Alden Global Capital – Media Nation

A deep dive into the Eastern Mass. media; plus, WBUR cuts again, and Alden rattles the tin cup

Map of Plymouth, Mass., in 1882. Via the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.

Mark Caro of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School has taken a deep dive into the media ecosystem of Eastern Massachusetts — the wreckage left behind by Gannett’s closing and merging many of its weekly papers, and the rise of independent startups, many of them digital nonprofits.

As Caro observes, the Gannett weeklies and websites that still exist are “ghost newspapers,” containing little in the way of local content.

The 6,000-word-plus piece focuses in particular on the Plymouth Independent, The Belmont Voice and The New Bedford Light, although a number of other projects get name-checked as well. Caro writes:

What’s happening in New England is being echoed across the country as the local news crisis deepens. While the nation’s ever-widening news deserts have drawn much attention, the ghost papers represent another dire threat to a well-informed citizenry. Many areas don’t meet the definition of a news desert, but residents have been left with newspapers so hollowed out that they’re bereft of original local news reporting.

I was especially interested to see that Caro interviewed K. Prescott Low, whose family sold off The Patriot Ledger of Quincy and its affiliated papers in 1998 only to see their legacy torn apart in less than a generation. The Ledger was once regarded as being among the best medium-size dailies in the U.S.; today it limps along with a skeleton staff and no newsroom.

As Low tells it, he thought he had found a trustworthy buyer, but his former papers soon ended up in the hands of GateHouse Media, a cost-cutting chain that in 2019 merged with Gannett. “Conceptually it was a good idea,” Low told Caro. “Practically it didn’t work out because of the subsequent purchase by GateHouse and what has happened across the media.”

Caro and I talked about the lack of news coverage in Medford, where I live, after Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and Somerville Journal. He also interviewed my “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, about Brookline.News, the digital nonprofit she helped launch after Gannett closed its Brookline Tab.

As I told Caro, there are reasons to be optimistic, but affluent suburban communities are doing better at meeting their own news needs than are urban areas, and there’s a certain random quality to all of it. “You can have a community that has something really good,” I told him, “and right next door is a community that has nothing.”

Caro has written a good and important article, and I hope you’ll take a look.

WBUR cancels ‘Radio Boston’

There was some sad news on the local public radio front earlier today. WBUR is ending “Radio Boston,” a locally oriented program that airs on weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon and is repeated from 3 to 4 p.m.

It is WBUR’s only local news show and follows cuts at both of Boston’s major public broadcasters this years, as well as downsizing across the country. Earlier this year GBH News canceled three local television shows, “Greater Boston,” “Talking Politics” and “Basic Black.” That last program will return next month, possibly as a digital offering.

GBH Radio continues to offer four hours of local programming each weekday — “Boston Public Radio,” a talk and interview show hosted by Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and “The Culture Show” from 2 to 3 p.m.

The end of “Radio Boston” won’t result in any layoffs, according to the station, as the folks who worked on that show will be reassigned to pumping up the local segments on NPR’s two national drive-time programs, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”

Alden’s tin cup

Alden Global Capital, the hedge-fund newspaper owner that has decimated community journalism from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Denver to San Jose, is trying something new: asking readers to give them money in order to offset some of the newsroom cuts they’ve made.

An alert Media Nation reader passed along an appeal sent to readers of Alden’s South Florida Sun Sentinel, asking for tax-deductible gifts to the nonprofit Florida Press Foundation‘s Community News Fund. The foundation appears to be legit, but it’s hard to imagine why they would agree to help prop up a paper that’s been slashed by its hedge-fund owner.

“Alden Capital is surrounded by small independents that continue to eat into their circulation area,” my informant says. “Key Biscayne Independent, the Bulldog Reporter, Florida Phoenix, Coastal Star … are just a few of the ‘independents’ started by former journalists to fill the news desert. Everyone competes for donations. So when a Wall Street PE [private equity] firm solicits for limited resources, they are actually starving their competition. I think this is sad and something that may be a harbinger of what’s to come under the new transactional administration.”

