On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sophie Culpepper, a staff writer at Nieman Lab who focuses on covering local news. She co-founded The Lexington Observer, a digital local news site covering Lexington, a town of 35,000 outside Boston. For two years, she was the nonprofit news outlet’s only full-time journalist. She covered public schools, local government, economic development and public safety, among other subjects.
I discusss the recent Nonprofit News Awards bestowed by the Institute for Nonprofit News. Three of the awards went to projects that have been featured on the “What Works” podcast. The Service to Nonprofit News Award went to Andy and Dee Hall, the retired founders of Wisconsin Watch, who were guests on this podcast last December. VTDigger won a community champion award. And Mississippi Today won an explanatory journalism award.
In addition, an INNovator Award for a sold-out event featuring live stories from the stage went to Brookline.News, a digital nonprofit founded by Ellen.
There’s some exciting news to report out of CommonWealth Beacon today. Laura Colarusso, currently the editor of Nieman Reports, will be the new editor of CWB, succeeding Bruce Mohl, who’s retiring.
I got to know Laura when she was digital managing editor of GBH News, for whom I wrote a weekly column for a number of years. I also had a chance to write for her at Nieman Reports. She will be terrific, as she combines leadership skills with vision and a strong ethical compass.
Originally a public-policy quarterly called CommonWealth Magazine, CommonWealth Beacon has morphed into a digital-only publication with a significant daily presence.
Bruce, who came to CWB from The Boston Globe, leaves behind an admirable legacy, transforming the publication to a leading source political and public-policy news about Massachusetts. The nonprofit is published by the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank that concentrates on quality-of-life issues.
(Disclosure: I’m a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory board.)
What follows is MassINC CEO Joe Kriesberg’s announcement:
Dear reader,
Following a nationwide search, I am excited to share with you that we have hired Laura Colarusso to succeed Bruce Mohl as the next editor of CommonWealth Beacon.
Taking the helm in November, Laura has the experience, network, and leadership skills to build on Bruce’s sixteen-year legacy. Our team is excited to welcome Laura and to continue building CommonWealth Beacon as the dynamic, civic news outlet that readers like you rely upon.
Laura comes to CommonWealth Beacon from Nieman Reports, an online and quarterly print publication with a mission of promoting and elevating journalistic standards. She has reported on a wide variety of topics including climate change, education and health care, and covered the Pentagon in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
She has held leadership positions at GBH News in Boston, where she was the digital managing editor before joining Nieman Reports in 2021, where she served as editor. Laura won a regional 2020 Edward R. Murrow Award for the story “The Original Old Boys Club” while she was at GBH.
As Laura has shared:
CommonWealth Beacon has a long history of creating outstanding journalism that helps the people of Massachusetts understand their government and the changes taking place in the world around them. I couldn’t be more excited to join this organization at such a critical time for our democracy, and I’m looking forward to leading CommonWealth Beacon as we work to connect with broader and more diverse audiences, and deliver even more high quality news and information to our readers.
Nearly one year ago, we launched CommonWealth Beacon with an expanded newsroom, a more readable and accessible digital platform and an updated strategy for audience and community engagement.
We are thrilled to have Laura lead our team in this next phase of CommonWealth Beacon’s journey and to better serve you, our diverse audience of readers, and the people of Massachusetts.
Sincerely,
Joe Kriesberg
CEO of MassINC, Publisher of CommonWealth Beacon
Now here’s a great idea. In New York City, a public-private partnership is spending $3 million to boost journalism in the city’s high schools. The program, called Journalism for All, aims to quadruple the number of Black and Latino students who are studying journalism, according to Claire Fahy of The New York Times (gift link).
High school newspapers, whether in print or digital, have been on the wane in New York and across the country in recent years, although the Student Press Law Center told the Times that the extent of the decline has not been reliably tracked.
Among other things, Journalism for All will help launch student publications by providing them with $15,000 in seed money. In addition, four students from each of the schools that are being served will be able to take part in summer internships at local news organizations.
Fahy reports that California, Illinois and Texas are also providing assistance to high school journalism programs. As I wrote this summer for CommonWealth Beacon, efforts are being made to revive a special commission to study the local news crisis in Massachusetts after the first attempt disappeared down a black hole.
