By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
South of Boston folks: I’ll be speaking on “News and Democracy in a Time of Crisis” at the Stoughton Public Library in Stoughton, Massachusetts, on Monday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. This free and open event is sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Sharon-Stoughton. Hope to see you there!
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.
Did Donald Trump get excited about sending troops into Portland, Oregon, because he was watching 5-year-old footage on Fox News depicting violence in the streets? It would appear that the answer is yes.
Independent journalist Philip Bump, part of the Washington Post diaspora, reported that Fox ran B-roll from Portland during segments with Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sept. 27 showing a violent protest in Portland that included fires, what appears to be tear gas, and demonstrators squaring off with law enforcement. But the footage is dated June 2020. Who knows if Trump was paying attention?
Bump offers this as well:
In an interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, he described a conversation he’d had with Oregon’s governor.
“I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different,’” Trump said of the conversation. “They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”
Well, yes, Man Who Has Access to the Breadth of Federal Intelligence Gathering. What you saw on TV was in fact not what was happening at the moment in Portland.
Mike Masnick writes at TechDirt, “The President of the United States — who has access to better intelligence than anyone on Earth — is moving to deploy military forces against American citizens based on what he saw on TV and what his ‘people’ told him, without bothering to verify whether any of it was real.” Masnick adds:
So half of this story is that we have a mad king who will fall for anything he sees on Fox News without bothering to first find out whether it’s true or not.
That’s terrifying!
But the other part is that his “people” around him are clearly abusing the senile President to take advantage of the situation to play out their own violent fantasies.
Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reports that Trump activated 200 National Guard troops on Friday in order to respond to the non-existent violence. City and state officials sued to stop the deployment, and a ruling is expected later today.
Congratulations to The Bay State Banner, which is embarking on its 60th year of publication. The Banner, founded by Melvin Miller, covers the Black community in Greater Boston and beyond. It was acquired in 2023 by two Black journalists, Ron Mitchell and André Stark, and it continues to provide strong coverage through a weekly print edition and a robust website.
In an editorial marking the Banner’s milestone, Mitchell, now the publisher and editor, writes that Donald Trump represents a dangerous threat to Black and brown communities, observing that even Trump’s seemingly positive actions carry within them the whiff of segregation:
This Trump administration is the first one to have increased funding for historically Black universities and colleges. That is a good thing for HBCUs, which have historically been underfunded. But those increases, coupled with the attacks on DEI on historically white campuses and the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded ban on considering race in their admissions, contain dangerous echoes of the “separate but equal” doctrine that a prior Supreme Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional.
Mitchell also quotes W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote, “There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.” And he pointedly signs the editorial with his full name, Ronald Du Bois Mitchell.
This week’s edition also contains a reprint of the commemorative section that the Banner put together in celebration of its 50th anniversary. You can access the print edition online, but I’m going to have to track down a copy.
The Banner is a great example of how an independent local media outlet can serve a community not just by covering it, but by giving it a voice.
Today marks the end of government funding for public media, and Boston’s GBH is announcing a major fundraising initiative to fill the gap. Susan Goldberg, the operation’s president and CEO, says that GBH will attempt to raise $225 million over the next three years to “secure a sustainable future for the organization following the unprecedented loss of federal funding.”
The press release identifies television documentary programs and children’s shows that are produced in Boston but distributed nationally. There’s no mention of radio, including “The World,” a daily broadcast that covers international news, or GBH News, which provides local news, primarily on radio but also on digital platforms. No doubt we’ll learn more soon.
As you know, the Republican Congress earlier this year pulled back $1.1 billion in funding for public media over the next two years at Donald Trump’s insistence, even though that money had already been approved.
The full text of GBH’s press release follows, lightly edited for style.
On the Day Federal Funding Ends, GBH Launches a $225 Million Campaign to Invest in the Future of Public Media
BOSTON — Public media powerhouse GBH today announced the launch of its “Fund the Future” campaign, an ambitious three-year initiative to raise $225 million and secure a sustainable future for the organization following the unprecedented loss of federal funding. The campaign, launched on the same day that federal funding expires, aims to ensure the continuity of independent, fact-based journalism and trusted educational content in the Boston area and beyond.
“Congress told us to ‘go fund ourselves,’ and that’s exactly what we are going to do,” said Susan Goldberg, President and CEO of GBH. “This is a time when facts are being questioned and communities crave connection. GBH is doubling down on our values, focused on protecting independent journalism and making trusted, educational, and inspirational content accessible to everyone. We have a long history of innovation, and we’re relying on that muscle memory, and on the support and passion of our communities, to reimagine public media.”
GBH’s “Fund the Future” campaign focuses on three key pillars:
The campaign kicks off with the provocative slogan “Congress told us to Go Fund Ourselves.” The campaign will also incorporate the concept of “Love it? Fund it,” appealing to supporters to invest in the media that makes a difference to them.
Now that Congress has defunded public media, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) will cease to exist. To mark this historic loss and show gratitude for CPB, GBH will pause programming for 10 seconds on Oct. 1 across broadcast and streaming channels. Audiences can experience these pauses on the radio at 11:59 a.m. on GBH 89.7; CRB Classical 99.5; CAI 90.1, 91.1, and 94.3; NEPM 88.5; and Classical NEPM; and on television at 7 p.m. on GBH 2, GBH 44, WORLD, and CREATE in the Boston area; and at 7:30 p.m. on NEPM TV.
Learn more about GBH’s “Fund the Future” campaign at gbh.org/FundTheFuture.
It’s almost the end of the month, which means that the free September shares that I still have for The New York Times will disappear. So here are gift links to three stories that caught my eye earlier today. Enjoy!
