By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
It’s time for your occasional reminder that though Media Nation is a free source of news and commentary, it takes a lot of work to produce. I’d appreciate it if you would consider becoming a supporter for just $5 a month. Supporters receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.
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A great bookstore is one that introduces you to books that you didn’t know you wanted to read. Amazon doesn’t do that. Most physical bookstores succeed only partially.
Over the summer, though, our travels took us through Manchester, Vermont, where we visited the Northshire Bookstore, an independent outlet that has the advantage of being both enormous and lovingly curated and thus well-stocked with books I might not have heard of. That’s where I discovered Caleb Carr’s “My Beloved Monster,” a memoir about his life with a Siberian cat named Masha.
This is a supporters-only post available in the weekly Media Nation newsletter at Patreon. To read the rest of this post and to get a wrap-up of the week’s content, photography and a song of the week, please sign up here.
After several weeks of thinking about it, I’ve switched to a new theme for Media Nation. (“Theme” is WordPress-speak for “design.”) I’m still on the lookout for something better, but for now I think this will be an improvement. Why did I do this?
• My previous theme, Lovecraft, struck me as a bit too artsy for what I was looking for. The new theme, Twenty Sixteen, is more straightforward and newsier.
• As one of WordPress’ official themes, Twenty Sixteen receives regular maintenance updates. Lovecraft hadn’t been updated since 2022.
• With Lovecraft, you couldn’t see a link for commenting unless you clicked through to the individual post. As a result, I had to add “Leave a comment | Read comments” by hand to each post. Twenty Sixteen not only handles that automatically, but it gives you a count of how many people have commented. That way, you’ll know whether it’s worth clicking or not.
• Change is good.
Let me know what you think. If you have any suggestions for a better theme, I’m all ears.
The idea behind having a weekly newsletter for paid supporters is to offer something extra. Today, though, I thought I would unlock my most recent newsletter so that you can see what you’ll get if you join for $5 a month. Every Thursday I send out a collection of commentary, photography, a round-up of the week’s posts and a song. I hope you’ll consider joining. To become a paid supporter, just click here.
Three and a half years ago, I decided to try something new. Although Media Nation is and always will be a free source of news and commentary, I added a paid tier for readers who wanted to support my work. At the time, Substack was going through a major growth period, and the historian Heather Cox Richardson had signed up enough paid subscribers to bring in more than $1 million a year even though access to her newsletter was free. I thought: Why not?
Well, I’m not making $1 million a year, but I did recently fulfill the extremely modest goal I’d had right from the start. It was the result of a small but unexpected surge, and I’m hoping that I can build on that.
Unfortunately, because I started doing this way back in 2005, I’m somewhat constrained in terms of the UX. In order to become a paid supporter, you need to sign up at a different site, Patreon, where you’ll be asked to pay $5 a month. The terminology is more confusing than it should be, too. You can subscribe to Media Nation for free, and if you do that, you’ll receive new posts to this blog in your inbox. But that’s not the same as becoming a paid supporter, which will get you a weekly newsletter with exclusive early content, a round-up of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.
I began blogging about the media since February 2002, which puts me in either the late first wave or early second wave of media bloggers, not all that far behind the legendary Jim Romenesko. He’s retired; I’m still at it. I hope you value what I do enough to become a supporter. All you need to do is click here. Thank you.
Every Thursday I post a newsletter that’s exclusively for supporters of Media Nation. I’m especially proud of the new one — a look at how critics of Jeff Bezos’ stewardship of The Washington Post and John Henry’s ownership of the Red Sox have converged into a miasma of resentment and envy. Each newsletter also includes photography, a round-up of the week’s posts and a Song of the Week. I’m especially pleased with what I dug up this week, and I think you’ll be, too.
I launched Media Nation as a source of news and commentary in 2005. It’s free and will remain so. But I hope you’ll consider becoming a supporter for $5 a month. Just click here.
Some notable front pages reporting Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels — payments aimed at keeping their sexual encounter out of the headlines just before the 2016 election.
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• Are we really doing this again? Richard Stengel argues in the paywall-protected Atlantic (free link) that news organizations should publish their journalism for free during the 2024 campaign lest readers be driven to non-paywalled sources of misinformation and disinformation. He provides no advice on how these news organizations are supposed to pay their journalists, and he makes no mention of the many high-quality sources of free news that still exist — among them The Associated Press, NPR, the PBS “NewsHour,” The Guardian, BBC News, local public radio and television stations, national network newscasts and local TV newscasts. You may disdain that last suggestion, but surveys show that local TV news is the most trusted source of journalism we have, and it’s an important source of breaking news.