Nurturing high school journalism programs and publications in Massachusetts ought to be something that gets serious consideration.
Listening to Vermont voters
It’s back to the future in Vermont, where the state’s public media operation is covering the election campaign by listening to voters and focusing on the issues they say are important rather than dwelling on the horse race and polls.
Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that journalists for Vermont Public, comprising television, radio and digital, “have spent the year speaking to more than 600 residents at diners, gas stations, and concerts about state and local politics across all 14 Vermont counties.”
It’s an effort known as the Citizens Agenda, but it’s hardly a new idea. Originally known as public journalism or civic journalism, the notion of shaping political coverage around the concerns of actual people was briefly popular in the 1990s. Among other things, the Globe itself engaged in a public journalism effort in covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is advising Vermont Public on implementing the Citizens Agenda; Rosen was also a leader of the public journalism movement in the 1990s, even writing a book about it called “What Are Journalists For?”
It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea today.
Hacked emails, then and now
One of the odder developments in the 2024 campaign is that three news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico — have reportedly received hacked emails from the Donald Trump campaign but have chosen not to publish anything from them, as Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported (gift link) in August for the Post.
Obviously this is quite a departure from 2016, when the news media eagerly passed along emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then as now, the leaks come from a foreign adversary — Russia eight years ago, Iran today. Then as now, the actual content of the emails may be of little interest.
I suppose we shouldn’t complain if news executives learned a lesson from 2016, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the media helped Trump on both occasions.
Then, last week, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared one of the hacked documents on his Substack newsletter — a Trump campaign dossier on all the embarrassing things that JD Vance had said about Trump over the years.
Klippenstein tried to share his newsletter item on Twitter and got blocked and banned. I posted a workaround and got locked out of my account until I deleted the offending post. Meta has been blocking anyone’s attempts to post a link as well, though they haven’t caught up with my Threads post yet.
In any event, you can download the dossier from Klippenstein’s newsletter. I haven’t read it, but I have paged through the table of contents, and it looks highly entertaining though not especially new. (“Vance Wrote That He ‘Loathed’ Trump’s ‘Obvious Personal Character Flaws,’” p. 76).
I assume Tim Walz is boning up ahead of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.
The former headquarters of the Portland Press Herald is now a hotel. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.
News publishers like sponsored content for a variety of reasons. In a sea of nearly worthless programmatic ads, sponsored content — also known as native advertising — commands a premium price. The articles, if they are well-done, attract eyeballs. They evade ad-blockers, too. At worst, they can be confused with actual editorial content, but with proper disclosure they raise no more in the way of ethical issues than does a standard banner ad.
Earlier this week, a conservative website called the Maine Wire reported the existence of a $117,000 deal cut by the Maine Trust for Local News to publish sponsored content from the state’s Department of Education. The nonprofit Trust owns the Portland Press Herald and a number of smaller daily and weekly papers. The Maine Wire article says in part:
The payment will cover the publication and promotion of six articles portraying the Maine DOE in a flattering light. It’s unclear whether the state-sponsored “news” content will be written by someone from the Maine DOE or employees of the Maine Trust for Local News newspapers.
The taxpayer-funded “marketing campaign” will highlight the Maine DOE’s “use of federal emergency relief funding,” and will aim to “promote the best learning opportunities for all Maine students” and to “inspire ‘trust in our schools,’” according to the document.
Scare quotes aside, though, this is just garden-variety sponsored content. Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute looked into it (scroll down to “Sponsored content controversy in Maine”) and found the deal to be pretty unremarkable, writing:
The Wire chose to ignore that article-style pieces became a staple of digital advertising more than a decade ago. The Federal Trade Commission has taken the position that as long as sponsorship is disclosed, it’s not deception (though violations, especially among influencers, are not uncommon).
The format is typically employed by companies burnishing their image, but there is no obvious reason the door should be slammed shut on a self-promoting government placement.
In fact, the first of six such sponsored ads that the Trust will be running says “Sponsored” and “Content provided by Maine Department of Education” right at the top. The article, which appeared in the Press Herald, is also in a different typeface from what the paper normally uses. Edmonds passed along a statement from Trust chief executive Lisa DeSisto as well:
Branded content is a growing piece of our advertising product offerings. We’ve attracted new customers to the Maine Trust by offering branded content products, and we think they’re an important part of our revenue goals. In developing these products, nothing has been more important to us than creating a clear distinction between branded content advertising and our journalism.
