Local News – Page 3 – Media Nation

How Bill and Linda Forry plan to expand their Boston publications thanks to a Press Forward grant

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Bill and Linda Forry, co-publishers of the award-winning Reporter newspapers in Boston. Bill serves as editor, and Linda focuses on business development and strategic partnerships.

The Reporter newspapers include the weekly Dorchester Reporter as well as Boston Irish and BostonHaitian.com. The publications and their websites are part of a media business owned and operated by the Forry family since 1973.

The Forrys were recently in the news. The Reporter is one of 205 news organizations in the U.S. to win an inaugural Press Forward grant to expand coverage of Boston’s underserved communities.

I’ve got a Quick Take on public radio. Put bluntly, public radio is in trouble, and not just NPR, which may be our leading source of reliable free news, but also public radio stations across the country. An important recent essay in Nieman Reports argues that the way forward for public radio stations may be to double down on local news.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on the Nieman Lab predictions for the media industry in 2025. Every year, Nieman Lab asks a select group of people what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Sam Mintz, the editor of Brookline.News, a digital outlet Ellen helped launch, is one of the prognosticators.

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

Two outside investors stake a claim in the financially ailing New Hampshire Union Leader

The financially ailing New Hampshire Union Leader has taken on two outside investors, according to an article that the paper published on Friday. The move coincides with the Union Leader’s closing on a $1 million loan to get out from under pension obligations.

The investors are Bob Singer, who lives in Manchester and is the former president of Merchants Auto, and Greg Wendt, a partner at Capital Group Companies in San Francisco. The amount of their investment was not disclosed. But the Union Leader account, by Jonathan Phelps, suggests that it will be enough to cover the $1 million loan — from the quasi-governmental New Hampshire Business Finance Authority, or BFA — and then some.

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“Part of the investment is to match up with the million dollars from the BFA,” president and publisher Brendan McQuaid is quoted as saying. “Then there is some further investment, which is helping to recapitalize the company.”

According to a November report by New Hampshire Public Radio’s Todd Bookman, the loan requires the Union Leader to raise $1 million in private equity as well as $750,000 in cash, which will be held as collateral — which would appear to be where Singer and Wendt come in. The five-year loan comes with a 2% interest rates, which, as Bookman observes, “is far below the market rate.” Bookman’s account continues:

The newspaper will use the funds to pay down decades worth of pension obligations for both existing and now retired employees. Under the terms of the deal, none of the rank and file employees will see a reduction in benefits, while pension payouts for a handful of executives will be slashed by up to 65%.

In a written statement, the New Hampshire News Guild — a union representing approximately 40 of the paper’s journalists, ad sales representatives and circulation customer service employees — praised the approval of the loan.

“This deal appears to ensure that New Hampshire will continue to benefit from the award winning journalism, advertising and customer care that our members create on a daily basis,” the guild said.

The Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications, at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, owns two-thirds of the Union Leader, according to a recent account of the paper’s woes by Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan. Phelps’ account suggested that arrangement will change at least to some extent: “Under this ownership structure, the Loeb School, a nonprofit organization, joins Wendt and Singer as an additional minority shareholder of the Union Leader Corporation by converting some previous debt to equity.”

Singer has long been a presence on the New Hampshire scene. In 2023, he was the recipient of the Davison Award for Philanthropy, administered by the Mary & John Elliot Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit that provides financial support for health-care needs in the southern part of the state and for Elliot Health System.

Singer is an occasional donor to political candidates as well, making small contributions to local politicians, most of them Democrats, according to the website Open Secrets. He’s made a few out-of-state donations as well, including $500 to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2019 and $1,000 to Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno in 2021; Moreno defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2024. Singer also gave $1,250 to Democrat Rufus Gifford in 2018 for his unsuccessful primary campaign against Massachusetts congresswoman Lori Trahan.

Wendt has no obvious ties to New Hampshire. According to his company bio, he’s an equity portfolio manager at Capital Group, where he’s worked for 36 years, and holds a Harvard MBA. He’s been active politically, too, mainly on behalf of mainstream Republican presidential candidates like John Kasich in 2016, giving $250,000, USA Today reported, and Tim Scott and Nikki Haley in 2024. Politico reported that Wendt had supported John McCain as well. According to Open Secrets, Wendt has also donated to a diverse range of political figures that includes Biden; incoming New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican; outgoing Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-independent; and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

The Union Leader, New Hampshire’s only statewide paper, holds a notorious place in the history of presidential politics, as its late owner and publisher, William Loeb, was infamous for his caustic criticism of any political figure who would dare cross him. In 2022 it was revealed that he had molested both his stepdaughter and his daughter when they were young children. In response to the revelations, the Union Leader removed his name from its masthead.

