Media – Page 23 – Media Nation

The Globe’s circulation levels off; plus, the Tampa Bay Times, angst at CNN and remembering Donald Barlett

Paid circulation growth at The Boston Globe has leveled off, as a modest increase in digital subscriptions has barely been enough to offset the continued deterioration of its print business. That’s according to publisher’s statements filed with the U.S. Postal Service that were printed in the Globe earlier this week as well as numbers provided by the Globe.

On weekdays, the average paid print circulation between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024, was 57,450. A year earlier it had been 64,977. That’s a decline of 7,527, or 11.6%.

On Sundays, the average paid print circulation was 102,703, down from 116,456 a year earlier. That represents a drop of 13,753, or 11.8%.

The Globe also reported paid digital circulation to the Postal Service, but those numbers — the same that it provides to the Alliance for Audited Media — are not a good reflection of the paper’s actual digital subscription base. According to Carla Kath, the Globe’s director of communications, paid digital circulation is now 261,000, an increase of about 6.5% compared to last October, when it was around 245,000.

When you combine paid print and digital, the Globe’s average weekday circulation is about 318,000, up by 8,000 over a year ago, for an increase of 2.5%.

On Sundays, average combined circulation now stands at 364,000, a rise of 3,000, or a little more than 0.8%.

Oddly enough, the paid digital numbers that the Globe reports to the Postal Service and AAN are higher than its internal figures because AAN uses a different methodology that allows for some double-counting.

Earlier this year, Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry told employees that her “North Star” goal for paid digital circulation is 400,000, plus another 100,000 for Stat, the company’s health-and-science news site. She did not put a timetable on that, but in May she told Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal that she expected 2024 to be a “building year,” with accelerated growth coming in 2025 and beyond.

“Our subscribers can see this investment with our expanded daily news videos, our new weather center, better games, new podcasts, deeper geographic expansion, and more,” Henry told Seiffert. “We do not expect growth to follow a linear pattern — we have a long-term strategy for continuing to serve our community as a strong and sustainable organization.”

Kath’s email message to me struck a similar tone. “Like most publishers in 2024, we have seen moderation in non-subscriber traffic. However, we’ve adjusted our strategy and continue to grow digital subscriptions while focusing on long-term growth and sustainability,” she said.

“Total paid subscriptions are up more than 30% over the last five years, and 2024 is performing as we expected. We continue to innovate and plan for growth in 2025 as we aim for our ongoing goal of 400,000 paid digital subscribers.”

Media notes

• The Tampa Bay Times has dropped its paywall for coverage of Hurricane Milton and its aftermath — just in time for a story on the Times’ own building being damaged by a collapsing crane. Zachary T. Sampson and Chris Urso report:

A crane collapsed in downtown St. Petersburg during Hurricane Milton’s thrashing winds Wednesday night — leaving a gaping hole in an office building that houses several business, including the Tampa Bay Times.

The crane fell from the Residences at 400 Central, the 46-story skyscraper being built across from the Times’ office, as the storm pummeled the region.

The crane remained crumpled across 1st Avenue South early Thursday, completely blocking the street.

The city said in a news release that no injuries have been reported at the site. The building damaged by the crane had closed ahead of Milton’s arrival Wednesday. No one from the Times’ newsroom was working inside when the crane collapsed.

• Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy has a tough item on CNN chair and chief executive Mark Thompson on the first anniversary of his tenure. Darcy, who left CNN a few months ago to start his newsletter, Status, writes:

In conversations that I have had over the last few weeks with employees at all different levels inside the company, it has become clear that morale has fallen considerably since Thompson took the helm. Staffers, who were once wide-eyed and filled with hope that Thompson would stroll into Hudson Yards with a toolbox full of foolproof, executable ideas, are now questioning whether he will ultimately prove to be successful in reversing the outlet’s dimming fortunes.

