Now here’s an interesting idea. On Saturdays, letters to the editor take up about two-thirds of The Boston Globe’s op-ed page. And today, those letters are from readers of La Presse, a Montreal paper, about the state of U.S.-Canadian relations under Donald Trump.
The letters are running in La Presse as well, writes the Globe’s letters editor, Matthew Bernstein — and Globe readers are being invited to write letters to their Québécois neighbors as well. The letters were written in French and translated into English. Bernstein explains:
Simon Chabot, director of the Dialogue section for La Presse in Montreal, invited readers of the French-language news outlet to share messages to their American neighbors. Chabot reminded them that not all Americans share President Trump’s point of view, especially in New England, which has maintained close ties with Quebec for centuries. He asked his readers: “Are these ties important to you? Would you like to tell our neighbors?”
So what do La Presse readers have to say? “It pains me to be unable to visit you, and the thought of enduring this for the next four years saddens me,” writes Nathalie Perreault of Sherbrooke. “I cherished my time in your country, where I completed my postdoctoral studies and embraced your culture for five wonderful years.”
Adds Jocelyne Kucharski of Bromont: “May I say that I found you very naive to have elected a criminal to head your country? The fact that you ignored all the red lights warning you of his duplicity arouses total incomprehension on my part…. How could you not hear and understand that he doesn’t give a damn about the average American? That his real friends are the ultrarich?”
Unfortunately, the letters are behind the Globe’s unforgiving paywall. But La Presse allows a few free clicks per month, and you can find the same letters here. When I accessed the page using Chrome, a button popped up giving me the option of using Google Translate. It looks pretty good to me, but caveat emptor.
Ibram X. Kendi. Photo (cc) 2019 by Tony Turner Photography.
The Emancipator, a digital magazine covering racial justice that was launched with great fanfare four years ago, is leaving Boston.
The project was originally a joint venture of The Boston Globe’s opinion section and the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The Globe ended its involvement two years later. The Emancipator will now be based at Howard University, the leading historically Black university.
The move was actually announced back in February, but it will formally take place on Monday, the last day of the academic year. Co-founder Ibram X. Kendi, the well-known antiracism scholar, is leaving BU to take a position at Howard, and The Emancipator is following him to Washington.
Amber Payne, The Emancipator’s publisher, announced on Thursday that she’ll be stepping down, writing:
After June 30, The Emancipator will transition from Boston University to Howard University as part of our co-founder Ibram X. Kendi’s Institute for Advanced Study, which will be dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of racism in the global African Diaspora. The Emancipator will be part of the institute’s larger mission to enhance the general public’s understanding of racism and evidence-based antiracist solutions through academic and publicly accessible research, public lectures, events, workshops, and outreach programs.
Payne was originally hired as co-editor along with Deborah Douglas, who now teaches journalism at Northwestern’s Medill School and is director of Medill’s newly created Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub.
Wesley Lowery, left, speaking at a panel discussion. Photo (cc) 2016 by New America.
When Sewell Chan was fired by the Columbia Journalism Review last month for reasons that have not been adequately explained, he wrote on social media about a sensitive story that was in the works. He said he had what he described as “pointed conversations” with three staff members. Here’s how he described one of those conversations:
[It] was with an editor who has been working for weeks on a sensitive MeToo investigation I launched about sexual harassment by a prominent investigative reporter. Following a legal review of that story, I urged her to share her draft to the dean so that we could move expeditiously toward publication. She asked for more time, to which I reluctantly acceded. The story remains unpublished.
Those of us who are media obsessives assumed he was referring to former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize winner. In March, Lowery was the subject of a tough article in his former paper (gift link), written by Will Sommer, alleging that he had left his job at American University over allegations that he’d made “inappropriate sexual comments in private meetings with students and unwanted sexual advances and actions toward journalists.”
On Wednesday, the story that Chan had alluded to finally dropped. And it is truly the stuff that nightmares are made of. Betsy Morais, named interim editor of the Columbia Journalism Review after Chan’s firing, reports that Lowery engaged in a pattern of serious sexual misconduct while he was at American University, with several women saying that Lowery had pressured them into sex or sexually assaulted them after he plied them with alcohol. It is a deeply disturbing story. Lowery would not speak with CJR, but he did give Morais a statement that I can only describe as unparseable. It says in part:
CJR’s portrayal of these periods in my personal life is incomplete and includes false insinuations about complicated dynamics. Still, I respect the women who have shared their experiences and take their perspectives seriously. As a young professional, I did not always recognize the power imbalances that surfaced as personal relationships evolved into professional ones, and vice versa.
He adds that he has since “committed to sobriety.”
This would be a tragedy in any case, especially for the women he allegedly victimized. But it’s also a tragedy because of what Lowery represents. He is a prominent Black journalist who has been outspoken about the ways that traditional notions of objectivity have served to reinforce the status quo with regard to race and gender — both within media organizations and in how the news is covered.
