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The Globe announces expanded regional coverage of Greater Boston

The Boston Globe is expanding its coverage of the Boston suburbs, adding the inner belt, the North and South Shores and MetroWest to Rhode Island and New Hampshire, where it has set up bureaus during the past few years.

The staffing is minimal enough that the Globe won’t be able to provide granular reporting in each of the many dozens of cities and towns in Greater Boston — although it is promising substantially more coverage of Cambridge and Somerville. But there are strong independent local news outlets in many suburban communities, and I expect that the Globe will be keeping an eye on them for story ideas. And here’s a thought: Perhaps the Globe could work with those outlets as well. In any event, more is more, and more is better than less. I’ve already signed up for the newsletter.

What follows is an email to the newsroom from editor Nancy Barnes and Anica Butler, the deputy managing editor for local news. Nothing coy about where I got it this time — it came directly from the Globe’s PR operation.

Hi all —

We are pleased to announce that we are launching a regional news team to bolster our coverage of news outside of Boston’s city limits, with the goal of meeting our existing readers where many of them are and attracting new eyes from the many surrounding communities.

Think ambitious enterprise and accountability journalism with statewide appeal, accompanied by creative digital storytelling, bolstered by audience engagement. We’ll also have a newsletter dedicated to our regional stories. Sign up here to get the first edition in your inbox.

Our expanded coverage will reflect the broad diversity in cities and towns outside of Boston, from the Gateway cities to the wealthy western suburbs to the growing Black middle class in Randolph and Stoughton to the new immigrants making their homes in Greater Boston. We will also be making Cambridge and Somerville — Camberville if you will — a beat of its own, reflecting the importance of these cities on Boston’s doorstep.

(And if you’ve already noticed an uptick in stories from outside of Boston this summer, it’s because our team has already gotten a start!)

Here’s the team:

Roy Greene, a deputy metro editor, will bring his great journalistic instincts and creative story ideas to lead this new team. Roy, who has been at the Globe for more than 20 years and has worked on past local news initiatives, lives in East Cambridge.

Assisting Roy in leading the team will be Steve Annear, one of our most creative and enterprising journalists, with an unparalleled ability to put his finger on the pulse of the region and determine which storylines are percolating online. Steve, who lives in Somerville, will edit our Cambridge and Somerville coverage and will lead the team’s digital efforts, including the newsletter.

Here are the reporters:

Spencer Buell, who has a knack for identifying and crafting viral stories (the Cop Slide!), will cover Cambridge and Somerville.

Billy Baker, who most recently showcased his considerable writing chops on the outdoors beat, will cover the North Shore.

John Hilliard, an indefatigable news hound with sources galore, will continue his coverage of the metro west and gateway cities. John always seems to land in the right place when a big story breaks.

Sarah Ryley, a data journalism expert, will cover the South Shore and will also help with metro west.

Roy and Steve will also work with reporters and editors across the newsroom whose beats are unfolding outside the city. So expect plenty of collaboration. And please feel free to send story ideas their way as the team gets going!

Nancy & Anica

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Public notices are a crucial source of revenue — and of government accountability

Mathewson Farm in Johnston, R.I. Photo (cc) by John Phelan.

When we think about revenue sources for local news, we tend to focus on the obvious — ads, subscriptions, events and, for nonprofits, voluntary memberships and grants. What we often overlook are public notices, also known as legal ads, taken out by government entities to inform the public that a job is being put out to bid or a meeting is being held. Mandatory public notices also include foreclosures, the disposition of public property and other business.

Public notices represent a significant source of revenue for community news organizations — and they can be weaponized. The Boston Globe recently reported on one such example in Rhode Island. Amanda Milkovits wrote that the city of Johnston has removed public notices from the weekly Johnston Sun Rise and moved them instead to the daily Providence Journal, even though the Journal charges much higher fees and is read by few people in Johnston.

The mayor, Joseph Polisena Jr., told Milkovits that he wanted public notices to reach a broader audience, especially to let construction companies know about bids. But the city has also been at odds with the Sun Rise and its editor/reporter, Rory Schuler. Publisher John Howell was quoted as saying that Polisena once told him, “I’m not going to support somebody who is working against me,” and that the mayor said he wouldn’t advertise as long as Schuler was with the paper. (Polisena denied the charges.)

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The loss of city public notices is costing the Sun Rise some $12,000 a year. Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told the Globe that the city might be violating the First Amendment if it could be shown that Polisena’s actions were retaliation for negative coverage.

