The hedge fund Alden Global Capital, notorious for hollowing out its newspapers, is shutting down eight weekly newspapers in Minnesota. Louis Krauss of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune reports that six of the papers are part of the Southwest News Media group and two are under the auspices of Crow River Media.
“The closings will leave the communities without their long-time local papers,” Krauss writes. “Two of the papers, the Shakopee Valley News and Chaska Herald, have been published for more than 160 years, while the Jordan Independent was founded 140 years ago.”
Alden owns 68 dailies and more than 300 weekly publications through its MediaNews Group as well as another seven larger-market dailies through Tribune Publishing. Tribune recently sold The Baltimore Sun to David Smith, the head of Sinclair Broadcasting; Smith’s first act was to meet with his staff and berate them. Alden also owns New York’s Daily News but for some reason has separated it from its Tribune holdings. In Massachusetts, Alden owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.
A number of startup projects that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about in “What Works for Community News” were founded by people who quit an Alden-owned paper rather than continue to put up with round after round of cuts. Examples include relatively large outlets like The Colorado Sun and small projects like The Mendocino Voice and Santa Cruz Local.
Now it looks like some opportunities are about to open up in Minnesota for entrepreneurial-minded journalists.
Citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor is moving on to a new phase of his career. Gillmor, whose 2004 book, “We the Media,” inspired a generation of activists, is retiring from Arizona State University, and will be working on a project aimed at promoting democracy and freedom of expression. He writes:
I am absolutely convinced that journalism’s most essential role at this critical moment goes far, far beyond what it’s doing. The status quo in political (and related) coverage consists of sporadically noting that gosh-maybe-there’s-a-problem, while sticking mostly to journalistic business as usual. The status quo is journalistic malpractice.
If I’m not mistaken, Gillmor was the first to refer to the public as “the former audience,” a phrase later picked up by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen and many others, to describe the idea that the internet enables members of the public to communicate easily with journalists and among themselves. This idealistic vision was later corrupted by the giant tech platforms, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful — and maybe at some point we can get back to that.
Gillmor inspired not just non-journalists but journalists as well. Boston newspaper veteran Bob Sprague, the retired founder of the nonprofit digital news organization yourArlington, in the Boston suburbs, told Ellen Clegg and me on our “What Works” podcast that he decided to start covering his community shortly after reading “We the Media.”
In 2006 I wrote a profile of Gillmor for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon) after he founded the Center for Citizen Media at Harvard Law School, a project that has since ended. Here’s what he told me about his vision for citizen media:
If the right people join in the conversation, it will inevitably get richer and richer. The practical problems are many. How do you get knowledgeable people to join? How do you moderate things, if it’s a large conversation, [in a way] that pushes forward the subject? How do you elevate the signal out of the noise? I happen to think that’s one of the core issues we need to address in citizen media. How do you address the fact that most people don’t have the time to read every comment on every relevant blog?
We still see the spirit of Gillmor’s original ideas here and there. One of the projects that Ellen and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News,” is The Bedford Citizen, yet another project in Boston’s suburbs. Unlike Bob Sprague, who was already a longtime journalist, the Citizen was started by three volunteers, only one of whom had any journalism experience. Since then the nonprofit website has growing into a professional news organization with a paid editor.
There’s also the Documenters project, which pays members of the public to cover public meetings — a key ingredient that was missing from the original notion of citizen journalism.
Congratulations and good luck to Dan Gillmor on his latest venture.
Everybody’s talking about that New York Times poll (free link) showing that President Biden has more or less caught up with Donald Trump. But I think the results of a Wall Street Journal poll (free link) published Friday evening are a lot more significant. It shows that abortions rights are by far the most most important issue for suburban women who live in seven swing states: 39%, with immigration coming in second at 16% and the economy at 7%.
As the Journal puts it in its lead: “Abortion is the most powerful issue driving suburban women who could decide the presidential election.”
Given that the election is almost certainly going to come down to turnout, the Journal poll bodes well for Biden. Of course, if Democrats fail to take back the House and hold on to the Senate, it will be for naught, since the party won’t be able to codify Roe v. Wade as it has promised. But abortion rights will be the major issue in House and Senate races as well, so who knows what might happen?
New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2012 by AlexiusHoratius
The Boston Globe published a story Friday about a New Hampshire state representative named Jonathan Stone, an ex-police officer who — according to recently released records that he tried to keep secret — “spoke of killing police and raping the chief’s wife and children.”
As the Globe notes, the story was broken on April 5 by Damien Fisher of InDepthNH, a nonprofit news organization that covers politics and public policy in the Granite State. Fisher’s story begins:
Republican Rep. Jon Stone’s New Hampshire law enforcement career ended when he threatened to kill fellow police officers in a shooting spree, and murder his chief after raping the chief’s wife and children, all while he was already under scrutiny for his inappropriate relationship with a teen girl, according to the internal investigation reports finally released this week.
