New York Times media columnist Ben Smith reports on efforts to compel Google and Facebook to turn over some of their advertising revenues to the news organizations whose content they repurpose without compensation.
The debate over what platform companies owe the news business goes back many years and has come to resemble a theological dispute in its passions and the certainty expressed by those on either side. Indeed, longtime digital-news pundit Jeff Jarvis immediately weighed in with a smoking hot Twitter thread responding to Smith.
Oh FFS, no, the news business crushed itself by relying on protectionism over innovation. @benyt goes all Murdoch & endorses Australia's digital Stamp Act. This isn't media criticism. It's lobbying. "Big Tech Has Crushed the News Business" https://t.co/vZJXLn4L4n
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) May 11, 2020
I’m not going to resolve that debate here. Rather, I want to offer some context. First, something like 90% of all new spending on digital advertising goes to Google and Facebook. Second, Google’s auction system for brokering ads destroyed any hopes news publishers had of making actual money from online advertising. How bad is it? Here’s an except from my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls”:
Nicco Mele, the former senior vice president and deputy publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who’s now the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School [he has since moved on], explained at a Shorenstein seminar why a digital advertising strategy based on clicks simply doesn’t work for news organizations that are built around original (which is to say expensive) journalism. “Google has fundamentally shaped the future of advertising by charging on a performance basis — cost per click,” he said. “And that has been a giant, unimaginable anchor weight dragging down all advertising pricing.”
For example, Mele said that a full-page weekday ad in the LA Times, which would reach 500,000 people, costs about $50,000. To reach the same 500,000 people on LATimes.com costs about $7,000. And if that ad appeared on LATimes.com via Google, it might bring in no more than $20. “Models built on scale make zero sense to me,” Mele said, “because I just don’t see any future there.” Yet it has led even our best newspapers to supplement their high-quality journalism with a pursuit of clicks for the sake of clicks.
From $50,000 to $7,000 to $20. This is why the advertising model for digital news is broken, and it’s why newspapers have gone all-in on paid subscriptions.
We’re living through a historic moment. Following the lead of many others, I’ve decided to start keeping a COVID-19 diary. Don’t expect anything startling — just a few observations from someone stuck at home, lucky to be working and healthy.
As we near the end of the second month of the shutdown, we are all wondering when it might be safe to start inching our way toward a new normal. I’m not talking about opening everything up — that would lead to disaster. But some cautious steps to reopen the economy would be good for all of us as long as they’re accompanied by appropriate social-distancing and other common-sense measures.
At Northeastern, we got a bit of good news Friday in the form of a message from the university president, Joseph Aoun, who wrote that we are going to try to reopen this fall. As he envisions it, we’ll still be a long way from back to normal:
While we continue to believe that classroom instruction should be the norm, we will offer many large lectures in both live and recorded formats, while some of our other classes will allow for both live and remote participation. We will need to expand student housing into new buildings and communities to reduce residential density. This may include setting aside residential space to accommodate those who will need to safely self-isolate.
I should add that all of this has to be seen as subject to change. If there’s a spike this summer, I can’t imagine we’ll reopen in person in the fall. And let’s face it — we’re still in the midst of a spike. But it would be great to see our students again.
I’ve already been asked to teach my undergraduate ethics class entirely online this fall. Given the nature of the course — lectures, reading, discussion, a research paper and the like — it seems doable. But I’m hoping I can teach intermediate reporting in person. I suppose a hands-on skills course could be taught remotely, but it wouldn’t be the same.
This is also a time for me to be thankful that I work for a large university. The Boston Globe reports today that 25 smaller colleges and universities in New England are in danger of closing over the next six years — up from 13 before COVID-19. Large institutions are simply in a better position to weather the storm.
We’re living through a historic moment. Following the lead of many others, I’ve decided to start keeping a COVID-19 diary. Don’t expect anything startling — just a few observations from someone stuck at home, lucky to be working and healthy.
We landed at Logan on Friday night, March 6. The airport was noticeably underpopulated, just as it had been in San Francisco. At that point, though, I still didn’t think the coronavirus was going to cause too much havoc. I was happy when we turned the clocks ahead that Sunday, looking forward to another hour of daylight as a sign that the long (if mild) winter was almost over.