If you see any other examples of rattling the tin cup at papers owned by corporate chains, please let me know.

Billionaire bash: More bad omens from the owners of The Washington Post and the LA Times

The problem with good billionaire newspaper owners is that they can turn into bad billionaire newspaper owners, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. This morning I bring you two disturbing data points about owners who had already put us on notice that their days of responsible stewardship were receding into the past.

First up: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has owned The Washington Post since 2013. Now, as I have written here on multiple occasions, Bezos was a sterling owner up until a couple of years ago, providing the legendary paper with money and independence as well as standing up to Donald Trump throughout the 2016 campaign and his first term as president. I wrote admiringly of his ownership in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” and no, I wouldn’t take any of it back.

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But Bezos lost his way sometime after Marty Baron retired as executive editor in 2021. Baron’s replacement, longtime Associated Press editor Sally Buzbee, was fine, but Bezos may have been intimidated by Baron into not indulging his worst instincts, and that ended with Baron’s departure.

Bezos’ next move was to hire British tabloid veteran Will Lewis as his publisher and to stick with him even after it was revealed that Lewis’ ethics were so compromised that his behavior has attracted the attention of Scotland Yard. Buzbee left rather than accept what looked like a demotion. The current executive editor, Matt Murray, has reportedly won the respect of the newsroom, but he’s supposed to be a temporary hire and is slated to move over to some sort of ill-defined “third newsroom” initiative. Continue reading “Billionaire bash: More bad omens from the owners of The Washington Post and the LA Times”

Independent news outlets track the latest ‘atmospheric river’ in Mendocino County

In drier times: Ukiah, Calif., the Mendocino County seat. Photo (cc) 2020 by Dan Kennedy.

When Kate Maxwell and Adrian Fernandez Baumann launched The Mendocino Voice in 2016, they were hoping to bring some in-depth journalism to a county that was undercovered due to deep cuts at newspapers owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Indeed, both Maxwell and Baumann had left jobs at Alden papers before launching the Voice.

And yes, they were able to do some enterprising reporting. But they also found that they had to devote a considerable amount of attention to Northern California’s increasingly weird weather. When I visited in March 2020, they were keeping an eye on a wildfire that Baumann told me had sprung up five months before what was typically wildfire season because of the unusually dry conditions.

Well, now the Voice and other news outlets in Mendo County are keeping tabs on an atmospheric river that has dumped heavy rain on the region and that threatens to create yet another weather-related crisis. (Ellen Clegg and I wrote about the Voice in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Maxwell and Baumann have moved on, and this past June the nominally for-profit site was acquired by the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation.)

The Voice this morning is dominated by stories about flooding. The lead article reports that sand for sandbags is available for residents and businesses seeking to protect their property from rising waters. “Residents and businesses must bring their own bags and shovels, unless noted otherwise,” reporter Sarah Stierch writes.

Below that is a brief story about power being restored along the coast, and that’s followed by a lengthier update headlined “Storm expected to bring ‘life-threatening’ floods to Mendocino County.” All those stories, by the way, were written by Stierch, which shows how hard folks at hyperlocal news projects have to work.

The Voice is not the only independent news organization in Mendo County. MendoFever, started in 2020 by a local resident named Matt LaFever, leads with a story published on Wednesday headlined “First atmospheric river of the season set to soak Mendocino County.” The article offers some nuts-and-bolts guidance on how residents should prepare. Public radio station KZYX offers an in-depth story by Emily Cox and updates on road conditions and power outages.

Finally, Alden’s Ukiah Daily Journal leads with — yes — the ongoing count in the presidential election. The most recent story listed under “Latest Headlines” is a five-day-old article about an art exhibit. Scroll down, though, and you’ll find a story published Wednesday morning reporting that the National Weather Service was predicting floods emanating from the atmospheric river. It is behind a paywall.

