum created by the decline of community journalism.

Civic life depends on reliable news and information. Without it, you have people showing up at school committee meetings to complain about phony, Fox News-driven issues like transgender sports and critical race theory rather than test scores and the cost of funding a new teachers’ contract.

Academic studies have shown that a lack of local news leads to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization and what my research partner, Ellen Clegg, and I like to call the “corruption tax” — that is, lenders demanding a higher rate of return when municipalities in news deserts seek to borrow money for such worthy causes as a new middle school or fire station. The lenders, it seems, want a premium if no one is going to keep an eye on how their money is being spent.

Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.

The news desert problem is serious and getting worse. According to the latest State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School, some 3,200 print newspapers have disappeared since 2005. Most of them were weekly papers that provided exactly the sort of coverage needed to build and maintain a sense of community.

At the same time, though, hundreds of independent news projects have launched in recent years. Most but not all are digital-only; many are nonprofit, some are for-profit.

As it happens, this is the time of year when it makes the most sense to support local news, especially nonprofits. Every year, the Institute for Nonprofit News, through its NewsMatch program, provides funds to nonprofits to match some of what they are able to raise within their communities. This year’s campaign began Nov. 1. As INN explains:

Eighteen national and regional funders have pledged $7.5 million to NewsMatch, the largest grassroots fundraising campaign to support nonprofit news in the U.S. Since 2017, participating news organizations in the INN Network have leveraged $31 million in NewsMatch funding to help generate nearly $300 million in support from their communities. All of these newsrooms have met INN’s membership standards for financial transparency, editorial independence, and original public service reporting. Not every nonprofit news outlet meets those standards and is able to become an INN member.

Ellen and I wrote our book, “What Works in Community News,” to profile independent local and regional news organizations that are finding ways to serve the public despite the ongoing financial challenge of paying for journalism. We also talk with news entrepreneurs and thought leaders on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our hope is that the people and projects we highlight will inspire others to fill the information gap in their own communities.

Philanthropy will remain an important source of funding for some time to come. We should assume that long-stalled federal efforts to provide tax credits for local news aren’t suddenly going to start moving forward during the Age of Trump II. Efforts in states that include New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California are worthwhile but limited.

Ultimately the news desert problem will be solved, or not, without government assistance. If your community has an independent news outlet, please support it. And if it doesn’t, I suggest you look into what it would take to get involved in starting one.

At The Minnesota Star Tribune, a non-endorsement leads 15 former staffers to write their own

Photo (cc) 2018 by Ken Lund

Last week, in a commentary for CommonWealth Beacon, I compared the outrage that greeted The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times over their non-endorsements with the relative calm with which a similar decision at The Minnesota Star Tribune was met.

I wrote that the problem with the Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and his counterpart at the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, was their last-minute cancellations of editorials endorsing Kamala Harris — and that the Strib had escaped similar opprobrium by announcing its decision back in August.

Well, not so fast. Because as Ellen Clegg reports at What Works, 15 former Star Tribune opinion journalists were so offended by the paper’s failure to endorse Harris that they wrote their own and published it online under the headline “The endorsement editorial the Star Tribune should have published.”

Ellen profiled the Strib in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Like the Post, the LA Times and, for that matter, The Boston Globe under John and Linda Henry, the Star Tribune is owned by a billionaire: Glen Taylor, who has received praise for building up the paper and transforming it into a profitable enterprise.

Earlier this year, the Star Tribune’s new editorial page editor, Phillip Morris, put an end to endorsements as part of a wide-ranging rethink of the opinion section. But Ellen writes that it’s unclear what role Taylor or publisher Steve Grove may have had in that decision.

Ellen also notes that Grove is writing a memoir and says: “Let’s hope that along with chapters about ‘reinvention, love, community, and what holds us together,’ he explains how he’ll stand up to powerful people who would prefer that the independent press heed their whims, and to the dark forces that want to extinguish it altogether.”

Correction: It’s Grove who’s writing a memoir, not Taylor, as I incorrectly wrote earlier.

The end of The Star-Ledger’s print edition marks the next step in Advance’s digital strategy

Downtown Newark. Photo (cc) 2016 by massmatt.

News that Advance Local is closing its print newspapers in New Jersey is sad on one level. On another level, though, it marks the continued evolution of the chain’s digital-first strategy, which I reported on in the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News.”

Ellen and I also talked about Advance’s digital focus on our podcast this past May with Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos, the top two executives at MassLive, the chain’s statewide online news organization in Massachusetts.

