Boston Business Journal supports creating a state news commission

The Boston Business Journal today published an editorial supporting the creation of a state commission to study the decline of local journalism in Massachusetts and to offer some recommendations. The bill is currently being considered by legislators in the form of a House amendment to the economic bond bill. The editorial is behind a paywall, but I have a workplace subscription. Here’s the kicker:

This amendment is just a first step, but a necessary one, to understanding what’s driving the steady decline in local journalism and what can be done to strengthen it again. We urge lawmakers to make this small investment in the future of our state’s democracy. It’s time to make local journalism a priority and endorse the amendment.

The editorial also references a letter of support that my colleagues and I at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism sent to the six members of the conference committee this week. If you’re so inclined, you can send emails to their offices. The House directory is here, and the Senate directory is here. The conference committee members are:

  • Sen. Eric Lesser, co-chair
  • Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante, co-chair
  • Sen. Michael Rodrigues
  • Sen. Patrick O’Connor
  • Rep. Aaron Michlewitz
  • Rep. Donald Wong

Ongoing kudos to Rep. Lori Ehrlich, D-Marblehead, who has been pushing for this measure for nearly two years. I’ve provided some assistance, and would be a member of the commission as the language is currently written.

I understand why some people are skeptical about the government getting involved in questions about the financial viability of local news. My response is that this is a modest step. I’d like to see an effort to identify independent local projects that are succeeding, find out what makes them tick and come up with some ideas to encourage more people to launch such projects in their own communities.

Comments are open. Please include your full name, first and last, and speak with a civil tongue.

Northeastern journalism faculty supports creation of a state news commission

Photo (cc) 2017 by Ted McGrath.

We’re down to the wire with a legislative proposal to create a special commission that would study the condition of local news in Massachusetts. You can learn more about it here. Currently a conference committee is hashing out the details of an economic bond bill; the commission has been included as an amendment to the House version.

My colleagues in Northeastern University’s School of Journalism have signed a letter to the six members of the conference committee urging them to support the amendment creating the news commission. If you are so inclined, I hope you’ll add your voice. Some disclosures: I was involved in proposing the commission; I testified in favor of it last year; and I would be a member if the measure is adopted as written.

There’s never been a more crucial time for local news. Gannett, a national corporate chain that owns dozens of daily and weekly papers and websites in Greater Boston and environs, is staggering under debt and continues to cut, as Don Seiffert reports in the Boston Business Journal. This is also the time of year when you can donate to a local nonprofit news organization through NewsMatch and have your contribution doubled. And don’t forget that today is #GivingTuesday.

Our letter to the conference committee follows:

***

November 30, 2020

To the members of the conference committee:

  • Senator Eric Lesser, Co-Chair
  • Representative Ann-Margaret Ferrante, Co-Chair
  • Senator Michael Rodrigues
  • Senator Patrick O’Connor
  • Representative Aaron Michlewitz
  • Representative Donald Wong

Community life and civic engagement are not possible without reliable, verified news and information. Unfortunately, local journalism is in the midst of a crisis. According to one widely cited study, more than 2,100 American newspapers have closed their doors over the past 15 years as Craigslist, Google, and Facebook have scooped up most of the advertising revenues that once paid for journalism. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation worse. And newspaper chains owned by Wall Street speculators and hedge funds have robbed local news executives of the revenues they need to invest in the future.

Which is why we faculty members at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism urge you to approve an amendment sponsored by Representative Lori Ehrlich — part of the House version of the Economic Bond Bill — that would create a special commission to study local news in Massachusetts and recommend some possible courses of action. The commission would comprise legislators, academics, journalists, and news-industry experts.

Massachusetts remains well-served by regional sources of news, including a robust daily newspaper, public media companies, and multiple television newscasts. At the local level, though, the picture is grim. Corporate ownership has resulted in the hollowing-out of dozens of newspapers across the Commonwealth. In all too many cases, these news outlets are failing to meet the information needs of the communities they ostensibly serve.

A commission could, among other things, shine a light on a number of independent news projects that are doing well in the hopes that they might inspire residents of other communities to undertake similar projects. A commission could also identify best practices and recommend legislation and policies to encourage local ownership or make it easier to start a nonprofit news organization.

