Boston Globe reporter Bob Hohler carved out a unique beat for himself over the years.
As an investigative reporter focusing on sports, he’s covered such high-profile stories as the Red Sox’ chicken-and-beer fiasco of 2011 and the near-fatal shooting of David Ortiz in the Dominican Republic. He also helped uncover a racist, homophobic, antisemitic hazing scandal on the Danvers High School hockey team and a lack of precautions that may have led to a devastating brain injury suffered by a Sharon High School football player.
Now Hohler is retiring, according to a newsroom memo from sports editor Matt Pepin that was provided to me by a trusted source. So, too, is a less well-known but equally valued member of the sports staff, Jim Hoban, the chief copy editor.
Hohler is leaving with his boots on. On Thursday, the Globe reported that it’s filing a lawsuit against the town of Sharon in an attempt to obtain documents it believes are public related to the brain injury suffered by 16-year-old Rohan Shukla.
He’s also written about topics other than sports over the years. When I posted news of his retirement on Facebook, another retired Globe legend, Steve Kurkjian, recalled that Hohler covered the Clinton White House during the Monica Lewinsky scandal (more properly known as the Bill Clinton scandal). “He said getting news out of the White House was easier than Red Sox ownership,” Kurkjian wrote.
Another commenter, Adam Sell, remembered that Hohler was a major contributor to a Spotlight series on the city’s taxi industry, even getting a license and driving a cab himself, as he had done years earlier as a college student.
Hohler’s retirement is a huge loss for the Globe and its readers. I hope the editors understand what a unique role he played in covering the intersection of sports and investigative journalism — and finds a suitable replacement rather than letting his beat go uncovered.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, has rescinded a gag order that had prevented the city’s police department from issuing press releases without the approval of her office. The contentious order was one of two reasons that the mayor, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, was given a New England Muzzle Award earlier this year.
The original, restrictive executive order was enacted on January 10, under former Police Chief Jon Murad, who did not seek reappointment. It required all BPD press releases, including emergency alerts, to be submitted to the mayor’s office for approval before public dissemination.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
What sealed the Muzzle, though, was that the mayor then called an invitation-only news conference without letting at least two outlets that had been critical of her know about it. Those outlets were Seven Days and Vermont News First. Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, who writes for Vermont News First, told me last winter that he believed only local television newscasts had been invited.
• Good/bad/good news in Dallas. Last week I wrote that the notorious cost-cutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital was ready to swoop in and upset the pending sale of The Dallas Morning News to the Hearst chain, a privately held company known for quality regional and statewide journalism. Now Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab that the sale to Hearst is back on track. “This morning,” Benton wrote Monday, “the DallasNews Corporation (formerly A.H. Belo) announced that its board had ‘reviewed and rejected’ Alden’s offer. (It also added a ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan, just in case Alden tries anything funny.)”
• An overdue Globe update. Last week The Boston Guardian and Contrarian Boston reported that two Boston Globe journalists, along with two South End residents who were accompanying them, had been attacked while on assignment as they were reporting in the notorious Mass and Cass area of Boston. The story was subsequently picked up by Universal Hub, Hub Blog and Media Nation. But there was no mention of it in the Globe until this morning, as part of a larger story by the two journalists, reporter Niki Griswold and Barry Chin. Griswold wrote:
While reporting this story, two Globe journalists were confronted by at least three men on the Melnea Cass bike path as they toured the area on a July afternoon with [Brian] McCarter and another longtime South End resident. The men approached and threatened the group after spotting the Globephotographer taking pictures from a distance. The men, two holding hammer-like tools, followed the group, which took shelter in a nearby building.
The incident prompted Globe editor Nancy Barnes to issue a memo to the newsroom about security precautions.
• The wages of sin. Paramount wasted no time in making up for some of the $16 million it paid to Donald Trump in order to settle a bogus lawsuit the president had brought against “60 Minutes” — a settlement widely believed to pave the way for a merger with Trump-friendly Skydance Media. Last week WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in Boston announced that a number of employees had been offered buyouts, while longtime reporter Beth Germano said she’d retire and health reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall said she’d been laid off, according to Ross Cristantiello of Boston.com. “I gotta believe it has something to do with the merger,” union official Fletcher Fischer was quoted as saying. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, local television news stands out as an exception. Moves like this, though, erode that trust.
• Here’s some fresh AI hell. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain as well as a steady source of terrible news about layoffs, closures and other cuts, is offering buyouts to many of its journalists so that it can replace them with artificial intelligence. Sean Burch of The Verge quotes a memo from Mike Reed, who writes in his characteristically inimitable style: “Given our static revenue trends, we need to adjust our organization to effectively meet the needs of our business today and position ourselves for sustainable growth in the future as we continue to use AI and leverage automation to realize efficiencies.”
Gannett’s weeklies are pretty much gone, but it still publishes several dailies in New England, most notably The Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, as well as about 200 dailies across the country, anchored by USA Today.
Correction: Sorry for rushing this. I’ve fixed a few botched names.
