Category: Media

Three shining examples of enterprise reporting from The Boston Globe that you should know about

A DEA drug bust in Norfolk, Va. Photo (cc) 2019 by the Office of Public Affairs for the U.S. Marshals Service.

This morning I’d like to call your attention to three outstanding recent examples of enterprise journalism in The Boston Globe. On Friday I shared my last gift links for the month to The New York Times (those links should still work, by the way); the Globe, unfortunately, has a tight paywall with no gift links. One, however, is a podcast that you can listen to for free. So here we go.

“The DEA said it arrested 171 ‘high ranking’ Sinaloa Cartel members. A Spotlight investigation found that’s not true.,” by Andrew Ryan, Hanna Krueger, Joey Flechas, Steven Porter and Amanda Milkovits, and edited by Gordon Russell.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has claimed that it’s made a major dent in the flow of illegal drugs in New England by arresting high-value suspects from a Latin American drug cartel. The Globe found that, in fact, the suspects were overwhelmingly “addicts, low-level dealers, shoplifters, and people living at a homeless encampment.” The Spotlight Team wrote:

“I can guarantee that he’s not part of the Sinaloa Cartel,” Scott Alati said of his son, Tyler, who was charged in state court in Franklin with a felony-level drug sale and immediately released without having to post bail. “He isn’t a high-ranking member of anything. He’s high-ranking dumb.”

In an editorial published today, the Globe asks: “If the Trump administration isn’t telling the truth about drug raids in New Hampshire, can people believe its rationale for killing supposed drug runners in the Caribbean?”

The answer is no. No, we can’t.

“Water is coming for the Seaport; the whole city will be poorer for it,” by Catherine Carlock and Yoohyun Jung. The story about how climate change threatens to inundate the Seaport District because of rising water levels is just one of a package. Other articles examine the effects of climate change-induced flooding on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, the low-lying town of Hull, the pressure on levees in cities like Chicopee, and what is happening in small coastal communities.

Carlock and Jung write of the Seaport:

Rising seas threaten to reclaim those old mud flats, and, together with more frequent and severe storms, could swamp the neighborhood that has risen atop them. In all, 99 percent of what’s been built in the Seaport in the last quarter-century is at risk of flooding by 2050, according to a recent analysis from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.

I want to call your attention to an interactive map put together by Jung and John Hancock that’s based on data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the Trump regime has been busily wrecking. You can enter any address and see what the risks are. It turns out that we’re far enough uphill from the Mystic Lakes that we have little to worry about, but that’s not true of our neighbors closer to the shore.

The digital presentation of the entire series is outstanding.

“The Harvard Plan, Season 2,” by Ilya Marritz. I do not share the Globe’s obsession with all things Harvard. But I listened to Season 1 on the fall of former Harvard president Claudine Gay and got more out of it than I had expected. Over the weekend I caught the first episode of Season 2, which deals with the Trump regime’s assault on Harvard and other universities. As someone who works for a large university, I couldn’t help but be enthralled.

The podcast is a collaboration between the Globe and the public radio program “On the Media,” and it’s free. I was especially taken with Kit Parker, a bioengineering and physics professor, Army officer and self-described conservative Trump supporter. Parker is in favor of Trump’s crusade. At one point he says:

We’re unable to complete our mission by hosting debate and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides. We continue to lower standards for admissions and scholarship, and integrity of scholarship.

We had spent 10 years talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, while we were aggressively excluding or silencing conservative voices on campus. Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.

Of course, there are also more liberal faculty members who express horror at what Trump is doing as well as ambivalence over how Harvard should respond.

If you live in the Boston area and you’re reading this blog, then you’re probably already a Globe subscriber. But as I’ve said before, I wish they’d offer a few gift links per month, and I think it would result in more paid subscribers.

With midnight approaching, here are my last three New York Times gift links for October

The U.S. Supreme Court

It’s that most wonderful time of the month, when I’ve got a few gift links to The New York Times that I haven’t used and I want to share them with my readers. These links will turn into pumpkins at midnight, which is appropriate on Halloween. (That is, they’d turn into unshareable pumpkins for me. Now that I’ve shared them, you should be able to use them indefinitely.) So please enjoy.

“The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices,” by Jodi Kantor. This is by far the most significant of the three, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Kantor’s major thrust is that Justice Elena Kagan is trying to stick with her longstanding approach of being conciliatory in the hopes of occasionally pulling Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to her side, whereas Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has put the right-wing majority on blast.

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A post-merger purge of 2,000 at Paramount claims WBZ-TV political analyst Jon Keller

Jon Keller, left, and I kicked around some media topics on WBZ-TV back in 2018, when we were both a little less gray.