By Monday, my concerns were growing. Harvard, MIT and other schools had announced they were shifting to online-only classes. On Tuesday, my first day back at Northeastern, I attended a college assembly. We took one minor precaution — the buffet was canceled, and we were served boxed lunches instead. Our dean said she expected some sort of announcement from the president’s office. But we all sat cheek-by-jowl; we were worried about what was coming, but at the same time the term “social distancing” had not yet entered our vocabulary.
Previously I wrote that the pandemic came at me gradually, then all at once. The all-at-once arrived the next day, on Wednesday, March 11. During our faculty meeting, an email arrived letting us know that Northeastern, too, was going online-only. That evening I taught my graduate ethics seminar in person for the last time. Along with the campus shutdown, two more events occurred in rapid succession that divided my psychological timeline into “before COVID” and “after COVID.”
Weifeng Xu and me. Used with permission.
First, my students and I watched President Trump’s unnerving Oval Office address — the one that sparked a 1,000-point drop in the Dow Jones Futures even as he was talking. It was clear to all of us that things were about to get very bad, and that Trump — no surprise — wasn’t even remotely up to the job.
Second, the NBA canceled that night’s game between the Utah Jazz and the Oklahoma City Thunder just before tipoff, sending thousands of mystified and angry fans home. It turned out that one player who wasn’t even in the arena that night had tested positive. The idea that the game would be shut down over such a seemingly minor incident served to emphasize the seriousness of what we were facing.
For good measure, the married actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced that night that they had been diagnosed with COVID-19 while in Australia.
At first, Northeastern tried to take a middle-of-the-road approach, letting students stay in the dorms even as classrooms were closed. Within a few days, though, everyone was ordered to leave. As with many things during this crisis, it seemed like an overreaction at the time but inevitable and necessary just a few days later.
With students leaving for the semester, I decided to spend Monday, March 16, in my office one last time, letting my students know I was on campus if they wanted to see me. By now, reality had sunk in. I drove rather than subject myself to the hazards of public transportation. Walking through Ruggles Station to get from the parking garage to my office, I noticed that it was mostly deserted. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses weren’t there. There was plenty of activity on campus, though, as cars with out-of-state plates lined the streets so the students could make their escape.
In the midst of such a frenzy, I shouldn’t have been surprised that just one student came to see me. Weifeng Xu was about to fly home to Hong Kong, and she wanted to check on some assignments and say goodbye. She was graduating, but there would be no commencement. We talked a bit about her plans, she took a selfie of us and that was it.
The rest of the semester was remarkably smooth, and my students deserve all the credit. Workshopping and student presentations were done via Zoom. Weifeng, back in Hong Kong, showed us the electronic wristband she was required to wear while in quarantine. Maria Aguirre checked in from her home in Guayaquil, Ecuador, the scene of one of the world’s worst COVID outbreaks. (She is now working remotely for New Hampshire Public Radio.) Other students beamed in from their apartments in Boston. Despite everything they were going through, my students remained cheerful and calm, doing good work and meeting deadlines.
Now we wonder what’s next. I already know that I’m teaching my undergraduate ethics class online this fall and will spend part of the next few months putting it together. I’m hoping I can teach intermediate reporting in-person.
When the latest Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday afternoon, it felt like they’d been beamed in from another dimension.
The awards honor the best in journalism from the previous year — a time when COVID-19 was barely a blip on the radar and didn’t yet have a name. You can be sure that coverage of the pandemic will dominate next year’s Pulitzers. This year, though, they were all about journalism that exposed neglected communities in rural Alaska, corruption in Baltimore, corporate and governmental malfeasance at Boeing, and the never-ending horror that is the Guantánamo Bay detention center.
Two winners, in particular, caught my eye. Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times won the commentary award for her lead essay accompanying The 1619 Project, a massive effort that re-examined American history through the lens of slavery. The Washington Post took home the explanatory-reporting prize for a series showing the effects of climate change. Both are the sort of journalism that will have staying power even after the pandemic has receded into the background.
Locally, The Boston Globe was left empty-handed for the sixth consecutive year. But it took finalist honors in three separate categories with excellent work that is worth examining more closely.
