Best wishes to Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who’s recovering from heart surgery. Spring training isn’t going to be the same without him.
Category: Media
Wondering about that Globe settlement money? It’s legit.
If you received an email in the past day or so telling you that you are owed money resulting from a legal settlement with The Boston Globe, I’m here to tell you that it’s legit.
The email, from the “Ambrose v Boston Globe Settlement Administrator,” pertains to a $5 million settlement that the Globe reached last May for grabbing the identifying information of users who watch videos on its website and sending it to Facebook. Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub and I both wrote about it at the time (here and here), but I could barely remember it when I got my notice on Friday.
Subscribers are receiving anywhere from a week’s extension to, in my case, $158.03, which is also the amount reported by several other people I’ve been in contact with. I don’t know how they arrived at that exact figure, but I’ll take it.
A state judge trims back ex-Globe president’s lawsuit
Remember Vinay Mehra, the former Boston Globe Media president who sued the company for compensation he claims he was owed after he was fired in 2020? Well, his suit continues to wend its way through the legal system, but Suffolk Superior Court Judge Peter Krupp trimmed back Mehra’s demands recently, ruling that Mehra is not entitled to triple damages should he prevail. Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub, channeling Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, has more.
Earlier:
Bob Edwards, 1947-2024
One of the hazards of working as a media critic for many years is that you’ll inevitably run afoul of people you admire. There was, for instance, the time that Mike Wallace called me a “son of a bitch.” And Bob Edwards, the host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” once complained bitterly to me in an email about something that I wrote — and used a general mailbox so I couldn’t respond. Edwards, a steadfast companion to millions on their morning commutes until he was forcibly retired in 2004, has died at the age of 76. He and his incomparable voice will be missed.
Correction: It turns out that Wallace called me a “bastard,” not a “son of a bitch.” Much better!
Bluesky makes its long-awaited public debut just as Threads skepticism sets in
Is Bluesky about to have its moment?
Since the fall of 2022, when Elon Musk acquired Twitter and proceeded to take a wrecking ball to it, those of us who are heavy users of short-form, text-based social media have been looking for a new platform. I bet heavily on Mastodon, but though I find it to be a pleasant environment most of the time, with a lot of activity and high engagement, it has not been adopted by more than a handful of news organizations, journalism think tanks, the Massachusetts political community and ordinary people. Those folks have, for the most part, remain firmly planted on Twitter/X.
Threads is a different matter. Since it debuted last summer, the platform has largely fulfilled its promise of becoming a better version of Twitter, a place to have conversations about news, journalism and other topics with less sociopathy than you encounter in Musk’s hellhole. Threads reportedly has about 130 million active monthly users, compared to 500 million on Twitter, which is pretty impressive for a service that’s less than a year old and is still rolling out features.
Unfortunately, it appears that Threads will not fulfill the hopes of its most news-obsessed users. On Friday, Mark Zuckberg’s Meta, which owns Threads, repeated previous statements that it has no intention of becoming a platform that is heavily focused on politics. Posts that the almighty algorithm deems political will not show up in the “For You” listing, which is what you see when you first log on and which is determined by software that thinks it knows what you’re interested in. Any accounts you’re already following will continue to show up, but discovering new accounts will become more difficult. The change also applies to Instagram.
According to Adam Mosseri, who runs Threads and Instagram, “we’re not talking about all of news, but rather more focused on political news or social commentary.” But as Taylor Lorenz and Naomi Nix report for The Washington Post (free link), who’s to say what’s political? They quote Ashton Pittman, news editor of the Mississippi Free Press, who tells them:
If I post about LGBTQ rights, or about being a gay man, is that political? If I post about Taylor Swift, is that political because bad actors are making everything political? Everything is political if we’re honest with ourselves — it’s just about who’s defining what’s political and who gets to define that and what does it mean?
Which brings me back to Bluesky. Unlike Threads, the platform is not fully for-profit; unlike Mastodon, it’s not a nonprofit. Rather, it’s a public benefit corporation, which means that it’s a for-profit company that must serve the public interest in some way and that reinvests any profits it makes back in the operation. Of the three major Twitter alternatives, Bluesky has garnered the most skepticism. For one thing, among Bluesky’s founders is former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who thought selling out to Musk was just fine. For another, Bluesky’s rollout has been painfully slow. Until last week, you couldn’t join without an invitation, which is why it has just 3.2 million users, far behind Threads and Twitter.
After Bluesky finally opened itself up to the public, though, the influential tech writer Mike Masnick wrote an enthusiastic post at Techdirt saying he was “pretty excited” about where the platform is heading. What has Masnick most excited is Bluesky’s roll-your-own approach to content moderation. He writes:
For example, the company has added some (still early) features that give users much more control over their experience: composable moderation and algorithmic choice. Composable moderation lets users set some of their own preferences for what they want to encounter on social media, rather than leaving it entirely up to a central provider. Some people are more willing to see sexual content, for example.
But, the algorithmic choice is perhaps even more powerful. Currently, people talk a lot about “the algorithm” and now most social networks give you one single algorithm of what they think you’ll want to see. There is often a debate among people about “what’s better: a chronological feed or the algorithmically generated feed” from the company. But that’s always been thinking too small.
