I think the biggest story coming out of the New Hampshire primary is that President Biden absolutely kicked butt while running as a write-in. That’s not easy to do, and if Dean “Who?” Phillips had turned in a showing that was even mildly respectable, it’s all the media would be talking about. Since New Hampshire is obviously not going to give up its first-in-the-nation primary, the Democrats might want to rethink their attempts to make it go away.
Beyond that, what can anyone say? It looks like Donald Trump beat Nikki Haley by about 11 points in what just about every political observer believes will be her best state. It’s only going to get worse from here. No one would be surprised if she endorses Trump at Mar-a-Lago by Friday, assuming that can be scheduled around his multiple court appearances.
For many years I had a gig as a weekly columnist for The Guardian and, later, for GBH News. My practice on mornings like this was to round-up morning-after commentary and try to make sense out of it. I am so glad I don’t have to do that this time beyond a few brief observations here. I’ll confess that I didn’t even pay attention to the Iowa caucuses, and only watched a bit of cable news Tuesday night. I should add that I asked my graduate students to come in this afternoon with an example of a story from New Hampshire that they think is illuminating in some way, which I guess makes me a sadist.
One pre-New Hampshire story I want to call your attention to is this article in The New York Times by Michael C. Bender and Nicholas Nehamas. It’s labeled “Political Memo,” which is supposed to signal the reader that the piece combines reporting, analysis and opinion. The headline itself is remarkable (“The Emasculation of Ron DeSantis by the Bully Donald Trump”), but the lead is even more noteworthy:
Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage takedown of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars out of the presidential race after just one contest and left him to pick up the pieces of his political future.
Wow. I often have problems with the way the Times both-sides its day-to-day political coverage, but this is some vivid writing in the service of truth-telling. Here’s a free link, so please read the whole thing. As Josh Marshall wrote at Talking Points Memo, “it suggested to me at least some shift in dropping the pretense of conventional news coverage for conventional politics and approaching the quite unconventional story of what is really on its own visceral and physical terms.”
It also represented a break from the “two flawed candidates” narrative that we’re going to hear over and over (and over) for the next 10 months — as if the contest between Biden and Trump didn’t offer the starkest choice since 1860.
I guess it’s Ezra Klein Week at Media Nation, because he published something earlier this week that’s getting a lot of buzz: a lament for the downsizing of the music website Pitchfork, which is being absorbed by GQ, a sister publication in the Condé Nast universe.
Klein’s argument is that the largest media outlets, like The New York Times and a very few others, are doing all right, as are the smallest, such as one-person paid newsletters on Substack. It’s the middle, represented by publications such as Pitchfork, BuzzFeed News, Vice and HuffPost, that’s being lost. Klein writes (free link):
You can thrive being very small or very big, but it’s extremely hard to even survive between those poles. That’s a disaster for journalism — and for readers. The middle can be more specific and strange and experimental than mass publications, and it can be more ambitious and reported and considered than the smaller players. The middle is where a lot of great journalists are found and trained. The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered.
For those of us who are wondering how The Washington Post’s new publisher, William Lewis, plans to revive Jeff Bezos’ sagging paper, he provided a few hints over the weekend at Davos. He talked about doing more to surface Post journalism that tends to be buried under the paper’s investigative reporting and voluminous coverage of politics. Specific areas he identified are “climate, well-being and sports,” according to Semafor (scroll down to “The Post’s Smorgasbord.”)
Climate makes sense because the Post has made it a real priority, and it may be one of the few areas in which the paper can distinguish itself from The New York Times, although the Times’ climate coverage is excellent as well. Well-being? Does Lewis really want to compete with the Times’ Well section? As for sports, maybe Lewis sees an opportunity given that the Times has offloaded its sports coverage to its subsidiary The Athletic and that Sports Illustrated may be on the verge of going under. Here’s a thought: Why not acquire SI and run it as a Post vertical?
Lewis also talked about dynamic pricing for subscriptions. I have no idea what that means except that it generally refers to charging some people more than others.
