On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Scott Brodbeck, founder and CEO of Local News Now.
Many of the news entrepreneurs on our podcast lead nonprofits. Local News Now is a for-profit. Scott owns and operates local news websites in three big Northern Virginia suburbs: Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax County. He also provides technical and back-office support to three other news outlets.
I’ve got a Quick Take about a corporate newspaper owner that is making a big bet on growth at a major metropolitan newspaper. In Georgia, Cox Enterprises is making a $150 million bet that it can transform The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If Cox is successful, it might serve as a model for other corporate newspaper owners.
Ellen has a Quick Take about a piece in the New Yorker by a writer named Nathan Heller. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to relate to local news. In fact, the title is pretty wonky: “The Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information.” But Heller has some smart observations about how information travels in a viral age.
Martin Luther King Jr. House in Atlanta. Photo (cc) 2019 by Warren LeMay.
The list of major metropolitan daily newspapers that are doing reasonably well is short and dominated by independent owners. There are The Boston Globe, The Minnesota Star Tribune and The Seattle Times, all under family ownership. Next up: The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit paper owned by a nonprofit foundation. (The Tampa Bay Times has a similar arrangement but is struggling.) And there’s The Salt Lake Tribune, which has gone fully nonprofit.
What generally doesn’t come to mind are chain-owned newspapers. One exception, though, is The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is in the midst of a buildup overseen by its corporate owner, Cox Enterprises. David Folkenflik of NPR reports that Cox is spending $150 million over the next several years in the hopes that publisher and president Andrew Morse can figure it out.
Cox isn’t Gannett or Alden Global Capital. At one time it owned a fairly significant newspaper empire, these days it’s down to the AJC, as the Atlanta paper is known, and a handful of papers in Ohio anchored by the Dayton Daily News. Nevertheless, the privately held conglomerate has major holdings in cable television and broadband services, claiming more than $13 billion in revenues in its communications division. In other words, it would seem to be the sort of bottom line-oriented company whose leadership holds few romantic views about the struggling newspaper business.
But Morse, a former top executive at CNN, is pushing ahead. According to Folkenflik, Morse hopes to build the AJC’s paid print and digital circulation from about 100,000 to 500,000 by doubling down on political coverage and reaching out to the city’s Black community, among other initiatives. A downtown newsroom is opening this week after years of being stranded in the suburbs. The AJC is expanding its staff, too.
“Instead of reading story after story about the futility of this, why don’t we grasp onto notions of, ‘How do we build for the future?'” Morse told Folkenflik, adding: “Our mission is to be the most essential and engaging source of news for the people of Atlanta, Georgia, in the South.”
As Folkenflik observes, Georgia is home to several papers owned by the cost-cutting Gannett and McClatchy chains. If Cox can show that there’s another way to do business, maybe the executives at those chains will realize that there’s more money to be made by offering quality than through endless rounds of downsizing. But probably not.
Pants on fire
Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, is on something of an apology tour as he promotes his book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”
The problem is that neither PolitiFact nor other prominent fact-checking projects, including FactCheck.org or The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, have been especially willing over the years to admit that Republicans lie more than Democrats. Donald Trump’s gusher of lies has changed that equation to some degree, although anyone who reads those sites knows that Trump is often treated as a particularly noxious exception to their otherwise both-sides-lie orientation.
Adair spoke with public radio’s “On the Media” over the weekend, telling co-host Brooke Gladstone that, well, he lied about lying. Here’s part of what he said:
In 2012, I was on C-SPAN, national television, live, taking calls. And Brian from Michigan calls in. And Brian says, Mr. Adair, I read in The Nation that when you add up the fact checks, that Republicans lie more and they lie worse. And I answer Brian and I lie. You know, I can honestly say I don’t keep score.
Well, we did keep score. We kept score by person. We didn’t reveal the party total. But I knew that Brian was right. And instead, I gave him this dodge that I always gave people when they asked this. I said, asking me that question is sort of like asking an umpire who’s out at home more, you know, the Yankees or the Red Sox.
I don’t know. I look at every play independently. And I think it’s important that we do that. I want to find Brian so that I can apologize to him because Brian was right then and Brian is even more right now. But I was trying to show that I was impartial.
Adair is now teaching at Duke University and is no longer involved in PolitiFact. But I find it interesting that he’s making this admission just a few months after the fact-checkers strained so hard at the two national political conventions to be “impartial” that they nearly gave themselves a hernia.
PolitiFact is perhaps best known for its “Pants on Fire!” rating for especially egregious lies. Well, Adair may not be able to sit down again for quite some time. He owes an apology not just to Brian but to all of us.
