The Boston Phoenix’s archives have taken a giant step closer to becoming accessible and usable.
A few weeks ago I learned from Giordana Mecagni, the head of special collections and university archivist at Northeastern, that a deal had been struck with the Internet Archive to make print editions of the Phoenix available — and searchable — online. On Wednesday, it became official. Caralee Adams has the details at the Internet Archive’s blog.
I’m really thrilled that this has happened. I was on staff at the Phoenix from 1991 to 2005, most of that time as the media columnist, and I continued to write for the paper occasionally up until it closed in 2013. Two years later, the Phoenix’s founder and publisher, Stephen Mindich, donated the archives to Northeastern, a gift I helped arrange.
Unfortunately, Stephen died in 2018, and the hopes we all had of digitizing the collection stalled out. A couple of years ago there was talk of a grant proposal, but that didn’t go anywhere, either. So what happened? Adams explains:
As it turns out, the Internet Archive owned the master microfilm for the Phoenix and it put the full collection online in a separate collection: The Boston Phoenix 1973-2013. Initially, the back issues were only available for one patron to check out at a time through Controlled Digital Lending. Once Northeastern learned about the digitized collection, it extended rights to the Archive to allow the Phoenix to be downloaded without controls.
“All of a sudden it was free to the public. It was wonderful,” Mecagni told Adams. “We get tons and tons of research requests for various aspects of the Phoenix, so having it available online for free for people to download is a huge help for us.”
I’ve been playing with the new collection the last few weeks, and though it’s not perfect, it’s a big step forward. It encompasses papers starting in 1973, when Mindich, the publisher of a competing alt-weekly called Boston After Dark, acquired The Phoenix and renamed it The Boston Phoenix, up until the closing in March 2013.
There are some significant gaps; there appear to be no issues from 2011 or ’12, and just 33 from 2010, for instance. (I’ll bet there are ways of fixing that. I know that the Boston Public Library has the Phoenix in its microfilm collection, and perhaps it’s more complete than what the Internet Archive has.) And BAD, the pre-Mindich Phoenix and The Real Paper, founded by former staff members of The Phoenix following the 1973 acquisition, are all absent as well.
But this is a huge, huge step forward. As Carly Carioli, the last editor of the Phoenix, told Adams: “It’s a dream come true. The Phoenix was invaluable in its own time, and I think it will be invaluable for a new generation who are just discovering it now.”
Giordana Mecagni deserves huge thanks. From the beginning, she has understood the value of the Phoenix. This is a big step forward for her vision as well.
How much of a financial hit would it take to force Mark Zuckerberg sit up and pay attention?
We can be reasonably sure he didn’t lose any sleep when British authorities fined Facebook a paltry $70 million earlier this fall for withholding information about its acquisition of Giphy, an app for creating and hosting animated graphics. Maybe he stirred a bit in July 2019, when the Federal Trade Commission whacked the company with a $5 billion penalty for violating its users’ privacy — a punishment described by the FTC as “the largest ever imposed” in such a case. But then he probably rolled over and caught a few more z’s.
OK, how about $150 billion? Would that do it?
We may be about to find out. Because that’s the price tag lawyers for Rohingya refugees placed on a class-action lawsuit they filed in California last week against Facebook — excuse me, make that Meta Platforms. As reported by Kelvin Chan of The Associated Press, the suit claims that Facebook’s actions in Myanmar stirred up violence in a way that “amounted to a substantial cause, and eventual perpetuation of, the Rohingya genocide.”
Even by Zuckerberg’s standards, $150 billion is a lot of money. Facebook’s revenues in 2020 were just a shade under $86 billion. And though the pricetags lawyers affix on lawsuits should always be taken with several large shakers of salt, the case over genocide in Myanmar could be just the first step in holding Facebook to account for the way its algorithms amplify hate speech and disinformation.
