The nonprofit Cambridge Day is beefing up, hiring veteran journalist Michael Fitzgerald as its editor. Founding editor Marc Levy will remain on board as well.
For many years the Day operated as pretty much a one-person shop, but now it’s got a board of directors and regular contributors. It also offers a weekly print edition and offers some coverage of Somerville as well as Cambridge.
This is yet another example of a community stepping up to fill the gap left by the newspaper chain Gannett’s abandonment of its weekly newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts. Gannett shut down the venerable Cambridge Chronicle in 2022, ending its print edition and replacing local news on its Wicked Local website with irrelevant filler from around the region.
The full announcement of Fitzgerald’s hiring follows.
Click on image for the interactive version of the map.
A new grant-supported project tracks LGBTQ media projects across the country.
According to News Is Out, the LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project “offers the first in-depth look at the scope, impact and urgent needs of local LGBTQ+ media across the United States. The report shows how these vital outlets, from one-person operations to established multimedia platforms, face shrinking advertising revenue, little foundation support and growing external threats, even as their audiences surge.”
The project was created in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Media Foundation, News Is Out and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
On the afternoon that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered, three teenagers, including the shooter, were reported to be in critical condition following a school shooting in Evergreen, Colorado. The shooter later died.
The only difference between these two awful events is that we’ve become numb to gun violence aimed at our children. Indeed, the Colorado incident barely registered in the media, while Kirk’s assassination got front-page coverage and was virtually the only story on cable news Wednesday evening.
What can any of us say at a moment like this except that it was just another day in America? Oliver Darcy offers a rundown (sub. req.) of recent incidents involving political violence:
Acts of political extremism are surfacing with alarming regularity in this country. Paul Pelosi was brutally attacked in his own home. Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer. Luigi Mangione was charged in December with killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in what authorities described as a politically motivated act. In the spring, an arsonist set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence and prosecutors later charged a suspect with attempted murder. In Minnesota over the summer, a man was charged after stalking Democrats and murdering House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband. Last month, a gunman sprayed more than 180 bullets at the Centers for Disease Control headquarters, killing a police officer. Each of the incidents were different, but together they paint an unsettling portrait: political violence is increasingly becoming the norm in America.
Darcy is correct in observing that the rise of politically motivated attacks is deeply disturbing. So is the ongoing epidemic of school shootings — not to mention mass gun violence in general. Let’s not forget the horror that unfolded in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023, when a gunman killed 18 people and injured 13 more.
The Charlie Kirk killing is different in that it has all the appearances of a political assassination; it took place in front of a large crowd of students at Utah Valley University; and the shooting was captured on video that then went viral on social media. One of the videos making the rounds was among the most graphic and disturbing I’ve seen.
Then, too, there was Kirk’s notoriety. He was about as famous as it is possible for a political figure to become without actually serving as an elected official or in a high government position. He was, as you no doubt know, notorious on the left, which led to a lot of offensive social media posts from people who ought to know better. MSNBC fired conservative-turned-liberal commentator Matthew Dowd after he walked right up to the edge of suggesting that Kirk got what he deserved. Dowd later apologized.
There’s really nothing to say at a time like this except that we have to do something about gun violence in this country, and that violence of any kind needs to be firmly condemned by all of us. Our thoughts today should be with Charlie Kirk and his family — as well as the families of the school shooting victims in Colorado, in addition to all the other victims of shootings, past and future.
Fox News wall in New York City. Photo (cc) 2019 by ajay_suresh.
Until this week, I had been cautiously optimistic about the future of the Murdoch media empire. That optimism was based on two accounts that were published last February.
The New York Times Magazine weighed in with an article about the succession drama involving the four adult children of Rupert Murdoch who had been designated as his heirs, while The Atlantic ran with a lengthy profile of James Murdoch, the brother who had lost power and who was seeking revenge, redemption or both.
The upshot was that James and his two sisters had won a convoluted civil suit to overturn the terms of their inheritance. Rupert’s designated heir, Lachlan, would be outnumbered by his three siblings after their father departs this vale of tears. And there was reason to believe that James, Prudence and Elisabeth might try to remake Murdoch’s right-wing properties — especially Fox News — along the lines of more normal conservative outlets.
It was not to be. On Monday evening, Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler of the Times, who wrote the earlier Times Magazine story, reported that James, Prudence and Elisabeth Murdoch had sold their shares of the family’s holdings for $1.1 billion apiece. The deal ensures that Lachlan Murdoch will remain in charge. Given that he is regarded as even more right-wing than his father, and politically out of step with his more moderate siblings, it would seem that Fox News, the New York Post et al. will continue as a toxic fungus spreading across the body politic.