Michael Socolow, a journalism professor at the University of Maine, initially raised some concerns about the arrangement on Twitter but then backed off once he saw the actual ad. “Turns out article’s labelled ‘Sponsored Content’ right at top, it’s not written by any journalists, and it’s actually a terrible piece of advertorial/propaganda [poorly written, boring + too long, and uninteresting]. So I’m less concerned,” he wrote.
Now, I do think it’s fair to ask whether a news organization ought to be accepting sponsored content from a government agency — but that horse left the barn quite a while ago. For instance, I searched the sponsored content at The Boston Globe to see if it had any similar arrangements, and it took me no time at all to find a native ad from Vermont Tourism, which a little additional searching revealed is a state agency. That said, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the Trust to have a conversation with its journalists about what practices are and aren’t acceptable, and to listen to any concerns the newsroom might raise.
Finally, a disclosure: The Maine Trust is sponsoring an event for Ellen Clegg and me in Portland on Oct. 15 to talk about our book, “What Works in Community News.” (You can register here.) I worked with DeSisto at The Boston Phoenix and, later, Ellen and DeSisto were colleagues at The Boston Globe; we both think highly of her. You can make of that what you will. But Edmonds and Socolow have no such ties, and their conclusions are the same as mine.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.
One of my Sunday night rituals is to read the Semafor media newsletter overseen by Ben Smith — something I also used to do when he was writing his media column for The New York Times.
Smith is a talented guy, and we’ve exchanged a few friendly messages over the years. So I was taken aback at his claim this past Sunday that New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi’s sexual affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while she was covering the presidential campaign was no big deal. Here’s part of what he said:
[N]ow that we are in the full fury of American media prurience and self-righteousness, I am going to risk my neck on a slightly contrarian view.
Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information. That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.
You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”
I realize that Smith isn’t the only observer who’s said this is much ado about very little. But the fact remains, as I noted earlier this week, that Nuzzi wrote an unusually harsh feature about President Biden’s cognitive abilities at a time when Kennedy was one of his rivals as well as a squishy profile of Donald Trump when Kennedy was trying to suck up to him.
So I was glad to see NPR media reporter David Folkenflik speak up for ethical journalism. In an interview with Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket, Folkenflik said what needed to be said about Nuzzi and, while he was at it, about Smith as well:
Ben’s a very smart guy, a serial news entrepreneur, and an interesting and fun thinker about journalism. And I’ve got a lot of regard for him. But this is pretty bananas as a claim. I think that if people are having an intimate relationship, whatever form that may take, with somebody who they’re writing about or whose world they’re writing about, but they fail to disclose — the supposed British sensibility of, “oh, well, we’re all in bed with each other” — is bonkers and bullshit. And it’s not how journalism should be conducted in the States, and it’s not actually how journalism should be conducted in the U.K. either. And I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my career looking at that very question as well.
Now, I should add that Smith later tweeted that he was joking, at least in part. But he’s far from the only journalist to come to Nuzzi’s defense, as Stephanie Kaloi and Ross A. Lincoln report for The Wrap. I don’t care what went on between Nuzzi and Kennedy; that’s between them and their significant others. But whatever that relationship may have been, it compromised Nuzzi’s independence and thus her journalism. Good for Folkenflik for reminding us of that foundational fact.
Failing the stress test
Angelu Fu of Poynter Online reported this week on a survey by Muck Rack showing that “more than half of journalists in the U.S. considered quitting their job this year due to exhaustion or burnout.” She writes:
The report, which was released Tuesday, examines the state of work-life balance in journalism. Muck Rack surveyed 402 journalists in August and found that 40% have previously quit a job due to burnout. That statistic, along with the finding that 56% of journalists have thought about quitting this year, was “staggering,” said the report’s author, Matt Albasi.
“It means we have to have half as many journalists in the wings waiting to move in next year,” said Albasi, a data journalist at Muck Rack. “And we’re going to lose all this institutional knowledge if these people actually do leave.”
