GateHouse creates a dilemma for its Quincy journalists

Quincy City Hall. Photo via Wikipedia.
Quincy City Hall. Photo via Wikipedia.

At CommonWealth Magazine, Jack Sullivan offers a good overview of a massive conflict of interest in Quincy, where GateHouse Media’s marketing subsidiary is bidding for a city contract in the shadow of GateHouse’s Patriot Ledger, headquartered in Quincy.

The GateHouse subsidiary, Propel Marketing, has already done work for Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch.

We’ve already been talking about this at Facebook, so feel free to chime in.

My insta-analysis is that newspaper owners always create conflicts of interest. Washington Post reporters have to cover Amazon, whose founder and chief executive is the Post‘s owner, Jeff Bezos. To extend that a little further, Amazon does business with the CIA, a major beat for the Post. The Boston Globe, owned by John Henry, covers the Red Sox, and Henry is the principal owner. And newspaper publishers have always held roles in the community that journalists shouldn’t, such as chairing the local chamber of commerce.

What matters is whether those conflicts are handled in a way that’s transparent, ethical, and arm’s-length. Given GateHouse’s recent misadventures involving casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, I’d say the Quincy situation needs to be watched very closely.

Jay Rosen has been indispensable in understanding the Las Vegas mess. Here’s what I wrote for WGBHNews.org about how one independent Connecticut journalist exposed part of the story. And here’s how the Patriot Ledger itself covered the Quincy story recently. It’s thorough in just the way you’d want it to be, so kudos.

Correction: In the first version of this post I wrote that the Patriot Ledger‘s headquarters are in Braintree. In fact, the Ledger is located in an office park on the Quincy side of the Quincy-Braintree line.

Advice from the pros at BU’s narrative journalism conference

b_kirtzBy Bill Kirtz

Desert the herd. Fact-check memories.

Celebrated writers Adam Hochschild, Samuel G. Freedman, and Alia Malek shared those thoughts last weekend at Boston University’s annual narrative journalism conference.

Conference founder Mark Kramer organized the three days of speeches, panels, and informal sessions as editors try new ways to tell complex stories.

“The best stories come when you don’t follow the pack,” said Hochschild, using examples from his new and well-received Spain in Our Hearts: Americans and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

Although nearly 1,000 writers covered the war—eating, drinking, and occasionally, like Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn, sleeping with each other—Hochschild noted that they missed two huge stories.

The first: that Republican militias created a social revolution. The only one to explore this was George Orwell, who detailed the saga of idealism and betrayal in the classic Homage to Catalonia. Hochschild pointed out that Orwell was there as a fighter, not a colleague sharing wine and story ideas.

The reason they didn’t tell the second story: Nobody asked the simple question of who provided fuel for Nationalist dictator Francisco Franco tanks and Hitler’s planes. Hochschild details their delivery from America because Texaco’s chairman supported Franco and Hitler, despite a neutrality act forbidding that.

His point: “The best stories come when you don’t follow the herd. Explore on your own,” he said, adding that new technologies now let non-journalists do this without having to follow the “party line.”

As the memoir craze continues and the fact-fiction line blurs, Freedman insisted, “Photoshopping my memories is not good enough for me.”

The noted journalism teacher and New York Times columnist is the author of Who She Was, which has been lauded as a moving but candid probe of his mother’s past.

Freedman rejected the notion that memoir operates by different rules from any other kind of nonfiction.

To him, much-emulated memoirist Vivian Gornick’s admission that she’s invented scenes and used composite characters invalidates her work while prolific author and journalist Pete Hamill’s up-front comment that his memory can be faulty makes him trust his.

With memory as the starting point, Freedman applied reporting skills to his own life. For Who She Was, he interviewed family members the same way he did anyone else: letting them know he was a journalist. And, as with any other source, he let them fact-check the manuscript and considered any objections they might have—but told them that the final decision about what or what not to include was his.

Malek, born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, uses the same intensive reporting technique in her forthcoming book about her motherland. Her aim: to put today’s headlines in context.

Her third book, a still-untitled narrative, uses her family’s house as a metaphor to trace 100 years of history. Like Freedman—her Columbia Journalism School mentor—she said she reports personal conflicts as she would any other story.

“It’s difficult if you do your job diligently,” said the former Department of Justice trial attorney and Al Jazeera America senior writer who did award-winning reporting from Syria for several major outlets.