What’s happening in Rhode Island is hardly unusual. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed a bill through the legislature that allows local governments simply to post public notices on their own websites — a cost-saving measure that also has the effect of making legal ads less visible. DeSantis’ disdain for the news media is well-known.

Colorado College journalism professor Corey Hutchins often tracks fights over public notices in his newsletter, Inside the News in Colorado. Recently he reported on a move by city officials in Aspen to designate the Aspen Daily News, which is locally owned, as the city’s “newspaper of record” over The Aspen Times, a daily owned by the Ogden chain, based in Wheeling, West Virginia. That peculiarity of Colorado law carries with it some major implications. Hutchins writes:

Newspapers that earn a city’s “of record” stamp means they are the ones a city pays to place legal notices and advertising. State law requires governments to publish certain things in local newspapers in order to keep residents abreast of public business. Being a city’s paper of record also can give a newspaper a sense of gravitas in a community.

In other words, more money for the Daily News, less for the Times, which became embroiled earlier this year in a dispute with county officials who were unhappy with the Times’ coverage of a billionaire’s development plans. (Hutchins does not claim there is a link between the county and city actions.)

According to Susan Chandler, writing for the Local News Initiative, such battles are under way across the country, with increasing pressure to move public notices from news outlets to government websites. Richard Karpel, executive director of the Public Notice Resource Center, told Chandler that these initiatives are part of Republican attacks on journalism, saying:

I don’t think the concept of legal notices is controversial. There needs to be a nonpartisan way to officially announce what the government is doing. What’s controversial is how it happens. We’ve seen it become more of a partisan issue in the last five or 10 years. In some states, there are Republicans who are in battle with the media as part of their political strategy. To that extent, it has become partisan.

In Massachusetts, change may be afoot as well. Currently, state law requires that public notices be placed in print newspapers, which has become increasingly difficult as the Gannett chain has closed and merged many of its weekly papers. A number of communities are being well served by nonprofit startups, but those tend to be digital-only. State legislators are considering ways to amend the law to allow public notices to be placed in web publications, especially in communities where there is no viable print paper.

I’ve consulted with state Rep. Ken Gordon, whose district includes Bedford, the home of a vibrant digital publication, The Bedford Citizen, but no print newspaper since Gannett closed the Bedford Minuteman about a year and a half ago. The town now publishes its public notices in The Sun of Lowell, which has virtually no presence in Bedford. Also of note: On the “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Ed Miller, editor of the startup Provincetown Independent, a print and digital publication. Miller argues that the print requirement for public notices is essential, at least in places that still have a print newspaper.

Public notices aren’t sexy. It’s much more satisfying to talk about a local news outlet that has built a successful events business or has found a way to boost digital subscriptions. But they are essential. Not only do they provide as much as 20% to 25% of a small local newspaper’s revenues, but they an important part of accountability. Public notices on a government website can be hidden away or even changed. Since Colonial times, public notices have helped local journalism thrive and have kept citizens informed. The laws governing public notices need to be updated — but not overturned.

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Gannett’s failed attempt to cover school sports with AI raises eyebrows and questions

Six years ago, The Washington Post announced that it would begin producing stories about high school football games using artificial intelligence. The expanded use of Heliograf, the Post’s “in-house automated storytelling technology,” would allow the news organization “to cover all Washington, D.C.-area high school football games every week,” according to a press release. The press release linked to an example of such coverage — a mundane article that begins:

The Yorktown Patriots triumphed over the visiting Wilson Tigers in a close game on Thursday, 20-14.

The game began with a scoreless first quarter.

In the second quarter, The Patriots’ Paul Dalzell was the first to put points on the board with a two-yard touchdown reception off a pass from quarterback William Porter.

Yet now, with AI tools having improved considerably, Gannett is running into trouble for doing exactly the same thing. Writing for Axios Columbus, Tyler Buchanan reports that The Columbus Dispatch had suspended AI-generated local sports coverage after the tool, LedeAI, came in for criticism and mockery. As Buchanan observes, one such article “was blasted on social media for its robotic style, lack of player names and use of awkward phrases like ‘close encounter of the athletic kind.’”

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Has AI gone backwards since 2017? Obviously not. So what went wrong? It’s hard to say, but it could be that the generative AI tools that started becoming available late last year, with ChatGPT in the forefront, are more finicky than the blunt instrument developed by the Post some years back. In theory, generative AI can write a more natural-sounding story than the robotic prose produced by Heliograf and its ilk. In practice, if an AI tool like LedeAI is trained on a corpus of material loaded with clichés, then the output is going to be less than stellar.

