The Mississippi judge who ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial from its website has reversed herself. But this is hardly a victory for freedom of the press.
Judge Crystal Wise Martin rescinded her temporary restraining order after the owner of The Clarksdale Press Register and the board of commissioners in that city agreed to settle a dispute that had resulted in a libel suit being filed. The commissioners agreed to drop the suit while Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, said the paper will publish a less incendiary version of the editorial, according to Michael Levenson of The New York Times (gift link).
That does not change the reality that Judge Martin leaped in to help city officials by censoring the newspaper, even though the First Amendment protects libelous materials from being subjected to prior restraint. Libel can, of course, be punished after the fact through a civil suit, although government agencies cannot sue for libel.
The editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”
The Associated Press has been in the news a lot lately, both because of its feud with the White House over Donald Trump’s insistence that it refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and for some cuts it’s had to implement (see Gintautus Dumcius’ story in CommonWealth Beacon and Aidan Ryan’s in The Boston Globe).
But here’s some good news: The AP announced on Thursday that it’s creating a Local Investigative Reporting Program to support efforts at the community level. According to an annoucement by executive editor Julie Pace, the initiative will be headed by veteran AP editor Ron Nixon, who “will work with state and local outlets to cultivate stories and support their investigative reporting needs.”
The program will encompass training, resources and access to AP services, and will build on the agency’s Local News Success Team “to localize national stories for member audiences and provide services and support to newsrooms across the U.S.”
Judge Crystal Wise Martin is sworn in by her mother, retired Judge Patricia Wise, in 2019. Photo via the Mississippi Office of the Courts.
In 1971, after a federal court stopped The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court was so alarmed at that naked act of censorship that it took up the case in a matter of weeks. On a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that the Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and others could resume publishing, though they might face prosecution for revealing classified information. (They didn’t.)
In 1979, after a small magazine in Wisconsin called The Progressive said it intended to publish an article revealing some details about how to manufacture an atomic bomb, a federal judge stepped in and said no — but so agonized over his censorious act that he all but begged the magazine and the government to reach a compromise.
Then there’s Judge Crystal Wise Martin of Mississippi. On Wednesday, Martin issued a temporary restraining order requiring The Clarksdale Press Register to take down an editorial from its website. According to Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press, the editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”
The city had sued the Press Register, claiming that the editorial was libelous and that it “chilled and hindered” the council’s work. Mayor Chuck Espy was quoted in the AP story as saying the editorial had unfairly implied that officials had violated the law. He cited a section of the editorial that asked, “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-back [see update below] from the community?”
The Huffington Post’s “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” headline has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.” 2016 photo via the Voice of America.
Recently a source in The Boston Globe newsroom forwarded to me a memo sent to the staff about the paper’s performance in Google search during 2024. “We get 25%-27% of our traffic from Google; it’s a significant way we reach people who don’t come to the Globe on their own,” wrote Ronke Idowu Reeves, the paper’s SEO editor. (SEO stands for search-engine optimization.)
As you might imagine, the big SEO winners in 2024 were the Karen Read trial, the phrase “who won the debate” (perhaps a reference to both presidential debates), the Celtics victory parade and Steward Health Care.
The memo, though, prompted another thought: What is the purpose of SEO in the age of paywalls? As you probably know, the Globe has an especially strict paywall, with no quota of gift links for the month. I emailed Reeves and asked her whether SEO was successful in getting casual visitors to sign up for a digital subscription given that they couldn’t read even the one story they’d searched for. She forwarded my email to spokeswoman Carla Kath, who told me by email: “Yes, a good number of people do read and subscribe to our stories that they encounter on search. But, because the scope of search is constantly changing, we are always adjusting how we approach it.”
It’s something I’d like to dig into more deeply at some point since it’s fundamental to the economics of digital news. Twenty years ago, paywalls were rare, and the idea behind SEO was to drive massive audiences to your stories so that they’d see the ads that accompanied them. The first iteration of The Huffington Post stressed SEO heavily, and its infamous 2011 headline “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.”
The power to rename things and to demand that others recognize that power is something that is right out of the authoritarian’s playbook. So if you think Donald Trump’s insistence that we refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America isn’t a big deal, think again. By getting us to go along, he makes us complicit.
Earlier today I wrote that Google Maps is now using the Gulf of America name despite 400 years of custom and a complete lack of international support. Now comes more ominous news: The Associated Press, which issued style guidance that keeps it as the Gulf of Mexico, says the Trump administration denied AP journalists access to a White House event. Here is what AP executive editor Julie Pace said:
Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing.
It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.
The AP Stylebook is the industry standard, used not just by the agency’s own journalists but by many other news organizations besides. I hope the AP stands firm.
