Media – Page 20 – Media Nation

Northeastern students weigh in on stories that ought to be getting more coverage

Andrea Martinez, chairwoman of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, stands outside the tribe’s polling location in Schurz, Nev., during the state’s 2024 primary election on June 11, 2024. Photo by Christopher Lomahquahu/News21.

When you page through the national and international news, it can sometimes seem like there is nothing going on except the presidential election campaign and the wars in Gaza (as well as the broader region) and Ukraine.

These are, in fact, news developments of monumental importance. But what would we be talking about if these issues were suddenly taken off the table? Once a semester, I ask my media ethics students to identify an undercovered story and explain why it should have gotten more attention.

It’s a big class — 30 students. And they are all smart and idealistic. I could easily highlight every story they found, but here is a representative sample of 11.

• Voting rights for Native Americans. Despite being recognized as U.S. citizens more than 100 years ago, Indigenous Americans in some places still face barriers to voting. Worse, some states are winding the clock backwards by making it more difficult for Native Americans to vote. This important reporting was produced by Carnegie-Knight News21, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available free of charge to other news organizations — including USA Today.

• The dangers of vaccine hesitancy. As I write this, I’m dealing with the after-effects of my Moderna COVID booster, which I got Monday along with a flu shot. Even now, though, I’d much rather put up with a little discomfort than get COVID. Here is a CBS News story that traces the history of vaccines from Benjamin Franklin to Jonas Salk to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s taken his anti-science views mainstream as a presidential candidate and, now, as a Donald Trump surrogate.

• Lost in space. The fate of two astronauts who are stuck on the International Space Station has gotten more attention lately, but it seems like we heard very little for months. I hesitate to call it a crisis, since it doesn’t seem that the two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are in any danger. But according to The New York Times, they will have wait until next year to come home on a SpaceX capsule rather than a Boeing vehicle, as originally planned.

• Let there be (too much) light. The pervasiveness of artificial light harms animals, including those of the human variety, since it’s a major contributor to overwork and maladjusted body clocks. Light pollution makes it more difficult for astronomers to do their jobs and wreaks havoc with the navigation systems of marine animals such as sea turtles. A story in National Geographic lays out the problem and suggests some steps that can be taken to ease it.

• Black women and breast cancer. In the modern media environment, it’s not just news organizations that are producing useful journalism. For instance, a blog post at the Mayo Clinic website informs us that Black women are “41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women,” even though they are a lower risk. The reason: breast cancer is more likely to be detected in Black women at a later stage, making it more difficult to treat.

• A horrifying protest goes unnoticed. You would think that when someone who demonstrates in favor of Palestinian rights lights himself on fire and dies of his burns, that story would get a great deal of attention. Yet the tragic story of Matt Nelson, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli consulate in Boston on Sept. 11, has attracted little notice. The left-leaning news site Common Dreams covered it, as did the Cape Cod Times, which noted that Nelson had ties to the Cape. Nothing in The Boston Globe, though; NBC Boston ran a brief story, and there was very little else, at least not in the local media.

• A recognition of public service. At a time when working for the government is disparaged, as it has been pretty much since the Reagan era, it’s useful to be reminded of the good work that many public servants perform. The Federal News Network reported last week on the 2024 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, known as the “Sammies,” which recognizes federal employees who have achieved excellence. How did a student find this story? She told me that she was reading The Washington Post and came across a link. The Post, of course, is the hometown paper for the federal government.

• Threatening the right to read. Book-banning doesn’t quite fall into the category of an undercovered story, but we don’t know as much about it as we ought to — especially on the state level and exactly what books are being banned. Word In Black, which describes itself as a “groundbreaking collaboration of 10 legendary Black news publishers,” reports that Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Utah and Tennessee are among the states that have restricted the books that public school students can access related to sex and Black history.

• Trump’s blood lust. This story from Rolling Stone is more than a year and a half old — but that’s what makes it important. As Trump was in the final months of his term in 2020 and early 2021, he embarked on an unprecedented spree of federal executions. As the story puts it, “Before 2020, there had been three federal executions in 60 years. Then Trump put 13 people to death in six months.” The article is behind a paywall (I accessed it through a library database), but for anyone who is horrified by the continued use of the death penalty, it would make sense to be reminded of Trump’s record during the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign.