Such efforts are urgently needed. Please approve the amendment and allow the commission to be formed and to begin its important work.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kaufman, Director
Belle Adler, Emeritus
Mike Beaudet
Rahul Bhargava
Matt Carroll
Myojung Chung
Joanne Ciccarello
Nicholas Daniloff, Emeritus
Charles Fountain
Michelle Hagopian
Meg Heckman
Carlene Hempel
Jeff Howe
Dan Kennedy
William Kirtz, Emeritus
Laurel Leff
Dan Lothian
Peter Mancusi
Meredith O’Brien
Walter V. Robinson, Emeritus
Jim Ross
Jody Santos
Alan Schroeder, Emeritus
Jeb Sharp
John Wihbey
Dan Zedek

Comments are open. Please include your full name, first and last, and speak with a civil tongue.

How local news can ease the angry polarization of the Trump era

Photo via Max Pixel.

Previously published at GBH News.

At the dawn of the Trump presidency four years ago, the journalist James Fallows offered a prescription for overcoming the anger and divisiveness that had given rise to Donald Trump’s toxic brand of right-wing populism: a renewed engagement with community life.

“At the level of politics where people’s judgments are based on direct observation rather than media-fueled fear,” Fallows wrote in The Atlantic, “Americans still trust democratic processes and observe long-respected norms.”

Fallows and his wife, Deborah Fallows, later wrote an entire book on the topic. But their advice was not heeded. President Trump sucked up every bit of oxygen and energy, from the Resistance to impeachment, from COVID and economic collapse to his racist rhetoric, his cruel policies and his sociopathic Twitter feed.

“We need a world in which we talk less about the president,” lamented Cardozo School of Law professor Ekow Yankah last week. “It’s not healthy.” That Yankah was being interviewed on a podcast called “Trumpcast” suggests the depth of the problem. Even now, Trump is dominating the news to a far greater extent than President-elect Joe Biden — and not in a good way. Rather than living locally, we spend all our time thinking nationally. It’s exhausting and leaves us feeling angry and alienated.

Our media in many ways are a reflection of our politics. The Trump years were very good for national news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and, God help us, cable news, especially Fox. And they were very bad for local media, especially community newspapers.

To renew civic life, you first need to renew local, independently owned newspapers and other media. I’m not talking about major regional newspapers, public radio or local TV newscasts. I’m talking about the hard but rewarding work of keeping tabs on city councils, school committees, zoning, police, development, neighborhoods and racial justice.

“There is a direct correspondence between the closing of newspapers and the polarization of people formerly served by those newspapers,” wrote Marc Ambinder, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership and Policy, in a recent essay for MSNBC.com. He added: “If we want a society where we can accurately understand the preferences and behaviors of everyone, we need more local journalism.”

Unfortunately, it has become nearly impossible to pay for such journalism. The causes are familiar, from the collapse of digital advertising for everyone except Google and Facebook to the rise of corporate and hedge-fund ownership that bleeds local newspapers dry.

The COVID pandemic has made the financial situation facing news organizations that much worse. According to CNN reporter Kerry Flynn, two major publicly traded chain newspaper owners, Gannett and Tribune Publishing, are near collapse. Gannett’s ad revenues were down 38% in the second quarter over the previous year and down 23% in the third quarter. Tribune was down 48% in the second quarter and down 38% in the third.

Between them, the two companies own hundreds of local papers that had been hollowed out even before the pandemic. And unlike national papers like the Times, the Post and The Wall Street Journal, these companies have barely gotten started on charging readers for digital access.

So what is to be done? As I’ve written a number of times previously, I think we need a variety of solutions; one approach is not going to work in every community. For-profit, nonprofit, cooperative ownership, even volunteer-driven projects are all doing good work in cities and towns across the country. But they remain the exception, and the overall picture continues to darken.

Rick Edmonds of Poynter reported recently that Congress is considering a number of ideas, including tax credits for subscribing to a local news source, tax relief for publishers, advertising subsidies, and an antitrust exemption that would allow the news business to negotiate as one in an attempt to extract some revenues from Google and Facebook.

“Congress has pretty much decided it should come to the aid of local news,” Edmonds wrote. “The question of how remains, together with making the help timely.”

In Massachusetts, a bill that would create a special commission of journalists, academics and legislators to study the extent of the local-news crisis has gotten bogged down in committee, though I’m told that it could pass before the end of the year. (Disclosure: I’ve worked on the measure with state Rep. Lori Ehrlich, D-Marblehead, and would be a member of the commission.)

