Bina Venkataraman – Page 2

Making endorsements relevant in the digital age

The Boston Globe and The New York Times today endorse Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for president and vice president. No surprise, of course. But the two editorials — especially the Globe’s — are indications of how newspapers are trying to keep the hoary old tradition of endorsements relevant in the 21st century.

First, it’s early. Traditionally, newspapers endorse as close to Election Day as possible, partly for maximum impact, partly to reduce the number of days that their news reporters have to labor under the burden of reporting fairly on candidates whom their paper’s opinion pages had spurned.

No more. These days, Election Day is merely the last day that you can vote. Early voting and mail-in balloting are already under way. If endorsements are going to have any influence at all, they need to be published before the majority of people have voted. And that’s now.

Second, digital media often obliterate the distinction between news and opinion. At large papers like the Times and the Globe, the editorial and news operations are separate. And sure enough, the front pages of today’s print editions don’t even mention that their editorial pages are endorsing — not even in the teases at the bottom of the page.

Yet the Times home page notes that the editorial section is endorsing Biden, a function of the Times’ opinion highlights in the right-hand rail. And the Globe actually leads the home page with its endorsement (see above). Savvy news consumers, especially those who came of age during the print era, won’t be confused. But not everyone is a savvy news consumer.

Third, though the Times endorsement is pretty old-fashioned and straightforward, the Globe’s is innovative — an attempt, no doubt, to get beyond the reality that everyone knew the Globe was going to endorse Biden. They’ve given the editorial a vibrant digital treatment. More interesting still, they’ve got 12 separate mini-editorials addressing different types of voters — the “business voter,” the “disenchanted Trump voter,” the “religious voter” and the like.

I’ve always doubted that newspaper endorsements can sway voters in presidential races; they are more influential in less visible contests in which readers don’t necessarily know much about the candidates. But Globe editorial-page editor Bina Venkataraman and her crew deserve credit for breaking out of the box of the old-fashioned endorsement.

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Will the Globe revoke its endorsement of Jake Auchincloss?

Update, Aug. 7: I should note that editorial page editor Bina Venkataraman has tweeted that the Globe will stick by its endorsement of Jake Auchincloss.

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Update, Aug. 6: In a direct shot at the editorial board, business columnist (and former interim editorial page editor) Shirley Leung has written a column endorsing one of Auchincloss’ opponents, Jesse Mermell.

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The Boston Globe editorial board appears to be getting ready for the possibility that it might revoke its July 31 endorsement of Democratic congressional candidate Jake Auchincloss. The extremely loud hint came in the form of an announcement that editorial page editor Bina Venkataraman would sit down with Auchincloss for a Zoom one-on-one this coming Monday:

Many Globe readers have expressed concerns about the candidate’s past statements and campaign finances, some of which emerged after the editorial board’s deliberations. Readers and voters deserve to know more and hear directly from the candidate. In this conversation, Globe editorial page editor Bina Venkataraman will ask Auchincloss about his record on racial justice, free speech, and beyond.

It’s not as if concerns about Auchincloss’ track record weren’t out there. On Tuesday evening, Greg Reibman, president of the Newton-Needham Regional Chamber of Commerce, tweeted out a June 27 commentary in the Newton Tab by Bennett Walkes that begins with this rather devastating statement:

While growing up Black in Newton, I’ve dealt with all sorts of racial profiling and slurs. However, no individual has made me feel more unwelcomed, unvalued and unsafe in my hometown than Jake Auchincloss — now a candidate for Congress.

Walkes cites Auchincloss’ support, on free-speech grounds, for the right to fly the Confederate flag — and comparing it to a Black Lives Matter or Pride banner.

Also on Tuesday evening, the Globe published a story by Stephanie Ebbert reporting on a variety of controversies involving Auchincloss, from his remarks about the Confederate flag to his “no” vote on a city council resolution calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump — an inconvenient fact given Auchincloss’ outspoken opposition to Trump. The editorial board is independent of the newsroom, of course; but they read the paper, and this must have come as very bad news.

