My interview with News@Northeastern.
How George Kariotis aided a Republican revival
In 1986, when I was working for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, I had a chance to interview business executive George Kariotis after he was drafted by the Republican State Committee for the mission impossible of running against Gov. Michael Dukakis.
Kariotis has died at the age of 90, according to this obituary by Bryan Marquard of The Boston Globe.
I remember very little about the interview except that Kariotis seemed like a good, sincere guy, and that he was far more conservative than most Massachusetts Republicans of his era. I’m not sure I knew until reading Marquard’s obit that Kariotis was a fellow alumnus of Northeastern University. (Here is an interview with Kariotis published on the Northeastern website.)
What I do remember vividly, and which Marquard only alludes to, were the circumstances that led to Kariotis’ candidacy. The Republicans had lost their two leading gubernatorial contenders. Royall Switzler dropped out after it was revealed that his claim to have fought in Vietnam was false. Greg Hyatt quit the race amid bizarre stories about his working in his office pants-free.
The Republican meltdown gave Dukakis’ then-nascent presidential candidacy a boost. But Kariotis’ decency and relentless focus on the issues may well have paved the way for 1990, when Republican Bill Weld was elected governor and the party made major gains in the state Legislature.
Photo via Northeastern University.
Some thoughts on that Rolling Stone cover (II)
Front page of the Sunday New York Times, May 5. Same picture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, page one, above the fold. Here is the story. Does anyone really want to argue that what the Times did is somehow different from what Rolling Stone did?
Also, a very smart commentary in The New Yorker by Ian Crouch.
Some thoughts on that Rolling Stone cover
I’ve been following and participating in the social media debate over Rolling Stone’s cover shot of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev since last night. And I have a couple of contradictory thoughts about it.
First, the positive. The cognitive dissonance makes for a brilliant piece of magazine design. The angelic-looking Tsarnaev juxtaposed with cover type calling him “the bomber” and “a monster.” The knowledge we all have that this is who Tsarnaev was not that long ago — and that he would soon begin his descent into terrorism.
As we know, the cover has been roundly criticized for supposedly glamorizing Tsarnaev. According to Steve Annear of Boston magazine, Tedeschi’s and CVS have both announced that they won’t sell the issue. Tedeschi’s released a statement that says:
Tedeschi Food Shops supports the need to share the news with everyone, but cannot support actions that serve to glorify the evil actions of anyone. With that being said, we will not be carrying this issue of Rolling Stone. Music and terrorism don’t mix.
Needless to say, similarly angelic portraits of Tsarnaev have appeared in just about every publication you can think of, including the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald and the New York Times. The outrage, it seems to me, is based on a misperception (reflected in the Tedeschi’s statement) of exactly what it is that Rolling Stone does.
In fact, the magazine publishes a lot of serious news stories and often puts them on the cover. And by way of analogy, I’ve posted a 1970 Rolling Stone cover of Charles Manson looking, if not exactly angelic, then at least somewhat more human than we’re used to seeing. I assume the accompanying story was not a flattering one.
For a little historical perspective, in 1938 Time magazine made Adolf Hitler both its “Man of the Year” and its cover boy. Yes, the start of World War II was still a year off, but Hitler was already a world pariah at that point.
Having said all that, I do have one negative observation to offer about the Rolling Stone cover — not that it glamorizes Tsarnaev, but that it draws attention to him in a way that may make an impression on other alienated people who could be inspired to follow his example.
My Northeastern colleague Jack Levin, a criminologist who’s an expert on serial killers and mass murderers, made that argument in an interview with Fox News. “If they want to become famous, kill somebody,” Levin said.
I’m not sure that we can or should edit with an eye toward how mentally disturbed people will react to decisions we make as journalists. Still, Levin’s point is well taken and well worth thinking about.
Update: Rolling Stone has now posted the story, preceded by the following statement:
Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts are always with them and their families. The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone’s long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day. The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens.
