Seth Moulton, left, and Ed Markey at Thursday’s Senate debate, sponsored by WCVB-TV, The Boston Globe and WBUR. Photo via YouTube.
As I wrote on Wednesday, The Boston Globe’s endorsement of U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton over incumbent Ed Markey in the Democratic Senate primary was a bit of a surprise, although it fits within a tradition of counterintuitive endorsements dating back through several different ownership groups.
Now, though, longtime Democratic political figure George Bachrach is claiming that Globe owners John and Linda Henry may have been motivated by an undisclosed conflict of interest: Since September 2023, Seth Moulton’s wife, Elizabeth Moulton, has been the chief talent and people officer at Elevate, a sports and entertainment consulting firm. In April 2024, Elevate acquired Fenway Sports Management’s Consulting Group. John Henry is the principal owner of FSM as well as the Boston Red Sox.
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton. Photo (cc) 2019 by Marc Nozell.
Endorsements matter in lower-profile races because voters might genuinely be looking for guidance.
Follow-up: A longtime politico alleges the Globe had a conflict in its Seth Moulton endorsement.
For instance, The Boston Globe’s endorsement of Lori Trahan and Jake Auchincloss might have been key factors in their first congressional victories, given that there was no incumbent and there were multiple candidates running. On the other hand, The New York Times’ double endorsement of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries stands out as an exercise in futility.
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In two weeks we’ll know which category the Globe’s endorsement of U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton (sub. req., but this is free) in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate fits into. The incumbent, Ed Markey, remains popular despite his advanced age: he leads Moulton by a 28-point margin, according to the latest WCVB-TV/UMass Amherst poll, and the Globe/Suffolk University poll (sub. req.) has Markey up by 14. Moreover, endorsements matter less in high-profile contests — president, governor, senator — than they do when voters are less familiar with the candidates.
Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory is making some big changes in the newsroom, according to a memo to the staff that a trusted source forwarded to me a little while ago.
Though insiders will be particularly interested in the names, what strikes me is that McGrory says he’s looking for big improvements to the website, observing that it’s “our most widely read platform.” For those who think the Globe is still too print-centric, well, he agrees: “This is not to suggest that print isn’t important. It is, but there are exactly no prospects for increasing our print readership.”
The website, he writes, needs to be “less dense and more thoughtfully packaged, with a clearly defined hierarchy” — something I’m sure every reader would agree with.
I started teaching full-time in 2005. Back then, large piles of The Boston Globe were distributed across Northeastern’s campus. Because students were able to pick up a free Globe on the way to class, I could ask them to bring the paper and be familiar with the main stories of the day.
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Those stacks disappeared years ago. Northeastern worked out a deal for discounted digital subscriptions for students, and I and most of my colleagues in our journalism school required them. But free distribution didn’t return until earlier this year, when Northeastern renegotiated its arrangement with the Globe. Now Northeastern picks up the cost of a digital subscription, and it is free to students, faculty and staff. I actually canceled the paid subscription we’d had since the mid-’80s (digital-only in recent years) and made the switch.
Worcester City Hall. Photo (cc) 2015 by Dan Kennedy.
An independent news organization called This Week in Worcester may be compelled to identify its confidential sources as the result of a libel suit brought against the outlet by a city police officer. First Amendment watchdog Andrew Quemere posted about the case on Bluesky.
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According to Brad Petrishen of the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, Superior Court Judge Gillian Feiner decided not to force This Week publisher Thomas Marino to identify his sources at this time, and she urged Marino and the plaintiff, Officer Thomas Duffy II, to work out a pre-trial settlement. Feiner did not rule out requiring Marino to identify his sources later on.
We got back from Chicago on Saturday after a great vacation with Barbara’s sister, Mary, and her husband, Eric. I’ll have more to say, especially about our visit to the Obama Presidential Center. Today, though, I want to lament the demise of print newspapers and offer some suggestions on how both publishers and airports could make for a better flight.
We flew out on Tuesday. Before boarding at Logan, I visited several Hudson News stores looking for a Wall Street Journal. There were no papers at all — not even USA Today. We got on board, and I was able to connect to Southwest’s wifi service for $8. Given the price of a newspaper these days, that seemed like a reasonable tradeoff. It cut out briefly a couple of times, but I was able to make my way through most of the content on the iPhone app.
On Saturday, I got up early and hit a couple of 7-Elevens near our hotel. Nothing. Needless to say, at one time I’d have been able to grab a free paper at the hotel, but no such luck. Once again, Hudson News stores at Midway were bereft of papers, but I figured I could just pay for wifi. I could not — no service was available. I looked a photos on my phone, stared into space and dozed off briefly. Fortunately, it was a short flight.
Now, you could say I should have brought a book, and yes, I guess I should have. But I didn’t realize it would be impossible to get a paper. It seems to me that at least a few people in airports would like newspapers, especially given the spotty wifi on airplanes. Since Hudson News is occupying space by virtue of a contract with a governmental entity, you’d think it might be required that they carry, say, three national newspapers.
