Category: Local News

A family-owned newspaper in Pennsylvania will be donated to a public broadcaster

Lancaster, Pa. Photo (cc) 2016 by Steam Pipe Distribution Venue.

Some very good news on the community journalism front: The family who owns the daily newspaper LNP of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is donating it to the local public broadcasting outlet. WITF will acquire LNP, Lancaster Online and several other media properties, known collectively as LNP Media. LNP reporter Chad Umble writes:

The Steinman family’s 158-year ownership of a daily newspaper in Lancaster will end in June with a gift meant to safeguard the future of its flagship publication.

Steinman Communications leadership on Tuesday announced to staff their plans to give LNP Media Group, publisher of LNP | LancasterOnline, at no cost to WITF, the Harrisburg-based public broadcasting station operator. WITF will oversee the Lancaster media company, which will be converted to a public benefit corporation and become a subsidiary of WITF.

Robby Brod of WITF covers the story as well.

Significantly, the deal will be accompanied by a major donation from the Steinman family, which will provide LNP with five years of runway to achieve long-term sustainability. Now, that’s stepping up. You may also recall that WITF was absolutely fierce in calling out elected officials in Pennsylvania who lied about the 2020 election results.

Not too many parallels come to mind. Probably the closest took place in 2022, when WBEZ acquired the Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid that was traditionally that city’s No. 2 daily. The Sun-Times was converted to a nonprofit, whereas the LNP properties will be run as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit whose governance structure imposes certain requirements for serving the public interest. Both deals, though, show that public broadcasters can help save regional news coverage.

I’ve reported pretty extensively on yet another situation that involved not a major regional newspaper but, rather, a medium-size digital-and-broadcast operation: NJ Spotlight News, created in 2019 by the merger of NJ Spotlight and NJ PBS. The combined operation includes a website that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey as well as a half-hour television newscast. The website and the newscast both incorporate quite a bit of journalism in common. The story of the merger and its aftermath will be told in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I are working on.

Recently my friend and mentor Thomas Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School wrote a paper on how public radio stations could do more to help solve the local news crisis; I wrote a response. The merger taking place in Pennsylvania isn’t quite what Patterson and I have in mind, but it’s adjacent. And it’s a great example of public media filling the gap at a time when traditional for-profit newspapers are fading.

A new group in Maine would reorganize the Portland Press Herald as a nonprofit

The Maine Sunday Telegram is the name of Sunday’s Portland Press Herald

Last month we learned that Reade Brower was getting ready to sell Maine’s Portland Press Herald and several other newspapers. Today we received good news: a nonprofit organization is hoping to acquire those papers and run them for the benefit of the public.

Retired Press Herald columnist Bill Nemitz, president of the newly formed Maine Journalism Foundation, writes that the nonprofit aims to buy Brower’s five daily and 25 weekly newspapers, known collectively as Masthead Maine, to “sustain and nurture Maine’s reputation as a bastion for independent local news.” Nemitz adds:

We at MaineJF want to be the next to carry the Masthead Maine banner. Our goal initially is to acquire the company and operate the various publications as a nonprofit. Beyond that, we will seek ways to enhance all journalism in Maine through targeted support for and collaboration with our media colleagues. Maine Public, for one, comes to mind.

In recent years, several papers have been acquired by nonprofit foundations, but the papers themselves continue to be for-profits. The most prominent example of that is The Philadelphia Inquirer. By contrast, Nemitz’s description sounds like the Press Herald and its sister papers will themselves be nonprofits, joining the Salt Lake Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, both of which have been reorganized as nonprofits.

Nonprofit status removes the pressure of having to satisfy investors, but it does come with some disadvantages as well: a nonprofit newspaper can’t endorse political candidates or specific pieces of legislation. Last fall the Press Herald published endorsements on ballot questions but not for candidates. As a nonprofit, it wouldn’t be able to do either.

Nemitz said that the new foundation is seeking to raise $15 million from large and small donors to buy all of Brower’s papers.

Brower, by all accounts, has been a good steward of the Press Herald. When he announced last month that he was seeking to offload his papers, he said he wanted to leave them in good hands, and he specifically mentioned a nonprofit organization or a public benefit corporation. Now it looks like he’ll get his wish — provided MaineJF can accomplish its fundraising goals.