The lawsuit is also one of the first tangible consequences of internal documents provided earlier this fall by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower who went public with information showing that company executives knew its algorithms were wreaking worldwide havoc and did little or nothing about it. In addition to providing some 10,000 documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Haugen told her story anonymously to The Wall Street Journal, and later went public by appearing on “60 Minutes” and testifying before Congress.
The lawsuit is a multi-country effort, as Mathew Ingram reports for the Columbia Journalism Review, and the refugees’ lawyers are attempting to apply Myanmar’s laws in order to get around the United States’ First Amendment, which — with few exceptions — protects even the most loathsome speech.
But given that U.S. law may prevail, the lawyers have also taken the step of claiming that Facebook is a “defective” product. According to Tim De Chant, writing at Ars Technica, that claim appears to be targeted at Section 230, which would normally protect Facebook from legal liability for any content posted by third parties.
Facebook’s algorithms are programmed to show you more and more of the content that you engage with, which leads to the amplification of the sort of violent posts that helped drive genocide against the Rohingyas. A legal argument that would presumably find more favor in the U.S. court system is the algorithmic-driven spread of that content, rather than the content itself.
“While the Rohingya have long been the victims of discrimination and persecution, the scope and violent nature of that persecution changed dramatically in the last decade, turning from human rights abuses and sporadic violence into terrorism and mass genocide,” the lawsuit says. “A key inflection point for that change was the introduction of Facebook into Burma in 2011, which materially contributed to the development and widespread dissemination of anti-Rohingya hate speech, misinformation, and incitement of violence—which together amounted to a substantial cause, and perpetuation of, the eventual Rohingya genocide..”
Facebook has previously admitted that its response to the violence in Myanmar was inadequate. “We weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence,” the company said in 2018.
The lawsuit at least theoretically represents an existential threat to Facebook, and no doubt the company will fight back hard. Still, its initial response emphasized its regrets and steps it has taken over the past several years to lessen the damage. A Meta spokesperson recently issued this statement to multiplenewsorganizations: “We’re appalled by the crimes committed against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. We’ve built a dedicated team of Burmese speakers, banned the Tatmadaw [the Burmese armed forces], disrupted networks manipulating public debate and taken action on harmful misinformation to help keep people safe. We’ve also invested in Burmese-language technology to reduce the prevalence of violating content. This work is guided by feedback from experts, civil society organizations and independent reports, including the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar’s findings and the independent Human Rights Impact Assessment we commissioned and released in 2018.”
No doubt Zuckerberg and company didn’t knowingly set out to contribute to a human-rights disaster that led to a rampage of rape and murder, with nearly 7,000 Rohingyas killed and 750,000 forced out of the country. Yet this tragedy was the inevitable consequence of the way Facebook works, and of its top executives’ obsession with growth over safety.
As University of Virginia media studies professor and author Siva Vaidhyanathan has put it: “The problem with Facebook is Facebook.”
Maybe the prospect of being forced to pay for the damage they have done will, at long last, force Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and the rest to do something about it.
Our guest on the latest episode of the “What Works” podcast is Rhema Bland, the first permanent director of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting at the University of North Carolina school of journalism. She was appointed in October 2020 after working in higher education as an adviser to student media programs. She is a veteran journalist who has reported and produced for CBS, the Florida Times-Union, WJCT and the New York Daily News.
The Wells Society was co-founded by award-winning journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ron Nixon and Topher Sanders. The society is named after the path-breaking Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, who fearlessly covered the lynching of Black men and was present at the creation of the NAACP. The society’s mission is essential to the industry: to “increase the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of color in the field of investigative reporting.” Bland and her colleagues host training seminars for journalists across the country, focusing on everything from entrepreneurship to racial inequality to COVID-19.
Also in this episode, Ellen Clegg talks about Ogden Newspapers’ purchase of Swift Communications, which publishes community papers in western ski towns as well as niche agricultural titles like the Goat Journal. And I share news about federal antitrust lawsuits that are in the works against Google and Facebook by more than 200 newspapers.
You can listen here and sign up via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever fine podcasts are found.
Covered railroad bridge in Hardwick, Vt. Photo (cc) 2010 by John Rife.