Needless to say, a commission isn’t going to fix what’s ailing local news. Yet if we’re going to have any chance of revitalizing civic engagement and closing the chasm that has come to separate us, we need to find a way.

In late October, The Inquirer and Mirror of Nantucket announced that the longtime editor and publisher, Marianne Stanton, along with a local businessman named David Worth, were buying the paper back from Gannett, which had owned it for a number of years.

“I think it’s pretty cool that two Nantucketers, both descendants of the early settlers, could work together to pull this off,” said Stanton in the announcement.

I think it’s pretty cool, too. It’s hard to know what, if anything, it will lead to. But it was a step in the right direction as well as very good news for the civic life of one community. Maybe it will be the start of something.

And share your thoughts here in the comments.

Gannett sells Mass. Lawyers Weekly and other B2B titles to a private-equity firm

Right on the heels of Gannett’s selling The Inquirer and Mirror of Nantucket and The Pine Bluff Commercial of Arkansas, the giant chain has now announced that it’s offloading its business-to-business subsidiary, BridgeTower Media, to a private-equity firm.

BridgeTower’s local holdings include Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly and Color Magazine, which “highlights topics of interest revolving around professionals of color.” The new owner, Transom Capital Group, is based in Los Angeles. Its self-description is so hilariously awful that it’s worth quoting:

Transom Capital Group is an operations-focused private equity firm in the lower-middle market. Our functional pattern recognition, access to capital, and proven ARMOR℠ Value Creation Process combine with management’s industry expertise to realize improved operational efficiency, significant top-line growth, cultural transformation and overall distinctive outcomes.

It’s too early to hope that the debt-addled Gannett chain, which has a stranglehold on most of the community newspapers in Greater Boston, Rhode Island and southern New Hampshire, is in the midst of a selloff. But if you’re thinking of making an offer on your local Gannett-owned newspaper, it looks like this might be a good time.

Talk about this post on Facebook.

The start of a trend? Gannett sells Nantucket paper to local owners

Nantucket. Photo (cc) 2013 by Si B.

I don’t suppose this is the beginning of a trend, but it’s great news nevertheless: The Inquirer and Mirror of Nantucket has been sold to local owners.

According to an announcement on the weekly paper’s website, Gannett (the part that’s formerly GateHouse Media) has agreed to sell the paper to a group put together by editor and publisher Marianne Stanton and a local businessman named David Worth.

I think it’s pretty cool that two Nantucketers, both descendants of the early settlers, could work together to pull this off,” said Stanton. I think it’s pretty cool, too.

No sooner did I tweet about this than I learned that Gannett had also sold The Pine Bluff Commercial to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which is itself independently owned. So maybe it is a trend. Or a mini-trend.

Meanwhile, the perpetually downsizing Gannett continues to struggle. Chief executive Mike Reed announced last week that the chain would embark on another round of voluntary buyouts.

So if you’d like to acquire the Gannett paper in your community, it sounds like it might be a good time to make an offer.

Talk about this post on Facebook.

The king of ‘pink slime’ journalism is back, this time boosting Republicans

The proliferation of Republican-backed, secretive local-news sites is not a new story. We’ve talked about it on “Beat the Press” several times. Just a few weeks ago, I had to do some research to determine whether a digital newspaper I was writing about might be one such site. (It wasn’t.)

But a front-page story in today’s New York Times takes an unusually deep dive into the phenomenon. Davey Alba and Jack Nicas report that about 1,300 of these sites are under the control of Brian Timpone, “a TV reporter turned internet entrepreneur who has sought to capitalize on the decline of local news organizations for nearly two decades.”

Alba and Nicas carefully document what looks like something awfully close to “pay to play.” For instance, a Republican congressional candidate from Illinois named Jeanne Ives has paid Timpone’s operations $55,000 over the past three years. “During that time,” they write, “the Illinois sites have published overwhelmingly positive coverage of her, including running some of her news releases verbatim.” (Ives claims the money was for web services and Facebook ads rather than for favorable coverage.)