— THE EDITORS
Update II: I’ve now had a chance to read the article, by Janet Reitman. It’s not great, but it’s pretty good. There’s not much new, but it offers a level of detail I haven’t seen previously, including interesting information about Tsarnaev’s abandonment by his family and his gradual embrace of his brother’s radical form of Islam.
No doubt many people will say that the article “excuses” Tsarnaev, but I don’t see it that way. To explain is not to excuse. I certainly don’t excuse him. We need to understand as best we can what happened, and why.
I thought the most chilling part came near the end, when we learn how widespread the belief is among Tsarnaev’s fellow immigrant classmates that 9/11 was an “inside job.”
Globe’s Leung to write a business column
Boston Globe business editor Shirley Leung is stepping aside in order to become a twice-a-week business columnist, according to the Globe’s Beth Healy. Editor Brian McGrory’s email to the staff follows.
I am delighted to announce that Shirley Leung has decided to become a business columnist for the Globe, giving our readers a fresh, creative, intelligent voice on matters of industry and the economy twice each week.
This is a huge development. You know as I know that Shirley literally exudes ideas, her hands always fluttering as if she’s trying to give them air. She recently became frustrated that people weren’t giving out their email addresses quite so readily, so we quickly had a front page story, the most widely read of the day. She heard about an auction of parking spaces in the Back Bay, and sure enough, the page one story that resulted — $560K for a pair of weed-strewn tandem spaces — was the talk of the town.
Now she’ll take her ideas, or at least many of them, and put them under her own name, presented in what I know will be a personable and blunt column-writing style, brimming with her unique experience and exhaustive reporting.
I’ve made no secret of my belief that good columnists are utterly critical to our mission, and have expressed my desire to add even more strong voices to our daily report to complement the ones we already have. The Business pages have been a priority, and as I looked near and far, I came to realize that the absolute best candidate might have been sitting in the editor’s chair — or more accurately, at home with a newborn during a maternity leave.
Shirley’s background is tailor-made for such a pivotal role. She was on a brief tryout at the Globe in 1995 when she was handed a tip scrawled on a piece of paper about a former state representative who became homeless after losing a fortune in the real estate crash. Others might have dismissed it. Shirley camped out in the guy’s hometown, got him, and wrote a Sunday front page story. She was, of course, hired. Old friend Caleb Solomon, then running the Boston bureau of the Wall Street Journal, lured Shirley away in 1997 to cover the wrangling over the Seaport District and the proposal to build a convention center. Shirley continued on to the Journal’s Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus, working a variety of beats from the California economy to fast food. Caleb, Caleb, as the Globe’s business editor, lured her back to Boston in 2004 as the Sunday business editor.
By 2007, Shirley was the business editor, soon overseeing coverage of the Great Recession, the housing bust, scary fluctuations in the stock markets, the rise of the Seaport, the $700 billion bank bailout, chronic unemployment, and the stagnant economy. She has been nothing shy of masterful at working with veteran reporters, spotting great talent, and developing sophisticated ideas in the throes of the ongoing economic storm. Then add in the stellar projects on Upper Crust, mislabeled fish, illegal workers, and child pornography, some of them garnering major national awards. That being not quite enough, Shirley built “Top Places to Work” into a profitable franchise and launched the boston.com innovation blog “The Hive,” which we are expanding.
On the personal side, Shirley is 41, married to Paul Lim, an editor at Money magazine, and they have two sons, Eli, who is 2-and-a-half, and Evan, who is six months.
Shirley will begin her column next week, her days being Wednesday and Friday. I couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come. Make sure you give her your congratulations. At the same time, be warned. Like any good columnist, Shirley will undoubtedly take the opportunity to shake you down for ideas.
Chris Chinlund and I will get to work selecting the next business editor. I have every expectation the position will stay in-house, and don’t expect the process will be a long one.
CommonWealth reviews “The Wired City”
Tom Fiedler, dean of Boston University’s College of Communication and a fellow “Beat the Press” panelist, reviews “The Wired City” in the new issue of CommonWealth Magazine. He writes:
Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University and author of the well-read blog Media Nation, packs a lot of other material into this book that withstands the passage of time. His explanation of how the newspaper business model fell victim to the Web’s ability to match advertisers with consumers, thus forcing publishers to trade print dollars for digital dimes, is as cogent as I have seen anywhere. I admired also Kennedy’s insights into the way online sites have upended the journalistic paradigm by enabling news consumers — formerly known as the audience — to also be news creators.