And shame on Google. Throughout the day, I saw anti-Trump folks on social media announce they would switch to Apple Maps or Microsoft’s Bing Maps. It’s futile. They’re standing fast for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or both of them give in a few days from now.
Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has written an interesting examination of what’s gone wrong at the Portland Press Herald and other papers that are part of the Maine Trust for Local News.
On the one hand, the story feels provisional — we still don’t know why two top executives left suddenly, and severe cuts that observers had told me were coming are, well, still coming. The executives who left recently were Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of the National Trust for Local News, which acquired the papers in 2023, and Lisa DeSisto, CEO of the Maine Trust — and, before that, publisher of the Press Herald. Other top people have departed as well.
On the other hand, Ryan has some details I hadn’t seen before. For one thing, the Trust reported that it lost $500,000 in 2024 as the decline of advertising outpaced gains in digital subscription revenue.
More shocking is that former owner Reade Brower apparently considered David Smith as a potential buyer before selling to the National Trust. Smith, the head of the right-wing television network Sinclair Broadcasting, is currently turning The Baltimore Sun into an embarrassment. Sinclair owns WGME-TV (Channel 13) in Portland, so who knows what sort of synergistic hell Smith had in mind.
Brower instead sold the papers to the National Trust for $15 million (a figure that’s being reported for the first time from documents that Ryan obtained) in the hope that a nonprofit organization would prove to be a better steward.
One data point I do want to address is Dr. Hansen Shapiro’s compensation, reported in the National Trust’s public 1099 filings and noted by both the Press Herald at the time that she stepped down and now by the Globe.
Hansen Shapiro did make a lot of money — nearly $371,000 in 2023 compared to just $117,000 in 2021. At the same time, though, 2021 was when the Trust pulled off its first deal, buying 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. The Trust today owns 65 papers in Colorado, Georgia and Maine. Given the Trust’s pivot to a hands-on operating role, Hansen Shapiro’s job responsibilities changed as well.
I’m not writing this to defend her compensation or, for that matter, the Trust’s change of focus. But it’s important context to think about.
“Journalists employed by the Maine Trust said while they remain hopeful about the new ownership, they question aspects of its approach,” Ryan writes, who notes that no one among the rank and file would speak with him on the record “because they feared retaliation.”
Finally, my usual disclosures: Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Hansen Shapiro for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and featured her on our podcast; we are both professional friends with DeSisto; and we gave a book talk at a fundraiser for the Maine Trust last fall.
Google caves
I learned this last night from journalist Dan Gillmor’s Bluesky feed: Google has apparently become the first of the internet map publishers to give in to Donald Trump’s ridiculous demand that the Gulf of Mexico now be referred to as the Gulf of America.
“I typed Gulf of Mexico into Google Maps,” Gillmor wrote. “It edited my query without permission and showed me the Trump cult invention that isn’t and never will be the real thing.”
At least as of this writing, Apple Maps and Microsoft’s Bing Maps are sticking with the Gulf of Mexico. But who knows what we’ll find tomorrow?
After Trump announced that he was renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain in Alaska (it is reverting back to Mount McKinley), The Associated Press issued guidance for its bureaus and any other news outlets who use its stylebook.
The AP will continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico, which is an international body of water whose name has 400 years of tradition behind it; but it will go along with Mount McKinley because it is entirely on U.S. territory. It was only in 2015 that President Barack Obama issued an order restoring the mountain’s original Indigenous name.
By the way, the U.S. Geological Survey is going with Gulf of America too — but that’s hardly surprising given that it’s a federal agency.
No thanks to their owners
Good work is the best answer to the damage that two billionaire owners have done to their storied newspapers.
Semafor reports that The Washington Post has seen an upsurge in web traffic since Trump’s chaotic return to office, notwithstanding owner Jeff Bezos’ untimely killing of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election. One especially hot story: a report on the White House’s illegal federal spending freeze.
Meanwhile, Sarah Scire reports for Nieman Lab that the Los Angeles Times experienced a rise in paid subscriptions during the recent wildfires even though the paper had temporarily dropped its paywall. Like Bezos, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong canceled a Harris endorsement, provoking outrage, resignations and cancellations.
The Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
One of the first media pieces I wrote for The Boston Phoenix was about the declining number of reporters who were covering state government in Massachusetts. I spent some time in the press gallery at the Statehouse interviewing members of the shrinking press corps, including Carolyn Ryan, then with The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, now managing editor of The New York Times.
Although I can’t find the story online, I know this was in 1995 or thereabouts. The situation has not improved over the past 30 years.
