At some point I realized I was never going to sit down and read “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson’s monumental history of the Great Migration. I decided to do the next best thing and listen to the audiobook, and I’m glad I did. Told principally, though not exclusively, through the lives of three African Americans who left the South in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, “The Warmth of Other Suns” (2010) is really nothing less than the history of the United States in the 20th century.
During the Great Migration, from around 1916 until the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, about 6 million Black people moved from the South to Northern cities in order to escape the racism of Jim Crow era. Of course, they encountered plenty of racism in the North as well, but it was less deadly and less restrictive than what they had experienced back home. For instance, one of Wilkerson’s protagonists, Ida Mae Gladney, left Mississippi after a family member was beaten to within an inch of his life on a false accusation that he had stolen turkeys. The next day, the turkeys wandered back from wherever they had been — and Ida Mae and her husband, George, soon left for Milwaukee before settling in Chicago.
Also portrayed are George Starling, who escaped to New York just ahead of a lynch mob that aimed to kill him because of his work in organizing Florida’s orange pickers, and Robert Foster, a gifted surgeon who left Louisiana for California rather than settle for a career as a country doctor caring exclusively for poor Black patients.
Wilkerson writes with considerable depth and empathy. The narrator, Robin Miles, never falters during the nearly 23-hour production, sharing Wilkerson’s words with warmth. Of course, I wish had a copy of the book marked up with highlights and notes — that’s the disadvantage of listening rather than reading. But I’m glad I was finally able to experience Wilkerson’s magnificent achievement.
Jack Thomas’ byline was in The Boston Globe for as long as I’d been a reader — an era that stretches back to the 1970s. His death, at 83, did not come as a surprise, not after he wrote an eloquent and moving piece in July 2021 upon learning he had a terminal illness. Still, it marked a sad milestone in Boston’s media history.
In his obituary of Thomas, Bryan Marquard leads not with Thomas’ meditation on death but with a much older story. Thomas, Marquard tells us, “went undercover for a week in 1972 to live in a cell at Boston’s Deer Island House of Correction, where he wrote about the hellish squalor in which convicts were consigned to live.” Marquard also quotes this great line from Thomas’ story: “The inmates had underestimated the situation.”
Thomas had the sort of decades-long Globe career that was common at one time but that has become increasingly rare. By his own telling, he covered the police, the Statehouse and Washington and held jobs as an editorial writer, a television critic a feature writer and as the Globe’s ombudsman — that is, the in-house watchdog and critic, a position that was once common but that few news organizations have anymore.
If you’d like to read more about Thomas but don’t have a Globe subscription, the obituary at Legacy.com is well worth your time. I should also note that Thomas attended Northeastern before leaving to join the Marine Corps Reserve, and that he was a founder of the Tom Winship Scholarship Fund at Northeastern. His voice will be missed.
Boston Globe columnist Jeneé Osterheldt has been promoted to a masthead position, according to a memo to the staff that I obtained a little while ago. Osterheldt is now the Globe’s senior assistant managing editor for culture, talent and development.
Osterheldt has worked as the Globe’s culture columnist since 2019, writing frequently about issues of racial justice. The recipient of several prestigious awards, she is the force behind “A Beautiful Resistance,” a series of multimedia stories on “Black joy, Black lives.”
“She will continue to write and produce in her new role, though perhaps not quite so much,” according to the memo, from editor Brian McGrory and managing editors Jen Peter and Jason Tuohey.
“While she writes passionately about culture, inequality, race, and the many places where they intersect,” they added, “she has also forged an utterly vital role within the newsroom as an advisor to senior editors, a mentor to many staff members, and a key representative in the industry and community.”
The Sun left its iconic downtown headquarters quite a while ago, but it maintained offices in Lowell until recently. Photo (cc) 2014 by Dan Kennedy.
So where are the missing MediaNews Group dailies? Last week, I noted that Contrarian Boston couldn’t find any evidence that the Boston Herald had returned to its Braintree offices, two years after Northeastern journalism student Deanna Schwartz and I found that the Herald had decamped for The Sun in Lowell.