Auchincloss is one of a large field of Democrats seeking to succeed U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, who’s running against U.S. Sen. Ed Markey. Maybe the editorial board will conclude that Auchincloss is still the best choice. But it sounds like they threw in with Auchincloss on the basis of incomplete information.

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The Globe’s early endorsement of Markey isn’t quite as early as it seems

It’s generally understood that when newspaper editorial boards endorse candidates, they do so as late as possible in order to avoid the perception that their news coverage will be slanted in favor of the endorsee. So I was surprised to see The Boston Globe endorse U.S. Sen. Ed Markey over his Democratic primary challenger, U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, a full five weeks before the primary.

What gives? According to the Globe’s editorial-page editor, Bina Venkataraman, it’s later than it seems: mail-in voting will begin soon, so the Sept. 1 primary date is merely the last day that people can cast ballots. I’d honestly forgotten that, even though I’ve applied to vote by mail.

https://twitter.com/binajv/status/1288085330034294784?s=20

In fact, as David Bernstein recently pointed out at WGBH News, the two campaigns are engaged in furious get-out-the-vote efforts already. Huge numbers of Massachusetts voters are expected to take advantage of the mail-in option in order to avoid exposure to COVID-19 at the polls.

There’s still a dilemma, though. Because Markey and Kennedy will be campaigning right up until Sept. 1, the Globe’s news reporters will have to fend of complaints of bias for more than a month. The editorial pages at a quality paper like the Globe do not affect news coverage (for example), but try explaining that to the general public.

Should newspapers endorse candidates at all, or is that an outmoded custom? I’ve found that my students are dubious about the merits of news organizations’ telling people whom to vote for. But I think it can be a valuable exercise, especially in situations where an endorsement might really make a difference.

In this case, the Globe endorsement might matter. Markey and Kennedy hold similar progressive views, and readers will sit up and take notice that the Globe isn’t endorsing a Kennedy, as they might have been expected to do — although, as a longtime Globe reader, I can’t say I was all that surprised that they went with Markey.

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Contrary to buzz in the newsroom, Linda Henry says: ‘The Globe is not for sale’

Are John and Linda Henry looking to sell The Boston Globe? Folks in the newsroom have been wondering in recent weeks. But according to Linda Henry, the paper’s managing director, the answer is no.

Henry hosted a Zoom town hall for Globe employees earlier today. Among the questions she was asked, according to a source, was whether the departure of Boston Globe Media president Vinay Mehra last week was related to a possible sale. I contacted her a short time later, and she replied via email:

The question [at the town hall] was if Vinay’s departure had anything to do with our ownership status, which it absolutely doesn’t. This doesn’t affect our thinking or what we have said about stewarding this great institution. The Globe is not for sale, I’m pretty sure you would have picked up on if it was.

The idea that a sale might be under consideration gained steam recently when Sarah Betancourt reported reported in CommonWealth Magazine that — according to the Boston Newspaper Guild — the Henrys were “apparently insisting on the removal of a provision in the existing contract that would keep the contract terms intact if the newspaper is sold.” Management and the Guild have been enmeshed in acrimonious contract talks for quite some time.

Yet in most respects the Globe seems to be doing well, although its status as a profitable business probably came a sudden halt when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and advertising nosedived. The paper went over the long-hoped-for 200,000 mark in digital subscriptions recently, and hiring continues. Just today, editorial-page editor Bina Venkataraman announced that Kimberly Atkins would be leaving WBUR Radio and joining the opinion section as a Washington-based senior writer.

Editor Brian McGrory also announced ambitious plans just last week to improve the diversity of the Globe’s hiring, promotions and coverage.

Two years ago, John Henry responded to similar talk of a sale by saying: “I don’t think of selling any local assets during my lifetime. Linda and I love and are committed to this city.”

It sounds like that hasn’t changed.

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Globe editor Brian McGrory addresses diversity in the newsroom and in coverage

Also published at WGBHNews.org.

This past Wednesday, Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory sent a long memo to his staff about steps the Globe will take to respond to issues of race and equity — both in the paper’s coverage and the diversity of its newsroom.