Under the leadership of his widow, the late Nackey Loeb, the Union Leader became tamer but no less right-wing. My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman’s biography of Nackey Loeb, “Political Godmother,” describes her role in the rise of Ronald Reagan, as the Union Leader’s support in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary was crucial in Reagan’s rise from the fringes.

Now, with the New Hampshire primary’s status no longer a sure thing following the Democrats’ decision to lead with South Carolina in 2024, and with center of right-wing media having long since shifted to Fox News, the Union Leader is struggling.

According to Ryan’s story in the Globe, Sunday print circulation has fallen from about 85,000 in 1999 to 20,000 today; weekday circulation has dropped from 63,000 in 1999 to fewer than 16,000 in 2023. Paid digital circulation is barely a factor, Ryan added, and annual revenue has fallen from $50 million-plus to about $14 million in recent years.

Fighting back against official harassment; plus, Biden’s fitness, and more on that Everett libel case

An idyllic scene in Lancaster, Penn. Photo (cc) 2018 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Reliable and comprehensive local news can help ease the polarization that has infected our national discourse. But it’s not a guarantee — and when MAGA-drenched politics pervades community life, the result can be that the press is attacked in a manner that’s similar to the cries of “fake news” from Trump supporters.

Which is exactly what is happening right now in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In a lengthy article for The Washington Post, Erik Wemple tells the story of Tom Lisi, a reporter for the newspaper LNP who’s become the focus of relentless attacks (gift link) from the Republican chairman of the county commission.

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That chairman, Joshua Parsons, has his eye on a state senate seat, and he is evidently using his crusade against Lisi in order to build support for his campaign. Among other things, Parsons has accused Lisi of lying about harassment he’s been subjected to, making up stories “out of whole cloth,” and of having “skulked around waiting to ambush County staff.” As Wemple wryly observes: “‘Reporter’ is an appropriate term for someone who skulks around ‘waiting to ambush County staff.’” Wemple adds:

[T]he events in Lancaster County bear … on a question that has vexed leaders in journalism in recent decades: Just how should they respond to the frequent, strident and often flimsy attacks from Republican politicians? Should they stick to the industry’s default mode of turning the other cheek? Or should they speak up to challenge the gripes?

LNP and its associated website, Lancaster Online, are not part of a corporate chain or owned by a hedge fund. Rather, the media outlet was saved in 2023 by public radio station WITF and has a newsroom of 70 journalists — impressive for a medium-size daily. That transaction, though, has resulted in an enormously complex ownership structure involving three separate nonprofit boards along with all the potential conflicts of interest that entails.

As for Lisi, Wemple writes that he has started to push back publicly on Parson’s falsehoods and exaggerations about his reporting, and that on one occasion he left his tormenter momentarily speechless. The lesson, according to Wemple: “Confront the media bashers wherever they practice their profession.”

Biden’s fitness

The Wall Street Journal today published an investigative report (gift link) on attempts by President Biden’s inner circle to control access not just throughout the past four years but during the campaign that preceded it as well.

There are some harrowing details but also some problems with the reporting, including this, in which an anonymous aide quotes an anonymous official:

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

Despite such hazy sourcing, the Journal’s story is a valuable addition to what we are learning about Biden’s age-related problems during the past half-dozen years. In retrospect, a Journal story (gift link) in early June of this year was the big breakthrough, although it was marred by its overreliance on Republican sources. A few weeks later, Biden met Donald Trump on the debate stage, and that was the beginning of the end of his re-election campaign.

A few points are now obvious: First, Biden’s inner circle covered up the president’s fading mental acuity for years — which makes you wonder why they went along with the June debate, which led directly to Kamala Harris’ candidacy and at least gave Democrats a fighting chance of holding on to the White House. Second, Biden should have pledged to serve just one term when he ran in 2020; at the very least, he should have declared victory and pulled out after Democrats did unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterms.

That we still don’t know exactly how impaired Biden was and is speaks to how difficult it is for reporters to pierce the veil. As the Journal’s story makes clear, members of Congress and even Cabinet secretaries were kept in the dark. This was not a failure of journalism so much as it was a failure of the president and the people around him to level with the public.

Everett update

Earlier this week, I noted that neither of Everett’s two remaining weekly newspapers had published anything about the demise of the Everett Leader Herald, which shut down and agree to pay Mayor Carlo DeMaria $1.1 million in order to settle a libel suit. Publisher and editor Joshua Resnek had previously admitted he fabricated stories and quotes aimed at making DeMaria appear to be corrupt.