The Hardwick Gazette, a weekly paper that serves several communities in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, is selling its building, going nonprofit and getting rid of its print edition. Volunteer citizen journalists are being recruited as well. Owner and editor Ray Small tells Mary Engisch of Vermont Public Radio:
I think that the key to the survival of the Gazette is it’s not necessarily a new approach — but it’s a new approach for the Gazette and it’s something that we tested several years ago — having the communities in essence cover themselves, partially because of local demand, partially because of looking forward to this day, which has now arrived.
I’m skeptical of the volunteer model, not because it can’t work — it can — but because it can take a long time to build up. But good for Small for coming up with new ideas to keep the Gazette going rather than just walking away.
We all have our favorite movies about journalism. Best known are the heroic films, which portray reporters as indefatigable warriors on behalf of truth, justice and the American way. At the top of that particular heap are “Spotlight,” “The Post” and — at the very pinnacle — “All the President’s Men,” which inspired a generation of young journalists. For those who like a bit more nuance, there’s “Absence of Malice.” And if you prefer pure entertainment to instruction or uplift, there’s “His Girl Friday,” a romantic romp starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
I’ve enjoyed all these movies. But I have to admit that my favorite film about journalism is “Shattered Glass,” a docudrama about a troubled young man named Stephen Glass, who concocted an increasingly outlandish series of articles while he was working at The New Republic in the 1990s. Exposed at last, he was drummed out of the business. It was the sort of scandal that proved defining for a small publication like TNR.
Indeed, I was somewhat startled over the weekend when I saw the magazine described as “at the time an influential journal of the center left.” At the time. It’s been a long decline for a magazine co-founded by Walter Lippmann; I understand it’s doing better these days. And though there are multiple factors responsible for its marginalization, most of which have to do with the explosion of digital opinion journals, it was the Glass scandal that provided the magazine with its first swift kick down the stairs.
“Shattered Glass” never made the big time, but it’s long since become a staple of journalism ethics classes. (I don’t know why; “don’t make stuff up” can be dispensed with during the first 10 minutes of the first meeting of the semester.) People in journalism have long been passionate about it as well. I was once asked to take part in a panel discussion and found myself sitting next to Marty Peretz, then TNR’s owner and editor-in-chief, who, of course, is portrayed in the film. I remember telling him something like, “I agree with you about the commas.” (If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know what I’m talking about.) I don’t think he laughed.
All this is by way of my introduction to a story that you must read if you haven’t already. Titled “Loving Lies,” the piece — by Bill Adair, the creator of PolitiFact and no thus coddler of journalists who fabricate — appears in a digital publication called Air Mail, which has been around for a couple of years even though I hadn’t previously heard of it. (Since I first published this in the Members Newsletter, I’ve learned that it was co-founded by former New York Times journalist Alessandra Stanley and former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.) The quality looks to be quite high, as I would expect of an outlet able to commission a piece from someone as accomplished as Adair.
If it seems like I’m dancing around the main topic, it’s because I am. I don’t want to write any spoilers here. I will tell you that it’s one of the most moving stories about love and redemption that I can remember reading in a long time, and even that’s more than I ought to say. Just read it. You’ll need to provide your email address, but it’s absolutely worth doing so.
This post was first published as part of last week’s Media Nation Members Newsletter. To become a member for just $5 a month, please click here.
Every time I open a window, in floats another end-of-the-year memo from a Boston Globe Media executive. This one is from Tom Brown, vice president for consumer revenue, who reports that the Globe’s digital-only subscriptions now stand at 226,000 — a remarkable accomplishment given that the Globe was at just 95,000 in mid-2019.
For those of you who keep telling me that the Globe is going to drop its print edition, let me call your attention to this observation by Brown: “The print paper remains at the core of what we do and at 55% of consumer revenue, the largest component of revenue.”
That’s true even though print circulation according to the most recent report filed with the Alliance for Audited Media was just 128,000 on Sundays and about 73,000 on weekdays. The Globe, like other newspapers, will shut down its printing presses once costs exceed revenues — but not a moment before.
