Chris Faraone – Media Nation

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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Misplaced priorities at the Boston Police Dept.

Last October the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU revealed that the Boston Police Department had been spying on left-wing activists such as the late Howard Zinn.

The police were working with the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), a so-called fusion center through which the authorities could coordinate with the FBI and other agencies to find out who might be plotting a terrorist attack. Zinn, a peace activist, an elderly professor and World War II hero, was clearly someone to keep a close eye on.

Of course, we now know that at the same time the police were wasting their resources on Zinn, they were ignorant of what the FBI knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Among those putting two and two together in the last few weeks were Michael Isikoff of NBC News; Boston journalist Chris Faraone, who produced this for DigBoston; and Jamaica Plain Gazette editor John Ruch, who wrote an analysis.

Although it would be a stretch well beyond the facts to suggest that if the police hadn’t been watching left-wing and Occupy protesters they might have caught Tsarnaev, the BPD was certainly looking in all the wrong places. The police did a good and courageous job of reacting to the Boston Marathon bombings. The issue is how they spent their time and resources in trying to prevent a terrorist attack.

Spying on the antiwar left makes no more sense today than it did in the 1960s and ’70s. Police Commissioner Ed Davis needs to take a break from giving commencement speeches in order to answer a few questions.

And while I’m on the subject of questionable law-enforcement practices, I sure hope we find out what actually happened in Florida last week. Don’t you?

The Boston Phoenix comes to the end of the road

I’m not even going to try to write a real post about this today. I’m getting bombarded from all directions, and besides that, I’m devastated. But I did want to note quickly, in case you haven’t heard, that The Phoenix — the erstwhile Boston Phoenix, reinvented as a glossy magazine last fall — is closing down, as is its affiliated Internet radio station, WFNX.com.

The Providence and Portland Phoenixes will continue, as well as a few non-journalism businesses.

Here is Doug Most’s report for Boston.com. [5:07 p.m. update: That report now carries Joe Kahn’s byline.]

The Phoenix gave me 14 great years, and it’s hard to believe that the end has come. There are way too many people to mention, so I’ll leave it at this: Peter Kadzis and Stephen Mindich were great bosses, smart, tough and loyal. Carly Carioli has done tremendous work on the reinvention, and it’s a tragedy that he ran out of time. I rely on David Bernstein for his deep reporting on politics and Chris Faraone for an alternative look at the news. Here is Mindich in a statement to the staff:

What I can and will say is I am extremely proud, as all of you should be, of the highest standards of journalism we have set and maintained throughout the decades in all of our areas of coverage and the important role we have played in driving political and socially progressive and responsible agendas; in covering the worlds of arts and entertainment, food and fashion – always with a critical view, while at the same time promoting their enormous importance in maintaining a healthy society; and in advocating for the recognition and acceptance of a wide range of lifestyles that are so valuable for a vibrant society….

We have had an extraordinary run.

And this is an incredibly sad day.

More: Unlike many who got their start at the Phoenix in their early 20s, I was 34 years old and thought my journalism career was over. In the late 1980s I had tried my hand at launching a regional lifestyle magazine in the suburbs northwest of Boston following some years at the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn. The magazine failed, and I was doing what I could to survive.

I was picked up on waivers in 1991 from the Pilot — yes, the Catholic paper — where I had been doing layout and production. The Phoenix hired me as a copy editor, but I kept an eye out in case something better came along. Yes, I had grown up reading the Phoenix, Boston After Dark and the Real Paper, but any romantic notions I’d had of the alternative press had pretty much dissipated.

Gradually, though, I got sucked in. And when I inherited the media beat in late 1994 from Mark Jurkowitz, I became a made member of the Phoenix family. It was the most formative experience of my career. Without the Phoenix, I can’t imagine what I’d be doing today — PR for some politician? Ugh.

CJR profiles the Phoenix’s iron man of Occupy

The Boston Phoenix’s Chris Faraone, whose iron-man coverage of the Occupy movement has been an inspiration, is the subject of a terrific profile in the Columbia Journalism Review. Faraone plans to publish a book on the movement next month called “99 Nights with the 99 Percent.”