Media – Page 13 – Media Nation

The Globe’s new Starting Point lead writer was co-writer of the Times’ morning newsletter

In her recent New Year’s message to readers, Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry listed an expanded morning newsletter as one of her goals for 2025. Today the Globe took a step toward accomplishing that goal, hiring Ian Prasad Philbrick, co-writer of The New York Times’ flagship newsletter, The Morning, to serve as chief writer for the Globe’s Starting Point.

According to Philbrick’s LinkedIn page, he’s currently living in Washington, but the Globe’s announcement says that he plans to relocate to the Roslindale area, where he has family.

No word in the announcement whether Starting Point will move from three days a week to five, which strikes me as a necessity, but perhaps that will be the next step. I should note that the Globe has a number of other newsletters, including a weekday-morning offering called The B-Side, which is part of Globe Media’s free Boston.com site and aimed at a younger audience.

What follows is the announcement to the newsroom from Jacqué Palmer, senior editorial director for newsletters; Teresa Hanafin, the editor of Starting Point; and Heather Ciras, deputy managing editor for audience.

We’re thrilled to announce that Ian Prasad Philbrick, a former co-writer of The Morning newsletter from The New York Times, has joined the Globe as our lead Starting Point writer.

Ian not only co-wrote The Morning, but was also a key player in its ongoing development since its inception five years ago. He has the journalistic mindset, skills, and strategic foresight required to successfully helm a flagship newsletter like Starting Point. We are delighted to have him step into this role and help us reach our subscription goals.

Ian’s former colleagues raved about his ability to write big, sweepy, and informative stories, but also dig into data, identify trends, and offer fresh takes on the old, but interesting. His former editor went on at length about how thoughtful, careful, and smart Ian’s work is — and the Starting Point team couldn’t agree more.

Ian grew up in rural Maine, taught in a Boston public school for City Year, and studied politics at Georgetown University. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée Madeline, his dog Pearl, and his cat Squash. In his free time, you’re likely to find Ian reading a presidential biography, jogging in the park, or trying out a new recipe (this pumpkin maple cornbread is a current favorite).

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Ian. He will soon relocate and is hoping to land near family in the Roslindale area. He reports to Jacqué, is edited by Teresa, and will sit with the audience team when he is in the office.

Thank you to all who have contributed to Starting Point since it launched in September. (And we may still come to you from time to time for guest essays.) Because of your work, we already have close to 30,000 subscribers, with more signing up every week. In fact, we regularly get emails from readers thanking us for this newsletter. If you have any questions about how we can highlight your work, please email the Starting Point team at startingpoint@globe.com.

The Washington Post suffers another self-inflicted blow as Ann Telnaes quits over a killed cartoon

The rough draft of the Ann Telnaes cartoon that was killed by her editor. Via Telnaes’ newsletter, Open Windows.

The latest self-inflicted blow to The Washington Post has been rocketing around the internet since Friday. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose wickedly funny editorial cartoons have graced the Post’s opinion section since 2008, quit after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes writes in her newsletter, Open Windows:

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

She’s wrong about one thing: Her resignation has created an enormous stir. Right now it’s trending at The New York Times and is No. 7 on The Boston Globe‘s most-read list. It’s all over social media as well.

The rough draft of Telnaes’ cartoon (above) shows Bezos and fellow billionaires Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of Open AI and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong kneeling before a giant statue of Trump. Three are holding bags of money in supplication. I’m not sure what Soon-Shiong is doing, though he appears to be wielding a container of lipstick. Mickey Mouse somehow figures into it as well.

Shipley, who was hired in 2022, is trying to do damage control, saying in a statement reported by New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin that he was simply engaged in normal editing and believed that the Post was running too much commentary about Trump’s billionaire courtiers:

Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

I’m going to take Shipley at his word. Opinion editors should assert themselves from time to time and insist on less repetition. But not in this particular instance. Given the fraught nature of Bezos’ recent Trump-friendly moves, including his decision to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund (which is what Telnaes was mocking in her cartoon), Shipley should have left this one go. By killing Telnaes cartoon, he acted in a deeply irresponsible manner at the worst possible time. And he lost one of his brightest stars.