Linda Shapley talks about journalism, leadership and the power of diversity

Linda Shapley. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

On the new episode of the “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I speak with Linda Shapley, the publisher of Colorado Community Media, who describes herself as a longtime denizen of the state’s media ecosystem. Indeed, she was at Colorado Politics and worked for 21 years for The Denver Post. “I’ve been a lieutenant for a lot of really great generals,” she once said. “This is my opportunity to be a general.”

CCM is a group of about two dozen weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. They were saved from chain ownership two years ago when they were purchased through a deal led by the National Trust for Local News. Last August we spoke with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the trust.

Shapley has talked about the power of representation as a visible Latina leader in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by white men. She says she hopes to use her position to encourage more diversity in journalism. Her mentor at the Post, Greg Moore, was a previous guest on What Works. You can listen to his episode here.

Shapley grew up in northeastern Colorado, in a rural county. Her father had a dairy farm. When I was in Colorado doing research for our book-in-progress, “What Works in Community News,” she told me that dairy farming is a lot like newspapers, because cows don’t know it’s Christmas.

Also this week, we talk with Madison Xagoraris, a graduate student in the Media Advocacy Program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Xagoraris recently reported on KefiFM, a Boston-based Greek music outlet dedicated to serving the Greek and Greek American communities in the Boston area and throughout New England.

Ellen has a Quick Take about retired journalists who are busy launching startup newsrooms. Nieman Reports has a piece by Jon Marcus that looks at the Asheville Watchdog in North Carolina, and the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts. These journalists say they want to help bolster the profession they gave their lives to by setting up nonprofit community news sites and mentoring younger reporters and editors. They aren’t playing pickleball.

I’m in a Colorado state of mind: My Quick Take is on the fifth anniversary of the Denver Rebellion, when the staff of The Denver Post rose up against further newsroom cuts being imposed by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. That rebellion sparked a revolution in Denver journalism.

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

Cambridge Day takes on an advisory board and seeks to raise $75,000

Cambridge City Hall. Photo (cc) 2007 by Thomas Steiner.

Over the course of several months, I’ve talked with a few people in Cambridge about the dearth of local news in that city. Its only newspaper, Gannett’s Cambridge Chronicle, has been without a reporter since last year. The leading news outlet, Cambridge Day, does good work, but it was essentially a one-person operation headed by Marc Levy on a volunteer basis. I encouraged Marc and two members of a group seeking to start a nonprofit, journalists Mary McGrath and Susanne Beck, to try to work together.

Now it looks like that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Cambridge Day, which Levy founded in 2009, has published a story announcing that the nonprofit group is going to head up a fundraising campaign with a goal of raising $75,000. “The fundraising is not only to ‘save’ Cambridge Day, but to help it take a leap forward in quality and comprehensiveness,” according to an article published by the Day on Tuesday. The campaign will be headed up by an organization called Cambridge Local News Matters. It’s not clear what Marc’s role will be moving forward, but it’s surely a good sign that he wrote the article announcing the changes.

You could go back several decades, to when the Chronicle was independently owned and competed with the Cambridge Tab, and even then it was often said that Cambridge was the largest city in the country (population: 118,000) without a daily newspaper. The Day has been indispensable since its founding, and I wish Marc and his new partners all the best.

Oklahoma sheriff’s office responds by blaming the messenger

Old analog stereo tape recorder
Photo (cc) 2012 by Nenad Stojkovic

The sheriff’s office in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, has responded with the alacrity you’d hope for when wrongdoing is exposed. Oh, wait. They’re going to charge the journalist who recorded their nausea-inducing tirade of racism and violence with a felony for taping county officials without their knowledge. The Associated Press passes along a statement made by the sheriff:

There is and has been an ongoing investigation into multiple, significant violation(s) of the Oklahoma Security of Communications Act … which states that it is illegal to secretly record a conversation in which you are not involved and do not have the consent of at least one of the involved parties.

The AP also quotes a local journalism professor who says that the recording would be illegal only if the officials had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Now, I have to say that I’m confused. Laws regarding audio recordings generally define “one party” as “either party.” The journalist, Bruce Willingham of the McCurtain Gazette-News, obviously gave his consent, and that would normally be regarded as sufficient. Let me return to the guide published by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which I referred to in my earlier item.