For me, the wildest angle was learning that Timpone is the guy who was behind Journatic, a much-loathed project that produced automated local news stories as well as content using grossly underpaid, out-of-town reporters — including cheap Filipino workers who wrote articles under fake bylines. As I wrote in 2012, Journatic’s work product was widely known as “pink slime” journalism, and it’s hard to see how Timpone’s news project is much better.

The new pink slime — which I should say is not limited to Republican sites, though they seem to comprise the overwhelming majority of them — takes advantage of the collapse of local news and the rise of news deserts throughout the country. Unsuspecting readers are no doubt grateful to run across some local news, and it’s only later (if at all) that they find out they’re reading propaganda. In that sense, Timpone’s operations are similar to Sinclair Broadcasting, which promotes a right-wing line but which, unlike Fox News, does so under the cover of a network of local television stations.

According to the map accompanying the Times story, there are 16 such pink-slime sites in Massachusetts. I’d love to see a list, and will add one if someone can point me to it.

Update: Here is the national list of sites associated with Timpone. Massachusetts is on page 6. Thanks to Aaron Read.

Talk about this post on Facebook.

Bright lights in Denver

After Alden Global Capital destroyed The Denver Post, everyone assumed it was lights out. A city that had long had two vibrant daily papers (the Rocky Mountain News closed down in 2009) now barely had one.

Suddenly, though, news sources are proliferating in Denver. Today the all-digital Denver Gazette makes its debut, joining an earlier start-up, The Colorado Sun. The alt-weekly Westword continues to publish.

The lesson, as always, is that when legacy media fail, entrepreneurial journalists seize the opportunity to move in.

Talk about this post on Facebook.

As Gannett seeks to hire journalists, Alden continues to ‘strangle’ them

Photo via the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Among those of us who follow the business of local news, there is a tendency to lump the two most notorious corporate chain owners together. Gannett Co. and Alden Globe Capital, after all, are both notorious for slashing their newsrooms to the bone. Their newspapers and websites in too many instances fail to meet the information needs of the communities they purportedly serve.

Yet there is a difference. And I was reminded of that difference recently by Rick Edmonds, who analyzes the media business for the Poynter Institute.

After a decade’s worth of cuts, Gannett is planning to bolster its reporting corps in the near future, Gannett chief executive Mike Reed told Edmonds — although he didn’t provide any numbers. Currently, Gannett employs about 5,000 journalists at its properties, which include USA Today, about 260 regional dailies and many other weekly papers and websites, including dozens in Greater Boston.

“We need to get even better,” Reed was quoted as saying. Well, OK. I would replace “even” with “a lot.” Still, such talk would be unimaginable at Alden Global Capital, whose MediaNews Group chain of about 200 papers has sparked newsroom revolts as well as demands from 21 U.S. senators that the company stop its “reckless acquisition and destruction of newspapers,” according to a recent story by Sarah Ellison in The Washington Post.

The difference between how Gannett and MediaNews are perceived may have something to do with their ownership structures.

The current Gannett is the result of a merger late last year between Gannett and GateHouse Media. Despite keeping the Gannett name, it was clearly GateHouse that got the better of the deal: Reed was the chief executive at GateHouse before assuming the same position at Gannett. The new Gannett immediately embarked on an estimated $400 million in cuts in order to pay down the debt it had taken on in financing the merger, according to the media-business analyst (and newly minted entrepreneur) Ken Doctor at Nieman Lab.

Gannett is a publicly traded corporation, which means that Reed’s ultimate goal is long-term growth and sustainability — albeit with as little journalism as the company can get away with. Reed hopes to do that by leveraging Gannett’s media holdings with digital marketing subsidiaries the company owns as well as an events business, which is obviously on hold during the COVID pandemic.

If everything works out over time, it is possible to imagine Gannett’s local news outlets staffing up and providing better, more comprehensive coverage than they have in recent years. As good as what would be offered by independent newspapers and websites? Almost certainly not. But any improvements would be welcome.

Alden Global Capital, on the other hand, is a hedge fund. And as best as anyone can tell, the company has no strategy for MediaNews Group beyond extracting as much money as it can for as long as it can. Its Massachusetts papers, the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Enterprise & Sentinel of Fitchburg, operate on a shoestring. The Fitchburg office was closed several years ago. The Herald’s office in Braintree was recently shut down as well, although it’s unclear whether that was a temporary, COVID-related move or something permanent.