I’ve enjoyed Telnaes’ work for years. During the Trump presidency, she often drew animated cartoons that were published on the Post’s digital platforms. Under her skillful pen, Trump was a grotesque figure, covered with makeup with his long red tie often reaching the floor.

Sadly, we are at a moment when editorial cartooning in general is on the decline, and it’s not a given that Telnaes will be picked up by another paper. The Times, which has been scooping up disaffected Posties, famously does not run editorial cartoons. Shipley says he hopes Telnaes will reconsider, but that seems unlikely.

No doubt Telnaes won’t come cheap. But several papers distinguished themselves with tough anti-Trump opinionating during the 2024 campaign, including The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I hope one of them sees fit to open up their checkbook and bring her on. The Atlantic, which like the Times has been hiring former Post staffers, is a possible landing spot as well.

At 50 hours, the audio version of Chernow’s Grant biography is scarcely shorter than the Civil War

I gave quite a bit of thought to whether I wanted to spend 50 hours with the audio version of Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant before deciding to take the plunge. I knew I was unlikely to find the time to read all 1,074 pages, and I wanted to know more about Grant and his era.

So I started it in mid-October during a drive to Portland, Maine, and kept at it an hour at a time, mainly on walks. I finished on New Year’s Day, and I’m here to report that it took longer for Grant to die than it did Joan of Arc during her interminable burning at the stake in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a 1928 silent film that we saw a few years ago accompanied by music written and performed brilliantly by a group of Berklee students.

I had previously listened to Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which, at 36 hours, was a romp by comparison. I don’t regret the time I spent getting to know Grant; Chernow is an eloquent writer and a skilled researcher, and, as I had hoped, I came away much more knowledgeable about his life and times.

But the level of detail about every trivial occurrence, and the repetitiveness about topics such as Grant’s alcoholism, military genius and ineptitude when not on the battlefield gets to be enervating after a while. As Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: “Chernow likes extreme research; if a Civil War luminary had hemorrhoids, you can read about them here.”

I find that I absorb information from an audiobook about as well as I do from print, but since I’m not taking notes, I can’t really go back and offer much in the way of detail. More than anything, though, what stood out was Grant’s dedication to Black equality. In Chernow’s telling, Grant and Abraham Lincoln were the foremost white advocates of civil rights until Lyndon Johnson. Grant eagerly made use of Black troops during the Civil War, pushed for an expansive approach to Reconstruction, and, as president, dispatched the military to the South to break the Ku Klux Klan.

Thus it’s more than a little disconcerting to come to the end of Grant’s presidency in 1877, when Northern support for Reconstruction was waning, and learn that he believed the Civil War — which claimed an estimated 750,000 lives — had all been for naught. It’s hard to disagree, as slavery in the South morphed into Jim Crow and lynchings, a reign of terror that extended into the 1960s and whose legacy has still not been entirely put behind us.

Media notes

• Unpacking New Orleans and Las Vegas. Around this time Thursday, authorities were reportedly investigating whether the terrorist in New Orleans had accomplices and if the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion might somehow be tied in. Then, too, Donald Trump was parroting a false report from Fox News that the New Orleans attacker had driven across the border from Mexico. Today, we know that none of it was true. As the “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” from the public radio program “On the Media” puts it: “In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong” and “There’s almost never a second shooter” — or, in this case, a second attacker.

• A challenge to the AP. Reuters and Gannett are planning to offer some sort of subscription-based service to regional and local news publishers, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, marking the next step in a partnership that began last spring. This is potentially bad news for The Associated Press, which has been losing customers because of its high prices. But it’s not clear how the arrangement will work. Reuters is a high-quality source of national and international news. Gannett, which publishes USA Today and owns some 200 local news outlets, is notorious for slashing its newsrooms and cutting their reporting capacity.

• Why local news matters. The Los Angeles Times has lost some 20,000 subscribers since owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and began embracing various Trump-friendly ideas, according to media reporter Oliver Darcy. Not good — but far fewer than the 250,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions over owner Jeff Bezos’ similar moves. The LA Times was starting from a smaller base, but there’s an additional factor that may be at play.

Under Bezos’ ownership, the Post reinvented itself as a nationally focused digital publication — making it relatively easy to cancel, since there are plenty of other sources of national and international news, starting with the Post’s ancient rival, The New York Times. By contrast, the LA Times is primarily a regional publication, not unlike The Boston Globe. Canceling the LA Times would mean losing access to important local and regional stories that no one else has.