Whenever there is a breaking story of national interest, it’s smart to check out what local news organizations are reporting. Like much of the country, Mendocino County has been all but abandoned by corporate journalism. Fortunately, independent outlets are doing a good job of keeping residents informed with “useful news,” as the Voice puts it.

The ProJo will shut its printing plant; plus, Google News exec quits, and healthier news habits

Illustration c. 1902 via the Internet Archive Book Images

The Providence Journal is shutting down its printing plant next March because its previous owner bet on a technology that is no longer supported. As a friend who’s now retired from the Journal put it on Facebook, “I didn’t realize we had the Betamax of printing presses.”

The closure could have serious consequences. The Journal, which is owned by the Gannett chain, is where a number of other Gannett papers are printed, including the regional edition of USA Today, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Cape Cod Times and others. The plant also earns money by printing non-Gannett papers such as the Daily News of New York, the Boston Herald and the Hartford Courant, all owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

According to Journal reporter Jack Perry, the closure will result in the loss of 136 jobs. He reports that some of the printing will move to Gannett’s facility in Auburn, Massachusetts, which, he writes, should result in no significant effect on delivery — but that some will move to a plant that the company owns in New Jersey. Perry explains what happened:

In 1987, The Providence Journal opened its $60 million production plant and began printing with a technology, flexography, that was new to newspapers, although the packaging industry had used it for about six decades. In relying on water-based, rather than oil-based ink, flexography was considered better for the environment, and cleaner for readers in that it wouldn’t leave ink smudges on their fingers.

Despite those and other perceived advantages, flexography didn’t catch on in the newspaper industry and replace offset printing as some expected. The English company that makes the printing plates for Providence’s flexo presses decided to stop making the plates because it wasn’t cost effective, since the Providence facility is its only remaining customer, according to Mike Niland, senior director of manufacturing, Gannett Publishing Services New England. It is the only company that makes the plates, he said.

A news industry source told me Tuesday via email that the printing quality should actually improve after the papers move from flexo to offset, though that would seem like small consolation given the early deadlines that will no doubt be imposed in order to truck papers north from New Jersey.

This is not the first time that Gannett has closed a New England printing plant. In January 2023, the company announced that it would shut down its facility in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That closure affected two New Hampshire papers, the Portsmouth Herald and Foster’s Daily Democrat of Dover, as well as the Burlington Free Press of Vermont, located not far from the Canadian border. The printing at that time was parceled out between Gannett’s plants in Providence and Auburn, Massachusetts. Now only Auburn remains.

Digital giant quits Google

One of the giants of digital news has quit Google. Shailesh Prakash, a vice president and general manager of Google News, has quit after just two years, reports Alexandra Bruell (gift link) in The Wall Street Journal, writing: “The high-profile departure comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets over how the search engine drives traffic and uses their content.”

Prakash came to Google from The Washington Post, and I interviewed him for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls.” Like then-executive editor Marty Baron, Prakash was a holdover from the Graham family regime, though Jeff Bezos had the good sense to hold on to both of them when he bought the paper in 2013.

Though the Journal story provides little insight into why Prakash decided to leave Google, it does describe the increasingly challenging environment in which he found himself:

At Google, he brought an understanding of publishers’ frustrations as they have grappled with traffic declines and seek compensation for the Alphabet unit’s [i.e., Google’s] use of their content. While he oversaw product and engineering for the News group, he also communicated with leaders at news publishers regarding changes related to search and generative AI.

Solving those news blues

The election of Donald Trump to a second term in the White House has led a lot of us to wonder how we might change our news-consumption habits. I’m thinking about less news of the day, more deep dives into topics that may not be directly related to national politics.

Nieman Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen has some good ideas as well: print newspapers, which are better than digital at packing their journalism into a finite space; cutting back on social media, including getting rid of Twitter; recommitting to RSS; and not reading news after hours.

“I’m still a working journalist and a huge part of my job is to read and follow the news,” she writes. “I’ll still do both those things because I love them. But sometimes it’s healthy to do something you love a little less, and differently.”

