Gannett and USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va. Photo (cc) 2008 by Patrickneil.
Gannett is laying off 74 employees in Massachusetts — but, for once, they are not people who were producing local journalism. The layoffs, which take effect Nov. 14, are related to the company’s decision to close Cambridge-based Reviewed, a website that combines consumer advice and commerce in a manner similar to Wirecutter, which is part of The New York Times.
The pending closure and layoffs were reported Aug. 26 by Mia Sato at The Verge and came amid accusations that Reviewed published articles produced by artificial intelligence and attributed to non-existent writers. Sato wrote: “As The Verge reported last fall, the marketing firm behind the Reviewed content is the same company that was responsible for a similar dust-up at Sports Illustrated, in which remarkably similar product reviews were published and attributed to freelancers.”
Gannett denied the allegations and said the decision to shut down Reviewed was based on changes in Google’s algorithms.
Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe quotes NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava in a statement:
We are deeply troubled by Gannett’s decision to shutter Reviewed. We are concerned for the future of dozens of workers represented by The NewsGuild of New York working at Reviewed, and about the broader impact of this announcement on the media industry at large.
The layoffs were announced in advance, reports Ray Schultz of Publishers Daily, because of a Massachusetts law mandating that companies provide 60 days’ notice ahead of a mass layoff.
Lookout Local founder Ken Doctor is about to take the next step in launching his second community news site. Today he’s announcing that Lookout Eugene-Springfield, in Oregon, will debut in early 2025 and that he’s assembled a national team with the aim of moving into “at least five markets” in 2025-’26. I wrote about initial plans for Lookout Eugene-Springfield back in May.
Doctor, a well-known journalist who covers the media business, began Lookout Local in 2020 with a site in Santa Cruz, California. Lookout Santa Cruz won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for its reporting on a January 2023 flood and its aftermath. Santa Cruz is also the home of another high-quality hyperlocal news site, Santa Cruz Local; both Doctor and Santa Cruz Local CEO Kara Meyberg Guzman are featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and have been guests on our podcast.
Lookout Eugene-Springfield will compete with Gannett’s Register-Guard as well as Eugene Weekly, an alternative publication saved by its readers earlier this year after an ex-employee was charged with embezzlement.
Reading the papers in San Francisco. From one of the murals at Coit Tower.
Is San Francisco a local news oasis amid the desertification of community journalism across the country? That’s what The New York Times claims.
Eli Tan reports that news in the Bay Area is as strong as it’s ever been (free link), noting that the city is served by a healthy daily (the San Francisco Chronicle), a billionaire-funded startup with paper-of-record ambitions (The San Francisco Standard) and a wide range of hyperlocal nonprofits and radio stations.
With 27 news organizations in a city of 800,000, Tan writes, San Francisco has about the same number of local news outlets that it had a decade ago.
Now, my first reaction to Tan’s story is that you could say the same about the Greater Boston area. The media scene here may not be quite as rich as it is in San Francisco, but we’ve got a lot, and the rise of digital nonprofits in a number of suburban communities has helped offset moves by Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, to close or merge many of its weeklies and to slash its dailies to the bone.
But on further consideration, I think it’s worth noting that a number of large cities are reasonably well-served; it’s the exurbs, rural areas and urban communities of color that are struggling. That’s true even in places like Denver (which Ellen Clegg and I write about in out book, “What Works in Community News”) and Chicago, where the hedge fund Alden Global Capital has hollowed out the legacy dailies but where a number of other news organizations, many of them new, have risen up to fill the gap.
In general, cities and affluent suburbs have the people and the money needed to support local news. What’s happening in San Francisco may be something of an outlier — but not quite as much of one as the Times seems to believe.
Endorsements of political candidates are fading into history. The latest blow was struck on Monday, when The New York Times said it would no longer endorse in local races (free link), although it will continue to endorse in the presidential contest.
In terms of influence, this has it exactly backwards. May we presume that the Times will endorse the Harris-Walz ticket this fall? Yes, we may. Meanwhile, readers in New York City and across the state — admittedly a shrinking share of the Times’ 10 million-plus subscribers, most of them digital — might genuinely want some guidance in deciding whom to vote for in state and local contests.
But there’s no turning back. Increasingly, communities are served by nonprofit local news organizations, which risk losing their tax-exempt status if they endorse candidates or specific pieces of legislation. As Tom Jones notes at Poynter Online, papers owned by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund stopped endorsing in 2022. Those include some of the largest papers in the country, such as New York’s Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and The Denver Post. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, has cut back on opinion, including endorsements.
