Category: Media

Despite Biden’s big night, Mendocino County remains firmly with Bernie

At the Ukiah Brewing Company. Photo by Adrian Fernandez Baumann.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

UKIAH, Calif. — About 15 people had gathered on the second floor of the Ukiah Brewing Company. The television in the corner was tuned to CNN, and Sen. Bernie Sanders was speaking. This was a pro-Sanders crowd. Nearly everyone stopped what they were doing so they could listen.

Then the band downstairs started playing, and that was the end of that.

I’m here this week learning about The Mendocino Voice, an online news organization started three and a half years ago that is in the process of moving toward a cooperative model of ownership — an innovative step that could help ensure the project’s future. “We are going to be owned by our readers and our staff,” publisher Kate Maxwell told those on hand. “We think that’s the best way to be sustainable and locally owned.”

The Super Tuesday party, which drew a total of 25 to 30 people, was organized by the Voice as a way of bringing the community together to watch not just the presidential results but to find out who had won the primary elections for the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors. There are five supervisors, and three of the seats were contested.

There’s no question, though, that most people were mainly interested in the Democratic presidential primary. Sanders won California easily on a night when the chatter was about former Vice President Joe Biden’s emergence as the clear (though hardly dominant) frontrunner. I was told that Mendocino County, a two-hour drive north of San Francisco, is even more pro-Sanders than the rest of the state. That was certainly true at the Ukiah Brewing Company, where the folks I spoke with expressed their enthusiasm for Bernie over burgers and beer.

“I think the possibility of having a socialist Democrat in the White House is really exciting,” said Rayna Grace, citing Sanders’ “solidarity with the Palestinian people” as well as his support for Medicare for All and for canceling student debt. Her companion, Silver, who declined to tell me her last name, added, “I’m just excited to see a candidate who reflects my radical values.”

Even the only non-Sanders supporter I spoke with said he preferred Sanders to the candidate he actually cast a ballot for — Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “I thought Warren is electable. I don’t know if Bernie is electable,” said John Haschak, a member of the board of supervisors. “Maybe my political calculation is a little off, but we can’t have four more years of Trump.”

Unfortunately for Warren, Haschak’s political calculation turned out to be more than a little off. Warren suffered the worst of what has been a series of bad nights for her, as she came in third in her home state of Massachusetts, behind Biden and Sanders. (WGBH News Senior Political Editor Peter Kadzis breaks down the Bay State results here.) In just a few months, Warren has gone from being the frontrunner to having to do some serious fence-mending with her constituents.

Like many people, I’ve visited California’s urban centers of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. But this is the first time I’ve been in the rural north. The population of Mendocino County is just under 90,000. Yet, geographically, it’s about two-thirds the size of Connecticut (population 3.5 million) and larger than Delaware (nearly a million).

As is the case in many other places, Mendocino County suffers from a dearth of reliable local journalism. Most of the papers in the county — including The Ukiah Daily Journal, the only daily — were absorbed into the MediaNews Group conglomerate years ago, and have been systemically gutted by the chain’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital.

Maxwell and Managing Editor Adrian Fernandez Baumann, the Voice’s only full-time staff members, are themselves former MediaNews employees. Though their office — a tiny second-floor room that they rent from a low-power FM radio station — is in the inland city of Ukiah, the county seat, they have positioned the Voice as a county-wide news service. As such, they regularly drive two hours to Fort Bragg, on the Pacific coast, as well as to other parts of the county.

This is weed-and-wine country. The “cannabis economy,” as Baumann calls it, is dominated by so-called back-to-landers, hippies and former hippies who moved to the area in the 1960s. So it’s no surprise that Sanders is the favorite here.

Yes, I did meet a few non-enthusiasts. Before the party, Baumann and I talked with voters outside a polling station at the county offices, where we encountered an older couple who’d cast their ballots for Biden and a volunteer firefighter who’d taken a Republican ballot and voted for President Donald Trump. Overwhelmingly, though, the folks we met had voted for Sanders.

“We’ve been diehard Bernie supporters since the last election,” Moriah McGill told us.

Given Biden’s strong performance across the country Tuesday, it’s no exaggeration to say that voters like McGill, Grace and Silver saved the Sanders campaign. Whether that will be enough to stop Biden is a question for another day.

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Should opinion journalists disclose whom they’re voting for?

Photo (cc) 2018 by Bill Smith

Previously published at Poynter Online.

We’re all familiar with newspaper endorsements. But what about individual journalists whose job descriptions include expressing their opinions about politics and politicians?

Is the old rule that opinion journalists shouldn’t reveal whom they’re voting for still relevant?

I’m referring to columnists for newspaper op-ed pages, certain types of magazine writers, journalists for websites that combine news and opinion, and the like. I’m not referring to partisan commentators whose loyalties are explicitly with a political party or candidate. That would apply to cable talking heads such as David Axelrod or Rick Santorum. They can do as they like.

