HuffPost hasn’t died, but it sure did fade away. Here are three reasons why.
Maybe BuzzFeed will save The Huffington Post. Frankly, though, it feels more like the end than a new beginning. Who has given much thought to HuffPost in recent years? Even with a sharp editor, Lydia Polgreen, at the top until recently, the site hasn’t seemed relevant for a long time.
So what happened? Your guess is as good as mine. But I’d argue that HuffPost was built on three pillars, and all of them are gone:
• Unpaid contributions. For a long time, HuffPost was a blogging platform as much as it was a publisher. The site took a lot of heat for not paying its writers, but I always thought that critics were making a category error. If you’re going to blog and not get paid for it, why not do it at a site where you’re more likely to be seen rather than on your own?
Maybe eight or so years ago, when I was between paid column-writing gigs, I wrote a few free pieces for HuffPost just to keep my hand in. There was a huge variety of contributions to HuffPost, some great, some terrible. They gave the site a vibrancy that it has lacked ever since such content was discontinued.
• Abusive aggregation. The Huffington Post originally made its mark with extremely aggressive aggregation — it would, for example, summarize a 5,000-word investigative piece published by another news organization in so much detail that you really didn’t need to click through to the original. As Jeff Bezos lamented shortly after announcing he would buy The Washington Post, HuffPost could rewrite a story “in 17 minutes” that had taken the originating media outlet weeks or months to report and write.
Over time, HuffPost’s approach to aggregation became more conservative even as it added more original reporting. That may have been the ethical thing to do, but I’m sure it cost them a substantial part of their audience.
• Social over search. HuffPost absolutely nailed search back when that mattered above all else. Remember the infamous “What time does the Superbowl start?” headline, which the rest of the internet reacted to with a mixture of rage and awe?
Well, search-engine optimization has long since given way to social-media engagement as the metric that really matters. And BuzzFeed perfected the latter, which is why it’s the senior partner in this particular deal. What the two sites have in common is BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, who helped HuffPost master SEO before founding BuzzFeed and embracing social.
All of this is why I’m not particularly optimistic about HuffPost staging a comeback. It was hugely influential for about a half-dozen years after Arianna Huffington launched it in 2005. But it was a creature of its time, and that time may have expired.
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3 reasons why it matters that Linda Pizzuti Henry was named CEO of the Globe
Previously published at GBH News.
Surprising though the news may have been, there was a certain inevitability to Linda Pizzuti Henry’s being named chief executive officer of The Boston Globe’s parent company.
She had long held the title of managing director, and it has become increasingly clear over the past few years that she and her husband, publisher John Henry, were determined to impose their will on the media properties they own. Indeed, the Henrys have been calling pretty much all the shots on the business side since the summer, when Vinay Mehra exited as president and was not replaced.
These are the best and worst of times for media organizations. The COVID-19 epidemic and the presidential campaign have resulted in renewed interest in the news as well as growing audiences. But advertising, already in long-term decline, has fallen off a cliff.
The Globe is no exception to those trends. Earlier this year, the Globe passed the 200,000 mark for digital-only subscriptions, a long-sought-after goal. Another Globe Media property, Stat News, has established itself as one of a handful of go-to sites for news about COVID.
Yet the paper, reportedly profitable before the pandemic, has been forced to trim its budget to adjust to the pandemic economy, cutting back on its use of freelancers and paid interns, for example, as well as implementing some business-side reductions.
Time will tell what the Linda Henry era will bring. But here are three thoughts that I think are worth keeping in mind:
• There is no longer any middleman. With co-owners John and Linda Henry holding the top two positions, all the heat will now be directed their way, for better or worse. When Mehra was in charge — and, before him, Doug Franklin and Mike Sheehan — both credit and blame could be deflected.
Now the Globe is the Henrys’ paper in every respect. That extends into the editorial operations as well given that editor Brian McGrory was actually involved in recruiting John Henry to buy the paper and that editorial-page editor Bina Venkataraman was hired by the Henrys.
For a useful contrast, consider The Washington Post. Although owner Jeff Bezos does involve himself in business strategy to a degree, he hired a publisher, Fred Ryan, to run the paper on a day-to-day basis, and left the executive editor (Marty Baron), the editorial-page editor (Fred Hiatt) and the top technology executive (Shailesh Prakash) in place after he acquired the paper.