The overall strategy, as Semafor describes it, is to “focus on improving the packaging of the Washington Post’s existing journalism, rather than expensive new initiatives.” No surprise — the money-losing paper is unlikely to go on a hiring spree right after cutting 240 jobs. And it still has one of the largest newsrooms in the country.
The New York Times has published a story (free link) that calls into question the rise of billionaires who own news organizations, noting that The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, the Los Angeles Times under Patrick Soon-Shiong and Time magazine under Marc Benioff are all losing money. True enough. My problem with the story is that reporters Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson try too hard to impose an ubertake when in fact there’s important background with each of those examples. Mullin and Robertson write:
All three newsrooms greeted their new owners with cautious optimism that their business acumen and tech know-how would help figure out the perplexing question of how to make money as a digital publication.
But it increasingly appears that the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies’ finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.
The role of wealthy newspaper owners is something of ongoing interest to me. My last book, “The Return of the Moguls” (2018), focused on the Post, The Boston Globe and the Orange County Register in Southern California, owned by a rich Boston-area businessman named Aaron Kushner. At the time the book came out, the Post was flying high, the Globe was muddling along and the Register was failing; it eventually fell into the hands of the slash-and-burn hedge fund Alden Globe Capital. The Post’s and the Globe’s fortunes have since moved in opposite directions.
Here are the particulars that get glossed over in Mullin and Robertson’s attempt to impose an overarching framework:
• Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, made deep investments in technology and built up the staff. The result was years of growth and profits, which only came sputtering to a halt after Donald Trump left the White House. Former executive editor Marty Baron, in his book “Collision of Power,” suggests that, over time, a disciplined approach to hiring became more lax. In other words, the Post got ahead of itself and is now in the midst of a reset. A new publisher, William Lewis, begins work this month, and we’ll see if he can articulate a strategy that amounts to more than “just like the Times only not as comprehensive.”
• Benioff bought a dog and, predictably, it’s going “woof woof.” Time was the largest of the Big Three newsweeklies, along with Newsweek and U.S. World & News Report; it’s also the only one of the three that still exists in a somewhat recognizable form. Newsweeklies succeeded because, pre-internet, you couldn’t get great national papers like the Times, the Post and The Wall Street Journal delivered to your doorstep. Not only is there no discernible reason for them to exist anymore, but the leading newsweekly these days, at least in terms of cachet, is The Economist.
• Not all billionaire owners are in it for the right reasons, and Soon-Shiong has proven to be an uncertain leader. Does he care about the Los Angeles Times or not? He’s built it up; now he’s tearing it down. He recently pushed out his executive editor, Kevin Merida, the most prominent Black editor in the country, and he’s done some truly awful things such as delivering Tribune Publishing’s papers to Alden Global Capital and more recently selling The San Diego Union-Tribune to Alden.
So what does that tell us about billionaire owners? Not much. As Mullin and Robertson acknowledge, some are doing just fine, including The Boston Globe under John and Linda Henry and The Atlantic under Laurene Powell Jobs. They could have also mentioned the Star Tribune of Minneapolis under Glen Taylor or, for that matter, The New York Times, a publicly traded company that is nevertheless under the tight control of the Sulzberger family. I don’t think the Sulzbergers are billionaires, but they are not poor.
At the moment, it seems that the only two viable models for large regional dailies is individual ownership by wealthy people who are willing to invest in future profitability and nonprofit ownership, either in the form of a nonprofit organization owning a for-profit paper, as with The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Tampa Bay Times, or a paper that goes fully nonprofit, as with The Salt Lake Tribune and The Baltimore Banner. The Banner is a digital startup that nevertheless is attempting to position itself as a comprehensive replacement for The Baltimore Sun. The Sun, in turn, was one of the Tribune papers that Soon-Shiong helped gift-wrap for Alden, and just this past week was sold to right-wing television executive David Smith.
