I started teaching full-time in 2005. Back then, large piles of The Boston Globe were distributed across Northeastern’s campus. Because students were able to pick up a free Globe on the way to class, I could ask them to bring the paper and be familiar with the main stories of the day.
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Those stacks disappeared years ago. Northeastern worked out a deal for discounted digital subscriptions for students, and I and most of my colleagues in our journalism school required them. But free distribution didn’t return until earlier this year, when Northeastern renegotiated its arrangement with the Globe. Now Northeastern picks up the cost of a digital subscription, and it is free to students, faculty and staff. I actually canceled the paid subscription we’d had since the mid-’80s (digital-only in recent years) and made the switch.
We got back from Chicago on Saturday after a great vacation with Barbara’s sister, Mary, and her husband, Eric. I’ll have more to say, especially about our visit to the Obama Presidential Center. Today, though, I want to lament the demise of print newspapers and offer some suggestions on how both publishers and airports could make for a better flight.
We flew out on Tuesday. Before boarding at Logan, I visited several Hudson News stores looking for a Wall Street Journal. There were no papers at all — not even USA Today. We got on board, and I was able to connect to Southwest’s wifi service for $8. Given the price of a newspaper these days, that seemed like a reasonable tradeoff. It cut out briefly a couple of times, but I was able to make my way through most of the content on the iPhone app.
On Saturday, I got up early and hit a couple of 7-Elevens near our hotel. Nothing. Needless to say, at one time I’d have been able to grab a free paper at the hotel, but no such luck. Once again, Hudson News stores at Midway were bereft of papers, but I figured I could just pay for wifi. I could not — no service was available. I looked a photos on my phone, stared into space and dozed off briefly. Fortunately, it was a short flight.
Now, you could say I should have brought a book, and yes, I guess I should have. But I didn’t realize it would be impossible to get a paper. It seems to me that at least a few people in airports would like newspapers, especially given the spotty wifi on airplanes. Since Hudson News is occupying space by virtue of a contract with a governmental entity, you’d think it might be required that they carry, say, three national newspapers.
At one time in the not-too-distant past, an absence of print newspapers wouldn’t have been a problem, at least not if you had a Kindle. Amazon used to offer a wide range of papers, and you could buy a single copy for a few bucks. Since the entire edition was downloaded to your device, you didn’t need connectivity. It was a great benefit, and I don’t understand why Amazon ended it.
I do have a solution, though. Why can’t newspaper apps have an option to download that day’s paper? The Boston Globe does, so next time I’ll save it for the plane. But why not The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? It seems like a natural benefit to offer to paid subscribers.
More: After I posted this, I learned from Bluesky user @nationalsliker.bsky.social that The Wall Street Journal offers a separate iPhone app for the print edition that lets you download that day’s paper, which I’m going to try on the train later this morning. (The Washington Post offers the downloadable print edition in its iPhone app if you click on the search tool.) And commenter John Caddel reports that the Journal sends him a daily email of the paper in PDF form.
Katie Kingsbury, the opinion editor at The Times, said in a memo to her staff that Mr. Douthat made the case for “a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism.”
“He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring,” she added.
Douthat is incredibly boring, and I find it hard to imagine that Kingsbury disagrees. I also doubt she’ll have much trouble finding a more engaging conservative to replace Douthat if that’s what she wants to do. She might consider Kevin Williamson of The Dispatch, who, like Douthat, is a conservative Catholic, and whose recent takedown (sub. req.) of JD Vance’s book “Communion” is both hilarious and devastating.
As for Douthat, I thought perhaps CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton were planning to use him as a commentator. Nope. He’ll be a full-fledged correspondent, despite having no television experience and, as far as I know, no reporting background.
Bill Siroty was an early supporter of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Photo (cc) 2003 by Elvert Barnes.
Bill Siroty, a New Hampshire political activist who died Sunday at 75, was one of the original political bloggers. I profiled him for The Boston Phoenix in November 2003 to find out how he’d turned his daily newsletter, New Hampshire News Links, into an influential outlet for political news ahead of that state’s presidential primary.
Paging through this 22-year-old story is like reliving the early days of the internet. There’s Chuck Todd, then with “Hotline,” now the retired moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” There’s James Pindell, then with PoliticsNH.com, now with The Boston Globe. There’s Deborah “Arnie” Arnesen, still a force on New Hampshire talk radio. And there’s Josh Marshall, still blogging at his Talking Points Memo site. This was all before social media, which has distorted politics — and the media — beyond recognition.
My condolences to Bill’s friends and family, including his husband, Bill Stelling.
An unlikely bigfoot
Meet Dr. Bill Siroty: Physician, Dean supporter, and New Hampshire’s indispensable media activist
The Boston Phoenix | Nov. 7, 2003
NASHUA, N.H. — The doctor sitting across the table from me in the Southern New Hampshire Medical Center cafeteria, sipping iced coffee late on a Friday morning, would not be on anyone’s list of media stars in this state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
William Siroty, a mild-mannered 52-year-old allergist and internist, doesn’t write about politics, analyze poll numbers, or blurt out pithy sound bites on TV talk shows. He speaks so softly that I have to ask him to repeat himself whenever a can goes clunk! in the soda machine behind me.
