Why rigorous opinion journalism continues to be a crucial part of local news

A good opinion section builds community. It’s an argument that my “What Works in Community News” partner, Ellen Clegg, makes over and over. As editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, she eliminated the last vestiges of nationally syndicated columnists and pushed the pages toward mostly local content. That has continued under her successors at the Globe, including the current opinion editor, James Dao.

Now Gretchen A. Peck of Editor & Publisher has checked in with three top journalists who are working for their papers’ opinion sections — Julieta Chiquillo, deputy editorial page editor at The Dallas Morning News; Peter St. Onge, editorial page editor at three North Carolina papers, The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer of Raleigh and The Herald-Sun of Durham, as well as opinion editor at McClatchy; and Lorraine Forte, opinion editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.

They all make similar points: local opinion journalism based on rigorous reporting is a crucial part of a local or regional newspaper’s mission. “I think it’s part of what gives the newspaper a personality and creates a sense of community,” Forte told Peck. “Otherwise, you’re just a collection of news stories.”

Indeed, the Sun-Times restored political endorsements about 10 years ago after briefly abolishing them. Many chain-owned dailies have gotten rid of endorsements because they’re a lot of work and because the owners don’t want to alienate any of their readers. There’s an additional problem as well: the new generation of nonprofit local news outlets can’t endorse without losing their tax-exempt status. Yet in many cases readers are looking for guidance — perhaps not on the big races, but certainly on more obscure offices like city council, school committee or select board.

Several years ago, Joshua Darr and his colleagues studied what happened when a Gannett daily, the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, eliminated national opinion content and replace it with local opinion for one month. Darr, who’s now at Syracuse University, and his colleagues found a small but measurable decline in partisan polarization after that month, as Ellen wrote at the time. Darr later talked about his findings on our podcast.

As someone who worked full-time in opinion journalism for many years at The Boston Phoenix, The Guardian and GBH News, I strongly believe that fair-minded point-of-view writing needs to be part of any news organization’s mission — and that it’s at least as important at the local level as it is on national issues.

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‘What Works’ comes to Danvers on Tuesday

Ellen Clegg and I will be at my old stomping grounds, the Peabody Institute Library of Danvers, on Tuesday, April 9, from 7 to 8 p.m. We’ll be talking about our book, “What Works at Community News,” followed by selling and signing. It would be great to see you there!

In Colorado, an intriguing experiment — and a disturbing anti-press move by the GOP

The Colorado Statehouse in Denver. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

Two stories about journalism from Colorado this morning, one intriguing, one disturbing. The state’s media ecosystem is one of the subjects of our book, “What Works in Community News.”

• Intriguing. Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins reports: “More than two dozen Colorado newsrooms have launched an unprecedented collaboration to better cover the 2024 elections.” These news outlets, led by the Colorado News Collaborative, have embraced what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the Citizen’s Agenda, whereby journalists will report on the issues that the public is most concerned about and gear their coverage around what they learn. It’s a more substantive approach than the horse-race model of political coverage, which focuses on polls and day-to-day sparring among the candidates.

Unprecedented? Not really. The Citizen’s Agenda is a revival of the public journalism movement of the 1990s, and Rosen was at the center of that, too. It faded away back then, although it never disappeared entirely. See, for instance, my account of this 2013 event on education reform sponsored by the New Haven Independent. The Colorado experiment, though, represents what could be the most fully realized example of public journalism in many years.

• Disturbing. Colorado Sun political reporter Sandra Fish was removed from a meeting of the state Republican Party “after being told that party Chairman Dave Williams found her ‘current reporting to be very unfair,'” according to Sun reporter Jennifer Brown. Although Fish had received a text from a party official telling her not to come, she showed up anyway and was able to obtain a press credential — only to be identified an hour later and escorted from the scene by a sheriff’s deputy.

“This is not a partisan issue,” Sun editor Larry Ryckman wrote in an email to subscribers. “The Founding Fathers understood that a free press is a pillar of a healthy democracy – and not just when reporters write stories politicians might like. That’s why they enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The public has a right to know. Public officials should be accountable and willing to have their words and actions scrutinized in the light of day.”

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The real problem with Facebook; or, taking a stroll down Indian Dick Road

Facebook now allows you to post a link to a story in the Kansas Reflector that was critical of Facebook. I tested it a little while ago. As I wrote the other day, I assumed it was initially blocked not because of the actual content of the story. I offered one data point — a Johnny Cash lyric I posted a few years ago that got me in trouble, apparently because it makes reference to guns and murder. Here are two more.

First, the Reflector story that got blocked is about a climate-mitigation program called Hot Times in the Heartland. Whoa! Sounds like some kinky stuff going on in the wheat fields.

Second, one of the worst stories about Facebook censorship I’ve heard involved The Mendocino Voice. I wrote about it in our book, “What Works in Community News.” It seems that the Voice had used Facebook to pass along an important announcement from the sheriff’s office about a wildfire evacuation route. It got taken down, though it was quickly restored when the Voice howled. No explanation was ever offered, but Adrian Fernandez Baumann, the Voice’s co-founder, observed that the post included a reference to Indian Dick Road.

The real problem with Facebook — and other Meta products, like Instagram and Threads — is that Mark Zuckerberg and company refuse to invest a single penny beyond what is absolutely necessary to create a better product. Everything is automated, robo-censors control our lives, and complaining is only occasionally successful.

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The Chicago public media merger, hailed two years ago, hits some serious bumps

Half full or half empty? Photo (cc) 2014 by bradhoc

Among the projects that almost made it into “What Works in Community News” was the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Public Media, which merged two years ago. It struck Ellen Clegg and me as a leading example of how public media could step up to preserve local and regional news, especially after the city’s leading paper, the Chicago Tribune, fell into the hands of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

Now the combined enterprise is laying people off. Dave McKinney of WBEZ, which is part of Chicago Public Media, reports that about 15% of 62 union content creators at the radio station are losing their jobs, and that four positions on the business side at the Sun-Times would be cut. In all, 14 jobs will be eliminated.