• Donald L. Barlett, one of the great investigative reporters of the 20th century has died. I remember reading his and James Steele’s “America: What Went Wrong” in the early 1990s, when it was first released. You might call it an early warning signal about the damage that Ronald Reagan’s economic and tax policies favoring the rich were doing to the country — damage that has contributed to the anger and polarization of politics today. The book was a compilation of reporting that Barlett and Steele had previously produced for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In an obituary for The New York Times, Glenn Rifkin writes (gift link):

Over four decades, Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele’s investigative prowess, rooted in deep, systematic research and complex analysis of issues and institutions that profoundly affected Americans, resulted in two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting (they were finalists for the award six times), six George Polk awards and various other honors.

Mr. Barlett was 88.

Less news, more happy talk: Why CBS News’ reprimand of Tony Dokoupil is so ridiculous

Count me among those who are perplexed as to why CBS News morning anchor Tony Dokoupil has been reprimanded by his bosses for the way he conducted himself in an interview with the journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates has written a new book called “The Message,” part of which comprises a harsh critique of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In a recent interview with Terry Gross of the public radio program “Fresh Air,” and again on “CBS Mornings,” Coates called Israel an “apartheid” state. He also questioned Israel’s existence on the grounds that he opposes the notion of any state based on ethnicity.

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Now, I’m not writing this item to take sides. I’ve long been an admirer of Coates, although I disagree with him strongly on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state within secure borders — and agree with him about the Netanyahu government’s brutal prosecution of the war in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

My point is that there was nothing wrong with Dokoupil’s interview. It was tough but polite. Probably Dokoupil’s one statement that I’d regard as out of line was this:

I have to say that when I read the book I imagine that if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.

But what of it? Coates parried Dokoupil deftly, and the conversation ended a few minutes later on an almost friendly note. Yet CNN media reporters Brian Stelter and Hadas Gold write that CBS News staff members were told at a meeting that Dokoupil’s manner did not meet the network’s editorial standards, adding:

In wake of the criticism, CBS News and Stations president and CEO Wendy McMahon and her top deputy Adrienne Roark enlisted the network’s standards and practices unit to conduct a review of the discussion, according to sources familiar with the matter. The news division’s race and culture unit was involved as well.

Management concluded that “the problem was Tony’s tone” in the interview, one of the sources said. McMahon and Roark didn’t say so on the Monday morning call, but they emphasized the importance of network standards and the need to have “courageous conversations.”

This is absurd. At the most, maybe Dokoupil should have been taken aside and privately told that the “backpack of an extremist” comment was inappropriate. But why do we expect television audiences to be treated like children, with everyone making nice rather than engaging in some tough talk?

As a sign of how clueless CBS managers are, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullins of The New York Times report, “Executives who discussed the interview on Monday’s call had asked staff members to keep their remarks confidential.” Uh, huh.

Neither Dokoupil nor Coates acted like anything untoward had happened, and that’s because it hadn’t. They had an enlightening though brief exchange. I’d like to see more interviews like it and less happy talk — but that’s not going to happen if journalists fear they’ll get in trouble just for doing their jobs.

The October Surprise, 44 years on; plus, extremism at home, and more on sponsored content

American hostage Ann Swift shortly after her release in January 1981. Public domain photo by the Department of Defense.

The October Surprise. These days the phrase is often used to describe fears that a political campaign will drop some sort of bombshell in the final weeks before Election Day.

Then-FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 would certainly qualify, though there was no evidence that the Trump campaign was behind it — nor, for that matter, any evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton.

So, too, would the Hunter Biden laptop story of 2020, though the Trumpers who were behind it were hampered by the inconvenient fact that they’d targeted the wrong Biden.

But I don’t think anyone used the phrase October Surprise until 1980, when it was used to describe something that Ronald Reagan and his associates feared would happen but ultimately did not: the release of more than 50 American hostages who had been held by Iran for many months. If President Jimmy Carter brought them home just before the election, it could have given him the boost he needed to win a second term. Continue reading “The October Surprise, 44 years on; plus, extremism at home, and more on sponsored content”

The Committee to Protect Journalists warns that violence against the press is an ongoing crisis

A special report by the Committee to Protect Journalists warns that the anti-media animus that characterized the Trump presidency has continued unabated, and that it will continue to pose an ongoing threat to the safety of journalists regardless of who wins the presidential election.