Last week Gintautas Dumcius of CommonWealth Beacon, who definitely knows his way around the Statehouse, reported that The Associated Press’ Steve LeBlanc is leaving Beacon Hill after taking a buyout and is unlikely to be replaced. Although an AP spokesman said the wire service will continue to cover the Legislature, Glen Johnson, who’s a former AP Statehouse bureau chief, told Dumcius that it won’t be the same without someone in the building:
There’s no substitute for being physically present where news happens and in a statehouse, there’s few things more powerful than being able to confront a newsmaker in person and at times other than official events. That only comes from proximity to power….
Some of the biggest stories I got as a statehouse reporter came because I bumped into somebody unexpectedly or saw something that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen.
As Dumcius points out, the move comes at a time when two newspaper chains owned by hedge funds, Gannett and McClatchy, have dropped the AP as a cost-cutting move. It’s a vicious circle. An AP subscription is expensive. News organizations walk away. The AP is left with fewer clients and thus has to increase its prices even more or cut back on coverage. Or both.
Jerry Berger, a former Statehouse bureau chief for United Press International who’s now a journalism professor at Boston University, recalls a time when the AP and UPI competed fiercely for news about state government. In his newsletter, “In Other Words…,” Berger says:
The Massachusetts Statehouse Press Gallery used to be a rowdy and raucous place, where reporters for two wire services and outlets from around the state worked side-by-side, in fierce competition, to document the daily workings of Massachusetts government.
Today, you can hear a pin drop — and the echoes just got a bit louder with word the Associated Press no longer has someone stationed in Room 456.
While I continue on my trip down memory lane, I’ll observe here that The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, where I worked in the 1980s, got its Statehouse news from UPI. I used to do a bit of stringing for the agency, and I think I’m the only freelancer who ever wrote for UPI and got all the money that was due him. Today, as Berger notes, UPI is owned by a company affiliated with the Unification Church, once headed by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Fortunately, there are still multiple news outlets covering state government in Massachusetts, including The Boston Globe, State House News Service, CommonWealth Beacon, Politico, WBUR, GBH News and local television newscasts. Just last week on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Alison Bethel, the chief content officer and editor-in-chief of State Affairs, yet another statehouse-focused news organization that is rolling out a Massachusetts edition in partnership with State House News.
Still, it’s a far cry from when the Statehouse press gallery was full of reporters hanging on every word from governors, legislative leaders and reform-minded rebels — that last category something that has virtually disappeared. Maybe if there were a few more reporters at the Statehouse keeping tabs on what’s going on, there would be a few more rebels as well.
More on the AP
The Associated Press is in the news for two other reasons today.
First, editors of the influential AP Stylebook have announced that they’re sticking with the Gulf of Mexico, despite President Trump’s insistence that it be called the Gulf of America, but that they’re following Trump’s lead in referring to Alaska’s Denali mountain as Mount McKinley, as it had been known previously.
The reason, the AP explains, is that the Gulf of Mexico name goes back 400 years and that the body of water is international. Denali, by contrast, is entirely within U.S. borders, and the president has the right to change its name by executive order, as President Barack Obama did in 2015.
Second, a new documentary film claims that AP photographer Nick Ut did not take an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a Vietnamese girl running naked from an American napalm attack, an image that may have hastened the end of the Vietnam War. The AP vociferously disagrees, saying that its own investigation shows Ut was indeed the photographer. Poynter media columnist Tom Jones has the details (fourth item).
I gave quite a bit of thought to whether I wanted to spend 50 hours with the audio version of Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant before deciding to take the plunge. I knew I was unlikely to find the time to read all 1,074 pages, and I wanted to know more about Grant and his era.
So I started it in mid-October during a drive to Portland, Maine, and kept at it an hour at a time, mainly on walks. I finished on New Year’s Day, and I’m here to report that it took longer for Grant to die than it did Joan of Arc during her interminable burning at the stake in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a 1928 silent film that we saw a few years ago accompanied by music written and performed brilliantly by a group of Berklee students.
I had previously listened to Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which, at 36 hours, was a romp by comparison. I don’t regret the time I spent getting to know Grant; Chernow is an eloquent writer and a skilled researcher, and, as I had hoped, I came away much more knowledgeable about his life and times.
But the level of detail about every trivial occurrence, and the repetitiveness about topics such as Grant’s alcoholism, military genius and ineptitude when not on the battlefield gets to be enervating after a while. As Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: “Chernow likes extreme research; if a Civil War luminary had hemorrhoids, you can read about them here.”
I find that I absorb information from an audiobook about as well as I do from print, but since I’m not taking notes, I can’t really go back and offer much in the way of detail. More than anything, though, what stood out was Grant’s dedication to Black equality. In Chernow’s telling, Grant and Abraham Lincoln were the foremost white advocates of civil rights until Lyndon Johnson. Grant eagerly made use of Black troops during the Civil War, pushed for an expansive approach to Reconstruction, and, as president, dispatched the military to the South to break the Ku Klux Klan.