Jeff Bezos, too, shows Trump ‘anticipatory obedience’; plus, death for sale, and Billy Penn at 10

Jeff Bezos. Photo (cc) 2019 by Daniel Oberhaus.

An increasing number of news organizations are becoming fearful in the face of a rising tide of fascism. The Washington Post today joined the Los Angeles Times in deciding not to endorse in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. David Folkenflik of NPR reports:

The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, would publish a note to readers online early Friday afternoon.

Shipley told colleagues the editorial board was told yesterday by management that there would not be an endorsement. He added that he “owns” this decision. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.

As with the LA Times, there has been no change in ownership at the Post, and both papers routinely have endorsed Democratic candidates in the past. The Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, courageously stood up to Trump in the face of threats during Trump’s rise in 2015 and ’16 and throughout his presidency. But the Post has been adrift in recent years, and the Bezos of 2018 is clearly not the Bezos of 2024.

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In CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter cites the historian Timothy Snyder’s warning about “anticipatory obedience,” quoting Snyder as writing that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” That appears to be what has happened with Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Now, it’s true that the very notion of newspaper endorsements may have had their day. Newspaper chains such as Alden Global Capital and Gannett have moved away from them. The New York Times, weirdly, has given up on state and local endorsements, where the editorial board’s views might be welcome, while continuing to endorse in national races. Nonprofit news outlets can’t endorse without losing their tax exemption.

But for the LA Times and the Post to take a pass on the presidential race this late in the campaign smacks of giving in to the punishment they might be subjected to if Trump returns to office. Anticipatory obedience, in other words. A thoughtful, considered explanation months ago as to why they were ending endorsements would be another matter, but this is anything but that.

Meanwhile, the Times Union of Albany, New York, part of the Hearst chain, endorsed Harris today, writing:

For all Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about the weaponization of government, it’s Mr. Trump who has threatened to fire thousands of diligent career civil servants, fill the federal workforce with his loyal minions, use the Justice Department to hound political adversaries, and sic the military on citizens who protest against him.

This is not the talk of a person fit to be president for all Americans. On the issues and on character, it’s Ms. Harris who can be entrusted with the power and responsibility of the presidency.

This has been a shameful week for the LA Times and The Washington Post, and now it’s been punctuated by a much smaller paper’s willingness to step into the breach.

Merchants of death

One of the worst consequences of the local news crisis has been the rise of the oxymoronic paid obituary. Sorry, but obits are news stories with journalistic standards. If someone is paying for it, then it’s not an obit, it’s an ad — a death notice, in other words.

Bill Mitchell has a stunning piece up at Poynter Online about the venerable Hartford Courant, now owned by the cost-slashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital. It seems that a respected former staff reporter named Tom Condon died recently — and the Courant, rather than producing its own obit, picked up the one published in CT Mirror, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available for a fee to other news outlets. What’s more, the Courant has now slipped that obit behind a paywall.

The Courant’s website also carried an obit written by the Condon family for Legacy.com, according to Mitchell, who writes:

Paid obits, often written by and paid for by family members, have been boosting the sagging revenues of newspapers for a couple of decades. (The Courant charges about $1,200 for an obit the length of the one submitted by the Condon family, with an extra charge for a photo.) In 2019, Axios reported that more than a million paid obits were producing $500 million annually for newspapers, a small but significant chunk of overall advertising and circulation revenues then totaling about $25 billion a year.

It’s outrageous, and it’s not because newspapers are profiting from death. Rather, charging for obits is fundamentally no different from charging for any other type of news, and it corrupts what is supposed to be a journalistic endeavor.

The Courant and Alden are hardly alone in this. But for the paper to rely on another news organization to cover the death of one of its own really drives home just how far we’ve traveled down a very bad road.