This is a massive problem in journalism. To some extent, the “always on” nature of the news business has always led to an undue amount of stress. But as jobs are lost and the pressure to produce keeps getting ratcheted up, the situation is only growing worse.
To compound matters, only 24% of survey respondents said they have access to mental health services.
Media notes
• My former Northeastern j-school colleague Dina Kraft has a fascinating story in The Christian Science Monitor about cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. They’re part of a movement called Standing Together, which Dina writes “is attracting record numbers of new members with its simple and direct calls for peace and its belief that Israeli-Palestinian partnership, starting within Israel, is not just aspirational, but essential.”
• ARLnow, a network of digital news outlets in the Arlington, Virginia, area, has done something unusual — it’s acquired a print newspaper known as the GazetteLeader and is converting it to a digital-only operation. Scott Brodbeck, the founder and CEO of ARLnow publisher Local News Now, said he’s adding staff as well. (Disclosure: I’m quoted.)
• Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab has a chilling look at what could happen to journalism if Trump is elected and Project 2025, the blueprint put together by his supporters, is put into effect. Benton has read the report, and he writes that punitive action could range from removing reporters from the White House, to cutting all funds for public broadcasting, to getting rid of Section 230, the federal law that holds web publishers harmless for third-party content.
• New England Public Media, which serves Western Massachusetts, has announced a partnership with The Latino Newsletter to train three high school journalists. The students will provide multimedia coverage of the election as part of the Latino Election Project.
• A distressing note from the Boston television scene: NBC Boston has laid off five people who work for the operation’s special-projects team, according to Boston Globe reporter Dana Gerber.
Shailesh Prakash, former chief technologist at The Washington Post. Photo (cc) 2017 by Nordiske Mediedager.
Several months ago, Brian Stelter wrote an article (gift link) for The Atlantic exploring how The Washington Post had lost its way. During the Trump years, the Post thrived under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, adding audience and staff as well as turning a profit. Since then, all three of those metrics have nose-dived. Bezos’ choice to turn things around, publisher Will Lewis, is beset by ethical problems that no one seems to want to deal with.
All those issues are explored in detail by Stelter, but there was one fact that stood out to me: The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag on the bottom line. Stelter wrote:
In 2021, the Post’s total profit was about $60 million. In 2022, the paper began to dip into the red. [Then-publisher Fred] Ryan reassured people that the loss was expected because of the investments in the Post’s journalism and continued losses at Arc XP, the in-house content-management system that the Post expanded during Bezos’s and Ryan’s tenure (the software is now licensed to other companies). Arc needed to spend a lot of money to have a chance to make money in the future, the argument went, and according to two sources, it accounted for the majority of the Post’s losses in 2022 and 2023.
If Ryan was right, then there was nothing wrong with the Post that getting Arc under control wouldn’t fix. I was surprised, and I filed that factoid away for future use. Well, the future arrived this week, as the Post announced it was laying off about 25% of Arc’s staff — more than 50 people — in order to stem those losses.
What happened? Stories about the layoffs in The Wall Street Journal (gift link) and Axios don’t really make it clear. But it seems that what at one time had looked like a smart bet on the future went south in a serious way.
CMS’s are universally loathed, but Arc was billed as something different and better — simple and built in a modular manner to made it easier to add features. It’s fast. To this day, the Post’s mobile apps load much more quickly than The New York Times’. The Boston Globe is an Arc customer, and if you use its Arc-based apps (look for a white “B” against a black background), content loads more or less instantly.
When I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” then-chief technologist Shailesh Prakash touted Arc as a key to the Post’s future success. Internally, the Post’s iteration of Arc featured the infamous “MartyBot” — an image of then-executive editor Marty Baron that popped up on a journalist’s screen as a reminder that a deadline was approaching. One of Arc’s customers was Mark Zusman, the editor and publisher of Willamette Week in Oregon. He told me by email:
They flew a team out here and within three months we were up and running. I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly it happened. Arc creates enormous functionality under the hood. I have a happy news team (talk about unusual) and the Post is rolling out improvements on a regular basis.
