The Washington Post has named a new publisher to replace Fred Ryan, who left earlier this year amid widening losses, falling circulation and a reported rift with executive editor Sally Buzbee. Ryan will be succeeded by Will Lewis, and there are some flashing lights we ought to pay attention to.
For one thing, Lewis was knighted by King Charles III on the recommendation of Boris Johnson. For another, he is a former top lieutenant to Rupert Murdoch, although he denies that he and Murdoch are close. Weirdly, a Post profile of Lewis says that “Lewis disagrees with media descriptions of him as a former ‘Murdoch lieutenant,’” but it’s a simple fact. It doesn’t mean that he still speaks to Murdoch or that he doesn’t have his own set of values.
Lewis is the founder, CEO and publisher of a project called The News Movement, which the Post describes as “a social-first media business providing nonpartisan news to Gen Z.” The homepage offers BuzzFeed-style clickbait, but Lewis also has a background in serious journalism.
In other words, there are warning signs, but Lewis may turn out to be an inspired choice. That said, Post owner Jeff Bezos’ hiring record is mixed. Ryan always struck me as not quite right for the job, something confirmed by former executive editor Marty Baron in his book “Collision of Power.” Among Ryan’s last acts was presiding over the death of the Post’s gaming vertical, one of the few features the paper offered that appealed to a younger readership.
Bezos’ pick for editorial page editor, David Shipley, has not improved the Post’s opinion section, which, with few exceptions, has been dismal for many years. The jury is still out on Buzbee. She was well-regarded in her previous job as executive editor of The Associated Press. Her performance at the Post strikes me as solid, but I’m not sure what her vision is. Perhaps her tense relationship with Ryan held her back.
Final fun fact: The New York Times beat the Post in breaking the news about Lewis’ hiring. Yes, I know it can be difficult to report on your own institution, but good grief.
Christian Science Center in Boston. Photo (cc) 2014 by Bill Damon.
In my undergraduate media ethics class the other day, my students and I talked about whether coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas is contributing to a sense of hopelessness. There is, in fact, so much legitimately terrible news that it’s hard to be optimistic about the prospects for peace and justice. Yet it’s important that we try.
One often-overlooked resource for times like this is located right here in Boston: The Christian Science Monitor, a 115-year-old publication that at one time was a highly influential news organization and that still does good work through its newsletters and website. As its homepage puts it, “the Monitor offers a story of our common challenges, and how we can begin to find solutions and credible hope.”
We listened to a 15-minute interview with Monitor journalist Ned Temko on why he thinks the current war, horrific as it is, might lead to a decent outcome. Temko certainly isn’t blind to the realities. This, for instance, is pretty bleak:
There is nothing, in my 40-plus years of covering both sides, that has been so wantonly violent against civilians, intentionally, as the October 7th attacks. It helps explain the ferocity of the intended Israeli response. I think psychologically and emotionally, it’s deeply changed how Israelis feel about their own army, their government, about the Palestinians, certainly about Hamas. And on the Palestinian side, as you point out, it’s kind of revived this sense of displacement because something like a million Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to the south of the Gaza Strip in anticipation of a major Israeli ground thrust into the north of Gaza.
But Temko adds that he is “hopeful” that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has reached such a terrible impasse that it may actually lead to a resolution — not soon, but in the years ahead. He explains:
I’ve had the good fortune not only to have covered this for a very, very long time, but to have covered both sides. I got to know both sides of this conflict on a human level. And if I can make the case for hope, unlikely though it seems now, I think it’s the following, that all the other options to this decades long conflict have been tried. Some resolution has sometimes been close, and I’ve covered that as well, but always ultimately failed. I think what’s different this time around is the immediacy, the visceral sense in which people on both sides have felt that this conflict is inescapably part of their lives, and not in a good way. That there is, for each of them, a dawning realization that their own interests in a stable, secure existence, in which they have a future, depends on some sort of resolution of this core dispute.
After we listened to the interview with Temko, we divided the class into five teams. Each was asked to find a story about the conflict that emphasized solutions, hope and optimism. Here is what they came up with:
• “‘I Love You. I Am Sorry’: One Jew, One Muslim and a Friendship Tested by War,” by Kurt Streeter, The New York Times, Oct. 22. An account of a friendship between two women in Los Angeles, one Muslim, one Jewish. “Their close friendship,” Streeter wrote, “signals that the ties that bind adherents of Judaism and Islam can remain strong, even as the war pitting people of their faiths against each other rages.”
• “Peace activists in Israel speak about their hopes for the end of war,” interview by Scott Simon, NPR, Oct. 21. Simon spoke with Sally Abed, an Israeli Palestinian, and Alon-Lee Green of the organization Standing Together. Green told Simon that “we see a lot of anger and a lot of feelings of revenge. And we do understand these feelings, but we do say in the clearest way possible, more killing of innocent people, more bloodshed, more feeding of this vicious circle of death and blood will not bring back anyone to life.”
