Category: Media

WBUR’s funding woes are part of a larger challenge facing public radio

WBUR’s CitySpace. Photo via WBUR.org.

If any form of media were well-positioned to respond to the decline of large daily newspapers, it was — seemingly — public radio.

For one thing, the business model wasn’t broken. Many people were still commuting to work in their cars. For another, public radio stations, unlike nearly all newspapers, are nonprofits, meaning they can attract funding from a more diverse range of sources: tax-deductible listener donations, large grants and even (in some states, anyway) direct government funding. (Public radio also receives a small amount of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which disburses federal money.)

When I was reporting on the Denver media environment for “What Works in Community News,” I learned that Colorado Public Radio was perhaps the largest news organization in the state — larger than any newspaper or digital source and on a par with the city’s TV news operations.

But things have changed. Post-pandemic, people are commuting fewer days each week. They also have more choices, and may be listening to a podcast while driving rather than public radio. Of course, public radio has a lot of podcasts, but they’re operating in a more competitive environment than they are on the radio dial. In Washington, WAMU Radio recently announced deep cuts and the closure of its DCist website. NPR itself is downsizing its workforce by about 10%, citing a drop in ad revenues.

And now that difficult environment has come to Boston, with WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) telling listeners that it may impose a hiring freeze or even cut jobs if listeners don’t increase their giving in order to offset a decline in advertising. The station’s chief executive, Margaret Low, told Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe that income from on-air sponsorships has dropped by 40% over the past five years, even as its audience has continued to grow. (Here is a different version of that story from Boston.com, the Globe’s free sister site.)

“The business has never been harder, full stop,” Low told Ryan.

Low laid out the challenges facing WBUR in some detail in a letter sent to members, which is online at CommonWealth Beacon. She says in part, “At WBUR we’ve seen a dramatic loss of sponsorship support. In the digital age, almost all that money now goes to the big platforms — like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Spotify,” adding: “Sponsorship dollars won’t return to previous levels. These are not temporary ups and downs. They’re long-term shifts.”

Boston is in the unusual position of having two large news-oriented public radio stations. In 2009, WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) switched to an all-news format and has competed head to head with WBUR ever since. WBUR has a larger news operation and has generally led in the ratings, but both operations have carved out their own niche, with WBUR focusing more on news and GBH, as it is now known, taking a lighter, more talk-oriented approach.

I haven’t heard anything about possible cuts at GBH News, as the outlet’s local operation is known and that comprises radio, television (Channels 2 and 44) and digital. Last month, though, the Globe’s Mark Shanahan reported on workplace tumult at the organization, which included a three-month investigation into allegations of bullying and intimidation. So all is not well at either of the city’s public radio outlets.

Together, WBUR and GBH News function as the city’s No. 2 news outlet after the Globe. The local television stations do a good job and outlets like the Boston Herald, Universal Hub, CommonWealth Beacon and neighborhood papers make a contribution as well. But the WBUR-GBH combine is vitally important to the civic health of the city, providing a free alternative to the Globe. Their continued viability is something that ought to concern all of us.

(Disclosures: I was a paid contributor at GBH News from 1998 to 2023, and I’m currently a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s unpaid Editorial Advisory Board.)

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The end of programmatic ads

This is mind-boggling. Josh Marshall writes that his political news and commentary site, Talking Points Memo, took in nearly $1.7 million in programmatic ad revenues in 2016 — and was down to just $75,000 in 2023. Marshall says that TPM is doing OK because he made the move to paid memberships a few years before the ad-pocalypse really set in. But it shows that the symbiotic relationship between news and the tech platforms has now completely disintegrated.

Marshall’s numbers show why for-profit news outlets can’t survive without fairly strict paywalls. They also show why nonprofit is so much more robust than for-profit — it’s easier to get money from foundations, wealthy individuals, paying members and earned income such as sponsorships and events. That’s not to say local publishers can’t succeed at selling ads to businesses in their community. But it does show that relying on third-party ads served up by Google is over.

