Paid circulation of Worcester’s daily newspaper has dropped by about 80% in 10 years

Former headquarters of the Telegram & Gazette. Photo (cc) 2011 by Daderot.

With a population just north of 200,000, Worcester is the second largest city in New England; surrounding Worcester County is home to more than four times that number of residents. Yet the 157-year-old Telegram & Gazette, the daily newspaper of record in Central Massachusetts, has lost most of its paid readership under the ownership of Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain.

According to Statements of Ownership that the T&G filed with the U.S. Postal Service on Oct. 1, average weekday paid circulation of the print edition stands at 8,698. The paper also reported an average of 4,133 paid electronic copies for a total paid average weekday circulation of 12,831. On Sundays, the numbers are 12,403 for print, 4,054 for electronic, and 16,457 for total paid average circulation. And as I pointed out the other day, digital circulation is reported using guidelines from the Alliance for Audited Media, which are somewhat inflated since AAN allows for some double-counting of print and digital.

Ten years ago, the T&G enjoyed paid circulation (print plus digital) of 74,000 on weekdays and 78,000 on Sundays, according to a story published just after then-new owner John Henry visited the paper’s offices, which means that circulation is down about 80% over the past decade. The aftermath of that meeting proved to be contentious, with T&G folks coming away from it believing that Henry — who acquired the paper as part of his purchase of The Boston Globe — had promised not to sell unless he could find a local buyer.

“It’s good to hear John Henry is focused on finding the right owner for the newspaper,” T&G publisher Bruce Gaultney was quoted as saying after meeting with Henry.

Henry later told me that he believed he’d promised only that he wouldn’t sell to GateHouse Media chain, which was notorious for laying off journalists and slashing coverage. Henry ended up selling to a Florida chain, which in turned handed it off to GateHouse, now Gannett. And Gannett has gutted the T&G, as it has so many of its properties.

Worcester is not a news desert. It has a number of other outlets, including the Worcester Business Journal, MassLive, the fledgling nonprofit Worcester Guardian, a GBH News bureau and several smaller outlets, including a lively aggregation service called The016. The once-mighty Telegram & Gazette, though, is barely a shadow of its former self.

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Jason Pramas on HorizonMass, a news nonprofit that brings students and professionals together

Photo courtesy of Jason Pramas

On the latest What Works podcast, I talk with Jason Pramas, executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and editor-in-chief of a new project called HorizonMass. (My co-host, Ellen Clegg, expects to return for the next episode.) Along with Boston journalist Chris Faraone, Jason is a co-founder of BINJ, which partners with community publications on investigative stories and civic engagement initiatives, and offers training programs to promising young journalists.

Now Jason is making a bold bet on the future of news by training a new generation of journalists. He’s launching HorizonMass, a statewide digital news publication with a focus on public interest journalism. At HorizonMass, college interns work as reporters, designers, marketers and editors alongside more experienced professional freelance writers.

Later on, in Quick Takes, I look at some data about news referrals from social media giants, specifically Facebook and X, or Twitter, or whatever it is this week. Large news organizations had become reliant on both of those platforms while the sort of local news outlets that we track here at What Works were more dependent on Facebook alone. In any case, those days are drawing to a close, and it’s long past time for community journalists to be asking themselves: What’s next?

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

That WSJ report on Iranian involvement in Hamas’ attack is coming under question

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini. 2015 photo by President of Russia.

One of the more chilling early reports following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel was that Iran was involved in planning and approving it. The story, reported by The Wall Street Journal (free link), began:

Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.

The story conjured up the horrifying possibility of a multi-front war dragging in not just Israel and Iran but possibly the United States and Russia as well. It was a Journal exclusive, and the paper has not retracted its report. But the problem with an exclusive is that, as the days go by and no one else matches your reporting, it starts to look like an exclusive for the wrong reasons.