Additional disclosure: my master’s (in American history) is from BU.
Back from Batavia
I had a great time meeting people in Batavia, N.Y., this past weekend to promote “The Wired City.” My thanks to bookstore owner Erica Caldwell of Present Tense Books for putting it together.
I enjoyed catching up with Howard Owens, the publisher of The Batavian, with whom I’m in regular touch but who I hadn’t actually seen since 2009. I also had a chance to meet Tom Rivers, a former reporter and columnist for The Daily News of Batavia who — inspired by Owens — started a local news site called the Orleans Hub earlier this year.
Tom, who’s written two books about life in Genesee County, also interviewed Owens and me for his site.
Photo by Tom Rivers.
Globe, Times need to correct online corrections
The Boston Globe published two corrections today. No big deal. It’s one of the ways that responsible news organizations hold themselves accountable.
But unless you read the print edition, you didn’t see the corrections — not even in the “Today’s Paper” view, which is supposed to include every item published in that day’s Globe. (Of course, corrections do appear in the ePaper, which is how I grabbed the image accompanying this post. But that’s just a PDF of the print edition.)
As someone who reads the Globe and The New York Times every day, I find myself scratching my head at how poorly the two papers handle corrections online. The Globe is worse, but the Times needs to improve, too.
The Times, at least, runs all corrections on its website and in the “Today’s Paper” section of its iPad-only HTML5 app. But they are missing from the iOS apps for the iPhone and the iPad, which are used by many of their customers. They’re also missing from Times Skimmer, an alternative desktop view based on the same feeds as the iOS apps. (I’m guessing the situation is the same with the Times’ Android apps.)
Unlike the Times, the Globe doesn’t run a separate section of online corrections anywhere — not on its website and not on its recently released iPhone app. When I posted a question on Twitter yesterday, Globe tech guy Damon Kiesow directed me to this. But it hasn’t been updated since April 4. In a follow-up, Kiesow indicated it would be fixed at some point.
I should note that both the Times and the Globe append corrections to online stories as necessary. That’s essential for archival purposes. But it doesn’t help if you read a story just once, on the day it’s published.
In any event, it’s long past time for both papers — and all papers — to take corrections as seriously in the digital space as they do in print.
More: Not long after this item was posted, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan tweeted:
Thoughtful piece by @dankennedy_nu on how online corrections should be handled: http://t.co/9XMNgNvCn7
— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) July 11, 2013
Also, in the comments I’ve posted an email from Globe spokeswoman Ellen Clegg, who says my post “mischaracterizes” the Globe’s correction policy. I don’t think that’s the case, but I’m happy to offer a different perspective.
A cat, some flowers and some shade
In Batavia, a for-profit, locally owned news site
This article appeared earlier at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I’ll be reading from “The Wired City” this Saturday, July 13, at 11 a.m. at Present Tense Books, located in Batavia at 101 Washington Ave.
For those of a certain age, perusing the ads posted at The Batavian, a for-profit news site in Batavia, N.Y., can seem a lot like flipping through the pages of a weekly community newspaper a generation or two ago.
Which is to say there are a lot of ads — more than 140, every one on the home page, a practice that publisher Howard Owens believes is more effective than rotating them in and out. There are ads for funeral homes and pizza shops. For accountants and tattoo parlors. For auto-repair centers and ice-cream stands. For bars and baseball (the minor-league Batavia Muckdogs).
The success of The Batavian matters to the future of local journalism. In my book “The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age,” I devote most of my attention to the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit site that subsists on grant money, donations and sponsorships. At this early stage of online news, nonprofits like the Independent are often able to raise more money more quickly than for-profits. But not every community can support a nonprofit. Thus it is vital for the future of news that entrepreneurs like Owens figure out the for-profit side — which is why I also devote a fair amount of space in “The Wired City” to what’s going on in Batavia.