► “How 106 People Got Together to Stop a School Shooting — Before It Happened,” by John Leland. The remarkable tale of a team in rural Madison County, New York, comprising law enforcement, mental health professionals, social workers and educators that intervened with a desperately unhappy high school student who was being bullied by his peers and derided as “the next school shooter.” The team’s intervention may have saved his life — as well as those of his fellow students.
► “To Get People Off the Street, He Pays for a One-Way Ticket Home,” by Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff. John Alle is a wealthy businessman in Santa Monica, California, who’s taken the vexing problem of homelessness into his own hands by paying people living on the streets to go back to where they came from. Alle himself was the victim of a severe beating at the hands of a homeless person, and he counts Stephen Miller as one of his heroes. Is Alle a good guy or a bad guy? There are no definitive answers here, but the article and accompanying visuals will make you think.
► “They Kindled Froggy Romance and Rescued Eggs to Save a Species in Mississippi,” by Catrin Einhorn. A story about efforts to save the once-endangered dusky gopher frog, which is native to southern Mississippi. Lots of photos and videos, and did I say frogs? Yes I did. Enjoy.
NJ PBS chair Scott Kobler has issued a statement in which he criticizes New Jersey government officials for “intransigence or maybe even apathy” over the public broadcasting funding crisis.
As I noted Wednesday, NJ PBS may shut down in June 2026 following a breakdown in negotiations between the state and WNET of New York, the public media organization that runs the New Jersey operation. In addition to losing some $1.5 million in federal funds, NJ PBS’s allotment of state funds has been cut from $1 million for the coming year to just $250,000.
The cuts are likely to affect NJ Spotlight News, a website covering statewide politics and public policy as well as the name of NJ PBS’s daily half-hour newscast. The two operations merged in 2019. Although WNET has pledged to keep the news operation alive online and on its New York-based station, Thirteen, regardless of what happens, its reporting capacity is likely to be reduced unless a well-heeled benefactor or two steps up.
A network of more than 1,200 websites better known for publishing so-called pink slime designed to look like legitimate local news is now branching out.
Kirk Carapezza reports for GBH News that Metric Media is flooding public colleges and universities in Massachusetts with public-records requests in order to find what its founder, Brian Timpone, calls “anti-American” classroom materials. The company is also seeking to learn the number of Chinese nationals enrolled as students at those institutions.
“There’s great public interest in what public universities are teaching students,” Timpone told Carapezza. “We want to see what they’re teaching and why.” Among the institutions that Metric Media has targeted are Salem State University, UMass Boston and Bridgewater State University.
I was one of the people who Kirk interviewed, and as I told him, I was surprised to see Metric Media taking such a pro-active role. Timpone’s various media ventures over the years have been involved in passive, money-making operations such as publishing alleged local news produced by distant employees, some in the Philippines, as the public radio program “This American Life” reported way back in 2012.
In recent years, Metric Media pink-slime sites such as North Boston News (a travel tip for those of you who aren’t from around here: North Boston is not a place that actually exists) have been publishing weirdly irrelevant slop, perhaps produced by AI. If you look right now, for instance, North Boston News features repetitive pseudo-stories on school test scores, high school sports and gas prices.
In 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review published the results of an investigation that showed Metric Media has ties to a variety of right-wing interests.
The public-records law in Massachusetts is notoriously weak, yet teaching materials such as syllabuses and reading lists at public institutions are arguably covered by it. Since I teach at Northeastern University, a private institution, it’s not something I have to be concerned about. On the face of it, I’m not sure why the two should be treated differently.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what Metric Media does with this material. And by “interesting,” I don’t mean to suggest that it will be anything good.
Two quick thoughts about Jimmy Kimmel’s return to ABC’s airwaves tonight.
First, though I’m deeply skeptical about the power of boycotts and protests, this one seems to have worked. A combination of cancellations, petitions, announcements by creatives that they would no longer work for Disney, and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s trash-talking his successor, Bob Iger (though not by name), apparently had a lot to do with the lifting of Kimmel’s suspension.
Second, there are a few factors that have yet to play out. FCC chair Brendan Carr, whose threat to Disney and to broadcasters that continued to carry Kimmel’s show is what started all this, lied on Monday by saying he had not threatened anyone. Well, if that’s what he’s claiming now and he’s sticking to it, then that’s good news.
But though Kimmel may be coming back to ABC, we have not yet heard a final decision from Nexstar or Sinclair, two giant broadcasting companies that together own about 25% of the country’s ABC affiliates. Nexstar is trying to pull off a merger with another media company and needs FCC approval.
Sinclair is controlled by right-wing interests, and the company went so far last week as to demand that Kimmel apologize for his mildly offensive monologue about Donald Trump and the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and make a sizable donation to Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Kirk.
This isn’t over yet.
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s thuggish threat to crack down on media companies following late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk differed from past instances only in that he said it out loud.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an appearance on a right-wing podcaster’s show. And Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair, all of which have significant regulatory issues before the FCC, wasted no time in making sure that Kimmel was banished from ABC’s airwaves.
Trump himself put it even more bluntly, saying that broadcasters who are “against me” should lose their licenses, reported Zoë Richards of NBC News.
The first comparison that comes to mind, naturally, is Richard Nixon’s threat in 1973 to take away the licenses of two Florida television stations owned by The Washington Post amid the paper’s dogged reporting on the Watergate scandal. “The difference here is that Nixon talked about the scheme only privately,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote about the scheme many years later.
Continue reading “MAGA media threats call to mind previous episodes during the Nixon and Bush eras”