Sports Illustrated, once among the finest magazines in the country and a model of great narrative journalism, is laying off its entire staff, according to Front Office Sports. SI was recently called out for running sponsored content with fake author profiles generated by artificial intelligence. I doubt this is the end of the road, though. The brand is heavily tarnished at this point, but I can’t imagine that someone won’t want to give it a shot.
Say hello to the new ethics committee. Photo (cc) 2012 by D J Shin.
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics identifies four broad principles: Seek Truth and Report It; Minimize Harm; Act Independently; and Be Accountable. Each of them is fleshed out in some detail. You will note that the slippery concept of objectivity is not mentioned. These days most journalists believe, as I do, that truth-seeking, independence and fairness are the standards to which we should aspire, and that holding up objectivity as a goal only leads to endless debates over what that actually means.
On Wednesday evening, I asked students in my graduate ethics seminar to come up with a fifth principle. There are only eight students in the class, so I had them work in teams of two. I also asked the gremlins of artificial intelligence to weigh in. But first, here’s what my students came up with; I’ve edited them very lightly.
Listen to Others
Be open to feedback
Promote cooperative relationships between journalists and the public
Be receptive to events in the world
Be open to a community that is not your own
Admit Limitations, Accept Your Own Bias
Don’t hide your own humanity
Accept that you can’t be objective
Accept you may not be able to follow all ethics codes all the time
Welcome criticism
Respect Relationships with Sources
Don’t get so close with sources that personal feelings might get in the way of reporting
Protect them if they will be harmed for their sharing of the truth
Provide full disclosure to the sources of what the article is about and where it is being published
Create Spaces for Untold Stories
One of the main priorities of a journalist should be to be prepared to fight for those who struggle. Journalists should:
Be righteous
Be brave
Create a sense of justice
Not be afraid to correct mistakes within their stories
Report on marginalized communities and use their personal resources to continue sharing information
I think these are terrific. The SPJ Code provides a pretty wide umbrella, so it’s not easy to come up with a fifth principle that isn’t already covered. But these proposals represent some fresh thinking. The “full disclosure” idea is important because when we’re interviewing people who aren’t accustomed to dealing with reporters, they may not understand the full implications of having their name, their quotes and in some cases their photos put before the public. And I love “Be brave.” That’s obviously true for, say, war correspondents. But journalists also have to deal with a rising wave of harassment and threats, both online and in real life. If they find that they’re unable to stand up to that, then they are not going to be able to serve their community. (They also shouldn’t be expected to put up with harassment, and newsrooms need to develop anti-harassment training and policies.)
Now … what about AI? While my students were working, I took the lazy way out and asked a couple of AI programs to come up with a fifth principle. Here’s the question I asked: “The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics has four principles: Seek Truth and Report It; Minimize Harm; Act Independently; Be Accountable. What would be a worthwhile fifth principle?” Once I finished playing, I deleted the answers and then asked them again so my students could watch everything unfold in real time. And here’s the answer from ChatGPT:
The addition of a fifth principle to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics could focus on promoting transparency. Here’s a suggestion:
“Foster Transparency: Journalists should strive to maintain transparency in their reporting processes, disclosing sources, conflicts of interest, and methodologies to enhance the credibility and trustworthiness of their work. By being transparent, journalists contribute to a more informed public and uphold the integrity of journalism.”
Not bad. Now, this is ChatGPT 3.5. You have to pay for the latest version, 4.0, and I’m obviously not going to do that. But I also asked the same question of Google Bard. As I understand it, the version that’s available to the public represents Google’s best tech. So here’s the answer:
There have been many suggestions for a fifth principle to the SPJ Code of Ethics, each reflecting evolving priorities and challenges in the journalism landscape. Here are some intriguing options to consider:
1. Foster Inclusivity and Diversity: This principle could emphasize the importance of representing marginalized voices, amplifying underrepresented perspectives, and ensuring newsrooms and reporting reflect the rich tapestry of society. It could challenge journalists to actively seek out diverse sources, challenge their own biases, and avoid harmful stereotypes.
2. Uphold Digital Responsibility: This principle would address the unique ethical challenges of the digital age, such as misinformation, disinformation, and privacy concerns. It could encourage journalists to verify information meticulously, source responsibly, and be transparent about online tools and methods.
3. Champion Civic Engagement: This principle could encourage journalists to go beyond informing the public and actively engage citizens in civic discourse. It could promote collaborative reporting, fact-checking initiatives, and platforms for audience participation, empowering the public to be informed participants in democracy.
4. Protect the Vulnerable: This principle could emphasize the need to protect vulnerable individuals and communities from exploitation or harm through reporting. It could call for sensitivity in covering sensitive topics, ensuring informed consent, and avoiding sensationalism that could endanger individuals.
5. Champion Transparency and Openness: This principle could focus on promoting transparency within the media itself, advocating for open access to information, and holding powerful institutions accountable. It could encourage self-reflection within journalism, critical examination of industry practices, and fostering a culture of ethical news consumption.
Ultimately, the “best” fifth principle is subjective and depends on the priorities and concerns of the journalism community at any given time. Each suggestion above addresses a critical aspect of ethical journalism in the 21st century, and ultimately, the decision lies with the SPJ and its members to determine which principle would best serve the mission of responsible and ethical journalism.
I hope this provides a helpful starting point for your exploration of this important topic!
This is pretty good. My students were meh about the ChatGPT answer but were impressed with Bard. If you’ve played with either of these programs, you know that the answer comes up almost instantaneously, which in itself is an impressive feat. I also think that though “Uphold Digital Responsibility” is fine as far as it goes, it should state explicitly whether or not AI is being used to help with reporting and writing.
Retired Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron writes about an unusual idea in his recent book, “Collision of Power.” Baron thinks that the time has come for news organizations to turn the tables on their tormenters and sue them for libel. Think of it like Dominion Voting System’s lawsuit against Fox News, which brought a $787.5 million settlement, except that the plaintiff would be a media outlet rather than a voting-machine company.
In his book, Baron observes that Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have both suggested that the law should be changed to make it easier for public officials and public figures to bring (and win) libel suits. He writes:
Legacy media have always vigorously defended against libel suits. Rarely have they brought defamation lawsuits of their own. What good could come of pursuing the sort of litigation we deplored? However, those who smear us find comfort in the expectation that, while we might complain, we’re unlikely to sue. We have rendered ourselves sitting ducks for slander.
I don’t want mainstream journalists to behave like warriors in the practice of their craft, but neither do I want us to suffer attacks on our character without fighting back. Winning in the court of public opinion may require, at times, going to court. If DeSantis, and copycat governors, make it easier for defamation plaintiffs to prevail, perhaps we should make some of those victories our own.
The reason I’m bringing this up now is that Baron expanded on the idea in a recent appearance on “Double Take,” a podcast produced by Newton Investment Management. Baron was interviewed by two Newton analysts, Rafe Lewis (formerly of The Boston Globe) and Jack Encarnacao (formerly of the Boston Herald). It’s a sharp interview, and well worth a listen.
As befits a podcast hosted by a financial firm, much of the conversation covered the revival of The Washington Post as a business under the ownership of Jeff Bezos. Unfortunately, the Post has gone backwards since Baron departed, and neither Lewis nor Encarnacao asked him about it. No doubt if they had, Baron would have simply said he’s not there anymore. But the Post lost a reported $100 million in 2023 and is shedding staff with the same alacrity that it was adding bodies a few years ago.
A new publisher, William Lewis, began work this month. In “Collision of Power,” Baron offers a mixed assessment of Lewis’ predecessor, Fred Ryan. Perhaps Lewis, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, will come up with a strategy for Post to thrive in the post-Trump era — that is, if we’ve even entered the post-Trump era.
