Something I stress with my journalism students is the importance of having your own home on the internet, either in the form of a newsletter or a blog, so that you have a repository for your work.
But you’ll notice I didn’t say “permanent” repository. Probably the two most widely used platforms, Medium and Substack, are owned by corporate entities that could disappear or change their terms in various onerous ways.
For Media Nation I use WordPress software with a hosting service, GoDaddy, which at least in theory is a safer bet. But something could go wrong with WordPress so that there would no longer be anyone to provide critical security updates. Or GoDaddy could Go Out of Business. The Internet Archive is invaluable, but it doesn’t scrape everything. The bottom line is that you have to stay on top of things if you want to keep the tumbleweeds from blowing into your digital homestead.
Which is why I was interested to read this interview with Brandon Tauszik, a fellow with the Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford, who is involved in designing low-cost ways for journalists to preserve their work.
Judge Crystal Wise Martin is sworn in by her mother, retired Judge Patricia Wise, in 2019. Photo via the Mississippi Office of the Courts.
In 1971, after a federal court stopped The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court was so alarmed at that naked act of censorship that it took up the case in a matter of weeks. On a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that the Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and others could resume publishing, though they might face prosecution for revealing classified information. (They didn’t.)
In 1979, after a small magazine in Wisconsin called The Progressive said it intended to publish an article revealing some details about how to manufacture an atomic bomb, a federal judge stepped in and said no — but so agonized over his censorious act that he all but begged the magazine and the government to reach a compromise.
Then there’s Judge Crystal Wise Martin of Mississippi. On Wednesday, Martin issued a temporary restraining order requiring The Clarksdale Press Register to take down an editorial from its website. According to Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press, the editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”
The city had sued the Press Register, claiming that the editorial was libelous and that it “chilled and hindered” the council’s work. Mayor Chuck Espy was quoted in the AP story as saying the editorial had unfairly implied that officials had violated the law. He cited a section of the editorial that asked, “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-back [see update below] from the community?”
The Huffington Post’s “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” headline has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.” 2016 photo via the Voice of America.
Recently a source in The Boston Globe newsroom forwarded to me a memo sent to the staff about the paper’s performance in Google search during 2024. “We get 25%-27% of our traffic from Google; it’s a significant way we reach people who don’t come to the Globe on their own,” wrote Ronke Idowu Reeves, the paper’s SEO editor. (SEO stands for search-engine optimization.)
As you might imagine, the big SEO winners in 2024 were the Karen Read trial, the phrase “who won the debate” (perhaps a reference to both presidential debates), the Celtics victory parade and Steward Health Care.
The memo, though, prompted another thought: What is the purpose of SEO in the age of paywalls? As you probably know, the Globe has an especially strict paywall, with no quota of gift links for the month. I emailed Reeves and asked her whether SEO was successful in getting casual visitors to sign up for a digital subscription given that they couldn’t read even the one story they’d searched for. She forwarded my email to spokeswoman Carla Kath, who told me by email: “Yes, a good number of people do read and subscribe to our stories that they encounter on search. But, because the scope of search is constantly changing, we are always adjusting how we approach it.”
It’s something I’d like to dig into more deeply at some point since it’s fundamental to the economics of digital news. Twenty years ago, paywalls were rare, and the idea behind SEO was to drive massive audiences to your stories so that they’d see the ads that accompanied them. The first iteration of The Huffington Post stressed SEO heavily, and its infamous 2011 headline “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.”
Justice Clarence Thomas. Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Donald Trump may find that there are limits to how far he can go in tearing down the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. Adam Liptak reports in The New York Times (gift link) that the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t seem inclined to revisit the libel protections of New York Times v. Sullivan, writing:
[I]t was notable that just five days before President Trump took office last month, the Supreme Court seemed to go out of its way to signal that it is not ready to embrace one of his most dearly held goals: to “open up our libel laws” and overrule the Sullivan decision.
That signal came in the form of an approving aside in a routine decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh for Sullivan’s requirement that public officials must offer “clear and convincing evidence” in order to win a libel case — a higher barrier than a “preponderance of the evidence,” that standard that applies in most civil cases.
