Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism

Northeastern news project wins $100k grant; plus, more on the Herald, and AI hell in Melrose

We have some exciting news about one of our sister projects at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Scope, a professionally edited digital publication that covers “stories of hope, justice and resilience” in Greater Boston, has received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a major philanthropic initiative funding local news.

“Since its launch in late 2017, The Scope has become a national leader in leveraging university resources to help solve the news desert crisis. This grant is a vote of confidence in our model,” said Professor Meg Heckman in the announcement of the grant. “Rebuilding the local information ecosystem is a big job, and we’re thrilled Press Forward sees the School of Journalism as a vital part of the solution.”

Heckman has been the guiding force behind The Scope for several years now. Joining her in putting the grant application together were the school’s director, Professor Jonathan Kaufman, and Professor Matt Carroll.

The Scope was one of 205 local news outlets that will receive $20 million in grant money, according to an announcement by Press Forward on Wednesday. Several of the projects are connected in one way or another to What Works, our project on the future of local news:

• Santa Cruz Local (California), which competes with a larger and better-known startup called Lookout Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz Local co-founder Kara Meyberg Guzman and Lookout Santa Cruz founder Ken Doctor were both interviewed for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” as well as on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.”

• The Boston Institute for Nonprofit News, an investigative project that publishes stories on its own website as well as in other outlets. Co-founder Jason Pramas has been a guest on our podcast. Several other Boston-based outlets received grants as well: the Dorchester Reporter, a 40-year-old weekly newspaper; Boston Korea, which serves the Korean American Community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and El Planeta, a venerable Spanish-language newspaper.

• The Maine Monitor, a digital project that covers public policy and politics. Now-retired editor David Dahl has been a guest on our podcast.

• InDepthNH, published by the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. The site focuses on public policy and politics, and its founder, Nancy West, has been a podcast guest.

• Montclair Local (New Jersey), a hyperlocal website that is one of the projects we write about in “What Works in Community News.” In 2009, the Local merged with Baristanet, one of the original hyperlocal news startups, which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City.”

• Eugene Weekly (Oregon), an alternative weekly that suffered a near-death experience earlier this year after a former employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. I wrote about that here and at our What Works website.

More on the shrinking Herald

Earlier this week I wrote about the latest paid circulation figures for the Boston Herald based on its recent filings with the U.S. Postal Service. I lamented that the numbers weren’t as complete as I would have liked because the Alliance for Audited Media was no longer providing its reports for free to journalists and researchers, as it had done in the past.

Well, it turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door. I now have recent reports for both the Herald and The Boston Globe. The AAM figures don’t significantly change what I reported about the Globe, but they do fill in some gaps for the Herald.

For March 2024, the most recent AAM report that’s available, the Herald’s average weekday paid print circulation for the previous six months was 12,272, a decline of 2,247, or nearly 15.5%, compared to its March 2023 totals. Sunday paid print circulation, according to the March 2024 report, was 15,183, down 2,690, also 15%.

As I explained earlier, AAM tallies up paid digital circulation differently from a newspaper’s internal count; among other things, AAM allows for some double-counting between print and digital. Nevertheless, its digital figures are useful for tracking trends.

In the March 2024 report, according to AAM, the Herald’s total average weekday paid digital circulation was 30,009, which actually amounts to a decrease of 2,250, or about 7%, over the previous year. Sunday paid digital in March 2024 was 29,753, down 1,952, or about 6.1%.

Needless to say, that’s not the direction that Herald executives want to be moving in — although I should note that, in its September 2024 post office filing, the Herald reported a slight rise in its seven-day digital circulation compared to the previous year.

What fresh hell is this?

The Boston suburb of Melrose is not a news desert. It has a newspaper, the Melrose Weekly News. But, like many communities, it would benefit from more news than it’s getting now, especially after Gannett shuttered the venerable Melrose Free Press in 2021.