Also, I thought it was interesting that the Globe’s paid digital circulation kept rising this year even as overall traffic shrank following the end of the Trump era. (It’s over, right? Please tell me it’s over.)
“We had a strong start in 2021, but in the post-election/post-inauguration spring news audiences around the country began to wane,” Brown wrote. “We saw about a 25% decline in our non-subscriber audience during this period — something that was widely seen throughout the industry, yet our overall subscriber numbers grew modestly.”
The full text of Brown’s memo follows.
Dear Colleagues,
The past two and a half years have been a period of exceptional subscriber growth at the Globe. In mid-2019, we were thrilled to have the leading digital subscription business among major metros with 95,000 digital-only subscribers. From the launch of Globe.com in the fall of 2011, it took us over 7 years to get to that number of digital-only subs. It took less than a year to more than double that number as we continued to refine, invest, and innovate to develop the sophisticated approach that we have today.
This note is intended to share an update of how we have evolved since that time and what the current state of our subscription business looks like.
The consumer team has disciplines in:
Analytics
Testing
Pricing
Database/campaign management
Email operations
Customer insights and market research
We work with so many of you across the organization on a wide array of projects. Our main focus is growing subscriptions and related revenue. Our team is in service of the incredible journalism that is created here every day. We feel a responsibility to recommend and enact strategies that help to continually attract new subscribers and retain existing subscribers. We focus on analytical techniques and approaches that can improve our ability to draw in, acquire, engage, retain and maximize yield of subscribers. We believe in the rigorous testing of new ideas and letting the data and analytics guide us as we refine our approach.
A Brief history – mid 2019
With support and guidance from leadership we set out to accelerate the growth of our digital subscription business. After a period of testing that began in the fall of 2018, we embarked on a major shift in our acquisition strategy in mid-2019. Encouraged by the early results of the testing we switched the core introductory offer (the offer most commonly seen on the paywall and in email). The rigorous outreach, tracking, sampling, and testing combined with our consistently excellent journalism led to our acquisition rate increasing by more than 500% and remarkably, engagement increased and the retention rate stayed the same. This propelled a sharp increase in subscribers beginning in the summer of 2019 — we passed the 100,000 subscriber mark in mid-June 2019! As 2019 continued, so did the strong results, and we felt more encouraged with each passing week that we had tapped into a new audience that saw great value in a Globe subscription once they had a chance to spend time with our content.
The effect of the pandemic on subscriptions
As the pandemic began in March 2020, we became even more relevant to our subscribers and to new readers. Many of the subscribers already acquired on the new offer were moving off their introductory rate in the early days of the pandemic, which caused an increase in retention. At the same time we were acquiring new subscribers at a record pace. Going into 2020, we planned for a record year with growth to 178,000 subscribers by the end of the year. This goal was surpassed in early April. By early May we had over 200,000 digital only subscribers. While it took over 7 years to grow to 100,000 we had added the next 100,000 in less than one year!
Earlier in 2021
We had a strong start in 2021, but in the post-election / post-inauguration spring news audiences around the country began to wane. We saw about a 25% decline in our non-subscriber audience during this period — something that was widely seen throughout the industry, yet our overall subscriber numbers grew modestly.
Where are we now — Q4 2021
Over the past 5+ months traffic has increased and so have subscriptions. We have reached a new all-time high of 226,000 digital-only subscribers.
We are a leader among U.S. major metro newspapers and one of only a few that have surpassed 100,000 digital only subscribers. Our strategy is being widely adopted across the industry and we are proud to be innovators in this approach and thrilled that it is even possible thanks to the incredible journalism, investment across the company to consistently improve what we do, and the support of the entire organization.
New England is the core for digital subscribers, accounting for 76% of total subscribers, but there are subscribers in all 50 states and more than 3,000 international subscribers!
A sampling of what we have planned for 2022
Continue to monitor acquisition results and test other offers to make sure we are always following an approach that nets us the best results for the long term health of the business.