• A deadly storm in Vietnam. It’s not unusual for our news feeds to be filled with weather-related stories, from the mundane (will it rain this weekend?) to serious coverage of floods and wildfires. Overseas, though, is another matter. Did you know, for instance, that Typhoon Yagi has claimed 143 lives in Vietnam, and many more people are missing? According to The New York Times, Yagi is just the latest example of a storm that was made more extreme because of climate change.

• The war on terror’s awful legacy. As a country, we have moved on from our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without ever coming to terms with the legacy of those conflicts. The New Yorker, with support from the Pulitzer Center, has gone back and reported on war crimes committed by U.S. forces, putting together a database of “the largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 — nearly eight hundred incidents in all.” These incidents include murder, sexual assault and other forms of abuse. It is interesting, to say the least, that Vice President Kamala Harris has gratefully accepted the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of the so-called war on terror. We should not forget what happened during those years.

An ethical dilemma for The Boston Globe after the host of its TV newscast endorses Harris

“Boston Globe Today” host Segun on a Harris-Walz fundraising call.

The Boston Globe has an ethical dilemma on its hands. Segun Oduolowu, who is the host of the Globe’s daily television newscast, “Boston Globe Today,” recently took part in a fundraising call for Vice President Kamala Harris and spoke enthusiastically on behalf of her presidential campaign.

But according to Jennifer Smith of CommonWealth Beacon, the newscast came under the control of the newsroom only recently, after the fundraiser, making it unclear whether Oduolowu violated the paper’s ethical guidelines.

Smith wrote that “the repercussions of his remarks are messy. The call was just two weeks before an internal email announced that the ‘Boston Globe Today’ show would be moving under newsroom control — likely subjecting it to a typical set of journalistic ethics rules.” (Disclosure: I’m a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory board.)

Oduolowu spoke for about seven minutes as part of an “African Diaspora for Harris-Walz” video event. Oduolowu’s remarks start here. Among other things, he said:

November 5, when you go to those polls, make the right decision for not just you, but the people who fought so hard for you to have that opportunity, to be in a call like this, to be in this country, to make that choice and put this woman in office…. I think the choice is simple.

Smith quoted a statement from the Globe that seems carefully worded to distance itself from Oduolowu’s actions without saying explicitly that he’d deviated from any ethical policy:

Boston Globe Media employees are expected to adhere to our company guidelines, standards, and policies which align with their role. In this case, the personal political comments made by an employee were their own and were not endorsed by or reflective of Boston Globe Media, nor were the comments shared via one of our products, platforms, or events.

Frankly, I’m confused. By all appearances, “Boston Globe Today” is an extension of the Globe’s journalism, presented as a newscast and frequently featuring interviews with Globe reporters.

But it does sound like any ambiguities are about to be eliminated, as Smith reports that editor Nancy Barnes sent an email to the staff on Sept. 10 announcing that “Boston Globe Today” would be moved “under the auspices of the newsroom.” The Harris-Walz call on which Oduolowu appeared took place on Aug. 26.

Trump’s threat to ABC shows that Nixon’s still the one; plus, media notes

It all goes back to Nixon. 1972 photo (cc) by Charles Harrity of The Associated Press.

Something that Donald Trump said after his disastrous debate with Kamala Harris served to confirm my Richard Nixon Unified Field Theory of Everything.

The morning after the debate, Trump called in to Fox News, and he was mighty unhappy. He began complaining about ABC News and its debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, who had the temerity to correct him when he said that undocumented immigrants are feasting on pets fricassee and that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, support “executing” infants after they are born. Then he issued a threat:

I think ABC took a big hit last night. I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Now, ABC is a network, and it doesn’t hold a license. But it does own stations in some of the largest media markets in the country, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. (The ABC affiliate in Boston, WCVB-TV Channel 5, is owned by the Hearst chain.) So even though no one can take away a non-existent license from the ABC network, a fact that Trump may or may not understand, he could threaten local licenses.