Clare Duffy of CNN found that Gannett’s use of AI was not limited to Columbus. Other outlets that ran LedeAI-generated sports stories included the Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky; AZ Central; Florida Today, and the Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Duffy reported that one story, before it was revised, included this Grantland Rice-quality gem: “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday.”

There’s another dynamic that needs to be considered as well. The Washington Post, a regional newspaper under the Graham family, repositioned itself as a national digital news organization after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013. Regional coverage is secondary to its mission, and if it weren’t covering high school football games with AI, then it wouldn’t be covering them at all.

By contrast, you’d think that high school sports would be central to the mission at Gannett’s local and regional dailies. Turning such coverage over to AI and then not bothering to check what they were publishing is exactly the sort of move you’d expect from the bottom-line-obsessed chain, though it obviously falls short of its obligation to the communities it serves.

Poynter media columnist Tom Jones, a former sportswriter, raises another issue worth pondering — the elimination of an important training ground for aspiring sports journalists:

There is still a contentious debate about how publishers should use AI. Obviously, journalists will be (and should be) upset if AI is being used to replace human beings to cover events. As someone who started his career covering high school football, I can tell you that invaluable lessons learned under the Friday night lights laid the foundation for covering events such as the Olympics and Stanley Cup finals and college football national championships in the years after that.

At a moment when AI is the hottest of topics in journalistic circles, Gannett’s botched experiment demonstrated that there is no substitute for actual reporters.

By the way, I asked ChatGPT to write a six- to eight-word headline for this post. The result: “AI-Generated Sports Coverage Faces Scrutiny: What Went Wrong?” Not bad, but lacking the specificity I was looking for.

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Two RI weeklies shut down

Two weekly newspapers in Rhode Island are shutting their doors, citing a decline in advertising revenue, according to Boston Globe reporter Amanda Milkovits (I’m quoted). The Coventry Courier and The Chariho Times are both owned by Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers, which also owns several dailies in the state — including The Call of Woonsocket, which I wrote about earlier this week.

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Judge takes steps to ensure Everett’s mayor will be able to collect in his libel suit

Earlier this year I shared an astonishing story from Boston magazine about the Everett Leader Herald, which is being sued for libel by Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria. According to Boston reporter Gretchen Voss, the paper’s editor and publisher, Josh Resnick, admitted in a deposition that he’d faked key interviews and concocted evidence in accusing DeMaria of corruption and sexual abuse.

Now Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub writes that Middlesex Superior Court Judge William Bloomer is so certain DeMaria will win that he’s frozen properties belonging to Resnek and the paper’s owners, Matthew and Andrew Philbin, so that the mayor will be able to collect damages estimated at $850,000. Bloomer wrote that DeMaria “has demonstrated a likelihood that he will recover judgment, including interest and costs.”

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Calling on The Call

From 1976 to ’78, I was a Northeastern co-op student at The Woonsocket Call in Rhode Island, working full-time for about a year in three- and six-month stints. It was a great place to learn how to be a reporter. Managing editor Bill Crouse, city editor Ed Berman and assistant city editor Jim Anagnostos (whose family published The Hellenic Chronicle in Boston) were all first-rate journalists, and the Palmer family, who owned the paper, took their responsibilities seriously.

Late Monday afternoon, I was driving home from the Providence area and decided on a whim to head up Route 146 to see what The Call’s building and the city looked like these days. The building, at 75 Main St., was apparently closed during COVID and has not been reopened. But the outside was very much as I remembered it.

I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning Samuel S. Foss, who was, according to the plaque in the third photo, the “Father of Woonsocket Journalism.” But in the second photo you can just make out that the paper’s headquarters, built in 1922, was known as the Buell Building. According to Wikipedia, The Call was founded in 1892 by Samuel E. Hudson and Andrew J. McConnell, and among their descendants was Buell W. Hudson.

Today the paper is owned by RISN Operations, a small chain that was launched in Rhode Island in 2007 and that today operates eight small dailies across the country as well as a number of weeklies.