• The Henrys must now settle an ugly labor dispute on their own. Earlier today the Boston Newspaper Guild, involved for quite some time in acrimonious contract talks with management, issued a statement ripping the Henrys for using the law firm of Jones Day, which critics say has a reputation for union-busting.
That’s not new. What is new is that Jones Day has been involved in representing Republicans in their attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election. “How can the Globe’s political journalists be asked to continue to endure such workplace attacks from the very law firm whose actions they are now reporting on and investigating?,” the union’s letter asks.
• The Globe is not for sale. From time to time, rumors have circulated within the newsroom and in the larger community that the Henrys are looking to get out. This happened most recently last fall, when Linda Henry presided over a town hall-style meeting on Zoom at which she was asked about a replacement for Mehra.
When I asked her about it, she replied via email, “The Globe is not for sale, I’m pretty sure you would have picked up on if it was.” After that, the rumors appeared to fade away. Now, by occupying the top two operational roles at the Globe, the Henrys, seven years into their ownership, clearly seem to be sending a signal that they’re in it for the long term.
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Globe union rips management for using Trump law firm in contract negotiations
In a press release sent out earlier today, the Boston Newspaper Guild rips John Henry, Linda Pizzuti Henry and Boston Globe management for using the controversial law firm of Jones Day in contract negotiations.
This is not a new complaint, as Jones Day is sometimes characterized as a union-busting operation. But now the firm has been called out for representing President Trump in his efforts to overturn the election results.
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Why the crisis within the Boy Scouts of America could lead to a scouting revival
Previously published at GBH News.
Could the Boy Scouts of America be heading into its final days? It sure looks that way. After decades of horrendous and widespread sexual abuse, documented in secret reports known as the “perversion files,” it appears that the moment of reckoning has arrived.
Among those of us for whom scouting was a formative and positive part of our lives, it’s a sad development. Yet there’s just no defending what took place. Earlier this year, the BSA declared bankruptcy in order to protect itself from mounting civil suits. A bankruptcy judge set a deadline of this past Monday for victims to file claims. More than 92,000 people responded.
How large is that number? According to The New York Times, that’s 10 times as many as the number of people who claim to have been sexually assaulted within the Catholic Church. The church scandal has done enormous damage and continues to reverberate, with questions now being raised about Pope John Paul II’s involvement in covering up for a renegade cardinal. Yet the rot within the BSA appears to be much more pervasive.
This is personal for me. My son is an Eagle scout. I’m an Eagle scout. I know what a difference scouting can make in the lives of boys and young men. (The BSA was almost exclusively male for most of its history but began admitting girls in 2018.) Scouting introduced me to hiking and backpacking, which became lifelong passions. Our adult leaders were honorable, decent men.
The sexual abuse wasn’t a secret, of course, but it always seemed to involve some other troop in some other town. According to the BSA, 130 million Americans have taken part in scouting over the years, and no doubt the vast majority of them emerged better for the experience. But that doesn’t excuse the reality that some boys were raped, and that the organization covered it up rather than exposing the evil-doers.
“The Boy Scout policy for decades was not to report to law enforcement,” Paul Mones, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents many of the victims, told Wade Goodwin of NPR. “In fact, they allowed many of these men to go quietly into that good night and leave. The Boy Scouts have never given a straight answer as to why they never reported to law enforcement.”
In some respects, it’s a surprise that the crisis was so widespread. As an adult leader, I had to go through the BSA’s youth-protection training program several times, and it struck me as high-quality and thorough. The organization also insisted on what it referred to as “two deep” leadership — no scouting trip was to have any fewer than two adult leaders on hand at any time. In fact, we used to talk about the need for four leaders — two to accompany a scout if he got hurt and had to go home and two to continue the activity with the other boys. Obviously, though, those rules were not universally followed, and terrible crimes were the result.
Now, we’re all aware that sexual abuse hasn’t been the only problem with the BSA, although it’s by far the most serious. Until recently, the organization banned gay scouts and adult leaders, a blight on its record that it did not erase until 2015. And the Boy Scouts continue to prohibit atheists from joining — a rule that is not only cruel and discriminatory but that is also unenforceable unless a scout decides to speak up. Atheist scouts are rewarded for keeping silent and punished for being honest, which is not exactly in keeping with the ideals of scouting.
There is something deeply anachronistic about scouting. A lot of us weren’t especially thrilled about the quasi-military uniforms even back in the 1960s and ’70s. At its best, though, scouting instills teamwork, discipline and a love for the outdoors. It’s also a refuge for kids who don’t fit in with youth sports or other activities.