Which brings me to Nixon. After he won re-election in 1972, his presidency started to unravel over the Watergate scandal — and coverage of that scandal was being driven by The Washington Post. One of Nixon’s responses was to threaten (not in so many words, mind you) to pull the licenses from several television stations that the Post then owned. For instance, a close friend of Nixon’s, Cromwell Anderson, headed up a group that challenged the Post’s license at a Miami TV station. Then-publisher Katharine Graham wrote in her memoir (free link), “Personal History”:

Anderson began to move against our station in Miami in September of 1972. This happened to be the same month Nixon (as later heard on the tapes) said that The Post would have “damnable, damnable problems” about our license renewals, a phrase that was censored when the tapes were first released by the White House….

[T]he legal costs of defending the licenses added up to well over a million dollars in the 2½ years the entire process took — a far larger sum then than now for a small company like ours.

Back then, presidents and former presidents didn’t blurt out such threats on national television. They worked behind the scenes, and Graham couldn’t be sure if Nixon had a direct role in the license challenges or not. Then as now, though, allowing the government to have a say in regulating the media can lead to threats and retaliation — something that Nixon took advantage of, and that Trump would like to emulate.

Media notes

• My Northeastern journalism colleague John Wihbey and I spoke with Patrick Daly of Northeastern Global News about why some media outlets in the U.K. are charging readers an extra fee if they don’t want to be tracked by advertising cookies. I told Daly that the practice hasn’t caught on in the U.S. because most people don’t care all that much about privacy. Daly, by the way, is based in Global News’ London office, where Northeastern has a campus.

• The once-great Baltimore Sun has fired reporter Madeleine O’Neill for comments she made on the Sun’s internal Slack channel about the paper’s newish owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group chair David Smith. Among other things, the op-ed page has been running pieces by Smith’s buddies without disclosing that Smith has been funding the causes they’re pushing. Fern Shen of the Baltimore Brew has the story.

Talking about the media with ‘SouthCoast Matters’

About once a year I drive down to Taunton in order to appear on “SouthCoast Matters,” a public affairs program hosted by Paul Letendre, to talk about a variety of media issues.

This year Paul was joined by Lean Camara, the CEO at The New Bedford Light, a vibrant nonprofit news outlet. Part one of our conversation aired on Sept. 5 and part two on Sept. 7. Paul is a terrific host, and I always enjoy appearing on his program.

Kamala Harris may have turned in the best performance in the history of national TV debates

After Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, I was trying to think of a better performance than Harris’.

The proper superlative was hard to come by. Joe Biden humiliated Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice presidential debate but was no better than good enough against Trump in 2020. Barack Obama, for all his rhetorical gifts, was only a so-so debater. Ronald Reagan may have won the 1980 election when he turned to President Jimmy Carter and said, “There you go again,” but Reagan was hardly a master of thrust-and-parry. I have not gone back and watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, but historians have said that people who listened on the radio actually thought Richard Nixon won.

So yes, it’s possible that Harris’ overwhelmingly dominant performance was the best in the history of televised national debates. What was so impressive was that she did not do particularly well in the 2019 Democratic primary debates, though she smoked Mike Pence a year later. And before you say, well, Trump helped Harris by melting down, a lot of that had to do with her.

Trump’s not easy to debate — just ask Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. His firehose of lies makes it difficult to find a point of entry. Harris did it by getting under his skin early on and making him lose his cool. Her body language was superb. She made sure to mention that he’s been found liable for sexual assault and faces sentencing in an unrelated criminal case. In retrospect, it’s a good thing that Harris lost her bid to keep both mics on throughout, since forcing Trump to stay (relatively) quiet allowed her to build her case.

My former Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a leading historian of presidential debates, put it this way on Twitter/X:

The worst possible version of Trump showed up for this debate tonight. Harris had him on the defensive from the opening handshake, and that’s where he stayed for the rest of the night. This is as clear-cut a win as I’ve seen in a presidential debate.

Here I’ll note that a few non-MAGA pundits were less than impressed with Harris. “For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed,” wrote New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Boston Globe political analyst James Pindell actually gave Harris a “C” and Trump a “C-minus,” saying, “Within the context of this campaign, this was a missed opportunity for Harris. She didn’t truly stand out.” I honestly don’t know what to say except: Good Lord, what were they watching?

