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Longtime Globe managing editor Jennifer Peter is leaving to take the top job at The Marshall Project

Jennifer Peter, the longtime number-two editor at The Boston Globe, is leaving to become editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, a highly regarded nonprofit news organization that covers criminal justice. Peter will start her new job on Sept. 29.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning outlet was founded 10 years ago with former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller as its top editor. Peter succeeds Susan Chira, who stepped down in December 2024. At The Marshall Project, Peter will be in charge of a staff of more than 60 journalists.

“I’m beyond thrilled to be joining such a high-caliber news organization with such a critical mission, particularly at this time in our history,” Peter was quoted as saying. “The Marshall Project was launched to meet the urgency of this moment, when so much of the criminal justice system is being reshaped.”

Added CEO Katrice Hardy: “Jennifer is the kind of leader and editor who has spent her career helping produce groundbreaking investigations and journalism, sometimes under the most trying circumstances.”

Peter has a background in newspapers and at The Associated Press, joining the Globe in 2004. She’s worked in a variety of editing jobs and oversaw the Globe’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. She was named managing editor in 2017.

In an email to the Globe staff that a source forwarded to me, Globe editor Nancy Barnes called Peter’s departure “bittersweet news” and said “she models a leadership quality that I admire: the ability to be kind, compassionate and yet unbending in her commitment to truth and ethics.” The full text of Barnes’ email follows:

Dear all,

This is bittersweet news that I am about to share with you, so brace yourselves.

After nearly 21 remarkable years at The Boston Globe, Jen Peter is leaving to become the editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization focused on criminal justice reporting.

I know this is tough news for so many of you, who have worked with Jen for a long time. As I was joining the Globe, Brian McGrory told me she was beloved, devoted to the newsroom, and incredibly hard-working. I have found all of this to be true. I would add that she models a leadership quality that I admire: the ability to be kind, compassionate and yet unbending in her commitment to truth and ethics. During my tenure, she has overseen our daily news report through a torrential cycle of news, taken leadership of several departments, and guided important projects, including last year’s examination of the handling of the state’s emergency shelter system. In addition, she has served as chief of staff, and helped with budget issues. She seems irreplaceable.

And yet… This is an exciting opportunity for Jen, to lead her own news organization at a time when so much is happening in the criminal justice space. I’m looking forward to seeing where she takes that organization next. Her last day in this newsroom will be Wednesday, Sept. 17. However, the good news is that she won’t be going far as this job will be mostly remote and she and her family will remain in Boston.

Jen started her journey at the Globe in 2004 as a co-editor of Globe North, moving on to become state politics editor and then city editor under then Metro Editor Brian McGrory. She succeeded him in that role during another turbulent news cycle: the Boston Marathon bombing, the capture and trial of Whitey Bulger, the conviction and suicide of Aaron Hernandez, the drug lab scandal, and several hotly contested mayoral, gubernatorial and US Senate elections.

She also oversaw several major projects, including 68 Blocks, a year-long immersion in the Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood; Getting In, which involved assigning eight reporters to follow families trying to get their children into the Boston Public Schools; Bus 19, which told the story of inequality in Boston through the regulars on a bus that traversed the city; and the Power of Will, Billy Baker’s story of one family’s relentless (and successful) pursuit of a cure for their child’s brain cancer. As managing editor, she conceived of the Valedictorian Project, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and helped guide the newsroom through the COVID years.

Many of you will want to know what’s next for the newsroom as Jen moves on to new challenges. We are going to put that question aside for a few weeks so that we can properly thank Jen, celebrate her innumerable contributions, and send her off in style.

Please join me in congratulating her — and let’s also remind her every day why she is going to miss this newsroom.

Nancy

Boston’s top two public media leaders argue that building community is the way forward. They’re right.

At a moment when public broadcasters are staggering from the loss of $1.1 billion in federal funds over the next two years, Boston’s two leading public media executives say that rebuilding trust and community are the keys to survival.

“I think the best way to build trust is from the local community up,” said Susan Goldberg, president and chief executive of GBH, which operates television, radio, and digital platforms. She touted the radio station’s studio at the Boston Public Library as a way for people to come in “and watch us create the content in front of them,” saying: “I think it’s that kind of transparency that can help build back trust.”