A look back at the ‘attitude’ and ‘edge’ of the late Aaron Brown’s CNN newscast

Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown died on Sunday. His passing recalls what might be called a golden era in cable news. Brown, who worked for CNN from 2001 to ’05, hosted a prime-time newscast, competing with yet another prime-time newscast on MSNBC anchored by Brian Williams. Sadly, cable news has long since given way to politically oriented talk shows during the prime viewing hours of 8 to 11 p.m.

On June 20, 2002, I wrote a critical overview for The Boston Phoenix of what Brown and Williams were up to; at 2,700 words, it’s as much an artifact of a bygone era as Brown’s and Williams’ programs. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Library Archives, I’m republishing it here. As The Associated Press’ obituary puts it, Brown’s newscast was “quirky” and “cerebral.” There’s nothing remotely like it on television today.

Anchors away

While NBC grooms old-fashioned Brian Williams, CNN’s Aaron Brown is honing the new New Thing

By Dan Kennedy | The Boston Phoenix | June 20, 2002

For a man who’s supposed to be the future of network television news, Brian Williams looks an awful lot like the past.

Just 43 when it was announced that he would anchor the “NBC Nightly News” starting in 2004, Williams in some respects seems older than Tom Brokaw, whom he’ll succeed. At 62, Brokaw is the youngest of the Big Three (CBS’ Dan Rather is 70; ABC’s Peter Jennings is 63). And Brokaw’s folksy-yet-serious, everyman persona still seems modern compared to the stern omniscience of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and John Chancellor in the 1960s and ’70s — or, for that matter, of Ted Koppel today.

But though the Cronkites and the Koppels have always been able to trade on their experience and credibility, Williams — who anchors “The News with Brian Williams” on MSNBC at 8 p.m. — often comes off as stiff and portentous. He is said to be intelligent and funny, and he probably is. On camera, though, the expensive dark suit, the cuff links, the perfect tan, the just-so head angle designed to show off his “good” side (does he in fact have a left ear?), and the grave, hectoring tone can border on the ridiculous, especially on a slow news day.

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Uri Berliner’s disingenuous critique of NPR was the most-viewed Media Nation post of 2024

Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.

On this last day of 2024, I’m taking a look back before we plunge ahead into the new year. Media Nation’s 10 most viewed posts for the year range from my takedown of an intellectually dishonest critique of NPR, to CBS News’ reprimand of an on-air host for being too confrontational with a guest, to news that The Boston Globe is seeking to acquire Boston magazine. So let’s get right to it.

1. Fish in a barrel: Berliner’s case against NPR is based on false and out-of-context facts (April 11). Uri Berliner, a top editor at NPR, created a stir when he accused his employer of liberal bias in a long essay for The Free Press. The problem was that his examples didn’t hold up to scrutiny. To name just one: Berliner wrote that NPR failed to confess its sins after special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia, which isn’t even remotely what Mueller reported. There was a lot more disingenuousness where that came from. Berliner ended up resigning his post at NPR and going to work for — yes, The Free Press.

2. Less news, more happy talk: Why CBS News’ reprimand of Tony Dokoupil is so ridiculous (Oct. 8). Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates popped up on the CBS morning newscast to promote latest book, “The Message,” and faced an unexpectedly tough grilling over his anti-Israeli views from co-host Tony Dokoupil. Among other things, Dokoupil told Coates that his book woudn’t be out of place “in the backpack of an extremist.” Coates gave as good as he got, and he probably sold a few more books than he otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CBS News management called Dokoupil on the carpet — probably because his attempt to commit journalism contradicted the light banter that defines the morning-news format.

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3. A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis (Jan. 29). A Globe report about the death of a new mother at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital had something in common with the same forces that have hollowed out much of the local-news business. The mother’s death may have been caused by the hospital’s lacking a basic piece of equipment that had been repossessed because its corporate owner, Steward Health Care, wasn’t paying its bills. Steward, in turn, had been pillaged by a private-equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which is the same outfit that helped the notorious newsroom-gutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital acquire Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers in 2021.