The heart of Times v. Sullivan, a unanimous decision handed down in 1964, is that public officials must prove “actual malice” in order to win a libel case. That is, they most show knowing falsehood or “reckless disregard” for the truth. Subsequent decisions extended the Sullivan standard to public figures and narrowed the definition of “reckless disregard.”
The decision was intended to shut down a wave of libel suits brought by racist Southern officials aimed at silencing coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. The Sullivan standard also enabled investigative reporting on matters such as the Watergate scandal, since publishers no longer had to worry that small, inadvertent errors would bring about financial ruin.
Press-freedom advocates have been holding their breath since Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that he would, if given the chance, overturn the Sullivan decision and Justice Neil Gorsuch said he favored severely curtailing it. As I wrote for GBH News in 2021:
What seems impossible today may become reality in the not-too-distant future. Changes to libel protections that we had long taken for granted are starting to look inevitable, especially in the hands of a Supreme Court built by Trump and Mitch McConnell.
But maybe Sullivan is secure, at least for now. “All of this suggests that there remain only two votes to overturn the Sullivan decision,” Liptak writes, “well short of the four it takes to add a case to the court’s docket, much less the five required to prevail on the merits.”
Still, threats remain. Liptak observes that numerous challenges to Sullivan, citing Thomas and Gorsuch, have been filed in the past few years. Just last week, casino mogul Steve Wynn filed an appeal in his ongoing libel suit against The Associated Press and asked that Times v. Sullivan be overturned. Howard Stutz of The Nevada Independent quotes David Orentlicher, a law professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who says:
This would be a dangerous time to revisit the protection of the free press. Unfortunately, we have an administration that has decided to target the press and others who write critical commentary. There is a blurring of lines between government officials and private persons who have power. This is exactly the wrong time to weaken the protection of the press.
Moreover, none of this does anything to stop deep-pocketed libel defendants such as ABC and possibly CBS from giving in to bogus suits filed by Trump in order to advance their business interests. So far, at least, the Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett, are holding firm in the face of Trump’s most ridiculous lawsuit — that they somehow engaged in “consumer fraud” by publishing the results of a poll that turned out to be way off the mark. The pollster, J. Ann Selzer, is being sued as well. Trump has been joined by a right-wing organization called the Center for American Rights, as Robin Opsahl reports for the Iowa Capital Dispatch.
Perhaps a signal from the Supreme Court that the protections of Times v. Sullivan remain secure will serve to stiffen the backbone of news organizations and their parent companies. If they’re not willing to fight for press freedoms that they already have, then the Sullivan decision is worth very little.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Matt DeRienzo, the new director of SciLine. The project was founded seven years ago to make it easier for reporters to get in touch with scientists on deadline and to dig into research. And facts. The program is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a 150-year-old organization that publishes the widely respected journal Science.
Most recently, Matt has been serving as temporary executive editor of Lookout Santa Cruz, the digital daily that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2024. He has a long track record in investigative and local news, serving as an innovative daily newspaper editor and publisher in Connecticut about 15 years ago. I interviewed Matt in 2011 for my book “The Wired City” when Matt was editor of the New Haven Register and the slogan “Digital First” meant something more than a warning that Alden Global Capital was coming to town.
Matt joins SciLine at an important time. The Trump administration has suspended communications by government agencies that oversee science. Yet many newsrooms aren’t equipped to cover this because they have cut back on science coverage, if they do any at all. SciLine helps reporters find expert sources and gives them the tools to interpret cutting-edge research. Matt has a staff of 14 and the organization seems poised for growth.
I’ve got a Quick Take that hits close to my home in Medford, Massachusetts. A brand-new digital-only for-profit news outlet called Gotta Know Medford is on the verge of going live. It’s the first time the city of nearly 60,000 has had a dedicated local news outlet in three years, after it was abandoned by Gannett.