Owens launched The Batavian in 2008 as a demonstration project for GateHouse Media, where he was the director of digital publishing. When his position was eliminated in early 2009, he asked GateHouse if he could take the fledgling site with him. He was granted his wish.
The Batavian is free and covers not just the city of Batavia (population 15,000) but surrounding Genesee County (60,000) as well. It receives about 80,000 unique visitors per month, according to Quantcast. That’s roughly the same as the site’s newspaper competition, The Daily News, also based in Batavia. (Web analytics are imprecise, and Owens says his internal count, provided by Google Analytics, shows about 118,000 uniques per month.) Of course, The Daily, as the locals call it, depends mainly on print distribution. On the other hand, The Batavian covers just one county to The Daily’s three, making Owens’ online reach all the more impressive.
The Batavian’s 12-month projected revenues are currently about $180,000 a year — enough to provide Owens and his wife, Billie Owens, the site’s part-time editor, with a comfortable living, and to employ a part-time sales and marketing coordinator. Unlike AOL, with its struggling network of Patch sites, The Batavian is independent, and Owens aims to keep it that way. As the Authentically Local project, of which The Batavian is a part, puts it: “Local doesn’t scale.”
If a nonprofit like the New Haven Independent can raise more money than a for-profit (indeed, Independent founder and editor Paul Bass chose the nonprofit route in 2005 because he realized he couldn’t support himself with a for-profit), there are nevertheless certain advantages to for-profit online journalism. Let me outline three of the more obvious.
• Anyone can start a for-profit news site. The nonprofit route requires approval from the IRS and support from local foundations. In many cases, neither may be forthcoming — and as I recently wrote, the IRS has all but halted approval of 501(c)(3) status for nonprofit news sites, which they depend on so that donors can make tax-free contributions. By contrast, all it takes to launch a for-profit site is talent, experience and a willingness to work hard. That’s no guarantee of success, but the opportunity is there for all.
• Local ads enhance the vibrancy of a site. Owens likes to say that advertising is content. The ads at The Batavian give you a good feel for Genesee County — and provide a context for Owens’ coverage of everything from court news to traffic accidents, from school events to development proposals. Advertising and news work together to provide a well-rounded picture of the community. Yet you won’t see ads at a nonprofit site like the Independent, save for a few image-building “sponsorships” from local institutions such as college and hospitals.
• For-profit sites enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment. Like public radio and television stations, but unlike the vast majority of newspapers, nonprofit news sites are legally prohibited from endorsing candidates for public office. “Editorial endorsements — or the denial of them — are among the most powerful tools that newspapers have for holding political figures to account,” write the media scholar Robert McChesney and the journalist John Nichols in their 2010 book “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.” The Batavian hasn’t actually endorsed any candidates, but at least it’s not legally prohibited from doing so — and Owens takes strong stands on other local issues without having to worry about the federal government swooping in and threatening his livelihood.
***
When I visited Batavia in 2009, I rode along with Owens as he made sales calls and covered stories in Genesee County. It seemed like a hard slog. At one point, as we were driving through the tiny farm town of Stafford, he gestured to a well-manicured golf course. “If you find out that I’ve joined the Stafford Country Club,” he said, “then I’ve been successful.” Two years later, I asked him about the status of his country club aspirations. He laughed. “I’d love to join the Stafford Country Club and have time to enjoy the privileges thereof,” he said, “but we’re probably years away from doing that.”
Yet The Batavian keeps growing. Last week the site announced a new real-estate ad partnership. Recently Owens told me he now spends virtually none of his time on ad sales, having offloaded that task to his part-time employee. The Owenses are able to devote the bulk of their time to journalism — something that was not the case when I was researching “The Wired City.”
Owens likes to remind people that we’re at the very beginning of online news as a business, and that what appears not to add up economically today may look quite different a few years from now. As Owens asked in a provocative blog post four years ago: “If it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?”
Photos (cc) 2009 by Dan Kennedy.