Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
It’s been nearly a week since Jeff Bezos issued his edict that The Washington Post’s opinion section would henceforth be devoted exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets,” and it’s still not clear what that is going to mean in practice.
Many observers, including me, have assumed that Bezos was using coded language — that, in fact, what he meant was that the Post would go all-in on Trumpism. That would seem logical given his earlier order to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris and his overall sucking up to Donald Trump.
So far, though, not much has happened other than the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley. Liberal opinion journalists like Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus and Perry Bacon Jr. are still there. Another liberal, Dana Milbank, responded to Bezos’ edict by tweaking the owner (gift link), writing:
If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend Bezos’s twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today: President Donald Trump.
Given that Bezos’ agenda has yet to be clearly articulated, let me suggest another possibility: rather than Trumpism, he intends to embrace libertarianism, which was thought to be his guiding political philosophy before he bought the Post in 2013.
Mike Rosenberg with a cartoon by local sports artist Dave Olsen. 2018 photo by Julie McCay Turner is used with permission.
One of the best parts of writing about local-news startups is the opportunity to go out on stories with reporters to observe how they do their jobs. And so it was that on a midsummer day in 2021, I accompanied Mike Rosenberg of The Bedford Citizen as he toured the town’s new cultural district.
Mike, then 72, was the first paid staff reporter since the Citizen’s founding as a volunteer project nine years earlier. He died on Monday while he was covering a basketball game at Bedford High School, according to an account by the site’s managing editor, Wayne Braverman.
I’d like to share with you what I wrote about Mike in “What Works in Community News,” by Ellen Clegg and me. He was a colorful character, deeply devoted to his town and to the Jewish community, with a strong sense of ethics and fair play. My condolences to Mike’s family, the folks at the Citizen and all of those he touched over the years.
***
Mike Rosenberg was walking along the Narrow Gauge Rail Trail, a dirt path that takes its name from the type of train that used to chug through the area. On this hot July morning in 2021, Rosenberg was reporting on the new cultural district in Bedford, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Leading the way were Alyssa Sandoval, the town’s housing and economic development director, and Barbara Purchia, chair of the Bedford Cultural Council. The town’s planning director, Tony Fields, joined the group about halfway through the tour.
A couple of cyclists rode by. “Hi, Mike,” said one of them. Rosenberg returned the greeting and then said to no one in particular: “I have no idea who that is.”
From left, Josh Stearns, Kara Meyberg Guzman and Joe Kriesberg
If you are a local nonprofit news publisher, editor, reporter, board member or donor, please mark this on your calendar: On Thursday, April 3, our What Works project will sponsor a free webinar titled “The Ethics of Nonprofit News: What Board Members and Donors Need to Know.” Issues will include conflicts of interest and understanding the boundaries between the news and fundraising sides of a community journalism organization.
• Josh Stearns, managing director of programs at the Democracy Fund, a longtime activist on issues related to media reform and equitable journalism. Stearns was most recently senior director of the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund, where he led its journalism and technology grantmaking. He was previously director of journalism sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and, before that, press freedom director at Free Press. He currently serves on the board of Honolulu Civil Beat and the Democratizing Philanthropy Project and was a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and First Draft News.
• Kara Meyberg Guzman, CEO and founder of Santa Cruz Local, a nonprofit news organization in California focused on communities not otherwise served by local media. Her passion is producing fair, accurate, reliable news that’s free and accessible to all residents, including those who will never be able to pay for it. She is also a board member of the Tiny News Collective, whose mission is to make journalism entrepreneurship more accessible, equitable and inclusive.
• Joe Kriesberg, CEO of the Massachusetts Institution for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to making Massachusetts a place of inclusive economic opportunity and civic vitality. In that capacity Kriesberg serves as publisher of CommonWealth Beacon, MassINC’s digital publication covering state politics and public policy. Kriesberg has decades of experience in nonprofit management and in working with news organizations.