Well, now both papers, which are owned by small independent chains, have been heard from. The Everett Advocate has an especially tough headline, “A Victory Over Journalistic Dishonesty,” with reporter Mark E. Vogler detailing the Advocate’s own role in exposing the Leader Herald’s fictions about DeMaria.

One aspect of the settlement that I was wondering about is clarified in Vogler’s story. He quotes a lawyer for DeMaria, Jeffrey Robbins, as saying that the demise of the Leader Herald was in fact a stipulation of the settlement rather than simply a side effect of suddenly having to come up with $1.1 million. “All a jury would have decided to do in this case would be to decide whether to award damages and how much in damages,” Robbins told Vogler. “But a jury could not have ordered a newspaper to close down. That was one of the things that made the settlement unusual.”

The Everett Independent has a shorter article, written by reporter Cary Shuman, headlined simply “DeMaria Vindicated.”

Finally, the Leader Herald’s former website now consists of a WordPress page that says, “You need to be logged in as a user who has permission to view this site.”

A deep dive into the Eastern Mass. media; plus, WBUR cuts again, and Alden rattles the tin cup

Map of Plymouth, Mass., in 1882. Via the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.

Mark Caro of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School has taken a deep dive into the media ecosystem of Eastern Massachusetts — the wreckage left behind by Gannett’s closing and merging many of its weekly papers, and the rise of independent startups, many of them digital nonprofits.

As Caro observes, the Gannett weeklies and websites that still exist are “ghost newspapers,” containing little in the way of local content.

The 6,000-word-plus piece focuses in particular on the Plymouth Independent, The Belmont Voice and The New Bedford Light, although a number of other projects get name-checked as well. Caro writes:

What’s happening in New England is being echoed across the country as the local news crisis deepens. While the nation’s ever-widening news deserts have drawn much attention, the ghost papers represent another dire threat to a well-informed citizenry. Many areas don’t meet the definition of a news desert, but residents have been left with newspapers so hollowed out that they’re bereft of original local news reporting.

I was especially interested to see that Caro interviewed K. Prescott Low, whose family sold off The Patriot Ledger of Quincy and its affiliated papers in 1998 only to see their legacy torn apart in less than a generation. The Ledger was once regarded as being among the best medium-size dailies in the U.S.; today it limps along with a skeleton staff and no newsroom.

As Low tells it, he thought he had found a trustworthy buyer, but his former papers soon ended up in the hands of GateHouse Media, a cost-cutting chain that in 2019 merged with Gannett. “Conceptually it was a good idea,” Low told Caro. “Practically it didn’t work out because of the subsequent purchase by GateHouse and what has happened across the media.”

Caro and I talked about the lack of news coverage in Medford, where I live, after Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and Somerville Journal. He also interviewed my “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, about Brookline.News, the digital nonprofit she helped launch after Gannett closed its Brookline Tab.

As I told Caro, there are reasons to be optimistic, but affluent suburban communities are doing better at meeting their own news needs than are urban areas, and there’s a certain random quality to all of it. “You can have a community that has something really good,” I told him, “and right next door is a community that has nothing.”

Caro has written a good and important article, and I hope you’ll take a look.

WBUR cancels ‘Radio Boston’

There was some sad news on the local public radio front earlier today. WBUR is ending “Radio Boston,” a locally oriented program that airs on weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon and is repeated from 3 to 4 p.m.

It is WBUR’s only local news show and follows cuts at both of Boston’s major public broadcasters this years, as well as downsizing across the country. Earlier this year GBH News canceled three local television shows, “Greater Boston,” “Talking Politics” and “Basic Black.” That last program will return next month, possibly as a digital offering.

GBH Radio continues to offer four hours of local programming each weekday — “Boston Public Radio,” a talk and interview show hosted by Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and “The Culture Show” from 2 to 3 p.m.

The end of “Radio Boston” won’t result in any layoffs, according to the station, as the folks who worked on that show will be reassigned to pumping up the local segments on NPR’s two national drive-time programs, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”

Alden’s tin cup

Alden Global Capital, the hedge-fund newspaper owner that has decimated community journalism from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Denver to San Jose, is trying something new: asking readers to give them money in order to offset some of the newsroom cuts they’ve made.

An alert Media Nation reader passed along an appeal sent to readers of Alden’s South Florida Sun Sentinel, asking for tax-deductible gifts to the nonprofit Florida Press Foundation‘s Community News Fund. The foundation appears to be legit, but it’s hard to imagine why they would agree to help prop up a paper that’s been slashed by its hedge-fund owner.