Like Hochschild, Malek mixes narrative with history. “I don’t want to bore the reader,” she said. “The difference between the novice and expert is good storytelling.”

She called expertise crucial to nuanced reporting. Her journalism teachers told her, “If you can cover a Kansas school board, you can cover anything.”

She disagrees, noting that many Western reporters covering the Middle East chiefs don’t speak Arabic, and call themselves totally objective while covering complex conflicts. “We don’t buy into that idea,” she said.

Bill Kirtz is a retired Northeastern University journalism professor and a Media Nation contributor.

Globe editor McGrory: It’s time to rethink everything we do

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Brian McGrory. Photo (cc) by the Newton Free Library.

A copy of Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory’s latest newsroom memo just wafted through an open window here at Media Nation. And it’s a doozy—an invitation to rethink how the Globe newsroom does just about everything, from the way beats are structured, to how many days the paper should appear in print, to how best to use technology.

“To help shape the discussion,” McGrory writes, “consider this question: If a wealthy individual was to give us funding to launch a news organization designed to take on The Boston Globe, what would it look like?” Needless to say, the Globe itself is already owned by a wealthy individual—John Henry, a financier who is the principal owner of the Red Sox.

Last fall I asked McGrory if the redesigned, thinner Saturday print edition was a prelude to cutting back on the number of print days. At that time he said no, but added, “We’re constantly thinking and rethinking this stuff.” Many newspaper industry observers believe it’s inevitable that daily papers will eventually move to a weekend print edition—where most of the advertising appears—supplemented by digital the rest of the week.

The conversation is being facilitated by three outside consultants, Tom Rosenstiel and Jeff Sonderman of the American Press Institute and Marty Kaiser, the former editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

So let’s get right to it:

Hey all,

It’s time to bring everyone up to date on a series of conversations I’ve initiated among senior editors over the past couple of months, conversations intended to lay the groundwork for a no-sacred-cows analysis of our newsroom and what the Globe should look like in the future. It’s also time to get the room fully involved in the process.

You know it as I know it: The Globe, like every other major legacy news organization, has faced what have proven to be irreversible revenue declines. The revenue funds our journalism. The declines have mandated significant cuts over the past dozen years.

There’s far too much good that goes on at this organization on a moment-by-moment basis to allow ourselves to be consumed by what’s wrong with the industry. But we can’t ignore hard realities, either, or simply wish them away. My own strong preference is to somehow shed the annual reduction exercise that seems increasingly inevitable here and everywhere. So I’ve asked senior editors to think about how we, at the very least, might get ahead of the declines, and in the best case, work to slow or even halt them. To help shape the discussion, consider this question: If a wealthy individual was to give us funding to launch a news organization designed to take on The Boston Globe, what would it look like?

There are important issues to raise and explore in what I’ll call a reinvention initiative: Do we have the right technology? Do we train staff in the right way? Should we remain in the current print format that we have now, same size, same sections? Do we have the right departments? Is our beat structure outdated? How can our work flows improve? Do we have too many of XX and not enough Ys? Should we publish seven days a week? Do print and digital relate in the right ways?

The questions could go on and on. They could become bolder still.

Easy answers, as you well know, are elusive. The good news is that we’ve got an absurdly smart, dedicated collection of journalists, many of the best in the nation, that has embraced profound and meaningful change over the years, always while maintaining our values. We’ve built two of the most successful websites in the industry, first boston.com, and now bostonglobe.com. The latter site is not only thriving, but growing rapidly, up more than 15 percent in uniques and page views this year over last, and leading the league in digital-only subscribers—the most important metric. We successfully overhauled key parts of the site last year. We’re about to launch a major sports redesign this spring, all while we confidently spread our wings with a broader array of stories and topics geared first to our web audience.

At the same time, we haven’t just maintained print, but enhanced it over the past few years, with a great new standalone business section through the week, a Sunday Arts section that showcases some of the best critics in the industry, Address, premium magazines, broadsheet feature sections. I’m missing things, I’m sure. We saw quite clearly in January just how much the physical paper means to an enormous swath of our readership.

The journalism, through it all, has been consistently exceptional. We drove the Olympics debate. We launched a national debate on concurrent surgery. We’ve been one of the smartest, freshest voices on the national political scene. We’ve chronicled poverty in rural Maine and economic segregation in greater Boston in deeply memorable ways. Day in, day out, we are one of the most thoughtful metropolitan news organizations in the land.