Testing of new acquisition approaches and getting more dynamic with our subscription offering.
Working with the Product Development and Engineering teams to implement new tests and a redesigned checkout flow.
Taking a data driven approach to increasing engagement and retention through a series of initiatives designed to address churn both proactively and reactively — working closely with Marketing and Customer Service.
Home Delivery
The print paper remains at the core of what we do and at 55% of consumer revenue, the largest component of revenue. While print subscriber volume has declined as more people choose a digital option, we still have a dedicated base of home delivery subscribers. We are continuing to invest in Home Delivery acquisition and will increase that investment in 2022. Our Home delivery subscribers consist of a very loyal base with an average tenure of over 20 years! We continue to use analytics to make sure we can deliver the best experience possible to every subscriber.
Print newsstand sales
Another important piece of the consumer business is the revenue generated from sales of single copies on the newsstand. The single copy business was hit hard at the beginning of the pandemic as the foot traffic to stores, especially in the city of Boston, collapsed suddenly. 2021 has been a bounce back year though and sales have remained relatively flat year over year since the spring, indicating that there is still a consistent demand for print single copy.
I hope this gave you a good glimpse into our consumer business. Please feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions to any of us on this entrepreneurial consumer team.
Chris Wallace. U.S. Army photo (cc) 2010 by Staff Sgt. Jim Greenhill.
Chris Wallace has finally stopped providing undeserved cover for Fox News, announcing at the end of his show today that he was leaving. He’ll host a show on CNN’s new streaming service.
Wallace deserves some credit for remaining a bastion of sanity on a network that’s embraced the hardcore Trumpist right and all of its lies and fantasies. But he’s 74 and has made a lot of money at Fox; let’s not get carried away.
Thomas Edsall’s latest, on what the Democrats need to do to regain power (I suppose I should say “maintain,” but it feels like they’ve already lost it), is filled with valuable insights from a variety scholars, many of them built around the theme of moving to the center and appealing more to working-class voters.
But I want to call your attention to this section, from Harvard’s Steven Levitsky, the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” which to my mind is one of the most important books of recent years. As Levitsky points out in a message to Edsall, there’s more wrong with our constitutional structure than there is with the Democratic Party:
“The Democrats have been amazingly successful in national elections over the last 20 years,” Levitsky wrote in an email.
They have won the popular vote in 7 out of 8 presidential elections — that’s almost unthinkable. They have also won the popular vote in the Senate in every six-year cycle since 2000. You cannot look at a party in a democracy that has won the popular vote almost without fail for two decades and say, gee, that party really has to get it together and address its “liabilities.”
Instead, he argued,
the liabilities lie in undemocratic electoral institutions such as the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate (where underpopulated states have an obscene amount of power that should be unacceptable in any democracy), gerrymandered state and federal legislative districts in many states, and recent political demographic trends — the concentration of Democratic votes in cities — that favor Republicans.
“Until our parties are competing on a level playing field,” Levitsky added, “I am going to insist that our institutions are a bigger problem for democracy than liberal elitism and ‘wokeness.’”
You really have to wonder how long a majority of the country is going to accept being relegated to minority status.
YourArlington, a venerable community news site that’s been pretty much a one-man operation throughout its 15 years of existence, is going nonprofit and ramping up. Founder Bob Sprague now has a board, and he’s begun searching for his successor, writing:
I plan to continue to be the chief guardian about what is posted on this site and am very pleased to have more help from those knowledgeable about the town. I am seeking an experienced journalist to take over the day-to-day operation of the site, which had record internet traffic in August and September.
YourArlington will no longer accept advertising but is accepting grants, donations and underwriting from local businesses.
“I have lived in Arlington since 1989, and I know it is a town whose residents crave good journalism,” Sprague told me in an email. “The news YourArlington provides remains free, but the cost to produce it continues. It’s exciting to think that residents will step up and support it.”
Bina Venkataraman. Photo (cc) 2019 by TED Conference.