Now, in a follow-up, Mark Pickering reports for Contrarian Boston that The Sun is nowhere to be found, either. He writes:
For the city of Lowell, the disappearance of The Sun marks the end of an entire era. For decades, the publishers of such papers were local kings that often built impressive headquarters. And the papers were the prime way for residents to keep up with local news.
Pickering asks: Have the Herald and The Sun joined a number of other newspapers part of MediaNews Group, owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, that no longer have any newsrooms at all? The answer to that question is not entirely clear.
One story I’ve heard is that the Alden papers in Massachusetts have a warehouse in Westford. (Update: Or perhaps in Devens.) Papers are delivered from whatever printing plant they’re using these days before being trucked out. I’ve heard there are a few offices there that Alden journalists can use. But it appears that Alden journalists, for the most part, work at their homes except when they’re out reporting.
And let’s not forget that another MediaNews Group paper, the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg, was deprived of its offices several years before the pandemic. That means that all three of the chain’s Massachusetts papers are operating without a proper newsroom.
Clarification: I’ve now noted in the caption that The Sun left its iconic downtown headquarters years ago.
Strategic ambiguity at its finest: Keep out, but if you’re here anyway, don’t let your dog go swimming. Seen on a 5.9-mile walk on the roads around the Middlesex Fells this afternoon, including the semi-forbidden Middle and South Reservoirs.
Boston City Hall. Photo (cc) 2009 by Marissa Babin.
The state’s weak public-records law, combined with the city of Boston’s lax response to requests for documents, has led to 221 such requests being terminated. Sean Philip Cotter reports in the Boston Herald:
Boston’s records office cited its own inaction in closing 221 public records requests in total, the city now says, going back to March 29, 2021, jumping the total number up significantly from what the office originally offered.
The city is taking the position that because it never responded to previous requests, those seeking them must no longer want them. Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told me by email:
Up until Cotter’s reporting, Boston had a policy of automatically closing out public records requests based on its own inaction. Essentially the city was saying in at least 200 cases, because we’ve taken too long to get back to you, we’re going to assume you no longer want the records you requested. That’s one way to shut up people looking for information.
Needless to say, this is not a good look for Mayor Michelle Wu or Shawn Williams, the city’s records access officer. Nor is it especially new. Back in June, Colman Herman reported for CommonWealth Magazine that 98 public records appeals had been filed with the secretary of state’s office “because the filers were dissatisfied with the city’s responses or lack of a response.” The secretary of state sided with the filers on 90 occasions and with the city just eight times. But don’t expect much to happen — the state’s public records law is among the weakest in the country.
According to Cotter’s article in the Herald, Wu has promised to do better, with her press office saying that the city ended its practice of automatically closing out public records requests earlier this summer. “The city has stressed that transparency, which Wu campaigned on, is a top priority,” Cotter wrote.
Wu will mark her first year as mayor next month. It’s time for her to start making good on her promise.
On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with David Greising, the president and chief executive of the Better Government Association, a century-old civic nonprofit organization that is also home to a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom as part of a new collaboration with the Illinois Solutions Partnership.
The new partnership is funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. The BGA separates its investigations team and policy team in order to wall off its journalism from its advocacy work. In May 2022, Madison Hopkins of the BGA and Cecilia Reyes of the Chicago Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for an investigation of the city’s history of failed building and fire-safety code enforcement, which proved lethal many times over.
I’ve got a Quick Take on a new development at The Provincetown Independent. Co-founder and editor Ed Miller was a guest on the “What Works” podcast earlier this year. The Indie is trying something really interesting: A direct public offering, or DPO.
Ellen has a Quick Take on the INNYs — the Institute for Nonprofit News Awards. A reporter named Sally Kestin won for best investigative journalism in a small newsroom. We’re talking really small: She works for the Asheville Watchdog, a nonprofit news outlet in North Carolina with only one paid employee. The rest are retired journalists, many of them quite well-known. Kestin won the 2013 Pulitzer for Public Service at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The Denton County Courthouse in downtown Denton. Photo (cc) 2014 by Kent Kanouse.
