Several readers called this Washington Post piece to my attention over the weekend. It’s about a fundraising drive recently held by the Tampa Bay Times to offset some of the advertising revenue it lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Post reporter Elahe Izadi observes that the idea isn’t entirely new. The Seattle Times has engaged in community fundraising drives, and The Times-Picayune and The New Orleans Advocate (one entity) received $1 million over the summer from the Ford Foundation. For that matter, The Boston Globe pays for some of its education reporting with a $600,000 grant from the Barr Foundation.
What makes the Tampa Bay project unusual is that the paper asked for people to donate in support of individual journalists, by name. That makes me a little uncomfortable, and I hope the next time they do this they abandon that particular wrinkle.
As you may know, the Tampa Bay Times, a for-profit newspaper, is owned by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism education institute. Back when Nelson Poynter melded the Times and the institute together, the expectation was that the newspaper — rolling in cash — could use some of its revenues to support the institute.
Needless to say, that stopped a long time ago. The Times has struggled for the past few years, and has cut back its print edition to twice a week. It’s still a great ownership model, though, emulated several years ago when Philadelphia Inquirer owner Gerry Lenfest donated his paper to the nonprofit Philadelphia Foundation. After Lenfest’s death, the organization that was set up to own the Inquirer and make investments in journalism was renamed the Lenfest Institute.
By the way, I really like the front page of today’s Tampa Bay Times. Let’s just hope they’re not fundraising off a commemorative issue later this week. Go Sox!
Terrific column by Bill Nemitz in the Portland Press Herald about how residents in the tiny Maine town of Harpswell revived their newspaper, the Harpswell Anchor, as a nonprofit.
“The November issue of the new-and-improved Harpswell Anchor will be its sixth,” Nemitz writes. “And by all indications, the 24-page tabloid isn’t just surviving. It’s thriving.”
You’ll have to forgive me for not plowing through a massive new report from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism on a survey of more than 300 newsroom employees at small (under 50,000 circulation) newspapers. The survey follows up a similar study conducted in 2016. I did look at the executive summary and the conclusion, which contain some interesting findings. Among them:
More than a third of those responding, or 37%, said they work between 50 and 60 hours a week, and 50% said they work 40 to 50 hours a week.
Recently the NewsGuild announced it was investigating unpaid overtime work at Gannett. But that would involve union papers, which tend to be larger. It’s no secret that small dailies and weeklies have been exploiting their employees pretty much forever. As the economics of the business become increasingly difficult, the situation may be getting worse.
COVID is taking a toll, with 43% saying they felt less secure in their employment than they did at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Participants were often highly critical of hedge-fund ownership and frequently cited nonprofit models as the way forward for the sector.”
Efforts to create more diverse newsrooms at small newspapers are inadequate at best.
Some 57% say they are more involved in digital work than they were three years ago; 49% said they are producing more stories per week than they were three years ago; and 62% said social media had become a more important tool in their work.
“Despite a challenging financial landscape, coupled with wider issues such as trust in journalism, our 2020 cohort — like their predecessors in 2016 — retained a sense of optimism about the future of their industry,” write the authors, Damian Radcliffe and Ryan Wallace. “In particular, they highlighted the importance of hyperlocal news, embracing digital and filing information gaps by covering stories not offered elsewhere.”
One fact that stands out from the survey is that the staffs at smaller newspapers are old and white, and that if there’s any hope of reaching younger, more diverse audiences, then new approaches are needed. I hope anyone working for these newspapers who’s under the age of 50 is making plans right now to start a new venture in their community.
There’s also an important unanswered question here. What would the findings look like if employees of independently owned newspapers could be separated out from those whose papers have been acquired by a corporate chain or hedge fund? Working conditions can be pretty tough at independents as well, but the journalists might have more of a sense of community service.
I am thrilled to announce the debut of our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” from Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
Every month — and soon, perhaps, every week — former Boston Globe editor Ellen Clegg and I will talk to journalists, policymakers and entrepreneurs about efforts they’re making to keep local news alive. (We’re working on a book with the same name.) Corporate chains and hedge funds are squeezing the life out of local news. There is a better way. We and our guests are telling that story.