So far, at least, the Globe has been able to avoid the sort of public turmoil over race that the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, among other news organizations, have experienced. But the Globe has long suffered from a lack of people of color in leadership positions. The last ranking Black editor, Greg Moore, left for The Denver Post in 2002 several months after losing out on the top position to Marty Baron. (The Globe’s opinion pages are led by Bina Venkataraman, who is Indian American.)

A couple of other points. First, although McGrory sent this out on Wednesday, no one leaked it to me until late Thursday. I don’t know the outcome of the Thursday presentation McGrory refers to. If someone at the Globe would like to send something along, I’d love to see it. I’d consider publishing an anonymous report as long as I knew who it was from.

Second, toward the end McGrory mentions wanting the Globe to adopt what amounts to a “right to be forgotten” for people who’ve been charged or even convicted of minor crimes. This sounds like an excellent idea as long as news stories aren’t going to be deleted from the archives.

Before the web, print editions soon disappeared into microfilm collections that were virtually impossible to search, which meant that the sort of minor incidents McGrory is referring to could not be easily found by, say, prospective employers. We need some way of returning to those days of semi-privacy without destroying the historical record.

What follows is the full text of McGrory’s memo.

Updates and plans

Hey all,

We’ll start with a request: Everyone should do everything possible to attend Thursday’s presentation of the company’s inclusion council. You’ve received an invitation under separate cover for an 11 a.m. Zoom call. The group will share findings and insights that may be hard to hear, but are vitally important to know, so I’d urge you all to participate.

Beyond that, we agreed at our town meeting a few weeks back that discussions about race, even and especially discussions involving deeply uncomfortable truths, are utterly vital. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to have had a good number of one-on-one conversations and small group discussions with people in the room, all of which have been eye-opening to the point of being invaluable. While all these exchanges are important, they are but a start. The real marker of this moment will be the actions that we take. So here, I’d like to outline some of the plans for the newsroom going forward. They are not the final word. They are a starting point, something that will ideally serve as our foundation for durable progress.

Recent assignments

In terms of our coverage, some key assignments have already been made and are worth sharing with you now. We launched a criminal justice team to look at the underlying racism in law enforcement that has served as the tipping point in the protests and calls for action. About two weeks old, it’s already had remarkable impact with stories on outrageously high overtime payments and ballooning payrolls, police officers on the streets despite numerous civilian complaints, a T officer who quietly resigned after abusing a homeless man, the acquisition by Boston Police of more miltary-style equipment, and clear-eyed looks at the push to defund. There is much more on the way. That team includes Milton Valencia, Vernal Coleman, Evan Allen, Tonya Alanez, Andrew Ryan, and Evan Allen, with strong assists from Dugan Arnett, Laura Crimaldi, and Danny McDonald. It’s led by Brendan McCarthy and Nestor Ramos, in a pitch-perfect example of cross-department collaboration. We are past time giving Boston Police and other law enforcement the scrutiny they warrant; this team is already addressing that.

If we focus only on criminal justice, we have failed in our mission to address core issues of racial inequality in and around Boston, one of the most unequal places on the planet. This, as we’ve discussed for years, should be a part of everyone’s beat, whether you cover the environment, the arts, sports, transportation, retail, or real estate. It’s especially vital in primary education, where society blithely accepts systems that are profoundly unequal. We have a strong education team already in place. Naomi Martin will join it, and the indefatigable Felicia Gans will also play a pivotal role ramping up the digital presence as part of her broader portfolio. Felice Belman will now help editor Sarah Carr with oversight.

In addition, we’ve asked Deanna Pan, Zoe Greenberg, Dasia Moore, and Jenee Osterheldt to focus a good part of their time and creative energy on broader racial and social injustice issues, including that wide space where race and COVID collide. And our business staff will remain focused on the epic economic injustices that are prevalent in this region.

Before, during, and after the recent town meeting, many colleagues have been forthright and generous with their insights and ideas. Not surprisingly, they’ve been really thoughtful — and really appreciated. Many of the plans below are pulled from these conversations, discussions with senior editors, and feedback from smaller groups. Again, there should and will be more to come.

• Cover the neighborhoods of color in and around Boston with more intensity — the culture, the economics, the challenges, the triumphs, the people, while also looking at broader stories about city life. We would assign at least one but likely more reporters to it, with strong editing guidance. We would also look for partnerships and innovative ways to get information to residents.