Fortunately, scouting is not dependent on the BSA for its continued existence. The Girl Scouts are very much with us; my wife and daughter were both active, and it strikes me as a much better run program than the Boy Scouts.
There are also programs that are similar to the Boy Scouts, some of which were set up as a breakaway groups. For instance, the Baden-Powell Service Association, named after the founder of scouting, “welcomes everyone, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion (or no-religion)” in order “provide a positive learning environment within the context of democratic participation and social justice.”
Now, that sounds like scouting as it was originally intended. Perhaps what we really need is for the BSA to disappear so that the true spirit of scouting can reassert itself. Because, ultimately, what we’re talking about isn’t an organization but an idea.
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In 2016, moving comments to Facebook seemed like a great idea. Now it’s a problem.
A little more than four years after turning off comments and directing everyone to Facebook, I’ve turned them back on. The move comes at a time when we’re all questioning our dependence on Facebook given the social-media giant’s role in spreading disinformation and subverting democracy across the world.
I will continue to post links on Facebook, and readers will be able to comment either there or here. But if you’d like to reduce your own use of the platform, I urge you to sign up for email delivery of Media Nation (click on “Follow This Blog” in the right-hand rail) and post your comments here. Your real name, first and last, is required.
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COVID Diary #12: The ongoing devastation
I messed up the time and missed the train this morning, so I took a Lyft instead. The driver, Dave, told me that his business is down 40% since the start of the pandemic. He hasn’t been called to Logan in months. It’s also been quite a while since he picked up a student.
These are the costs of COVID-19 — and it’s going to get worse, and there’s no sign that Prime Minister Mitch McConnell will deign to bestow upon us another round of stimulus spending.
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The New York Times cites a pro-charter school group without disclosing its ties
The New York Times, in a story on President-elect Joe Biden’s education priorities, quotes Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, as saying she’s “worried that the Biden administration might stack the government with people who are ‘interested in fortifying the status quo that has been failing so many of our kids.’” Rodrigues continues:
This is the biggest table right now, and I don’t see parent groups, family groups, community groups present…. It seems we’re back to the same old, “We’re going to do things to you, not with you.”
So what is the National Parents Union? All the Times has to say is that it “represents low-income parents and parents of color.” But here’s what UMass Boston Professor Maurice Cunningham reported when the organization was getting off the ground in April 2019:
Keri Rodrigues of Massachusetts Parents United, the highly subsidized-by-the-Walton-family front in the education privatization business, is pitching a new organization called the National Parents Union. It’s got elements that should appeal to the WalMart heirs — hidden money, infiltration of the Democratic Party, pro-charters, privatization of public goods, and virulently anti-union.
In 2016 Rodrigues was the head of a group called Families for Excellent Schools, which pushed a ballot question that would have greatly expanded the number of charter schools in the state, thus inflicting further damage on the vast majority of kids who’d be left behind. Fortunately, that measure was defeated decisively.
The Times needs to do a better job of vetting — and describing — its sources. (Disclosure: My wife is teaches in a public school and is a proud union member.)
Correction: This item originally misidentified the organization behind the 2016 ballot question.
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How local news can ease the angry polarization of the Trump era
Previously published at GBH News.
At the dawn of the Trump presidency four years ago, the journalist James Fallows offered a prescription for overcoming the anger and divisiveness that had given rise to Donald Trump’s toxic brand of right-wing populism: a renewed engagement with community life.
“At the level of politics where people’s judgments are based on direct observation rather than media-fueled fear,” Fallows wrote in The Atlantic, “Americans still trust democratic processes and observe long-respected norms.”
Fallows and his wife, Deborah Fallows, later wrote an entire book on the topic. But their advice was not heeded. President Trump sucked up every bit of oxygen and energy, from the Resistance to impeachment, from COVID and economic collapse to his racist rhetoric, his cruel policies and his sociopathic Twitter feed.
“We need a world in which we talk less about the president,” lamented Cardozo School of Law professor Ekow Yankah last week. “It’s not healthy.” That Yankah was being interviewed on a podcast called “Trumpcast” suggests the depth of the problem. Even now, Trump is dominating the news to a far greater extent than President-elect Joe Biden — and not in a good way. Rather than living locally, we spend all our time thinking nationally. It’s exhausting and leaves us feeling angry and alienated.