In our first episode, I interview Massachusetts state Rep. Lori Ehrlich, a Marblehead Democrat who co-sponsored legislation to launch a commission that will study the future of local news in the state. (Note: I’ll be a member of the commission.) Ehrlich lays out her vision and underscores the role that local journalism plays in a democracy. Ellen and I share a few quick takes on the news as well.
You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Pocket Casts, and we’re aiming for more platforms soon. We hope you’ll give it a listen — we’re very excited about this project, which has been long in the making.
Also, many thanks to Alison Booth, who designed the graphic that accompanies our podcast, and to Promiser, whose song “WOW!” is our theme. Wow indeed.
The challenge in providing government assistance to ease the local news crisis is to find ways of helping those who really need it while keeping the bad actors out. Which is why Martha Minow said this week that she’s “hopeful” but “fearful” about a federal bill that would create tax credits to subsidize subscribers, advertisers and news organizations.
“What I’m troubled about is: What’s local news, who defines it and how do we prevent the manipulation of this by multinational corporations?” she said. “That’s a problem, and I don’t know anyone who’s come up with an answer for that.”
Minow, a Harvard Law School professor, is the author of the recently published “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech.” The book lays out a series of ideas for reviving journalism, from requiring social media platforms to pay for content to providing subsidies for nonprofit news. She spoke Monday at a local book group that met virtually.
The legislation Minow was referencing, the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, has attracted an unusual amount of bipartisan support and seems to stand a decent chance of becoming law. Those who wrote the proposal included limits on the size of news organizations that would be eligible, but the large corporate chains that own many of them would not be blocked from applying. That’s problematic given that chains and hedge funds are squeezing the life out of local news.
Minow, though, was referring to a different phenomenon — “sham” local news organizations that “shill for who knows what.” Although Minow did not use the term, such sites are purveyors of what is known as “pink slime” journalism, which look like community sites but are in reality vehicles for political propaganda. Those who operate such projects have taken advantage of the opening created by the precipitous decline of legitimate local news organizations in recent years by launching hundreds of such sites — most of them on the political right, but some on the left as well. One suggestion Minow offered was to limit government assistance to news organizations whose journalists live in the communities they cover.
Much of “Saving the News” is devoted to the proposition that government has always been involved in subsidizing journalism, from low postal rates to the development of the telegraph, from regulating radio and television to investing in the internet. Given that activist history, she writes, it would be derelict for the government not to step in. She quotes Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who in 1945 wrote that “it would be strange indeed … if the grave concern for freedom of the press which prompted adoption of the First Amendment should be read as a command that the government was without power to protect that freedom.”
Her proposals fall under three broad categories:
• Regulating Facebook and other social media platforms “subject to duties and expectations commensurate with their functions and their powers.” That would include not just requiring them to pay news organizations for the content they use but also regulating them as public utilities and subjecting them to antitrust enforcement;
• Fighting misinformation and disinformation through “public and private protections against deception, fraud, and manipulation and bolstering the capacities of individuals and communities to monitor and correct abuses and demand better media and internet practices”;
• Using the power of government to “support, amplify, and sustain a variety of public interest news sources and resources at the local, regional, and national levels.”
“With the entire project of democracy in danger, federal, state, and local governments can and indeed should be obliged to act — while remaining as neutral as possible toward content and viewpoint in private speech,” Minow writes. “If judicial readings of the First Amendment prevent such actions, the courts would be turning the Constitution into a suicide pact.”
In a time of intense polarization, Minow said this week that she hopes reviving local news can help bring communities together. Noting that studies have shown corruption rises and voting rates drop in the absence of reliable local journalism, she said, “There’s less polarization in local communities for obvious reasons. People have to get along, they have to get the snow plowed.”
Minow comes by her interest in reliable news and information naturally: Her father, Newton Minow, is a former chair of the FCC best known for calling television “a vast wasteland.” His daughter’s book is a useful compendium of why we need to take steps to save local news — and what some of those steps might look like.
By now you may have heard about a remarkable 1,000-word retraction published by the Daily Camera of Boulder, Colorado, regarding a story about local residents’ memories of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. I first learned that the paper had a problem from Colorado College journalism professor Corey Hutchins’ newsletter. He wrote last Friday that the story in question had been taken down, and then — several hours later — came the retraction.
It seems that just about everything you could imagine was wrong with the story, including quotes, names and even the location of the Pentagon. The Camera frankly uses the word “fabricated” in describing what happened. The retraction does not name the reporter, but Hutchins does — April Morganroth, who would not comment when Hutchins contacted her.