Old friend Jon Keller was laid off Thursday by WBZ-TV (Channel 4) as part of wide-ranging cuts at Paramount-owned CBS, writes Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan (sub. req). Keller, a political analyst at the station for 20 years, was one of five staff members who lost their jobs, although he was the only on-air journalist.

Earlier this year the station laid off medical reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall, and veteran reporter Beth Germano retired. The departures represent a significant blow to the station given that television news depends on recognizable, trusted journalists.

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The Washington Post runs three editorials failing to disclose Jeff Bezos’ conflicts of interest

Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, there were fears that he would position its editorial pages to boost his various business interests and amplify his quirky political philosophy.

Consider, for example, Shel Kaphan, an engineer who was Amazon’s first employee and later had a falling-out with Bezos. “It makes me feel quite nauseous,” Kaphan told the Post immediately after the purchase was announced. “I’d hate to see the newspaper converted into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.”

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Contrary to Kaphan’s fears, Bezos proved to be an exemplary owner for 10 years. Then, in late 2023 he hired the ethically challenged Fleet Street veteran Will Lewis as his publisher, and it’s been all downhill since then.

Particularly damaging has been Bezos’ assault on the Post’s opinion section, which began with his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 presidential election. That was followed by the exodus of key employees, Bezos’ pronouncement that the opinion section would be reoriented to emphasize “free markets and personal liberties,” and the hiring of the conservative journalist Adam O’Neal to be opinion editor.

Now comes yet another disturbing development in the Post opinion section’s race to the bottom. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that, on three occasions in recent weeks, the Post has editorialized in favor of Bezos’ business interests without making any disclosure — a violation of basic journalistic ethics. As Folkenflik observes:

For the newspaper’s owner to have outside business holdings or activities that might intersect with coverage or commentary is conventionally seen to present at the least a perception of a conflict of interest. Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency.

The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past, whether the Graham family’s holdings, which included the Stanley Kaplan educational company and Slate magazine, or, since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper’s reporters do so as a matter of routine.

The three undisclosed conflicts, by the way, involved a rousing endorsement of Donald Trump’s hideous ballroom, for which Amazon was a major corporate donor; support for the military’s bid to build nuclear reactors, which could bolster another Amazon investment; and a piece urging local officials in Washington to approve self-driving cars. Amazon’s autonomous car company, Zoox, had just announced that it would be moving into the nation’s capital.

Folkenflik noted that in the case of the ballroom to replace the now-demolished East Wing, the Post added a disclosure after its initial publication — but only after being called on it by Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin.

It’s not at all unusual for media moguls to have a variety of entangling business interests. The solution, without exception, is to disclose those conflicts whenever they are being reported on or editorialized about. The Boston Globe, for instance, rarely fails to disclose John and Linda Henry’s ownership of the Red Sox and their other sports-related interests when reporting on them as business enterprises.

To borrow Shel Kaphan’s description, it is nauseating to watch Bezos destroy his legacy as a first-rate newspaper owner by turning the Post’s opinion section into a pathetic joke. It has cost the Post tens of thousands of readers, and media reporter Natalie Korach of Status reports writes the staff is preparing for a painful round of cuts just before the holidays.

But Bezos doesn’t care. His interests are elsewhere. I just wish the world’s fourth-richest person would donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation so that he can cease being, as he’s put it, “not an ideal owner” of one of our great newspapers.

Mark Arsenault is leaving the Globe to report on education for The New York Times

Mark Arsenault. Photo via LinkedIn.

A well-known Boston Globe byline will soon be appearing in The New York Times. Mark Arsenault, who came to the Globe in 2010, has been hired by the Times to report on education. He’ll leave the paper on Oct. 30.

An email to the staff from editor Nancy Barnes and deputy managing editor Francis Storrs, forwarded to me by a trusted source, says in part:

Mark started at the Globe’s DC bureau in 2010, and has been based in the Boston office since 2011. Amazingly prolific and adaptable, he’s covered Congress and politics, teen suicide, the rise of the state casino industry, national parks, and the US-Canada trade war, to name just a few subjects. He worked for years on the Spotlight Team, including on projects about men imprisoned for life, the housing crisis, an ousted MIT professor, and about patients who died amid the Steward Health Care collapse. He reported on the Marathon Bombing, as part of the Globe staff that won a Pulitzer, and was on the Steward team that recently won a Loeb, among many other honors.

Arsenault’s recent Globe stories include a report from the border (sub. req.) between Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick, on how residents in both communities were faring during Donald Trump’s second term, and a story on the long-running battle (sub. req.) between Trump and the Pritzker family. Penny Pritzker, a senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, has helped lead that university’s fight against Trump’s depredations.

Boston.com, the Globe’s free site since its launch 30 years ago, is adding a metered paywall

Boston.com as it appeared in 2008.