Lessons from Billy Penn

Ten years ago, the digital journalism pioneer Jim Brady launched Billy Penn, a mobile-first news outlet covering Philadelphia. A few months later, I was in Philly to interview Brady and Chris Krewson, Billy Penn’s first editor, for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”

Billy Penn was eventually acquired by WHYY, Philly’s public radio station. Brady is now vice president of journalism for the Knight Foundation, and Krewson is executive editor of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers.

Krewson has written an informative and entertaining piece for LION on “10 things I’ve learned about independent publishing since launching Billy Penn in 2014.” Probably the most important of those lessons is that it took longer for Brady and Krewson to make a go of it than they were able to give — the project finally broken even in 2021, but by then WHYY was in charge.

That remains a problem for today’s start-ups, Krewson writes, although he’s hopeful that new philanthropic efforts such as Press Forward will give them the runway they need to build toward sustainability.

If the LA Times’ owner had stepped up, the LA Local News Initiative might not be needed

Los Angeles with Mount Baldy in the background. Photo (cc) 2019 by Alek Leckszas.

The American Journalism Project announced this week that it’s raising $15 million to cover underserved communities in Los Angeles. The news was broken Tuesday by Axios media reporter Sara Fischer.

What’s been left unsaid (although Rick Edmonds of Poynter observes that it’s being hinted at) is that this is being driven by the abject failure of the Los Angeles Times’ celebrity billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, to step up and provide the region with the journalism that it needs. Indeed, among the board members of the new Los Angeles Local News Initiative is Kevin Merida, who quit as executive editor of the Times amid budget cuts and reports that Soon-Shiong was interfering with Merida’s editorial judgment.

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For a metropolitan area the size of LA, $15 million is a drop in the bucket, though presumably it’s meant as a down payment on what will be a larger effort. The money will be spread among a variety of existing projects and could fund new outlets as well. Monica Lozano, who chairs the initiative’s board, told Fischer: “We believe no one news entity can fill all of the information needs of communities as large, complex and diverse as Los Angeles. We needed to think about a model that would match that complexity and that diversity.”

Here’s how the American Journalism Project describes the initiative in its announcement:

The L.A. Local News Initiative will launch a nonprofit organization that will operate and support local newsrooms in Los Angeles to provide coverage at neighborhood, regional, and state levels in service of L.A. communities. The initiative aims to increase the volume of coverage that enables residents to take effective action and navigate life on a local level, and that represents all L.A. communities in public discourse. It will also increase accountability journalism that keeps in check the billions of dollars in government and private spending affecting the Angelenos.

What’s sad is that the AJP should have been able to direct its attention elsewhere if Soon-Shiong hadn’t proven himself to be a feckless and irresponsible owner. An unimaginably wealthy surgeon, he and his family purchased the LA Times in 2018 for $500 million. He appeared to be exactly what the Times needed after years of chaotic ownership.

Like John and Linda Henry at The Boston Globe, Glen Taylor at The Minnesota Star Tribune and Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post (who, as we know, has run into difficulties in recent years), Soon-Shiong was seen as someone who would invest a small share of his billions into rebuilding the Times so that it could re-emerge as a profitable and growing enterprise.

Instead, Soon-Shiong showed little of the patience and judgment needed to pull it off. Worse, he used his position on the board of Tribune Publishing to allow that chain’s nine large-market daily newspapers to fall into the hands of the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital, and later sold The San Diego-Tribune (which he’d acquired as part of the LA Times deal) directly to Alden.

Meanwhile, the Times has endured cut after cut under Soon-Shiong’s stewardship, including about 115 employees, or more than 20% of the newsroom, earlier this year.

As Rick Edmonds writes of the new initiative:

While the announcement does not criticize the Los Angeles Times directly, it has numerous veiled references to what the initiative’s founders find wrong with the legacy newspaper. Its first sentence says the initiative has been undertaken in response to “drastic losses in local journalism resources.”

The shame of it is that there are only so many philanthropic dollars out there, and the money and energy being invested in Los Angeles could have been directed elsewhere — if only Soon-Shiong thought of himself as a genuine steward of journalism in Southern California.