I’ll be moderating the panel. I’m a professor in Northeastern’s School of Journalism and the co-author, with Ellen Clegg, of the book “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate” (Beacon Press, 2024). Ellen and I also host a podcast and website on the future of local news, part of the School of Journalism, at whatworks.news.
The Associated Press has been in the news a lot lately, both because of its feud with the White House over Donald Trump’s insistence that it refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and for some cuts it’s had to implement (see Gintautus Dumcius’ story in CommonWealth Beacon and Aidan Ryan’s in The Boston Globe).
But here’s some good news: The AP announced on Thursday that it’s creating a Local Investigative Reporting Program to support efforts at the community level. According to an annoucement by executive editor Julie Pace, the initiative will be headed by veteran AP editor Ron Nixon, who “will work with state and local outlets to cultivate stories and support their investigative reporting needs.”
The program will encompass training, resources and access to AP services, and will build on the agency’s Local News Success Team “to localize national stories for member audiences and provide services and support to newsrooms across the U.S.”
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Erica Heilman, who produces a podcast called “Rumble Strip.” Heilman’s shows air monthly on Vermont Public and other NPR stations as well as the BBC. “Rumble Strip” can also be found on all the usual podcast platforms.
Her episodes range in length from a few minutes to, well, as long as they need to be! As Chelsea Edgar wrote in a profile for Seven Days of Burlington, Vermont, “She wants to make meandering, kaleidoscopic stories about the stuff of ordinary Vermont life.”
In 2020, Heilman produced a memorable pandemic miniseries, “Our Show.” It featured listener-submitted recordings of life in lockdown, and it was The Atlantic’s No. 1 podcast of the year. In November 2021 she produced “Finn and the Bell,” the textured story of a Walden teenager who died by suicide. It won a Peabody, the highest award in broadcasting.
Ellen has an update on Suki Dardarian, the retiring editor and senior vice president of The Minnesota Star Tribune. She has been named the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year by the National Press Club.
I’ve got a Quick Take about tools for local news organizations dealing with various forms of harassment. The Institute for Nonprofit News, a leading organization for hyperlocal journalism, has put together some resources.
Social media post from Never Ending Books, via the New Haven Independent
With Donald Trump and Elon Musk rampaging through our government and sparking a constitutional crisis, it seems that many anti-Trump folks are changing their news consumption habits in one of two ways: they’re either overloading on the horror show that’s being endlessly reported and dissected on national news outlets, or they’re tuning out altogether.
But this is a moment when local news is more important than ever.
For one thing, it builds community, and we still need to find ways to move past our political differences and work cooperatively with our neighbors on issues that are grounded in where we live.
For another, local-news organizations are documenting how Trumpist authoritarianism is playing out in our states, cities and towns. What they’re offering is a crucial supplement to the top-level coverage that national outlets are providing about issues like JD Vance’s support for a neo-Nazi party in Germany, the angry resignations of career prosecutors over Trump’s corrupt deal with New York Mayor Eric Adams and Musk’s dismantling of the federal work force.
But of course these stories all have downstream effects as well. With that in mind, here are nine recent stories about how Trumpism is playing out at the local level, all reported by news outlets profiled in “What Works in Community News,” the book I co-authored with Ellen Clegg.
Neo-Nazis Gather, Shout, Salute,Disperse, by Brian Slattery, New Haven Independent. “A group of neo-Nazis showed up on State Street Saturday night. Their destination: Never Ending Books, the long-running free bookstore, arts and nonprofit community space. Whatever the purpose of their visit was, it was met with a larger gathering of Never Ending Books supporters, and a police intervention. The incident — which ended without violence — occurred while Never Ending Books was hosting a show of improvised music from the New Haven-based FIM collective.”
As Deportation Fears Spread, Memphis Mayor Promises to Focus Elsewhere,by Brittany Brown, MLK50. “Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s communications team told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism that the city does not currently plan to partner with ICE to carry out mass deportations. ‘Our police [department] is understaffed and has pressing issues to address,’ Young said in a statement. The mayor refused to say if the city will make any proactive efforts to support Memphis’ immigrants, who make up more than 7% of the city’s population.”