Almost immediately, Josh Marshall took note of the Journal’s reliance on sources inside Hamas and Hezbollah and dismissed the notion of any direct tie between Iran and Hamas’ actions over the weekend. “Anyone looking for a rationale for Israel or the U.S. to declare war on Iran needs to be smacked down hard and ignored,” he wrote. Of course, Iran and Hamas are close allies, and Marshall was careful to note this:

Iran funds and arms Hamas and is cheering on their attack. Hamas also receives training from the network of Iran-backed militias in the region. So it’s not like there’s some big mystery about whose side they’re on or whether they support and supply Hamas.

On Wednesday, meanwhile, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies could find no evidence that Iranian officials had advance knowledge of the Hamas attack. The account begins:

The United States has collected multiple pieces of intelligence that show that key Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas attack in Israel, information that has fueled U.S. doubts that Iran played a direct role in planning the assault, according to several American officials.

The events that are unfolding right now are bad enough without whipping up hysteria that could lead to a wider, even more deadly conflict. Although we can’t know for sure, it looks like the Journal might have gotten played. It’s in Hamas’ interests to drag Iran into the war, and of course Iran would like to stop peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But that doesn’t make the Journal’s story true, and we should regard it as unsupported unless more evidence emerges.

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Circulation holds steady at the Globe while it continues its slow decline at the Herald

Photo (cc) 2008 by Dan Kennedy

The news about paid circulation at Boston’s two daily newspapers is so-so. The Boston Globe is hanging in there, trading paid print for paid digital, while the Boston Herald continues its long, slow slide.

First the Globe. This week the paper published its Statements of Ownership for both the Sunday and daily papers, something it’s required to do under federal postal laws. Average weekday paid print distribution for the one-year period from Sept. 1, 2022, to Aug. 31, 2023, was 64,977, down from 74,220 a year earlier. That’s a decline of nearly 12.5%. The story was the same on Sunday, as the paid print edition on average registered a decline from 128,920 to 116,456, or about 9.7%.

Paid digital, though, gave those numbers a boost. Using the methodology employed by the Alliance for Audited Media, the average weekday combined print and digital circulation for the 12-month period that ended Aug. 31 was, 346,944, up from 337,748 a year earlier. That’s an increase of 2.7%. On Sunday, total paid circulation is now at 408,974, compared to 403,566 the year before. That’s up about 1.3%.

Now, why am I invoking AAM’s methodology? Because its figures have always involved some double-counting, and it’s not entirely clear what they’re measuring and what they’re not measuring. For instance, according to the Globe’s Statements of Ownership, its current average paid electronic distribution on weekdays is 281,967, and on Sundays it’s 292,518. Globe spokeswoman Heidi Flood told me that those numbers are taken from the figures that the paper reports to AAN using the auditing agency’s rules. Also, digital subscribers to the Globe know that you pay one price, so different numbers for weekdays and Sundays make little sense.

So what is the Globe’s own assessment of its paid digital circulation base? Flood told me in an email that the Globe currently has “more than 245,000 digital-only subscriptions.” That’s an increase of about 10,000 since February 2022, when then-editor Brian McGrory said in an email to his staff that paid digital was around 235,000.

Given all that, let’s put current paid circulation of the Globe at about 310,000 on weekdays and 361,000 on Sundays. That’s more or less unchanged over the past year or so, although readership continues to shift from print to digital. Print brings in more money than digital both from subscribers and advertisers, but it also costs more. The Trump years and the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a lot of growth at the Globe, and that has now leveled off.

One possible good omen for the Globe is that the Statements of Ownership show slightly higher paid circulation on the days closest to the filing dates, in early September 2023, than the 12-month averages. That could mean growth continued over the previous year, but I don’t want to overinterpret a small (literally a one-day) sample size.

Over at the Herald, meanwhile, journalist Mark Pickering has taken a look at the latest AAM reports, which cover the six-month period ending March 31 of this year. Pickering, writing for the newsletter Contrarian Boston (sub. req.), found that paid weekday print circulation at the Herald was down 20%, from 20,353 to 16,043; on Sunday, the print Herald dropped 16%, from 23,702 to 19,799.