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The right is freaking out over the ABC News debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for having the temerity to call out a few of Trump’s more egregious lies. But though you can make the case that fact-checking should be on the candidates, the moderators shouldn’t sit there liked potted plants, either. It shouldn’t have been left solely to Harris to highlight Trump’s grotesque lies about non-existent abortion laws that allow just-born babies to be “executed” and fake memes claiming that undocumented immigrants are eating dogs and cats. Oliver Darcy put it this way in his media newsletter:

While it was not feasible for Muir and Davis to correct every lie that streamed from Trump’s mouth, the duo admirably worked to ensure that on issues of major importance, the debate was not reduced to a he-said, she-said. Instead, ABC News made certain that the debate was tethered to reality and that brazen mis-and-disinformation was not given a free haven to infect the public discourse.

The questions for the most part were very good, too, getting into real substance about Trump’s unfitness to lead — especially his racism and his role in the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021.

Then again, Trump continually turned questions that should have been helpful to him against himself, especially regarding the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that took place under President Biden’s watch. I mean, who is “Abdul,” anyway?

And to top it off, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris after the debate ended, signing off her Instagram post as “Childless Cat Lady.”

The Washington Post checked in with 25 uncommitted swing-state voters after the debate; 23 said Harris performed better and only two thought Trump did. There’s also this remarkable finding from CNN’s flash poll of registered voters who watched the debate:

Debate watchers said, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia. Prior to the debate, the same voters were evenly split on which candidate would perform more strongly, with 50% saying Harris would do so and 50% that Trump would. And afterward, 96% of Harris supporters who tuned in said that their chosen candidate had done a better job, while a smaller 69% majority of Trump’s supporters credited him with having a better night.

Two and a half months ago, President Biden turned in what might have been the worst debate performance in history, raising questions about his age and stamina and ultimately forcing him out of the race — and overshadowing Trump’s own miserable lie-infested performance. Last night we saw exactly the opposite.

Will it matter? Probably not. The race remains unimaginably tight. But for 90 minutes, Kamala Harris made the best possible case for herself and Donald Trump made the worst. That has to count for something.

The New York Times reports that the far-right media ecosystem is awash in Russian cash

Russian President Vladimir Putin. 2022 photo via President of Russia.

The New York Times is doing some crucially important work on how the far-right media in this country are being influenced by Russian money.

The latest is a report detailing how $10 million from Russia (free link) was funneled to a Canadian couple who set up a company in Tennessee called Tenet Media that paid right-wing influencers to produce pro-Kremlin messages for their site. The story is based on Justice Department documents. The couple, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, have not been charged, and the influencers themselves may be dupes. So far, the only charges that have been filed are against two RT employees accused of violating money-laundering laws.

But the Times’ reporting shows that vast chunks of the right-wing media ecosystem is awash in Russian cash, “trafficking in pointed political commentary as well as conspiracy theories about election fraud, Covid-19, immigrants and Russia’s war with Ukraine.” The influence extended all the way to Tayler Hansen, who filmed the shooting of Ashli Babbitt at the Capitol during the attemped coup of Jan. 6, 2021.

I have to confess that I had not heard of these influences. They are not name brands like, say, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens. But in many respects their messages are similar, and they help spread pro-Russian propaganda across a range of social media platforms.

You can fault Attorney General Merrick Garland for moving too slowly on a number of fronts. But at least this time, unlike 2016, we’re learning about Russian attempts to influence the presidential campaign before Election Day.

The Boston Globe will unveil a new morning newsletter on Monday

I just signed up for Starting Point, The Boston Globe’s new morning newsletter, scheduled to debut on Monday. It sounds like it’s being positioned as a more serious alternative to The B-Side, a breezy take on the day’s events aimed at younger readers that’s part of the Globe’s free Boston.com website.

Here’s the email that I got a little while ago:

Dear Globe reader,

We’re Boston Globe journalists Diamond Naga Siu and Jazmin Aguilera, and on Sep. 9 we’re launching a morning newsletter called Starting Point.

How is it different from every other morning newsletter out there?

First, it’s focused on New England, with a selection of the most consequential stories from our region. But we’ll also survey the national and international scene, picking out the most important and interesting stories. The reporters in our Washington Bureau will provide insights into the presidential election and critical races around the US. We’ll chat with Globe journalists about the stories behind their stories. There will be special guest writers from time to time.