A couple of observations about this remarkable lapse of journalism ethics.
First, we used to call this the “Romenesko effect,” after the pioneering media blogger Jim Romenesko, now retired. When he first began his work in the late 1990s, he would occasionally highlight some instance of fabrication or plagiarism that had gotten someone fired.
Oftentimes these incidents took place at obscure publications. Back in the day, young, inexperienced reporters caught in such instances of wrongdoing might, if they were sufficiently contrite, have a chance to start over at a different publication. The rise of online media such as Romenesko’s blog made that all but impossible since a reporter’s misdeeds would follow them wherever they tried to land. Maybe that was fair, maybe it wasn’t. But the rules had changed for good.
Second, it’s hard not to notice that the Camera is owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Staffing, no doubt, is minimal, and Morganroth’s story may have been published with little or no editing. It’s possible that a diligent editor would have spotted problems, though maybe not.
Certainly large, well-edited papers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe have had issues with fabricators, so I don’t mean to pick on the Camera. But to the extent that the problems with Morganroth’s story were catchable, they were less likely to be caught at a paper with few newsroom resources than at one that still has a reasonable level of editing.
The Denver Post’s former downtown headquarters looms over the Colorado Statehouse. The Post itself now operates out of its printing plant in the suburbs. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
The McCarthy era is often cited as a time when the limits of journalistic objectivity were exposed for all to see. For years, the press reported Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s false claims that he had a list of communists in a straight-up, deadpan manner, reasoning that it was their job to inform the country of what a United States senator was saying, not to offer any judgments.
But that’s not what Walter Lippmann had in mind when he first defined objective reporting a century ago. As he conceived it, objectivity was not acting as a conveyor belt for the lies of the powerful; nor was it mindless balance. Rather, it was an objective, fair-minded pursuit of the truth. Once you had determined the truth to the best of your ability, your job was to report it.
“We tell people in a forthright and unflinching way what we have learned because we’ve done the reporting,” retired Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said at a virtual appearance at Northeastern earlier this year. Baron defined objectivity as “independence and open-mindedness and a posture of listening and learning.”
Recently I read a book as part of my research into local news that is about as obscure as you can imagine: “Thunder in the Rockies: The Incredible Denver Post,” written by Post staffer Bill Hosokawa and published in 1976. And I was struck by how courageously the Post stood up to McCarthy — especially since, in previous decades, the Post had been mired in corruption and racism.
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By the time McCarthy came along, the Post’s editor was a stand-up guy named Palmer Hoyt, who was unflinching in his insistence on holding the Wisconsin senator to account. In a memo to his staff, he defined true objectivity in such a compelling way that it ought to be taught to every reporter. I’m not going to quote the entire memo, but here’s a key excerpt:
It is obvious that many charges made by reckless impulsive officials cannot and should not be ignored, but it seems to me that news stories and headlines can be presented in such a manner that the reading public will be able to measure the real worth or value and the true meaning of the stories.
For example, when it is possible and practical, we should remind the public in case of a wild accusation by Senator McCarthy that this particular senator’s name is synonymous with poor documentation and irresponsible conduct and that he has made many charges that have been insupportable under due process.
In 1954, Hoyt received the John Peter Zenger Freedom of the Press Award. In his acceptance speech, Hoyt continued to speak boldly, turning media critic: “It is true that the number of newspapers critical of McCarthy has grown during the last year or two. But there are still many of them who are his supporters, his apologists, even his devotees.” And he singled out the Chicago Tribune and the Hearst papers as particularly egregious offenders.
It hardly needs to be said that we are facing a crisis of democracy today — perhaps the most serious since the Civil War, as Robert Kagan recently wrote in The Washington Post (free link). The brainless objectivity of the 1950s has morphed into something else. As Thomas Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School has written, Donald Trump received an enormous assist from the press in 2016 by portraying his grotesque behavior and corruption as being equal to Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings — you know, her emails.
Today, Trump and his supporters, who seek to destroy the integrity of our elections in order to pave the way for an illegitimate second Trump term, are getting plenty of harsh coverage, as they should. But to absorb this through the media is to see it balanced against the Democrats’ struggles over its infrastructure bills and chaos at the border. It’s all both sides and false equivalence.
