Whenever The New York Times takes on as large and amorphous an idea as freedom of expression, it quickly escalates into a war of words about the Times itself. That was certainly the case with a nearly 3,000-word editorial it posted last Friday under the headline “America Has a Free Speech Problem.”
The piece launched a thousand hot takes, many of them dripping with mockery and sarcasm. I certainly don’t agree with everything in the editorial, and I find a lot of what the critics are complaining about — especially the paper’s patented “both-sides-ism” — to be right on target. But in the spirit of contrarianism, and in recognition that this is a Major Statement by our leading newspaper, I’m at least going to take it seriously.
Chris Krewson is the executive director of Local Independent Online News Publishers, better known as LION Publishers. The national nonprofit aims at supporting local journalism entrepreneurs and has some 400 members. He speakers with Ellen Clegg and me on the latest “What Works” podcast.
LION tapped Chris as its leader in 2019, and he brings significant digital experience to the job. In fact, he’s had many prior lives. He was the top editor at Billy Penn, a mobile-first local start-up in Philadelphia launched by the legendary Jim Brady that’s now part of public radio station WHYY. He’s also the former top digital editor for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania.
I’ve got a Quick Take on a Poynter Online essay by Kathleen McElroy, director of the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin, who urges local journalists to consider staying in the game by publishing a local newspaper. Ellen discusses the new Harvey World Herald online site, which fills a need in a news desert just outside of Chicago.
David Ortiz celebrates the first of his three championships with the Red Sox. Photo (cc) 2013 by Colin Steele.
Boston magazine and The Boston Globe published dueling stories over the weekend that recount the 2019 shooting of Red Sox legend David Ortiz.
The Boston magazine story, by Mike Damiano, appears to have been many weeks, if not months, in the making — it’s a rich, deeply reported story about Ortiz’s life in the Dominican Republic and his complicated family situation. The Globe article, by Bob Hohler, may have been assigned (or least put on the fast track) in reaction to BoMag. It’s a newsy account of that attempts to get to the bottom of who ordered Ortiz’s shooting, and why.
By all means, read both. But by far the most interesting detail is the dueling theories about the role of a major drug trafficker, César Peralta, known as “The Abuser.” According to the Globe’s account, former Boston police commissioner Ed Davis, who was hired by Ortiz to investigate the shooting, Peralta is in fact the guy who ordered the hit. Hohler writes:
Davis, disclosing his findings for the first time, said the powerful and politically connected drug lord César “The Abuser” Peralta came to feel disrespected by Ortiz, prompting him to place a bounty on Ortiz’s head and sanction the ragtag hit squad that tried to kill him.
“Peralta said he had David shot,” Davis said in an interview, citing information that he said US law enforcement officials gathered and shared with him.
The BoMag story, on the other hand, all but rules out Peralta as having any role. Here’s what Damiano has to say:
As I, too, tried to get to the bottom of what caused the shooting, I found that the closer I got to people with genuine knowledge of the Santo Domingo underworld, the more skepticism I heard about the love-triangle theory and any possibility of Peralta’s involvement. One man I spoke with who knows many of the men in Peralta’s circle, as well as some of the men accused of involvement in the shooting, said that the theory was bunk. No part of it added up, he said, and hardly anyone in his neighborhood — Herrera, a hot bed of Dominican drug trafficking — believed it.
The two accounts also raise some questions about access. The Globe’s owner and publisher, John Henry, is also the principal owner of the Red Sox. Davis is a security consultant for the Globe. It does not appear that Davis shared his theory about Peralta with BoMag.
Both stories dismiss the widely mocked theory put forth by Dominican authorities that Ortiz was the victim of mistaken identity.
The conclusion I took away from Damiano’s and Hohler’s reporting was that we may never know who ordered the hit on Ortiz. I’m just glad he’s still with us.
Footnote: I’m told that Damiano has been hired by the Globe.
Congratulations to Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, for his victory in an important public records case in New York State, culminating a two-year-plus fight.
I took my first hike in the Middlesex Fells since last December. It was a beautiful day, but the trails were much drier than I expected. That doesn’t bode well unless we have an exceptionally wet April. No signs of greenery yet. No patches of snow, either, although there was a little bit of slushy ice on one of the smaller ponds. Click on the photos for a larger view.
Gannett is closing at least 19 print weekly newspapers serving at least 26 communities in Eastern Massachusetts, according to notices posted on those papers’ websites. In addition, nine weeklies are being merged into four.
“Local newspapers aren’t dying. They’re dead,” wrote Greg Reibman, president of the Charles River Regional Chamber and a former journalist at Gannett’s predecessor company, GateHouse Media.
The closings were announced with the same boilerplate language claiming that Gannett is committed to a bright digital future in which local news will be covered better than ever, children will play and every puppy will find a home. For instance, here’s a portion of the announcement published in the Bedford Minuteman:
This business decision reaffirms The Bedford Minuteman’s commitment to the sustainable future of local news. The Bedford Minuteman and its parent company, Gannett, understand many readers value and depend upon the news and information they find weekly in their print products. The company’s focus on digital news presentation helps ensure continued delivery of valuable community journalism and effective platforms for advertisers.
