In practical terms, they are essential reading for anyone considering a news startup. For most people, journalist or not, launching a news venture without consulting these volumes invites the sort of outcome awaiting a novice cook attempting a French feast sans recipe.
Mitchell really gets what co-author Ellen Clegg and I are up to, noting that the book is the hub of a larger enterprise that includes a podcast, updates to our website and, last month, a conference on local news at Northeastern University that drew about 100 participants.
Also, a fun fact: Brant was my editor when I started working as a stringer at The Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1979. Not long after I started, he told me that he was thinking about leaving, and that if I stuck around, I might be able to take his job. And so I did, working at the paper for 10 years before kicking around for a while and eventually landing at The Boston Phoenix.
This week we learned that the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to ban trichloroethylene, better known as TCE, an industrial solvent that has been linked to leukemia, birth defects, reproductive problems and other health issues.
As Michael Casey of The Associated Press notes, TCE was at the center of a major story in Woburn, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s and ’80s, when six children died of leukemia and a landmark lawsuit was brought in U.S. District Court. The lawsuit alleged that those deaths and a range of other illnesses had been caused by exposure to TCE in the drinking water. But none of that might have happened if not for the reporting of Charles Ryan, then a young reporter at The Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn. I was working at the paper at the time, and I remember what an enormous impact Charlie’s reporting had on advancing the battle against toxic waste.
Charlie had already reported on the discovery of contamination in the drinking water as well as suspicions that it was linked to a cluster of leukemia cases in East Woburn. The question that had to be answered was whether the cluster was statistically significant enough that it warranted further investigation. In December 1979, the state was about to release the results of a study. Charlie was set to go into Boston and get a copy of the report. Somehow, the story leaked out early, and the Boston Herald American reported the findings: no statistical significance. “I was a little pissed,” Charlie told me years later. “But I went in there anyway.”
Charlie quickly realized that state investigators had made a math error — they were using Woburn’s 1970 population of 40,000, whereas by 1979 that had dropped to 36,000. Correct the denominator, and the leukemia cluster moved into the zone of statistical significance. “That story changed everything,” Charlie told me. His reporting didn’t set well with Woburn’s old-line establishment, and he remembered once being told, “Your father would be turning over in his grave if he knew what you were doing to his city.” Charlie’s response: “That means you didn’t know my father very well.”
Later on, I covered some aspects of the story and was in court for all but five days of the 78-day civil trial. I covered the appeals process, too. The trial was the subject of a terrific book called “A Civil Action,” by Jonathan Harr, and a not-so-terrific movie starring John Travolta. The trial didn’t end well for the eight families who sued. One of the three defendants settled out of court before the trial, a second was cleared by the jury, and the third, W.R. Grace, settled for a paltry $8 million after being found liable for contaminating the water. The jury never had a chance to determine whether the contamination had actually caused the illnesses that were at the heart of the case.
Charlie is now retired after a lengthy career in journalism and continues to live in Woburn. The proposed ban on TCE is long overdue, and it’s part of his legacy as a reporter. It’s also a testament to the vital importance of local news that holds powerful interests to account.
Later today we’ll be attending a wake for Paul Andrews, the retired superintendent of schools in Woburn, who died last Saturday at 84. Paul led a remarkably long and productive life. I didn’t even know about his service as chair of the board of directors at Winchester Hospital until I read this obituary. I got to know him when I was covering the Woburn Public Schools for The Daily Times Chronicle in the 1980s. At the same time, Paul’s children, Paul, Kevin and Marcia (and occasionally Paul himself), were taking photos for the paper.
I want to share one anecdote that shows Paul’s dedication to doing things the right way. I was covering the Woburn School Committee one evening when the committee voted to go into executive session. I don’t remember the reason; it probably had something to do with contract negotiations with the teachers union. The chair announced that the committee would not be returning to open session, which meant that members of the public — including me — were free to leave.
The next morning, Paul gave me a call to let me know that the committee had, in fact, returned to open session late that night and taken a vote. Of course, there was no one there to witness it. As superintendent, he was the committee’s secretary, so he told me the details of the motion and the vote so I could make some calls and write it up for that afternoon’s paper.
Later on, he told me that several committee members were peeved with him for giving me a head’s-up, and that he had to explain they had violated the open meeting law by returning to public session after announcing they would not do that. He took the hit for their illegal action — something that any reporter who’s dealt with local officials who either don’t understand or don’t respect the public’s right to know can appreciate.
Paul will be greatly missed, and I offer my condolences to his family and friends.
Last week I received some very good news — Jim Haggerty, the editor of The Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn, had been selected to receive the Bob Wallack Community Journalism Award from the New England Newspaper and Press Association. I worked for Jim from 1979-’89, and I was delighted that I was asked to say a few words. Here’s the text of my remarks:
Congratulations to Jim Haggerty for winning the Bob Wallack Community Journalism Award. The award “recognizes an individual who has an exceptional record of commitment to community journalism.” Through his work at The Daily Times Chronicle and through his years of mentoring young journalists, Jim, along with the entire Haggerty family, have shown that they are committed to the highest ideals of local news.
I first met Jim in 1979, when I began working as a part-time reporter covering the town of Winchester. A few months later, after I graduated from Northeastern, Jim hired me. I learned from him and his family what community journalism was about — telling tough stories when they need to be told, but doing it with compassion and with an understanding that holding local government officials, business people and others accountable is not incompatible with treating them like human beings. It’s a lesson I’ve tried to carry with me throughout my own career.
During my 10 years at The Daily Times Chronicle, the paper covered the years-long story of Woburn’s toxic waste tragedy comprehensively and courageously. Families in East Woburn claimed that contaminated drinking water had resulted in their children contracting leukemia and other illnesses. Several of them died. The pressure on Jim and his family from city officials to tone down the coverage must have been overwhelming. But that never trickled down to those of us who were covering the story. Jim’s dedication to journalism and truth-telling during those years was inspiring.