And because we all love a good read and honest recommendations, we’ll share our favorite books and articles, restaurants and cafes, great places to visit, and interesting things to do throughout New England.

Our goal is to inform, intrigue, and delight you. Give Starting Point a try — it’s free — and let us know what you think.

Update: As alert reader Greg Reibman notes, the sign-up pages says that Starting Point will only come out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Not much of a daily newsletter, but maybe they’re rolling it out slowly.

The looming competition between Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy is also a test for free versus paid

Brian Stelter. Photo (cc) 2017 by Ståle Grut / NRKbeta.

This is going to be interesting. Last month, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy announced he was leaving in order to start his own subscription-based newsletter called “Status.” CNN said it would replace Darcy as the lead writer on its “Reliable Sources” newsletter, but it wasn’t clear who that person would be or when it might happen.

On Tuesday, it was announced that Brian Stelter — Darcy’s predecessor at CNN — would be returning as the network’s chief media analyst, and that he’ll be back at the helm of the “Reliable Sources” newsletter next Monday. His old television show, also called “Reliable Sources,” will not be back, but Stelter said he expects to pop up on a number of CNN programs to talk about media topics.

This is very good news for people who care about the media, as Stelter and Darcy are both outstanding. But let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Darcy is charging $14.95 a month — triple what solo newsletter writers normally charge, but no doubt what he calculated he needs to make ends meet. Stelter’s newsletter presumably will be free, although that caveat is important given that CNN chief executive Mark Thompson is reportedly developing some paid products.

Here’s what Stelter had to say about the looming competition:

All the while I remained an avid reader of “Reliable Sources,” and especially admired Oliver Darcy’s fearless reportage, as well as his decision to launch Status last month. I’m rooting for Oliver and, as I have told him personally, I think we’re going to complement each other wonderfully.

And here’s Darcy’s take:

It goes without saying, but I am very much looking forward to Stelter’s second act at CNN. As I’ve said before, he has been a first-class mentor to me. Now, I look forward to him being a first-class competitor!

Darcy’s challenge is that though Stelter’s newsletter may be the most similar to what he does, there are also a number of other media newsletters, and most of them are free. Indeed, the author of one of them, Tom Jones of the Poynter Institute, devoted the top of his morning round-up today to Stelter’s return.

As you may recall, Stelter was one of a handful of high-profile people who were fired by Chris Licht during Licht’s brief stint as CNN’s top executive. Stelter had emerged as an important voice in speaking out against then-President Donald Trump’s war on journalists, who he called “enemies of the people,” and the new owners of CNN apparently believed Stelter was too hot for them.

The ownership hasn’t changed, but fears that CNN was going to turn into Fox Lite proved unfounded, and Stelter — who’s been busy as a freelancer — has popped up frequently on CNN’s air in recent months. Darcy, meanwhile, established a reputation for independence right from the start and wrote a number of newsletter items that must have made Licht extremely unhappy before Licht himself was finally shown the door.

I hope there’s room in the burgeoning media newsletter universe for both Darcy and Stelter. But, as I said, I have to wonder how paid can compete with free if they are both mining essentially the same ore. Best wishes to both of them.

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Margaret Sullivan calls out a looney example of false equivalence in The New York Times

One of our most prominent media critics has dissected a particularly looney example of the so-called liberal media twisting itself into knots in order to appear fair. Writing in her newsletter, Margaret Sullivan has identified what she calls “an ugly case of ‘false balance’ in The New York Times.” Her example: a recent story headlined “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.”

Now, on many occasions the Times will publish a headline or social media tease that makes you think they’re engaging in both-sides-ism — then, when you read the story, you see that it’s actually not that bad. In this case, though, reporters Jeanna Smialek and Linda Qiu literally compare Vice President Kamala Harris’ proposal to provide government assistance in order to boost housing with Donald Trump’s threat to deport undocumented immigrants, thus opening up their homes to native-born Americans. Both ideas have problems! Or as Smialek and Qiu write:

Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common, and Ms. Harris’s plan is far more detailed. But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.

Good Lord. Here’s how Sullivan puts it:

Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.

But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump. There’s so much of this false-balance nonsense in the Times that there’s a Twitter (X) account devoted to mocking it, called New York Times Pitchbot.