In fact, many of these titles have been zombie papers for quite some time, carrying little if any local news. And the current round of closures follows the revelation several weeks ago that staff reporters at nearly all of Gannett’s Massachusetts weeklies would be assigned to regional beats, pulling them off bread-and-butter coverage of local government and community events. The only weeklies not affected by that earlier change were the Cambridge Chronicle, the Old Colony Memorial of Plymouth and the Provincetown Banner.
Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, publishes more than 100 daily newspapers in 46 states, including the flagship USA Today. I can no longer even guess at how many weeklies it publishes, but in the not-too-distance past the number exceeded 1,000. As I’ve said before, I have no problem with moving to digital in order to save costs and invest in local journalism. But Gannett is cutting print and journalism simultaneously.
Fortunately, there are many sources of independently owned local news outlets in Massachusetts. Please support them.
The list of closures and mergers I’ve compiled may be incomplete. Over the past year, Gannett has whacked a number of print weeklies, so this is just the latest round. If you hear of any more, please let me know.
Closures
Bedford Minuteman
Beacon (Acton and Boxborough)
Beacon Villager (Maynard and Stow)
Billerica Minuteman
Brookline Tab
Burlington Union
Carver Reporter
Country Gazette (Bellingham)
Eagle-Independent (Chelmsford, Littleton and Westford)
Kingston Reporter
Needham Times
Newton Tab
Sudbury Town Crier
Waltham News Tribune
Watertown Tab
Wayland Town Crier
Weston Town Crier
Transcript & Bulletin (Dedham, Westwood and Norwood)
Times Advocate (Walpole and Sharon)
Mergers
Advocate & Star (Arlington Advocate and Winchester Star)
Coastal Mariner (Marshfield Mariner, Scituate Mariner and Cohasset Mariner)
Now that we appear to be on the verge of adopting daylight saving time year-round, we are finally starting to see some long-overdue pushback.
In The Boston Globe, reporters Gal Tziperman Lotan and Sarah Fatima quote experts who say that although we should stop moving the clocks forward and back twice a year, we should settle on standard time rather than daylight time. The reason: sunrise that can come to Boston as late as 8:15 a.m. during the darkest weeks of the year is far more harmful to us than sunset at 4:15 p.m. They quote Charles Czeisler, a sleep expert at Brigham and Women’s, as saying:
In their zeal to prevent the annual switch, the Senate has unfortunately chosen the wrong time to stabilize onto. What the Senate passed yesterday would require all Americans to start their work and school an hour earlier than they usually do, and that’s particularly difficult to do in the winter, when the sun is rising later.
Czeisler is right — but do we really want to give up those glorious 8:30 p.m. sunsets in the summer, with the light lasting until after 9 for a few weeks? I sure don’t.
So is year-round daylight saving time the way to go? We’ve tried it before — and it quickly proved to be unpopular. In 1973, the federal government adopted a measure to abolish standard time in order to deal with an oil shortage. Andrew Beaujon of Washingtonian magazine writes that the sight of children walking to school in the dark led to quick repeal of the measure:
The early-morning darkness quickly proved dangerous for children: A 6-year-old Alexandria girl was struck by a car on her way to Polk Elementary School on January 7; the accident broke her leg. Two Prince George’s County students were hurt in February. In the weeks after the change, eight Florida kids were killed in traffic accidents. Florida’s governor, Reubin Askew, asked for Congress to repeal the measure. “It’s time to recognize that we may well have made a mistake,” US Senator Dick Clark of Iowa said during a speech in Congress on January 28, 1974. In the Washington area, some schools delayed their start times until the sun caught up with the clock.
In fact, Beaujon found, the increase in the number of fatalities was statistically insignificant, and we really did save a whole lot of energy. But the larger point stands. More sunlight in the afternoon sounds like a good idea until people see what it looks like when they wake up in the morning.
The Senate unanimously passed a permanent daylight saving bill on Wednesday, delighting long-time proponents such as U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, sponsor of the Sunshine Protection Act. The very name suggests that Markey is not a morning person. We’ll see whether it becomes law, or if it stalls once it reaches the House.
There are only so many hours of sunlight available. Some people may not like moving the clocks back and forth, but it’s probably the best of all options.
Pam Johnston, general manager for news with GBH, has a deep background in local television in Boston at WLVI (Channel 56), and earlier at local stations in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Portland, Maine. At GBH, which is a public media company, she has a broad portfolio. She is responsible for local and regional news operations across all platforms, including radio, television and digital. She also supervises GBH’s contributions to two NPR programs, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
Johnston joined GBH in 2012 as director of audience development for “Frontline,” the national investigative series, where she is credited with diversifying the audience and connecting them with long-form documentaries, virtual reality experiences and podcasts.
I have a Quick Take on a multimillion-dollar glitch in ad tech by Gannett, and Ellen Clegg reports on a union survey of workers at Tribune Publishing (now owned by Alden Global Capital) that reveals big gaps in pay equity.