Produced by CPJ journalist Katherine Jacobsen, the report, titled “On Edge: What the U.S. election could mean for journalists and global press freedom,” is chilling in its details and frightening in its broader implications. She writes:

Trump’s presidency has been widely seen as bad for press freedom. A 2020 CPJ report found that his administration escalated prosecution of news sources, interfered in the business of media owners, harassed journalists crossing U.S. borders, and used the Espionage Act — a law that has raised grave concerns about its potential to restrict reporting on national security issues — to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. At the same time, Trump undermined the credibility of news outlets by lashing out at reporters, often on the president’s social media feeds, as “corrupt,” “dishonest,” and “enemies of the people.”

On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump has threatened to further his anti-press agenda by strengthening libel laws; weakening First Amendment protections; prosecuting reporters for critical coverage; and investigating the parent company of NBC and MSNBC for the channels’ “vicious” news coverage. He has also called for National Public Radio (NPR) to be defunded. “They are a liberal disinformation machine,” he wrote of the public broadcasting organization on his Truth Social platform in an all-cap post. “Not one dollar!!!”

The denigration of U.S. media, coming at a time when shrinking newsroom budgets, the shuttering of local news publications, and record public mistrust of mainstream outlets have hampered their ability to counter the anti-press narrative, has continued to resonate in the years since Trump lost the 2020 election, helping to fuel extremist and fringe ideas on both the left and the right. The result is an increasingly precarious safety environment for reporters.

Much of the report comprises an overview of threats and violence directed against journalists starting with the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, and continuing to the present. At least 18 journalists were assaulted during the rioting at the Capitol, and nine people have been charged.

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Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, a freelance photographer who was on assignment for The Washington Post that day, was injured in the melee and rioters threatened to shoot her.

“Generally speaking, I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing,” she told CPJ. “But hearing the audio of January 6th while covering the committee meetings, that’s still frankly very difficult for me. There was a moment during the hearings where they played a piece of footage where you can see a very close friend of mine running down the hallway … having to hide for her life.”

Other incidents covered by the report include:

The murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German by a public official who was angered by his reporting and the frightening online abuse directed at another Review-Journal reporter, Sabrina Schnur, after Twitter’s sociopath-in-chief, Elon Musk, unleashed his mob against her.
The harassment and vandalism experienced by New Hampshire Public Radio reporter Lauren Chooljian, her parents and her editor following her reporting on allegations of sexual misconduct against a local business owner. Four men have been charged under federal law and one has been sentenced to prison.
A dramatic increase in lawsuits against journalists and news organizations, including Anna Wolfe of Mississippi Today, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting is the subject of a libel suit by the state’s former governor, Phil Bryant. The news organization is fighting an effort by Bryant to force it to turn over internal notes and other records.
Unprovoked attacks by police officers against journalists, including three photographers in Detroit who were injured by rubber bullets shot by an officer at a Black Lives Matter protest.

What happens in the U.S. affects press freedom globally, the CPJ report argues: “Over the past three decades, CPJ has documented how major policy shifts and the curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S. have been used to justify similar measures curbing press freedoms for journalists in other countries.” Examples cited include Morocco, Russia, Haiti, Palestinian journalists caught up in the Israel-Gaza war, and Brazil under former president (and Donald Trump ally) Jair Bolsonaro.

The report concludes with a letter sent to the two presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, asking that they sign a pledge to adopt a “respectful” tone with journalists, to take action when journalists are threatened with or subjected to violence, to support a federal shield law known as the PRESS Act that would protect reporters from the prying eyes of the government, and to promote press freedom around the world.

“The Harris campaign acknowledged receipt of CPJ’s letter,” CPJ says, “but neither candidate had signed the pledge by CPJ’s requested deadline of September 16.”

Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.

There was a key moment in last night’s vice presidential debate between Democratic candidate Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, and I’ll get to it. But first I want to deal with the fact-checking, since that was the biggest issue going in.

Before the debate, word was that the CBS News moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would not attempt to fact-check the candidates in real time, as David Muir and Linsey Davis did in last month’s encounter between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — much to Trump’s detriment. Instead, television viewers who watched the debate on CBS would see a QR code on the screen that would take them to a fact-checking site where some 20 journalists were beavering away. Continue reading “Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.”

A conversation with ChatGPT, given a voice by Siri, shows AI’s promise and limitations

Mike Blinder, publisher of the trade journal Editor & Publisher and the host of its vodcast, “E&P Reports,” tried something unusual recently. He hooked up ChatGPT to Siri and conducted an interview about issues related to artificial intelligence and journalism. The result is like a smarter version of Eliza, a 1960s-vintage AI program that could carry on what seemed like a realistic conversation.

Blinder has become something of an AI evangelist, using to automate some of E&P’s editorial processes and asking ChatGPT to write bios of guests on “E&P Reports.” But AI has a long way to go in terms of carrying on an intelligent conversation that’s also spontaneous.

For instance, as you’ll hear, Blinder’s approach in interviewing ChatGPT is to lead the witness with long, information-packed questions that the chatbot can then use to scour the internet and come back with a plausible-sounding answer.

I also detected at least one error. In response to a question about the possibility that AI-powered search engines will harm news organizations by removing any incentive to click through, ChatGPT says:

When AI tools like Perplexity or Chat GPT provide detailed summaries of content without directing traffic back to the original source, it creates a real challenge for news publishers who rely on page views for ad revenue and subscriptions. I completely understand the concern.

The problem is that Perplexity actually does cite its sources, which differentiates it from ChatGPT and other competitors. It’s why I suggest to my students that Perplexity is a useful tool as long as they click through, and it’s why I use it as well.

Nevertheless, Blinder’s close encounter of the robotic kind is fun and interesting. You can watch it on YouTube or subscribe on any podcast app. Blinder’s been a guest on our “What Works” podcast about local news twice, and Ellen Clegg and I were on “E&P Reports” earlier this year to talk about our book, “What Works in Community News.”

CommonWealth Beacon names Laura Colarusso as its new editor

There’s some exciting news to report out of CommonWealth Beacon today. Laura Colarusso, currently the editor of Nieman Reports, will be the new editor of CWB, succeeding Bruce Mohl, who’s retiring.

I got to know Laura when she was digital managing editor of GBH News, for whom I wrote a weekly column for a number of years. I also had a chance to write for her at Nieman Reports. She will be terrific, as she combines leadership skills with vision and a strong ethical compass.

Originally a public-policy quarterly called CommonWealth Magazine, CommonWealth Beacon has morphed into a digital-only publication with a significant daily presence.

Bruce, who came to CWB from The Boston Globe, leaves behind an admirable legacy, transforming the publication to a leading source political and public-policy news about Massachusetts. The nonprofit is published by the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank that concentrates on quality-of-life issues.

(Disclosure: I’m a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory board.)

What follows is MassINC CEO Joe Kriesberg’s announcement:

Dear reader,

Following a nationwide search, I am excited to share with you that we have hired Laura Colarusso to succeed Bruce Mohl as the next editor of CommonWealth Beacon.

Taking the helm in November, Laura has the experience, network, and leadership skills to build on Bruce’s sixteen-year legacy. Our team is excited to welcome Laura and to continue building CommonWealth Beacon as the dynamic, civic news outlet that readers like you rely upon.

Laura comes to CommonWealth Beacon from Nieman Reports, an online and quarterly print publication with a mission of promoting and elevating journalistic standards. She has reported on a wide variety of topics including climate change, education and health care, and covered the Pentagon in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

She has held leadership positions at GBH News in Boston, where she was the digital managing editor before joining Nieman Reports in 2021, where she served as editor. Laura won a regional 2020 Edward R. Murrow Award for the story “The Original Old Boys Club” while she was at GBH.