The Times story suggests that James Murdoch’s indiscretions in talking with McKay Coppins of The Atlantic may have hastened the deal. Legal proceedings were under way accusing James of violating the terms of the family trust by disclosing confidential information to Coppins. Perhaps James decided to throw in the towel rather than get caught up in yet another protracted court fight.
Then again, it was never clear that the three siblings’ distaste for the lying and hate-mongering that define Fox News outweighed their interest in keeping it the money flowing in. They are all well aware of what happened when Fox called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden on the grounds that he had, you know, won. A large share of Fox’s Trump-worshipping audience immediately decamped for even farther-right cable channels like NewsMax and OAN. Fox soon got with the program, and the audience returned, though the Murdochs ended up having to pay a $787.5 million libel settlement because several of their on-air hosts lied about the Dominion voting-machine company.
With Fox News now officially a lost cause, we can only hope that the Murdochs maintain the excellence of The Wall Street Journal. Though the Journal’s editorial pages are conservative, they are normal (even more so than before Murdoch bought the paper in 2007), and they’ve taken Donald Trump to task on such anti-business moves as tariffs.
Moreover, the Journal’s news pages are on fire. Editor-in-chief Emma Tucker has emerged as perhaps our most prominent and respected editor following Marty Baron’s retirement at The Washington Post. Not only has the Journal broken some major stories about Trump’s depravity, including his birthday letter to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, but it is filled every day with interesting stories about business and culture that you won’t see in the Times.
Lachlan Murdoch’s purview includes the Journal even now. So we can only hope that the Journal’s status as one of our great papers continues after Rupert is no longer looking over his shoulder.
Note: With this post I am starting a new practice. Rather than indicating which stories are available through gift links, I am simply going to note when a story is blocked by a paywall. I’ll use the old Romenesko label: “sub. req.”
Marblehead Light from Fort Sewell. Photo (cc) 2009 by mygiraffe.
The town of Marblehead, an affluent community of about 20,000 residents on Boston’s North Shore, is proving to be a hotbed for hyperlocal journalism.
Just a few years ago, its only newspaper was the Gannett-owned Marblehead Reporter. Then, after the chain dumped virtually all of its weeklies’ local coverage in favor of regional content, three different independent news projects moved in to fill the void. One eventually ceased operations, leaving the town with two. Soon, though, the count will return to three.
What’s fueling the latest startup is the departure last month of Will Dowd from the Marblehead Current. Dowd, the community editor as well as a co-founder, had been with the Current from its launch in 2022. But the Current, a nonprofit print weekly with a robust website, is dealing with some financial challenges, which led to the elimination of Dowd’s full-time job.
Now Dowd is starting The Marblehead Independent, built on the increasingly popular Ghost newsletter platform. He expects to debut later this month. Dowd told me by email that he decided to go solo rather than accept the Current’s offer to continue as a paid freelancer for much less money. “I don’t hold any animosity over it; the board had to do what it had to do,” he said.
The Current recently published an editorial thanking Dowd for his work but adding that its nonprofit status “does not relieve the Current of its obligation to balance its books.” An uncertain financial environment, the editorial said, led it to impose “drastic temporary measures, like 25% across-the-board pay cuts,” adding: “We, of course, will continue to work for brighter days, as we turn over every rock in search of funding.”
The town is also served by the Marblehead Weekly News, a for-profit print weekly mailed to every home in town and owned by The Daily Item of nearby Lynn. For a time, a for-profit digital project known as the Marblehead Beacon operated as well. The Beacon suspended publication in late 2023, although its website is still live.
At a time when many communities don’t have a single reliable local news source, Marblehead is served by a plethora of outlets, the Current’s challenges notwithstanding. The median household income in Marblehead is about $166,000, which is about 64% higher than the statewide median of $101,000.
But that only proves a point that my research partner Ellen Clegg and I often make. Affluent suburban communities are finding ways to overcome the local news crisis while rural areas and urban communities of color are often being left behind.
Meanwhile, I hope both the Current and the Independent — and, yes, the Weekly News, too — are able to survive and thrive.
J. Jonah Jameson of “Spider-Man” fame visits the San Diego Comic-Con in 2017. Photo (cc) by William Tung.
When does aggressive but acceptable behavior on the part of editors cross the line into workplace abuse? Back when I was covering the media for The Boston Phoenix, I heard some hair-raising stories emanating from the newsrooms at The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.
But though the targets of that abuse were shaken up, consequences for perpetrators were few. There was a sense at least among some folks that it went with the territory, and that if you didn’t like it, you should suck it up. I’ll hasten to add that I didn’t accept that line of thinking, and I’m fortunate to have never been yelled at by an editor — at least not one I worked for. (A few editors I’ve reported on let me have it, but that’s OK.)
Photo by Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke via Pixabay
Nearly four years ago, Ellen Clegg and I began tracking solutions to the local news crisis with our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our first guest was Lori Ehrlich, at that time a state representative who was working to launch a commission to study the state of community journalism in Massachusetts and make some recommendations.