Ellen’s Quick Take involves big changes in Maine. In Bangor, the Bangor Daily News, a family-owned paper, is cutting back on staff-written editorials and opening the pages up to new voices. Separately, at the National Trust for Local News, which acquired the Portland Press Herald and a number of other Maine papers in 2023, the co-founder and CEO, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, is stepping down. We interviewed Dr. Hansen Shapiro for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and for an earlier episode of this podcast.
The Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
One of the first media pieces I wrote for The Boston Phoenix was about the declining number of reporters who were covering state government in Massachusetts. I spent some time in the press gallery at the Statehouse interviewing members of the shrinking press corps, including Carolyn Ryan, then with The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, now managing editor of The New York Times.
Although I can’t find the story online, I know this was in 1995 or thereabouts. The situation has not improved over the past 30 years.
Last week Gintautas Dumcius of CommonWealth Beacon, who definitely knows his way around the Statehouse, reported that The Associated Press’ Steve LeBlanc is leaving Beacon Hill after taking a buyout and is unlikely to be replaced. Although an AP spokesman said the wire service will continue to cover the Legislature, Glen Johnson, who’s a former AP Statehouse bureau chief, told Dumcius that it won’t be the same without someone in the building:
There’s no substitute for being physically present where news happens and in a statehouse, there’s few things more powerful than being able to confront a newsmaker in person and at times other than official events. That only comes from proximity to power….
Some of the biggest stories I got as a statehouse reporter came because I bumped into somebody unexpectedly or saw something that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen.
As Dumcius points out, the move comes at a time when two newspaper chains owned by hedge funds, Gannett and McClatchy, have dropped the AP as a cost-cutting move. It’s a vicious circle. An AP subscription is expensive. News organizations walk away. The AP is left with fewer clients and thus has to increase its prices even more or cut back on coverage. Or both.
Jerry Berger, a former Statehouse bureau chief for United Press International who’s now a journalism professor at Boston University, recalls a time when the AP and UPI competed fiercely for news about state government. In his newsletter, “In Other Words…,” Berger says:
The Massachusetts Statehouse Press Gallery used to be a rowdy and raucous place, where reporters for two wire services and outlets from around the state worked side-by-side, in fierce competition, to document the daily workings of Massachusetts government.
Today, you can hear a pin drop — and the echoes just got a bit louder with word the Associated Press no longer has someone stationed in Room 456.
While I continue on my trip down memory lane, I’ll observe here that The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, where I worked in the 1980s, got its Statehouse news from UPI. I used to do a bit of stringing for the agency, and I think I’m the only freelancer who ever wrote for UPI and got all the money that was due him. Today, as Berger notes, UPI is owned by a company affiliated with the Unification Church, once headed by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Fortunately, there are still multiple news outlets covering state government in Massachusetts, including The Boston Globe, State House News Service, CommonWealth Beacon, Politico, WBUR, GBH News and local television newscasts. Just last week on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Alison Bethel, the chief content officer and editor-in-chief of State Affairs, yet another statehouse-focused news organization that is rolling out a Massachusetts edition in partnership with State House News.
Still, it’s a far cry from when the Statehouse press gallery was full of reporters hanging on every word from governors, legislative leaders and reform-minded rebels — that last category something that has virtually disappeared. Maybe if there were a few more reporters at the Statehouse keeping tabs on what’s going on, there would be a few more rebels as well.
More on the AP
The Associated Press is in the news for two other reasons today.
First, editors of the influential AP Stylebook have announced that they’re sticking with the Gulf of Mexico, despite President Trump’s insistence that it be called the Gulf of America, but that they’re following Trump’s lead in referring to Alaska’s Denali mountain as Mount McKinley, as it had been known previously.
The reason, the AP explains, is that the Gulf of Mexico name goes back 400 years and that the body of water is international. Denali, by contrast, is entirely within U.S. borders, and the president has the right to change its name by executive order, as President Barack Obama did in 2015.
Second, a new documentary film claims that AP photographer Nick Ut did not take an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a Vietnamese girl running naked from an American napalm attack, an image that may have hastened the end of the Vietnam War. The AP vociferously disagrees, saying that its own investigation shows Ut was indeed the photographer. Poynter media columnist Tom Jones has the details (fourth item).