***
The 1619 Project, grounded in the idea that American history began with the introduction of slavery in Virginia that year, was a massive multimedia effort. It took up an entire issue of The New York Times Magazine last August, featuring contributions from a wide range of writers. It sparked a series of podcasts. It’s been reworked as a school resource. But the animating focus is the 7,600-word lead essay by Hannah-Jones, who conceived of the project and who has been its public face.
By honoring Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer judges chose a piece of writing that is not only worthy but also controversial. And perhaps the most controversial assertion she makes is that the American Revolution was sparked by, among other things, the belief among slave-holding interests that the colonies needed to become independent so that the British wouldn’t abolish slavery. As Hannah-Jones puts it: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
Did she get it right? Late last year, a group of five historians wrote to the Times arguing that Hannah-Jones was wrong about that central argument. “This is not true,” they wrote. “If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.” That sounds devastating. And Leslie M. Harris, one of the historians with whom The 1619 Project consulted, has written that the Times ignored her warnings. But in an answer to the five historians, Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein cites compelling evidence — including a reference to the Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s book “These Truths” — that fear of abolition was in fact a significant reason why the slave-holding white power structure supported independence.
In the Columbia Journalism Review last August, Alexandria Neason wrote, “For the media to tell the truth about the U.S., it must commit to both a reeducation of its readers and of its workers. Efforts like The 1619 Project look backwards to inform a path forward.”
Almost as an exclamation point, a Pulitzer was also awarded posthumously to Ida B. Wells “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.” Hannah-Jones’ Twitter handle is Ida Bae Wells.
By honoring Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer judges have ensured that the conversation she sparked will continue.
***
The Washington Post last August published the first of a series of 10 stories aimed at showing not merely that climate change was inevitable, but that it was already here, resulting in extreme temperatures and other effects in the United States and around the world. The data-driven series, titled “2˚C: Beyond the Limit,” examined places where the average temperature has risen by at least 2 degrees Celsius.
“A Washington Post analysis of multiple temperature data sets found numerous locations around the globe that have warmed by at least 2 degrees Celsius over the past century,” the Post reported. “That’s a number that scientists and policymakers have identified as a red line if the planet is to avoid catastrophic and irreversible consequences. But in regions large and small, that point has already been reached.”
In awarding the explanatory-reporting prize to the Post, the Pulitzer judges called “2˚C: Beyond the Limit” a “groundbreaking series that showed with scientific clarity the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet.” The series offers close-up looks at the effects of climate change such as floods, droughts and extreme heat in places ranging from New Jersey to California, from Qatar to Siberia, as well as a conclusion headlined “How We Know Global Warming Is Real.”
Yet in looking over the Post’s award-winning work, I couldn’t help but think of the epistemic closure that characterizes the political right these days. The Post’s audience no doubt appreciated the deep, fact-based reporting. But at a time when extremist allies of President Donald Trump are refusing to accept the reality of a pandemic that has already claimed about 70,000 American lives, it’s hard to imagine that climate change-deniers will be swayed by new evidence.
***
Whether a news organization wins a Pulitzer or not often comes down to the competition. The Baltimore Sun won in the local-reporting category for exposing corruption involving Mayor Catherine Pugh. Actually, make that the former mayor.
The Boston Globe didn’t expose any official wrongdoing in “The Valedictorians Project.” But by comprehensively reporting on the struggles experienced by Boston’s valedictorians in the years following their high-school graduation, the Globe revealed that the city was failing even its brightest, most successful students. The reporting was supplemented by data visualizations, videos and other interactive features. It may not have brought down a mayor, but it was certainly worthy of the finalist citation it received. (Disclosure: Several of our Northeastern journalism students worked on the project.)
Two other finalists from the Globe were also recognized.
In feature writing, Nestor Ramos was cited for his story on Cape Cod and climate change, “At the Edge of a Warming World” — which, like “The Valedictorians Project,” was enhanced with a vibrant multimedia presentation.
In feature photography, Erin Clark was honored for — as the Pulitzer judges put it — her “respectful and compassionate photography of a working Maine family as it falls into homelessness and finds new housing, albeit precarious.”