But opinion journalism, properly understood, is bound by the same ethical considerations as straight news reporting. You don’t make political contributions, you don’t put bumper stickers on your car or signs on your lawn, and you certainly don’t take part in a campaign in any way.

I’ve been working the opinion side of the street since the early 1990s, first as a writer for the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix, now as a panelist on WGBH-TV’s “Beat the Press” and as a columnist for the WGBH News website. I’ve always tried to take the ethics of my craft seriously.

Though bound by the same ethical considerations, there are some differences between opinion journalism and straight news reporting. The most relevant difference is this: I am free to write (for example) that I think Elizabeth Warren is the best-qualified candidate for president by virtue of her policy positions, her experience and her temperament. What I’m not free to do is to take the next logical step and say I’m voting for Warren.

Unfortunately, as with so many customs, President Donald Trump has broken the mold. Four years ago I made it clear that I would vote for the Democratic nominee against Trump regardless of whether it was Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. I considered Trump a threat to journalism and the First Amendment, and I thought it was important for journalists to take a stand in defense of both. And I’m repeating that in 2020: I will vote for the Democratic nominee.

I’ve seen others make the same assertion. I’ve even seen a few mainstream opinion journalists come very close to disclosing their preferred candidate. Some find themselves in conflicted positions, including two New York Times columnists: Michelle Goldberg, who has disclosed that her husband is a consultant for Warren, and Thomas Friedman, whose every effusion on behalf of Michael Bloomberg is accompanied by a statement that Bloomberg gave money to a literacy museum Friedman’s wife is building.

As with any custom, it makes sense to revisit this one from time to time and ask if it still matters.

The argument in favor of disclosing your vote is that traditional notions of objectivity are obsolete (although I would argue that Walter Lippmann’s original conception of objectivity as the dispassionate pursuit of truth is as relevant as ever), and that journalists should aim to be as transparent as possible.

The argument against disclosure, which I’ve always accepted, is that not only does disclosing your vote change your audience’s perception of you, it also changes the way you write and comment on the candidates.

Some years back, I wrote a commentary for The Huffington Post arguing that President Barack Obama’s crackdown on leaks within his administration was a threat to the First Amendment. His Justice Department at the time was threatening to jail journalists if they refused to reveal their sources. The headline: “Obama’s War on Journalism.”

I admired Obama then and admire him more today. I wrote all kinds of laudatory things about him as a candidate and as president. But I never wrote that I would or had voted for him. If I had, I think it would have changed the calculation, not just for readers but in the way I would have approached writing such a commentary. I don’t need those kinds of entanglements, and readers have a right not to have to wade through them.

I put the question up on Twitter and Facebook earlier this week. A few thought disclosure was acceptable, but most believed that the old rules should still apply.

“Wouldn’t go there,” said Mike Pride, editor emeritus of New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor and retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. “Makes future commentary too easily dismissible. Readers/listeners may figure out where you stand from what you write/say, but keep your vote to yourself.”

Added liberal columnist Michael Cohen of The Boston Globe: “If you take sides, particularly in the primary, it makes it harder to be an effective analyst.”

The other side was perhaps best expressed by Joshua Benton, editor of Nieman Lab, who also used the occasion to snark at The New York Times for its dual endorsement of Democrats Warren and Amy Klobuchar:

“I don’t see why someone paid to have public opinions should be prevented from having this particular one,” Benton said. “I think it’s a useful clarity. In the same way I wouldn’t want an editorial board to interview all the candidates, have clear strong opinions, and then not pick one.”

So is there still a meaningful difference between expressing your opinions about politics and saying whom you’re voting for? I think there is, and I come down on the side of withholding that last piece of information — with just a few obvious exceptions, such as my “anyone but Trump” assertion. (I may have let my 2020 choice slip once or twice on Facebook, and I shouldn’t have.)

“I am a champion of old rules in a new world,” is the way Pride puts it.

I’ll be away on a reporting trip next week, so I’m going to take advantage of early voting by casting my ballot in the Massachusetts Democratic primary this Friday.

But no, I’m not going to tell you my choice.

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Burgers, beers and journalism: An experiment in civic engagement

Photo (cc) 2012 by Ruocaled

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Can a news organization help to support itself by opening a café, bar and wedding venue? It’s a good question, but here’s a better one: Can such a gathering place lead to the revival of civic engagement and, thus, to renewed interest in local journalism?

The New York Times last week reported on an interesting experiment taking place at The Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa, Texas. The paper was acquired last year by two former New Yorkers, Maisie Crow and Max Kabat, who quickly found themselves facing the challenge of paying the bills in an era of shrinking ad revenues. Their solution was to renovate a former bar and transform it into a newsroom and café. The revenues, Crow said, would be used to expand the Sentinel’s coverage, explaining that “we wanted to expand the potential.”