I want to call your attention to what strikes me as a very odd poll that’s in today’s Boston Globe. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/USA Today poll surveyed 1,000 New Hampshire voters and asked them about the war between Israel and Hamas. Support for Israel was high — 48.6%, with 15.8% supporting the Palestinians and 14.7% sympathizing equally with both sides.
But here’s the question that has me flummoxed: “When it comes to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, what do you think the US goal should be right now?” Take a look at the responses:
Respondents only got to pick one answer. Yet if a pollster had asked me this question, I would have answered “yes” to all four, with one caveat: I’d support a cease-fire only if it were accompanied by a demand that the hostages being held by Hamas be released simultaneously. Otherwise, provide military aid to Israel? Push for a cease-fire (and the release of the hostages)? Advocate for a two-state solution? Insist that Netanyahu step down? Yes, yes, yes and yes. I suppose the first two questions, calling for Israel to “eliminate Hamas” versus pushing for a cease-fire, are binary. But I’d have answered “yes” to both anyway because I support military aid to Israel and peace and justice.
I can’t imagine I’m alone in my thinking. Given that, I’m not sure that these polls results have any value. And I guess I’d have been with the 2.1% who refused to answer.
Substack, the newsletter and blogging platform that got so much attention a few years ago, is in a world of trouble. Casey Newton is taking his Platformer newsletter about social media and tech to a nonprofit, open-source self-publishing service called Ghost after he says his efforts to persuade Substack to pull pro-Nazi content failed to result in a meaningful change of policy. The controversy has been building since November, when Jonathan M. Katz wrote a piece for The Atlantic headlined “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”
Of course, this is a crisis of Substack’s own making, and it could resolve it quickly if its executives choose to do so. But an obstinate refusal to deviate from what they see as their commitment to free speech has so far led them to do nothing — or at least not enough to keep a highly regarded publication like Platformer from leaving. In a December post that has been widely criticized and ridiculed on Substack Notes, co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote in part:
I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either — we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse.
We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.
The problem, as I wrote for GBH News three years ago, is that Substack has two separate businesses. One is a solid contribution to the tech community: great software that makes it easy to self-publish and solicit payments from your audience. The other is to establish itself as a major force in the publishing world, paying celebrities like Newton (he says Substack provided him with health-insurance subsidies and legal assistance) and promoting their content. Now problems with the second business are threatening to overwhelm the first.
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The internet itself can be a pretty terrible place, filled with terrorists, pedophiles and, yes, Nazis. But the net is also neutral. Substack, like Facebook, Twitter/X, Threads and most other platforms, is anything but, promoting certain types of content for eyeballs, clicks and profit. Substack is not just hosting Nazis, it is arguably pushing their content in front of readers and making money from it. Newton wrote:
Substack’s aspirations now go far beyond web hosting. It touts the value of its network of publications as a primary reason to use its product, and has built several tools to promote that network. It encourages writers to recommend other Substack publications. It sends out a weekly digest of publications for readers to consider subscribing to.
Substack has made itself a congenial home for writers once associated with the left who’ve since moved right, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. It will be interesting to see if they say something. Perhaps we’ll hear from Bari Weiss, a heterodox conservative who occasionally shows some backbone and who publishes a site called The Free Press on Substack.
The writer I’ll be watching most closely, though, is Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian who is perhaps Substack’s biggest star. She has to be thinking about moving her “Letters from an American” to another platform, but I haven’t seen anything from her so far. If she would like to ghost Substack and move to Ghost, though, I’m sure Casey Newton would lend a hand.
The yellow is the path of what would become the Tip O’Neill Tunnel through the city. The red and blue are the Ted Williams Tunnel to Logan Airport. Photo (cc) from the 1990s by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.
Over the past few months, news organizations in Boston have unveiled massive projects that dig deeply into traumatic (for very different reasons) historical events — The Boston Globe’s series on the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart at the hands of her husband, Charles, whose claim that the killing was carried out by a Black man turned the city upside-down; and GBH News’ nine-part podcast on the Big Dig.