A Michelle Obama for vice president boomlet is now under way. This would be a very bad idea. Joe Biden is 77, and, if he’s elected, there’s a good chance that his running mate will become president before his first term is up. Obama has no relevant experience beyond being a former first lady. You can be sure that would be used against her during the campaign. And let’s not forget that Obama has said over and over that she has no intention of ever seeking political office.
I actually think Obama would make a decent president because, like most normal people, she has the humility to know what she doesn’t know. She’s wicked smart, and she would almost certainly choose good advisers and listen to them. One of those advisers, obviously, would be Barack Obama. So a Michelle Obama presidency would probably work out OK.
But for Biden to choose someone with no history in elected or appointed government office would be a political disaster. He’s promised to pick a woman, and I think he ought to choose a woman of color. Kamala Harris would be an excellent choice, though there are others, too.
Maybe putting Michelle Obama on the ticket would turn out to be a stroke of genius. She’s popular and likable. But choosing her would be wildly unconventional, and there’s too much at stake to take that kind of chance.
For an aspiring autocrat like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a gift-wrapped opportunity to crack down on what’s left of his country’s free press.
Hungary’s parliament recently approved a state of emergency that allows Orbán to rule by decree. Among other things, journalists may be imprisoned for up to five years if they spread what the government considers to be misinformation about COVID-19. According to an anonymous journalist quoted in The Guardian, the measure began having its censorious effect even before it was voted on, as she learned after she called a hospital to ask about doctors who may have contracted the virus.
“A few minutes later,” she said, “the hospital’s chief communication officer called me back and asked if I think it’s a good idea to keep asking about this, a day before the government’s bill will be passed.”
Even as COVID-19 spreads disease, death and economic disruption across the world, it may also be contributing to repression in the name of protecting public health. The ominous developments are described in a new report by Reporters without Borders (known by its French acronym, RSF), which accompanies its annual World Press Freedom Index.
The index ranks countries on the basis of how much freedom journalists have to do their jobs and hold the powerful to account. According to RSF, the rankings have dropped several notches among countries that have suppressed the media as part of their response to COVID-19 — not just Hungary (now 89th), but also China (177th), Iran (173rd) and Iraq (162nd).
“The public health crisis provides authoritarian governments with an opportunity to implement the notorious ‘shock doctrine’ — to take advantage of the fact that politics are on hold, the public is stunned and protests are out of the question, in order to impose measures that would be impossible in normal times,” said RSF Secretary-general Christophe Deloire in a statement accompanying the report.
Cracking down on the media is not the only step governments are taking to stifle dissent. As The New York Times recently noted in a round-up of repressive responses to COVID-19, countries ranging from democracies such as Britain and Israel to more authoritarian states such as Chile and Bolivia have trampled on their citizens’ rights in the name of protecting public health. The measures include enhanced detention powers, increased surveillance and, in Bolivia’s case, postponing elections.
Draconian though those measures may be, threats to freedom of the press are uniquely dangerous because of its role as a monitor of power. Take that away and we have no way of knowing about the full extent of government repression.
Nor has the United States escaped the notice of RSF. Although its press freedom ranking of 45th is up slightly over last year, it still lags well behind Western European countries, in large measure because of President Donald Trump’s war against the media. Among other things, the report cites the Justice Department’s decision to file espionage charges against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange as well as the “public denigration and harassment of journalists.”
Although RSF doesn’t mention it, the COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate the deterioration of press freedom in the U.S. In recent weeks President Trump has commandeered an hour or two of television time on many afternoons, using his bully pulpit, so to speak, to insult individual reporters when they try to ask tough questions. The media have been willing participants in their own delegitimization, with many outlets giving Trump free airtime and individual reporters rarely acting in solidarity.
There may be limits. As The Washington Post reported, a CNN reporter refused to move from her front-row seat on Friday after being ordered to do so by a White House official. Despite threats to involve the Secret Service, the White House apparently backed off. (Seat assignments are managed by the independent White House Correspondents Association.) And Trump — humiliated by the mockery he received after suggesting that people could ingest bleach to fight COVID-19 — vowed not to take part in any more press briefings. (By Monday, unsurprisingly, he was back at the podium.)