• “‘Let Gaza Live’: Calls for Cease-Fire Fill Grand Central Station,” by Claire Fahy, Julian Roberts-Grmela and Sean Piccoli, The New York Times, Oct. 31. On the surface, this story doesn’t inspire much in the way of optimism. The protest that is described was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, an explicitly anti-Zionist organization, and it led to more than 300 arrests on charges of trespass and disorderly conduct. But it’s hard to disagree with the sentiment expressed in a sign that some of the protesters unveiled: “Never Again for Anyone.”
• “‘I hope it can endure’: examples of Jewish-Arab solidarity offer hope in Israel,” by Bethan McKernan, The Guardian, Oct. 15. Abed and Green of Standing Together make another appearance in this story, was reported from Jerusalem. Wrote McKernan: “Thousands of volunteers of different ethnicities are working to help victims of the violence and clean up neglected bomb shelters, amid many other efforts at calming the heightened tensions around the country.”
• “Opinion: We are a Palestinian and an Israeli in Los Angeles. We find comfort and hope in mourning together,” by Rana Shalhoub and Hila Keren, The Los Angeles Times, Oct. 17. These are not the same two Los Angeles women profiled by The New York Times. “Of course, our close connection does not mean we agree on all aspects of this catastrophic situation,” Shalhoub and Keren wrote. “But we feel grateful that our true care for each other has at least allowed us to unite around two things. One relates to the present: the value of mourning together all loss of innocent human life. The other relates to the future: the belief that humanity on both sides is key to breaking the vicious circle created by hate.”
The Boston Globe has hired a managing editor for local news, according to a memo to the staff from editor Nancy Barnes. I received the memo earlier today from a trusted source. Cristina Silva, currently managing editor for national news at USA Today, will start work at the Globe toward the end of November. A reporting fellow at the Globe in 2005 and ’06, she has also worked at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), The Associated Press, the International Business Times and Newsweek.
According to a job description posted at LinkedIn, Silva will be in charge of business, metro, the express desk and the Rhode Island and New Hampshire bureaus. According to her LinkedIn bio, she is active in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, co-founding and serving as president of the Los Angeles chapter.
The move comes at a time when the Globe is expanding its local and regional news footprint, adding a New Hampshire bureau to its several-years-old Rhode Island bureau and beefing up coverage in the suburbs, especially in Cambridge and Somerville.
The full text of Barnes’ memo follows:
Dear all,
I am pleased to announce that Cristina Silva, a veteran journalist currently with USA Today, will join our newsroom at the end of November in the newly created role of Managing Editor for Local News.
In that position, she will report to me, and work closely with the Metro, Business, Express, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire teams.
Some of you may be familiar with Cristy from her time as a reporting fellow here in Boston from May of 2005 to August of 2006. Since those early days, she has gone on to do exceptional work as a reporter and editor, with reporting stintsat the St. Petersburg Times and the Associated Press. Her editing experience ranges from serving as Managing Editor of the International Business Times, News Director for Newsweek, and several enterprise roles at USA Today before being promoted to her current position of Managing Editor for National News.
During her tenure at the USA Today Network, she has overseen a wide range of coverage: the Surfside condo collapse in Miami, the Astroworld Festival disaster, theJan. 6 insurrection, and the Ukraine War. She has managed major projects that examined the failures of schools across the country during the COVID crisis, and ground-breaking work examining the discriminatory effect of COVID on communities of color.
Cristy has been a fierce advocate for promoting diversity in reporting and hiring not just in her own newsroom, but through her work with myriad national journalism associations.At Gannett,she helped create and run a Latino Leadership Academy and a Diversity Leadership Academy aimed at retaining top talent. Her colleagues told me repeatedly that she is valued as a generous mentor to her staff and peers alike.
Cristy will join the newsroom Nov. 28, when she will be here in Boston, and will commute between here and Los Angeles until Jan. 2, when she will relocate permanently. She is thrilled to be joining us.
“I am deeply honored to rejoin The Boston Globe, this time as Managing Editor for Local News. The Globe’s legacy of excellence and its commitment to serving the community have long shaped who I am as a journalist,” she said. “I look forward to supporting this talented newsroom and working closely with the community to deliver the exemplary news coverage Boston and New England deserve.”
Please join me in welcoming Cristina Silva back to Boston.
One of the most vexing, and even dangerous, issues facing journalists these days is harassment, both online and in real life. Among the best-known examples is New Hampshire Public Radio, whose reporter Lauren Chooljian, along with her editor, Dan Barrick, and her parents were the targets of vandalism to their homes, apparently in retaliation for Chooljian’s reporting. Four New Hampshire men have been indicted by federal authorities and face long prison terms and heavy fines if they are convicted.