Prakash told me that he hoped Arc might help the Post become the hub of a news ecosystem that would benefit both the Post and news organizations that licensed the CMS:
I would love it if the platform we built for the Post was powering a lot of other media organizations. That would definitely break down the silos for content sharing, a lot of the silos for analytics, for personalization. The larger the scale the better you can do in some of those scenarios. But those are still aspirational at this point.
Well, Prakash is long gone, and is now vice president of news at Google. Baron has retired. And Arc has failed to deliver on its promise of becoming a revenue-generator for the Post as well as a way for the paper to establish itself as the center of a network of Arc-using news organizations.
I hope we find out what happened. I know that Arc is expensive — probably too expensive for it to be adopted by more than a handful of news clients. Still Axios reports that the CMS has more than 2,500 customers. Maybe the layoffs will allow for a reset that will lead to future growth. But the story of Arc sounds like one of opportunity that slipped away.
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Photo (cc) 2015 by Tom Woodward. Digitally edited to remove license plate number.
In 2020, Massachusetts took what was billed as a major step forward in holding police officers accountable. Following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the state created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission “to improve policing and enhance public confidence in law enforcement by implementing a fair process for mandatory certification, discipline, and training for all peace officers in the Commonwealth.”
But according to an investigation by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, the POST Commission has not collected the employment data it needs to do its job. The story, by BINJ editorial director Chris Faraone and Sam Stecklow, an investigative journalist currently on a fellowship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute of Chicago, found that Mass. POST and its director, Enrique Zuniga, made a series of decisions that experts say undermine the agency’s mission. Faraone and Stecklow write:
Despite passing regulations that instruct it otherwise, POST’s database does not include the full employment history of all of the officers that are going through the state’s recertification process — only for officers who have had discipline sustained against them. This prevents the press and public from analyzing data about what are often known as “wandering cops,” who transfer between departments after committing misconduct.
Employment history data are basic information that 27 other states around the country, including Vermont, have released to a national reporting project.
“It doesn’t make any sense that the previous employment of these officers wouldn’t be tracked and recorded if the ultimate goal was to prevent police misconduct from occurring,” Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition,” is quoted as saying. “We’re only getting half the story without this information.”
Over the course of 3,500 words, Faraone and Stecklow go into great detail in explaining what data are missing and what the implications might be. As for the POST Commission, it has earned a New England Muzzle Award for only partially lifting the veil of secrecy that protects police officers who’ve been accused of misconduct.
The story, by the way, is the product of a partnership between BINJ and the Invisible Institute that Faraone explains here. Their investigation is being published not just by BINJ’s HorizonMass affiliate but also by The Shoestring in Western Massachusetts, Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World newsletter, and about a half-dozen hyperlocal weeklies and other publications.
And lest we overlook the mutual backscratching opportunities here, I’ve interviewed BINJ and HorizonMass co-founder Jason Pramas on “What Works,” our podcast about the future of local news, while Faraone and Stecklow give a shoutout to the Muzzle Awards in their article.
In the weeks after President Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 presidential debate, there were several crucial data points. His interviews with George Stephanopoulos and Lester Holt, which did little to restore confidence in his abilities to think and communicate clearly. A Wall Street Journal story on how his staff was stage-managing his decline. A New York Times op-ed by the actor George Clooney, a longtime Biden friend and supporter, urging the president to step aside.
So I don’t want to make too much of a story by Olivia Nuzzi, published in early July by New York magazine, which described Biden as increasingly out of it and obviously unfit to stay in the campaign. But I will tell you that it made an impression on me at the time, combining first-hand observation and quotes from people close to Biden. Yes, the quotes were anonymous, a fact that is now being added to the bill of particulars against Nuzzi. But haven’t we all gotten accustomed to that? Did anyone seriously expect Biden’s friends to step forward and attach their names to what they were saying — other than Clooney?
Here’s an excerpt from Nuzzi’s story that describes — rather compellingly, I think — the rising fears among Biden’s friends and supporters:
When they discussed what they knew, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.
Now we know that Nuzzi’s entire article was corrupt. That is, it’s suffused with a kind of wrongdoing that’s separate from fabulism or plagiarism, two species of journalistic ethics violations that we’re all familiar with. Nuzzi’s piece might be entirely accurate as well as truthful in its judgments and conclusions. But we don’t know. We’ll never know.