Our media in many ways are a reflection of our politics. The Trump years were very good for national news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and, God help us, cable news, especially Fox. And they were very bad for local media, especially community newspapers.
To renew civic life, you first need to renew local, independently owned newspapers and other media. I’m not talking about major regional newspapers, public radio or local TV newscasts. I’m talking about the hard but rewarding work of keeping tabs on city councils, school committees, zoning, police, development, neighborhoods and racial justice.
“There is a direct correspondence between the closing of newspapers and the polarization of people formerly served by those newspapers,” wrote Marc Ambinder, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership and Policy, in a recent essay for MSNBC.com. He added: “If we want a society where we can accurately understand the preferences and behaviors of everyone, we need more local journalism.”
Unfortunately, it has become nearly impossible to pay for such journalism. The causes are familiar, from the collapse of digital advertising for everyone except Google and Facebook to the rise of corporate and hedge-fund ownership that bleeds local newspapers dry.
The COVID pandemic has made the financial situation facing news organizations that much worse. According to CNN reporter Kerry Flynn, two major publicly traded chain newspaper owners, Gannett and Tribune Publishing, are near collapse. Gannett’s ad revenues were down 38% in the second quarter over the previous year and down 23% in the third quarter. Tribune was down 48% in the second quarter and down 38% in the third.
Between them, the two companies own hundreds of local papers that had been hollowed out even before the pandemic. And unlike national papers like the Times, the Post and The Wall Street Journal, these companies have barely gotten started on charging readers for digital access.
So what is to be done? As I’ve written a number of times previously, I think we need a variety of solutions; one approach is not going to work in every community. For-profit, nonprofit, cooperative ownership, even volunteer-driven projects are all doing good work in cities and towns across the country. But they remain the exception, and the overall picture continues to darken.
Rick Edmonds of Poynter reported recently that Congress is considering a number of ideas, including tax credits for subscribing to a local news source, tax relief for publishers, advertising subsidies, and an antitrust exemption that would allow the news business to negotiate as one in an attempt to extract some revenues from Google and Facebook.
“Congress has pretty much decided it should come to the aid of local news,” Edmonds wrote. “The question of how remains, together with making the help timely.”
In Massachusetts, a bill that would create a special commission of journalists, academics and legislators to study the extent of the local-news crisis has gotten bogged down in committee, though I’m told that it could pass before the end of the year. (Disclosure: I’ve worked on the measure with state Rep. Lori Ehrlich, D-Marblehead, and would be a member of the commission.)
Needless to say, a commission isn’t going to fix what’s ailing local news. Yet if we’re going to have any chance of revitalizing civic engagement and closing the chasm that has come to separate us, we need to find a way.
In late October, The Inquirer and Mirror of Nantucket announced that the longtime editor and publisher, Marianne Stanton, along with a local businessman named David Worth, were buying the paper back from Gannett, which had owned it for a number of years.
“I think it’s pretty cool that two Nantucketers, both descendants of the early settlers, could work together to pull this off,” said Stanton in the announcement.
I think it’s pretty cool, too. It’s hard to know what, if anything, it will lead to. But it was a step in the right direction as well as very good news for the civic life of one community. Maybe it will be the start of something.
And share your thoughts here in the comments.
The media’s slow call
I’ve seen quite a few complaints over the past few days about the glacial pace at which the media moved toward calling the election for Joe Biden, with some suggesting it was because they didn’t want to incur the wrath of President Trump. I have no special insight, but I can think of several reasons why I’d be reluctant to pull the trigger if I were in charge of making the call.
- Fox News and The Associated Press called Arizona for Biden with lightning speed. Yet here we are, five days later, and it’s still not 100% clear that Arizona will end up in the blue column. It now looks like Arizona was a premature call, and it may have made news orgs hesitate about calling other states.
- News organizations may have set some benchmarks for calling Pennsylvania — and then the vote came in more slowly than expected.
- Trump has unleashed a horde of lawyers upon the land to sue and challenge outcomes in key states. Those actions are, by all accounts, frivolous and abusive. But the courts are filled with Trump judges, right up to and including the Supreme Court. No doubt the media wanted to make sure that they didn’t call the election only to have the courts halt the count in some cases. It now seems reasonably clear that isn’t going to happen.
- And yes, there’s no question that media decision-makers knew that calling the election for Biden would unleash a hellburst of rage from Trump. That’s not a reason to hold back. But it is a reason to make absolutely.. certain that Biden was the winner.
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