Today at What Works, we have a story by one of our Northeastern graduate students, Ian Dartley, about Inside Arlington, a local news project powered by artificial intelligence. It’s no substitute for the human touch, and in fact the town already has a very good nonprofit news organization, YourArlington. But it’s an interesting experiment, and Ian does a great job of explaining it.
We also decided to have a little fun. The headline and the bullet points used to summarize Ian’s story were written by ChatGPT. So was the social media post we used to promote the story. Here’s how it looks on Threads:
How about ChatGPT finding that dog emoji? Good boy! I thought it was interesting that ChatGPT wrote fairly dull headlines and bullet points but suddenly developed a sense of fun when it came time to write a social media post.
On the latest What Works podcast, Ellen and I talk with Meg Heckman, a colleague of ours at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Meg is an associate professor and author who’s had a long career as a journalist. She spent more than a decade as a reporter and, later, the digital editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, where she developed a fascination with presidential politics, a passion for local news and an appreciation for cars with four-wheel drive.
Her book, “Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party,” documents the lasting impact of New Hampshire publisher and conservative activist Nackey Loeb. Loeb and her husband, the right-wing provocateur William Loeb, helped shape the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire presidential primary for many decades at their newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader. As you’ll hear, Heckman draws a straight line from Nackey Loeb’s support of Republican Patrick Buchanan in 1992 to the rise of Donald Trump a generation later.
In Quick Takes, Ellen calls attention to a piece in ProPublica by journalist Dan Golden about his history working for the local daily in Springfield, Massachusetts. Turns out the good-old-days in newspapering weren’t all good. Golden cautions against recreating them. ProPublica, a nonprofit, allows other outlets to republish its work, so you’ll find Golden’s essay on the What Works website.
I take a look back at an example of how diligent local news reporting can have an enormous impact nearly 45 years after the fact. Recently the EPA proposed a ban on trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent that’s been linked to leukemia, birth defects and other health problems. The road to that ban began in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1979, with a super-smart young reporter I had the honor of working with. I wrote about it for The Boston Phoenix back in 1998.
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.
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 stintsat 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, theJan. 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.
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.
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.
CommonWealth Magazine is about to unveil a rebranding and an expansion. The nonprofit website, which covers state policy and focuses on “politics, ideas and civic life,” will be reborn as CommonWealth Beacon on Nov. 1. I’m a member of the advisory committee, and we just finished a meeting at which the redesign was unveiled. It’s clean and minimalistic, and it translates well to mobile.
CommonWealth is part of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, which I would describe as centrist and serious. The magazine ended its print edition in 2018, so the digital rebranding is long overdue. The journalism will remain free, though Beacon will offer various paid membership tiers with extra goodies.
The best part is that the project is staffing up, having added two reporters and two people to work on audience engagement and fundraising. Content will be available for free to other publications in the hopes that the local news startups that have sprouted in Massachusetts will use it to bolster their coverage. The email that went out to readers earlier this afternoon follows.
Dear CommonWealth reader,
We are writing today with exciting news:
On November 1, CommonWeath will become CommonWealth Beacon, a new name for a new era of expanded civic journalism for Massachusetts.
The decline in for-profit journalism, the rise in misinformation and the increasingly fractured and polarized civic culture underscore the need for a response. We believe independent, non-partisan, non-profit civic journalism is an essential antidote to these troubling trends.
That is why we have been working to develop a strategy and find the resources to fuel an expansion of our journalism. We took time to learn from our peers across the country, craft a business plan, and raise the seed funding that would allow us to hire more people and build a sustainable business model. In recent months, we have hired four new people — two reporters and two people to work on reader engagement and fundraising — to prepare for the launch of CommonWealth Beacon.