If you live in Medford, Massachusetts, as I do, I have some incredibly exciting news. A for-profit digital-only news organization is about to debut nearly three years after the Gannett newspaper chain all but abandoned the city. Gotta Know Medford is expected to launch with a website and a newsletter by the end of this month.
“We want to hold people accountable and make sure people are informed before they make decisions,” says co-founder Nell Escobar Coakley, who will be the site’s managing editor. She’ll be joined by two other co-founders, Wendall Waters and Chris Stevens. All three are veteran journalists who spent part of their careers working at Gannett and its predecessor chains. “We know what we’re doing,” Coakley says.
Gotta Know Medford will be free and advertiser-supported.
Coakley, in fact, is a former editor of the Medford Transcript, which ceased to exist in the spring of 2022, when Gannett merged it with the Somerville Journal. The merged paper, the Transcript & Journal, consists almost entirely of non-local news from across the chain.
Coakley, Stevens and Waters have been working to start a Medford news project for many months; Coakley says that Gotta Know Medford began coming together this past fall. That’s when the three of them connected with the Medford Chamber of Commerce, which in turn introduced them to Medford-based web developer Amanda Stone.
“We just saw the preview of our site, and we’ve just sent all of the revisions back to Amanda,” Coakley says, adding she’s thrilled with the design that Stone has come up with.
At least at first, Gotta Know Medford will be a part-time endeavor for Coakley, Stevens and Waters. Coakley is the part-time editor of Winchester News, a digital nonprofit, and she plans to continue with that for the time being. Stevens has been reporting for Winchester News as well.
“Those Winchester folks were really inspirational,” Coakley says. “They’ve been very helpful too in giving us advice and some ideas.” She also credited people involved in Greater Boston hyperlocal news, saying, “I find that people running these smaller news outlets, it’s a real community.”
Gotta Know Medford, Coakley says, will be a typical local news project, covering municipal government, development issues, arts and entertainment, and the like. School sports will be added somewhere down the line. There’s certainly plenty to cover, with issues such as a possible revision of the city charter and rezoning along Salem Street top of mind for many of us who live here.
Medford is not entirely uncovered. We have a Patch, which occasionally publishes an interesting story about the city, and students at The Tufts Daily do an excellent job of covering some Medford news. There is no substitute, though, for a locally owned, independent news outlet.
Now, a disclosure: I’ve been involved in trying to bring local news back to Medford since 2020. At that time the Transcript did not have a full-time reporter, a situation that dragged on for about a year. That was finally rectified, and I put my efforts on hold.
Then, in March 2022, the Transcript ceased publication. I gathered a group of local residents to see if we could organize a nonprofit outlet similar to Winchester News, YourArlington or Brookline.News, co-founded by my research partner, Ellen Clegg. Unfortunately, none of us were able to put in the time needed to start fundraising and begin the work of assembling an organization.
Next I approached a for-profit out-of-state chain that had a decent track record in moving to places vacated by Gannett and publishing good-quality newspapers. That effort appeared promising; at one point, the CEO even came to Medford for a tour, and the local group I’ve already mentioned took him and one of his fellow executives to lunch. Unfortunately, that company ultimately decided against moving ahead.
Nell and I have been in touch for at least a year, bouncing ideas back and forth as she considered whether to go for-profit or nonprofit and offer a print edition (she says it’s something she still might do at some point in the future) or publish online only. So, needless to say, I’m thrilled that she and her partners — a women-owned company, she points out — are finally about to restore local news to our city.
I gave quite a bit of thought to whether I wanted to spend 50 hours with the audio version of Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant before deciding to take the plunge. I knew I was unlikely to find the time to read all 1,074 pages, and I wanted to know more about Grant and his era.
So I started it in mid-October during a drive to Portland, Maine, and kept at it an hour at a time, mainly on walks. I finished on New Year’s Day, and I’m here to report that it took longer for Grant to die than it did Joan of Arc during her interminable burning at the stake in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a 1928 silent film that we saw a few years ago accompanied by music written and performed brilliantly by a group of Berklee students.