But though there is a buffoonish nature to Trump’s war against the press that sometimes makes it difficult to take him seriously, the fears raised by the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that has resulted could empower the president to take new measures against journalists, whom he regularly calls “enemies of the people.”
We may be in the midst of a well-meaning reduction in media access at the local level as well. Local officials, like all of us, are meeting via Zoom, which makes it more difficult for reporters to understand what’s going on and to ask questions. And when public officials try to be open, they run the risk of being Zoom-bombed. Just last week the New Haven Independent reported that the city’s board of alders got hit with child pornography. That same night, the Hamden legislative council had to shut down its meeting in the face of Zoom-bombers posting racist and homophobic slurs.
Zoom has security features, such as password protection and waiting rooms, that make it harder for trolls to break in. But that also makes it harder to live up to the letter and the spirit of open-meeting laws. The New England First Amendment Coalition recently urged that local officials delay crucial decisions until in-person meetings can be resumed, saying, “Government bodies should not opportunistically take advantage of the public’s inability to attend large gatherings to make critical decisions affecting the public’s interest if those decisions can reasonably be postponed.” But what if a month or two becomes six? Or 12? Or 18?
The pandemic is also accelerating the censorship of speech on Facebook and other internet platforms. According to an essay in The Atlantic by law professors Jack Goldsmith of Harvard and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona, this is actually a positive development, as, even before COVID-19, algorithmic tools were being brought to bear on “bullying, harassment, child sexual exploitation, revenge porn, disinformation campaigns, digitally manipulated videos, and other forms of harmful content.”
They add: “What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated ‘normal’ to return to. We live — and for several years, we have been living — in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech.” Or, as they put it elsewhere in their essay: “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”
Good Lord. That’s a lot to wrap our minds around. As Noah Rothman puts it in Commentary: “Much of Goldsmith and Woods’ argument glosses over the important consideration that the Chinese model is dependent on coercion.”
But I’m going to leave aside the larger debate about free speech and repression so that I can hone in on one small but vitally important issue that Goldsmith and Woods gloss over. We already live in a world in which most news consumption takes place online, and an ominously large percentage of that consumption is mediated by Facebook. If Facebook’s role as an arbiter of news is going to grow even more powerful, and if we’re going to applaud the Zuckerborg for eliminating speech that it deems harmful, it seems to me that we’re going to have a free-press problem that is exponentially larger than Reporters without Borders’ most dystopian vision.
Then again, for a lot of us, freedom isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. According to a 2018 study by Elizabeth J. Zechmeister of Vanderbilt University, about one in four U.S. adults “believes a coup would be justifiable in times of high crime or high corruption.” Imagine to what heights that support might soar if we get into, say, September or October, and conditions continue to deteriorate.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, has already warned that President Trump might try to delay the November election. Would he try? Would he attempt to declare a state of emergency, as Hungarian leader Orbán has done? Would U.S. military leaders obey their commander-in-chief — or their oath to defend the Constitution?
Our liberties are fragile, and that is especially the case at a terrible moment like the one we’re living through. Can freedom of the press survive the pandemic? It’s already been seriously damaged in Hungary and elsewhere. And it’s going to require vigilance — and luck — for it not to be seriously damaged in America as well.
A front-page story in today’s New York Times suggests that Sweden hasn’t paid much of a price for its blasé attitude toward COVID-19. Here is the key paragraph supporting that premise:
Sweden’s death rate of 22 per 100,000 people is the same as that of Ireland, which has earned accolades for its handling of the pandemic, and far better than in Britain or France.
As USA Today noted: “Sweden has a population of 10 million people, about twice as large as its nearest Scandinavian neighbors. As of April 28, the country’s Covid-19 death toll reached 2,274, about five times higher than in Denmark and 11 times higher than in Norway.”Nursing home residents account for more than a third of all deaths.
And get this: Friedman supports the Swedish approach, arguing that it’s the only way we’re going to build herd immunity. Yet the World Health Organization recently reported that we don’t know whether people who’ve recovered from COVID can get it again. Needless to say, if there’s no immunity, there will be no herd immunity.