Yikes. Fisher writes that he first filed a right-to-know request in 2020, and that the records were ordered released last month by New Hampshire’s Supreme Court. InDepthNH executive editor and founder Nancy West was a guest on our “What Works” podcast in November 2022.
In Ohio, DIY pink slime
Jack Brewster of NewsGuard, a project that tracks the rise of pink slime news sites, has written an essay for The Wall Street Journal (free link) that is at turns harrowing and hilarious. Spending just $105, he put together a website powered by artificial intelligence that’s designed to look like a local news outlet. Per his specifications, the site, which he called the Buckeye State Press, was designed with a right-wing bias, favoring Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno over the Democratic incumbent, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Brewster used an Israeli-based service called Fiverr.com to build the site, which in turn was programmed by a Pakistani freelancer named Huzafa Nawaz. Brewster writes:
From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total. The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it.
I’ve been following developments in pink slime off and on for the past decade, and what I’ve found is that they are pretty inept. That proved to be the case with Brewster’s experiment as well — at one point his site hallucinated Brown’s attendance at a local fig festival. At some point, though, these projects are going to evolve into effective sources of political propaganda, which we all need to be concerned about.
Google plays hardball in California
As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m skeptical of legislative attempts to force Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for the journalism that they repurpose. If anything, the notion has become more nonsensical over time, as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has made it clear that it would just as soon eliminate news content on platforms like Facebook and Threads.
Google is a different matter, but no less complicated. News publishers want money from Google, but at the same time exactly none of them add the necessary code to their sites which would make them invisible to Google, because they’re dependent on traffic from the giant search engine, too.
Still, it’s hard not to be outraged by Google’s latest tactic. According to Jeremy B. White of Politico, Google is blocking access to some local news content in parts of California as it fights against state legislation that would force them to pay news organizations. White writes:
“We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism,” Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, Jaffer Zaidi, said in a Friday blog post. Zaidi warned the bill could “result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”
Well, I guess so. These are the tactics of a thug, and yet another sign that the tech giants have amassed way too much power.
I’m genuinely surprised to learn that Robert MacNeil — who died today at the age of 93 — was still alive. I wasn’t watching the “PBS NewsHour” back when he was on the air and only started to tune in when the late Jim Lehrer was anchoring. I think they’ve done a good job of transitioning to a younger team without losing their seriousness. I’m also glad that Judy Woodruff still weighs in occasionally, and I really miss Gwen Ifill.
These newsroom culture stories are coming fast and furious. Today The Wall Street Journal weighs in (free link) with a detailed look at angst and turmoil inside The New York Times, encompassing everything from current controversies over its coverage of the war in Gaza and transgender issues all the way back to the 2020 defenestration of James Bennet. Not much new here, but it’s nicely pulled together.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Josh Stearns, the senior director of the Public Square Program at Democracy Fund.
The Democracy Fund is an independent foundation that works for something very basic and increasingly important: to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges. Josh leads the foundation’s work in rebuilding local news. The Democracy Fund supports media leaders, defends press freedom, and holds social media platforms accountable. (Ellen Clegg was stuck in traffic somewhere on the Zakim Bridge in Boston for the duration of this show, but she’ll return for the next episode!)
In our Quick Takes, I poach on Ellen’s territory and reports on a development in Iowa, the Hawkeye State. When two local weekly newspapers near Iowa City recently got into trouble, their owner found an unusual buyer: The Daily Iowan, the independent nonprofit student newspaper. Now there are plans to supplement local coverage with contributions from student journalists.
It’s not something I’d like to see everywhere — after all, we want to make sure there are jobs for student journalists after they graduate. But at least in this case, it sounds like the Iowa solution is going to be good for the weekly papers, good for the students and good for the communities they serve.
Michael Dukakis is not only a national treasure, he’s been a treasure at Northeastern University since the early 1990s. On Thursday he was honored by three of his successors.
Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.
Nearly 40 years ago I heard a lawyer tell a jury something in court that has stuck with me: If there’s a rotten fish floating around the top of the barrel, you’re under no obligation to reach in to see if there’s something better underneath. He was more eloquent (if no less graphic) than I, but you get the idea. If someone bolsters their argument with false or distorted facts, then you should feel free to disregard their larger point.
That’s why I want to return one more time to NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner’s long essay in The Free Press about what he regards as his employer’s move to the fringe left. Mainly he seems to be worked up about diversity workshops and a change in NPR’s audience from one that was more or less balanced ideologically to one that is overwhelmingly liberal and progressive — which, as I wrote earlier this week, is more a consequence of the great national sorting-out than of anything NPR itself has done.