With Bluesky’s algorithmic choice, anyone can make or share their own algorithms and users can choose what algorithms they want to use. In my Bluesky, for example, I have a few different algorithms that I can choose to recommend interesting stuff to me. One of them, developed by an outside developer (i.e., not Bluesky), Skygaze, is a “For You” feed that … is actually good? Unlike centralized social media, Skygaze’s goal with its feed is not to improve engagement numbers for Bluesky.
For some time now, I’ve been using Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky more or less equally on the theory that we’re a long way from knowing which platform, if any, will emerge as the main alternative to Twitter. (I’m also still on Twitter, mainly for professional purposes, though I’ve locked my account and post less frequently there than on the other platforms.) Even though I have far fewer followers on Bluesky than elsewhere, I’ve found the engagement to be quite good and the content consistently interesting — more so than on Mastodon, and with less crap than on Threads.
We will never go back to the days when there was one platform where everyone gathered, for better or worse. But Bluesky seems like a worthy entry into the social media wars now that it’s (finally) open to the public.
A billionaire owner is fine as long as it’s the right billionaire
I’ve been defending billionaire media owners of late, noting that, despite the recent backlash, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis and others are far better off for being owned by the ultra-wealthy than they otherwise would be. So let me recommend Richard J. Tofel’s latest post about an owner who is unfortunately turning into a glaring exception — Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is currently in the process of dismanting the Los Angeles Times. Tofel writes:
What has already happened in LA — and the worst for the Times is likely ahead, as it’s hard to see how the paper hasn’t now been launched into a downward spiral — is not so much a refutation of the notion that rich people can save important publications as a reminder that it matters which rich people are involved.
Exactly.
The Globe portrays GBH News as an operation beset by turmoil and toxicity
Early this morning, The Boston Globe published an in-depth story documenting turmoil at GBH News, the local operation at the public media giant that encompasses television, radio and digital. The article, by Mark Shanahan, largely focuses on what some (but not all) employees describe as a toxic workplace culture and hostility toward “old white men.”
The leaders who come under criticism in Shanahan’s reporting are general manager Pam Johnston and executive editor Lee Hill, both of whom apologized to the staff after an internal investigation found, as Shanahan writes, that “senior managers made inappropriate comments about employees’ race, age, and gender by referring to ‘old white men’ when discussing newsroom diversity.” (Johnston turned down Shanahan’s request for an interview, but Ellen Clegg and I hosted her on our “What Works” podcast back in March 2022.)
The two most outspoken voices in the story belong to Jim Braude, co-host of GBH Radio’s “Boston Public Radio,” and Callie Crossley, host of “Under the Radar with Callie Crossley” and cohost of “The Culture Show,” both of which are radio programs.
“People fear for their jobs,” Braude, who’s white, told the Globe, adding: “People testified about mistreatment. Much of it was confirmed. No one was held responsible. Now people have to report to the same person they testified against and pray their supervisor doesn’t know they did.”
Crossley, who’s Black, has a very different view. “Bias, bullying, and intimidation cannot be tolerated, that’s absolutely correct,” she’s quoted as saying. “But I want to be clear: That. Did. Not. Happen. Here.” She also offers some context, saying, “People assume there’s a higher level of civility at public media stations, but I want to correct that. People may assume that based on ‘Masterpiece Theater,’ but newsrooms in public radio are exactly the same as they are anyplace else.”
There’s much more to the story, including angst over falling ratings, some good news on the digital side, and quotes from GBH’s newish chief executive, Susan Goldberg, that everyone is “moving on.” If you care about GBH and public media in general, I urge you to read it.
Beyond that, I really can’t say much. If you’re reading this, you probably know that I was part of GBH News for many years, mainly as a panelist on “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” throughout its entire run, from 1998 to 2021, but also as a weekly columnist for the website (a stint I ended in 2022) and an occasional guest on radio. I’m also friends with a number of current and former GBH folks.
Shanahan appears to have done an excellent job of bringing GBH’s internal problems into the open, where they belong (remember, this is public media), and I wish the station well in moving beyond this.
At long last, Bluesky opens up
I guess I’ll never get rid of those five unused invitations now. Bluesky, one of three significant Twitter alternatives, has finally dropped its invitation-only model and has opened the platform up to the public. I’ve been seeing comments that Bluesky blew it by opening up too late. I don’t know that that’s true. I’ve put most of my efforts into Threads and Mastodon, and I have issues with both. The future of all of these platforms is very much TBD.
CNN’s new chief moves to put some news in cable news
Surely it’s a good thing that new CNN chief Mark Thompson is going to replace the network’s morning show with — well, with news.
GBH-TV takes on the Kevin Cullen controversy
Because of a schedule conflict, I had to turn down an invitation to discuss the Kevin Cullen story on GBH-TV’s “Talking Politics” Friday. But I would have agreed with guests Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute and journalist Susie Banikarim of the podcast “In Retrospect” that The Boston Globe made the right call in disclosing that Cullen had signed a document attesting to the mental fitness of Lynda Bluestein, whose quest to die via physician-assisted suicide he was reporting on. I also agree with them that the Globe was on solid ground in running the story anyway along with an editor’s note disclosing Cullen’s ethical breach.
Of note was their response to host Adam Reilly’s question about whether Cullen should have been disciplined. Both said that maybe he was, and that whatever sanction he might have received was handled privately.