So … artificial intelligence to the rescue? In CommonWealth Beacon, Jennifer Smith introduces us to the “Melrose Update Robocast,” which uses fake voices, male and female, to talk about local issues based on information that’s fed into it to produce an AI-generated script. (Note: Smith interviewed me for the piece, though I didn’t make the cut. I’m also on CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)

“In a way, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” “Robocast” creator Tom Catalini tells Smith.

Yet all across Massachusetts, independently operated news sites with real human beings are springing up to cover local news. Community journalism is how we connect with each other, and an AI-generated podcast can’t do that.

In Medford, where I live, we haven’t had a local news source for two years. But we do have a podcast, “Medford Bytes,” hosted by two activist residents who convene important conversations about what’s going on in the city, including a recent interview with the mayor about three contentious ballot questions that would raise taxes in order to pay for schools, road repairs and a new fire station.

That’s the sound of community members talking among themselves.

A Muzzle Award to Mass. POST for spurning data needed to track police misconduct

Photo (cc) 2015 by Tom Woodward. Digitally edited to remove license plate number.

In 2020, Massachusetts took what was billed as a major step forward in holding police officers accountable. Following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the state created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission “to improve policing and enhance public confidence in law enforcement by implementing a fair process for mandatory certification, discipline, and training for all peace officers in the Commonwealth.”

But according to an investigation by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, the POST Commission has not collected the employment data it needs to do its job. The story, by BINJ editorial director Chris Faraone and Sam Stecklow, an investigative journalist currently on a fellowship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute of Chicago, found that Mass. POST and its director, Enrique Zuniga, made a series of decisions that experts say undermine the agency’s mission. Faraone and Stecklow write:

Despite passing regulations that instruct it otherwise, POST’s database does not include the full employment history of all of the officers that are going through the state’s recertification process — only for officers who have had discipline sustained against them. This prevents the press and public from analyzing data about what are often known as “wandering cops,” who transfer between departments after committing misconduct.

Employment history data are basic information that 27 other states around the country, including Vermont, have released to a national reporting project.

“It doesn’t make any sense that the previous employment of these officers wouldn’t be tracked and recorded if the ultimate goal was to prevent police misconduct from occurring,” Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition,” is quoted as saying. “We’re only getting half the story without this information.”

Over the course of 3,500 words, Faraone and Stecklow go into great detail in explaining what data are missing and what the implications might be. As for the POST Commission, it has earned a New England Muzzle Award for only partially lifting the veil of secrecy that protects police officers who’ve been accused of misconduct.

The story, by the way, is the product of a partnership between BINJ and the Invisible Institute that Faraone explains here. Their investigation is being published not just by BINJ’s HorizonMass affiliate but also by The Shoestring in Western Massachusetts, Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World newsletter, and about a half-dozen hyperlocal weeklies and other publications.

And lest we overlook the mutual backscratching opportunities here, I’ve interviewed BINJ and HorizonMass co-founder Jason Pramas on “What Works,” our podcast about the future of local news, while Faraone and Stecklow give a shoutout to the Muzzle Awards in their article.

The Somerville Wire shuts down, but its editor says that coverage in the city is growing

Near Davis Square in Somerville. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.

Nearly two years ago, Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and the Somerville Journal into one weekly paper called The Transcript & Journal. Even worse, nearly all local news was removed from the new paper, replaced with regional news from elsewhere in the chain.

In Medford, where I live, we now have nothing, although I’m optimistic that will change in the near future. In Somerville, though, there were several alternatives, foremost among them the weekly Somerville Times and a digital outlet called the Somerville Wire. Unfortunately, the Wire is shutting down. Jason Pramas, the editor, writes that the Wire got to be too much of a financial burden as well as a drain on his other work with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) and HorizonMass. (Pramas talked about both of those projects in a recent appearance on the “What Works” podcast.)

Besides, Pramas notes that Somerville has been getting more coverage lately, as the Cambridge Day has expanded into the city and The Boston Globe has begun a weekly “Camberville & beyond” newsletter. Pramas writes that “while Somerville is still in danger of becoming a ‘news desert’ (a community that no longer has a professionally-produced news outlet covering it), it’s now getting more news coverage than it was in 2021,” when the Wire launched.