Margaret Low, chief executive of WBUR Radio, agreed, observing that her station reaches beyond its airwaves and digital presence through events at its CitySpace venue and through such initiatives as the WBUR Festival.

“There’s something very powerful about bringing people together in a place to talk about some of the most pressing issues of the day,” she said. “And it’s different than the one-to-many that broadcasting is, or even a newsletter is. It’s actually people feeling like they’re part of something bigger than themselves, that they’re part of a community.”

Goldberg and Low spoke Wednesday at a webinar sponsored by the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The theme of the evening was survival. Earlier this summer the Republican-controlled Congress, acting at the behest of President Trump, eliminated the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a semi-independent agency that provided funding for PBS, NPR and local public television and radio stations.

Read the rest at CommonWealth Beacon.

Why a philanthopic effort to bolster public broadcasting may harm local news outlets

Major philanthropies are stepping up to offset some of the cuts to public television and radio, Benjamin Mullin reports in The New York Times (gift link). But will it be enough? And what possible downstream effects might there be on local news organizations that also depend heavily on foundation money?

As we all know, the Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting earlier this summer. The CPB, a semi-independent agency, had been set to spend $500 million over the next two years.

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PBS and NPR receive most of their funding from grants and donations by, well, viewers and listeners like you, but their member stations — especially in less affluent and rural areas — are more dependent on government funding. Both national networks have been cutting their budgets in an attempt to help their member stations survive.

According to Mullin, foundations such as Knight, MacArthur, Ford and others have come up with an emergency $26.5 million to keep those stations afloat with a goal of reaching $50 million this year. “We believe it’s crucial to have a concerted, coordinated effort to make sure that the stations that most critically need these funds right now have a pathway to get them,” Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, the president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation, was quoted as saying.

Continue reading “Why a philanthopic effort to bolster public broadcasting may harm local news outlets”

Why we’re stuck in our homes and jobs; plus, a new ‘abundance’ journal, and how AI threatens the power grid

This may be the most important story you’ll read all month. Konrad Putzier and Rachel Louise Ensign report in The Wall Street Journal (gift link) that we are losing our economic dynamism. Americans have stopped moving to different parts of the country, and they are less likely to leave their jobs to try something new.

In addition, the combination of record-low interest rates a few years ago and much higher rates now means that too many people feel like they’re locked into their home. Putzier and Ensign write:

This immobility has economic consequences for everyone. The frozen housing market means growing families can’t upgrade, empty-nesters can’t downsize and first-time buyers are all but locked out. When people can’t move for a job offer, or to a city with better job opportunities, they often earn less. When companies can’t hire people who currently live in, say, a different state, corporate productivity and profits can suffer.

This phenomenon has been building for years, although it’s gotten worse since COVID. Some of the more traditional liberal policies that Joe Biden was pursuing might have helped reverse these trends, but now Donald Trump is creating economic uncertainty with massive tax cuts for the rich and his chaotic tariff policy.

I’m one to talk. I have always lived in the Boston area, and I wouldn’t live anywhere else; my wife and I have lived in one apartment and three homes in just two communities. Over the past 45 years I’ve worked at exactly three jobs, not counting a few short-time stints when I was unemployed during the 1990 recession.

But that was a conscious choice. In the Journal article, you’ll see that a number of people interviewed would like find a better job and a different place to live, but they’re stymied by factors beyond their control.

Our country is not just spinning out of control — it’s also spinning down. We need government policies that will help restore the dynamism that defined us until recently.

An ‘abundance’ of punditry

Do we need another publication aimed at helping to define a new form of liberalism? Whether we do or not, we’re getting one. It’s called The Argument, and it sounds like it might be interesting.

Max Tani of Semafor reports that Jerusalem Demsas left The Atlantic recently to start the project, which sounds like it will be largely rooted in the “abundance” agenda promoted by writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book of that name. The idea is that the left has stymied innovation and growth by creating a bureaucratic and legal framework aimed more at stopping things rather than building, whether it be public transportation or housing.