Of the various new business models that are emerging for community journalism, mergers between public broadcasters and existing news outlets are among the most promising.
One of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I are tracking for our book-in-progress, “What Works,” is NJ Spotlight News, a nonprofit digital startup covering politics and public policy in New Jersey that was acquired several years ago by WNET. They’ve merged their operations, continuing to offer deep coverage on their website while rebranding the daily half-hour newscast that appears on NJ PBS.
Now comes another move that’s well worth keeping an eye on. Public radio station KERA announced earlier this week that it intends to acquire the Denton Record-Chronicle, a daily newspaper that covers the suburbs north of Dallas. In a statement, owner and publisher Bill Patterson said, “This arrangement gives us the opportunity and the ability to preserve local journalism for the people of Denton County. As our population continues to grow, it’s imperative that we grow as well. With KERA’s commitment and expertise, our organization will be able to serve our audiences well into the future.”
What’s especially encouraging about the move is that it was facilitated by the National Trust for Local News, which raises money and connects legacy newspaper owners with possible buyers in order to keep them from either shutting down or falling into the hands of corporate chain owners. Terms of the Denton deal weren’t announced, but according to the National Trust, it was one of four that will be supported through a $17.25 million fund. According to Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the National Trust:
Communities across the country are clamoring to ensure the long-term sustainability of their local and community news. This expected acquisition of a beloved and storied community newspaper by a strong public media station shows another way forward. This new “public media community anchor” model to keep local news in local hands has important implications for media sustainability that reach far beyond the hills of North Texas.
Hansen Shapiro, by the way, was a recent guest on the “What Works” podcast.
The National Trust is best known for helping to purchase 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. The papers are now owned by a nonprofit organization (the papers themselves remain for-profit) and managed by The Colorado Sun, a for-profit digital startup.
The population of Denton is about 148,000, according to U.S. Census data. The Record-Chronicle doesn’t report its circulation to the Alliance for Audited Media, but this Wikipedia article claims that, as of 2011, it was about 12,500 on Sundays and 9,200 on weekdays. If the paper is like nearly every other daily, the circulation is no doubt smaller today.
The Record-Chronicle traces its roots to 1892. In recent years, it’s had a close relationship with the Dallas Morning News, the major metro in that region: the Patterson family sold the paper to the Morning News’ parent company, A.H. Belo Corp. (now the DallasNews Corp.), in 1999, only to buy it back in 2018.
I hope the Record-Chronicle thrives under its new arrangement, which is scheduled to become official in 2023. And I hope it serves as a model for many more such arrangements.
Should one of the world’s most influential billionaires own one of our most influential news organizations? That’s the question Dan Froomkin asks in the Columbia Journalism Review about Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post. It’s an important article, and you should read it. But I have some reservations, which I detail below.
Headlined “The Washington Post Has a Bezos Problem,” Froomkin’s piece argues that the situation has changed since the early years of Bezos’ ownership, when the Post’s news and editorial pages were edited by Graham-era holdovers (Marty Baron and Fred Hiatt, respectively) and the paper returned to glory with deep investigative reporting on Donald Trump, both before and after the 2016 election.
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Now, Froomkin writes, Bezos tweets critically about President Biden’s economic policies while the Post’s news coverage, whether coincidentally or not, appears to track with those tweets. Bezos also had a hand in hiring Baron’s successor as executive editor, former Associated Press executive editor Sally Buzbee, and editorial page editor David Shipley, a Bloomberg journalist who was hired following Hiatt’s sudden death. Froomkin writes:
Throughout history, newspapers have frequently been owned by moguls — and readers were at times appropriately apprehensive. In this era, Rupert Murdoch has created a powerful media empire, which includes Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, and his influence has been considerable.
But Bezos is in a different league even from Murdoch. The world has never seen wealth like this before, and it has never been so interconnected.
As I said, Froomkin makes some good points. We ought to be concerned about that kind of power concentrated in one of our leading news outlets. He quotes Edward Wasserman, a media ethicist at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, as saying that Bezo’s dual role as a master of the universe and as the Post’s owner as being “not compatible with the kind of independence we normally associate with independent news organizations.”