I’m heading out for a family wedding in a little while, but the media news keeps coming. Here are three stories you should be aware of.
📰 Trump backs down. “The federal government says it will drop its subpoenas compelling New York Times reporters to testify about anonymous sources in a case that involved President Donald Trump’s claims about a Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet” (CNN). My earlier coverage.
📰 Mass. Senate to boost public records. “Top Senate Democrats signaled Thursday they will seek a vote next week on legislation that would, like a bill passed last month in the House, subject both the governor’s office and the Legislature to some kind of public records framework, taking aim at the same topic already targeted by a question on the November ballot” (CommonWealth Beacon).
📰 Journalism cuts at UMass Dartmouth. “Student journalists at UMass Dartmouth are speaking out about what they say may be unfair treatment, or even retribution, after the university’s only journalism professor was let go — two months after a university dean wrote that the professor’s contract extension was already ‘approved’” (New Bedford Light).
Click here or on image to watch on Contrarian Boston.
On the latest edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we take a look at the Trump regime’s decision to subpoena New York Times journalists in an attempt to find out who told the paper about security problems on the new Air Force One, a corrupt gift from the Qatari government.
As we note, the Constitution does not protect journalists from having to identify their confidential sources if they are ordered to do so by a court. But the White House is running roughshod over long-established standards regarding how such demands ought to be handled.
We also examine how news organizations decided whether or not to carry Trump’s lie-infested speech about election security, and his threat to challenge the broadcast licenses of outlets that took a pass; and how the World Cup turned out to be a huge success in Greater Boston despite predictions by many in the media that we were headed for a disastrous confluence of chaos and gridlock. Plus, our panel’s Rants & Raves.
Emily is in the moderator’s seat, joined by our host, Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston; Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe, and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.
One of several planes that have been used as Air Force One. Photo (cc) 2015 by Gage Skidmore.
In the waning days of the last Congress in December 2024, a Republican senator killed efforts to pass a federal shield law that would have protected journalists from being forced to identify their anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents.
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The so-called PRESS Act, which had passed the House unanimously, died when Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas — acting at the behest of Donald Trump, who’d just been re-elected — objected to an attempt to pass it by unanimous consent. Cotton said that passage would turn senators “into the active accomplice of deep-state leakers, traitors and criminals, along with the America-hating and fame-hungry journalists who help them out.”
Now we see the consequences of Cotton’s recklessness. Michael M. Grynbaum reports in The New York Times that three of the five Times journalists who exposed security problems on the new Air Force One — a corrupt gift to Trump from the Qatari government — received subpoenas ordering them to reveal their sources.
Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt discredited the just-the-facts model of journalistic objectivity. Photo via the Encyclopedia Britannica.
On Nov. 21, 1954, Palmer Hoyt strode to the podium at the University of Arizona to accept the John Peter Zenger Freedom of the Press Award. Hoyt, the editor and publisher of The Denver Post, was being honored for his courage in standing up to Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist witch hunt — a notable exception to the timidity shown by much of the press in tangling with the Republican senator from Wisconsin.
Hoyt used the occasion to call out publishers who had enabled McCarthy’s campaign of lies and character assassination. As quoted in Bill Hosokawa’s 1976 book, “Thunder in the Rockies,” an authorized history of the Post, Hoyt told his audience, “It is true that the number of newspapers critical of McCarthy has grown during the last year or two. But there are still many of them who are his supporters, his apologists, even his devotees.” Moreover, he denounced McCarthy’s journalistic toadies for being “as short-sighted as they are self-destructive.”
The larger target of Hoyt’s disdain was the notion of journalistic objectivity, or at least a certain definition of that much-used and much-abused term.
Protesters on Monday in Biddeford, Maine. Photo (cc) 2026 by Emma Davis / Maine Morning Star.
For the second time in a week, an ICE agent has shot and killed a man, this time in Biddeford, Maine, southeast of Portland.
The circumstances are murky. The Trump regime claims that the victim of Monday’s shooting, a Colombian named Joan Sebastian Guerrero, was endangering public safety as he attempted to drive away. There’s no evidence for that, and given the official lies that were told about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year, we have every reason to be skeptical. It’s notable, too, that Guerrero was reportedly not even the person ICE was looking for.
Earlier today, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office put out a photo and a statement saying that he’s sick, not dead or comatose. The conspiracy theories started immediately. I’ll begin with a straight-news post on Bluesky from Phil Lewis, an editor at HuffPost:
Social media users started questioning when the newspaper he’s holding had been published. I’ve seen suggestions that it’s from April. Well, no. In fact, it’s the front page today’s Washington Post sports section. (And minor props to McConnell for grabbing the sports pages.)
Even more ridiculous: You can see in the top photo that McConnell has the requisite four fingers and a thumb on his left hand. Almost immediately, though, an image started circulating showing McConnell with five fingers, thus “proving” that the photo is an AI fake. If you hadn’t seen the original, you might even believe it. mfa08 is an anonymous Bluesky account with 1,000 followers.