Indeed, Thompson will be one of the contributors to The Argument, which is published at Substack.

Based on Demsas’ introductory video and message, it sounds like The Argument will mainly appeal to the center left in an attempt to try to craft a vision that reaches beyond not just the MAGA pestilence that has infected the body politic but also the excesses of the progressive left, which she doesn’t exactly define. That’s going to be hard given the ease with which the right caricatured Kamala Harris as a left-wing menace while she was actually espousing moderately liberal policies. Demsas writes:

We will convene not just self-described political liberals, but socialists, moderates, libertarians and center-right conservatives. I won’t agree with everyone we publish, and I doubt they all agree with everything I have said, but we will only publish people who seek truth from facts and who are excited to engage directly with their opponent’s ideas.

I can think of a whole host of reasons why The Argument might fail, or modestly succeed while fading into obscurity and irrelevance. But let’s hope that it will have a wider impact than that. Democrats have a difficult needle to thread if they are going to return to power in 2026 and ’28. A new source of ideas with broad, popular appeal would be a welcome development.

AI’s power grab

We are nearing the end, blessedly, of what’s been a brutally hot summer. I don’t know what we’d do without air conditioning, or, frankly, how we got by without it when I was growing up — and yes, heat waves were shorter and nights were cooler back in the 1960s and ’70s.

But air conditioning is powered by electricity, and we are using it at a reckless rate as the AI surge continues apace. You can’t avoid it. It’s not just a matter of consciously using it with programs like ChatGPT and Claude; now you can’t even search Google without getting an AI-generated answer at the top of your screen. I recently tested the latest version of ChatGPT by asking it to draw a photorealistic version of Bob Dylan drumming. You can see the result; but how many kilowatts did I use?

The economist Paul Krugman’s latest newsletter post is about AI and electricity, noting that AI data centers were already consuming 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, and that it may rise to 12% by 2028. We need vastly more electricity-generating capacity, and yet Krugman observes that Trump has “a deep, irrational hatred for renewable energy.” He adds that many tasks being performed by brute-force AI could be turned over instead to lighter, less-energy-intensive versions; still, he observes:

It’s obvious that any attempt to make AI more energy-efficient would lead to howls from tech bros who believe that they embody humanity’s future — and these bros have bought themselves a lot of political power.

So I don’t know how this will play out. I do know that your future electricity bills depend on the answer.

Among other things, news organizations are embracing AI both for better and for worse. My own view is that there’s a lot more to dislike about AI than to like. But it’s here to stay, and we might as well try to use it in ways that are ethical and responsible. Unfortunately, we appear to be rushing headlong in the wrong direction.

The Globe’s investigative sports reporter, Bob Hohler, leaves behind a remarkable legacy

Boston Globe reporter Bob Hohler carved out a unique beat for himself over the years.

As an investigative reporter focusing on sports, he’s covered such high-profile stories as the Red Sox’ chicken-and-beer fiasco of 2011 and the near-fatal shooting of David Ortiz in the Dominican Republic. He also helped uncover a racist, homophobic, antisemitic hazing scandal on the Danvers High School hockey team and a lack of precautions that may have led to a devastating brain injury suffered by a Sharon High School football player.

Now Hohler is retiring, according to a newsroom memo from sports editor Matt Pepin that was provided to me by a trusted source. So, too, is a less well-known but equally valued member of the sports staff, Jim Hoban, the chief copy editor.

Hohler is leaving with his boots on. On Thursday, the Globe reported that it’s filing a lawsuit against the town of Sharon in an attempt to obtain documents it believes are public related to the brain injury suffered by 16-year-old Rohan Shukla.

He’s also written about topics other than sports over the years. When I posted news of his retirement on Facebook, another retired Globe legend, Steve Kurkjian, recalled that Hohler covered the Clinton White House during the Monica Lewinsky scandal (more properly known as the Bill Clinton scandal). “He said getting news out of the White House was easier than Red Sox ownership,” Kurkjian wrote.

Another commenter, Adam Sell, remembered that Hohler was a major contributor to a Spotlight series on the city’s taxi industry, even getting a license and driving a cab himself, as he had done years earlier as a college student.