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In Colorado, a Trumper is charged with assaulting a journalist of color; plus, media notes

“This is Trump’s America now.” Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.

This story has been slowly building since Dec. 18 and finally broke through over the weekend. A Colorado television journalist who’s a person of color was reportedly attacked by a taxi driver who attempted to choke him, demanded to know whether he was a U.S. citizen, and taunted him by shouting, “This is Trump’s America now.”

No doubt we can expect to see more of this as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House on Jan. 20. Trump has normalized attacks on the media, and we shouldn’t be surprised that some of his more unhinged supporters would escalate that hatred into actual physical assaults.

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I learned about the incident from Corey Hutchins, who writes Inside the News in Colorado, a weekly newsletter. He wrote about it on Dec. 27 and decided not to name either the alleged assailant or the journalist, though both had been previously identified by CBS Colorado. Hutchins explained:

I haven’t yet seen the victim say anything publicly beyond what he told police, though I’ve reached out, and you can imagine what kind of hate and harassment might come his way these days with his name widely known. As for the accused, I haven’t seen him reached for comment yet, either. A Mesa County Court official said on Thursday he is represented by a public defender; her voicemail stated she is out of the office until after the new year.

That was a smart ethical decision on Hutchins’ part, though it didn’t hold for very long. As he notes, the story was picked up by The Associated Press on Dec. 28 and has since been reported by a number of news outlets including CNN, Axios and The Guardian.

According to the AP account, the taxi driver, 39-year-old Patrick Thomas Egan, was arrested on Dec. 18 in Grand Junction after police say he followed reporter Ja’Ronn Alex for about 40 miles. Egan pulled up next to Alex at a stoplight and, according to police, said something like “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”

Alex is a native of Detroit with a Pacific Islands background, according to news accounts.

Alex drove his news vehicle back to his station, KKCO/KJCT and, after he got out, was reportedly chased by Egan, who demanded to see his ID. Egan is accused of then tackling Alex, putting him in a headlock and attempting “to strangle him,” police said. Coworkers and others came to Alex’s rescue and said he was starting to lose his ability to breathe.

Egan has not yet been formally charged but is being held on $20,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday.

Hutchins also quotes from a recent study finding that 37% of white respondents thought it was acceptable for political leaders to target journalists and news outlets. As the authors of the study, Julie Posetti and Waqas Ejaz, wrote for The Conversation: “It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face…. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.”

Media notes

• Through a glass, darkly. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is slow-walking a pledge she made during her 2022 campaign to bring the governor’s office under the purview of the state’s public-records laws, according to Matt Stout of The Boston Globe. Healey says she still supports “transparency,” and would like to extend the law to the legislative and judicial branches as well — but she now says the governor needs to be able to invoke unspecified “exceptions.” The public-records law is one of the most restrictive in the country.

• Battle of the MAGAs. In case you missed it over the holidays, Heather Cox Richardson has a good overview of the battle that broke out online last week between Tech Bro MAGA and White Racist Twitter. The fight is between newly minted Trumpers like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who don’t want immigration restrictions to apply to highly educated tech workers, and classic haters like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, who really, really want to prevent anyone who doesn’t look like from them entering the country. “Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base — which, indeed, have opposing interests — are at war,” Richardson writes.

• Coming attractions. Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry’s year-end message, published as a full-page ad in Sunday’s print edition and emailed to subscribers (you can read it here), lays out a number of goals for 2025. I found two especially worthy of note. The morning newsletter, Starting Point, will be expanded, which I hope means it will be come out every weekday instead of just on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Earlier would be better, too. By 7 a.m., most of us are off and running for the day.

Another smart goal: “Enhancing our high school sports coverage to further local engagement.” The region’s legacy newspapers are barely covering school sports these days, and many of the nonprofit startups don’t see it as part of their mission. More Globe sports coverage would fill a real need.

• Remembering Jimmy Carter. The late, great Jimmy Carter lived so long that several of the journalists who wrote his obituary years ago were no longer with us by the time their work was published. At The New York Times (gift link), Peter Baker shares a byline with Roy Reed, who died in 2017. The Washington Post’s obit (gift link) was written by Kevin Sullivan and Edward Walsh, the latter of whom died in 2014. Carter left office 43 years ago. For perspective, Franklin Roosevelt was in the midst of his second term 43 years before that.