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The left’s angry revolt against The New York Times

If you spend any time on the Twitter alternative Threads, then you know there is a revolt taking place among liberals and progressives over the way that The New York Times is covering the presidential election. I’ve been writing about the Times’ propensity for both-sides-ism in its political coverage for years, but the current outburst strikes me as over the top. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has a good overview of the controversy.

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A New York Times story about Hamas and sexual violence comes under scrutiny

Like many of you have no doubt been doing, I’ve been tracking a story about a possible massive failure on the part of The New York Times. It’s about a story the paper published in December headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It is a harrowing and horrifying report on how Hamas terrorists sexually assaulted women in the most violent ways imaginable during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which claimed some 1,200 lives.

Parts of the story came under serious scrutiny on Feb. 28 in an investigative report published by The Intercept. It’s a complicated critique, because no one, including The Intercept, doubts that the terrorists engaged in sexual brutality. But the Times relied in part on a freelancer whose social media activity suggests that she is anti-Palestinian and who has little in the way of journalism experience. The Intercept has also called into question some key details in the Times story. The Times, it should be noted, stands behind its reporting.

The Intercept has also reported that the Times canceled an episode of “The Daily” concerning the sexual violence story after internal and external critics raised questions about its veracity. That, in turn, has led to an investigation inside the Times to determine who may have leaked that news. The NewsGuild of New York has accused the Times of targeting employees whose backgrounds are Middle Eastern or North African, which the Times denies.

This is a developing story. For now, I highly recommend this overview at Semafor by Ben Smith, which not only lays out the details but offers some valuable background and analysis.

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Roger Fidler predicted the future of news delivery. But he missed a crucial piece.

The New York Times last week published a story by David Streitfeld on Roger Fidler, a digital journalism visionary who touted the idea of delivering news via tablet computers a good 20 years before such devices were even available. I wrote about Fidler in my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking News for the Twenty-First Century.” An excerpt follows. It’s fascinating to look back at what Fidler got right and got wrong.

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In the early 1990s, a Knight Ridder executive named Roger Fidler developed an idea that was stunningly close to the tablets and smartphones of the 2010s. I attended a conference at Columbia University at which Fidler outlined his vision for a digital tablet on which we would read newspapers and magazines — something he had been thinking about for the previous dozen or so years. The screen would have the same resolution as a glossy magazine; the devices would be flexible so you could roll one up and take it with you; and they would be so cheap that newspapers would give them away to eliminate the money-burning tasks of printing and distribution. How far ahead of his time was Fidler? Even as of 2017, we were nowhere near achieving any of those three goals.

Fidler also anticipated the choice and interactivity that would come with digital newspapers. For instance, he said that a subscriber might purchase a subscription to The New York Times’s international news, The Washington Post’s political news and her local paper’s regional news. And the tablet would have interactive capabilities so that you could, for instance, click on a restaurant ad to make a reservation. “It was not quite like Roger had descended from another planet, but he was saying some things that were simply very hard to believe at the time,” John Woolley, who worked with Fidler, said in 2012. “He had conjured up this idea of a tablet at a time when laptops were revolutionary. He was clearly a futurist. And he didn’t care what anyone believed. He never backed down.”

I have no notes from that conference, so I’m relying largely on my memory, as well as a video that Fidler put together when he was head of the Knight Ridder Information Design Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. The prototype in the video was simultaneously retro in that the display looked exactly like a printed newspaper and futuristic in its capabilities, which included better, faster interactive graphics than we generally see today as well as sophisticated voice controls.

But keep in mind Marshall McLuhan’s admonition that the medium is the message. Fidler envisioned a revolutionary leap forward in the way we interact with text, photography, graphics, audio and video. What he did not envision was that the digital future would be altogether different from what had come before and that we would use it in ways he could not imagine. In his talk at Columbia, he said that we’d download the content we had paid for by plugging our devices into, say, our cable television box before going to bed. In the video, he also raised the possibility of something that looked like a credit card that you could take with you and use to load more content onto your device if you were away from home. What he missed was that digital newspapers would be distributed via the open web rather than a closed system controlled by publishers. Fidler could see into the future in ways that were remarkable. But in 1994, he did not mention what would turn out to be the most revolutionary change of all. Even though he brilliantly anticipated the technological revolution that was to come, he failed to foresee the cultural revolution that would accompany it.