The commission has twice failed to achieve liftoff, but Ellen and I have built a multidimensional project. We wrote a well-received book, “What Works in Community News,” which was published by Beacon Press in 2024. And we are involved in other ways as well.
Today the What Works project, which is part of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and affiliated with the university’s Center for Transformative Media, comprises several different initiatives:
Our website, where we post updates to the projects that we write about in our book, new episodes of our podcast, and news and commentary about other developments in local news.
Our podcast, on which we interview enterpreneurs and thought leaders on an every-other-week basis. We’ll be back later this month with our 105th episode following a summer hiatus.
Our Bluesky feed, where we link to coverage and smaller items that don’t quite meet the criteria for a full blog post. If you’re not interested in joining Bluesky, you’ll find our news feed embedded on the website. If you’re reading What Works on your laptop, just cast your eyes to the right.
A database of independent local news organizations in Massachusetts. Although much of our work is national in scope, we also believe we can offer unique value to the grassroots journalism community right here at home. Look for links to “Mass. Indy News” in the upper right corner of this blog and at the What Works website. You can also bookmark it at tinyurl.com/mass-indy-news.
Speaking appearances at which we talk about our book and evangelize about the future of local news. We also engage in ad hoc consulting with the leaders of news projects that are either startups or moving in new directions.
Gatherings for local news leaders both in person and via webinar. We’re already planning our second in-person conference, which will be held next year on Friday, March 13.
Ellen and I are trying to build something of lasting value and to push back against the narrative that local news is dead. Through independent community control and innovative nonprofit and for-profit business models, we believe the local news crisis is being solved one community at a time.
What would Walter Cronkite say? The legendary CBS News anchorman at the 1976 presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Public domain photo.
Is there a media organization that’s fallen harder or faster in the Age of Trump II than CBS News? You might point to The Washington Post, but Jeff Bezos has thus far left its news coverage alone, contenting himself with taking a wrecking ball to the opinion section.
By contrast, CBS’s corporate overlords earlier this year settled a bogus lawsuit brought by Donald Trump against the network’s premier news program, “60 Minutes,” for $16 million in order to grease the skids for a sale to Skydance Media, headed by the Trump-friendly David Ellison.
And now comes the next act in this tragedy. According to a story first broken by Puck and since confirmed by other news outlets, Ellison is on the verge of acquiring The Free Press, a prominent right-leaning opinion outlet founded by Bari Weiss, the celebrity former New York Times opinion editor. The price tag could be somewhere between $100 million and $200 million. The idea is to bring Weiss inside the CBS tent and give her a major leadership role over CBS News.
What a revolting development. I’m not a regular reader of The Free Press, but its reputation is not so much right-wing as it is anti-anti-Trump. As CNN media reporter Brian Stelter wrote in July, when talk of a Weiss-Ellison alliance was starting to bubble up: “Earlier this year New York magazine described The Free Press as a media organ that ‘both wants to excoriate liberals but not fold fully into the MAGA wing.’”
Perhaps The Free Press’ most notorious piece was a takedown of NPR by one of the network’s former top editors, Uri Berliner. As I wrote at the time, Berliner’s screed was shot through with intellectual dishonesty, as he built his argument that NPR had fallen victim to liberal bias on a scaffolding of mischaracterizations and outright falsehoods. Look at its homepage this morning and you’ll see clickbait such as “How Zohran Mamdani Could Kill New York’s Schools,” “Is There a Dumber Housing Policy Than Rent Control?” and “The Democratic Socialists of America Don’t Know If They Should Condemn Murder.”
Media reporter Oliver Darcy on Wednesday wrote an excoriating takedown of the pending deal and the absurd notion that The Free Press is somehow worth $100 million or more, saying in part:
Ellison appears determined to replicate the John Malone playbook at CNN: nudge the newsroom into a posture more deferential to Trump, launder that shift as “balance,” and hope the MAGA crowd will suddenly reward him. But this formula is already tired and simply doesn’t work. Meddling at CNN, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times has only destabilized those institutions. It chases away the core audience, while failing to win over the right-wing demographic, which has no interest in embracing legacy news brands no matter how many concessions are made. These audiences celebrate the destabilization of news institutions, not because they will ever turn to them for information, but because they despise them and want to see them burn to ash.
CBS News was never quite the “Tiffany network” of legend. Edward R. Murrow was gradually sidelined during the years after he publicly called out Red Scare-monger Joseph McCarthy. Dan Rather, still going strong at 93, was eased out as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and producer Mary Mapes was fired after the short-lived “60 Minutes II” aired a report in 2004 about then-President George W. Bush’s sketchy service in the Air National Guard that was, admittedly, based in part on phony documents.