Harassment has been emerging as an issue in journalism education as well. I’ve been trying to find ways of dealing with it in my undergraduate and graduate ethics classes. A year ago, I devoted just part of one 100-minute class to the subject. Now I set aside a week — two full classes.
Because I know other journalism instructors are dealing with this, I thought I’d lay out how we handled it in my class just recently. This is ever-evolving, of course, so please consider this one instructor’s attempt to wrestle with a difficult issue.
This past Friday marked one year since Elon Musk purchased X/Twitter and took a wrecking ball to it. Twitter was far from perfect — we all called it “the hellsite” long before he arrived. But he’s done everything he could to drive it into the ground, empowering trolls, restoring extreme-right and neo-Nazi accounts, and enabling disinformation on a widespread scale.
Musk took specific actions to degrade the experience as well. He ended a modest paid-subscription service that allowed you to edit your tweets. He got rid of the blue checks for verified accounts and replaced them with blue checks for anyone who was willing to pay, thus greatly amplifying hate and falsehoods. He blocked access for anyone who didn’t have a Twitter account, which blew up embedded news feeds. And he proved that he himself was among the most sociopathic users of the service he’d purchased, engaging in such behavior as amplifying an online wilding campaign against a young journalist and putting her life in danger.
The results for Twitter as a business have been devastating. The Washington Post reports (free link):
The number of people actively tweeting has dropped by more than 30 percent, according to previously unreported data obtained by The Washington Post, and the company — which the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX has renamed X — is hemorrhaging advertisers and revenue, interviews show.
The Post also reports that Musk has succeeded in moving Twitter far to the right. My own experience is that a number of conservatives who I’d like to follow on one of the new platforms that have sprung up or grown in response to Musk’s actions have stayed put, almost as a sign of tribal loyalty. Not everyone — certainly a lot of the Never Trump conservatives have moved elsewhere. But it’s enough that the old sense you had on Twitter that everyone was there has fractured, probably forever.
After Musk bought Twitter, I went all-in at Mastodon, which had already been around for several years. But though I was able to build a decent list of followers and have found engagement to be quite good, most news organizations and prominent people are missing. Bluesky, co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, seems like the closest thing to a direct Twitter replacement, but it’s falling behind because of its incredibly aggravating invitation-only scheme.
Which leaves us with Threads, part of the Zuckerborg. It’s definitely the fastest-growing of the alternatives, and it’s where I spend most of my social-media time these days. It’s also adding features quickly in an attempt to catch up. Threads got off to a fast start when it was launched during the summer, lagged, and now seems to be taking off again. Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Threads now has 100 million monthly users — no doubt well behind Twitter (Musk took the company private, so he’s free to lie about metrics), but impressive nevertheless.
Yet I find that there are three buckets of Twitter users that I need to connect with who aren’t going anywhere: friends who are not extremely online; Massachusetts politics folks; and people and organizations involved in the future of local news. For some reason, they’re still firmly planted on Twitter.
Twitter was far from perfect — very far indeed. It had become a frequently ugly place, and a lot of us were already using it differently compared to, say, 10 years ago. But Musk has made it much worse.
For more than eight years, The Washington Post experienced a second golden age. From late 2013, when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the storied paper for $250 million, through the early months of 2021, when Donald Trump left the White House and a new administration began to settle in, the Post was firing on all cylinders. Thanks to Bezos’ strategic investments in technology and an expanded news report, the Post emerged as a real competitor to The New York Times for the first time since the 1970s.
That second golden age also overlapped with Martin Baron’s time as executive editor of the Post. In his new book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” Baron tells the story of those years, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the end of the legendary Graham era; how Bezos quickly transformed a shrinking, mostly regional newspaper into a national digital media outlet; and the challenge of covering Trump, whom Baron frankly, and repeatedly, calls an “authoritarian.”
The Sun Journal of Lewiston, Maine, and the Portland Press Herald have dropped their paywall for coverage of the mass shootings in Lewiston on Wednesday night, which claimed what’s now reported to be 18 lives. The two papers, which are owned by the same nonprofit trust, have also published a sensitive story about some of the victims — six at the moment, with, sadly, more to come.
Meanwhile, The Boston Globe is treating this as a local story, going all-in with multiple reports. Today’s print edition includes four front-page stories, ranging from a round-up of what we know so far to a story on Maine’s gun laws. There are two opinion pieces and four more articles in the metro section covering topics such as the fear experienced at nearby Bates College and how teachers should discuss mass shootings with their students. The Globe is also running updates on its homepage.