I had previously listened to Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which, at 36 hours, was a romp by comparison. I don’t regret the time I spent getting to know Grant; Chernow is an eloquent writer and a skilled researcher, and, as I had hoped, I came away much more knowledgeable about his life and times.
But the level of detail about every trivial occurrence, and the repetitiveness about topics such as Grant’s alcoholism, military genius and ineptitude when not on the battlefield gets to be enervating after a while. As Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: “Chernow likes extreme research; if a Civil War luminary had hemorrhoids, you can read about them here.”
I find that I absorb information from an audiobook about as well as I do from print, but since I’m not taking notes, I can’t really go back and offer much in the way of detail. More than anything, though, what stood out was Grant’s dedication to Black equality. In Chernow’s telling, Grant and Abraham Lincoln were the foremost white advocates of civil rights until Lyndon Johnson. Grant eagerly made use of Black troops during the Civil War, pushed for an expansive approach to Reconstruction, and, as president, dispatched the military to the South to break the Ku Klux Klan.
Thus it’s more than a little disconcerting to come to the end of Grant’s presidency in 1877, when Northern support for Reconstruction was waning, and learn that he believed the Civil War — which claimed an estimated 750,000 lives — had all been for naught. It’s hard to disagree, as slavery in the South morphed into Jim Crow and lynchings, a reign of terror that extended into the 1960s and whose legacy has still not been entirely put behind us.
Media notes
• Unpacking New Orleans and Las Vegas. Around this time Thursday, authorities were reportedly investigating whether the terrorist in New Orleans had accomplices and if the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion might somehow be tied in. Then, too, Donald Trump was parroting a false report from Fox News that the New Orleans attacker had driven across the border from Mexico. Today, we know that none of it was true. As the “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” from the public radio program “On the Media” puts it: “In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong” and “There’s almost never a second shooter” — or, in this case, a second attacker.
• A challenge to the AP. Reuters and Gannett are planning to offer some sort of subscription-based service to regional and local news publishers, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, marking the next step in a partnership that began last spring. This is potentially bad news for The Associated Press, which has been losing customers because of its high prices. But it’s not clear how the arrangement will work. Reuters is a high-quality source of national and international news. Gannett, which publishes USA Today and owns some 200 local news outlets, is notorious for slashing its newsrooms and cutting their reporting capacity.
• Why local news matters. The Los Angeles Times has lost some 20,000 subscribers since owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and began embracing various Trump-friendly ideas, according to media reporter Oliver Darcy. Not good — but far fewer than the 250,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions over owner Jeff Bezos’ similar moves. The LA Times was starting from a smaller base, but there’s an additional factor that may be at play.
Under Bezos’ ownership, the Post reinvented itself as a nationally focused digital publication — making it relatively easy to cancel, since there are plenty of other sources of national and international news, starting with the Post’s ancient rival, The New York Times. By contrast, the LA Times is primarily a regional publication, not unlike The Boston Globe. Canceling the LA Times would mean losing access to important local and regional stories that no one else has.
Almost from the beginning of the social-media age, I’ve been too deeply immersed for my own good. So I appreciated this recent essay (gift link) in The New York Times Magazine by J Worthen, who tells us that Bluesky might look like the better, kinder place at the moment but that it’s probably destined to turn into a vortex of sociopathy like all the rest. Here’s the nut:
We have officially arrived in late-stage social media. The services and platforms that delighted us and reshaped our lives when they began appearing a few decades ago have now reached total saturation and maturation. Call it malaise. Call it Stockholm syndrome. Call it whatever. But each time a new platform debuts, promising something better — to help us connect better, share photos better, manage our lives better — many of us enthusiastically trek on over, only to be disappointed in the end.
As someone who used to get into fights on Usenet back in the 1990s (look it up), long before anyone had ever thought of using algorithms to drive content that engages and enrages, I agree that it’s hopeless. Bluesky might prove to be the exception. Among other things, you get to choose your own algorithm, or none at all. But it really doesn’t matter. The real problem is that, no, you can’t have meaningful conversations with strangers, and social media is inimical to the way we’ve evolved.