Rest assured, CommonWealth Beacon will retain much of what our readers love about CommonWealth — non-partisan, original reporting on the issues that matter to Massachusetts residents. As we grow, we can cover more stories, across a wider range of issues, with more detail and expertise:
CommonWealth Beacon will also feature a renewed commitment to long-form journalism through CommonWealth In-Depth and a rebranded opinion section called CommonWealth Voices.
Look for new polling about Massachusetts and our weekly podcast, The Codcast, kicks off with a live discussion at 3:15 pm ET on November 1 about the state of Massachusetts democracy with Harvard professor Danielle Allen.
We also intend to give our content away to other news outlets in Massachusetts to help strengthen local news coverage across the state. In the lifeboat of local journalism, no one is a competitor and everyone is a potential collaborator.
We see CommonWealth Beacon as a partnership among civic-minded people who understand that independent journalism is essential to a functioning democracy. As a subscriber to our newsletter, you are already a partner. We invite you to deepen your engagement by encouraging others to subscribe, by joining our membership program (details to come very soon), and by giving us feedback so we can improve. CommonWealth Beacon will be a collective enterprise and we need as many people as possible to get involved.
Thank you again for helping us to get to this exciting moment. We see this as just the beginning with much more to come in the months ahead.
This week we learned that the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to ban trichloroethylene, better known as TCE, an industrial solvent that has been linked to leukemia, birth defects, reproductive problems and other health issues.
As Michael Casey of The Associated Press notes, TCE was at the center of a major story in Woburn, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s and ’80s, when six children died of leukemia and a landmark lawsuit was brought in U.S. District Court. The lawsuit alleged that those deaths and a range of other illnesses had been caused by exposure to TCE in the drinking water. But none of that might have happened if not for the reporting of Charles Ryan, then a young reporter at The Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn. I was working at the paper at the time, and I remember what an enormous impact Charlie’s reporting had on advancing the battle against toxic waste.
Charlie had already reported on the discovery of contamination in the drinking water as well as suspicions that it was linked to a cluster of leukemia cases in East Woburn. The question that had to be answered was whether the cluster was statistically significant enough that it warranted further investigation. In December 1979, the state was about to release the results of a study. Charlie was set to go into Boston and get a copy of the report. Somehow, the story leaked out early, and the Boston Herald American reported the findings: no statistical significance. “I was a little pissed,” Charlie told me years later. “But I went in there anyway.”
Charlie quickly realized that state investigators had made a math error — they were using Woburn’s 1970 population of 40,000, whereas by 1979 that had dropped to 36,000. Correct the denominator, and the leukemia cluster moved into the zone of statistical significance. “That story changed everything,” Charlie told me. His reporting didn’t set well with Woburn’s old-line establishment, and he remembered once being told, “Your father would be turning over in his grave if he knew what you were doing to his city.” Charlie’s response: “That means you didn’t know my father very well.”
Later on, I covered some aspects of the story and was in court for all but five days of the 78-day civil trial. I covered the appeals process, too. The trial was the subject of a terrific book called “A Civil Action,” by Jonathan Harr, and a not-so-terrific movie starring John Travolta. The trial didn’t end well for the eight families who sued. One of the three defendants settled out of court before the trial, a second was cleared by the jury, and the third, W.R. Grace, settled for a paltry $8 million after being found liable for contaminating the water. The jury never had a chance to determine whether the contamination had actually caused the illnesses that were at the heart of the case.
Charlie is now retired after a lengthy career in journalism and continues to live in Woburn. The proposed ban on TCE is long overdue, and it’s part of his legacy as a reporter. It’s also a testament to the vital importance of local news that holds powerful interests to account.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I urge you to read Daniel Golden’s ProPublica feature about working in Western Massachusetts at the Springfield Daily News in the early years of his career. ProPublica allows republication, so we posted it Tuesday at What Works. Golden, who later worked at The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, is now a Boston-based reporter and editor for ProPublica, which is a well-known investigative news project.