But I think we have to dig a little deeper. When I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” I could find no evidence that Bezos interfered with the paper’s news coverage or even its opinion operations. (The latter would be perfectly acceptable for an owner, and in fact John and Linda Henry are known to have their say in the opinion pages of The Boston Globe.) Nor did Froomkin find any evidence to the contrary.
What I have found as a reader of the Post is that though the paper will offer tough coverage of Amazon when warranted, it hasn’t gone out of its way to do any in-depth enterprise reporting on Amazon, as The New York Times has. As I told Froomkin, “I suppose nothing would answer the question more thoroughly than if they suddenly unveiled a real ass-kicking story about Amazon — a real in-depth piece of enterprise reporting that reflected pretty harshly on their owner.”
But every newspaper owner has conflicts of interest. Before Bezos bought the Post and took it private, it was a publicly traded company owner by the Graham family, who also owned the Kaplan testing company. The Grahams were often criticized for the Post’s soft coverage of the education testing industry. Of course, John Henry is the principal owner of the Red Sox. Glen Taylor, who revived the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, is a sports owner as well. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, is a pharmaceutical entrepreneur. And on and on.
All of these billionaires have improved their papers at a time when corporate chain owners and hedge funds like Gannett and Alden Global Capital are hollowing out their newspapers by the hundreds. Soon-Shiong’s ownership of the LA Times has been controversial, but he’s invested in the paper and he hired a fine newsroom leader, Kevin Merida, the most prominent Black editor in the country now that Dean Baquet has retired from the NY Times. Needless to say, none of these billionaires wields the sort of clout that Bezos does. But you have to ask: What is the alternative? Who is Dan Froomkin’s ideal owner?
In fact, I asked Froomkin that on Twitter. His answer: “A local foundation or a local philanthropist or a civic-minded billionaire or a union. Anything but the (near) richest guy in the world. This broken system is working for him just great.”
Thanks, Dan. Answer: A local foundation or a local philanthropist or a civic-minded billionaire or a union. Anything but the (near) richest guy in the world. This broken system is working for him just great.
Hmmm. Certainly the Henrys, Taylor and Soon-Shiong qualify as civic-minded billionaires — maybe even as local philanthropists. Presumably the only thing that rules out Bezos is scale. I’m not familiar with any unions that own newspapers, although it’s a great idea and there are some historical examples.
A local foundation? There are a few. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Tampa Bay Times are for-profit newspapers owned by nonprofit foundations — the Lenfest Institute and the Poynter Institute, respectively. But that came about because the billionaires who owned those papers donated them. The Salt Lake Tribune is a nonprofit that was donated by yet another billionaire.
Frankly, I think the biggest worry about the Post is that Bezos might be losing interest, which — if you read between the lines of a recent NY Times story — is a real concern. If that’s the case, would Bezos donate the Post to a foundation, as Gerry Lenfest did in Philadelphia and Nelson Poynter did in Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg? I’d like to think he wouldn’t preside over the revival of The Washington Post only to turn around and deliver it into the arms of Alden Global Capital. But who knows?
It could well be that the only thing worse than the Post under Bezos is the Post under a different owner.
This photo was provided to Media Nation in August 2020 by a trusted source.
More than two years ago, Northeastern journalism student Deanna Schwartz — at the time an intern at GBH News’ “Beat the Press — learned that the Boston Herald had moved from its headquarters in Braintree to The Sun of Lowell. Both papers are owned by MediaNews Group, which in turn is owned by the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
— Dan Kennedy is on Threads (@dankennedy_nu) August 14, 2020
On Sunday, Mark Pickering and Scott Van Voorhis reported in Contrarian Boston that the Herald has not returned to Braintree. “The Herald? They’re long gone. Long gone,” according to one person who was interviewed. Frankly, I didn’t think coming back was in the cards. The question in my mind is whether they’re working at The Sun or out of their homes. Does anyone want to share that information? I’ll post an update.