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Bigfoot can’t spell

Shortly after the police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of its 98-year-old co-publisher, Joan Meyer, most news outlets spelled her name “Joan.” Then The New York Times came along and, in an otherwise lovely tribute, spelled her name “Joann.” A lot of us decided we were wrong, and I went back and changed everything. Now it turns out that it was the Times that couldn’t spell her name properly. It is, in fact, “Joan,” though it’s pronounced “jo-ANN.”

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Greater Boston arts and local news get a boost from three new nonprofit projects

There’s good news about local news in Greater Boston today on three fronts. I’ll start with an attempt to revive arts reviews — at one time a staple of mainstream and alternative publications, but now relegated to niche outlets like The Arts Fuse, a high-quality website edited by Boston University professor and former Boston Phoenix arts writer Bill Marx.

Recently Paul Bass, the executive director of the nonprofit Online Journalism Project in New Haven, Connecticut, launched a grant-funded project called the Independent Review Crew (link now fixed). Freelancers in seven parts of the country are writing about music, theater and other in-person cultural events. Boston is among those seven, and freelance writer-photographer Sasha Patkin is weighing in with her take on everything from concerts to sand sculpture.

You can read Patkin’s work on the Review Crew’s website — and, this week, her reviews started running on Universal Hub as well, which gives her a much wider audience. Here’s her first contribution.

Bass is the founder of the New Haven Independent, started in 2005 as part of the first wave of nonprofit community websites. The Online Journalism Project is the nonprofit umbrella that publishes the Indy and a sister site in New Haven’s northwest suburbs; it also oversees a low-power radio station in New Haven, WNHH-LP. Before 2005, Bass was a fixture at the now-defunct New Haven Advocate, an alt-weekly that, like the Phoenix, led with local arts and was filled with reviews. The Review Crew is his bid to revive the long lost art, if you will, of arts reviewing.

Other places that are part of The Review Crew: New Haven; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Troy/Albany, New York; Oakland, California; Hartford, Connecticut; and Northwest Arkansas (the Fayetteville metro area is home to about 576,000 people).

I’ve got all kinds of disclosures I need to share here. I gave Bass some guidance before he launched The Review Crew — not that he needed any. The Indy was the main subject of my 2013 book “The Wired City,” and I’ve got a lengthy update in “What Works in Community News,” the forthcoming book that Ellen Clegg and I have written. I also suggested Universal Hub to Bass as an additional outlet for The Review Crew; I’ve known Gaffin for years, and at one time I made a little money through a blogging network he set up. Gaffin was a recent guest on the “What Works” podcast.

In other words, I would wish Paul the best of luck in any case, but this time I’ve got a bit more of a stake in it.

***

The Phoenix was not the city’s last alt-weekly. For nearly a decade after the Phoenix shut down in 2013, DigBoston continued on with a mix of news and arts coverage. Unfortunately, the Dig, which struggled mightily during COVID, finally ended its run earlier this year. But Dig editors Chris Faraone and Jason Pramas are now morphing the paper into something else — HorizonMass, a statewide online news outlet. Pramas will serve as editor-in-chief and Faraone as editor-at-large, with a host of contributors.

HorizonMass will publish as part of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, founded by Faraone and Pramas some years back to funnel long-form investigative coverage to a number of media outlets, including the Dig. HorizonMass will also have a significant student presence, Pramas writes, noting that the project’s tagline is “Independent, student-driven journalism in the public interest.” Pramas adds:

With interns working with us as reporters, designers, marketers, and (for the first time) editors, together with our ever-growing crew of professional freelance writers, we can continue to do our part to train the next generation of journalists while covering more Bay State happenings than ever before. We hope you enjoy our initial offerings and support our efforts with whatever donations you can afford.

***

Mark Pothier, a top editor at The Boston Globe, is leaving the paper to become the editor and CEO of the Plymouth Independent, a well-funded fledgling nonprofit. Pothier, a longtime Plymouth resident and former musician with the band Ministry, is already listed on the Independent’s masthead. Among the project’s advisers is Boston Globe journalist (and my former Northeastern colleague) Walter Robinson, also a Plymouth resident, who was instrumental in the launch of the New Bedford Light. Robby talked about the Plymouth Independent and other topics in a recent appearance on the “What Works” podcast.

Pothier started working at the Globe in 2001, but before that he was the executive editor of a group of papers that included the Old Colony Memorial, now part of the Gannett chain. When Gannett shifted its Eastern Massachusetts weeklies to regional coverage in the spring of 2022, the Memorial was one of just three that was allowed to continue covering local news — so it looks like Plymouth resident are about to be treated to something of a news war.