What few people know is that the Springfield Republican, as the paper was once known (and is again), at one time was considered the finest newspaper in the region and better than its moribund brethren in Boston. Louis M. Lyons, in his 1971 authorized history of The Boston Globe, “Newspaper Story,” writes that Republican publisher Samuel Bowles was brought in to oversee the revitalization of the Boston Traveller in 1857, but that those efforts came to naught. Lyons explains:
[T]he project was undercapitalized, and Bowles’s thorny independence did not mix with Boston banking. In four months he returned to Springfield to make his provincial paper the most distinguished journal in New England. The Traveller slid back into being just another struggling Boston newspaper.
In 1905, the Massachusetts legislature considered a bill to require that the makers of patent medicines list their ingredients. The newspapers of that day gave the bill no coverage, Lyons writes, because they were highly dependent on advertising from all kinds of charlatans selling quack cures. Nationally, the patent medicine makers bought $40 million in advertising every year, and Massachusetts papers were threatened with the cancellation of those ads if the bill were to pass. Not surprisingly, the legislation went down to defeat, with only one paper in the state covered the issue: the Springfield Republican.
When Golden was working in Springfield, the city was served by the afternoon Daily News and the Morning Union, both of which were eventually acquired by the Newhouse chain. Eventually they were merged into one paper. Golden writes that the paper was eventually renamed The Republican, but it struck me as odd that the name had been lost in the first place. According to this Wikipedia article, the Sunday paper had retained the Republican name — which goes back to the paper’s Abolitionist origins — and the entire enterprise was renamed The Republican in 2003.
As Golden notes, The Republican — still a Newhouse paper — has shrunk considerably over the past two generations. But it has a lively and expanding website, MassLive, that covers statewide news and has been expanding over the past year.
Former headquarters of the Telegram & Gazette. Photo (cc) 2011 by Daderot.
With a population just north of 200,000, Worcester is the second largest city in New England; surrounding Worcester County is home to more than four times that number of residents. Yet the 157-year-old Telegram & Gazette, the daily newspaper of record in Central Massachusetts, has lost most of its paid readership under the ownership of Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain.
According to Statements of Ownership that the T&G filed with the U.S. Postal Service on Oct. 1, average weekday paid circulation of the print edition stands at 8,698. The paper also reported an average of 4,133 paid electronic copies for a total paid average weekday circulation of 12,831. On Sundays, the numbers are 12,403 for print, 4,054 for electronic, and 16,457 for total paid average circulation. And as I pointed out the other day, digital circulation is reported using guidelines from the Alliance for Audited Media, which are somewhat inflated since AAN allows for some double-counting of print and digital.
Ten years ago, the T&G enjoyed paid circulation (print plus digital) of 74,000 on weekdays and 78,000 on Sundays, according to a story published just after then-new owner John Henry visited the paper’s offices, which means that circulation is down about 80% over the past decade. The aftermath of that meeting proved to be contentious, with T&G folks coming away from it believing that Henry — who acquired the paper as part of his purchase of The Boston Globe — had promised not to sell unless he could find a local buyer.
“It’s good to hear John Henry is focused on finding the right owner for the newspaper,” T&G publisher Bruce Gaultney was quoted as saying after meeting with Henry.
Henry later told me that he believed he’d promised only that he wouldn’t sell to GateHouse Media chain, which was notorious for laying off journalists and slashing coverage. Henry ended up selling to a Florida chain, which in turned handed it off to GateHouse, now Gannett. And Gannett has gutted the T&G, as it has so many of its properties.
Worcester is not a news desert. It has a number of other outlets, including the Worcester Business Journal, MassLive, the fledgling nonprofit Worcester Guardian, a GBH News bureau and several smaller outlets, including a lively aggregation service called The016. The once-mighty Telegram & Gazette, though, is barely a shadow of its former self.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I urge you to read Daniel Golden’s ProPublica feature about working in Western Massachusetts at the Springfield Daily News in the early years of his career. ProPublica allows republication, so 