A newspaper endorsement is a recommendation to vote for a particular candidate written in the institutional voice of the news organization. At larger newspapers, editorial boards comprising the staff of the opinion section and sometimes some outside members make those decisions in consultation with the publisher. In many cases these boards interview the candidates before making their decision.
The opinion section of a newspaper is entirely separate from the news staff, with the editor and the editorial-page editor reporting directly to the publisher, who may or may not be the owner of the paper as well. Publishers have been known to overturn the editorial board’s recommendation — that’s their prerogative. At smaller papers these lines tend to get blurred. At now-defunct Boston Phoenix, where I worked for many years, the editorial board comprised publisher Stephen Mindich and the news staff. Then again, the Phoenix, as an alt-weekly, mixed opinion and reporting, so the wall separating news from commentary didn’t really exist.
There was a time when rich men bought newspapers mainly so that they could express their political views, with the news section taking a back seat to the editorial page. These days, though, endorsements are often regarded by political reporters as a hindrance in their efforts to convince candidates who were not endorsed by the opinion section that they will cover them fairly. My conversations with students over the years have led me to believe that they are skeptical of the whole notion of a news outlet speaking as an institution, and that they’re more comfortable with signed opinion pieces such as those that typically appear on the op-ed page.
When a local news organization chooses not to endorse, either on principle or to keep the IRS at bay, it loses an opportunity to share its expertise with its audience. For instance, the nonprofit New Haven Independent covers a city that is served a 30-member board of alders, as the city council is known. How is anyone supposed to keep track?
But there are other steps a news outlet can take. It can put together a guide to where candidates stand on the issues and link to that guide every time it publishes a story on that particular race. The guide can take the form of a series of articles or an issues grid — or both. And I should add that the Independent covers city politics with depth and fairness.
If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, Ellen Clegg and I talked with Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby about endorsements on our “What Works” podcast back in 2022. Ellen, who’s a retired editorial-page editor for the Globe which continues to endorse in state and local elections, is pro-endorsement; Jeff is against them. I’m (uncharacteristically) in the middle.
1874 painting of Swampscott via the Boston Public Library.
For the past two years, the North Shore town of Marblehead has been a hotbed of local news experimentation, with two (and, for a while, three) independent community journalism outlets battling to fill the gap left behind by Gannett’s near-disappearance.
Yet neighboring Swampscott, a virtual twin of Marblehead, has remained a news desert. Now that’s about to change.
Four Swampscott residents, three of them with journalism backgrounds, plan to launch a new nonprofit digital news organization sometime in late autumn. The publication, Swampscott Tides, already has a website. Founding president Anne Driscoll tells Steve Marantz, writing in the Jewish Journal of Greater Boston, that she envisions “a fair and factual independent news outlet,” adding:
I think people in recent years have begun to recognize what a loss it is not to have a local paper. You can’t have a functioning democracy if you don’t have functioning journalism. You can’t get information on what’s going on, events, local politics, how municipal government is functioning.
The story in Swampscott is a familiar one. In the spring of 2022, Gannett closed or merged a couple of dozen weekly newspapers in the Boston suburbs. Although the Swampscott Reporter continues as a standalone weekly, it was purged of virtually all local news, with content from across the chain filling the news hole.
The same thing happened with Gannett’s Marblehead Reporter, which led to the establishment of the nonprofit Marblehead Current and the for-profit Marblehead Weekly News. A third for-profit, digital-only project, the Marblehead Beacon, is now on hiatus, and it’s not clear whether it will be back.
Driscoll told the Jewish Journal that the Swampscott folks approached the Marblehead Current about the possibility of forming a partnership but that the Current decided against it.
Driscoll has a long background as a journalist at The Boston Globe, Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Reporting and other stops. Her three colleagues are Robert Powell, a financial journalist; Tim Dorsey, a corporate lawyer; and Peter Masucci, who has worked in various roles in television journalism.
The organizers are aiming to raise $200,000 to $400,000 so that they can hire a managing editor and one or two reporters.
Nearly three and a half years after then-Gov. Charlie Baker signed a bill creating a local news commission, the Massachusetts legislature is ready to try again. The first commission lapsed without ever holding a formal meeting (one preliminary meeting was held before all the members had been appointed), so essentially we’re starting from scratch.
A public hearing will be held this Wednesday, June 26, at 10 a.m. to discuss the make-up of a journalism commission, the state of journalism in Massachusetts, and what the public would like to see a commission address. The hearing is being held by the Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Business, and will take place in Room B-1 at the Statehouse as well as virtually over Teams. I’ve signed up to testify.