Boston Globe editor Nancy Barnes has now addressed the assault on two of her journalists at Mass and Cass. An email went out to the newsroom a little while ago, and a copy of it was provided to me by a trusted source. That source adds that Mass and Cass isn’t the only location where Globe reporters need protection. Barnes’ message follows.
Dear all,
The incident at Mass. and Cass involving our journalists, Niki Griswold and Barry Chin, is understandably concerning to everyone who goes out on assignment in places that might be dangerous. The situation at Mass. and Cass has evolved in recent years, and we are considering a requirement for anyone going there to have security, which we will discuss with our reporting teams and the rest of the company. We understand that not every journalist supports this approach. Meanwhile, we always have security available as an option to anyone going out on assignment if needed. Please reach out to your department head if you are headed to an area that might not be safe.
We have already been in contact with Poynter and the Dart Institute about training for reporters covering protests or other points of conflict; we will let you know as soon as that is scheduled. And, we will have a fuller conversation with our reporters and photographers who cover Mass. and Cass and other trouble spots to discuss best practices for our journalists in the weeks and months ahead. More information about security, including digital security, is available on the Globe intranet, On Point, and Jen Peter will send out a broader note about resources in the next few days.
The work of a journalist, serving as a witness, is a challenging job on many days. We never want our journalists to put themselves in danger, or to lack the security and training they need to stay safe. Please let us know if there are resources, training or gear that we lack, and which would be helpful. I’m available to talk to anyone about their specific concerns as well.
Sketch of Trump and Epstein by Mike Goad using Sora AI
This morning I want to highlight an astonishing passage in The Wall Street Journal’s new report (gift link) that Donald Trump’s name does indeed show up in the Epstein files:
They told the president at the meeting that the files contained what officials felt was unverified hearsay about many people, including Trump, who had socialized with Epstein in the past, some of the officials said. One of the officials familiar with the documents said they contain hundreds of other names.
They also told Trump that senior Justice Department officials didn’t plan to release any more documents related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender because the material contained child pornography and victims’ personal information, the officials said.
Let’s unpack this a bit. The files contain “unverified hearsay” about Trump, which sounds like it could be really bad, although possibly untrue. And the documents include child-sex-abuse materials. Thus we have the president of these United States being tied to some sort of unproven bad behavior that is somehow connected with, or at least adjacent to, the sexual exploitation of children.
Wow. And of course this comes on the heels of last week’s Journal exclusive (gift link) that Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein a “bawdy” letter on the latter’s 50th birthday that included a reference to “another wonderful secret.”
Last week I listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast with journalist Will Sommer (gift link) about Epstein, QAnon and the conspiracy theories at the heart of Trump’s appeal to the unhinged right. To summarize, an Epstein cover-up is the one thing for which Trump’s base will not forgive him. You may say, well, eventually they forgive him for anything, but Sommer makes a compelling argument that this really is different: They forgive him for anything because they see Trump’s role as exposing an international pedophile ring controlled by secretive elites, including top Democrats. Once that’s gone, there’s nothing left.
And right on cue, the “QAnon Shaman,” Jake Angeli-Chansley, turned on Trump this week.
It’s very bad for Trump, and it seems likely to get a whole lot worse. The question is how many others will be hurt along the way.
Globe journalists attacked
Two Boston Globe journalists on assignment and two South End residents who were accompanying them were attacked last week by alleged drug dealers near the notorious intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, known as Mass and Cass. The incident was reported by Jules Roscoe in The Boston Guardian and by Scott Van Voorhis, who writes the newsletter Contrarian Boston. Van Voorhis writes:
First, a drug-addled man, swinging a nasty-looking metal rod studded with nails, threatened them. Before long, Globe City Hall reporter Niki Griswold and photographer Barry Chin and their neighborhood sherpas were surrounded by a group of what appeared to be drug dealers on bikes, demanding that they delete their pictures and turn over the camera.
One of the neighborhood residents bravely confronted a 300-or-so-pound dealer as he started towards the Globe’s photographer. The Good Samaritan flipped the thug to the ground when the man appeared to reach for a weapon, sources who were at the scene told Contrarian Boston.
The Globe has not yet reported on the incident. Nor has Mayor Michelle Wu contacted the residents, according to the two accounts, though they reportedly have heard from City Councilor Ed Flynn, state Rep. John Moran and Wu’s mayoral challenger, Josh Kraft.
Gin Dumcius moves on
Congratulations to longtime political reporter Gin Dumcius, who’s moved to State House News Service in order to take the helm of the insidery MASSter List newsletter. Until recently, Dumcius had been a staff reporter for CommonWealth Beacon.
CommonWealth, meanwhile, is advertising for a senior reporter to replace Dumcius. I’m on the board of advisers, and I think this is one of the top opportunities in the country for someone who wants to do serious reporting about politics and public policy.