“Alden Capital is surrounded by small independents that continue to eat into their circulation area,” my informant says. “Key Biscayne Independent, the Bulldog Reporter, Florida Phoenix, Coastal Star … are just a few of the ‘independents’ started by former journalists to fill the news desert. Everyone competes for donations. So when a Wall Street PE [private equity] firm solicits for limited resources, they are actually starving their competition. I think this is sad and something that may be a harbinger of what’s to come under the new transactional administration.”

If you see any other examples of rattling the tin cup at papers owned by corporate chains, please let me know.

Jeffrey Schwaner tells us how the nonprofit Cardinal News covers rural western Virginia

Cardinal News executive editor Jeffrey Schwaner with education reporter Lisa Rowan

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Jeffrey Schwaner, executive editor of Cardinal News, a nonprofit digital news outlet covering Southwest Virginia. It also covers something called Southside Virginia, which is an area south of the James River, near Richmond. Since we taped this in Boston, we asked him to explain their coverage area in more detail.

Jeff joined Cardinal News in September after nine years as a storytelling and watchdog coach — including five years as editor — of Gannett’s two Virginia newsrooms, the News Leader in Staunton and The Progress-Index in Petersburg.

I’ve got a Quick Take that explores a key question: Does a lack of local news correlate with support for Donald Trump? A new study by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School finds that it does, although they caution that correlation is not causation. I discuss what the study found — and why it matters even if you don’t believe that the role of local news ought to include persuading people to change their voting patterns.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on a mysterious website that popped up in Oregon after a 147-year-old paper called the Ashland Tidings folded. Called the Daily Tidings, it recently published story after story by a reporter named Joe Minihane, who supposedly skiied, hiked and ate his way through Southern Oregon. Except Minihane is based in the U.K., visited Oregon for a week on vacation, and doesn’t know how his byline got hijacked. The stories are made up, perhaps by AI. Ryan Haas of Oregon Public Broadcasting has the story.

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

A new study finds that Trump swamped Harris in news deserts

One of the most important animating principles in the work that Ellen Clegg and I have done on the future of local news is that civic engagement isn’t really possible in its absence. People naturally seek out news, and if there’s no local source, they’re more likely to spend too much time gorging on partisan talk shows on Fox News and MSNBC.

We are not especially concerned about how that might affect national elections because democracy needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that folks who are relearning the arts of community and cooperation will vote differently from those sit at home watching TV (if they’re older) or spending way too much time on social media.

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So I was intrigued that a new study from the Local News Initiative (LNI) at Northwestern’s Medill School showed Donald Trump ran up some of his biggest margins over Kamala Harris in news deserts. Medill defines a news desert as a county that lacks a professional news source. It turns out that even though Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the national popular vote by the slimmest of margins, just 1.5%, he beat her by 54% in the news-desert counties that he won. Harris won a few news-desert counties as well, but her margin was 18%. Moreover, Trump won 91% of the 193 news-desert counties that LNI tracked.

There is, needless to say, a chicken-and-egg problem here, and LNI’s Paul Farhi and John Volk acknowledge it. Did Trump run up such an overwhelming victory in those counties because its residents lack local news sources? Or are people who live in those counties paradigmatic Trump voters regardless of whether they have a local news outlet? Farhi and Volk write:

Trump’s dominance of news deserts doesn’t imply a cause and effect. That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news. Instead, a simpler and more obvious correlation may be at work: News deserts are concentrated in counties that tend to be rural and have populations that are less educated and poorer than the national average — exactly the kind of places that went strongly for Trump in 2024 and in 2020.

As Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, tells Farhi and Volk, “The wrong way to interpret this is ‘Oh, the rubes voted for Trump because they’re uninformed.’” Nevertheless, Waldman adds, the findings underscore the reality that Trump supporters are “some of the most common victims of the collapse of local news.”

The findings translate to Massachusetts as well. Despite beating Trump here 61% to 30%, Trump won a number of communities and performed better than he did against Joe Biden in 2020. If you take a look at the map, Harris was very strong in media-rich Eastern Massachusetts and weak in the southeast, central and southwest parts of the state.

Some of those Trump communities are well served by local news outlets, and here I want to give a shoutout to Nemasket Week, which was launched a few years ago and covers my hometown of Middleborough, where Trump won by 52% to 46%. Still, you see the same correlation that LNI found: big margins for Harris in affluent areas that are the home of quite a few independent local news projects; and smaller margins for Harris, or even Trump victories, in less affluent and more rural areas, which also tend to be less well covered.

To repeat what Waldman says, what we need isn’t to figure out how we can flip Trump voters to support Democrats. Rather, we need to foster a renewed sense of community life — and reliable sources of local news is an indispensable starting point.