I know Lowery slightly and, until recently, counted myself among his admirers. I interviewed him briefly for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.” I’ve emailed back and forth with him about which of his books I should assign my ethics students. I’ve assigned his essays on objectivity as well as the video of a panel discussion he took part in on that topic hosted by the Columbia Journalism School, which is the home of CJR.
It is a real loss that his voice will no longer be heard. And no, I won’t be assigning his work anymore. There are times when it’s just too difficult to separate the writer from what they have written.
Lowery worked for The Boston Globe about a dozen years ago, and when editor Marty Baron left to become executive editor of The Washington Post, Lowery followed not long after. He wrote an important book about the first wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” and he helped the Post build a widely praised database of people who had been killed by police officers.
But it is Lowery’s critique of objectivity that was uniquely valuable. I don’t agree with him entirely — as Walter Lippmann originally conceived of objectivity, it is the fair-minded, evidence-based pursuit of the truth, not mindless balance, which is the way it is often caricatured. And I don’t really think Lowery disagrees with Lippmann.
At the beginning of each semester, I’ve asked my ethics students to read an op-ed piece (gift link) that Lowery wrote for The New York Times in 2020 headlined “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” and to watch an address that Baron delivered at Brandeis in 2023 called “In Defense of Objectivity.”
What’s striking is that Lowery’s and Baron’s views aren’t really that far apart, even though their clashes over Lowery’s outspokenness on social media led to Lowery’s departure from the Post.
Now Lowery has been silenced — has silenced himself. The debate over journalistic ethics, objectivity and race will be poorer without his contributions. I am not saying he deserves any special treatment for the terrible behavior of which he’s been accused. I am saying that his critique of how journalists do their work will be missed.
I realize that, in lamenting the loss of Lowery’s voice, I haven’t given voice to any of the women quoted in the CJR story. So I’m going to close with a thread on Bluesky written by Olivia Messer, the editor-in-chief of Barbed Wire, who told CJR a harrowing tale of being sexually assaulted by Lowery.
Messer also says that she was interviewed, on the record, for the article that Sommer wrote for The Washington Post and that her comments did not make it into print. Sommer has since left the Post for The Bulwark. So it sounds like there are still some loose ends to be tied up.
Here is what she posted last night:
Some of y’all noticed I’ve been uncharacteristically offline. This is why, and I remain on leave for a few weeks to handle a PTSD relapse. CJR was dogged in its pursuit of my story. Because of what I do and who I am, I felt that I had to answer their questions honestly.www.cjr.org/feature-2/we…
I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but I also believe it was a chance to prove that I mean what I say to the women who have trusted me with theirs. I have to believe that there’s power in telling the truth — and in journalism.
I’m really really overwhelmed by the messages of support — and the multiple journalists who’ve DMed me about their similar experiences with him. It’s going to take time to get back to everyone, but I deeply appreciate it and am filled with just immense gratitude and relief.
Ann Telnaes is a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting and commentary; after all, she previously won in 2001, and she was a finalist in 2022. Her winning portfolio is trademark Telnaes, portraying Donald Trump as a dumpy, orange-faced gnome who somehow manages to be simultaneously menacing and pathetic.
At the same time, I think it’s unavoidable to conclude that the Pulitzer judges, in recognizing Telnaes, were sending a message to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes quit in January after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Bezos.
Shipley later followed Telnaes out the door after Bezos decreed that the Post’s opinion pages would henceforth be dedicated exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets.”
As Poynter media columnist Tom Jones observes, the Pulitzer board took note of Telnaes’ departure earlier this year by hailing her “fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”
By ruling in favor of The Associated Press in its lawsuit to overturn a ban imposed by the Trump White House, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden applied the First Amendment in a straightforward, entirely predictable manner. The Trump administration may appeal, but it would be shocking and deeply disturbing if McFadden’s decision isn’t upheld.
First, McFadden ruled that though the White House can exercise broad discretion in terms of which news organizations are allowed access to the Oval Office, Mar-a-Lago and other venues, it must do so in a neutral manner. The White House, by explicitly stating that the AP was being banned for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its proper name rather than the “Gulf of America,” was engaging in unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination,” McFadden wrote. He continued:
The analysis is straightforward. The AP made an editorial decision to continue using “Gulf of Mexico” in its Stylebook. The Government responded publicly with displeasure and explicitly announced it was curtailing the AP’s access to the Oval Office, press pool events, and East Room activities. If there is a benign explanation for the Government’s decision, it has not been presented here.
The judge also rejected the Trump administration’s claim that the AP was seeking special privileges. First Amendment precedent holds that a news organization has no right to demand, say, an interview with a public official, or to be called on at a news conference. The White House claimed that’s what the AP was seeking.
William Harlan Hale delivering the first Voice of America Broadcast on Jan. 1, 1942. Photo via Wikipedia.