McKinney notes acidly:

The job cuts coincide with the debut of a $6.4 million, state-of-the-art studio at WBEZ’s Navy Pier office and follows a double-digit-percentage pay increase for Chicago Public Media’s top executive. Additionally, other high-level executives departed the not-for-profit news organization in December.

The announcement follows cuts and threats of cuts at a number of public media outlets around the country, including WAMU in Washington, Colorado Public Radio and, in Boston, WBUR and GBH, neither of which has announced layoffs but have pointedly said cuts may be coming.

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How Rev. Laura Everett is making Greater Boston a better place

Lisa Hughes of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) has put together a terrific profile of my friend Laura Everett as part of her “Change Makers” series. I got to know Rev. Laura some years back through Twitter — yes, there was actually a time in those pre-Musk days when you could make friends there. When we moved back to Medford in 2015 after a 29-year absence, I asked her for church recommendations, and we found Grace Episcopal Church as a result.

I learned some interesting facts about Everett from Hughes’ profile. For instance, I didn’t know that she started divinity school on 9/11, which is a story in and of itself. She tells Hughes:

When I’m with a congregation, we’re trying to repair our broken relationships with one another. When I’m with the City of Boston Reparations Task Force, that is a citywide effort to repair an unjust history. This is all the work of repair.

Everett, who’s executive director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, is also a passionate advocate for urban cycling and women’s sports; she wrote about the latter for WBUR.org this week. And she’s as generous with her time, giving an interview to one of my intermediate reporting students just recently. Count her among those people who are making Greater Boston a better place.

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A nonprofit news outlet gets blocked by Facebook after publishing a critical story

The Kansas Reflector, which has done some great work in exposing the illegal police raid on the Marion County Record in rural Kansas, got blocked by Facebook for what it reports was seven hours earlier today. Indeed, I got a notice from Facebook that something I’d linked to in the Reflector last August was being taken down.

Folks at the Reflector, a nonprofit that’s part of the States Newsroom network, are wondering if a story they published that was critical of Facebook had anything to do with it. Probably not. I’ve been kicking the hell out of Facebook for years without any problem. The only time I can remember ending up in Facebook purgatory was when I answered a question about the greatest single line in a song. My offending answer: “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Guns, death, algorithms!

The Reflector quotes a Twitter post from Meta spokesman Andy Stone, who said, “This was an error that had nothing to do with the Reflector’s recent criticism of Meta. It has since been reversed and we apologize to the Reflector and its readers for the mistake.” As of this writing, though, you still can’t share a link to the story that criticized Facebook. I tried just to see what would happen and got the following message: “Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can’t be edited.”

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Could Boston’s two newsy public radio stations merge? Plus, local news tidbits.

WBUR’s CitySpace. Photo (cc) 2023 by Todd Van Hoosear

Before social media, when blogging was everything, a lot of us wrote what were known as “link blogs” — that is, a running list of links with little in the way of commentary. Now that social media is (are?) falling apart as a way for distributing journalism, I’m trying to get back to that, mixing in some short posts with longer pieces.

But there’s a problem. I have a sizable contingent of readers who receive new posts by email and, at least at the moment, I don’t have a way of giving them the option of receiving one daily email with the day’s posts. I’d like to do something about that once the semester ends and I have some time. No one wants to receive multiple emails with short posts throughout the day. So here are three media stories I don’t want you to miss, pulled together in one post.

• Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan follows up the paper’s recent stories on struggles at the city’s two news-oriented public radio stations, GBH (89.7 FM) and WBUR (90.9 FM), with a closer look at whether both of them can survive in their current form. As someone who was a paid contributor to GBH News from 1998 to 2022, I have to say a lot of us were puzzled in 2009 when GBH announced it would turn its classical- and jazz-oriented radio station into a direct competitor with WBUR. You might say that it worked until it didn’t, and now there are some serious questions. The most provocative: Could the two radio stations merge? The answer: Probably not, but who knows?

• The local news crisis has led a number of college and university journalism programs to step up with their own solutions. At Northeastern, for instance, we publish The Scope, a grant-supported digital publication that covers social-justice issues in Greater Boston. Well, The Daily Iowan, an independent nonprofit newspaper that covers the University of Iowa, is going several steps further than that, acquiring two struggling weekly community newspapers. “It’s a really great way to help the problem of news deserts in rural areas,” the paper’s executive editor, Sabine Martin, told The Associated Press.

I contacted the paper to ask whether students who report for the weeklies will be paid. Publisher Jason Drummond responded that the details are still being worked out, but that students will be paid for work they produce exclusively for the weeklies, which are also in the process of hiring paid student interns. The weeklies will be able to pick up stories from The Daily Iowan for free, but the Iowan’s staff members are already paid.

• Four years ago I visited The Mendocino Voice, which covers a rural area in Northern California; it was my first reporting trip for “What Works in Community News.” The Voice, I learned, has to devote a lot of its resources to covering the state’s extreme weather, especially wildfires. Now the Voice’s publisher and co-founder, Kate Maxwell, is putting together a Local News Go Bag Toolkit so that local news organizations can prepare for emergencies. “The emphasis is on preparing before a disaster — it’s the most important step that journalists, newsrooms, and communities can take. This project is designed to be useful for local newsrooms and journalists at any stage of a disaster,” writes Maxwell, who’s currently a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. The toolkit is a work in progress, and she’s asking for ideas from other journalists.

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