On Thursday a trusted source sent me an internal memo from Boston Globe editorial page editor Bina Venkataraman offering her take on the opinion section’s accomplishments in 2021. (Thanks, source!)
Probably the newsiest part of the memo is that The Emancipator, a racial justice collaborative involving the Globe and Boston University that’s been slow to get off the ground, is ramping up and “will begin publishing regularly” in the near future. Venkataraman also takes note of the paper’s 2020 editorials on housing in Newton, which won a Pulitzer finalist nod.
Her full memo follows.
Dear BGMP colleagues,
It’s a delight to be able to share with you some updates from the Globe Opinion team as we near the end of the year.
Thanks to our leadership, the company has made significant investments in growing and diversifying the Opinion team and the editorial board since 2019, helping us launch a pioneering partnership with Boston University, and allowing us to to do truly digital-first, innovative projects like our endorsement of Joe Biden and our editorial series Future-proofing the Presidency. This has raised the profile of our work nationally, where Globe Opinion content and voices are often featured in major broadcast venues, and has deepened our connection with local and regional communities. The growth has also allowed us to have a closer eye on and hold accountable the institutions and political leaders in Greater Boston and New England responsible for serving the public interest.
2021 has been busy and productive in Opinion and Ideas. Here are a few of the highlights that made our year extraordinary:
*Editorial board meetings with mayoral and municipal election candidates across Greater Boston, which culminated in our publishing a spate of endorsements.
*A significant and innovative project, the aforementioned “Future-proofing the Presidency,” extensively covered in national broadcast media, influenced proposed Congressional reforms.
*Our ongoing op-ed series on longevity, in collaboration with MIT’s AgeLab, which sparked a conversation about Boston’s role as a city for innovation in aging.
*The launch of a hot new Ideas newsletter that already has thousands of subscribers and is engaging readers and driving them back to our section.
*The announcement of a new non-profit publication, The Emancipator, our groundbreaking collaboration with BU to reimagine 19th-century abolitionist newspapers for today’s conversation on racial justice. We started with the hiring of a great editor-in-chief and the launch of the Unbound newsletter.
*Globe Letters packages featuring our readers’ voices on the major issues of the day, from geoengineering to Mass. & Cass to Thanksgiving-season gratitude.
*Our popular Op-Talk event series and Now What? (formerly known as Don’t Look Back) newsletter, which offer new entry points to our journalism and expand our reach.
*Ideas features on artificial intelligence, race and mobility, the future of work, and urban schools led the conversation online and in the community.
* Columnists’ ongoing smart takes on pressing local, regional, and national topics — often featured in local events and on national broadcast, raising the profile of Globe Opinion.
*A new social media strategy featuring different voices of our editorial board and innovations such as Instagram cards and reels, that has significantly grown our online audience and presence.
*Expert opinions weighing in on the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow and the threats to America’s democracy via the war on voting rights.
Looking ahead, The Emancipator will begin publishing regularly under the leadership of its co-editors in chief, Amber Payne and Deborah Douglas, while growing their editorial team and launching a new Web presence. Ideas will be publishing an exciting package on reenvisioning the US Constitution on the anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Our pandemic and political coverage will continue in editorials and op-eds, with a special focus on the gubernatorial election. Globe Opinion also aims to look back at some of the Globe’s coverage of communities of color to reckon with the past as the paper celebrates its 150th birthday. Watch for new ways we’ll engage with letter writers, more point/counterpoint op-eds, further experiments with our social media presence, and new deep dives in Sunday Ideas.
We’re always eager to find new ways to showcase evidence-based opinion and break through polarized, simplistic debates with original, reported, and nuanced perspectives. We welcome your ideas as we scan the horizon and are grateful to collaborate with our colleagues across BGMP on many of these efforts. Let us know if you see a way we might conspire in the new year!
All the best,
Bina
Bina Venkataraman
Editorial Page Editor
The Boston Globe
The Boston Phoenix’s archives have taken a giant step closer to becoming accessible and usable.