But there were also three factual assertions he made. One is flat-out false; one is devoid of crucial context; and one is questionable. So here we go.
• False.Berliner writes that special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had engaged in collusion with Russia, writing, “Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.”
Berliner has essentially adopted then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s gloss of the Mueller report, which itself was false. When the full report came out, and when Mueller himself finally testified before a congressional committee, we learned that the truth was more complicated. First, “collusion” is not a legal concept. Second, there was massive evidence of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. Third, there was evidence that Trump had obstructed justice and had attempted to obstruct justice only to be stopped by those around him.
Become a supporter of this free source of news and commentary for just $5 a month.
“In his report, Mueller said his team declined to make a prosecutorial judgment on whether to charge Trump, partly because of a Justice Department legal opinion that said sitting presidents shouldn’t be indicted,” according to this detailed fact-check by The Associated Press, headlined “Trump falsely claims Mueller exonerated him.” The AP added that Mueller “deliberately drew no conclusions about whether he collected sufficient evidence to charge Trump with a crime. He merely said that if prosecutors want to charge Trump once he is out of office, they would have that ability because obstacles to indicting a sitting president would be gone.”
• Lacking crucial context. Berliner blasts NPR for failing to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the waning days of the 2020 campaign and for failing to come clean when it was later found to be genuine, writing: “The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.”
As proof, Berliner links to a Washington Post story that was published in March 2022 — that is, a year and a half after the New York Post published its initial story. That’s how long it took for The Washington to verify at least part of the hard drive’s content as genuine. The story notes: “The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post.” There’s also this:
Some other emails on the drive that have been the foundation for previous news reports could not be verified because the messages lacked verifiable cryptographic signatures. One such email was widely described as referring to Joe Biden as “the big guy” and suggesting the elder Biden would receive a cut of a business deal. One of the recipients of that email has vouched publicly for its authenticity but President Biden has denied being involved in any business arrangements.
In other words, The Washington Post was not able to find a single verified email tying President Biden to his son’s business dealings, leaving anything beyond that to the he-said/he-said that we already knew about.
In addition, Berliner makes it sounded like NPR was unique in holding back on the laptop story in October 2020. But as The New York Times reported, even the New York Post — which, after all, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — had trouble getting it out there. The reporter who wrote most of it refused to let the paper put his byline on it “because he had concerns over the article’s credibility.” Another staff member whose byline did appear did little work on the story and didn’t realize her name would be on it until after it was published.
Even worse, Fox News, Murdoch’s 800-pound gorilla, reportedly took a pass on it, according to Mediaite, because the Trump operative who brought it to them, Rudy Giuliani, could not provide “sourcing and veracity” for the emails.
Contrary to Berliner’s complaint, the restraint that NPR showed was no different from that of any other news organization — including Fox News. No more than a small portion of the emails on hard drive have ever been verified, and none of those emails suggest any wrongdoing on the part of President Biden.
• Questionable. Berliner takes NPR to task for accepting without reservation the theory that COVID-19’s origins were most likely from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China, rather than from a leak at a nearby lab, complaining that “politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.”
Admittedly, this complaint by Berliner is more legitimate than his other two examples. More than four years after the virus was discovered, we still don’t fully understand its origins, and it’s a fact that the story got caught up in our toxic political environment. As I wrote for GBH News in June 2021, the media — in their haste to dismiss a right-wing conspiracy theory that COVID was created as part of a Chinese bioweapons program — leaned too hard in the other direction, rejecting any possibility that COVID had come from anywhere other than the Wuhan market.
That said, deep dives by the media over the past several years have turned up nothing definitive, and it still seems more likely than not that COVID sprang up from the market rather than from a lab experiment gone awry. Once again, I think Berliner is being too hard on his employer.
Which appears to be the point. By going public with his complaints about the culture inside NPR, Berliner may have accomplished the impossible: He’s made it so that his continued tenure at NPR is untenable while at the same time rendering himself unfirable. I detect a resignation and a fat contract with Fox News in Berliner’s immediate future.
NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin has responded to Uri Berliner’s long piece in The Free Press lamenting what he regards as the network’s move to the progressive left. New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin obtained a memo she sent to the staff and broke the story old-school — on Twitter/X. The top line:
I and my colleagues on the leadership team strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism and the integrity of our newsroom processes. We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows to do to cover a wide range of challenging stories. We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of our country and our world.
scoop: NPR editor in chief Edith Chapin responds to Uri Berliner’s essay in @TheFP: “I and my colleagues on the leadership team strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism…” pic.twitter.com/VLz2DOkGvI