Hohler’s retirement is a huge loss for the Globe and its readers. I hope the editors understand what a unique role he played in covering the intersection of sports and investigative journalism — and finds a suitable replacement rather than letting his beat go uncovered.

No, Jeanine Pirro’s vile op-ed is not further evidence that Jeff Bezos is wrecking The Washington Post

Jeanine Pirro. Photo (cc) 2021 by Gage Skidmore.

Because Jeff Bezos has taken a wrecking ball to The Washington Post’s opinion section, critics have become sensitive to any hint that the billionaire owner is paying obeisance to Donald Trump.

Which brings me to an op-ed the Post published Tuesday evening (gift link) by newly confirmed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro about Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., in order to crack down on a crime wave that, by all credible accounts, does not exist. I haven’t been able to find any media commentary criticizing the Post for running Pirro’s piece, but I have seen grumbling on social media along with yet another round of vows by readers to cancel their subscriptions.

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Deciding whether to run such a piece is not just a journalistic decision but also an ethical one. Pirro’s major qualification for her job as D.C.’s top prosecutor is having served as a Trump-worshipping talk-show host on Fox News, although it has to be said that she served as both a prosecutor and a judge many years ago. Her op-ed defends an authoritarian president who is militarizing the nation’s capital just because he can. Should the Post have just said no?

The Post itself editorialized against her appointment (gift link) back in May. Part of the paper’s objection was over process, but the editorial also called out her judgment and noted that her executive producer at Fox News had referred to her as a “reckless maniac” in promoting the voting-machine conspiracy that led to a $787.5 million libel settlement by her then-employer.

Which is to say that the Post’s editorial board, compromised though it may be, saw fit to stand up to Pirro and Trump as recently as three months ago. No doubt the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, decided to run Pirro’s op-ed for the most ordinary of reasons: it was submitted (if not necessarily written) by a high-ranking government official with responsibility for a significant issue in the news.

In that regard, it’s useful to remember the mess over The New York Times’ decision to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton back in 2020 in which Cotton endorsed the use of military force to crush violent Black Lives Matter protesters. As I wrote for GBH News, the Times shouldn’t have run the piece for several reasons. Among other things, the editors did not insist that Cotton address an earlier public statement he’d made suggesting that violent protesters should be killed on the streets, and he was allowed to make an entirely unsubstantiated assertion that antifa was involved in the protests.

We later learned that editorial-page editor James Bennet hadn’t even bothered to read Cotton’s screed before publishing it. Bennet, whose miscues were piling up (including his inserting a false assertion into an editorial that led to Sarah Palin’s endless libel suit against the Times), was soon fired.

Pirro’s op-ed strikes me as unremarkable right-wing boilerplate about what she describes as a need to crack down on youthful offenders. She calls on the D.C. Council to amend or reverse three laws that would strip those offenders of important rights and protections. The op-ed says in part:

Unfortunately, young criminals have been emboldened to think they can get away with committing crime in this city, and, very often, they do. But together with our local and federal partners, our message to them today is: We will identify you, prosecute you and convict you. For any juveniles: We are going to push to change the laws so that if you commit any violent crime, I have jurisdiction to prosecute you where you belong — in adult court.

Don’t get me wrong. This is terrible, vile stuff, but the question is whether the Post should have run her op-ed. I think the answer is yes. It’s a newsworthy piece by a public official who’s close to the president. If I were editing the piece, I would have insisted that she address the falling crime rate in D.C. (As a general principle, I think editorial-page editors need to insist on standards of truthfulness and accuracy in outside contributions.) Overall, though, I don’t think Pirro’s piece is nearly as objectionable as Cotton’s was five years ago.

The Post, given its location in the nation’s capital, has always been a favored landing spot for op-eds by high-ranking government officials. The best way to have prevented Pirro’s op-ed from running would have been to keep Trump out of the White House. But it’s far too late for that.

What we know about Israel’s targeted killings of six Al Jazeera journalists

2023 photo of Gaza war damage via Wikimedia Commons

Poynter media columnist Tom Jones has a thorough roundup of how news organizations covered Israel’s killing on Sunday of six Al Jazeera journalists, observing that Anas al-Sharif, who was apparently the target, had predicted his death.