Now here’s an interesting dilemma. A digital news organization publishes a police blotter item about an arrest. The arrest is later expunged, and the arrestee contacts the news outlet demanding that any mention of it be deleted. They refuse, though they do add a note saying that the matter had been dropped. But that’s not good enough for the arrestee, and now prosecutors are pursuing criminal charges against the two journalists for sticking by their policy against unpublishing news items.
Whew. This came to my attention recently in the form of a press release from the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The news outlet, Redbankgreen, covers Red Bank, New Jersey, and the journalists being targeted are publisher Kenny Katzgrau and editor Brian Donohue. The journalists have a clear and unambiguous First Amendment right to publish truthful information without interference from the government, but that’s not what makes this interesting.
The arrest itself was a big nothing. In August 2024, Kyle Pietila was charged with simple assault, and in March 2025, after the charge was dropped, Redbankgreen updated the item to note that a judge had expunged it “under an order determining the arrest ‘shall be deemed to have not occurred.’” I am naming Pietila only because he is pursuing criminal charges against Redbankgreen and has thus made himself a public figure.
According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which is part of the Freedom of the Press Foundation:
An attorney for the journalists filed a motion to dismiss and expunge the charges on July 11, arguing that the “publication of truthful information on matters of public significance cannot be punished unless it involves a state interest of the highest order.”
“Moreover, information concerning the arrest was published prior to the expungement, and there is no requirement in law that it be removed from the publisher’s website simply because an expungement had taken place,” Bruce Rosen wrote. “The issuance of probable cause in this matter is plain legal error, this prosecution is unconstitutional and in fact unfathomable, and the matter should be promptly dismissed.”
Unconstitutional and unfathomable are good descriptions of this. Yet there are two ethical issues that need to be considered as well.
First, in recent years thoughtful news organizations have ended the practice of regurgitating the local police blotter for the entertainment of their readers. Such alleged news, to quote the late Jack Cole, serves no public purpose, and in some cases it can reinforce racial stereotypes. A few years ago I wrote about how the Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire eliminated routine police news in order to concentrate on more serious crime and broader stories about criminal justice.
Second, I think Redbankgreen acted ethically by appending the police blotter item to note that the arrest had been expunged. What’s not clear from the coverage is whether Katzgrau and Donohue offered to engage in a milder form of unpublishing: keeping it on their website but making it invisible to search engines. A number of news organizations have done this, including The Boston Globe with Fresh Start program.
The prosecution of these two journalists is an outrage, and any officials involved should be reprimanded and punished. Nevertheless, I hope Redbankgreen’s ordeal might lead to a rethink of how they cover news from the local police.
Update: After this item was published, I heard from Brian Donohue, and we talked about Redbankgreen’s unpublishing policy.
Downtown New Bedford, Mass. 2008 public domain photo by Marc N. Belanger.
The New Bedford Light and The Boston Globe are both suing the city of New Bedford in an attempt to pry loose public records. The Light seeks records pertaining to funds the city awarded that it received through the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, as well as the city’s contract with a consultant that it hired following the Globe’s Spotlight series on the police department’s dubious reliance on confidential informants. The Globe’s suit also pertains to the Spotlight series.
The Light’s story about the lawsuits notes that this is the first time since the nonprofit’s founding in 2021 that it has sued the city. Executive editor Karen Bordeleau is quoted as saying:
The role of journalism in a democracy ensures that elected officials serve the public’s interest and the best way to accomplish this is through public records. Unfortunately this administration has refused multiple times to turn over public documents that would shed light on its decision to award ARPA grant money to high risk projects or to release the cost of a police consultant’s review of departmental conduct.
Indeed, suing for public records is an extreme step taken only after other avenues of appeal have been exhausted. The Globe is also suing the cities of Boston, Worcester and Springfield as well as Massachusetts State Police.
The Light’s and the Globe’s lawsuits are both pending in Bristol County Superior Court.
The altar boy-in-chief resigns. 1974 photo in the public domain.
Two weeks ago The Boston Globe published letters from readers of La Presse, a Montreal newspaper, in which they expressed their views about Donald Trump. The letters were published in both the Globe and La Presse.
Part two, letters from Globe readers to La Presse, appears today. If you’re not a Globe subscriber, you can access the feature at La Presse by clicking here. If you use Chrome, you should see a box at the top asking if you want to translate the page from French into English.
Because I’m always up for a good Nixon analogy, I especially liked a letter written by Sandra Regan of Winthrop, who says in part:
Richard Nixon was an altar boy compared with the entity who is currently impersonating the president of the United States. Donald Trump has trashed our Oval Office and soiled the history and dignity of our beautiful White House. Now he is trying to use you and other allies in yet another shameless attempt to get whatever he wants.
Donna R. Cooper of Provincetown adds:
I want to assure you that many Americans do not support his racist, sexist, and homophobic agenda. He understands only money, so I support you in not spending yours in the United States (although I’ll miss overhearing that lovely French as I sit on the beach this summer). Urge your elected officials not to compromise in the face of Trump’s tariffs. Take your products to other countries. Do not let the bully win.
And Marjorie Martin of Framingham concludes her letter with this: “Please pray for us.” Indeed.
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.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
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