As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has said over and over again, the press is not equipped to cover a reality in which one of our two major political parties remains its normal self and the other has lurched into authoritarianism. You can see it in the headlines this week describing the debt-limit crisis as something the Democrats are struggling to solve — as if it’s a given that the Republicans have descended into madness and therefore can’t be blamed.
We are living through an incredibly ugly time. At the very least, we should remember what Palmer Hoyt said about the media’s obligation to tell the truth.
Bill Wasserman. Photo by Jim Walsh. Used by permission.
Legendary North Shore publisher Bill Wasserman has died at the age of 94. The founder of the Ipswich Chronicle, which he built into a group of about a dozen papers comprising North Shore Weeklies, Wasserman sold in 1986 and later became an outspoken critic of corporate chain ownership.
Several years ago, GateHouse Media — now Gannett — folded the Chronicle and merged it into a paper called the Chronicle & Transcript, which covers six North Shore Communities. Wasserman did something about it, becoming a consultant and ad salesman at a nonprofit startup, Ipswich Local News, which appears to be going strong.
Starting in the early 1990s, Wasserman’s former papers became part of larger groups — first Community Newspaper Co., owned by Fidelity and later then-Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell, and then GateHouse. Wasserman lamented the cuts that were implemented at his old papers. In 2008 I wrote about GateHouse for CommonWealth Magazine; Wasserman was among those I interviewed. An excerpt:
After 20 years of consolidation, it’s fair to ask if corporate ownership of community newspapers makes sense — not just journalistically, but financially. Take Bill Wasserman, who built North Shore Weeklies and sold the group in 1986 to investors who, in turn, sold to Fidelity several years later. Wasserman says the main problem with corporate ownership is a failure to understand that, even in the best of times, community journalism is little more than a break-even proposition.
“I was paid a salary, which was modest,” says Wasserman. “The reward was not in the profit. The reward was having a lot of fun putting out a community paper.”
Earlier this year Wasserman was honored by the Ipswich Rotary Club. Even in his 90s, he was looking to the future, saying:
The Ipswich Local News, which is surviving despite all the reports of failing local newspapers, is doing well because of its small but dedicated staff led so ably by John Muldoon — a Rotarian — and the broad support of both the local business community and the residents. It is a joy to be part of this effort to keep local news and its watchdog component alive.”
Wasserman retired from the paper a little more than a year ago, saying, “I will be 93 in two weeks, and I would like to pay more attention to my family and sleep without a deadline. There’s enough news and concerns in our town to keep busy 24 hours 7 days a week.”
I last saw Wasserman several years ago. He looked well and was as sharp as ever. His passion for community journalism was undimished. It’s fitting that toward the end of his life he came full circle — helping to found a newspaper in Ipswich to take the place of a once-thriving paper shut down by a corporation for whom the bottom line is always the bottom line.
It looks like Chicago’s number-two newspaper is about to get a huge boost. Given that the dominant daily, the Chicago Tribune, is being gutted by its new hedge-fund owner, the move can’t come soon enough.
According to media writer Rob Feder, the Chicago Sun-Times and public radio station WBEZ are seeking to merge their operations. The Sun-Times, a tabloid that bills itself as “The Hardest-Working Paper in America,” has long labored in the shadow of the Tribune. But with the Tribune now controlled by Alden Global Capital, the Sun-Times/WBEZ combination could quickly emerge as the news source of record in our third-largest city.
Sun-Times reporter Jon Seidel writes that the newspaper would become a subsidiary of Chicago Public Media. What’s unclear — and maybe those taking part in the talks haven’t figured it out themselves yet — is whether the Sun-Times would become a nonprofit or if it would remain a for-profit entity owned by a nonprofit. It matters for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that nonprofits are not allowed to endorse political candidates.
I couldn’t immediately find any numbers on how big the two entities’ reporting staffs are. But it’s significant that there would reportedly be no job reductions if the two operations are combined. WBEZ is one of public radio’s powerhouses, and the Sun-Times has maintained decent paid circulation — nearly 107,000 on Sundays and almost 100,000 on weekdays, most of it print, according to numbers it filed with the Alliance for Audited Media a year and a half ago. (The Tribune clocked in at 527,000 on Sundays and 256,000 on weekdays.)