All of which is to say: We’re very good at change. We’re committed to high standards. We are well-positioned to go even further.

So I’ll frame the discussion one more way: Is it possible to build something bold rather than shrink what we have?

It’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether this reinvention initiative is an excuse for more cutting. The glib answer is that we don’t really need an excuse to cut. The revenue declines require it. The more involved answer is that even without declining revenue, we should still be exploring reinvention, given the massive advances in technology and massive changes in reader habits. And even without a reinvention initiative, we’d still have to cut. So the honest answer is that a reinvention would naturally take into account the realities of declining revenues.

I’ve sought some outside counsel to help facilitate the process, people who have thought long and hard about these issues and are deeply knowledgeable about what’s been tried at other news organizations and how it’s worked. Tom Rosenstiel and Jeff Sonderman, the executive director and deputy director respectively of the American Press Institute, plan to be in the newsroom on Friday—tomorrow—to meet in small groups with some staff. They’ll be joined by Marty Kaiser, the highly respected former editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who has worked with Tom on these exact issues. After Tom, Jeff, and Marty get an initial sense of our newsroom, we’ll discuss a path forward and how they might help. The key is to create a process that involves as many people as possible, at all levels, tapping into the wealth of creativity that is this newsroom’s trademark.

This is a significant and important undertaking. It’s also an exciting one. We’re in a moment in this industry and at this organization that requires us to be bold (have I used that word enough yet?) and imaginative, always in our journalism, but also in determining how we best fulfill our civic responsibilities. There’s not the tiniest bit of doubt that we’re up to the challenge.

I’ll be reaching out to some of you about meeting with Tom, Jeff, and Marty tomorrow, and then I’ll report back soon in a series of Winship Room gatherings about the road ahead. We’re committed to a process in which everyone can effectively share their thoughts, ideas, and concerns. In the meantime, feel more than free to reach out to me directly.

Brian

Why Washington’s Metro may be even worse than the T

Washington's Metro: Beautiful stations, big problems. Photo (cc) by Mustafa Khayat.
Washington’s Metro: Beautiful stations, big problems. Photo (cc) by Mustafa Khayat.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Not long ago I had to navigate the sort of public-transportation meltdown that is familiar to any Bostonian. The subway wasn’t running, and I had some important meetings to get to. I took a Lyft into the city. After my meetings, still no subway—so I took advantage of the nice weather and walked.

Ah, the MBTA. Except this wasn’t the T. Instead, it was Metro, the fast, clean, and—until recently—reliable rail system that serves Washington, DC, and its environs.

Those of us who rely on the T have long considered Metro to be the very model of what a modern subway system is supposed to look like. It may be 40 years old, but compared to Boston’s 1890s-vintage patchwork of subway lines and streetcars, it’s brand spanking new.

Now, though, both systems are suffering from what happens after many years of chronic disinvestment. Believe it or not, the problems facing Metro may be more acute. The infrastructure needs of both systems are huge, yet the political will to meet those needs is lacking. And if two cities like Boston and Washington—a regional hub and the nation’s hub—are behind the eight ball, what hope is there for the Buffalos and the Worcesters, the Detroits and the New Bedfords?

Metro’s most recent woes began on March 14, when an electrical fire broke out near the McPherson Square station. Because of similarities to a fire last year in which one person died and 84 were hospitalized because of smoke inhalation, the folks in charge decided to shut down the entire system all day on March 16 in order to conduct extensive safety inspections. Metro’s many woes—which include a crash that claimed nine lives in 2009—made it to the front page of the New York Times this week.

As it turned out, that was the first of two days for which I had scheduled interviews in downtown Washington. To my relief, the roads were not gridlocked, and Lyft didn’t take advantage of the crisis by jacking up prices. My three-mile walk from K Street through Georgetown, over the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and back to my hotel in Rosslyn was pleasant—it was a warm late-winter day, and the cherry blossoms were out.

Metro reopened the next day. But get this: The system’s leadership is now considering shutting down entire lines for six months at a time in order to carry out long-overdue repairs. A Post editorial thundered:

Do they want to scare commuters into expecting the worst so they won’t complain when the shutdown is only three months? Are they trying to rattle the federal and local governments into ponying up more money? Or are they really so cavalier about disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of Washington-area residents?

By comparison, our own MBTA looks like the gold standard. Sure, we put up with delays, cancellations, fires, and Orange Line passengers being forced to climb out windows. But I can’t remember a time when the entire system was shut down for a day except for extreme weather. And the idea of closing a line for six months is just too awful to contemplate.