Pramas and his colleagues Chris Faraone and John Loftus continue to do good and important work, and I wish them all the best.

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Jason Pramas on HorizonMass, a news nonprofit that brings students and professionals together

On the latest What Works podcast, I talk with Jason Pramas, executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and editor-in-chief of a new project called HorizonMass. (My co-host, Ellen Clegg, expects to return for the next episode.) Along with Boston journalist Chris Faraone, Jason is a co-founder of BINJ, which partners with community publications on investigative stories and civic engagement initiatives, and offers training programs to promising young journalists.

Now Jason is making a bold bet on the future of news by training a new generation of journalists. He’s launching HorizonMass, a statewide digital news publication with a focus on public interest journalism. At HorizonMass, college interns work as reporters, designers, marketers and editors alongside more experienced professional freelance writers.

Later on, in Quick Takes, I look at some data about news referrals from social media giants, specifically Facebook and X, or Twitter, or whatever it is this week. Large news organizations had become reliant on both of those platforms while the sort of local news outlets that we track here at What Works were more dependent on Facebook alone. In any case, those days are drawing to a close, and it’s long past time for community journalists to be asking themselves: What’s next?

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Greater Boston arts and local news get a boost from three new nonprofit projects

There’s good news about local news in Greater Boston today on three fronts. I’ll start with an attempt to revive arts reviews — at one time a staple of mainstream and alternative publications, but now relegated to niche outlets like The Arts Fuse, a high-quality website edited by Boston University professor and former Boston Phoenix arts writer Bill Marx.

Recently Paul Bass, the executive director of the nonprofit Online Journalism Project in New Haven, Connecticut, launched a grant-funded project called the Independent Review Crew (link now fixed). Freelancers in seven parts of the country are writing about music, theater and other in-person cultural events. Boston is among those seven, and freelance writer-photographer Sasha Patkin is weighing in with her take on everything from concerts to sand sculpture.

You can read Patkin’s work on the Review Crew’s website — and, this week, her reviews started running on Universal Hub as well, which gives her a much wider audience. Here’s her first contribution.

Bass is the founder of the New Haven Independent, started in 2005 as part of the first wave of nonprofit community websites. The Online Journalism Project is the nonprofit umbrella that publishes the Indy and a sister site in New Haven’s northwest suburbs; it also oversees a low-power radio station in New Haven, WNHH-LP. Before 2005, Bass was a fixture at the now-defunct New Haven Advocate, an alt-weekly that, like the Phoenix, led with local arts and was filled with reviews. The Review Crew is his bid to revive the long lost art, if you will, of arts reviewing.

Other places that are part of The Review Crew: New Haven; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Troy/Albany, New York; Oakland, California; Hartford, Connecticut; and Northwest Arkansas (the Fayetteville metro area is home to about 576,000 people).

I’ve got all kinds of disclosures I need to share here. I gave Bass some guidance before he launched The Review Crew — not that he needed any. The Indy was the main subject of my 2013 book “The Wired City,” and I’ve got a lengthy update in “What Works in Community News,” the forthcoming book that Ellen Clegg and I have written. I also suggested Universal Hub to Bass as an additional outlet for The Review Crew; I’ve known Gaffin for years, and at one time I made a little money through a blogging network he set up. Gaffin was a recent guest on the “What Works” podcast.

In other words, I would wish Paul the best of luck in any case, but this time I’ve got a bit more of a stake in it.

***

The Phoenix was not the city’s last alt-weekly. For nearly a decade after the Phoenix shut down in 2013, DigBoston continued on with a mix of news and arts coverage. Unfortunately, the Dig, which struggled mightily during COVID, finally ended its run earlier this year. But Dig editors Chris Faraone and Jason Pramas are now morphing the paper into something else — HorizonMass, a statewide online news outlet. Pramas will serve as editor-in-chief and Faraone as editor-at-large, with a host of contributors.