17 Colorado Environmental Projects Are in Limbo after Trump Halts Spending from Biden-era Law, by Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun. “The proposed projects focus on improving habitats, ecological stability and resilience against drought in the Colorado River Basin, where prolonged drought and overuse have cast uncertainty over the future water supply for 40 million people. The bureau also awarded $100 million for Colorado River environmental projects in Arizona, California and Nevada.” By the way, the Sun has a special section on its homepage titled “Trump & Colorado.”
The New Administration Acts and the Heritage Foundation Smiles,by Alan Gueberg, Cherokee Chronicle Times, which is affiliated with the Storm Lake Times Pilot of Iowa: “Project 2025 is the cornerstone of President Trump’s governing plans. Moreover, many of his most controversial cabinet and other federal appointees come with Heritage Foundation’s stickers on their considerable baggage. Those plans and that assembled team — including policy-heavy, farming-lite secretary of agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins — will have a deep impact on farmers, ranchers, and rural America if used as guidelines to write the 2025 Farm Bill.”
Trump Administration Freezes Billions for Electric Vehicle Chargers, by Michael Sol Warren, NJ Spotlight News. “The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, NEVI, was created as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by former President Joe Biden in 2021 with the goal of building out America’s network of fast chargers for electric vehicles. Of the $5 billion allocated for the program, $104 million is dedicated to New Jersey. The Garden State is supposed to get that money over a five-year period, according to the state Department of Transportation.”
Slew of Minnesota Companies beyond Target Go Mute on DEI, by Brooks Johnson, Patrick Kennedy and Carson Hartzog, Sahan Journal, Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Target has been considered for years a national corporate leader in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices — a position bolstered after its support of Black-owned businesses following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. So when the Minneapolis-based retailer announced last month it is pulling back on its diversity goals, Target was accused of political expediency, losing the trust of some Black activists who said the betrayal hurt more than other DEI pullbacks from companies such as Amazon, Google, Deere and McDonald’s.”
Wary Town Departments Identify Programs,by Mike Rosenberg, The Bedford Citizen, Bedford, Massachusetts. “Bedford Town Manager Matt Hanson met this week with municipal department heads to identify programs and activities that might be jeopardized by funding suspensions and/or terminations at the federal level. ‘At a high level, we have started to discuss ways to continue to provide the same level of services to residents should certain programs be cut or scaled back from the federal government,’ Hanson said. ‘But there are many moving parts to consider.’”
Texas Migrant Shelters Are Nearly Empty after Trump’s Actions Effectively Shut the Border, by Berenice Garcia, The Texas Tribune. “Migrant shelters that helped nearly a thousand asylum seekers per day at the height of migrant crossings just a few years ago are now nearly empty. The shelters mostly along the Texas-Mexico border reported a plunge in the number of people in their care since the Trump administration effectively closed the border to asylum seekers in January. Some expect to close by the end of the month.”
North Coast Counties React to Trump’s Funding Orders, by Mary Rose Kaczorowski, The Mendocino Voice, Mendocino County, California. “Between President Donald Trump’s plans to take over Greenland, Panama, Canada, and now Gaza, it’s not surprising that people might have lost touch with what’s happening here at home. That luxury is not granted to a wide variety of nonprofits, districts, and agencies. Trump’s recent executive orders to pause all federal funding until recipient programs could be reviewed for adherence to his policy priorities are at the moment legally suspended. That doesn’t mean the matter is dead.”
Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has written an interesting examination of what’s gone wrong at the Portland Press Herald and other papers that are part of the Maine Trust for Local News.
On the one hand, the story feels provisional — we still don’t know why two top executives left suddenly, and severe cuts that observers had told me were coming are, well, still coming. The executives who left recently were Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of the National Trust for Local News, which acquired the papers in 2023, and Lisa DeSisto, CEO of the Maine Trust — and, before that, publisher of the Press Herald. Other top people have departed as well.
On the other hand, Ryan has some details I hadn’t seen before. For one thing, the Trust reported that it lost $500,000 in 2024 as the decline of advertising outpaced gains in digital subscription revenue.