You probably have heard that Nuzzi was involved in some sort of sex scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was, by turns, a Democratic and then an independent candidate for president before ending his ridiculous campaign and endorsing Trump. The details of the scandal aren’t important; they reportedly involve nude photos, maybe sexting. What matters is Nuzzi was writing that Biden was too infirm to stand for re-election while she was sexually involved with one of his rivals.
The story about Nuzzi and Kennedy was broken last Thursday by independent media reporter Oliver Darcy in his newsletter, Status. Darcy reported that Nuzzi had been placed on leave, and he published this statement from New York magazine:
Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.
Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.
No evidence of bias? I just pointed out massive evidence of bias. You can’t report on one candidate when you’re sexually involved with another. Or as the late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal once memorably put it: “I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.” Much of what Nuzzi wrote about Biden was obvious to anyone who had watched Biden fumbling and stumbling on TV. But did she lay it on a little thick to help Kennedy? Did she make Biden seem more infirm than he really was? Or was she truly able to separate the personal from the professional? Who knows?
The last Nuzzi story I encountered was just a couple of weeks ago. It was a long interview with Trump that struck me as interesting, offering some insights into Trump’s thinking following the first assassination attempt, but weirdly soft and sympathetic. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now we know that she was involved, or had been involved, with someone who was angling for a high position in a possible Trump administration. Again — no bias? Seriously? By the way, I listened to her Trump profile on The New York Times’ audio app, and I’m sure Times editors are thrilled to have learned that they provided Nuzzi with an additional platform she didn’t deserve.
Unlike some observers who’ve been piling on Nuzzi, I knew nothing about her until last week except that was young (31) and employed by a magazine that I thought had high standards. I remember with relish a story she wrote several years ago about traipsing through New York City with a clearly inebriated Rudy Giuliani. I knew she had a reputation for being extraordinarily talented.
One story of hers I have not read is her profile of Kennedy from last November, which is reportedly what led to whatever it was that came next.
On a personal level, what a mess. The oft-married Kennedy has been caught cheating (I guess?) on his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, while Nuzzi was until recently engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza, who lost a previous job at The New Yorker over some MeToo allegations.
But you can get caught up on all the tabloid details elsewhere. What matters is that Nuzzi, one of our highest-profile political writers, wrote two long profiles this year that were so enmeshed in her undisclosed (at the time) conflict of interest that we now have no way of knowing whether they were on the level — or were instead hopelessly compromised.
The Keene Sentinel has been a leader in changing how it covers police news
Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe has an interesting story exploring why many startup local news organizations are taking a different approach to how they cover police news. Rather than running the police log verbatim, including the names of people charged with minor offenses, they’re taking care to focus only on crime stories that have a real impact on people’s lives. He writes:
As longtime newspapers in Massachusetts and across the country continue to disappear, a new crop of online news sites are looking to win over audiences and reimagine how they share police log information. Some have continued the news industries’ tradition of publishing police logs to give people information about public safety, but limit what details they share. Others have decided not to post the logs in an attempt to move away from a reliance on unchallenged police accounts and avoid potentially contributing to a misperception about crime in their communities.
This is an issue I’ve been following intermittently since the 1980s, when I worked for a small paper whose editor-owner would not publish the names of people who’d been arrested for minor offenses. All of us younger reporters in the newsroom thought he was wrong, but I later came to see the wisdom of his approach. After all, “minimize harm” is one of the four principles contained within the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
Here are three pieces I’ve written over the years that expand on Ryan’s reporting. I hope you find them of some interest.
“A murder, a media frenzy, and the rise of a new form of local news,” Nieman Lab, June 5, 2013. An excerpt from my book “The Wired City,” which is primarily about the New Haven Independent, a digital nonprofit founded in 2005. Among other things, I explore founder Paul Bass’ decision not to identify a “person of interest” named by police in the murder of a young Yale lab technician.
“How an escapade on a frozen pond led one newspaper to reform its crime coverage,” Media Nation, Sept. 26, 2022. An account of how The Keene Sentinel, in southwest New Hampshire, had changed its approach to covering police news by eliminating accounts of minor incidents, focusing on major crimes and trends, and giving people a chance to have their misdeeds removed from Google search — something a number of other papers, including The Boston Globe, have also done.
But 