According to Lola Fadulu and Tracey Tully of The New York Times (gift link), Advance will end the print editions of three daily papers in New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey Times. A weekly, the Hunterdon County Democrat, will also end its print run. Another daily, the Jersey Journal, which covers Jersey City, will shut down altogether. According to a statement from Advance:

“Today’s announcement represents the next step into the digital future of journalism in New Jersey,” said Steve Alessi, President of NJ Advance Media. “It’s important to emphasize that this is a forward-looking decision that allows us to invest more deeply than ever in our journalism and in serving our communities.”

Alessi said that that ceasing print publication will allow NJ Advance Media to reallocate resources to strengthen its core newsroom. He said that the newsroom has more reporters than it did a year ago and has plans to continue to grow in 2025 as the organization looks to bolster reporting in previously under-covered areas of the state.

That strategy reflects the direction that Advance was moving in back in March 2022, when I interviewed Chris Kelly, who at that time was the interim editor of NJ.com. Advance was already taking a one-newsroom approach, putting NJ.com first and then doling out stories to its print edition. It was a strategy that had allowed NJ.com to build up strong statewide and regional coverage, Kelly said, although he conceded that it meant hyperlocal coverage was lacking. Here’s an excerpt from our book:

***

In New Jersey, as elsewhere, the newspaper scene today is much diminished. The Star-Ledger remains the largest paper in the state, with a weekday print and digital circulation that averaged nearly 125,000 and a Sunday circulation of about 140,000. Next up is The Record, which covers northern New Jersey (35,000 on weekdays, 40,000 on Sundays) and the Asbury Park Press (27,000 on weekdays, 39,000 on Sundays), both of which are owned by Gannett. Observers we spoke with gave those papers reasonably high marks for the quality of their reporting, but the breadth of their coverage was regarded as lacking. The Star-Ledger, owned by Advance Publications, is worth a closer look. Advance is a privately held company based in New York and controlled by the Newhouse family. It is best known for its magazine division, Condé Nast, which publishes prestige titles such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. But the company operates a number of daily newspapers as well, including The Birmingham News of Alabama, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland and The Oregonian of Portland.

Advance runs its newspapers in regional groups, emphasizing paid digital subscriptions over print. In New Jersey, that means The Star-Ledger and two smaller dailies, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey News, as well as a number of other Advance publications, are all part of NJ.com. A unified newsroom feeds stories to its digital hub and to its print newspapers. Some of those stories are specific to a particular region and might only run in one paper; others, more general in nature, might run statewide. All of them are posted at NJ.com, which, as of early 2022, was attracting about 1.5 million daily visits. What it means is that NJ.com is able to field the largest editorial staff in the state — about 115 journalists — as well as offer robust statehouse, investigative and data reporting. The advantage is that Advance is able to provide its audience with strong statewide and regional coverage. The disadvantage is a shortage of day-to-day accountability journalism at the community level.

As was the case with many media outlets in the spring of 2022, the NJ.com newsroom was closed as a consequence of the COVID pandemic. We met Chris Kelly, NJ.com’s senior director of news, features, topics and innovation, who was serving as interim editor, at a restaurant near his home in Maplewood. [He is now managing producer of entertainment.] He spoke animatedly about Advance’s strategy for covering New Jersey. “My argument in the eight years that I’ve been here is that you’ve got to basically become a statewide news outlet and almost move from man-to-man coverage to zone coverage,” he said. “We just simply cannot sustain a reporter covering Maplewood, covering Millbrook. I’m not unaware that doesn’t come without the downside of, yeah, we cannot cover every council meeting, we are going to miss things. But that’s been the strategy that mostly seems to be working and has allowed us to kind of sustain at the level we’re sustaining.” He also lauded Advance’s commitment to enterprise journalism, telling us: “The one thing that I can say is, if we’ve got a story that we’ve got to get, we’re going to get it, and we’re going to keep doing it. That level of commitment, the financial support, the legal support has been unwavering since I’ve been there.”

‘What Works in Community News’ will soon be available in paperback

“What Works in Community News” will soon be available in paperback!  The nice UPS driver delivered some advance copies to Ellen and me on Wednesday. The list price is $19.95, which is $10 less than the hardcover edition, and, according to Bookshop.org, you can pre-order it now for shipping on Nov. 12. There’s an audio version, too, which is perfect for those long fall walks as you ponder how to launch an independent news project in your community.

Jeff Bezos, too, shows Trump ‘anticipatory obedience’; plus, death for sale, and Billy Penn at 10

Jeff Bezos. Photo (cc) 2019 by Daniel Oberhaus.

An increasing number of news organizations are becoming fearful in the face of a rising tide of fascism. The Washington Post today joined the Los Angeles Times in deciding not to endorse in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. David Folkenflik of NPR reports:

The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, would publish a note to readers online early Friday afternoon.