The post-Musk social-media landscape has also been defined by the incredibly annoying practice of platform-shaming — a hopeless chase after the least-evil alternative, accompanied by bitter criticism of anyone who would dare keep using those platforms that are deemed insufficiently free of harmful entanglements.
Map of Plymouth, Mass., in 1882. Via the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.
Mark Caro of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School has taken a deep dive into the media ecosystem of Eastern Massachusetts — the wreckage left behind by Gannett’s closing and merging many of its weekly papers, and the rise of independent startups, many of them digital nonprofits.
As Caro observes, the Gannett weeklies and websites that still exist are “ghost newspapers,” containing little in the way of local content.
What’s happening in New England is being echoed across the country as the local news crisis deepens. While the nation’s ever-widening news deserts have drawn much attention, the ghost papers represent another dire threat to a well-informed citizenry. Many areas don’t meet the definition of a news desert, but residents have been left with newspapers so hollowed out that they’re bereft of original local news reporting.
I was especially interested to see that Caro interviewed K. Prescott Low, whose family sold off The Patriot Ledger of Quincy and its affiliated papers in 1998 only to see their legacy torn apart in less than a generation. The Ledger was once regarded as being among the best medium-size dailies in the U.S.; today it limps along with a skeleton staff and no newsroom.
As Low tells it, he thought he had found a trustworthy buyer, but his former papers soon ended up in the hands of GateHouse Media, a cost-cutting chain that in 2019 merged with Gannett. “Conceptually it was a good idea,” Low told Caro. “Practically it didn’t work out because of the subsequent purchase by GateHouse and what has happened across the media.”
Caro and I talked about the lack of news coverage in Medford, where I live, after Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and Somerville Journal. He also interviewed my “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, about Brookline.News, the digital nonprofit she helped launch after Gannett closed its Brookline Tab.
As I told Caro, there are reasons to be optimistic, but affluent suburban communities are doing better at meeting their own news needs than are urban areas, and there’s a certain random quality to all of it. “You can have a community that has something really good,” I told him, “and right next door is a community that has nothing.”
Caro has written a good and important article, and I hope you’ll take a look.
WBUR cancels ‘Radio Boston’
There was some sad news on the local public radio front earlier today. WBUR is ending “Radio Boston,” a locally oriented program that airs on weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon and is repeated from 3 to 4 p.m.
It is WBUR’s only local news show and follows cuts at both of Boston’s major public broadcasters this years, as well as downsizing across the country. Earlier this year GBH News canceled three local television shows, “Greater Boston,” “Talking Politics” and “Basic Black.” That last program will return next month, possibly as a digital offering.
GBH Radio continues to offer four hours of local programming each weekday — “Boston Public Radio,” a talk and interview show hosted by Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and “The Culture Show” from 2 to 3 p.m.
The end of “Radio Boston” won’t result in any layoffs, according to the station, as the folks who worked on that show will be reassigned to pumping up the local segments on NPR’s two national drive-time programs, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
Alden’s tin cup
Alden Global Capital, the hedge-fund newspaper owner that has decimated community journalism from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Denver to San Jose, is trying something new: asking readers to give them money in order to offset some of the newsroom cuts they’ve made.
An alert Media Nation reader passed along an appeal sent to readers of Alden’s South Florida Sun Sentinel, asking for tax-deductible gifts to the nonprofit Florida Press Foundation‘s Community News Fund. The foundation appears to be legit, but it’s hard to imagine why they would agree to help prop up a paper that’s been slashed by its hedge-fund owner.
“Alden Capital is surrounded by small independents that continue to eat into their circulation area,” my informant says. “Key Biscayne Independent, the Bulldog Reporter, Florida Phoenix, Coastal Star … are just a few of the ‘independents’ started by former journalists to fill the news desert. Everyone competes for donations. So when a Wall Street PE [private equity] firm solicits for limited resources, they are actually starving their competition. I think this is sad and something that may be a harbinger of what’s to come under the new transactional administration.”
If you see any other examples of rattling the tin cup at papers owned by corporate chains, please let me know.