Talking about the future of local news with Kimberly Atkins Stohr

Ellen Clegg and I were thrilled to have a chance to speak with Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr on her podcast, “Justice by Design.” We talked about our book, “What Works in Community News,” as well as the importance of community journalism and how it’s being revived in hundreds of places across the country. You can watch us on YouTube, listen here or subscribe using your favorite podcast app.

Lisa DeSisto resigns as CEO of the Maine Trust for Local News, which owns the Portland Press Herald

Big news from Down East as Lisa DeSisto, the CEO and publisher of the Maine Trust for Local News, has announced that she’s resigning. The Maine Trust is a nonprofit that owns the state’s largest daily paper, the Portland Press Herald, as well as three other daily papers and a number of weeklies. The papers themselves are for-profit entities.

According to Press Herald reporter Hannah LaClaire, DeSisto will leave by the end of the year. She’ll be replaced by Stefanie Manning, a Maine Trust executive who will assume the title of managing director. DeSisto said in a statement:

I have cherished my time leading this organization and working alongside such dedicated and talented colleagues. Serving our readers and supporting this incredible team has been a privilege. Representing the Maine Trust for Local News in the community has been an honor I will carry with me.

DeSisto leaves amid a time of transition at the Maine Trust. Longtime executive editor Steve Greenlee took a position at Boston University earlier this year and was replaced by Carolyn Fox, who had previously been managing editor of the Tampa Bay Times.

DeSisto hosted Ellen Clegg and me for a talk about our book, “What Works in Community News,” back in October. Ellen and I both have previous connections with Lisa — she and I were colleagues in the 1990s at The Boston Phoenix, where she was an executive in the advertising department, and Ellen worked with her after she moved to a top business-side position at The Boston Globe.

Lisa has been in Portland for 12 years and has been through several ownership changes. I visited the Press Herald in late 2015 to talk with her and others about a failed attempt by Boston-area entrepreneur Aaron Kushner to buy the paper in 2012; Kushner, who later bought the Orange County Register in Southern California, was one of the wealthy newspaper owners I profiled in “The Return of the Moguls.”

After Kushner’s bid in Maine fell apart, the paper was acquired by a wealthy Maine businessman named Donald Sussman, who in turn sold it to Reade Brower, a printer, in 2015. Brower sold the Press Herald and other papers he had accumulated to the nonprofit National Trust for Local News in 2023. The Maine Trust is a subsidiary of the National Trust.

Through it all, Lisa has been a source of stability and continuity. There’s no question that she’ll be deeply missed.

On this Giving Tuesday, please support local news in your community

Provincetown, Mass. Photo (2008) by Andrew Malone.

Today is Giving Tuesday, and what better time to support your local news organization?

I just gave to two different outlets whose advisory boards I serve on — CommonWealth Beacon, a nonprofit digital project that covers statewide politics and public policy, and the Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that helps pay for public-interest journalism at The Provincetown Independent. The Independent is a print weekly with a strong digital presence that’s organized as a for-profit public benefit corporation.

These days there are very few examples of independent local news organizations that are pure for-profits and that can support themselves solely through advertising and subscriptions. The rise of nonprofits like CommonWealth and hybrids like the Independent has filled some of the gap created by the implosion of corporate-owned newspapers. But they need our support.

There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth

Ginia Bellafante’s friend has a very odd definition of what it means to tune out the news. In a recent New York Times article on liberals who have decided their mental health would be better if they stopped paying attention to the news (gift link) in the Age of Trump II, Bellafante writes:

When I spoke with a friend in Brooklyn a day or two after Donald Trump won, he told me he had committed to reading only the print paper — and just in the morning, forgoing any possible all-consuming afternoon digression into whatever might be up with Tulsi Gabbard. When I checked with him earlier this week, he was still maintaining the ritual and it felt good, he said.

Someone who reads a newspaper every day, whether in print or in digital, is actually at the high end when it comes to news consumption. Compared to most people, he is extraordinarily well-informed. Although Bellafante doesn’t tell us what he cut out of his news diet, if he’s decided to forego cable news and politically oriented social media, he may be even better informed than he was when he was jacked in to the national conversation for many of his waking hours. As I like to say, friends don’t let friends watch cable news.

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When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 while losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, it set off a frenzy of news consumption and the rise of the #Resistance — hyper-well-informed liberals and progressives who devoted much of their time and emotional energy to opposing Trump through actions such as the 2017 Women’s March. News consumption soared. You can’t stay it didn’t matter; Trump did, after all, lose to Joe Biden in 2020. Continue reading “There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth”