By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
What’s terrifying about Putin’s attack on Ukraine is that it doesn’t seem rational. He’s turned himself into an international pariah, and his country will be under crippling sanctions for years to come. It’s hard to see how this ends well for him — yet he did it anyway.
God bless the people of Ukraine.
Babz Rawls Ivy is host and co-producer of “LoveBabz LoveTalk” on WNHH-LP radio in New Haven. But that doesn’t begin to describe her. So let’s add a few more words: Force of nature. Wise presence. Storyteller.
WNHH is a low-power FM community station launched seven years ago by the New Haven Independent, a pioneering online nonprofit news site. Paul Bass, founder and editor of the Independent, wanted to bring powerful local voices onto the airwaves. Babz Rawls Ivy brings truth-telling to a whole new level.
Rawls Ivy’s show is on the air every weekday from 9 to 11 a.m. If you’re in New Haven, you can hear it at 103.5 FM. You can also listen live on the Independent’s website and on its Facebook page, where programs are also available after the show. Past programs are also available on a number of other platforms, including Apple Podcasts. Just search for “WNHH Community Radio.”
In our Quick Takes for the week, Dan shares the latest on Gannett’s downgrading of local coverage, and Ellen asks whether retired journalists are the new seed capital for startup digital sites.
You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
After I reported last week that Gannett was dropping most local news from its Massachusetts weekly newspapers in favor of regional coverage, I heard from a few independent hyperlocal publishers, several of them with projects I wasn’t familiar with. So I started compiling a list of independent news organizations, putting out the word for nominations on Twitter and Facebook.
The titles came pouring in. Independent journalism is alive and well in Massachusetts, and though I’m sure many of the projects I found are economically marginal, they’re providing the kind of granular community coverage that you just can’t get from a corporate chain-owned newspaper. There are weekly newspapers on my list as well as digital-only projects, a few dailies and even a couple of radio stations.
I’ve got nearly 200 entries, sortable by the name of the project, the community and the type. Some, like the Berkshire Eagle, serve multiple communities; most cover just one town or neighborhood. I’ve added a link to the menu bar for easy access. Meanwhile, please keep those nominations coming — just send an email to me at dan dot kennedy at northeastern dot edu.
One afternoon more than 25 years ago I was talking with the late Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan. I mentioned to him that we were buying a three-family house in Topsfield as a rental property. He warned me about new state septic-system regulations. I didn’t pay much attention.
I should have. Several years later, after a heavy rainstorm, the septic system failed, and we had to replace it. As I recall, it cost us $50,000. We sold the house and vowed to stay out of the rental market from that point on.
I thought about that this morning when I read the horrifying story of Emmaline and Brian Proctor, whose new home in Wareham became a financial disaster when their oil tank leaked. According to the Globe’s Sean Murphy, state-mandated cleanup will cost them more than $185,000, and their homeowners insurance doesn’t cover it. Murphy writes:
Under strictly enforced state environmental laws, the Proctors are now responsible for removing contamination caused by the spill. That means their contractor must excavate at least 10 feet under the house to test the soil and remove contaminated portions. And to do that, the contractor must temporarily lift the house off its foundation for access.
Yow! This could happen to any of us with oil heat. The oil tank in our current house started leaking within a week or two of our moving in seven years ago. There was little spillage, fortunately, and I remember being peeved that we had to spend $700 on a new tank. Now I realize it could have been much, much worse.
As Murphy writes, coverage for such disasters should be mandatory. And something should be done to help unsuspecting homeowners like the Proctors, who face financial disaster for a problem that was not of their making.
Could The Boston Globe, profitable and growing, help make up for the local news vacuum in Eastern Massachusetts? The shortage of reliable community journalism became much more acute last week when Gannett told reporters at most of its weekly papers that they would be reassigned to regional beats or to one of the chain’s dailies.
The Globe could conceivably step in by reviving an idea that was perhaps before its time. Under New York Times Co. ownership, the Globe published web pages known as YourTown, one for each suburban community as well as a few of Boston’s neighborhoods. They relied heavily on aggregation — too heavily, as the Times Co. found out in court — and they competed with papers owned by GateHouse Media (now Gannett) that weren’t nearly as hollowed-out as they are today. What’s more, YourTown was part of the Globe’s free Boston.com site (this was before BostonGlobe.com), and the hyperlocal advertising that was supposed to support YourTown never materialized. John Henry shut down YourTown not long after he bought the Globe in 2013.
So what would a revived YourTown look like? Advertising isn’t nearly as important as it used to be, but the Globe has been successful in selling paid digital subscriptions. So imagine a YourTown with one full-time reporter in each community. If the Globe signed up 500 new subscribers in a community, that could bring in as much as $120,000 a year. I’m basing that on an average subscription costing $20 a month (the full cost is $30, but many people would be paying discounts).
No doubt this would work better in some places than in others. I live in Medford, a city of about 58,000 residents that, as of now, doesn’t have a single full-time reporter covering the community. Selling an extra 500 subscriptions — or more — ought to be doable.
But right next door, in Arlington (population: 43,000), there’s a good-quality nonprofit news website, Your Arlington, which would make a Globe-branded YourTown less attractive. Or consider a small town like Bedford — not only are there just 13,000 residents, but it’s the home of a well-established nonprofit news site, The Bedford Citizen.
Still, I think a revived YourTown would work well enough in a few communities that it’s worth trying. I doubt it would be a money-maker for the Globe, but it might be a break-even proposition. And the paper would be filling a real need.
“Beat the Press,” which was canceled last summer by GBH-TV after a 22-year run, is back — this time as a podcast.
Hosted, as always, by the incomparable Emily Rooney, our debut features a discussion of how the media should cover the crisis in democracy; the Cuomo-CNN meltdown (recorded before Jeff Zucker’s implosion); what to do about social media-driven hoaxes; and Dave Chappelle’s recent anti-transgender remarks.
Emily is joined by Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe, Jon Keller of WBZ-TV and me. You can find us on Apple Podcasts and, I imagine, just about anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Jack Shafer asks an important question: Who is funding Sarah Palin’s legal battle against The New York Times? As Shafer observes in his new Politico Magazine piece, Palin’s legal team overlaps with the lawyers who represented Hulk Hogan in his lawsuit against Gawker. That effort turned out to be funded by Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel, who was aggrieved at having been outed by a Gawker-owned website. Shafer writes:
Nobody can criticize Palin for passing the hat to finance her case — if that’s what she did. Lawsuits are expensive and crowdfunding them without naming the funders is a time-honored practice — civil liberties groups do it routinely — and the practice is especially praiseworthy when the litigation is of the “impact” variety, designed to change the law and protect rights. But as the Gawker case demonstrated, such lawsuits can also be seen as punitive exercises, financed by a third party as payback.
The problem is that when lawsuits are funded by vast sums of dark money, they can have a distorting effect. Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy suit after Gawker published video of him having sex without his permission was certainly worthy of pursuing. But in the ordinary course of such matters, it would have been settled and life would have gone on. Instead, Hogan’s lawyers used secret Thiel money to push the suit all the way to its conclusion, with Gawker ultimately going bankrupt and shutting down. (The site has since been relaunched under new ownership.)
Unlike Hogan’s case, Palin’s libel suit against the Times is entirely lacking in merit. The Times published an editorial falsely tying Palin’s rhetoric to the 2011 shooting of then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords and the killings of six others. But there was zero evidence that the Times acted with “actual malice” (knowing falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth), which is the standard for public officials and public figures.
Palin’s suit shouldn’t have gotten as far as it did, and the devastating defeat she suffered this week ought to put an end to it. But if she’s backed by an endless stream of screw-you money, she can keep pushing, and perhaps get her case eventually heard by the U.S. Supreme Court — where Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have indicated they’re prepared to overturn or pare back the libel standards that have protected the press since the landmark 1964 Times v. Sullivan decision.
Gannett is poised to take a major step back from its coverage of Massachusetts communities as it prepares to replace local news in its weekly papers with regional stories about topics such as public safety, education, racial justice and the environment.
This post is based on communications I had with several sources who insisted on anonymity as well as internal documents that were provided to me. There are a number of details I don’t know. For instance: Is this part of a nationwide initiative? Will the dailies be affected? Will there be any coverage of such important matters as city council, select board and school committee meetings? How will local elections be handled?
Also, I hear that several — perhaps three — Massachusetts weeklies will not be affected by the move, including the Cambridge Chronicle. I don’t know which of the other papers will be left more or less alone.
Emails to Gannett corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and to Gannett New England went unanswered. The company is the largest newspaper chain in the U.S., with more than 100 dailies and around 1,000 other media properties.
The Massachusetts papers are known collectively as Wicked Local. The changes will take effect within the next week or two. According to a message to employees from Len LaCara, content strategy analyst at Gannett’s USA Today Network, the change is being made in an attempt to bolster paid digital circulation and offset shrinking print readership. According to a screen shot of his message that was sent to me, he wrote:
There is ample evidence that people will not subscribe to read a lot of the content currently being produced for the newspapers. We see this in the low subscription numbers and the lack of traffic to the stories. But we have seen in community after community that the topics Lisa outlines for you are valued by your potential audience. [This is a reference to Lisa Strattan, vice president of news for Gannett New England.] They can and do generate loyal digital readers who will return to your site and renew their subscriptions.
Well, I want to know what’s going on at City Hall, and if my local Gannett weekly isn’t going to tell me, I’m stuck. In our community we have a Gannett weekly with a capable full-time reporter, who is apparently going to be reassigned to cover regional news. Other than that, we have Patch, Facebook and Nextdoor. Big opportunity for Patch, but I can’t imagine they’re going to staff up.
I’m told that Gannett journalists have been asked to apply for new regional jobs covering their preferred beats. Click on the slidedeck above for more details. Although Gannett has closed a number of weekly papers over the past year and has gone through round after round of job cuts, I hear that no one is losing their jobs as a result of this reorganization.
As for the appeal of regional news — isn’t that why we have The Boston Globe, public radio and television, and TV newscasts? I want local news from my local paper. I understand that circulation at Gannett’s weeklies is shrinking, but I think it’s more likely because there isn’t enough local news rather than too much. This does not strike me as a smart move, to say the least.
Update: I’m hearing that a few of the weekly reporters will be assigned to Gannett’s dailies rather than to one of the new regional beats.
Previously published at GBH News.
To the extent that fading right-wing icon Sarah Palin had any strategy in pursuing her deeply flawed libel suit against The New York Times, it was this: to force a reconsideration of protections for the press that had stood for nearly 60 years, thus exacting vengeance against her tormenters in what she once infamously labeled “the lamestream media.”
It’s at least theoretically possible that could still happen. But the devastating manner in which she lost has made it less likely, not more, that the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually take her up on her invitation to weaken or overturn its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan decision.
First came U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff’s move on Monday to throw out the case and rule in the Times’ favor.
Rakoff was troubled by the 2017 Times editorial at the heart of the case, which claimed — falsely — that Jared Loughner, who shot then-U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others in 2011, had been incited by a map put together by Palin’s political action committee that depicted gunsights over Giffords’ district and those of 19 other Democrats.
“I don’t mean to be misunderstood,” Rakoff said. “I think this is an example of very unfortunate editorializing on the part of the Times.” But Palin’s lawyers did not present any evidence that the error was anything other than a sloppy mistake by then-editorial page editor James Bennet, who was contrite and apologetic during his testimony.
Rakoff did not inform the jurors of his ruling, instead allowing them to move ahead with their deliberations in order to assemble a more complete record for the inevitable appeals. That only added to Palin’s humiliation, as all nine jurors voted against her when they announced their verdict on Tuesday.
“Your job was to decide the facts, my job is to decide the law,” Rakoff said. “As it turns out, they were in agreement in this case.”
Press advocates had worried that the case could substantially weaken Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 court ruling that public officials cannot win a libel suit unless they are able to show that a false, defamatory story about them was published or broadcast with “actual malice” — that is, with the knowledge that it was false, or with reckless disregard for the truth. That protection was later extended to public figures.
Palin is all of the above — a former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate who transformed herself into an all-purpose celebrity. A ruling in her favor would have rendered the actual-malice standard meaningless.
There are, of course, those who have railed against Times v. Sullivan for years. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump vowed he would “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
And as I’ve written previously, two Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have said they would like to revisit Times v. Sullivan. But though Thomas appears ready to overturn the decision in its entirety and return libel law to the states, Gorsuch has indicated he would take a more subtle approach. Because the Palin verdicts are so clear-cut, it may be difficult for the justices to use them as a reason to sink their fangs into the Sullivan decision.
Rakoff’s unusual two-part approach presents an additional obstacle to Palin’s hopes for winning on appeal. As David Folkenflik reported for NPR, if an appeals court were to set aside Rakoff’s verdict, the jury’s verdict would still be in effect.
Finally, the case helped demonstrate the importance of First Amendment protections even for bad journalism — which the Times’ editorial surely was. Bennet inserted language into an editorial — “the link to political incitement was clear” — that was patently false and defamatory. There was no connection between Palin’s map and the shooting of Gabby Giffords and others. (Although it would not be surprising to learn that the jury considered the fact that Palin really did publish that grossly irresponsible map.)
But the media must have the freedom to report on matters of public importance without being subjected to crippling lawsuits because of inadvertent mistakes. As Justice William Brennan wrote in the Sullivan decision, “erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate, and … it must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the ‘breathing space’ that they ‘need … to survive.’”
So Times v. Sullivan lives — for now. Whether Palin’s lawyers will somehow be able to transform their resounding defeat into a winner on appeal remains to be seen. But a federal judge and a jury of Palin’s peers saw through her bogus complaint. For now, that’s enough.
Lincoln Millstein played a critical role in launching The Boston Globe’s free digital site, boston.com, in 1995. Boston.com began as a portal, and carried Globe journalism but also curated other news sites and community blogs. It had a separate staff, and the office was in downtown Boston, not in the old Dorchester plant. Lincoln went on to be executive vice president at New York Times Digital, then moved on to the Hearst Corporation, where he held a number of different roles.
When Lincoln retired as senior assistant to CEO Steven Swartz of Hearst in 2018, he wondered what was next. He found the answer by returning to his roots as a local reporter, recalling the days when he started out in the Middletown bureau of the Hartford Courant in the mid-1970s.
He and his wife, Irene Driscoll, also a longtime journalist, had upgraded their summer place in Maine in anticipation of spending more time there in retirement. Then the pandemic hit, and they moved in. He started picking up lots of local scoops on how the pandemic was affecting businesses. Not to mention the occasional deer collision. That’s how The Quietside Journal got its start.
Dan has a Quick Take on the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, which recently won a big public-records victory over the city of Worcester, which has been stonewalling them for years, and Ellen looks at newsroom layoffs and transparency.
You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app (as long as it’s not Spotify).