As Laura has shared:

CommonWealth Beacon has a long history of creating outstanding journalism that helps the people of Massachusetts understand their government and the changes taking place in the world around them. I couldn’t be more excited to join this organization at such a critical time for our democracy, and I’m looking forward to leading CommonWealth Beacon as we work to connect with broader and more diverse audiences, and deliver even more high quality news and information to our readers.

Nearly one year ago, we launched CommonWealth Beacon with an expanded newsroom, a more readable and accessible digital platform and an updated strategy for audience and community engagement.

We are thrilled to have Laura lead our team in this next phase of CommonWealth Beacon’s journey and to better serve you, our diverse audience of readers, and the people of Massachusetts.

Sincerely,

Joe Kriesberg
CEO of MassINC, Publisher of CommonWealth Beacon

New York City to boost student journalists; plus, listening to voters, and a hacking update

Now here’s a great idea. In New York City, a public-private partnership is spending $3 million to boost journalism in the city’s high schools. The program, called Journalism for All, aims to quadruple the number of Black and Latino students who are studying journalism, according to Claire Fahy of The New York Times (gift link).

High school newspapers, whether in print or digital, have been on the wane in New York and across the country in recent years, although the Student Press Law Center told the Times that the extent of the decline has not been reliably tracked.

Among other things, Journalism for All will help launch student publications by providing them with $15,000 in seed money. In addition, four students from each of the schools that are being served will be able to take part in summer internships at local news organizations.

Fahy reports that California, Illinois and Texas are also providing assistance to high school journalism programs. As I wrote this summer for CommonWealth Beacon, efforts are being made to revive a special commission to study the local news crisis in Massachusetts after the first attempt disappeared down a black hole.

Nurturing high school journalism programs and publications in Massachusetts ought to be something that gets serious consideration.

Listening to Vermont voters

It’s back to the future in Vermont, where the state’s public media operation is covering the election campaign by listening to voters and focusing on the issues they say are important rather than dwelling on the horse race and polls.

Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that journalists for Vermont Public, comprising television, radio and digital, “have spent the year speaking to more than 600 residents at diners, gas stations, and concerts about state and local politics across all 14 Vermont counties.”

It’s an effort known as the Citizens Agenda, but it’s hardly a new idea. Originally known as public journalism or civic journalism, the notion of shaping political coverage around the concerns of actual people was briefly popular in the 1990s. Among other things, the Globe itself engaged in a public journalism effort in covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is advising Vermont Public on implementing the Citizens Agenda; Rosen was also a leader of the public journalism movement in the 1990s, even writing a book about it called “What Are Journalists For?”

It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea today.

Hacked emails, then and now

One of the odder developments in the 2024 campaign is that three news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico — have reportedly received hacked emails from the Donald Trump campaign but have chosen not to publish anything from them, as Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported (gift link) in August for the Post.

Obviously this is quite a departure from 2016, when the news media eagerly passed along emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then as now, the leaks come from a foreign adversary — Russia eight years ago, Iran today. Then as now, the actual content of the emails may be of little interest.

I suppose we shouldn’t complain if news executives learned a lesson from 2016, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the media helped Trump on both occasions.

Then, last week, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared one of the hacked documents on his Substack newsletter — a Trump campaign dossier on all the embarrassing things that JD Vance had said about Trump over the years.

Klippenstein tried to share his newsletter item on Twitter and got blocked and banned. I posted a workaround and got locked out of my account until I deleted the offending post. Meta has been blocking anyone’s attempts to post a link as well, though they haven’t caught up with my Threads post yet.

In any event, you can download the dossier from Klippenstein’s newsletter. I haven’t read it, but I have paged through the table of contents, and it looks highly entertaining though not especially new. (“Vance Wrote That He ‘Loathed’ Trump’s ‘Obvious Personal Character Flaws,’” p. 76).

I assume Tim Walz is boning up ahead of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.