HorizonMass will publish as part of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, founded by Faraone and Pramas some years back to funnel long-form investigative coverage to a number of media outlets, including the Dig. HorizonMass will also have a significant student presence, Pramas writes, noting that the project’s tagline is “Independent, student-driven journalism in the public interest.” Pramas adds:

With interns working with us as reporters, designers, marketers, and (for the first time) editors, together with our ever-growing crew of professional freelance writers, we can continue to do our part to train the next generation of journalists while covering more Bay State happenings than ever before. We hope you enjoy our initial offerings and support our efforts with whatever donations you can afford.

***

Mark Pothier, a top editor at The Boston Globe, is leaving the paper to become the editor and CEO of the Plymouth Independent, a well-funded fledgling nonprofit. Pothier, a longtime Plymouth resident and former musician with the band Ministry, is already listed on the Independent’s masthead. Among the project’s advisers is Boston Globe journalist (and my former Northeastern colleague) Walter Robinson, also a Plymouth resident, who was instrumental in the launch of the New Bedford Light. Robby talked about the Plymouth Independent and other topics in a recent appearance on the “What Works” podcast.

Pothier started working at the Globe in 2001, but before that he was the executive editor of a group of papers that included the Old Colony Memorial, now part of the Gannett chain. When Gannett shifted its Eastern Massachusetts weeklies to regional coverage in the spring of 2022, the Memorial was one of just three that was allowed to continue covering local news — so it looks like Plymouth resident are about to be treated to something of a news war.

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The local news renaissance in Mass. needs to spread beyond the affluent suburbs

Downtown Marblehead, Mass. Photo (cc) 2011 by Daniel Mennerich.

People are starting to notice the local news renaissance in Eastern Massachusetts that’s been inspired by the Gannett newspaper chain’s never-ending cuts.

Dana Gerber reported in The Boston Globe on Tuesday about “The Great Marblehead Newspaper War,” where three independent start-ups have been launched in response to Gannett’s evisceration of the Marblehead Reporter last year. These days Marblehead is served by a for-profit digital project, the Marblehead Beacon; a well-funded digital and print nonprofit, the Marblehead Current; and the Marblehead Weekly News, a for-profit print newspaper started by The Daily Item of Lynn, which is itself independently owned.

Just a few days ago, Mariya Manzhos reported for Poynter Online about The Concord Bridge, another well-funded nonprofit start-up. And there are a number of others, including The Bedford Citizen, which at this point has to be considered venerable: the nonprofit digital site was started a decade ago by three volunteers in response to cuts by Gannett’s predecessor company, GateHouse Media, at the weekly Bedford Minuteman. Now the Citizen has a small paid staff and is the only news source in town, the Minuteman having been shut down last year. (The Citizen is one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I are profiling in our book-in-progress, “What Works in Community News,” to be published in early 2024 by Beacon Press.)

But there is an ongoing problem, and it’s one I spoke with Gerber about when she interviewed me: these startups are highly concentrated in affluent, mostly white suburbs like, well, Marblehead, Concord and Bedford. Yes, there is The New Bedford Light, an extraordinarily well-funded nonprofit that’s gotten national attention, but that’s the exception. Most local outlets that serve more diverse communities, such as The Bay State Banner and the Dorchester Reporter, tend to be for-profit publications that have been around for a while; we’re seeing little in the way of new ventures to cover such places. And many have little or nothing. Cambridge Day does a good job, but it’s essentially a one-person shop. Why is Marblehead, with a population of under 20,000, getting more comprehensive coverage than a city of 117,000 people? (I should note that the Cambridge Chronicle is one of just three Gannett weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts that purportedly still covers some local news, although you wouldn’t know it from its website.)

As Manzhos notes, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism has provided some assistance to local news outlets. What we need, though, are news outlets that provide ongoing accountability journalism in each of the state’s 351 communities — city council, select board, school committee, police, development and the like. I hope that will happen.

We’re also closer than you might think. If you haven’t seen it before, here is a spreadsheet I maintain of every independent local news outlet in the state. Obviously some are better than others, but some of these are excellent.

Reporting by DigBoston and BINJ helps delay snooping by surveillance cameras

Reporting by DigBoston and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism helped stave off a serious violation of civil liberties — at least for now.