At one time in the not-too-distant past, an absence of print newspapers wouldn’t have been a problem, at least not if you had a Kindle. Amazon used to offer a wide range of papers, and you could buy a single copy for a few bucks. Since the entire edition was downloaded to your device, you didn’t need connectivity. It was a great benefit, and I don’t understand why Amazon ended it.
I do have a solution, though. Why can’t newspaper apps have an option to download that day’s paper? The Boston Globe does, so next time I’ll save it for the plane. But why not The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? It seems like a natural benefit to offer to paid subscribers.
More: After I posted this, I learned from Bluesky user @nationalsliker.bsky.social that The Wall Street Journal offers a separate iPhone app for the print edition that lets you download that day’s paper, which I’m going to try on the train later this morning. (The Washington Post offers the downloadable print edition in its iPhone app if you click on the search tool.) And commenter John Caddel reports that the Journal sends him a daily email of the paper in PDF form.
Protesters outside an ICE facility in Scarborough, Maine. Photo (cc) 2026) by Eesha Pendharkar / Maine Morning Star.
Monday’s fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero at the hands of an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine, is a national story, with The New York Times, NPR, CNN and others all offering plenty of coverage. And as I wrote on Tuesday, the Maine-based media are following this closely as well, especially the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News.
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Today I want to focus on The Boston Globe, which occupies sort of a middle ground — not national, not regional in terms of covering Maine, but nevertheless close enough that Biddeford could be considered an exurb of Boston.
This is what the top of The Boston Globe’s homepage looks like today. When I checked out the e-paper, I saw that the first two pages are given over to 1776. If you’re a home delivery subscriber, I’d be curious to know exactly what it looks like in print. Is it the front page, or is it tucked inside somewhere?
More: My wife picked up a print edition at Wegmans. Nicely done!
This video about a break-in at a mansion in Beverly, Mass., helped launch Emily Sweeney to stardom.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Emily Sweeney of The Boston Globe. As the Globe’s first social video journalist, Emily has broken through the clutter on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram with her Dorchester accent and her collection of track suits. Not to mention her skills as a reporter.
There’s a Northeastern connection as well: Sweeney played on NU’s championship-winning Division 1 women’s ice hockey team.
I’ve got a Quick Take about NJ Spotlight News, a website and a newscast that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey. It’s also featured in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Spotlight was in danger of being seriously downsized after Donald Trump and the Republican Congress zeroed out funding for public media. The state of New Jersey, facing a budget crisis, cut its public media subsidy as well. Now, though, it looks like there’s good news to report.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on a comprehensive investigation into a Trump donor named Tim Barnard. Barnard Construction has received billions in taxpayer dollars to build the border wall in the Southwest. The story was reported by the nonprofit High Country News in Colorado and republished by another nonprofit news site, AZ Luminaria in Arizona. It’s a strong example of how a national story can be localized and, in doing so, pack a real punch.
As Sophie Culpepper correctly observes at Nieman Lab, book reviews in the mainstream press are fading away, with The Washington Post folding its standalone books section and The Associated Press getting rid of reviews.
Now Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has taken matters into its own hands. Culpepper reports that co-owner Josh Cook has launched something called the Porter Square Review of Books, which is publishing one review every week or so. Cook tells Culpepper:
A lot of bookselling is the first couple steps of writing a book review anyway. You assess it to see if you like it, you figure out how you’re going to describe it to other people, you decide whether you’re going to finish it … We already are part of the way there. Why not just see if we could do it?
It’s a positive step, but it’s hardly the only innovative attempt at keeping book reviews alive. So let me remind you of a couple that I’ve mentioned during the past several years.
📚 Midbrow, originally the Independent Review Crew, is a nonprofit project launched by New Haven Independent founder Paul Bass in 2023. Midbrow’s mission is to revive arts and culture reviewing across all genres — including books — in the spirit of the old alternative press. (Bass himself wrote about politics for the now-defunct New Haven Advocate for many years.)
Midbrow’s content is published on its own website and in eight cities that have correspondents. Boston is not among them at the moment, although in the past there was a local writer whose work was republished by Universal Hub. Bass talked about Midrow with Ellen Clegg and me on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” around the time of its launch.
📚 The Arts Fuse, begun in 2007, offers high-brow arts criticism — again, including books — in the spirit of the late, great Boston Phoenix, where founder Bill Marx was a longtime critic and where I worked for many years as the media columnist. I’m an occasional contributor to The Arts Fuse, and in fact I’m working on a book review for Marx right now. The nonprofit, according to its website, is “a curated, independent online arts magazine dedicated to publishing in-depth criticism, along with high quality previews, interviews, and commentaries.”
📚 Marx is also a co-founder of Viva la Book Review, a nonprofit project aimed at fostering “thoughtful, well-crafted book criticism in community news media across the country,” as Ellen and I put it in our introduction to Marx’s appearance on “What Works” in 2025. We had a great conversation about how book reviewing intersects with local news.
📚 Finally, another former Phoenix colleague of mine, acclaimed author Nina MacLaughlin, started an email newsletter after The Boston Globe short-sightedly dropped her Sunday column about local book news. MacLaughlin now writes essentially the same column on her own. She doesn’t write reviews; rather, she rounds up news about literary happenings in Boston and across the region. It’s called New England Literary News, and yes, you should subscribe.