But at a time when the decline of civic life is leading to diminishing interest in the day-to-day goings-on that are the staple of local newspapers, bringing journalists and the community together in a common space could help remind residents of why news matters. Indeed, Abbie Perrault, the Sentinel’s managing editor, told the Times that the shared space is “a great way to keep my finger on the pulse and get new leads and find stories.”

The Sentinel is offering a fresh take on an idea that nearly got off the ground a decade ago. That’s when Matt DeRienzo, then the 34-year-old publisher of The Register Citizen in Torrington, Connecticut, was opening up his newsroom to the public with the encouragement of John Paton, an innovative executive who was briefly the toast of the newspaper business.

As The New York Times wrote back then, members of the public could visit The Register Citizen’s Newsroom Café for coffee and muffins and to use the paper’s archives for free. “Matt’s taking his audience and making it a colleague,” Paton was quoted as saying. “A building with open doors, with no walls, is the brick-and-mortar metaphor for how the web works.”

DeRienzo was soon named editor of all of the Journal Register Co. chain’s Connecticut newspapers, including its flagship, the New Haven Register. I interviewed him around that time, and he was brimming with ideas. The company sold off its hulking plant by I-95, and DeRienzo began making plans for an open newsroom on the Yale side of the New Haven Green.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Journal Register was merged with another chain, MediaNews Group, and the resulting behemoth was dubbed Digital First Media — an ironic moniker that paid tribute to Paton’s oft-repeated mantra, “digital first,” but that soon proved it was dedicated mainly to squeezing out profits for the benefit of its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. Paton left. DeRienzo left. And the idea of local journalism reinvented around open newsrooms and public participation faded away. (I told the full story of Digital First’s rise and fall in an earlier WGBH News commentary.)

“It elevated the awareness and reputation of the newspaper and the people who worked in the newsroom,” DeRienzo said of the Torrington experiment in a Facebook discussion last week. “It improved transparency and trust with readers. Our audience grew, and our digital revenue grew.”

Nearly a generation ago, the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote in his landmark book “Bowling Alone” that newspaper readership correlates strongly with civic engagement. People who vote in local elections, take part in volunteer activities, attend religious services or engage in any number of other activities are also more likely to read the paper. “Newspaper readers,” he wrote, “are machers and schmoozers.”

Which brings us back to The Big Bend Sentinel. The local news crisis has multiple causes, technological change and corporate greed being foremost among them. But, fundamentally, it’s also about declining interest in what the school board is up to, whether the city council will approve a new liquor license and other quotidian matters.

News organizations that hope to survive and thrive can’t settle for merely covering civic life — they have to teach their communities the importance of local news so that people will start paying attention and realize that what the mayor is doing is likely to have more of an effect on their families than anything that is taking place in Washington.

Such journalism is sometimes derisively called “eating your broccoli.” So kudos to the Sentinel for reimagining the intersection of journalism and audience engagement more along the lines of a cheeseburger and a beer. And look! Here comes the bride!

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of the town name of Marfa, Texas.

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Do newspaper endorsements matter? Why a hoary tradition may be near its end

My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman has written an important thread about political endorsements by news organizations. Her starting point is the Concord Monitor’s unusual decision not to endorse in the New Hampshire primary. (Heckman is a former editor at the Monitor.) Please read it and come back.

The Monitor’s non-endorsement is not the only break with the past that we’ve seen in recent weeks.

Read the rest at WGBHNews.org. And talk about this post on Facebook.

What ‘American Factory’ says about the soul of our nation — and the coming campaign

A scene from “American Factory”

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The botched Iowa caucuses and the State of the Union mark the official opening of the presidential campaign. From now until November, you’re going to hear a lot about whether Democrats can take voters in the Midwest back from President Trump.

And so politics was very much on my mind when I watched “American Factory” over the weekend. The Netflix documentary, the first released by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground, tells the story of a glass factory opened by the Chinese in 2016 at the site of a former General Motors plant near Dayton, Ohio. The film has been nominated for an Oscar. (Note: Spoiler alerts ahead.)

When we talk about the working-class voters who defected to Trump in 2016, we are inevitably talking about white working-class voters. But the people who were hired by the Fuyao glass company — many of them former GM employees — comprised an integrated workforce. At least as depicted in the film, the white and African American employees get along, and though they resent their Chinese co-workers and managers for what they perceive as unrealistic demands, we don’t hear anything even remotely racist from the Americans.