In Oklahoma, “An individual who is a party to an in-person, telephone or electronic conversation, or who has the consent of one of the parties to the conversation, can lawfully record it or disclose its contents, unless the person is doing so for the purpose of committing a criminal or tortious act.” And: “The consent of at least one party to a conversation is required to record any oral communication.”

Obviously there’s more to it than that, and it’s possible that Willingham ran afoul of the law by leaving the room rather than participating in a “conversation.” (Then again, he was kicked out.) But contrast that with what the guide says about our state: “Massachusetts prohibits the recording, interception, use or disclosure of any conversation, whether in person or over the telephone, without the permission of all the parties.” If you are old enough and obsessive enough, you may recall that Linda Tripp was in the clear when she secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky while they were in Virginia, which, like Oklahoma, is a one-party state — but she broke the law when she recorded Lewinsky in Maryland, a two-party state.

Anyway, it’s good to see that McCurtain county officials have their priorities straight by going after the press rather than dealing with their own hateful dysfunction.

One more thing: The Washington Post story I referenced earlier described Willingham as a reporter for the Gazette-News. And so he is. But it turns out that he’s also the publisher. Probably the delivery guy and custodian as well. Anyway, he’s performed a tremendous public service, and he ought to be considered a candidate for a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.

Local reporter catches Oklahoma county officials in a racist, hate-filled tirade

McCurtain County Courthouse. Photo (cc) 2013 by Billy Hathorn.

See follow-up.

Whenever I’m asked why local news matters, I generally give a rather bloodless answer about democracy, journalism’s watchdog role and the like. But now the McCurtain Gazette-News, in southeastern Oklahoma, has provided considerably more graphic evidence.

According The Washington Post (free link), Gazette-News reporter Bruce Willingham surreptitiously left his recorder behind when he and members of the public were ordered to exit a meeting of McCurtain county officials. Willingham told a local television station that he was hoping to find evidence that the officials were violating the state’s open meeting law.

What Willingham found was considerably more horrifying than that, as the commissioners proceeded to mock a woman who had died in a recent house fire, reminisced about the good old days when young Black men could be lynched with impunity, and suggested that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if Willingham himself turned up dead.

The Gazette-News does not appear to have a website, but the paper has been posting snippets on Google Docs and Dropbox. Here’s the exchange about lynching:

Jennings: It’s like somebody wanting this job, they don’t realize, like your job. I heard it the other day, said I heard 2 or 12 people were going for sheriff. I said fuck, lets get 20. They don’t have a goddamn clue what they’re getting into. Not this day and age. I’m gonna tell you something. If it was back in the day, when that when Alan Marshton would take a damn black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell? I’d run for fucking sheriff.

Sheriff: Yeah. Well, It’s not like that no more.

Jennings: I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.

Jennings is county commissioner Mark Jennings. The sheriff’s name is Kevin Clardy.

In case you’re wondering, Willingham was on the right side of the law in making a secret recording. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Oklahoma is a one-party state when it comes to audio recordings, which means that only one party needs to give their consent — in this case, Willingham himself. Massachusetts, by contrast, requires the consent of all parties.

The Gazette-News, meanwhile, says it has more audio and that follow-up stories are in the works. And CNN reports that Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has called on Clardy, Jennings and two other officials who were involved in the exchanges to resign.

It bears repeating: If the McCurtain Gazette-News didn’t exist, and if its reporter hadn’t been assigned to cover the county, then these racist hate-mongers would not have been exposed.

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At Gannett, those better days that are just around the corner never seem to arrive

Photo (cc) 2010 by Shashi Bellamkonda

Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory wrote Wednesday that he’d heard from Gannett chair and chief executive Mike Reed after his recent piece detailing the devastating cuts that the country’s largest newspaper chain had endured. Reed told McGrory that the worst was over and that happy days were almost here again. McGrory wrote:

“My full intention is to do more journalism, not less,” Reed said. “We’re so close to that inflection point that the major cuts are behind us.” Moments later, for emphasis: “The cuts are behind us.”

Is that a commitment, Mike?