Career on fire
Add Laura Helmuth to the long list of journalists who’ve blown up their career for the sake of a momentary cheap thrill on social media. Helmuth, the editor — make that the former editor — of Scientific American, resigned last week after posting a series of F-bomb-laden posts on Bluesky in which she expressed her outrage at Donald Trump’s election.
Among her posts, according to Maya Yang at The Guardian: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” She later deleted the offending posts and offered up the proverbial boilerplate that they “do not reflect my beliefs.” Apparently it wasn’t enough.
Now, you might think this wasn’t a big deal, but Scientific American is a pretty buttoned-down institution as well as an important part of the scientific establishment, which has been targeted by Trump and the people around him.
As I tell my students, your social-media posts should stay within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do in your day job. Helmuth clearly went well beyond that.
Going, going, gone? Photo (cc) 2015 by J.C. Burns.
Anyone who was around 15 or 20 years ago would be surprised at the persistence of print. Back when newspapers started moving to the web, it seemed likely that print editions would soon become part of the past.
But as visions of lucrative interactive advertising gave way to the realities of Craigslist, Google and Facebook, print emerged as a way to slow down the decline of the newspaper business. The value of print advertising, though on the wane, held up far better than digital ads. And you could charge a lot for home delivery. Even as digitally focused a newspaper as The Boston Globe continues to earn more than half its revenues from the print edition.
Now that may be changing. For years, media observers have been predicting that daily print would eventually disappear. Under this scenario, most papers would continue with one big weekend print edition while switching to digital-only for the rest of the week. In 2019, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette did just that, giving their subscribers iPads so they could continue to read the paper.
The next major news outlet to make that move may be The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, according to bloggers Maria Saporta and John Ruch. The move may be announced at a staff meeting this Thursday. In a staff memo, editor Kevin Riley said:
It’s been a while since we’ve had an in-person newsroom staff meeting, but don’t worry, I promise there won’t be any shoes dropping at this meeting. Instead, I would like to get together and share exciting information as we plan for our future. The leadership team hopes you leave the meeting feeling as optimistic as we do about our path forward — a path that allows us to continue to produce our meaningful work for a long time to come.
The challenges to cutting back to a weekly print edition are several. You need to find people who are willing to deliver the paper once a week, which represents a considerable loss of income. There’s a lot of down time for the presses, calling into question their continued viability. (The AJC outsourced its printing to The Times of Gainesville in 2021.) The paper loses some of its visibility, making it more difficult to promote.
But there are real benefits, too, which is why the AJC may be doing it. According to paid circulation numbers that the paper reported to the Alliance for Audited Media earlier this year, print had fallen to just 39,917 on Monday, the lowest day of the week, and to 94,786 on Sunday. That shows the benefits of continuing with a weekend print edition. Overall circulation was 82,776 on Monday, 137,637 on Sunday.
Advertising, which once accounted for 80% of a typical newspaper’s revenue, has been in an industry-wide downward spiral for many years — from a peak of nearly $49.5 billion in 2005 to an estimated $9.6 million billion in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. Reader revenue, meanwhile, has been slowly rising, and now accounts for slightly more than half of all revenues.
In such an environment, it makes sense to cut back on print. Digital subscriptions don’t bring as much money as print, but the expenses are far lower. If The Atlanta Journal-Constitution succeeds, expect to see a lot more papers follow.
Tom Breen of the New Haven Independent covers real-estate transactions the old-fashioned way. Photos (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
At least two New England newspaper publishers have begun using artificial intelligence rather than carbon-based life forms to report on real-estate transactions.
The Republican of Springfield, online as MassLive, and Hearst Connecticut Media, comprising the New Haven Register and seven other daily newspapers, are running stories put together by an outfit called United Robots. MassLive’s stories are behind a hard paywall, but here’s a taste from the Register of what such articles look like.
United Robots, a Swedish company, touts itself as offering “news automation at massive scale using AI and data science.”
Last year I wrote about artificial intelligence and journalism for GBH News. I’m skeptical, but it depends on how you use it. In some ways AI has made our lives easier by, for instance, enhancing online search and powering the inexpensive transcription of audio interviews. But using it to write stories? Not good. As I wrote last year:
Such a system has been in use at The Washington Post for several years to produce reports about high school football. Input a box score and out comes a story that looks more or less like an actual person wrote it. Some news organizations are doing the same with financial data. It sounds innocuous enough given that much of this work would probably go undone if it couldn’t be automated. But let’s curb our enthusiasm.