And yet. Gabrielle Gurley, who knows both the Boston and Washington systems well (she was an editor at CommonWealth Magazine in Boston and is now an editor at The American Prospect in DC), insists the MBTA is actually in worse shape than Metro, and that it’s only a matter of luck that we’ve been spared the worst. Noting that the MBTA’s maintenance backlog is about $7 billion, Gurley writes:

For all that Washingtonians grumble about their 40-year-old Metro, it remains an engineering marvel (albeit a sputtering one) and a tourist attraction in its own right. Boston’s subway system, the country’s oldest, opened in 1897. It barely gets commuters around the region on sunny days.

David Alpert, who blogs at a site called Greater Greater Washington, wrote recently: “Metro has twin challenges of disinvestment and mismanagement, and both feed on one another. The agency’s failures make people understandably more reluctant to throw money at what seems like a black hole, but underfunding and unusually high expenses have put the system on a knife’s edge where a small mistake has big consequences.”

That certainly sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Here in Greater (Greater?) Boston, Governor Charlie Baker deserves credit for making at least some strides toward reforming the MBTA’s broken culture by establishing a Fiscal Management and Control Board to oversee the system.

But the T needs a massive infusion of funds in addition to management controls. And as former state transportation secretary Jim Aloisi wrote for WGBH News, the 9.3 percent fare increase recently approved by the T not only squeezes money out of the wrong people but isn’t even remotely adequate.

Safe, reliable public transportation is good for the economy and good for the environment. Yet in both Boston and Washington, government seems unwilling to do what it takes to get it right.

Stanley Forman speaks about his iconic photo

Nice interview by Boston Herald photographer Mark Garfinkel with former Boston Herald American photographer Stanley Forman to mark the 40th anniversary of Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo showing an African-American lawyer, Theodore Landsmark, being attacked by a white anti-busing protester wielding an American flag. Forman tells Garfinkel:

I took the image and followed the group to Post Office Square not realizing the impact the image had. Herald American reporter Joe Driscoll  caught up with me in the Square telling me about [what happened] via the AP wire and he was dispatched from the office. I said, “I have the photo of it!”  Of course I had no idea what I had gotten. I knew I had motor drive trouble and there was no instant looking at the back of your camera 40 years ago.

Forman, who’s been a videographer with WCVB-TV (Channel 5) for many years, won two individual Pulitzers with the Herald American. (He was part of a team Pulitzer as well.) The two individual awards were for news photos that are among the most iconic in Boston’s history—the Landsmark image, taken in 1976, and, the year before, a picture of a 19-year-old woman and a 2-year-old girl falling from a fire escape. The 19-year-old later died.

You can see both photos here. Also, the Herald‘s Jack Encarnacao recently spoke with Landsmark about the effect of Forman’s photo.

Rob Curley out, jobs eliminated at Orange County Register

Photo (cc) by Dan Kennedy
Photo (cc) by Dan Kennedy

Digital news pioneer Rob Curley is out as editor of the Orange County Register, whose acquisition by Digital First Media was completed earlier today. The story was broken by the Orange County Business Journal.

Gustavo Arellano, the editor of OC Weekly, adds that some 50 to 70 employees are losing their jobs at the Register and its sister paper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise. These are “mostly on the sales, circulation, and marketing side,” Arellano writes, a sign that Digital First—which also owns several other papers in Southern California—is consolidating its business operations.

A little more than a year ago I spent a good chunk of a day at the Register as part of my book project. Curley, who made his bones as an early digital guy at the Lawrence Journal-World a dozen years ago, followed by stops at the Washington Post and the Las Vegas Sun (among other places), allowed me to spend a considerable amount of time with him and answered all questions. However, it was completely off the record, so I can’t share with you anything I learned. I can tell you it wasn’t all that eventful.

The next day, Kushner—who had tried to purchase the Boston Globe and Maine’s Portland Press Herald before leading a group that bought the Register in 2012—stepped down a day before I was to interview him. Kushner’s emphasis on print, and his head-turning moves to hire staff and buy and launch newspapers (including a short-lived daily in Los Angeles), earned him national recognition. Unfortunately, a shortage of funds led him to dismantle what he had built in very short order.