Poynter pushes back against gloom and doom; plus, transitions in Colorado and Maine

The Poynter Institute has published an in-depth report on the state of journalism that’s aimed at injecting some optimism into what often seems like a dreary and depressing landscape. The report is called “OnPoynt,” and the introduction says in part:

[D]oom-and-gloom narratives that cherry pick stories of vulture capitalists, job loss statistics and print closures are incomplete or out of date, painting an inaccurate picture of a news and information ecosystem on life support.

OnPoynt aims to offer a forward-minded look at the state of journalism and the news industry that propels the story by considering trends related to creative product ideas, audience growth strategies and traction around revenue, artificial intelligence and innovation.

The entire report is worth reading, but I want to take note of two sections — one on trust, the other on local news.

The narrative that the public has lost trust in the news media overlooks the reality that people actually have a fair amount of faith in their local news outlets. For instance, a survey that Poynter conducted found that 83% of respondents believe that local news organizations “are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community,” and 71% say local journalists are reporting the news accurately. The numbers are only slightly lower for Republicans than they are for Democrats. The report continues:

Audiences will spend more time and money with sources of information that they “trust.” Civic participation will grow as trust in media grows. Accessible local news improves democratic participation.

This really goes to the heart of a central argument that Ellen Clegg and I explore in our book, “What Works in Community News.” National news organizations, especially the cable outlets, are contributing to polarization and to the decline of civic life. Rebuilding the local news infrastructure could help lower the temperature and help people on different sides of the political divide find common ground.

Fortunately, as Poynter says in its section on local news, there are viable alternatives to corporate-owned chain newspapers, which in too many cases are being hollowed out and leaving communities bereft. Poynter identifies local television news, public radio and the rise of philanthropy in supporting nonprofit community journalism as countervailing trends.

“The local news ecosystem is complex. The loss of traditional local news journalism jobs should not be minimized, but the battle cry of ‘saving local news’ is oversimplified,” the report says. “Hundreds of news or niche information sites have started in recent years. Many are independent, many represent new offerings from existing companies.”

Poynter’s survey also shows that people who are engaged in civic life are more likely to be local news consumers — a finding that goes back at least to Robert Putnam’s landmark 2000 book “Bowling Alone.”

There’s a lot of bad news out there, and it would be pollyannaish to pretend otherwise. But it’s crucial to look at success stories, figure out why they’re working and encourage people to emulate them in their own communities.

Transition at The Colorado Sun

The Colorado Sun, a digital startup that we profile in “What Works in Community News,” announced a major reorganization last week. Editor and co-founder Larry Ryckman will now be the publisher, with senior editor and fellow co-founder Dana Coffield moving up to the editor’s slot.

In an announcement, the Sun said the shuffle was motivated in part by the Sun’s transition from a for-profit public benefit company to a nonprofit organization, which has created “new responsibilities for its senior leadership.”

The Sun was founded six years ago by 10 journalists at The Denver Post who quit out of frustration over repeated cuts by the paper’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. Today the Sun employs two dozen staff members.

Ryckman was a guest on our “What Works” podcast in July. Coffield, who came from a background of small newspapers in the rural parts of Colorado, told us for our book that she was proud of the Sun’s role in reporting stories from across the state that can be republished for free in smaller newspapers.

“We’ve been able to provide quality journalism to some of the smallest outlets in the state,” she said. “I like being able to contribute to a healthy ecosystem for smaller newspapers, since I came from that heritage.”

A new editor in Maine

The Maine Trust for Local News, a nonprofit organization that publishes the for-profit Portland Press Herald and about a dozen other daily and weekly newspapers, has named an executive editor to oversee the trust’s holdings.

Carolyn Fox, currently managing editor of the Tampa Bay Times, will start her new position on Oct. 7. Her appointment was announced by Lisa DeSisto, the trust’s publisher and CEO.