Michelle Johnson’s journey; plus, the deer explosion in Mass., and fighting back against Musk

I’m driving in the slow zone this holiday week, but I do want to share a couple of stories and some information on how you can make Elon Musk unhappy as we count down the days until 2025.

First up: Marc Ramirez has written a fascinating story in USA Today about Michelle Johnson’s journey to learn more about her Black ancestors in the South. A lot of us in Boston media know Johnson as a retired journalism professor at Boston University and, before that, as a top editor at Boston.com during its early days in the mid-1990s.

Johnson and her spouse, Myrna Greenfield, traveled to the Carolinas earlier this year to research family members who had been slaves and who had continued to live in the South after the Civil War. At one point, she visited a home in North Carolina, where they were invited in by the white couple who lived there and shown the still-standing slave quarters out back. Johnson recalled:

They had taken the slave cabin and pieced it together with this old kitchen and use it as a guesthouse now. There was a ladder leaning up against it and they told us the enslaved persons working there would have used it to up to the second level. … I wondered if any of my relatives would have been there. Would they have worked in that kitchen? To be in that space where some of them might have been was really moving.

Having learned about her mother’s side of the family, Johnson told Ramirez that she is now hoping to delve into her father’s side.

Oh, deer

This past Saturday we were driving along the Mystic Lakes in Medford shortly before 10 p.m. when two deer suddenly bounded in front of us. My wife, Barbara, who was driving, swerved and missed the first but then hit the second. It crumpled by the side of the road; we drove off, then returned a few minutes later to see that it had evidently gotten up and bounded into the surrounding woods. We hope it wasn’t badly hurt.

It turns out that the deer population in Massachusetts is exploding. Scooty Nickerson reports for The Boston Globe that Massachusetts is home to about 160,000 deer, double the population in the 1990s.

As a result, more and more deer are running afoul of motor vehicles. Westport leads the state with 337 reported collisions between 2018 and 2022; Middleborough, where I grew up, was second, with 272.

Overpopulation is spreading disease and contribution to erosion, as the animals eat plants along shorelines. Sadly, one solution is more hunting, which is unpopular in Massachusetts, especially in the urban and suburban communities inside Route 495.

Avoiding collisions is a challenge. Deer can dart out in front of cars during daylight hours and in settled areas, as you can see from the police photo that accompanies the Globe story. But you might be able to improve your odds by driving slowly and staying alert if you find yourself driving through a wooded area after dark.

Make Elon cry

Elon Musk hates Wikipedia, because of course he does. The serial entrepreneur, destroyer of Twitter and now Donald Trump’s wingman went off on one of his periodic benders a few days ago, denouncing it as “Wokepedia,” questioning its finances and offering to donate $1 billion if it would change its name to “Dickipedia.” Gosh, what a brilliant sense of humor.

Wikipedia may be the last uncorrupted place on the internet, driven solely by its mission to make the world’s knowledge available to everyone. It’s not perfect, but the folks who run it do a much better job of keeping out trolls and vandals than was the case in the early days more than 20 years ago. Better understood as a research tool than a reference source, it is the ideal starting place for all kinds of projects — especially through the linked footnotes and external websites that are listed at the bottom of every article.

I’ve given in the past and decided to dig a little deeper following Musk’s outburst. I hope you will, too.

A flick of the mutant wrist

Adam Gaffin has posted a hilarious find at Universal Hub — an AI-generated X-ray of a wrist published by The Boston Globe that has all kinds of problems, including a third forearm bone and finger bones that don’t actually connect to anything. It’s now been online since Dec. 19, and it persists despite some mockery on Bluesky as well as Adam’s post.

Tracing back the roots of an odd story about a missing congresswoman

Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, at a reception in her honor last month in Washington. Photo via the House Appropriations Committee.

I wasn’t necessarily planning to write today, but I want to call your attention to an odd story that broke out over the weekend, and why I initially thought it was fraudulent.

On Sunday, I saw a post on Bluesky claiming that a Texas congresswoman named Kay Granger had disappeared for six months without anyone in the media taking note:

I started tracing it back, and I saw that the story had seemingly come from WCBM, a right-wing talk station in Baltimore, which is rather far from Texas. The headline: “‘Missing’ GOP Congresswoman Not Seen For Six Months Finally Found Living at Dementia Care Home.”