He hesitated. I swear I could hear the loud warning beeps from a truck backing up. “What I’m saying is we’re near the end of the process on the reduction side,” he replied. Then this: “I wouldn’t say that I don’t know there’ll be one more cut.” And finally: “We’re in the ninth inning of the game.”

It sounded so familiar. I’ve written about Gannett and its predecessor company, GateHouse Media, many, many times over the years. For instance, after I wrote for GBH News in June 2019 that GateHouse seemed to be imploding, Reed contacted me to push back. He wouldn’t put any of our phone conversation on the record, but he didn’t need to. Because it’s been the same old song for a very long time.

How long? Let’s go back to August 2008, when GateHouse’s stock price was taking such a pounding that it could not longer be traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. In a conference call with investors, according to the Rochester Business Journal, Reed was full of assurances that the worst was over. “Our results, while below our estimates, are holding up quite well, and our capital assets put us in a position of strength going forward,” he said. And: “We believe our assets will continue to produce strong cash flows and when the economic cycle improves we are positioned in our small markets to grow.”

If that’s not enough déjà vu for you, consider that, around the same time, the website 24/7 Wall St. named Reed “The Most Overpaid CEO Of The Day,” noting that he was being paid a salary of $500,000 to preside over a company whose stock price was down 90%. As readers of Media Nation know, Reed was just getting started. He received $7.7 million in total compensation in 2021, and was rewarded with another $3.4 million in 2022. Meanwhile, Gannett newspapers are being shut down and journalists laid off by the score.

In October 2008, I wrote a piece for CommonWealth magazine about GateHouse’s operations in Eastern Massachusetts — around 100 community newspapers, mostly weeklies, that it had acquired from Boston Herald owner Pat Purcell, who had in turn purchased them from Fidelity Capital a few years earlier. The theme of the day, inevitably, was newsroom cuts. But Kirk Davis, then the president and publisher of GateHouse Media New England, was, to invoke an old cliché, cautiously optimistic:

“We feel that community newspapers have a very viable future and, juxtaposed against the trend overall, are performing very well,” says Davis, arguing that small, community newspapers have a competitive advantage over major metros because their locally focused content is not available elsewhere. “I believe in it, and I believe it’s going to stay strong.”

Five years later, the company sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection so that it could restructure $1.2 billion of the debt it had taken on in assembling its newspaper chain.

The cutting continued after GateHouse emerged from bankruptcy, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always with the same downward momentum. In late 2019, GateHouse merged with Gannett, a longtime publisher that was also notorious for running its papers on the cheap. The new Gannett was saddled with $1.1 billion in debt, and a lot of that has been financed by cutting the workforce in half, as Axios reported recently. Davis left shortly after the merger, but Reed continues to decimate newsrooms, just as he continues to insist that better days are just around the corner, as he told the trade publication Editor & Publisher last November.

The problem with Gannett, as always, is that better days for Reed never translate to better days for his newspapers, his journalists or the communities they serve. McGrory’s skepticism is warranted.

Five years after the Denver Rebellion, local news is surviving in Colorado

The Buell Media Center, home of The Colorado Sun. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

Of all the alarms that have been sounded over the decline of local news, perhaps none was louder than the one in Denver, Colorado, five years ago this month. In what became known as the Denver Rebellion, editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett wrote a front-page editorial calling for the Post’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital, to sell the paper to local interests. Plunkett wrote:

We call for action. Consider this editorial and this Sunday’s Perspective offerings a plea to Alden — owner of Digital First Media, one of the largest newspaper chains in the country — to rethink its business strategy across all its newspaper holdings. Consider this also a signal to our community and civic leaders that they ought to demand better. Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom. If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will.

Unfortunately, Alden did not sell; after all, there were still profits to be squeezed out. At one time, the Post employed a newsroom of about 300 people, and its competitor, the Rocky Mountain News, had another 300. But the Rocky was shut down by a different chain owner years ago, and by the time that Plunkett wrote his manifesto, Alden was in the process of downsizing the Post again, from about 100 journalists to 60.