Dan Atkinson reported on March 25 that “city officials are quietly looking to hire consultants to maintain a linked network of more than 1,000 video cameras across the Metro Boston area, with remote access shared across nine cities.”

The move came, Atkinson noted, even as Boston City Council members were pushing for greater oversight of surveillance technology.

On Friday, The Boston Globe reported that Acting Mayor Kim Janey will not move forward with the plan, though she declined to kill the proposal altogether. The Globe’s Danny McDonald quoted a Janey spokeswoman as saying that she “is directing her staff to take a fresh look at this request…. Mayor Janey remains committed to strengthening public safety, transparency and accountability for the City of Boston.”

So kudos to DigBoston, the city’s last alternative weekly, and BINJ. And if you’d like to get a better sense of how the two organizations work together, check out this story from November 2019 by Adrian Ma at WBUR.org.

How alt-weeklies are surviving pandemic and recession

In late 2015 I traveled to Burlington and Montpelier, Vermont, to report on a heartening development: though Gannett had hollowed out the state’s major daily, the Burlington Free Press, several other news organizations had arisen to fill the gap.

VT Digger, a nonprofit website, and Vermont Public Radio were expanding. And towering above all was Seven Days, a thick alt-weekly with a vibrant website. As someone who had worked for many years at The Boston Phoenix, which closed in 2013, I was agog at the size of the staff and the number of ads. Somehow, Seven Days had become the largest news organization in the Burlington area. And it was turning a profit. As Paula Routly, the publisher, co-editor and co-owner told me in an interview for my book “The Return of the Moguls,” the paper had never lost money since its founding in 1995. She explained:

When the recession hit, we invested. That’s when we ramped up in news. And that is when the Free Press visibly diminished. They just made different business decisions. “Let’s make it smaller, let’s lay people off.” That’s where I think they made their mistake.

So it was great to see Seven Days get prominent mention by The Daily Beast in a round-up of alt-weeklies that are somehow surviving despite the pandemic and the recession. Sophia June reports in The Daily Beast on four — Seven Days, the Cleveland Scene, The Stranger of Seattle and The Austin Chronicle. According to June, Seven Days was able to reverse the cuts that it had made within six weeks, suggesting that the newspaper apocalypse that seemed to be upon us in the early days of the shutdown didn’t quite come to pass. Here’s a key excerpt:

The paper had to stop hosting events and printing several of their guides, but they reached out to businesses like the Department of Health, a local hospital, and banks to find new advertisers. They pitched new guides, including a travel guide for the Vermont Department of Tourism, encouraging safe travel in the state. They were also able to keep revenue-generators like monthly parenting and real-estate inserts.

Also getting a mention is DigBoston, which has kept the alt-weekly scene alive here in the post-Phoenix era. The Dig stopped publishing its print edition last March but then started up again in June, as Poynter’s Kristen Hare reported at the time. It’s notable that all of the papers I’ve mentioned are for-profit entities, although the Dig shares content with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, a sister organization.

Does this mean that happy days are here again? Of course not. But these stories are yet another sign that independent newspapers unburdened by corporate and hedge-fund ownership can find a way to survive. Once the pandemic is behind us, maybe they’ll even thrive.

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In Somerville, as elsewhere, tough times for local news

The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism has an interview with Julia Taliesin, the only reporter at Gannett’s Somerville Journal, on what it’s like to work at an under-resourced corporate-owned newspaper. Key quote:

I am acutely aware that it is absolutely impossible for me to do justice to what the city deserves in terms of news. What Somerville deserves is a handful of reporters who watch every city council meeting, or at least 90% of them, because this city council is busy. When I think of what effective news looks like, it’s just that. It’s just enough people to cover the issues. Not the press conferences and the press releases, but the actual work and the legislating that goes on.

I should note that Somerville has more than 80,000 residents. Next door, the Gannett-owned Medford Transcript hasn’t had a full-time staff reporter to cover the city’s 57,000 residents since the fall of 2019.