The Portland Press Herald and its owner get enmeshed in a controversy over sponsored content

The former headquarters of the Portland Press Herald is now a hotel. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.

News publishers like sponsored content for a variety of reasons. In a sea of nearly worthless programmatic ads, sponsored content — also known as native advertising — commands a premium price. The articles, if they are well-done, attract eyeballs. They evade ad-blockers, too. At worst, they can be confused with actual editorial content, but with proper disclosure they raise no more in the way of ethical issues than does a standard banner ad.

Earlier this week, a conservative website called the Maine Wire reported the existence of a $117,000 deal cut by the Maine Trust for Local News to publish sponsored content from the state’s Department of Education. The nonprofit Trust owns the Portland Press Herald and a number of smaller daily and weekly papers. The Maine Wire article says in part:

The payment will cover the publication and promotion of six articles portraying the Maine DOE in a flattering light. It’s unclear whether the state-sponsored “news” content will be written by someone from the Maine DOE or employees of the Maine Trust for Local News newspapers.

The taxpayer-funded “marketing campaign” will highlight the Maine DOE’s “use of federal emergency relief funding,” and will aim to “promote the best learning opportunities for all Maine students” and to “inspire ‘trust in our schools,’” according to the document.

Scare quotes aside, though, this is just garden-variety sponsored content. Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute looked into it (scroll down to “Sponsored content controversy in Maine”) and found the deal to be pretty unremarkable, writing:

The Wire chose to ignore that article-style pieces became a staple of digital advertising more than a decade ago. The Federal Trade Commission has taken the position that as long as sponsorship is disclosed, it’s not deception (though violations, especially among influencers, are not uncommon).

The format is typically employed by companies burnishing their image, but there is no obvious reason the door should be slammed shut on a self-promoting government placement.

In fact, the first of six such sponsored ads that the Trust will be running says “Sponsored” and “Content provided by Maine Department of Education” right at the top. The article, which appeared in the Press Herald, is also in a different typeface from what the paper normally uses. Edmonds passed along a statement from Trust chief executive Lisa DeSisto as well:

Branded content is a growing piece of our advertising product offerings. We’ve attracted new customers to the Maine Trust by offering branded content products, and we think they’re an important part of our revenue goals. In developing these products, nothing has been more important to us than creating a clear distinction between branded content advertising and our journalism.

Michael Socolow, a journalism professor at the University of Maine, initially raised some concerns about the arrangement on Twitter but then backed off once he saw the actual ad. “Turns out article’s labelled ‘Sponsored Content’ right at top, it’s not written by any journalists, and it’s actually a terrible piece of advertorial/propaganda [poorly written, boring + too long, and uninteresting]. So I’m less concerned,” he wrote.

Now, I do think it’s fair to ask whether a news organization ought to be accepting sponsored content from a government agency — but that horse left the barn quite a while ago. For instance, I searched the sponsored content at The Boston Globe to see if it had any similar arrangements, and it took me no time at all to find a native ad from Vermont Tourism, which a little additional searching revealed is a state agency. That said, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the Trust to have a conversation with its journalists about what practices are and aren’t acceptable, and to listen to any concerns the newsroom might raise.

Finally, a disclosure: The Maine Trust is sponsoring an event for Ellen Clegg and me in Portland on Oct. 15 to talk about our book, “What Works in Community News.” (You can register here.) I worked with DeSisto at The Boston Phoenix and, later, Ellen and DeSisto were colleagues at The Boston Globe; we both think highly of her. You can make of that what you will. But Edmonds and Socolow have no such ties, and their conclusions are the same as mine.

David Folkenflik stands up for ethics; plus, journalism flunks the stress test, and media notes

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.

One of my Sunday night rituals is to read the Semafor media newsletter overseen by Ben Smith — something I also used to do when he was writing his media column for The New York Times.