The WCBM article, in turn, linked to a news outlet called The Dallas Express. I started doing some due diligence and found a 2023 article from the Texas Observer 2023 headlined “The ‘Dallas Express’: Your Go-To Source for Right-Wing, Astroturf News.” That’s where I learned that the Express may or may not be linked to Metric Media, a notorious chain of pink-slime websites — that is, websites that purport to offer local news but that are actually engaged in political propaganda. (The Observer noted that it’s not clear whether the Express is part of Metric Media or not, and that there have been threats of legal action.) I also learned that Carlos Turcios, the reporter who broke the story for the Express, is “a Young Latino Conservative Activist in the Dallas Fort Worth area.” In other words, not a journalist.

Finally, I discovered that there was a tribute to Granger held in Washington in November to mark her pending retirement from Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson was among those on hand. Granger was definitely there, as you can see from the above photo. That would certainly contradict the assertion that Granger had “disappeared” for six months. Game, set, match — right?

Wrong. As news about Granger continued to spread, I went back and read Turcios’ story in The Dallas Express more carefully. It turns out he did not assert that Granger hadn’t been seen in six months — rather, he reported that she hadn’t taken part in any House votes for six months. The “not seen for six months” line was an exaggeration added by WCBM. Everything else has subsequently checked out. Granger is, indeed, in an elder-care facility in Forth Worth, and, in a follow-up, her son told The Dallas Morning News that she has been experiencing “dementia issues.”

So the biggest remaining question is this: Why was it left to The Dallas Express to uncover Granger’s disappearance from Congress? The Texas political scene, after all, is well-covered. Granger’s district is served by two major daily newspapers, the Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Texas Tribune, one of the largest nonprofit news organizations in the country, has a presence in Washington.

I began this item with a post by journalist and historian Garrett Graff calling this an “incredible testament to the loss of local news coverage.” Not quite. I’d say the coverage was in place, but for some reason it failed. While editors are celebrating the holidays this week, I also hope they take a few moments to ask themselves a time-honored question: Why we no have?

Meanwhile, kudos to Carlos Turcios and The Dallas Express. I hope people start taking them more seriously. I know I will.

Update: Damon Kiesow trod similar ground.

The Globe’s Sandra Birchmore story is a shocking tale of depravity, expertly told

I feel like I ought to offer something uplifting this holiday week, but what I’ve got this morning is the opposite of that. Last week The Boston Globe published a two-part story (here and here) on Sandra Birchmore, the young woman who, we were originally told, died by suicide after years of a sexual affair with a Stoughton police officer. She was pregnant, and the officer, Matthew Farwell, may have been the father.

Following an investigation by federal authorities, Farwell has since been charged with murder. The Globe story, by Laura Crimaldi and Yvonne Abraham, unfolds in narrative style, telling a horrendous tale involving allegations that Farwell and Birchmore began having sex when she was just 15 (which would be statutory rape) and that she also had sex with Farwell’s brother, William, and another officer, Robert Devine; Devine denies the allegation. Crimaldi and Abraham write:

The immense power imbalance that Birchmore endured in her life persisted long after she was gone. Time and again, investigators gave the benefit of the doubt to the police officer now accused of killing a young woman who was rarely, if ever, granted the same consideration.

It’s a story that alleges shocking depravity on the part of the officers. It’s hard to come away from it with anything but despair over the human condition. But a Globe editorial accompanying the story does manage to find some heroes: Birchmore’s family and friends, who never gave up their conviction that Sandra had not killed herself.

“If it weren’t for the friends and family of Sandra Birchmore who pushed and prodded for justice after her death, there’s a good chance that Matthew Farwell, the man accused of killing her, would still be walking free,” the editorial says, adding: “The fact that Farwell was a police officer raises disturbing questions about whether police are capable of investigating themselves.”

The story appears in yesterday’s Sunday magazine as well as online. The Sandra Birchmore saga has received an enormous amount of coverage during the past few years, but Crimaldi and Abraham’s account will make you see it in a new light, through Birchmore’s eyes and those who believed in her. Depressing and upsetting though it may be, it is also a triumph of narrative journalism.