Sullivan, as you may know, is a former public editor for the Times and a former media columnist for The Washington Post. She currently writes a media column for The Guardian as well as her newsletter, “American Crisis.” (Disclosure: She also provided a kind blurb for our book, “What Works in Community News,” which graces the front cover.)

Sullivan’s lament about the Times’ very strange comparison of Harris and Trump on housing comes at a moment of rising anger on social media from the left about the paper’s coverage of politics, with a number of people either angrily threatening to cancel their subscriptions or claiming they’ve already done so.

Like Sullivan, I value the Times’ coverage in many areas. Its investigative reporting, including deep dives into Trump’s corruption and worse, has been invaluable. But, too often, its day-to-day political coverage does indeed lapse into both-sides-ism and false equivalence, as I often complained about when I was at The Boston Phoenix in the 1990s and early ’2000s. In 2009, when I was writing a media column for The Guardian, I concluded that the Times and other mainstream media were so cowed by the extreme right that they often pulled their punches:

Major elements of the media, terrified of accusations that they’re in the tank with Democrats and liberals, would rather deny reality than tell the simple truth. This abject spinelessness is a significant factor in how the lies of the right infect public discourse.

I later took my column to GBH News and wrote a piece in 2018 about “the timid Times.” You get the idea. I’m citing all this to assert that my Times-bashing credentials are in order, because all too often I see way too much silly criticism along the lines of Let’s start a boycott because the Times published an op-ed I don’t like. These days I often find myself actually defending the Times. We should reserve our outrage for the truly outrageous.

Still, as Sullivan astutely observes, there’s enough to that criticism that we need to take notice. The Times is our largest and most influential daily newspaper, and much of the press continues to take its cues from them. That includes the Big Three evening newscasts, still the closest thing we have to a mass medium.

No, I’m not going to cancel my subscription, and you shouldn’t, either. But foolishness like pretending to take Trump’s “housing” “plan” seriously serves no one — least of all democracy.

A predictably uneventful interview; plus, media links and observations for your weekend

Dana Bash interviews Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and we’re getting away for a few days. Before we do, though, here are a few links and observations.

• In Thursday night’s CNN interview, Dana Bash’s questions were predictable, Vice President Kamala Harris’ and Gov. Tim Walz’s answers were fine, and that was that. I don’t know why anyone thought two experienced politicians were going to have any trouble in such a setting. Here’s a theory I haven’t heard from anyone else: Donald Trump invariably runs off the rails, and President Biden has an increasingly difficult time expressing himself. We’d forgotten what these things normally look like.

• A New Hampshire man named Taylor Cockerline has been sentenced to 27 months in prison and three years of supervised probation for his role in harassing and intimidating New Hampshire Public Radio journalist Lauren Chooljian, her parents and her editor, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston. Co-defendants Eric Labarage and Michael Waselchuck have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing, while a fourth defendant, Keenan Saniatan (identified only as “Saniatan” in the news release), will reportedly plead guilty on Sept. 5. Earlier, more in-depth coverage of this bizarre case is here.

• In other New Hampshire media news, The News and Sentinel, a weekly paper in Colebrook, is shutting down after the Harrigan family, which owns the 154-year-old paper, was unable to find a buyer. The InDepthNH story on the closure contains a lot of fascinating details about the paper, especially a 1997 incident when a gunman killed four people, including the editor. The late publisher, John Harrigan, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the shooting. The News and Sentinel’s slogan, by the way, should be a model for other news outlets: “Independent but Not Neutral.”

• Barnes & Noble is opening 58 new stores in 2024, and media newsletter writer Bo Sacks says that’s good news for the ailing magazine business: “B&N has a terrific well curated newsstand for magazines. 54 [sic] new newsstands may not sound like much, but it will be a big national help in magazine sales.” By the way, Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio died earlier this week at 83.

• Veteran tech writer Mathew Ingram is leaving the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review, where he’s been working since 2017 after earlier stints at the late, lamented Gigaom and, before that, The Globe and Mail of Toronto. Ingram is a calm, sometimes contrarian voice at moments when everyone else’s hair is on fire, and he is well worth paying attention to. No word on what’s next, though he says he’ll continue to write for CJR from time to time. Best wishes to him.