But journalism in Denver survived. Earlier this month, Plunkett wrote an opinion piece for The Colorado Sun looking back on the past five years. The Sun grew out of the Post: 10 senior people left after the rebellion and launched a digital-only news project that has grown to a couple of dozen people. This time around, Plunkett, now at the University of Colorado in Boulder, took a more optimistic view:

So much new talent has bubbled up around us as a result it’s difficult to keep track. The legislature’s got more reporters than you shake a stick at. Who could deny the excellence and the ambition of presenting and covering Denver’s recent mayoral debates?…

Hey, it’s heartening to see media companies banging around like they want to fight. Think of how bad off we’d be if we didn’t have such energy.

What’s happened in Colorado led Ellen Clegg and me to include it in our book, “What Works in Community News,” which will be published by Beacon Press early next year. I visited the Denver area in September 2021 and learned that the metro region is being well served. The Sun, the Post, Colorado Public Radio and another startup, The Denver Gazette, were all doing good work.

The problem, though, was in those places that weren’t within commuting distance of Denver. The news deserts that exist in the rural parts of the state were why The Colorado Sun was trying to provide some statewide coverage rather than merely focusing on Denver. So it was heartening to see that several papers whose owners wanted to move on have been acquired by a small chain. The indefatigable Corey Hutchins of Colorado College reports that O’Rourke Media Group, based in Arizona, is the new owner of Colorado papers in Salida, Buena Vista, Leadville, Park County and Fairplay.

“I feel like I’m taking over newsrooms that are well resourced,” the chain’s CEO, Jim O’Rourke, told Hutchins. “I like that, because that gives us an opportunity to come in and work with this team on things that we can do differently moving forward — things that we could do to help. And it’s better starting from a position like this versus going into a totally distressed situation where the previous company gutted the place.”

The news desert problem is real. But what’s happened in Denver and, now, in rural Colorado demonstrates what I’ve seen since I started reporting on the local news crisis some 15 years ago: Where there is failure there is also opportunity.

More: Ellen and I recently interviewed former Denver Post editor Greg Moore on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” And in June 2021, I wrote about how 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs were saved through an effort that included The Colorado Sun.

Shed a tear for Gannett’s Reed, whose compensation has been cut to just $3.4 million

I guess we’ll have to start referring to Mike Reed as Gannett’s $3.4 million man.

According to Gannett’s just-released proxy statement for 2022, Reed, the newspaper chain’s chair and CEO, received nearly $3.4 million in total compensation last year, down from $7.7 million the year before. That’s a decline of 56%, but it’s still a healthy pay package for someone who has wreaked so much destruction on the local news business. It’s also 66 times more than the median salary ($51,035) earned by Gannett employees in 2022, as Don Seiffert observes at the Boston Business Journal. Seiffert broke the news about Gannett’s latest numbers on Friday afternoon.

The main difference in Reed’s compensation package is that he received just $2 million in stock awards in 2022, down from about $6 million in 2021. His base salary was cut slightly as well, from $900,000 to $859,615, but he also received a bonus of $513,652 in 2022, which he did not get in 2021. Finally, he got a 401(k) match of $6,184 in 2022, something he didn’t get in 2021. I guess we can refer to that last as rubbing-it-in money, since Gannett suspended 401(k) matches for its employees last October. If they were restored later on, I haven’t heard about it.

Gannett’s chief financial officer and chief accounting officer, Douglas Horne, received nearly $2.2 million in 2022, up from about $1.75 million the year before. And all but one of Gannett’s nine non-executive board members continued to receive in excess of $200,000 for their part-time work — which, as I reported last August, was at least generous, and perhaps excessive, when compared to other publicly traded companies. You’d think that would especially be the case for Gannett, whose stock price opened 2022 at $5.54 a share and closed the year at $2.03. (It’s now down to $1.87.)

Gannett is our largest newspaper chain, but it’s hard to say exactly how large. At one time it published more than 200 dailies and a slew of weeklies, but it’s been closing weeklies in droves over the past few years. Just last week, Sara Fischer of Axios reported that Reed was predicting the closure of more papers moving forward. Just recently a knowledgeable industry observer told me that they wouldn’t be surprised if Gannett got down to about 30 dailies, including its flagship, USA Today, and zero weeklies in the not-too-distant future.

Gannett’s annual meeting is scheduled for June 3. If the past is any indication, though, the only complaint will be that Reed hasn’t cut enough.