According to a news release quoted by the Sun-Times, the combined outlet “would invest in journalism through expanded capacity to better serve Chicago; expand and engage with diverse audiences throughout the region, and expand digital capabilities to deliver a compelling digital experience across platforms and reach audiences where they are.”
Public radio can play a vitally important role in keeping regional news coverage alive in markets where legacy newspapers are shrinking. In Denver, for instance, Colorado Public Radio, combined with Denverite, which it acquired several years ago, now has what is likely the largest newsroom in the state — about 65 staff members, according to executive editor Kevin Dale. The Denver Post, cut drastically under Alden ownership, employs about 60 journalists, and The Colorado Sun, a well-regarded digital start-up, has 22, according to editor Larry Ryckman.
In Boston, public radio stations WBUR and GBH have probably the most robust news operations in the region after The Boston Globe. Unlike the Tribune, the Globe is independently owned and growing. But if that were to change, the public radio stations would be well-positioned to fill in the gap.
The WBEZ/Sun-Times announcement is the best journalism news to come out of Chicago since Alden acquired the Tribune earlier this year. Let’s hope it becomes a model for what might take place elsewhere.
One of the best things about visiting local news organizations is getting a chance to accompany reporters on stories. I still look back fondly on my trips to New Haven about a dozen years ago, when I shadowed the staff of the New Haven Independent. And then there was the unforgettable experience of covering the first news conference on COVID-19 in Mendocino County, California, on March 5, 2020, while I was reporting on The Mendocino Voice.
I was in Denver last week learning about The Colorado Sun, an online-only project founded three years ago by a group of journalists who left The Denver Post after multiple rounds of cuts by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. And on Monday, I struck gold.
I was sitting in on the morning news meeting when we learned that students had staged a walkout at Denver North High School to call for the removal of school board member Tay Anderson, who was censured last week for inappropriate interactions with an underage student. (Anderson has said he cut off all contact as soon as he learned she was 16.) I took a Lyft to Denver North, where hundreds of students had gathered in Denver Park.
Already on the scene were two young journalists — the Sun’s education reporter, Erica Breunlin, and photographer Olivia Sun (“no nepotism involved,” she quipped), who began a stint at the Sun through the Report for America program several months ago.
It was a wild scene. Students were chanting “Hey hey, ho ho! Tay Anderson has got to go!” And “Resign!” After gathering on the steps of the school, they headed off for Denver Public Schools headquarters, some two and a half miles away. The chants grew more profane, with “Fuck That Pedo” proving to be the most popular.
Breunlin and Sun, meanwhile, were hard at work. Breunlin had made the mistake of wearing red pumps, but that didn’t stop her from interviewing students and then running to keep up with the crowd. At one point she asked a student, “Do you feel unsafe?” “Yes.” “Why do you feel unsafe?” Pause. “It’s not right.”
Report for America photographer Olivia Sun
Breunlin was careful to point out to the students that the evidence against Anderson was ambiguous, but that didn’t stop them from demanding action. At one point, the students started chanting “Lock him up!”
I knew Breunlin was tweeting. But while I was scanning my phone outside the DPS building, I was surprised to see that the Sun had posted a full story. When had she written that? She later explained to me that it was pieced together by her editor, Lance Benzel, from her tweets and from phone calls.
“He was great, because he was telling me to really just focus on the scenery and talking to people and tweeting and really capturing that color,” she told me later. “And then he was embedding my tweets into the story, pulling information from my tweets to put in the story, so it was like I was doing the reporting. He was kind of finessing the story, so it really was a good team effort.”
Sun told me she had sought a position through Report for America, which places young journalists with newsrooms across the country, because she was burning out on her job as a photographer with the Des Moines Register.
“The institutional knowledge I gained from working somewhere like that [the Register] is really irreplaceable,” she said. “I really got to learn from old guard veteran journalists. But essentially I wanted to see what else was out there and how I could personally put my skills to a more streamlined use in just illustrating local issues.”
Ironically, both Breunlin and Sun said that what had attracted them to the Sun was the chance to work on in-depth stories rather than breaking news — and here they were, covering a breaking story. But that’s not typical of what they, or the Sun, do.
Finally, here is their story. It was updated later in the day, so it isn’t quite as urgent as the first version. But you’ll get the idea. Nor was theirs the only strong account. I thought The Denver Post, in conjunction with Chalkbeat, did a nice job as well.
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