The Herald’s combined print and digital weekday circulation dropped from 50,707 to 46,783, for a decline of around 8%. But remember, AAM’s digital numbers are somewhat inflated, as some print subscribers are also counted as digital subscribers. As with the weekday numbers, add about 30,000 digital subscribers to get the Herald’s combined paid Sunday circulation.

“For the Herald,” Pickering wrote, “the numbers seem to show that there will be some circulation to be gained through digital subscribers, but how much remains to be seen.”

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Northeastern students evacuated while hundreds rally in solidarity with Israel

I don’t intend to overwhelm you with news from Northeastern, but it seems appropriate in the days following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. Besides, all news is local.

The first story, from our in-house operation, Northeastern Global News, is about the evacuation of three students who were working in Israel on co-op jobs. Cesareo Contreras writes:

All three Northeastern students who were in Israel during Hamas’ surprise attack have been safely evacuated from the country with the help of the university’s global security team.

Two of the students, Jesse Ruigomez and Keren Doherty, were completing co-ops in Tel Aviv. The third student, Joshua Einhorn, is an N.U.in student studying in Greece. He was in Jerusalem visiting family and friends for the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah.

The second story was published by The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper. Zoe MacDiarmid reported on a vigil that drew hundreds to the Cabot Quad Tuesday night. The account begins:

Hundreds of Northeastern community members gathered Tuesday night on Cabot Quad in solidarity with Israel. Since Hamas’ Saturday assault on Israel, over 1,200 people in Israel and 900 people in Gaza have been killed, with thousands more injured.

The Quad was saturated with the blue-and-white colors of the Israeli flag as students, faculty and other community members gathered to show support for the country. Many wore the flag like a cloak. Most men wore kippot. As Jewish student organization leaders and rabbis spoke, the crowd cheered, embraced one another and cried.

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The gap between the NY Times and the WashPost continues to widen

Two consecutive headlines in Nieman Lab’s daily newsletter Tuesday drove home the growing gap between The New York Times and The Washington Post. The first: “The Washington Post is reducing its workforce by 240 positions.” The second: “The New York Times opinion section has tripled its size since 2017.”

I’ve written about this before, including a suggestion I made last year that the Post should reconnect with local news. As someone who covered the early years of the Post’s revival under Jeff Bezos, I find the current situation sad. Both the Post and the Times flourished during the Trump presidency, but the Times has continued to soar in the post-Trump years (yes, I know we’re not really in the post-Trump years) while the Post has sputtered, losing money and circulation.

We need two great general-interest national newspapers. If the Post is going to get back in the race, it needs to find a way to differentiate itself from the Times. For a few years, the Post difference was a tougher, more truth-telling brand of political coverage, but these days both papers seem pretty much the same. I don’t blame Sally Buzbee, who succeeded the legendary Marty Baron as executive editor. The vision — and the resources — have to come from the very top.

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Northeastern’s leadership issues statement on the war between Israel and Hamas

Northeastern University has issued a statement about the war between Israel and Hamas. I’d like to share it with you:

To all Members of the Northeastern Community,

The terror and bloodshed inflicted by Hamas’s attacks on Israel are cause for the deepest sorrow and most vehement condemnation. As war now ravages Gaza and Israel, we mourn for all the innocent lives that have been lost. To the many members of our community directly affected by these horrific events, you have our utmost solidarity and support.

Three of our students who were in Israel at the time of the attacks are safe and secure. We are also in touch with students, faculty and staff with connections to the region to ensure their wellbeing in this traumatic time.

We realize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ignites strong views on all sides. As an academic institution, we welcome peaceful dialogue and debate that is inclusive of all viewpoints. But we should all be united in our condemnation of terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians.