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As Jones writes, Israel claims that al-Sharif had been actively involved in Hamas’ terrorist attacks. Al-Sharif had denied the allegation, and the killings were condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which issued a statement saying, “Israel is murdering the messengers.”

Al Jazeera called the killings a “targeted assassination,” as they surely were. The right-wing Jerusalem Post ran a headline that said “Israeli military kills Hamas terrorist doubling as Al Jazeera reporter near Shifa Hospital,” claiming: “Documents shared by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] included personnel rosters, lists of terror training courses, phone directories, and salary documents for Al-Sharif.”

Ironically, the Post’s story is attributed to its own staff and to Reuters, the international wire service for which al-Sharif shared in a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2024.

The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz runs a straightforward account of the killings. The Times of Israel’s live blog currently leads with a story about media organizations that have condemned the attacks as well as a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that he is “gravely concerned.”

CPJ reports: “With Sunday’s killing of six journalists, 192 journalists have been killed since the start of the Israeli-Gaza war on October 7, 2023. At least 184 of those journalists were Palestinians killed by Israel.”

The Associated Press tells its book critics that it’s ending weekly reviews

Terrible news from The Associated Press. Media Nation correspondent J.A. passes along this note from Anthony McCartney, the AP’s global entertainment and lifestyle editor.

AP to end its weekly book reviews

Dear AP book reviewers,

I am writing to share that the AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1. This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews. AP will continue covering books as stories, but at the moment those will handled exclusively by staffers.

I want to thank you for your time and commitment to reviewing books for the AP. All current review assignments through Aug. 31 will be honored and your invoices will be paid. (Please submit those as you normally would, and file final invoices by Sept. 15.)

I want to take a moment to thank Carolyn, who has coordinated reviews and made sure relevant titles were covered, and Mark, who has edited the reviews and incorporated best practices for trying to get reviews to appear in search results and get as many readers as possible.

Thank you again for your diligence and work on reviews. I wish you all the best.

From the CJR, a more nuanced view of where The Washington Post may be heading

Where is The Washington Post heading? Certainly from outside the paper’s walls, the situation looks grim, as staff members are streaming toward the exits in droves, especially but not exclusively from the opinion side. But as disgusted as I am by Jeff Bezos’ shift from model owner to boss from hell over the past couple of years, I’ve held out hope that all may not be lost — as long as he doesn’t mess with the news operation. So far, he hasn’t.

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Which is why I want to call your attention to this Jon Allsop piece from the Columbia Journalism Review. He recounts the devastation in minute detail, but he offers more nuance than I’ve seen elsewhere. He also buries the lead. The key is his wrap-up:

[J]ournalism is more of a team sport than the industry focus on its stars sometimes acknowledges, and the Post is clearly retaining a corps of incredibly talented journalists. In their departure notes, [chief political reporter Dan] Balz and [sports columnist Sally] Jenkins both emphasized this fact, with the latter writing that she sees “the glimmer of a new Washington Post — one that moves”; it will have “to be right-sized,” she added, “and young trees planted, but when the clocks all start chiming at the same time, it will be glorious.” Chelsea Janes, who covers baseball for the Post, and is staying, reacted to news of Jenkins’s exit with a different metaphor — that of a sports team that has been torn apart for unclear reasons — but added that there’s “plenty of talent still on the roster, and everyone on that roster plays to win.” I can sympathize with Janes’s analogy: my English soccer team is currently in the process of a full-scale rebuild, and a lot about it sucks. But it also feels like a moment of opportunity. That is, if the owners and management know what they’re doing. The same is true in journalism.

The challenge is finding an audience for the Post now that Bezos’ feckless leadership has allowed the paper to be caricatured as a mouthpiece for Donald Trump, even though it’s not, and even though its news coverage remains superb. It also doesn’t help that he’s stuck with Will Lewis as his publisher despite Scotland Yard’s ongoing interest in Lewis’ possible involvement in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. I would love it if Bezos returned to the generous, hands-off owner I wrote about in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” but that’s not likely to happen.