When a coup takes place in other countries, we sometimes learn that news programming is taken off the air and replaced with patriotic music. I don’t know what kind of music has been playing on Voice of America since Saturday morning. What I do know is that dictators like Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping found it pleasing to their ears.
There is a danger at moments like this to breeze past stories such as the virtual shutdown of Voice of America because we knew it was coming anyway, and because there are more immediate matters with which to grapple, including illegal arrests and deportations. But the Trump White House’s shutdown of Voice of America, though not surprising, is nevertheless a moment worth paying careful attention to as the authoritarian regime headed by Donald Trump tightens its grip.
On Thursday morning, I posted our latest “What Works” podcast, in which my Northeastern University colleague Mike Beaudet of WCVB-TV (Channel 5) explained to Ellen Clegg and me why the folks running local television news need to transition to a digital-first, mobile-first mentality if they hope to attract a younger generation of viewers.
The pixels were barely dry before I started hearing from The Boston Globe newsroom that the paper was canceling its four-days-a-week 5 p.m. newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” I was able to break that news before anyone else, so thanks as always to my sources. The program, launched in February 2023, appeared Monday through Thursday on New England Sports Network, of which Globe owners John and Linda Henry are part-owners.
I’m getting multiple messages that The Boston Globe is shutting down its TV/digital newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” There’s also a bit of an uproar from the newsroom that a message from a staff member who’s been laid off was removed from the Globe’s Slack channel. More later, I’m sure.
Here is the somewhat skeptical post I wrote when the newscast made its debut a little more than two years ago. As I said at the time, the producers needed to find ways of breaking the newscast down into stories that could be consumed by younger viewers on their phones.
And here’s what I wrote last fall when newscast host Segun Oduolowu popped up on a Kamala Harris fundraising call and explicitly endorsed her presidential campaign, creating an ethical dilemma for Globe management.
The Boston Globe is losing one of its top editors, Mark Morrow, who’s retiring after nearly 30 years at the paper. Before that, he worked for 12 years as a reporter and editor at The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, giving him a career trajectory that would be difficult to replicate these days.
Morrow, 71, the Globe’s editor-at-large, has been involved in some of the paper’s most noteworthy journalism over the years, including the pedophile-priest story that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and was the subject of the movie “Spotlight.” According to a memo to the staff from executive editor Nancy Barnes, which was shared with me by a trusted source, Morrow “played a significant editing role garnered the Globe three Pulitzers and seven Pulitzers finalists among myriad other recognitions.”
Barnes’ full memo to the staff follows.
When I first arrived at the Globe, more than two years ago now, I looked across the long conference table where the morning news meeting is held every day, and saw a rare editor. He carried no laptop. His arms were folded across his chest. He was just listening and thinking — at least until it came around to his turn to share his deep thoughts. And share, he did in the manner of a grand poobah.
You all know who I am talking about, the inimitable, and yes, irreplaceable, Mark Morrow, our editor-at-large and editor extraordinaire. And yet, somehow, after nearly 30 years, this newsroom will have to learn to do without him. Mark is retiring, at 71, after a lifetime of dedication to journalism and other journalists. God knows he deserves it, but we will all miss him, and me especially, as he has served as a thought partner in editing when I most needed one here. Mark will leave at the end of the month, exact date to be determined.
Mark once told me that it was initially hard to get a foothold at the Globe, but he was determined, and he finally got his chance in the summer of 1995 when then metro editor, Walter V. Robinson, and Editor Matt Storin, took a chance on him. Since then, he has served in myriad roles, as political editor, overseeing the state house and city hall teams, and as national editor during the Clinton impeachment years, the first wave of mass shootings, and the 2000 national election that brought us all hanging chads. The national operation, in those days, included a DC bureau of about a dozen or so people, a roving national reporter, and correspondents in three national bureaus: New York, LA, and New Orleans.
After the Bush-Gore election, Mark moved on to something completely different. He took over the Living/Arts department for 18 months before Marty Baron promoted him to AME [assistant managing editor] for projects in the summer of 2002, when the Globe’s investigation into the Catholic Church clergy scandal was roaring along. He succeeded Ben Bradlee Jr. as the senior editor overseeing the Spotlight Team for the balance of that singular investigation, shared in the Public Service Pulitzer it earned, and has guided and served as final editor on all Spotlight Team work in the 22 years since.
He has also been instrumental in most of the Globe’s other noteworthy and impactful projects and enterprise, in his other role as Sunday editor, for the past 12 years. Projects in which he played a significant editing role garnered the Globe three Pulitzers and seven Pulitzers finalists among myriad other recognitions. But most importantly, it was work that made a difference in the life of our community, our state, and the journalists who worked with Mark.
Be kind to him today, as it’s sure to be a difficult one. We will share details of how to celebrate him before too long.
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.”