Using AI to produce stories about real-estate transactions may seem fairly harmless. But let me give you an example of why it’s anything but.
In November, I accompanied Tom Breen, the managing editor of the New Haven Independent, as he knocked on the doors of houses that had been foreclosed on recently. The Independent is a digital nonprofit news site.
A note Breen left behind asking the resident to call him. (Phone number removed.)
Breen has spent a considerable amount of time and effort in housing court and poring through online real-estate transactions. From doing that, he could see patterns that had emerged. Like Boston and many other cities, New Haven has experienced an explosion in real-estate prices, and a lot of owners are flipping their properties to cash in. In too many cases there are victims — low-income renters whose new landlords, often absentee, jack up the rents. Breen takes the data he’s gathered and rides his bike into the neighborhoods, knocking on doors and talking with residents. It’s difficult, occasionally dangerous work. Once he was attacked by a pit bull.
We didn’t have much luck on our excursion. No one was home at either of the two houses we visited, so Breen left notes behind asking the residents to call him.
“If investors are swapping properties at $100,000, $200,000 above the appraised value and tens of thousands of dollars above what they bought it for two days prior,” Breen told me, “all that can do is drive up costs that are passed down to the renters — to the people actually living in the building.”
The result of Breen’s enterprise has been a series of stories like this one. The lead:
Tenants of a three-family “lemon” of a house on Liberty Street are wondering how two landlords managed to walk away with $180,000 by double-selling a property that they say remains a dump.
You’re not going to get that kind of reporting from artificial intelligence.
Now, of course, you might argue — and some have, as I noted in my GBH News piece — that AI saves journalists from drudge work, freeing them up to do exactly the kind of enterprise reporting that Breen does. But story ideas often arise from immersion in boring data and sitting through lengthy proceedings; outsource the data collection to a robot, and it’s likely that will be the end of it.
Bad sign: Here’s how Breen and I were greeted at one foreclosed-upon property. (Names removed.)
At the corporate chains that own so many of our newspapers, there’s little doubt that AI will be used as just another opportunity to cut. Hearst and Advance, the national chain that owns The Republican, are not the worst or most greedy newspapers chains by any means. But both of them have engaged in more than their share of cost-cutting over the years.
And it’s spreading. United Robots’ U.S. clients include the McClatchy newspaper chain and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, part of the Cox chain. No doubt the Big Two — Gannett and the groups owned by Alden Global Capital — won’t be far behind.
Officials with the Boston Police Department are upset over a tough cartoon about police shootings of black men that appeared on the opinion pages of Monday’s Boston Globe. But the Globe’s editorial-page editor is standing by it. And the president of the local NAACP defends the cartoon as a satirical comment on a tragic reality.
The cartoon, by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose work is nationally syndicated, depicts a white police officer. In one frame, labeled “For White People,” he is seen holding a piece of paper that says “Miranda Rights.” In the other, “For Black People,” a piece of paper says “Last Rites.”
I recently had the privilege of helping to judge more than 100 entries for the 2013 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, which is administered by Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center. We chose six finalists, which were announced immediately, and a winner, which will be honored on Tuesday evening.
At a time when news organizations are struggling to survive, it was heartening to see so much good work. But the finalists also show how the world of investigative journalism is changing.
For instance, two of the newspapers that made it to the finalists’ circle, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, are owned by the troubled Tribune Co., which recently came out of bankruptcy and is now up for sale. If Tribune Co. ends up with the wrong owner, investigative excellence at its newspapers could become a thing of the past.
On the other hand, another finalist was produced by a collabortion among nonprofit news organizations: the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity, Public Radio International and the Investigative News Network. This is no longer surprising. Rather, it is further evidence that nonprofits are essential to carrying out public-service journalism.
Further evidence of the way things are in 2013: two of the finalists were produced by the New York Times, which, despite financial problems of its own, is more firmly established today as our leading news organization than perhaps at any other time in our history.
The sixth finalist is from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a Cox paper that has been experiencing something of a revival in recent years.
The finalists’ entries themselves run the gamut, from sexual abuse in Boy Scout troops, to Walmart’s corporate misbehavior in Mexico, to how the chemical and tobacco industries conspired to foist toxic flame retardants upon the public.
In addition to the investigative reporting award, also to be presented on Tuesday will be the Career Award for Excellence in Journalism, which will go to keynote speaker Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times. The Goldsmith Book Prize will go to Jonathan M. Ladd for “Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters” and Rebecca MacKinnon for “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.”
The event, which is open to the public, will begin at 6 p.m. in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at 79 JFK St. near Harvard Square.