More shocking is that former owner Reade Brower apparently considered David Smith as a potential buyer before selling to the National Trust. Smith, the head of the right-wing television network Sinclair Broadcasting, is currently turning The Baltimore Sun into an embarrassment. Sinclair owns WGME-TV (Channel 13) in Portland, so who knows what sort of synergistic hell Smith had in mind.
Brower instead sold the papers to the National Trust for $15 million (a figure that’s being reported for the first time from documents that Ryan obtained) in the hope that a nonprofit organization would prove to be a better steward.
One data point I do want to address is Dr. Hansen Shapiro’s compensation, reported in the National Trust’s public 1099 filings and noted by both the Press Herald at the time that she stepped down and now by the Globe.
Hansen Shapiro did make a lot of money — nearly $371,000 in 2023 compared to just $117,000 in 2021. At the same time, though, 2021 was when the Trust pulled off its first deal, buying 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. The Trust today owns 65 papers in Colorado, Georgia and Maine. Given the Trust’s pivot to a hands-on operating role, Hansen Shapiro’s job responsibilities changed as well.
I’m not writing this to defend her compensation or, for that matter, the Trust’s change of focus. But it’s important context to think about.
“Journalists employed by the Maine Trust said while they remain hopeful about the new ownership, they question aspects of its approach,” Ryan writes, who notes that no one among the rank and file would speak with him on the record “because they feared retaliation.”
Finally, my usual disclosures: Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Hansen Shapiro for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and featured her on our podcast; we are both professional friends with DeSisto; and we gave a book talk at a fundraiser for the Maine Trust last fall.
Google caves
I learned this last night from journalist Dan Gillmor’s Bluesky feed: Google has apparently become the first of the internet map publishers to give in to Donald Trump’s ridiculous demand that the Gulf of Mexico now be referred to as the Gulf of America.
“I typed Gulf of Mexico into Google Maps,” Gillmor wrote. “It edited my query without permission and showed me the Trump cult invention that isn’t and never will be the real thing.”
At least as of this writing, Apple Maps and Microsoft’s Bing Maps are sticking with the Gulf of Mexico. But who knows what we’ll find tomorrow?
After Trump announced that he was renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain in Alaska (it is reverting back to Mount McKinley), The Associated Press issued guidance for its bureaus and any other news outlets who use its stylebook.
The AP will continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico, which is an international body of water whose name has 400 years of tradition behind it; but it will go along with Mount McKinley because it is entirely on U.S. territory. It was only in 2015 that President Barack Obama issued an order restoring the mountain’s original Indigenous name.
By the way, the U.S. Geological Survey is going with Gulf of America too — but that’s hardly surprising given that it’s a federal agency.
No thanks to their owners
Good work is the best answer to the damage that two billionaire owners have done to their storied newspapers.
Semafor reports that The Washington Post has seen an upsurge in web traffic since Trump’s chaotic return to office, notwithstanding owner Jeff Bezos’ untimely killing of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election. One especially hot story: a report on the White House’s illegal federal spending freeze.
Meanwhile, Sarah Scire reports for Nieman Lab that the Los Angeles Times experienced a rise in paid subscriptions during the recent wildfires even though the paper had temporarily dropped its paywall. Like Bezos, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong canceled a Harris endorsement, provoking outrage, resignations and cancellations.
Gotta Know Medford has made its long-awaited debut, bringing real journalism back to this medium-sized city a few miles northwest of Boston for the first time in several years. It looks great, and I can’t wait to dig in.
Congratulations to founders Nell Escobar Coakley, Chris Stevens and Wendall Waters!
Former headquarters of the Portland Press Herald in Maine, now a luxury hotel. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.
I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot more about the National Trust for Local News and especially its newspapers in Maine, anchored by the Portland Press Herald. The National Trust’s co-founder and CEO, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, stepped down last week, and I’ve heard from serious people that substantial cuts may be coming.