Thus it’s more than a little disconcerting to come to the end of Grant’s presidency in 1877, when Northern support for Reconstruction was waning, and learn that he believed the Civil War — which claimed an estimated 750,000 lives — had all been for naught. It’s hard to disagree, as slavery in the South morphed into Jim Crow and lynchings, a reign of terror that extended into the 1960s and whose legacy has still not been entirely put behind us.
Media notes
• Unpacking New Orleans and Las Vegas. Around this time Thursday, authorities were reportedly investigating whether the terrorist in New Orleans had accomplices and if the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion might somehow be tied in. Then, too, Donald Trump was parroting a false report from Fox News that the New Orleans attacker had driven across the border from Mexico. Today, we know that none of it was true. As the “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” from the public radio program “On the Media” puts it: “In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong” and “There’s almost never a second shooter” — or, in this case, a second attacker.
• A challenge to the AP. Reuters and Gannett are planning to offer some sort of subscription-based service to regional and local news publishers, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, marking the next step in a partnership that began last spring. This is potentially bad news for The Associated Press, which has been losing customers because of its high prices. But it’s not clear how the arrangement will work. Reuters is a high-quality source of national and international news. Gannett, which publishes USA Today and owns some 200 local news outlets, is notorious for slashing its newsrooms and cutting their reporting capacity.
• Why local news matters. The Los Angeles Times has lost some 20,000 subscribers since owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and began embracing various Trump-friendly ideas, according to media reporter Oliver Darcy. Not good — but far fewer than the 250,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions over owner Jeff Bezos’ similar moves. The LA Times was starting from a smaller base, but there’s an additional factor that may be at play.
Under Bezos’ ownership, the Post reinvented itself as a nationally focused digital publication — making it relatively easy to cancel, since there are plenty of other sources of national and international news, starting with the Post’s ancient rival, The New York Times. By contrast, the LA Times is primarily a regional publication, not unlike The Boston Globe. Canceling the LA Times would mean losing access to important local and regional stories that no one else has.
Another quick post from vacationland. In case you missed it, The Boston Globe has gotten itself into trouble for publishing a headline that claimed Olympic boxer Imane Khelif is transgender. The headline was affixed to an accurate AP story. Step two: The Globe botched the correction. Finally, it published this editor’s note:
A significant error was made in a headline on a story in Friday’s print sports section about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif incorrectly describing her as transgender. She is not. Additionally, our initial correction of this error neglected to note that she was born female. We recognize the magnitude of this mistake and have corrected it in the epaper, the electronic version of the printed Globe. This editing lapse is regrettable and unacceptable and we apologize to Khelif, to Associated Press writer Greg Beacham, and to you, our readers.
Social media has erupted in fury at the Globe. This was a mistake that could have been avoided with the right training and editing processes in place. I hope the Globe takes steps to ensure that this sort of error doesn’t happen again.
Follow-up, Aug. 5: My old Boston Phoenix and “Beat the Press” friend Adam Reilly reports for GBH News on the fallout. I’m quoted.
•Kim lie dogs Noem. South Dakota’s dog-killing governor, Kristi Noem, also lied in her forthcoming book about staring down North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some media outlets are describing her claim as “false” rather than as a “lie,” which I guess is OK. Several, though, have parroted her claim that it was an “error.” For instance, here’s a headline from The Associated Press: “South Dakota Gov. Noem admits error of describing meeting North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in new book.” And here’s how the “PBS NewsHour” rewrote that AP headline: “South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem erroneously describes meeting with Kim Jong Un in new book.” Whatever else you want to call it, it was not an error — you don’t confuse the dictator of North Korea with the governor of North Dakota.
•Gannett nixes expansion. Earlier this year, top executives at Gannett said they were in expansion mode. Our largest newspaper chain, notorious for hollowing out newsrooms, was going to try something else, building up both the news and advertising sides. Well, that didn’t last long. Rick Edmonds reports for Poynter Online that Gannett’s plans to add staff at its smallest dailies have been put on hold, although hiring continues at larger papers. On Thursday, Gannett reported a loss of $84.8 million in its first quarter.
•Media chain roulette. You may have heard that Kim Tunnicliffe, a respected reporter for WBZ-AM, was laid off by the soulless corporate ghouls who own what was once a great all-news radio station. What I didn’t know was that the three entities called WBZ all have different owners. WBZ-TV is owned by CBS and WBZ-AM by iHeartMedia. The third entity, WBZ-FM, is much better known as the Sports Hub, and its owner is Beasley Media Group. I had assumed the Sports Hub was part of iHeart. Anyway, best wishes to Tunnicliffe, who deserves an opportunity to work for an outfit that’s worthy of her talents.