Northeastern is a global community of learning, and our fundamental values are rooted in knowledge over hate, harmony over division, and reason over brutality. These values will continue to guide us as we move forward together.

These resources are available to all who may need them during this painful time …

As we hope for a peaceful resolution to the violence and suffering, let us affirm our commitment to our shared values. Northeastern will always stand against hatred.

Sincerely,

Joseph E. Aoun
President

David Madigan
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Kenneth W. Henderson
Chancellor and Senior Vice President for Learning

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Student journalists are essential to knowing what’s taking place on campus

I just want to give a quick shoutout to our great student journalists at Northeastern. The Boston Globe published a story Monday about problems with NU Bound, a program under which our students begin their education at campuses outside of Boston — especially Oakland, California, and London. Students talk about running into a housing squeeze as well as a sense that they’ve fallen behind academically and socially, according to Globe reporter Vivi Smilgius.

The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper, posted an article that covered similar ground on Oct. 2. Written by Jackson Laramee, the story is especially strong on the different academic culture in London, where students are given little in the way of graded assignments and professors, according one student, are disorganized and short on preparation.

And let’s not overlook The Daily Free Press at Boston University, where student journalists published a comprehensive report on problems at Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Research Center that had other media scrambling to catch up.

Student journalists are doing a great job, and their work is essential to understanding what is taking place on college campuses.

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With Israel and Hamas at war, here are some free reliable sources of quality news

Map (cc) 2023 via Wikimedia Commons

With Israel and Hamas now at war following Hamas’ terrorist attacks over the weekend, I’ve seen a number of laments that X/Twitter is no longer much good for breaking news and that its would-be replacements are not ready for prime time. I’ll get back to that in a moment. But it seems to me that this is the perfect moment to re-embrace quality news sources.

I’ve been following developments mainly at The New York Times, but there are reliable sources of free news as well. Here are a just a few:

Now, to get back to Twitter and its competitors: Despite Elon Musk’s having taken a wrecking ball to his plaything, if you have a good list of follows, then it remains intact. I constantly see complaints about trolls and haters popping up in people’s “For You” feed, which is controlled by algorithms, but all you need to do is switch to “Following” as soon as you log in. Twitter’s lists are still a worthwhile feature, too. Josh Marshall has put together a list of reliable accounts that is worth checking out.

These days I spend more time on Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads than I do Twitter. But though I suspect Threads, with Mark Zuckerberg’s billions behind it, will eventually emerge as the winner, it currently lacks lists and hashtags, which gives it limited value in following breaking news. Bluesky doesn’t have hashtags or real lists, either. Mastodon has lists and hashtags, but you can’t follow someone else’s lists, which means you have to start from scratch.

It seems to me that there have been two defining stories of the war so far. The first is The Wall Street Journal’s report (free link) that Iran was directly involved in planning and approving Hamas’ attack. As the Journal ominously puts it:

A direct Iranian role would take Tehran’s long-running conflict with Israel out of the shadows, raising the risk of broader conflict in the Middle East. Senior Israeli security officials have pledged to strike at Iran’s leadership if Tehran is found responsible for killing Israelis.

The second is Hamas’ horrifying attack on a music festival in southern Israel, where its fighters simply slaughtered concert-goers for no purpose except to inflict terror. The New York Times has put the number of dead Israelis at round 140. The Times of Israel has placed the death toll at closer to 250.

Readers of Media Nation know that this is an opinion blog, so let me state my allegiance here. As much as I detest the Netanyahu government, its slide into authoritarianism, and its utter refusal to seek peace with the Palestinians, I am solidly committed to Israel’s right to exist as an independent Jewish state. As President Biden said:

Terrorism is never justified. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people. The United States warns against any other party hostile to Israel seeking advantage in this situation.  My Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.

The Palestinian people have a right to live in peace and dignity as well. Sadly, Hamas’ actions are likely to set back their own legitimate aspirations for a generation. Beyond that, I am at the limit of my expertise. This is a time for reading, watching and learning.

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