Even so, we still have three great national newspapers — the Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. If the Journal can survive and thrive despite Murdoch family ownership (by the way, here’s a terrific profile of Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker by The Guardian’s Michael Savage), then the Post can overcome Bezos. That is, assuming Bezos wants it.

Media Nation on semi-hiatus

We’re heading out later today for the rest of the week, and I’m not planning on writing anything unless there’s huge media news. I’ll try to send out an abbreviated supporters newsletter sometime on Thursday. Behave yourselves.

A Muzzle update from Vermont; plus, the Dallas sale, the Globe, WBZ-TV cuts and Gannett’s AI-driven buyouts

Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.

The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, has rescinded a gag order that had prevented the city’s police department from issuing press releases without the approval of her office. The contentious order was one of two reasons that the mayor, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, was given a New England Muzzle Award earlier this year.

Kolby LaMarche reports for the Burlington Daily News:

The original, restrictive executive order was enacted on January 10, under former Police Chief Jon Murad, who did not seek reappointment. It required all BPD press releases, including emergency alerts, to be submitted to the mayor’s office for approval before public dissemination.

As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.

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What sealed the Muzzle, though, was that the mayor then called an invitation-only news conference without letting at least two outlets that had been critical of her know about it. Those outlets were Seven Days and Vermont News First. Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, who writes for Vermont News First, told me last winter that he believed only local television newscasts had been invited.

Here is the official announcement about the revocation of the mayor’s gag order.

Media notes

• Good/bad/good news in Dallas. Last week I wrote that the notorious cost-cutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital was ready to swoop in and upset the pending sale of The Dallas Morning News to the Hearst chain, a privately held company known for quality regional and statewide journalism. Now Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab that the sale to Hearst is back on track. “This morning,” Benton wrote Monday, “the DallasNews Corporation (formerly A.H. Belo) announced that its board had ‘reviewed and rejected’ Alden’s offer. (It also added a ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan, just in case Alden tries anything funny.)”

• An overdue Globe update. Last week The Boston Guardian and Contrarian Boston reported that two Boston Globe journalists, along with two South End residents who were accompanying them, had been attacked while on assignment as they were reporting in the notorious Mass and Cass area of Boston. The story was subsequently picked up by Universal Hub, Hub Blog and Media Nation. But there was no mention of it in the Globe until this morning, as part of a larger story by the two journalists, reporter Niki Griswold and Barry Chin. Griswold wrote:

While reporting this story, two Globe journalists were confronted by at least three men on the Melnea Cass bike path as they toured the area on a July afternoon with [Brian] McCarter and another longtime South End resident. The men approached and threatened the group after spotting the Globe photographer taking pictures from a distance. The men, two holding hammer-like tools, followed the group, which took shelter in a nearby building.

The incident prompted Globe editor Nancy Barnes to issue a memo to the newsroom about security precautions.

• The wages of sin. Paramount wasted no time in making up for some of the $16 million it paid to Donald Trump in order to settle a bogus lawsuit the president had brought against “60 Minutes” — a settlement widely believed to pave the way for a merger with Trump-friendly Skydance Media. Last week WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in Boston announced that a number of employees had been offered buyouts, while longtime reporter Beth Germano said she’d retire and health reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall said she’d been laid off, according to Ross Cristantiello of Boston.com. “I gotta believe it has something to do with the merger,” union official Fletcher Fischer was quoted as saying. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, local television news stands out as an exception. Moves like this, though, erode that trust.

• Here’s some fresh AI hell. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain as well as a steady source of terrible news about layoffs, closures and other cuts, is offering buyouts to many of its journalists so that it can replace them with artificial intelligence. Sean Burch of The Verge quotes a memo from Mike Reed, who writes in his characteristically inimitable style: “Given our static revenue trends, we need to adjust our organization to effectively meet the needs of our business today and position ourselves for sustainable growth in the future as we continue to use AI and leverage automation to realize efficiencies.”

Gannett’s weeklies are pretty much gone, but it still publishes several dailies in New England, most notably The Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, as well as about 200 dailies across the country, anchored by USA Today.

Correction: Sorry for rushing this. I’ve fixed a few botched names.