“For most people a newspaper’s like a friend,” Fidler says in the video. “It’s somebody you know who you have come to trust. Over the last 15 years there have been many attempts to develop electronic newspapers, and many of the technologists who have been pursuing these objectives assume that information is simply a commodity, and people really don’t care where that information comes from as long as it matches their set of personal interests. I disagree with that view.”

In fact, Fidler was wrong. Most news turned out to be so generic that it is difficult to imagine anyone would ever pay for it. As I am wrapping up this chapter in late March 2017, one of the big news stories of the day is the fate of President Donald Trump’s tax proposals following the Republican Congress’ failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act — a major plank in Trump’s platform. Entering “Trump taxes” at Google News brings more than 7.3 million results — the very definition of commodity news. More than 20 years after the narrator of Fidler’s video assured viewers that people wanted “a specific newspaper with a branded identity,” there are very few types of content that readers might be persuaded to pay for: certain types of local and investigative stories that no other news organizations are publishing; personalities that distinguish a paper from its competitors, such as popular columnists; and the intelligent judgment of editors regarding what news is the most important, what’s less important, and what can be left out of the paper altogether.

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A coda to The Boston Globe’s reporting on the Stuart case

I just finished listening to the 10th episode of the podcast “Murder in Boston,” produced by The Boston Globe and HBO, which revisits the infamous 1989 Charles Stuart case. The podcast and the Globe series had concluded, but Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who narrates the podcast, explains that the decision was made to release one more episode after Mayor Michelle Wu publicly apologized to the Black community for the city’s and the police department’s racist response. And here’s a good overview of the Globe’s reporting by Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab. Both are well worth your time.

Earlier coverage.

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A longtime investigative nonprofit may be nearing the end of the road

I was sorry to hear that the Center for Public Integrity is in danger of shutting down. Although some observers are going to portray the center’s woes as further evidence that we are in the midst of a news meltdown, I suspect the answer is simpler than that. There’s only so much room for a nationally focused nonprofit investigative reporting organization, and ProPublica has sucked up most of the oxygen. ProPublica was founded in 2007; the lower-profile CPI dates back all the way to 1989.

CPI’s editor-in-chief, Matt DeRenzio, has already left, according to Benjamin Mullin’s account in The New York Times. I got to know Matt about a dozen years ago, when he was editor of the New Haven Register. He’s a good guy, and I hope he lands on his feet.

My friend and former Boston Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi, the finest reporter I’ve ever worked with, was on staff at CPI for a number of years, where she helped to report a series of stories about sexual abuse on college campuses. When Rolling Stone’s infamous story about an alleged rape victim at the University of Virginia fell apart, the Columbia School of Journalism conducted an in-depth post-mortem — and interviewed Kristen on how to do such sensitive reporting the right way. Kristen now runs Columbia’s postgraduate reporting program.

The full story of what happened to CPI may be yet to come out. According to the Times, the just-departed chief executive, Paul Cheung, has been accused by an employee of financial misbehavior, which Cheung has denied. According to tax records I looked up at GuideStar, Cheung received about $318,000 in total compensation in 2022 — maybe in line with a nonprofit of CPI’s size, but a lot of money given that the organization was already spending more than it was taking in.

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Did Howie Carr turn on the former MassGOP leadership over unpaid bills?

Howie Carr and Grace Curley, a host on his radio network. Photo (cc) 2020 by Timothy Quill.

During the Massachusetts governor’s race in 2022, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr strangely turned on his allies in the MAGA wing of the state party and began attacking them in his column and on his radio show. Howie being Howie? Well, maybe. Or maybe not.

Scott Van Voorhis, who writes the newsletter Contrarian Boston, reports that Carr’s motives may have been a lot simpler than that: the state GOP owed him money. With the Democratic candidate for governor, Maura Healey, coasting to victory, Van Voorhis writes that Carr began “savagely” attacking the then-head of the state party, Jim Lyons, and Healey’s Republican rival, Geoff Diehl.

