The last Sunday before Labor Day is not normally a time when newspaper editors feel the need to put their best foot forward. More often it’s an opportunity to mail it in and wait a couple of weeks for when people will be back from vacation.
So I just want to take note that the Boston Globe published two major packages on Sunday: the latest Spotlight Team installment of “The Desperate the Dead,” about the crisis created by closing most of the state’s mental hospitals, and “The Issue of Crime,” produced by the Ideas section, looking at crime from a variety of angles.
Each was given a vibrant digital treatment, which is a key part of eventually weaning readers away from print.
My personal Sunday favorite was Kathryn Miles’s Globe Magazine story on Gerry Largay’s last days after becoming lost on the Appalachian Trail in Maine. As someone who has done a lot of backpacking in New England, I know how easy it is to lose the trail. In her case, the outcome was tragic.
Given that the Globe is in the midst of yet another round of downsizing (including possible layoffs), the paper’s continued good work is encouraging.
Gawker’s problems began in October 2012, when the gossip site ran a portion of a sex tape featuring wrestler Hulk Hogan, which Hogan claimed violated his privacy and infringed on his publicity rights.
It was later revealed that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—an outspoken critic of the website—provided financial backing for Hogan’s suit, which came to a close earlier this year, when a Florida court ruled in Hogan’s favor and the jury handed down a $140 million verdict that ultimately doomed the media company.
Here, Dan Kennedy, associate professor in the School of Journalism and a nationally known media commentator, weighs in on the effect of shuttering the gossip site on the broader media landscape and the “troubling” mechanics behind the suit that served as its demise. Its termination, he says, could empower “wealthy interests” to use the legal system to drive media organizations out of business.
Before the web, there was Prodigy. And no, it wasn’t much good.
The web—or, as we used to call it, the World Wide Web—is 25 years old this month. On August 6, 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who had outlined his idea for the web two years earlier, published the first website. It was, as the Telegraph put it, “a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages.”
Those of us who were there at the beginning understood that this was a big deal. Even so, the revolution it launched could not have been imagined. As Virginia Heffernan put it in her recent book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, “The Internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization.” And the web provides the road map that makes the internet navigable.
There she goes again. My friend and WGBH colleague Callie Crossley won top honors for her radio commentaries at the recent National Association of Black Journalists conference in Washington. The press release follows.
BOSTON—WGBH News award-winning journalist Callie Crossley was recognized with top honors in the Commentary category at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Conference, held August 3-7 in Washington Crossley, host of WGBH News’ Under the Radar, won first place for Top 15 Markets for her three-part compilation of commentaries “Race Matters: Echoing History,” which explores current racial issues in the United States through the lens of the country’s civil rights history.
“We are proud of Callie and have long believed that her observations are the best offered by local radio,” said Phil Redo, WGBH General Manager for Radio. “Callie’s examination of race and media coverage has come at a critical moment in the current political climate, and her unwavering commitment to telling the stories that are often overlooked is what makes her so original and so compelling.”
A former producer for ABC News’ 20/20, Crossley is also a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow through the Council of Independent Colleges, guest-lecturing at colleges and universities about media, politics and the intersection of race, gender and media. She also holds two fellowships at Harvard University. Crossley was a producer for Blackside Inc.’s Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, which earned her an Oscar nomination, a National Emmy Award and the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award. Crossley has earned the Associated Press, Edward R. Murrow and Clarion Awards for writing, producing and hosting.
In addition to hosting Under the Radar, which features stories not usually covered by traditional media outlets, Crossley appears weekly on WGBH’s Beat the Press, examining local and national media coverage, and Basic Black, focusing on current events concerning communities of color. She also contributes to national programs including CNN’s Reliable Sources, PBS’s NewsHour and PRI’sThe Takeaway.
Under the Radar airs Sundays from 6 to 7 p.m. EDT on 89.7 WGBH. Crossley’s weekly commentaries air Mondays during WGBH’s Morning Edition.
Officials with the Boston Police Department are upset over a tough cartoon about police shootings of black men that appeared on the opinion pages of Monday’s Boston Globe. But the Globe’s editorial-page editor is standing by it. And the president of the local NAACP defends the cartoon as a satirical comment on a tragic reality.
The cartoon, by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose work is nationally syndicated, depicts a white police officer. In one frame, labeled “For White People,” he is seen holding a piece of paper that says “Miranda Rights.” In the other, “For Black People,” a piece of paper says “Last Rites.”
Yes, I would read a story about a cat that looks like a raccoon or, for that matter, a raccoon that looks like a cat. When I scroll through a digital newspaper, though, I’m looking for something else: journalism I need to be a well-informed citizen—and, OK, the occasional cat that looks like a raccoon.
By now you may have at least heard about a 19-minute rant by John Oliver on his HBO program Last Week Tonight in which he reminds us of newspapers’ central role in our democracy and laments their demise.
I’m on the road without my laptop. But my friends at WGBH News have posted a memo I received from a source earlier today in which Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory updated the staff on issues involving downsizing, possible layoffs, and a massive reinvention effort.
My first inclination today was to write something about this being a moment that we might look back on as the beginning of the end for the Trump campaign.
But rather than belabor the obvious, I’d like to examine the proper role of the news media in covering a campaign like this, which is utterly unique in the post-World War II era—possibly even in the post-Civil War era. Let me start by laying out what I hope the vast majority of you will regard as self-evident truths about the two major-party candidates.
In case you haven’t heard, the New York Post today is running 20-year-old nude photos of Melania Trump. The pictures were taken during a modeling session for which she was presumably paid. There doesn’t seem to be any scandal associated with the photos. And yet, last night, I saw a number of people denounce the Post‘s decision to publish them as “sexist.”
Is it? I wouldn’t have published the photos. You’ll notice that I’m not linking to them. Yet when various media outlets published a mostly nude photo of Scott Brown during his mercifully brief career as a national political figure, I don’t recall anyone denouncing that as sexist.
File this under “no big deal.” Especially after Donald Trump viciously attacked the Khans, the Constitution-waving Gold Star parents who spoke out against Trump’s hatred of Muslims at last week’s Democratic National Convention. That, folks, is a big deal.
Update: Here’s a worthwhile distinction. Not sure why I didn’t think of it myself.
not sure it's sexist but I think it's wildly inappropriate. Brown was a candidate; Melania is not.