Shipley told colleagues the editorial board was told yesterday by management that there would not be an endorsement. He added that he “owns” this decision. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.

As with the LA Times, there has been no change in ownership at the Post, and both papers routinely have endorsed Democratic candidates in the past. The Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, courageously stood up to Trump in the face of threats during Trump’s rise in 2015 and ’16 and throughout his presidency. But the Post has been adrift in recent years, and the Bezos of 2018 is clearly not the Bezos of 2024.

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In CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter cites the historian Timothy Snyder’s warning about “anticipatory obedience,” quoting Snyder as writing that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” That appears to be what has happened with Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Now, it’s true that the very notion of newspaper endorsements may have had their day. Newspaper chains such as Alden Global Capital and Gannett have moved away from them. The New York Times, weirdly, has given up on state and local endorsements, where the editorial board’s views might be welcome, while continuing to endorse in national races. Nonprofit news outlets can’t endorse without losing their tax exemption.

But for the LA Times and the Post to take a pass on the presidential race this late in the campaign smacks of giving in to the punishment they might be subjected to if Trump returns to office. Anticipatory obedience, in other words. A thoughtful, considered explanation months ago as to why they were ending endorsements would be another matter, but this is anything but that.

Meanwhile, the Times Union of Albany, New York, part of the Hearst chain, endorsed Harris today, writing:

For all Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about the weaponization of government, it’s Mr. Trump who has threatened to fire thousands of diligent career civil servants, fill the federal workforce with his loyal minions, use the Justice Department to hound political adversaries, and sic the military on citizens who protest against him.

This is not the talk of a person fit to be president for all Americans. On the issues and on character, it’s Ms. Harris who can be entrusted with the power and responsibility of the presidency.

This has been a shameful week for the LA Times and The Washington Post, and now it’s been punctuated by a much smaller paper’s willingness to step into the breach.

Merchants of death

One of the worst consequences of the local news crisis has been the rise of the oxymoronic paid obituary. Sorry, but obits are news stories with journalistic standards. If someone is paying for it, then it’s not an obit, it’s an ad — a death notice, in other words.

Bill Mitchell has a stunning piece up at Poynter Online about the venerable Hartford Courant, now owned by the cost-slashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital. It seems that a respected former staff reporter named Tom Condon died recently — and the Courant, rather than producing its own obit, picked up the one published in CT Mirror, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available for a fee to other news outlets. What’s more, the Courant has now slipped that obit behind a paywall.

The Courant’s website also carried an obit written by the Condon family for Legacy.com, according to Mitchell, who writes:

Paid obits, often written by and paid for by family members, have been boosting the sagging revenues of newspapers for a couple of decades. (The Courant charges about $1,200 for an obit the length of the one submitted by the Condon family, with an extra charge for a photo.) In 2019, Axios reported that more than a million paid obits were producing $500 million annually for newspapers, a small but significant chunk of overall advertising and circulation revenues then totaling about $25 billion a year.

It’s outrageous, and it’s not because newspapers are profiting from death. Rather, charging for obits is fundamentally no different from charging for any other type of news, and it corrupts what is supposed to be a journalistic endeavor.

The Courant and Alden are hardly alone in this. But for the paper to rely on another news organization to cover the death of one of its own really drives home just how far we’ve traveled down a very bad road.

Lessons from Billy Penn

Ten years ago, the digital journalism pioneer Jim Brady launched Billy Penn, a mobile-first news outlet covering Philadelphia. A few months later, I was in Philly to interview Brady and Chris Krewson, Billy Penn’s first editor, for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”

Billy Penn was eventually acquired by WHYY, Philly’s public radio station. Brady is now vice president of journalism for the Knight Foundation, and Krewson is executive editor of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers.

Krewson has written an informative and entertaining piece for LION on “10 things I’ve learned about independent publishing since launching Billy Penn in 2014.” Probably the most important of those lessons is that it took longer for Brady and Krewson to make a go of it than they were able to give — the project finally broken even in 2021, but by then WHYY was in charge.

That remains a problem for today’s start-ups, Krewson writes, although he’s hopeful that new philanthropic efforts such as Press Forward will give them the runway they need to build toward sustainability.

More fallout from the LA Times; plus, the Sun shines in Colorado, and news deserts spread

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.

News that the Los Angeles Times would not endorse a candidate for president has quickly ballooned into yet another crisis for Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s feckless and irresponsible owner.

Mariel Garza, the Times’ editorials editor, quit on Wednesday, reports Sewell Chan in the Columbia Journalism Review. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

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Chan, by the way, is a former editorial-page editor at the Times. He was recently named editor of the CJR after previously working as editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune.

Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon, responded to the criticism with a post on Twitter suggesting that he wanted to publish a side-by-side analysis of Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s strengths and weaknesses, but that the editorial board refused to comply:

In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.

Needless to say, the purpose of a newspaper’s opinion pages is to express opinions, not to offer “non-partisan information.”

Now, let’s back up a bit and look at the role of owners at large metropolitan newspapers like the LA Times. Ethically, owners should stay clear of news coverage, but Soon-Shiong reportedly violated that edict by interfering with a story about a friend whose dog had bitten someone, of all things. Natalie Korach reported in The Wrap earlier this year that the incident played a role (along with deep cuts in the newsroom) in executive editor Kevin Merida’s decision to quit in January of this year.

On the other hand, owners are free to exert their influence on the editorial pages. Indeed, at one time the lure of exercising political influence was one of the main reasons that rich people bought newspapers. So Soon-Shiong did not act unethically in killing an editorial endorsing Harris for president. Even so, his actions were high-handed and disrespectful, and by acting as he did at the last minute — instead of, say, announcing a no-endorsement policy earlier this year — he precipitated a crisis. In fact, as Max Tani noted in Semafor on Tuesday, the Times had endorsed in state and local races just last week.

Another consideration is the effect that endorsements actually have on political campaigns. A good rule of thumb is that the smaller and more obscure the race, the more that a newspaper’s opinion might actually influence the outcome. A presidential endorsement is the opposite of that, which Garza acknowledged in her resignation letter:

I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many “Trump is unfit” editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her.

But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.

Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state — and one of the largest in the nation still — declined to endorse in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.

Garza gets at something that is at least as important as influencing voters. An endorsement is how a news organization expresses its values. And what Soon-Shiong has expressed is that his newspaper is going to remain neutral at a time when a fascist (according to two generals who served under Trump, John Kelly and Mark Milley, language that Harris herself has now adopted) is seeking to return to office.

Newspapers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe have endorsed Harris. Yet, in a potentially ominous sign, The Washington Post so far has not.

Unlike the public manner in which the LA Times’ non-endorsement has played out, there’s no indication of what’s going on at the Post. Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that the Post’s silence is starting to raise eyebrows, as well as new questions about its ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. Darcy writes that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, “has repeatedly been targeted by Donald Trump over the years” and “is not alone amongst the rich and powerful who may prefer to stay as far away from politics as possible this election cycle.”

Let’s hope the Post is heard from soon.

The Sun is shining

A little over a year ago, The Colorado Sun announced it was switching from a hybrid for-profit/nonprofit ownership model to nonprofit governance. At the time, co-founder and editor Larry Ryckman (now the publisher) said that whatever misgivings he might have about the nonprofit model, it gave the Sun an easier story to tell to prospective funders.

“Whether I agree with it or not, whether I even like it or not, the reality is that many individuals, many institutions and philanthropic groups, have concluded that journalism should be nonprofit,” Ryckman told me in an interview for Nieman Lab. “I have my own thoughts on that, but that is reality.”

Well, now the switch has paid off. Ryckman announced earlier this week:

The Colorado Sun has been awarded a $1.4 million grant from the American Journalism Project. AJP is a national nonprofit whose purpose is to boost nonprofit journalism around the country, and it has thus far committed $62.7 million to 49 news organizations across 35 states.

The grant will be spread over three years, and the funds will be used to strengthen the long-term sustainability and future expansion of The Sun. This will include growing our fund development efforts and bolstering our business operations to allow us to deepen our impact in Colorado, while laying the foundation for the next era of high-quality, nonprofit journalism in our state — ensuring that Coloradans have the news they deserve for generations to come.

Before becoming a nonprofit, the Sun was a public benefit corporation, a for-profit that operates under certain restrictions and requirements. It also had a relationship with a nonprofit organization, which allowed donors to support the Sun’s journalism with tax-deductible contributions.

The Sun, by the way, is one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I feature in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Ryckman has been a guest on our podcast as well.

The crisis continues

The Colorado Sun’s good news notwithstanding, the local news crisis continues unabated and may be getting worse. That was the message at a webinar Wednesday to mark the release of the third annual State of Local News report from the Medill School at Northwestern University.

“The crisis in local news is snowballing,” said Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. Franklin said that more than 3,000 newspapers have closed since 2005, about a third of the total, with a concomitant decline in newspaper jobs, which he called “a staggering loss.”

Zach Metzger, who runs the project now that founder Penelope Abernathy has retired, added: “News deserts are continuing to expand.”

I plan to look more closely at the data and write a follow-up at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a thorough overview of the new report.