• Still more on the internal crisis at NPR. Alicia Montgomery, who held several high leadership posts at NPR before moving to Slate, has written her own essay about what’s wrong with the network’s culture, partly in response to Uri Berliner, partly to get a few things of her own off her chest. Montgomery’s essay is nuanced, and she acknowledges that NPR’s culture can be more than a little twee. But here’s the money quote: “In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” That certainly reflects my experience as a listener — that though NPR may tilt left on culture, its coverage of politics too often indulges in both-sides-ism at its most reductionist. And here’s yet another piece prompted by Berliner’s essay, this one by NPR anchor Steve Inskeep.
• Two digital news giants walk into a room… Richard Tofel, a founder and former president of the investigative nonprofit ProPublica, recently interviewed Evan Smith, a founder and the former CEO of The Texas Tribune, the largest statehouse nonprofit in the U.S. My colleague Ellen Clegg, who wrote about the Tribune for our book, “What Works in Community News,” offers her perspective on the encounter — which took place not in a room but in Tofel’s must-read newsletter, “Second Rough Draft.” As Ellen writes: “When two legends in digital publishing sit down to talk in unvarnished terms about the past, present and future of nonprofit journalism, it’s worth noting. And reading.”
The Boston Globe has named Brendan McCarthy as the editor of the Spotlight Team, its investigative unit. According to an announcement by executive editor Nancy Barnes and senior deputy managing editor Mark Morrow that sent to me by several newsroom sources:
Brendan will oversee an expanded investigative unit that will eventually include a deputy editor, five or six reporters with specialized skills, three quick strike reporters, and an engagement reporter/producer. Our goal is to tackle more significant investigations, while maintaining the ability to move quickly off the news. As the Spotlight editor, he will have full authority to work across the room as needed, especially when a big story breaks that demands deeper investigative work.
McCarthy replaces Patricia Wen, who is now the staff writer for the Globe’s Sunday magazine following seven years of running Spotlight.
Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen is the subject of an extraordinary editor’s note that reveals he helped facilitate the physician-assisted suicide of a terminally ill woman he was writing about. Cullen and photographer Jessica Rinaldi documented the death of Lynda Bluestein, a Connecticut woman who traveled to Vermont to take advantage of that state’s so-called “aid in dying” law.
Cullen describes a meeting with Bluestein and Dr. Diana Barnard, a Vermont physician who was helping Bluestein with the process. Present at the meeting were Cullen and members of a team that was making a film. “At one of the meetings in July with Barnard,” Cullen writes, “Lynda asked a Globe columnist [see editor’s note] and also a member of the documentary team following her story to sign the form saying she knew what she was doing and wasn’t under duress.” Cullen agreed to sign, which prompted this editor’s note from the Globe’s executive editor, Nancy Barnes:
From the editor:
The right to die has long been a controversial issue in many societies, and especially in some religious communities.
Last year, Globe reporter and columnist Kevin Cullen and photographer Jessica Rinaldi set out to chronicle Connecticut resident Lynda Bluestein on her mission to die on her own terms in Vermont, which has a “medical aid in dying” provision. Our intent was not to advocate for this issue, but to share an important perspective and a very personal, albeit wrenching, story.
Vermont’s law required two witnesses to sign a form attesting that Bluestein was in a clear state of mind when she made this decision, and they could not be family members, doctors, any beneficiaries, a nursing home owner or employee, etc.
Bluestein, with the support of her doctor, asked two people who were with her on July 10 to attest to this for her. Reporter Kevin Cullen was one of those people and he agreed to do so — a decision Cullen regrets. It is a violation of Globe standards for a reporter to insert themselves into a story they are covering. That it was intended primarily as a gesture of consideration and courtesy does not alter that it was out of bounds.
After reviewing these details, we have concluded that this error did not meaningfully impact the outcome of this story — Bluestein died on Jan. 4 and she likely would have found another signatory in the months before then. For that reason, we chose to publish this powerful story, which includes exceptional photojournalism, while also sharing these details in full transparency.
Nancy Barnes
Boston Globe executive editor
This is not the first time that Cullen has run afoul of the Globe’s ethics policies. In 2018, he was suspended for three months following an investigation that determined he had fabricated details about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings in radio interviews and at public appearances. A review of his work for the Globe revealed no problems beyond a few minor errors of fact.