The Chinese are another story. Early in the film, we hear the chairman of Fuyao, the billionaire entrepreneur Cao Dewang, say of the Americans: “They’re pretty slow. They have fat fingers.” Later we hear complaints from the Chinese that the Americans are too soft, unwilling to work overtime, and — worst of all — lacking in gratitude because they were trying to form a union. After U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown puts in a good word for unions at the plant’s opening, we see an American manager joking to one of the Chinese executives that Brown’s head should be cut off (what a card!) and promising that Brown would be banned from future events.

The jobs, though, were a far cry from what GM had once offered. During the union-organizing drive, one of the American employees at Fuyao says that his full-time position paid just $27,000 — and that his daughter was making $40,000 in a nail salon. Fuyao may have brought blue-collar work back to the Dayton area, but at $12 an hour (raised to $14 in an attempt to head off the union), they were hardly the kind of well-paying jobs that had once made the Midwest a prosperous outpost of Democratic union households.

“We will never, ever make that kind of money again,” says one of the GM-turned-Fuyao employees. “Those days are over.”

The end of that era, decades in the making and accelerated by the Great Recession, has fueled resentment and hopelessness. As Trump tells us over and over, the unemployment rate is as low as it’s been in many years and the stock market is booming. Yet growing income inequality has led to stagnant or worsening living standards for all but the wealthy, the specter of college debt acts as a barrier to economic opportunity, and — as Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson said recently on WGBH News’ “The Scrum” — structural flaws in our system have elevated a small class of rich oligarchs who wield power over a majority that neither voted for them nor support their policies.

At the end of “American Factory,” we see robotic arms moving glass efficiently around the factory. Chairman Cao tours the floor with his executives as they show him the operations that will be replaced by machines in the coming years. As of 2018, we’re told as the film closes, the factory had achieved profitability — but that starting wages remained stuck at $14 an hour.

What’s disheartening is that, on one level, the Fuyao experiment worked. In return for tax incentives, a factory that had closed miraculously reopened, employing some 2,400 Americans and 200 visiting Chinese. What Fuyao didn’t bring back — and perhaps couldn’t bring back — were the middle-class wages and lifestyles that for several generations had been seen as a birthright by people who may not have gone to college but who were willing to work hard.

We are no closer to charting a path for them than we’ve been in the past several elections. Trump offers them nothing but anger and resentment. Several of the Democratic candidates have devised ambitious proposals to soak the rich and invest in their future, but we all know how difficult it is to turn even the best-devised plans into reality.

In the end, “American Factory” is a snapshot of a way of life that continues to decline. How that narrative will intersect with the 2020 campaign is anybody’s guess — but we should start getting some answers this week.

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The Boston Globe embraces uppercase ‘Black’ to describe race and culture

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory sent this email to his staff last week, and it is just now wending its way in my direction:

Effective immediately, we’re updating the Globe stylebook to put the word Black in uppercase when it is used to describe a person’s race. After consulting with leaders in the Black community, we’re making this change to recognize that the word has evolved from a description of a person’s skin color to signify a race and culture, and as such, deserves uppercase treatment in the same way that other races — Latino being one example — are capitalized. Unless otherwise requested by a person we’re writing about, we’ll use Black, which is considered to be more inclusive, rather than African-American.

This is a good, progressive move. Will the Associated Press follow suit?

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When Clayton Christensen and Jill Lepore tangled over ‘disruption theory’

Clayton Christensen. Photo (cc) 2011 by Betsy Weber.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s ideas about why some businesses adjust to competition and some don’t were so controversial that a battle broke out on Twitter within hours of his death last Friday at the age of 67.

“It’s easy for journalists to mock someone known for ‘disruption theory,’” said Nieman Lab editor Joshua Benton, “but Clay was a brilliant mind and one of the very nicest people I’ve ever sat across a desk from.”

That brought the first of several blistering retorts from Siva Vaidhyanathan, a prominent media-studies scholar at the University of Virginia: “He was not brilliant. He wrote simplistic, theological analyses of things he never understood.” Mathew Ingram of the Columbia Journalism Review defended Christensen, telling Vaidhyanathan, “I think he had some insights about disruption that were worthwhile.” I jumped in on Christensen’s side as well.

Christensen’s best-known critic by far, though, is Harvard historian Jill Lepore. Nearly six years ago, in a long essay for The New Yorker, Lepore lambasted Christensen’s theories as flights of fancy with little evidence to back them up.

I had read Christensen’s first book about disruption theory, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” and thought he had some provocative things to say about the struggling news business. So not long after Lepore’s piece appeared, I wrote a self-published essay for Medium about Lepore and Christensen’s battle of ideas, which I’m republishing here this week.

Obviously the world doesn’t look exactly the same in 2020 as it did in 2014. But if you’re wondering who Clay Christensen was and what disruption theory is all about, I hope you’ll find that this is a useful introduction. Continue reading “When Clayton Christensen and Jill Lepore tangled over ‘disruption theory’”