In Ellison’s Washington Post article, Alden managing director Heath Freeman tried to portray himself as a savior of journalism. “I would love our team to be remembered as the team that saved the newspaper business,” he was quoted as saying. Ellison, though, ran through a list of MediaNews papers across the country that have been so gutted that they have virtually no one to cover the news.

“Don’t buy the idea that Alden is trying to save newspapers. I don’t think any idiot would buy that,” said Dean Singleton, the owner of an earlier iteration of MediaNews Group whose own reputation as a cost-cutter looks benign by today’s standards. Freeman’s retort: “We’ve saved the very newspapers that Dean Singleton ran into bankruptcy, so take his recriminations with a grain of salt.”

Stop me if you’ve heard me say this before, but quality local news can be a key to reviving civic engagement, which in turn could help us overcome the hyperpolarization that defines our culture nationally. According to a recent survey by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, 70% of Americans believe the news media play a “critical” (30%) or “very important” (42%) role “in making residents feel connected to their local community.”

Moreover, Andrea Wenzel of Temple University, in her new book “Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust,” found that people trust local news outlets more than they do national media.

“While national press was perceived by residents of all political backgrounds as distant, privileged, and dismissive of local culture,” she wrote, “it was not uncommon for residents to have first- or secondhand interactions with local reporters. So while participants could identify shortcomings, there was a base-level familiarity and trust.”

Those interactions are important — but they are becoming increasingly rare at the local news organizations being run by Gannett and MediaNews Group. At least there’s some reason to hope that the situation might improve at Gannett. As for MediaNews, a former reporter for the chain, Julie Reynolds, put it this way in The Nation several years ago: “Don’t just blame the Internet for journalism’s decline. Old-fashioned capitalist greed also strangles newspapers.”

Talk about this post on Facebook.

Book review: Why listening to community voices could help revive local news

Philadelphia and its environs are emblematic of what’s gone wrong with local news. The area is served by a well-regarded metropolitan newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a powerhouse public radio station, WHYY, as well as various television newscasts. But the focus of those outlets is regional, not local. At the grassroots neighborhood and community levels where people actually live, journalism is scarce and looked upon with suspicion.

Rebuilding local news in places like the Philadelphia area is the subject of Andrea Wenzel’s Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust.

Read the rest at The Arts Fuse. And talk about this review on Facebook.

Union to protest outsourcing of jobs at Northampton’s Daily Hampshire Gazette

The Pioneer Valley NewsGuild, the union that represents press and distribution employees at the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, will rally Monday afternoon to honor the 29 employees who are being laid off as the Gazette closes down its presses and outsources its printing. The work will be handled by Gannett, which owns the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester and a printing plant in nearby Auburn. The move was announced in mid-June by Gazette publisher Michael Moses, who wrote:

While our decision to get out of the business of manufacturing newspapers was economically motivated, it also reflects our desire to focus on the Gazette’s core mission. Content, particularly local news content, is unequivocally that mission. This is, without question, the business model that best positions us for the future, allowing us to continue the award winning coverage our readers require.

The Gazette — owned by a small independent chain anchored by the Concord Monitor of New Hampshire — becomes the latest daily paper to job out its printing. With press runs much smaller than they used to be, it makes little sense these days for a paper to operate its own presses unless it can take on enough outside work to make it economically viable. Still, it’s a sad day for the employees who are losing their jobs.

The text of the union statement is below.

WHO: The Pioneer Valley NewsGuild and YOU, the community

WHAT: A socially distant rally honoring the workers who have helped make our paper for years on their last day before a massive layoff.

WHEN: Monday, July 27 at 5:15 p.m.

WHERE: On the sidewalk in front of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, located at 115 Conz St. in Northampton

WHY: We are standing in solidarity with those who have worked shoulder to shoulder during a global pandemic to bring this community vital news every single day. After all of that hard work and risk, Newspapers of New England is eliminating their departments, ending the 233 year history of printing the paper in Northampton in order to outsource that work to media giant Gannett. This means 29 people, including 24 union members, will be laid off. Bring signs to show appreciation for these essential workers — the people who actually make this paper. (Signs telling Newspapers of New England how shameful their behavior is are also welcome.) For more information, please contact The Pioneer Valley NewsGuild at mailto:pvnewsguild@gazettenet.com

Talk about this post on Facebook.