Like the Maine papers, the Tampa Bay Times is a for-profit paper owned by a nonprofit — the Poynter Institute.

“The nonprofit model is so exciting in part because you can make that pitch to people that the journalism matters — what we do matters — and then sell that,” Fox told Eric Russell of the Press Herald. (I’m quoted as well.)

Fox will succeed Steve Greenlee, who’s moved on to a faculty position at Boston University. The organizational structure will be different in that Greenlee was the editor of just the Press Herald, whereas Fox will oversee all of the trust’s holdings.

Is San Francisco a local news oasis? Yes — but so are many other large cities.

Reading the papers in San Francisco. From one of the murals at Coit Tower.

Is San Francisco a local news oasis amid the desertification of community journalism across the country? That’s what The New York Times claims.

Eli Tan reports that news in the Bay Area is as strong as it’s ever been (free link), noting that the city is served by a healthy daily (the San Francisco Chronicle), a billionaire-funded startup with paper-of-record ambitions (The San Francisco Standard) and a wide range of hyperlocal nonprofits and radio stations.

With 27 news organizations in a city of 800,000, Tan writes, San Francisco has about the same number of local news outlets that it had a decade ago.

Now, my first reaction to Tan’s story is that you could say the same about the Greater Boston area. The media scene here may not be quite as rich as it is in San Francisco, but we’ve got a lot, and the rise of digital nonprofits in a number of suburban communities has helped offset moves by Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, to close or merge many of its weeklies and to slash its dailies to the bone.

But on further consideration, I think it’s worth noting that a number of large cities are reasonably well-served; it’s the exurbs, rural areas and urban communities of color that are struggling. That’s true even in places like Denver (which Ellen Clegg and I write about in out book, “What Works in Community News”) and Chicago, where the hedge fund Alden Global Capital has hollowed out the legacy dailies but where a number of other news organizations, many of them new, have risen up to fill the gap.

In general, cities and affluent suburbs have the people and the money needed to support local news. What’s happening in San Francisco may be something of an outlier — but not quite as much of one as the Times seems to believe.

The Times’ decision to stop local endorsements is just the latest blow to a venerable tradition

Endorsements of political candidates are fading into history. The latest blow was struck on Monday, when The New York Times said it would no longer endorse in local races (free link), although it will continue to endorse in the presidential contest.

In terms of influence, this has it exactly backwards. May we presume that the Times will endorse the Harris-Walz ticket this fall? Yes, we may. Meanwhile, readers in New York City and across the state — admittedly a shrinking share of the Times’ 10 million-plus subscribers, most of them digital — might genuinely want some guidance in deciding whom to vote for in state and local contests.

But there’s no turning back. Increasingly, communities are served by nonprofit local news organizations, which risk losing their tax-exempt status if they endorse candidates or specific pieces of legislation. As Tom Jones notes at Poynter Online, papers owned by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund stopped endorsing in 2022. Those include some of the largest papers in the country, such as New York’s Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and The Denver Post. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, has cut back on opinion, including endorsements.

A newspaper endorsement is a recommendation to vote for a particular candidate written in the institutional voice of the news organization. At larger newspapers, editorial boards comprising the staff of the opinion section and sometimes some outside members make those decisions in consultation with the publisher. In many cases these boards interview the candidates before making their decision.

The opinion section of a newspaper is entirely separate from the news staff, with the editor and the editorial-page editor reporting directly to the publisher, who may or may not be the owner of the paper as well. Publishers have been known to overturn the editorial board’s recommendation — that’s their prerogative. At smaller papers these lines tend to get blurred. At now-defunct Boston Phoenix, where I worked for many years, the editorial board comprised publisher Stephen Mindich and the news staff. Then again, the Phoenix, as an alt-weekly, mixed opinion and reporting, so the wall separating news from commentary didn’t really exist.