How much support do newspapers owned by cost-cutting corporate chains deserve? It’s a dilemma. On the one hand, the people who live in communities served by those papers need reliable news and information. On the other hand, subsidizing them with money and resources could be considered a reward for bad behavior.
Last week Report for America, or RFA, announced that it would send 225 journalists to news organizations in 46 states and Puerto Rico during 2020-’21. With local news in crisis even before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a welcome piece of good news. Most of the organizations that will host these young journalists are either independent or part of small chains, and they include a sizable number of public broadcasters, nonprofit start-ups, the Associated Press and the like. Locally, The Bay State Banner will be getting a reporter.
But in looking over the list, I also noticed a substantial number of newspapers that are part of corporate chains. By my count, 15 papers are part of McClatchy, which recently declared bankruptcy after staggering under unsupportable debt for many years. Twelve are part of Gannett, recently merged with GateHouse Media; both chains are notorious for slashing their newsrooms, and not just since COVID-19 reared its head. One reporter is even going to Cleveland.com, the website of The Plain Dealer and the scene of a recent union-busting effort on the part of Advance Publications.
As I said, it’s a dilemma. If you attempt to punish chain owners for squeezing out revenues at the expense of newsroom jobs, you wind up hurting communities.
I contacted Report for America co-founders Steven Waldman, who serves as RFA’s president, and Charles Sennott, who’s the chief executive officer and editor of The GroundTruth Project, of which RFA is a part. Their answers have been lightly edited. First Waldman:
My general answer is: Yes, half of our placements are in nonprofit, and others are in locally owned commercial entities. But we do indeed have some placements in newspapers that are owned by chains. Our primary standard is: Will this help the community? So we have on occasion accepted applications from newspapers with the problems you mentioned if we were convinced that they would use the reporter to better serve their readers. If we can be a positive force in helping those newspapers tip more in the direction of great journalism, we view that as a real positive step…. [Ellipses Waldman’s.] In effect, we’re creating hybrid nonprofit/for-profit models that provide even better local journalismBy the way, we have always had newspapers like that in the program, as part of the mix. That’s not new.
Now Sennott:
One of the stronger papers in our original Report for America class of 2018 was the Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy paper in Kentucky. They pitched us on reopening the Pikeville Bureau in the heart of coal country in Eastern Kentucky, a bureau they had been forced to close 10 years earlier. They felt they were not serving well the community there. We placed RFA corps member Will Wright there and he became one of our true stars, breaking a story on a water crisis in which tens of thousands of residents did not have access to clean drinking water. His reporting turned a spotlight on this issue and helped the community force the county officials to repair the work and restore the access to clean drinking water. I went to Pikeville to work alongside Will Wright on this story and saw his incredible impact in that community with my own eyes. That is what we care about, serving the communities in these under-covered corners of America. And that’s why we have always been proud of our work with the Lexington Herald and why we did not rule out McClatchy as a place for us to look for RFA host newsroom partnerships, even if it is a chain that is going through hard economic times.
We did an enterprise project with Will Wright and two other reporters in rural Appalachia. Here is a link to the project, which was also featured on GroundTruth, as home of RFA:
Also, we got news today of a full-page ad was taken out by Republicans and Democrats thanking McClatchy for its service to Kentucky.
And adding a poetic new chapter to the story, Will Wright has been accepted by The New York Times for its very competitive fellowship. And no, we are not leaving them high and dry. In this new class, we will have three journalists (two reporters and one photographer) at the Lexington Herald.
Sending an RFA journalist to a Gannett paper isn’t going to lead directly to a layoff. More public-accountability coverage is in everyone’s interests. And the chains, unfortunately, have a monopoly in many parts of the country, so it’s not like RFA could send someone to another news organization in that community.
Overall, I think RFA is doing the right thing — even if it makes me a bit queasy.
Coronavirus news conference in Ukiah, California, on March 5. Photo (cc) 2020 by Dan Kennedy.
We’re living through a historic moment. Following the lead of many others, I’ve decided to start keeping a COVID-19 diary. Don’t expect anything startling — just a few observations from someone stuck at home, lucky to be working and healthy.