• Promote and/or hire Black editors and other editors of color to significant roles, including, but by no means limited to, the masthead. This is of paramount importance.

• Require a staff-wide work audit for racial representation. Each reporter, photographer, columnist, producer, and editor will be given the necessary time to look back six months and assess their work through a racial lens — how many people of color were subjects, how many were quoted as experts, how many were depicted in photographs and videos, and in what fashion?
Likewise, we’ll go through home pages and print section fronts, as well as the magazine, to see how often and in what ways we depicted Black people and other people of color.

This exercise is not meant to embarrass or penalize anyone. It’s to learn from our own work and create awareness of what we need to do. We’ll figure out a meaningful way to share the broader results.

Meantime, it is of the utmost importance for everyone to include a diverse range of voices in stories and to develop sources who don’t look like you. Jenee has worked up a strong list of Black sources to share, with an assist from Adrian [Walker] and Yvonne Abraham, to help people get started.

• We’ve had important success hiring star journalists of color over the past couple of years, but we are nowhere near where we want or need to be. We’ll redouble our efforts to make the newsroom more diverse, with a dual focus on retention and hiring.

• Make sure we dedicate the right resources to cover law enforcement agencies as a key part of our regular and ongoing coverage.

Internal changes

• Reframe our summer internship program, beginning in 2021, to a diversity internship and training program in which all participants will be students or recent graduates of color.

• Mandate that a specific proportion of our co-ops are students of color.

• Work with the Guild to amend the newsroom’s ethics policy to allow for participation in Black Lives Matter rallies by staffers.

• Form a newsroom advisory council to weigh in on coverage and initiatives that involve race issues.

• Explore outside funding for a training program for early-career journalists of color, in partnership with universities, nonprofits, and possibly other news organizations. This program would allow for the hiring of journalists for a predetermined tenure at the Globe involving intensive training, mentorship, and meaningful work while they are here.

One more

• Launch a ‘right to forget’ initiative that allows people to appeal their presence in a story from the Globe archives and ask for it to be de-linked from search engines. This includes, but is not limited to, someone charged and even convicted of non-violent crimes. Our journalism was never meant to be a permanent obstacle to someone’s success, with the worst decisions and moments in regular people’s lives accessible by a few keystrokes for the rest of time. This will be a complicated endeavor, involving a small committee and imperfect judgments, but it will be worthwhile.

There will undoubtedly be additional measures. And we will also be working closely in the newsroom with ReadySet, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firm that has been smartly engaged by the Globe’s inclusion council to help the entire organization.

As tends to happen in this business, we find ourselves at the intersection of opportunity and responsibility. It’s on all of us to make the most of it and to have the strongest impact, meaning we have much work to do in the weeks ahead.

Please keep reaching out with your thoughts, insights, and ideas.

Brian

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No, The New York Times shouldn’t have published Tom Cotton’s ugly little screed

Sen. Tom Cotton. Photo (cc) 2013 by Gage Skidmore.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The New York Times may be rethinking its decision to publish Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s terrible, offensive op-ed piece endorsing the use of military force to crush the violent protests that have broken out around the country following the brutal police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Though Cotton’s essay was posted online Wednesday, it doesn’t appear in today’s print edition. And, at least at the moment, you have to scroll to the bottom of the digital opinion section in order to find it.

Should it have run? On the face of it, an op-ed by an influential Republican senator deserves consideration no matter how awful it might be. By tradition, newspaper opinion pages in the United States are ideologically diverse. Though the Times’ editorial pages are liberal, they also feature conservative columnists and, on occasion, provocative right-wing outside contributors like Cotton. Not every piece can or should cater to the views of the Times’ mostly liberal readership.

Editorial-page editor James Bennet defended his decision to run the piece. “Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy,” he tweeted. “We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton’s argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.”

But not every opinion deserves to be aired. Presumably the Times would not run an op-ed by a white supremacist calling for a return to Jim Crow laws, or a communist who wants to send billionaires to forced-labor camps.

Cotton’s piece isn’t quite that bad. But here are three reasons that it shouldn’t have run.