While we’re waiting, though, I recommend this thoughtful analysis by Rick Edmonds, who writes about the business of news for the Poynter Institute. He speculates that one reason the National Trust may have run into trouble was that it morphed from a philanthropic venture that acquired newspapers into a nonprofit organization that saw its mission as actually running them.
In an interview last summer, Dr. Hansen Shapiro told Edmonds, “half-joking,” that “we are becoming like Gannett or McClatchy,” two chains notorious for cutting costs at their newspapers through top-down management. The difference was that the National Trust’s management was focused on improving its papers rather than squeezing out every last drop of revenue. But as Edmonds writes in a piece that was published on Thursday:
In practice, though, that meant not only ownership but decision-making had migrated up to a central office. The trust had become out of sync with the mantra that news organizations work best when they are owned and run by those closest to the local communities.
The National Trust’s first move was to acquire 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs back in 2021, which Ellen Clegg and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News.” It later expanded into Maine and Georgia, and today owns about 60 papers.
Last summer, Hansen Shapiro told Edmonds that the National Trust was shifting from 25% investments and 75% execution to the reverse. In other words, what was originally intended as a project to save newspapers from chain ownership and then run them with a light touch morphed into something much more hands-on.
That has played out in an especially painful way in Maine, where Press Herald editor Steve Greenlee left to take a position at Boston University last year (in an email with Edmonds, he cryptically referred to leaving “at a time of great stress”), and Lisa DeSisto, the longtime publisher of the Press Herald and CEO of the Maine Trust for Local News (essentially a subsidiary of the National Trust), abruptly exited from her job in December.
My usual caveats: Hansen Shapiro is featured in our book and has been on our podcast; DeSisto is a professional friend of ours; and we were the guests at a fundraiser for the Maine Trust last October.
Update: Jody Jalbert has resigned as publisher of the Sun Journal of Lewiston, which is a Maine Trust paper. The story is paywalled, but according to Jalbert’s LinkedIn profile, she had been with the paper in various business-side positions since 1988. That’s a lot of experience to be walking out the door.
This past weekend I listened to a bracingly entertaining conversation that the public radio program “On the Media” conducted with tech journalist Ed Zitron. Co-host Brooke Gladstone had billed it as a chance for Zitron to make sense out of DeepSeek, the new Chinese artificial-intelligence software that purports to do what ChatGPT and its ilk can do for a fraction of the cost — and, presumably, while using a fraction of the electric power burned by American AI companies.
But it was so much more than that. Maybe you’re familiar with Zitron. I wasn’t. As I learned, he is a caustic skeptic of American AI in general. In fact, he doesn’t even regard the large language models (LLMs) that we’ve come to think of as AI as the real thing, saying they are nothing but an error-prone scam that is attracting fast sums of venture capital but will never make any money. Here’s a taste:
The real damage that DeepSeek’s done is they’ve proven that America doesn’t really want to innovate. America doesn’t compete. There is no AI arms race. There is no real killer app to any of this. ChatGPT has 200 million weekly users. People say that’s a sign of something. Yes, that’s what happens when literally every news outlet, all the time, for two years, has been saying that ChatGPT is the biggest thing without sitting down and saying, “What does this bloody thing do and why does it matter?” “Oh, great. It helps me cheat at my college papers.”
And this:
When you actually look at the products, like OpenAI’s operator, they suck. They’re crap. They don’t work. Even now the media is still like, “Well, theoretically this could work.” They can’t. Large language models are not built for distinct tasks. They don’t do things. They are language models. If you are going to make an agent work, you have to find rules for effectively the real world, which AI has proven itself. I mean real AI, not generative AI that isn’t even autonomous is quite difficult.
As you can tell, Zitron has a Brit’s gift for vitriol, which made the program all the more compelling. Now, I am absolutely no expert in AI, but I was intrigued by Zitron’s assertion that LLMs are not AI, and that real AI is already working well in things like autonomous cars. (Really?)But given that we just can’t keep AI — excuse me, LLMs — from infesting journalism, I regarded Gladstone’s interview with Zitron as a reason to be hopeful. Maybe the robots aren’t going to take over after all.