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What’s the Buzz in Burlington, Mass.? Nicci Kadilak on what it’s like to be a one-person news source

Nicci Kadilak was among several local news entrepreneurs featured earlier this year by GBH News. Photo by Jeremy Siegel / GBH News. Used by permission.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Nicci Kadilak, an educator, author, mom and founder of Burlington Buzz. The Buzz is a hyperlocal online news site serving Burlington, Massachusetts, a town of 26,000 people north and west of Boston. Kadilak created the Buzz in early 2022, when a town election was on the horizon and the local Gannett weekly, the Burlington Union, switched to regional coverage — and later ended its print edition altogether. In the 1980s, Burlington was covered by two weekly papers and The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, where I worked for quite a few years.

Nicci uses the Substack platform and charges a range of subscription fees. She offers news stories about town government, cultural events, sports, and has a section that provides a platform for audio interviews of newsmakers. She allows reader comments, too. Nicci also writes essays at Nicci’s Notes, and her debut novel, “When We Were Mothers,” is available wherever you buy books online. (Nicci, Ellen and Dan met in a Zoom discussion of local news led by Simon Owens for his informative Media Newsletter.)

By the way, the Buzz was just named one of 74 finalists for a Lion Independent Online News (LION) Publishers’ Local Journalism Award. Listeners of this podcast will notice a number of other familiar news organizations as well.

In our Quick Takes on developments in local news, I report on another effort to leverage tax credits for local journalism, and Ellen checks in on the decline and apparent death of the Santa Barbara News-Press.

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

Journalism, public goods and the free rider problem

Watchdog journalism at its finest. Photo via Needpix.

One of the arguments that often comes up in discussions about how to pay for news is that journalism is a “public good.” I was thinking about this last night when I read Rebuild Local News president Steve Waldman’s latest piece in The Atlantic, in which he observes that journalism often saves more money than it costs. He cites some notable examples, including a ProPublica investigation that led to $435 million in fines and reporting by MLK50 in Memphis, Tennessee, that resulted in the cancellation of about $12 million in debt owed by hospital patients.

This is the very definition of a “public good.” When economists talk about a public good, they mean something similar, but not identical, to what we lay people mean. You and I might simply mean that a public good is good for the public, as tough, ethical journalism surely is. But what economists mean is that it’s also something that benefits the public whether they pay for it or not. Here’s how Investopedia puts it: “The two main criteria that distinguish a public good are that it must be non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Non-rivalrous means that the goods do not dwindle in supply as more people consume them; non-excludability means that the good is available to all citizens.” Thus, a public good carries with it a free rider problem.

This is what I wrote about public goods in my 2013 book “The Wired City”:

In economic terms, a public good is something that benefits everyone, whether each of us pays for it or not — which, perversely, creates incentives for us not to pay. That is why we must pay taxes rather than make voluntary contributions to fund national defense. “Public good” is a phrase that also comes up a lot in discussions of why it is so difficult to fix the news business. For example, the local newspaper reports that members of the school committee are taking bribes from a bus company with a record of safety violations. As a result of that reporting, those committee members are removed and prosecuted. Schoolchildren are safer. Yet people who don’t buy or even read the paper benefit just as much as those who do. Thus, there needs to be a way to pay or such journalism outside the for-profit, advertiser-based context that worked reasonably well until a few years ago. Seen in this light, community journalism is a public good that deserves funding beyond what the market is willing to pay.

The problem is that when tax money is used to fund journalism, it can create a conflict that interferes with the independence needed for a news organization to fulfill its role as a monitor of power. Watchdog reporting is difficult when the institutions you’re holding to account are also providing you with the money you need to operate. That makes journalism very different from the fire department, schools or public works, all of which may accept public money without any such conflicts.

In his Atlantic piece, Waldman advocates for tax credits for local publishers and advertisers, a variation of an idea that he’s been promoting for several years that was recently revived in the form of the Community News and Small Business Support Act, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Now, tax credits are sufficiently arm’s-length that they don’t present much of a threat to journalistic independence. But the very fact that such indirect government assistance is being talked about helps illustrate why news isn’t just good for the public — it’s also a public good in every sense of the term.

At one time there was so much advertising money supporting journalism that we didn’t need to think about such things. These days, news has morphed from a highly profitable enterprise into a classic public good. It makes sense for us to find ways to fund that public good as long as we can do so without undermining the very qualities that make it a public good in the first place.