It turns out that Lyons’ wrecking crew owed Carr more than $7,000 for ads on Carr’s radio program, which he owns. Lyons’ replacement as party chair, the slightly less MAGA-ish Amy Carnevale, is now paying back Carr at the rate of $500 a month. Van Voorhis is careful to note that it’s not clear if the dispute over those unpaid bills came about before or after Carr began attacking Lyons and Diehl.

And here’s a fun detail: Van Voorhis credits the MassGOP Majority newsletter for breaking the story. But when you click through, you learn that though that may be the URL, the actual name of the newsletter is Kool-Aid Kult Kronicles. Apparently that is some sort of joking reference to something Carr said. There’s more news, too, including WRKO Radio’s supposed decision to ban Diehl from its airwaves because of “the perennial candidate’s repeated, baseless claims that Howie Carr is being paid by the MassGOP to attack him and his slate of candidates for Republican State Committee.”

Now, let’s get serious for a moment. Van Voorhis describes Carr as “not exactly the kind of guy you want to piss off.” True enough. But how far can Carr veer from the ethics of journalism and still manage to write for the Herald? Journalists — even opinion journalists like Carr — are expected to maintain their independence. We don’t give money to candidates. We don’t take money from candidates. And we don’t criticize candidates and party officials who owe us money, whether there is a direct connection between those two facts or not.

Just grotesque stuff from someone who wrote a must-read column back in the 1980s and has long since devolved into a caricature of himself.

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Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr calls for the return of the public editor

Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr calls for the return of the ombudsperson, sometimes known as the public editor — an in-house journalist who holds their own news organization to account. As she observes, at one time such positions were common at large media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

They were eliminated, for the most part, when financial pressures made such a position seem like an unaffordable luxury. But as Stohr argues, with the Times and the Globe once again profitable and growing, “They can easily bring them back as a signal that they value public trust.” (Note: Stohr interviewed me.)

I suggested the Globe bring back its ombudsperson last spring after the paper published an extensive correction about a story involving top executives at the MBTA who were reportedly working from distant locales. Instead, the Globe fired the lead reporter, Andrea Estes, and has never really offered an explanation as to what went wrong. Estes, a respected investigative journalist, is now working at the Plymouth Independent, a new nonprofit edited by Mark Pothier, himself a former top Globe editor.

As far as I know, the only major news organization that still has a public editor is NPR, where those duties are carried out by Kelly McBride, who’s also senior vice president at the Poynter Institute. Meanwhile, as Stohr writes, the Times is increasingly under fire on social media from liberal critics who complain that the paper normalizes Donald Trump by treating him like a typical presidential candidate rather than as someone facing 91 criminal charges who attempted to foment an insurrection. I largely share that critique, although I think some of it is overblown.

The presence of a public editor, Stohr writes, “can help journalists be more self-aware while not placing the burden of public criticism on individual reporters, who are usually not in a position to make the sort of organization-wide changes that are often necessary to restore public confidence.”

The public editor was not a perfect institution by any means. Partly it depends on the skill of the person doing it. The Times’ next-to-last public editor, Margaret Sullivan, was the best I can think of, and Stohr quotes a post Sullivan wrote on Twitter/X arguing that the Times needs to bring that position back. Partly it depends on how willing top editors are to provide access. (Sullivan, who still writes media criticism for The Guardian and her own newsletter, is now executive director at the Craig Newmark Center on Journalism Ethics & Security at the Columbia School of Journalism.)

But there are certain things an in-house critic can do that an outside commentator can’t. A public editor has the time to dig deeply and, if they have the cooperation and support of the top leadership, can make a real contribution in helping the public understand why certain decisions are made. And, sometimes, what the story was behind mistakes and misjudgments.

More: There is still an Organization of News Ombudsmen, though I don’t know how active it is. If you look at the U.S. members, you’ll see that most of them hold titles like “managing editor for standards.” I should have noted that PBS has a public editor, Ric Sandoval-Palos.

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