I approached both projects with some trepidation, wondering what more I could learn about such well-known events. Well, the Globe’s series and podcast were incredibly well done, and we did learn a few things we didn’t previously know; I did not see the Stuart documentary film made in conjunction with the series, but I understand it’s essentially a shortened version of the podcast. “The Big Dig” (that is, the podcast, not the tunnels) was outstanding as well. I just finished listening to it a couple of days ago.
Once I started “The Big Dig,” I got hooked because of the premise. We live at a time when it seems that we’re unable to build great public projects. They come in way over budget, they’re flawed and NIMBYs are able to keep them tied up for years. The way host and co-producer Ian Coss frames the podcast is that the Big Dig is among the earliest and most expensive examples of that phenomenon. As we all know, it cost far more than initial projections, it was years late, it was fatally flawed (literally) and opponents were able to tie it up in red tape.
It’s a dilemma that Ezra Klein of The New York Times has talked about a lot on his own podcast. Rather than liberalism that fetishizes process and empowers stakeholders (and non-stakeholders) in such a way that it makes it too easy to stop progress, he argues, we need a “liberalism that builds.” That will also be the topic of his next book, co-authored with Derek Thompson.
“The Big Dig” begins with an unusually righteous example of process liberalism — the fight to stop the Southwest Corridor, led by a bright young bureaucrat named Fred Salvucci and eventually embraced by Gov. Frank Sargent. Salvucci, whose voice holds together the podcast throughout all nine episodes (he’s now 83), rose to become secretary of transportation under Gov. Michael Dukakis and embraced the two projects that eventually became known as the Big Dig: the Ted Williams Tunnel connecting the city with Logan Airport and the Tip O’Neill Tunnel, which enabled Salvucci’s dream of removing the elevated Central Artery and knitting the city back together.
It makes no sense for me to summarize the podcast except to say that Coss does a masterful job of including a tremendous amount of detail and human-interest stories while keeping it moving. We learn all about Scheme Z, a phrase that I thought I’d never hear out loud again. The greedy parking lot owner who held up the airport tunnel. The soil that was softer than expected. The flaws in the slurry walls. That said, I do have three reservations.
At the end of episode 8, the Big Dig is portrayed as unsafe. Although Coss tells us that the improperly installed ceiling tiles that led to the death of a driver, Milena Delvalle, were fixed, you do not get the impression that the overall project was safe. Yet in episode 9, the epilogue, we learn that the Big Dig finally can be seen as a success story without any indication of how those safety problems — including significant leaks in the slurry walls — were overcome.
A personal pique, but audio clips of my friend and former GBH colleague Emily Rooney, who hosted “Greater Boston” and “Beat the Press” for many years, are heard over and over, especially in episodes 7 and 8 — yet she is never named. Even Howie Carr is identified after one brief snippet of sound. Emily was the face and voice of GBH News for many years, and she should have gotten a mention.
The series closes with the launch of the Green Line Extension, which is presented as a triumphant last piece of the puzzle. “It felt good to feel good about a big project that our city had accomplished,” Coss says. “To put the cynicism away for a day and just enjoy the ride.” Now, I’m sure the lead time for the podcast was long, but, uh.
Overall, though, “The Big Dig” is an extraordinarily well-done overview of a project that kept the city tied up in knots for years, and that has been a success despite the astronomical cost — more than $24 billion by some estimates, or triple the $7.7 billion that was budgeted once the work had started, which was itself far higher than the original $3 billion price tag.
I hope GBH got the bounce they were looking for, because I’d like to see more such podcasts in the future. And if you’re new to Boston, you learn a lot about our city from both the Globe’s reporting on the Stuart case and from “The Big Dig.” Along with J. Anthony Lukas’ book “Common Ground,” the story of Boston’s desegregation crisis, these two works of extended narrative journalism have entered the library of essential Boston reading and listening.
Substack, the newsletter and blogging platform that got so much attention a few years ago, is in a world of trouble. Casey Newton is 