First, by calling for government-sanctioned violence against protesters, Cotton may be endangering lives. A number of Times employees took to Twitter to blast the piece. The Washington Post reports: “Several tweeted the same message — ‘Running this puts Black @nytimes staffers in danger’ — with a screen shot of the editorial’s headline, ‘Tom Cotton: Send In The Troops.'”

Second, just two days earlier Cotton took to Twitter and demanded, “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” As The Bulwark notes, “The phrase ‘no quarter’ means killing enemy combatants rather than taking any prisoners.” Cotton, a retired Army captain, presumably knows that’s a war crime. Bennet should have told Cotton he had disqualified himself when the senator came peddling his op-ed.

Third, Cotton makes a dangerous, unsubstantiated claim in his op-ed — that “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa [are] infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” That echoes rhetoric from President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr, but there is no evidence of it, according to The Associated Press. Again, where were Bennet and the other editors? As the oft-cited Daniel Patrick Moynihan rule would have it, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

I thought Bina Venkataraman, The Boston Globe’s editorial-page editor and herself a Times alum, put it well in a thread Wednesday night, writing that “there is a distinction btw a ‘provocative’ opinion that ought to be aired & a dangerous point of view like Cotton’s that already had the largest megaphone in the country: the bully pulpit occupied by the president of the United States.”

She added: “The Cotton oped neither enriches understanding nor offers new ideas — nor does it even break news; everyone paying attention already knew the senator fell in line with the president.”

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So no, Cotton’s piece shouldn’t have been published — not because Times readers shouldn’t be exposed to views with which they disagree, but because it was an ugly little screed that failed to meet basic ethical and journalistic standards.

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The Boston Globe makes an unconventional hire to run its opinion pages

The Boston Globe’s next editorial-page editor, Bina Venkataraman, is an unconventional hire for some interesting reasons. She’s young (39), a person of color, an outsider (notwithstanding a brief stint at the Globe some years ago), an academic associated with MIT and Harvard, and a woman (as were her two predecessors, though it’s still unusual enough to be worth noting).

More than anything, though, her intellectual orientation is very different from the politics-and-powerbrokers style that is typical of editorial-page editors generally. She’s a science journalist who’s worked for The New York Times. She was also a senior adviser for climate-change innovation in the Obama administration and is the author of a new book, “The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age.”

This is an enormously important hire. The editorial-page editor, like editor Brian McGrory, reports directly to publisher John Henry and managing director Linda Henry. I’d be very surprised if Linda Henry, in particular, was not a driving force in bringing Venkataraman back to the Globe.

Opinion journalism is everywhere these days, though much of it can’t really be considered journalism. In an interview with the Globe, Venkataraman showed that she gets it, saying, “There are a lot of opinions in our media environment right now, and a lot of people are able to offer their opinions, so it raises the bar for what we produce.”

Venkataraman’s predecessor, Ellen Clegg, who retired a little more than a year ago (disclosure: we are research partners on a project we’re not ready to announce), oversaw a vibrant redesign of the print pages, innovative and controversial projects on gun violence and a fake front page about a possible Trump presidency, and the expansion of digital-only content. After Clegg left, business columnist Shirley Leung filled in for a few months as interim editorial-page editor but didn’t really have time to leave her mark.

I would expect to see Venkataraman lead the Globe opinion pages in a more science-based direction, especially with regard to solutions-oriented journalism about climate change. I’d also like to see further expansion of digital-only content — two print pages with lots of white space really isn’t enough.

One big question is the future of the Ideas section, which will be part of Venkataraman’s portfolio. Earlier this year a sharp-eyed observer found a job ad suggesting that the Globe was going to morph it into more of a traditional Sunday week-in-review section — perhaps similar to the old Focus section that Ideas replaced, though it would need considerable updating.

Whether Ideas stays or goes, I think it needs to be made more relevant and rooted in the news. As it stands, many of the pieces strike me as too obscure. That may be a reflection of my own pedestrian tastes, although I don’t think I’m alone in that assessment. We’ll see what Venkataraman does.

Venkataraman begins in November. You can find out more about her in this online bio.

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