Digital First bought the Register and the Press-Enterprise for $49.8 million after the US Department of Justice convinced a federal judge that a higher bid by Tribune Publishing, which owns the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union Tribune, should be rejected because it would reduce competition.

It struck a number of observers, including me, that the government was engaged in outdated thinking that no longer applied to the shrinking, money-losing newspaper business. Tribune has gone through numerous gyrations over the years, but the LA Times has remained an excellent newspaper. It almost certainly would have been a better steward of the Register and the Press-Enterprise than Digital First.

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No, the entire country has not gone Trump-crazy

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Police photo of Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski grabbing reporter Michelle Fields’s arm.

At a time when it seems like the entire political world has gone mad, I offer some welcome perspective this morning from E.J. Dionne:

  • President Obama’s approval rate is currently 53 percent. At a similar point in George W. Bush’s presidency, his standing had fallen to 32 percent.
  • Donald Trump’s favorability rating is a minuscule 33 percent, and just 34 percent among independents. The vast majority of his support comes from Republicans, 64 percent of whom view him favorably.

Dionne writes:

Trumpism is not sweeping the nation. It has a strong foothold only in the Republican Party, and not even all of it….

We are allowing a wildly and destructively inaccurate portrait of us as a people to dominate our imaginations and debase our thinking.

We’ve got a long way to go between now and November. As Dionne notes, the successes of Trump and Bernie Sanders “reveal the discontent of Americans who have been left out in our return to prosperity.” (Needless to say, even though both Trump and Sanders have embraced economic populism, only Sanders has managed to do so without couching it in the language of racism and violence.)

But it’s wrong to think that the entire country has gone nuts. Just part of it. And I agree with Dionne that the media could do a far better job of making that clear.

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Yet again, Trump disavows pledge to back GOP nominee

Donald Trump said on CNN last night that—OMG!—he’s revoking his pledge to support the Republican nominee for president and not run as an independent.

To which I ask: What pledge? Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Trump has always added the caveat that he wouldn’t bolt the party as long as he’s treated “fairly.”

For instance, last November 22, he said on national television that he was rethinking an independent run in light of reports that Republican leaders were going to launch a concerted effort to defeat him. “Well, I’m going to have to see what happens,” he said. “I will see what happens. I have to be treated fairly. You know, when I did this, I said I have to be treated fairly.  If I’m treated fairly, I’m fine. All I want to do is a level playing field.”

Then, in February, he did it again, claiming unfair treatment and saying, “I signed a pledge but it’s a double-edge pledge, and as far as I’m concerned they’re in default of the pledge.”

For that matter, if you go back to last September, when he signed the pledge, you could interpret one of his statements as leaving himself wiggle room: “I see no circumstances under which I would tear up that pledge.” In other words, he could not foresee at the time that he’d be treated “unfairly.”

To be sure, this is probably the least noteworthy bit of Trump news you’ll see today given that he’s defending his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, against charges—captured on video—that he manhandled a female reporter who was trying to ask Trump a question. (This being Trumpworld, one of Lewandowski’s lawyers is a former US attorney who was once accused of biting a stripper in Florida. Of course.)

And, for that matter, Trump’s rivals are no longer pledging to support him if he wins the nomination, either.

But let’s be serious about the unserious pledge Trump made last September. He has never said he’d stick to it except on his own self-defined terms.

Why flat rates make sense for public transportation

Photo (cc) by matthrono.
Photo (cc) by matthrono.

Transportation officials are considering a new high-tech MBTA fare system that could, among other things, be used to charge you more if you are traveling a longer distance. Such a system is already in effect on the commuter rail lines, but not on the subway or buses.

Superficially, such a system makes sense. On the other hand, the farther you travel via public transportation, the more you are benefiting the rest of us in terms of relieving road congestion and reducing air pollution.

Back when I lived in Danvers, I would occasionally take public transportation. Occasionally, that is, because it was too expensive to do it every day. Parking at the Beverly train station cost $5. A round-trip train ticket was $15. And the subway to and from Northeastern was another $5 or so. That’s $25 a day—an enormous expense, especially if you commute every day.

By contrast, I can now walk to the West Medford train station and pay $4.20 for a round-trip ticket. With subway fare, it comes to less than $10. Yet the social and environmental benefit of taking public transportation from West Medford is considerably less than it is compared to the North Shore.

In a perfect world, you’d pay a flat rate for all forms of public transportation. I realize we don’t live in a perfect world, but the benefits of a flat rate are something I hope T officials at least think about.

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