There was a time when rich men bought newspapers mainly so that they could express their political views, with the news section taking a back seat to the editorial page. These days, though, endorsements are often regarded by political reporters as a hindrance in their efforts to convince candidates who were not endorsed by the opinion section that they will cover them fairly. My conversations with students over the years have led me to believe that they are skeptical of the whole notion of a news outlet speaking as an institution, and that they’re more comfortable with signed opinion pieces such as those that typically appear on the op-ed page.

When a local news organization chooses not to endorse, either on principle or to keep the IRS at bay, it loses an opportunity to share its expertise with its audience. For instance, the nonprofit New Haven Independent covers a city that is served a 30-member board of alders, as the city council is known. How is anyone supposed to keep track?

But there are other steps a news outlet can take. It can put together a guide to where candidates stand on the issues and link to that guide every time it publishes a story on that particular race. The guide can take the form of a series of articles or an issues grid — or both. And I should add that the Independent covers city politics with depth and fairness.

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, Ellen Clegg and I talked with Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby about endorsements on our “What Works” podcast back in 2022. Ellen, who’s a retired editorial-page editor for the Globe which continues to endorse in state and local elections, is pro-endorsement; Jeff is against them. I’m (uncharacteristically) in the middle.

On at least two occasions, Jack Connors was part of efforts to buy The Boston Globe

Steve Bailey’s profile of Jack Connors in The Boston Globe Magazine of June 3, 2007

In his obituary of Boston businessman and philanthropist Jack Connors, who died Tuesday at 82, Boston Globe reporter Bryan Marquard reminds us that Connors was part of several failed attempts to buy the Globe from the New York Times Co., which finally sold it to financier and Red Sox principal owner John Henry in 2013. Marquard’s obit, by the way, is remarkable, and includes quotes from an interview Connors gave just last week as he was dying of cancer.

The first time Connors’ name came up in connection with an attempt to purchase the Globe was in the fall of 2006, when he partnered with retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch and concession magnate Joseph O’Donnell. But with Times Co. chief executive Janet Robinson all but coming right out and saying the Globe was not for sale, talk of a Welch-led sale faded away. O’Donnell died earlier this year, and Welch — who died in 2020 — does not enjoy the sterling reputation he had back when he was at the height of his power and influence.

Connors’ second run at the Globe came in 2011, when he was part of a group headed by entrepreneur Aaron Kushner, who tried to convince the Times Co. to sell him the paper even though the paper’s executives were adamant that it wasn’t available. Former Globe publisher Ben Taylor and his cousin Steve Taylor, himself a former top Globe official, were involved in the Kushner bid as well. At that time Poynter business analyst Rick Edmonds wrote that with the Globe’s business having stabilized following a crisis in 2009 and the Times Co.’s debt burden eased, “It looks to me like a keeper for the company — unless someone comes forward with cash and is prepared to way overpay.”

Ultimately Kushner was spurned, and then he lost out on a bid to purchase the Portland Press Herald in Maine. In 2012, a Kushner-headed group bought The Orange County Register in Southern California, and he quickly ran it into the ground with a hiring spree that he mistakenly believed would result in a massive influx of new readers and advertising revenues. (I wrote about Kushner’s misadventures in Boston, Portland and Orange County for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”) Today the Register is a shell of its former self, having been acquired out of bankruptcy by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group.

Connors’ name also came up in 2013 before the Globe was purchased by Henry.

What kind of a newspaper owner would Jack Connors have been? He was kind and generous, according to all accounts, but he would have been a minority owner with only a limited say in the Globe’s direction. Globe readers should be glad that the paper was never headed by “Neutron Jack” Welch or by Kushner, whose business plan for the Globe — a copy of which I obtained and wrote about in “Moguls” — was utterly unrealistic, depending on the same sort of unaffordable expansion that led to disaster in Southern California.

The praise that is now flowing for Connors is well deserved. He was, by all accounts, a kind and generous man. And I have one suggestion for the Globe. On June 3, 2007, the Sunday magazine published a terrific profile of Connors by then-business columnist Steve Bailey. You have to do a deep dive into the archives in order to find it. Why not republish it online?

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