Never, though, has CBS News fallen as far as it has this year. Giving Bari Weiss some sort of oversight role may represent a new low, but I have a feeling that will soon be eclipsed by some other outrage. Walter Cronkite weeps.
It’s time for the Globe to ease up a bit on the metered paywall. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kali Norby.
Boston Globe Media has named a vice president of product. Jim Bodor “will help define and implement our product vision and strategy, ensuring our products are customer-centric, innovative, and market-leading,” according to an email to the staff forwarded to me by a trusted source. And I could give him an earful. Here are three ideas I hope are on his to-do list:
Clean up the homepage. Overly busy homepages are epidemic among leading newspaper websites, including those of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — not to mention large regionals like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Minnesota Star Tribune. Still, the Globe takes it to another level. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Offer some gift links. The Times and the Post give subscribers 10 links a month that they can share on social media or with friends. The Journal and The Atlantic offer unlimited sharing. Giving non-subscribers some grazing privileges can turn them into paying customers. Why not start with five or six shares a month and see how it goes?
Fix the social connection. Sometimes I’ll be scrolling Bluesky or Facebook and I’ll see a link to a Globe story that I want to read. I’m a paying subscriber. I’m logged in. Yet if I try to come in from an external link, more often than not I’ll hit the Globe’s paywall. The Globe isn’t the only publication that has that issue, but it’s time to repair it once and for all.
What follows is the full text of the memo announcing Bodor’s appointment. Dhiraj is Dhiraj Nayar, the president and chief financial officer of Globe Media. AB is Anthony Bonfiglio, the chief technology officer.
Team,
We are excited to share that Jim Bodor joined us today in the new role of VP of Product at Boston Globe Media. Jim will help define and implement our product vision and strategy, ensuring our products are customer-centric, innovative, and market-leading.
Jim will partner closely with the newsrooms, sales, business, technology, and marketing to achieve key business outcomes focused on furthering our product-led culture of innovation, experimentation, and audience-first thinking.
Jim brings extensive experience as a digital product leader in the media and learning industries. Most recently, he served as vice president of product management at Harvard Business Publishing (HBR), where he led HBR’s first generative AI initiatives, directed the relaunch of the HBR.org mobile app, and championed the company’s first virtual events program, among other things.
Early in his career, Jim held leadership roles at WGBH and The Boston Globe, where he launched subscription products, scaled digital platforms, modernized content strategy, and led redesigns of award-winning programs.
Across all of these roles, Jim has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to balance strategic vision with operational excellence, blending business acumen, customer focus, and product innovation.
Not Dead Yet “is a national, grassroots disability rights group that opposes legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia as deadly forms of discrimination.”
Jeff Jacoby has a sharp column up at The Boston Globe on the dangers of physician-assisted suicide, writing that “a decent society does not enlist physicians to end lives; it strives to relieve suffering while upholding life’s inestimable worth.”
I wrote about the same topic a couple of weeks ago in my supporters newsletter. Like Jeff, I was motivated by a deep investigation published by The Atlantic (gift link). Here’s what I had to say:
***
At some point, the Massachusetts Legislature is expected to take up the matter of physician-assisted suicide, and when that time comes, I intend to pull together something more coherent than today’s newsletter.
Suffice it to say that I am extremely skeptical, and I don’t like efforts to relabel it as “medical aid in dying,” a euphemism piled on top of a euphemism in an attempt to play down the reality. As an auxiliary member of the disability community, I’m deeply concerned that physician-assisted suicide could be a way of encouraging people to kill themselves as a way of saving money for the health-care system. As the disability-rights organization Not Dead Yet puts it, “assisted suicide and euthanasia” should be regarded as “deadly forms of discrimination.”
What prompts today’s essay is an article in The Atlantic by Elaina Plott Calabro on Canada’s experience with physician-assisted suicide. If you are interested in this issue at all, then I urge you to read it in full. Calabro is rigorously fair, even going along with Canada’s absurd acronym for medical aid in dying, MAID, as though a kindly woman was going to enter your room and blissfully whisk you off to another dimension.
But what comes through is that a system that began with allowing terminally ill people in their final days of life to opt out of the pain and suffering they were experiencing has devolved into something entirely different, with people choosing to die because they are depressed, because they’re burdened with high medical bills, or just because the Canadian law places patient autonomy ahead of all other values. Calabro writes:
Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?
Physician-assisted suicide rears its head in Massachusetts every so often. The Boston Globe has editorialized in favor of it, and in 2024 was embarrassed when it was revealed that staff member Kevin Cullen had actually signed papers to hasten the death of a woman whose journey he was chronicling. If we begin moving toward legalization here, I’ll have more to say. At the very least, we need stringent protections to make sure that this extraordinary remedy is reserved for extraordinary circumstances. Then again, the Canadian example shows that once physician-assisted suicide is normalized, then protections that had been put in place quickly fade away.