Smith is a talented guy, and we’ve exchanged a few friendly messages over the years. So I was taken aback at his claim this past Sunday that New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi’s sexual affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while she was covering the presidential campaign was no big deal. Here’s part of what he said:

[N]ow that we are in the full fury of American media prurience and self-righteousness, I am going to risk my neck on a slightly contrarian view.

Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information. That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.

You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”

I realize that Smith isn’t the only observer who’s said this is much ado about very little. But the fact remains, as I noted earlier this week, that Nuzzi wrote an unusually harsh feature about President Biden’s cognitive abilities at a time when Kennedy was one of his rivals as well as a squishy profile of Donald Trump when Kennedy was trying to suck up to him.

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So I was glad to see NPR media reporter David Folkenflik speak up for ethical journalism. In an interview with Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket, Folkenflik said what needed to be said about Nuzzi and, while he was at it, about Smith as well:

Ben’s a very smart guy, a serial news entrepreneur, and an interesting and fun thinker about journalism. And I’ve got a lot of regard for him. But this is pretty bananas as a claim. I think that if people are having an intimate relationship, whatever form that may take, with somebody who they’re writing about or whose world they’re writing about, but they fail to disclose — the supposed British sensibility of, “oh, well, we’re all in bed with each other” — is bonkers and bullshit. And it’s not how journalism should be conducted in the States, and it’s not actually how journalism should be conducted in the U.K. either. And I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my career looking at that very question as well.

Now, I should add that Smith later tweeted that he was joking, at least in part. But he’s far from the only journalist to come to Nuzzi’s defense, as Stephanie Kaloi and Ross A. Lincoln report for The Wrap. I don’t care what went on between Nuzzi and Kennedy; that’s between them and their significant others. But whatever that relationship may have been, it compromised Nuzzi’s independence and thus her journalism. Good for Folkenflik for reminding us of that foundational fact.

Failing the stress test

Angelu Fu of Poynter Online reported this week on a survey by Muck Rack showing that “more than half of journalists in the U.S. considered quitting their job this year due to exhaustion or burnout.” She writes:

The report, which was released Tuesday, examines the state of work-life balance in journalism. Muck Rack surveyed 402 journalists in August and found that 40% have previously quit a job due to burnout. That statistic, along with the finding that 56% of journalists have thought about quitting this year, was “staggering,” said the report’s author, Matt Albasi.

“It means we have to have half as many journalists in the wings waiting to move in next year,” said Albasi, a data journalist at Muck Rack. “And we’re going to lose all this institutional knowledge if these people actually do leave.”

This is a massive problem in journalism. To some extent, the “always on” nature of the news business has always led to an undue amount of stress. But as jobs are lost and the pressure to produce keeps getting ratcheted up, the situation is only growing worse.

To compound matters, only 24% of survey respondents said they have access to mental health services.

Media notes

• My former Northeastern j-school colleague Dina Kraft has a fascinating story in The Christian Science Monitor about cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. They’re part of a movement called Standing Together, which Dina writes “is attracting record numbers of new members with its simple and direct calls for peace and its belief that Israeli-Palestinian partnership, starting within Israel, is not just aspirational, but essential.”

• ARLnow, a network of digital news outlets in the Arlington, Virginia, area, has done something unusual — it’s acquired a print newspaper known as the GazetteLeader and is converting it to a digital-only operation. Scott Brodbeck, the founder and CEO of ARLnow publisher Local News Now, said he’s adding staff as well. (Disclosure: I’m quoted.)

• Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab has a chilling look at what could happen to journalism if Trump is elected and Project 2025, the blueprint put together by his supporters, is put into effect. Benton has read the report, and he writes that punitive action could range from removing reporters from the White House, to cutting all funds for public broadcasting, to getting rid of Section 230, the federal law that holds web publishers harmless for third-party content.

• New England Public Media, which serves Western Massachusetts, has announced a partnership with The Latino Newsletter to train three high school journalists. The students will provide multimedia coverage of the election as part of the Latino Election Project.

• A distressing note from the Boston television scene: NBC Boston has laid off five people who work for the operation’s special-projects team, according to Boston Globe reporter Dana Gerber.