For journalists, this is difficult, harrowing work. I’ve covered some emotionally upsetting stories, but never anything remotely like this. While we focus on the suffering of the victims, think about the reporters, too. Like first responders, journalists are performing a vital role in keeping the public informed about an ongoing tragedy.
Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center reported the results of a survey that found news consumption fell significantly between 2016 and 2022: “In 2016, 51% of U.S. adults said they followed the news all or most of the time. But that share fell to 38% in 2022, the most recent time we asked this question.”
Now we are in a moment of real horror and crisis. From war in Ukraine to Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel to the retaliatory response that’s now under way; from chaos in Washington to another terrible mass shooting, this time in Lewiston, Maine — it’s no wonder that people are tuning out. Who can process all this?
With the shooter in Lewiston still at large, it’s a good time to take another look at “The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook,” compiled in 2013 after an earlier mass shooting. Given that initial reports are often wrong, there’s little reason to watch the story unfold in real time. Catch the top of the hour if you must, but otherwise wait for something more comprehensive and vetted.
And here are some Maine-based sources of coverage:
The Telegram & Gazette of Worcester published a story with some mighty odd timing. Like many media outlets, the paper reported Tuesday that state Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office had reached a settlement with state Sen. Ryan Fattman and his wife, Worcester Registrar of Probate Stephanie Fattman, to end a three-year investigation into campaign-finance improprieties.
But wait. The T&G story, by Kinga Borondy, includes quotes from an interview with the Fattmans conducted at Sen. Fattman’s Statehouse office last Friday. “There was no finding of liability, no admission of wrongdoing,” Ryan Fattman was quoted as saying.
On the surface, it looks like the T&G held important news about campaign-finance irregularities for four days. Lance Harris, who writes the Central Mass. Politics blog, wrote on X/Twitter: “Wait. The T&G knew Friday that the Fattmans were settling the case with OCPF [the Office of Campaign and Political Finance] and sat on it until today? The Fattmans gave an exclusive ‘our side of the story’ in exchange for the T&G embargoing the interview?”
I asked the T&G’s executive editor, Michael McDermott, why his paper held the story. Here was his emailed answer:
We did have an interview with the Fattmans on Friday afternoon and a story was filed. I felt that what they said needed to be confirmed by the attorney general’s office, so I decided not to publish until we got that confirmation. It came on Tuesday morning. Once we got the confirmation, we published. I’m glad we waited because the attorney general provided significant additional context that would have otherwise been missing.
You know what? That’s a good answer. If the T&G had rushed to publish as soon as the interview with the Fattmans was over, it would have only had one side of the story. By waiting, the paper was able to include the attorney general’s official disposition of the case, which covered both Fattmans, other members of their family, and state and local Republican committees. It’s a complicated story, but the bottom line is that the Fattmans owe several hundred thousand dollars in compensation and fines.
Borondy’s article includes a statement from Campbell that said: “Enforcing our campaign finance laws, and holding those who violate them accountable, are critical functions of our office. We will continue to hold accountable those who misuse positions of power, break the law and undermine the public’s trust.”
And I give McDermott credit for resisting the urge to press the “publish” button before the T&G had a complete account.
A disturbing new development has emerged in The New York Times’ botched initial headline about the Gaza hospital explosion. Charlotte Klein of Vanity Fair obtained internal Slack messages that show there was internal pushback in the Times newsroom, but that those raising concerns were overruled by senior editors. I don’t have a log-in for Vanity Fair, but Tom Jones of Poynter Online has summarized her story:
Klein wrote, “… senior editors appear to have dismissed suggestions from an international editor, along with a junior reporter stationed in Israel who has been contributing to the paper’s coverage of the war, that the paper hedge in its framing of events.”…
[T]he international editor wrote, “I think we can’t just hang the attribution of something so big on one source without having tried to verify it. And then slap it across the top of the [homepage]. Putting the attribution at the end doesn’t give us cover, if we’ve been burned and we’re wrong.”
No kidding. Please read Jones’ item in full; trust me when I tell you that it gets worse.
As we know, the Times and a number of other media outlets claimed Oct. 17 that an Israeli missile had struck Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City and killed an estimated 500 people, attributing the news to the Hamas-led Palestinian government. It took the Times at least an hour and a half to add that Israeli officials were claiming that the explosion was the result of a failed missile launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Hamas ally. The Times published an Editor’s Note on Monday acknowledging that it fell short of its own standards.
Based on the best available evidence, it now appears likely that Israeli officials were correct; that the Islamic Jihad missile did not actually strike the hospital but exploded nearby; and that the death toll, though still uncertain, is considerably lower than 500. This BBC News assessment, which points in that direction, is now six days old, but The Washington Post reports that U.S. intelligence now believes with “high confidence” that Israel was not responsible.