They say that crises come at you gradually, then all at once. At least I think that’s what they say. I know that’s how I experienced the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this installment, I’ll talk about the gradual part. Following that, the all-at-once.
For a long time, the coronavirus was a real but distant threat. At a faculty meeting in early February, we talked about trying to have some sort of get-together for our Asian students to acknowledge what their families were going through back home. A month later, as we were about to go on spring break the first week of March, I remember telling someone that we probably wouldn’t have any problems when we came back because our Chinese students would no doubt stay in Boston rather than hazard a trip abroad.
My own spring break was spent in Mendocino County, California. It was a reporting and research trip aimed at learning as much as I could about The Mendocino Voice, a two-person digital news organization that was transitioning from a for-profit model to cooperative ownership. On Monday I landed at San Francisco International Airport, picked up a rental car, and began the two-and-a-half-hour drive north — a drive I won’t describe to you because the Voice’s managing editor and co-founder, Adrian Fernandez Baumann, told me that’s the clichéd opening written by every reporter who parachutes in for a few days.
Photo by Adrian Fernandez Baumann. Used by permission.
The trip was exactly what I was hoping for. Baumann and the other co-founder, publisher Kate Maxwell, are the sort of hard-working, idealistic young journalists who are well-suited to coming up with new ideas for independent local journalism. I hung out at a small Super Tuesday event the Voice sponsored upstairs at the Ukiah Brewing Company, accompanied them on a few stories, and spent more than three hours interviewing them in a windowless upstairs office in downtown Ukiah that they rent from a public radio station. I also got to drive through the redwood forest and out to the Pacific coast for interviews in Fort Bragg and Philo.
But when I wasn’t working, I was checking my phone — and the news about the new coronavirus (I don’t think they were calling COVID-19 yet) was becoming ominous. The New York Times was reporting that so many people were dropping their travel plans that airlines were canceling flights. I wondered if I’d be able to get back on Friday. As I was reading this, I was in a bar-restaurant next to my hotel that was filled, cheek by jowl, with customers in various states of inebriation. They obviously weren’t concerned about getting sick, and at that point neither was I.
Things started to get more real on Thursday, March 5. I showed up a few minutes before 9 a.m. for a news conference at the county offices in Ukiah, which are contained within a modern one-story building a bit outside the city’s center. Kate and Adrian had told me such news conferences are generally held outside — not because of the threat of disease, but, I imagine, to take advantage of the nice California weather. This morning, though, about 50 reporters and county employees crowded into a harshly lit meeting room.
“We have been working 24/7 since January,” said Dr. Noemi Doohan, the interim public health officer. And though there were no cases in Mendocino County at that time, she urged “no more handshaking for a while.” She displayed a poster recommending fist bumps (these days, I’m sure, not even elbow bumps would be recommended), stocking up on nonperishable food, getting to know your neighbors, and staying six feet away from each other.
Photo (cc) 2020 by Dan Kennedy
As she spoke, we were all about six inches from each other, but no one seemed concerned. And I should note that even though California has been a hotbed of COVID-19, Mendocino County is so remote and sparsely populated (about 88,000 people live in an area that’s two-thirds the size of Connecticut) that, even as of this past Monday, only 11 people had been diagnosed, with no reported deaths.
Later that day I interviewed Kate and Adrian about their plans for the Voice. I don’t think it occurred to any of us that whatever plans they were making were about to be upended.
I flew home to Boston on Friday. In contrast to the packed plane I had taken to San Francisco, there were a lot of empty seats. I appreciated the extra room and, yes, given that the coronavirus was becoming a bigger and bigger news story, I was relieved that the seat next to me was empty.
As we were about to get off the plane, I struck up a conversation with an older woman from Guatemala who had flown to Boston to visit her family. I asked her what she was planning to do for fun. Her response: Probably visit the casino.
I hope she made it before it was shut down — and that she and everyone close to her have remained healthy.
Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, is getting roasted on Twitter for writing an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that colleges and universities should reopen this fall.
I have to say that I find her ideas less than compelling. For instance: She invokes the standard warning that “of course we still won’t be able to have large classes in large lecture halls.” But small classes are usually held in small rooms — and, at least in my experience, those rooms have inadequate or non-existent ventilation. How is that any better?