These days, local news is in crisis, as the internet has undermined advertising revenues while corporate chains and hedge funds are slashing the newspapers that they own. The residents of Woburn and the surrounding communities are lucky that The Daily Times Chronicle is still family-owned, still doing good work and still dedicated to the principles that have sustained it for the past hundred years. Best wishes to you, Jim — and good luck to you and your family as you embark on the next hundred.
Update II: And the paragraph has been restored. I’m told there was nothing nefarious about its disappearance.
Update: Oh, my. The nutty last paragraph that prompted this post has been deleted. Not a good look, Harvard.
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In an otherwise unremarkable story from Harvard Business School about a study into the effects of local newspaper closures on corporate wrongdoing, I ran into this bizarro closing paragraph. The story quotes Professor Jonas Heese, a co-author of the study:
Saving local newspapers isn’t Heese’s specialty, but he points to a recent trend of hedge funds buying up distressed local media outlets as having the potential to stabilize the market and resurrect local news. And that makes him wonder: “Is this a reason to be hopeful?”
No, Professor Heese. It is not a reason to be hopeful. I suggest you stick to statistical analysis, which you seem to be pretty good at. Here’s the abstract, from the Journal of Financial Economics, titled “When the Local Newspaper Leaves Town: The Effects of Local Newspaper Closures on Corporate Misconduct”:
We examine whether the local press is an effective monitor of corporate misconduct. Specifically, we study the effects of local newspaper closures on violations by local facilities of publicly listed firms. After a local newspaper closure, local facilities increase violations by 1.1% and penalties by 15.2%, indicating that the closures reduce firm monitoring by the press. This effect is not driven by the underlying economic conditions, the underlying local fraud environment, or the underlying firm conditions. Taken together, our findings indicate that local newspapers are an important monitor of firms’ misconduct.
Reading this leads me to think about our work at The Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn, when we uncovered a massive toxic waste problem in the early 1980s that may have led to an outbreak of childhood leukemia and other illnesses. Charlie Ryan’s reporting was crucial to breaking the story wide open. In 1998, he recounted in The Boston Phoenix the sequence of events that led the world to understand that Woburn had an environmental and public health disaster on its hands:
Ryan’s most important story came in December 1979, on a development he thought he’d been beaten on. The state’s Department of Public Health was about to release the results of a study on Woburn’s leukemia rate, and Ryan arranged to interview DPH officials. That morning, the Boston Herald American published a front-page story reporting that the leukemia rate was within the normal range for a city of Woburn’s size.
“I was a little pissed,” Ryan remembers, “but I went in there anyway.” He sat down with a DPH statistician, who explained the results to him: essentially, the DPH had taken the number of leukemia cases and divided it by the total population of Woburn, based on the 1970 census. Ryan stopped him. 1970? The population of Woburn, Ryan knew, had fallen from 40,000 to around 36,000. Ryan asked a simple question: What would happen if the lower figure were used? The statistician recalculated the numbers — and, all of a sudden, the number of leukemia cases appeared to be “statistically significant,” the bland-sounding phrase used to describe what was obviously a very real problem.
“That story drastically changed everything,” says Ryan, who got out of journalism a few years ago and now helps run the computers for Essex County Newspapers. “To that point, everyone had considered Anne Anderson to be just a hysterical mom. I think without that story, the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state never would have pushed that hard.”
Yes, local journalism is crucial in holding corporations to account, just as it is in keeping an eye on government and other large institutions. But no, hedge funds are not the solution. They’re the problem.
Meaningful participation in civic life isn’t possible without access to high-quality news and information. Consider the most fundamental aspect of community engagement: voting in local elections. If prospective voters lack the means to inform themselves about candidates for the select board, the city council, the school committee and the like, then it follows that they will be less likely to vote.
But is the reverse also true? Does the presence of a reliable news source result in a higher level of voter participation? To find out, I compared two towns, Bedford and Burlington, both northwest of Boston.
Now here’s something sobering to think about. Recently I had a chance to talk about “The Return of the Moguls” with Phil Gallagher of “BNews,” part of Burlington Cable Access Television. And Phil informed me that the first time I was on his show was 38 years ago, when he was a Burlington selectman and I was a reporter for The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn. I guess we should both be grateful that we’re still upright.
(Conflict alert: I am a paid panelist on Channel 2’s Friday “Beat the Press” and an unpaid contributor to WGBHNews.org. And yes, Rooney will continue to host “Beat the Press.”)
I covered Braude as far back as the 1980s, when he was head of the liberal Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts and I was a reporter for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn. He and Barbara Anderson, who ran Citizens for Limited Taxation, often debated in public, even traveling together despite their different ideological viewpoints.
In 1996 I interviewed Braude when he was launching a liberal magazine called Otherwise and I was covering the media for The Boston Phoenix. The idea, he told me at the time, was motivated in part by complaints on the left that they were too often ignored by the mainstream.
“We’ve done so much bitching about media access for so long that my reaction is to just do it,” Braude said. “The environment is as ripe as it could be.”
Otherwise had a decent run, but as is generally the case with startup magazines, it eventually faded away. Braude hasn’t. His program on New England Cable News, “BroadSide,” which he’s leaving, has been a bastion of intelligence for years. His radio show with Eagan — the only listenable program on the late, unlamented WTKK — was so good that it brought both of them to WGBH.
The big question is how “Greater Boston” will change with Braude at the helm. “I love Emily,” he tells The Boston Globe’s Shirley Leung. “We are different people with different styles. Beyond that, stay tuned.”