Boston.com, a free service of Boston Globe Media since its launch 30 years ago, is adding a paywall. According to a memo sent to the staff Wednesday afternoon and provided to me by a trusted source, the site is moving to a metered paywall that can be tailored “as we learn more.” I take that to mean Boston.com will offer a certain number of free shares per month that may be moved up or down depending on what the data show.

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The cost is $5 a month for a combined subscription to Boston.com and Boston magazine, which Globe Media acquired in January of this year. Strangely enough, the cost is the same even if you only want Boston.com. Those are introductory offers; the site is also offering a non-discounted annual subscription fee of $90 that leaves out BoMag. It’s a little confusing — and don’t get me started on the completely different subscription offers you’ll find at BoMag. I’d say some unsnarling needs to be done.

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A reminder that George Santos was exposed by a local news outlet whose reporting was ignored

Photo taken from the George Santos for Congress Facebook page via Talking Points Memo.

Weeks after the 2022 congressional elections, The New York Times exposed George Santos as a world-class fraudster, documenting a trail of deceit that eventually led to prison. The Times is still bragging about it today, and the Santos saga is sometimes held up as an example of the rot that can fester when local journalism fails.

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But as I wrote in December 2022, it was the Times that failed — and, to an even greater extent, Newsday, a daily newspaper that purportedly covers Long Island, including Santos’ district. Both papers ignored reporting by a local news outlet, The North Shore Leader, showing that there were massive plumes of smoke emanating from Santos’ campaign headquarters and that maybe someone ought to take a look and see if there were any flames coming out as well.

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Public journalism redux: Post-academia, Jay Rosen returns to where he started

Jay Rosen. Photo (cc) 2017 by the Moody College of Communication.

Jay Rosen has been one of the major thinkers in journalism since the 1990s. Younger followers may think of him mainly as a media critic, and there’s no doubting his influence in that field. Through his blog, PressThink, and his social media presence (especially back in Twitter’s heyday), Rosen showed an uncanny ability to frame issues in a way that made a lot of us think about what we were doing.

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The “production of innocence” was his phrase for “a public showing by professional journalists that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of — and here we enter the realm of dread — political bias.”

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The Globe’s print circulation drops again, but it says paid digital ‘is thriving’

Photo (cc) 2018 by Dan Kennedy

The Boston Globe’s paid print circulation continues to fall, and the paper has stopped reporting numbers for digital subscribers — although a spokeswoman says that paid digital “is thriving and surpassing expectations.”

The print numbers come from the Globe’s annual “Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation,” which it is required to publish under postal regulations. The Sunday Globe numbers appeared this past Sunday and the weekday numbers were reported on Monday.

The Globe’s average weekday paid print circulation for the 12-month period ending in August 2025 was 51,626. That’s a decline of 5,824 over the previous year, when the figure was 57,450, and a total drop of 13,351 from two years ago, when it was 64,977. In percentage terms, daily paid print circulation is down 10.1% over last year and 20.5% over two years ago.

On Sunday, the most recent 12-month average for paid print is 89,809, down 12,894 (from 102,703) compared to the previous year and down 26,647 (from 116,456) compared to two years ago. The percentage drops are 12.6% over the previous year and 22.9% over the past two.

Of course, what really matters at the Globe, and at most other newspapers, is paid digital circulation. Unfortunately, I have nothing to share, as the Globe has stopped providing those numbers. Don Seiffert reported in the Boston Business Journal last June that the Globe was no longer including paid digital in the numbers that it makes available to the Alliance for Audited Media. He quoted a Globe spokesperson as saying that its digital-subscriber base “continues to grow at a steady pace” and that the paper will share those numbers “periodically, most likely around significant milestones.”

In the past, the Globe has shared its internal numbers for paid digital with journalists. But when I asked for them this week, Globe spokeswoman Carla Kath told me by email, “While I can’t share exact figures right now, our subscription business is thriving and surpassing expectations. We will continue to share our subscriber numbers at key milestones.”

Last fall, the Globe said that paid digital circulation had reached 261,000, up from 245,000 the previous year. Chief executive Linda Henry has set a long-term goal of 400,000 paid digital subscribers.

In the absence of any paid digital numbers, I’ll note that Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab recently reported that the Globe’s website received 8,691,001 visits in June of this year, making it the 13th most heavily trafficked newspaper site in the U.S. That was down 18.9% from the previous month, when the Globe was No. 7. (Large month-to-month fluctuations in web traffic are not unusual.) That’s impressive for a paper with an exceptionally tight paywall, something that limits casual traffic.

If Globe executives want to boost digital subscriptions, I’d suggest that they offer a few free shares each month, as many other papers do. If non-subscribers could have a chance to sample the Globe’s journalism, they might decide it’s worth handing over their credit-card information.