The original legislation would have created a 23-member commission. The new proposal would strip that down to a more workable nine members. I would have been guaranteed a slot on the first commission; there are no guarantees in the new legislation, but I’ve told Rep. Paul McMurtry, D-Dedham, who’s the House chair of the committee, that I’d be willing to serve. I’ve also offered his office some thoughts on how the commission might be structured and what areas it could address.
The local news landscape here has deteriorated considerably since then-Rep. Lori Ehrlich and I first started talking about a commission in 2018. Especially destructive was Gannett’s decision to close or merge a couple dozen of its weekly papers in the spring of 2022 and to jettison nearly all of its local coverage in favor of regional stories from around the chain. (Ellen Clegg and I spoke with Ehrlich on our very first “What Works” podcast in October 2021. Ehrlich is now the regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.)
On the bright side, we’ve also seen an upsurge in local news startups in the Boston area, mainly nonprofit. These projects are doing a better job of covering local news than Gannett had in many years. But some communities are without any journalism, and the startups tend to be located in affluent suburbs.
What could a news commission do? That would be up to the members. But a commission could shine a light on independent projects that are doing well in order to inspire folks in other cities and towns to try their hand. And it could propose some policy measures aimed at bolstering local efforts. One that seems especially promising are tax credits for news publishers who hire and retain journalists, as is being done in Illinois and New York. “Tax credits” is a bit of misnomer since they can be structured to benefit nonprofits as well as for-profits that are losing money.
Here’s the full announcement about Wednesday’s hearing:
Please be advised that the Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Businesses will hold a hybrid public hearing on Wednesday, June 26th starting at 10am in Room B-1 to discuss the composition of the Journalism Commission, the current state of journalism in the Commonwealth and matters that interested parties would like to see the commission address once the commission is formed. Instructions for providing oral and written testimony are below.
Date of Hearing: Wednesday, June 26th, 2024 Time: 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Location: Room B-2 — Hybrid Hearing via Microsoft Teams Subject Matter: Journalism
IN-PERSON AND VIRTUAL TESTIMONY: For both in-person and virtual testimony, you must fill out the following form: https://forms.office.com/g/6VKVLTVXjj
WRITTEN TESTIMONY: Written testimony may be submitted to the Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Businesses by emailing the garrett.burns@mahouse.gov
DEADLINE TO PRE-REGISTER: For both in-person and virtual testimony, the deadline to register to testify is 12:00pm, Tuesday, June 25th, 2024. Individuals registered for virtual testimony will receive an email the day before the hearing with a link to join the hearing on Microsoft Teams.
SAME DAY SIGN-UP: Individuals who miss the deadline to pre-register for testimony may appear on the day of the hearing and sign up to speak in-person on forms provided by committee staff. Time permitting, when all pre-registered individuals have been called to testify, the Chairs will then call any individuals who sign up in-person on the day of the hearing.
ORDER OF TESTIMONY: The Chairs, at their discretion, will determine the order of testimony. It is the responsibility of the individuals registered to testify to be prepared to speak when called upon by the Chairs. If an individual is called by the Chairs and that person is not logged into the Teams platform, the Chairs will move on and call the next individual or panel. We respectfully request that all oral testimony be kept to 3 minutes or less.
State Capitol building in Albany, N.Y. Photo (cc) 2015 by Marcela.
A three-year, $90 million appropriation to boost local news in New York State is sparking a contentious battle over who is eligible and who isn’t, according to an article by Jon Campbell of Gothamist.
As originally touted by its supporters, the program was supposed to provide subsidies to offset the cost of hiring and retaining journalists at all manner of news organizations — print, digital and broadcast, for-profit and nonprofit. Now much of that is up in the air — so much so that Campbell says the only sure thing is that it would cover all or most for-profit print newspapers. Campbell writes:
As crafted, the law largely excludes many local news outlets it purports to support — aside from for-profit print newspapers — due to a crush of last-minute negotiations in the days before the budget passed. Those led to a final version that excluded most TV broadcasters and many commercial radio stations….
Also excluded were nonprofit news outlets, which were never included in the first place — to the surprise of some leading supporters who were convinced otherwise.
If nonprofits aren’t eligible, that represents a significant reversal of a principle everyone thought they understood. Indeed, Steven Waldman, president of Rebuild Local News and a prominent supporter of nonprofit journalism, praised the appropriation shortly after it was approved in late April. Now he tells Gothamist that leaving out nonprofits would be a major mistake.
“We missed something all along here, and it was never quite set up the way any of us thought it was,” Waldman is quoted as saying. He added: “Nonprofits — including both websites, news services and local public radio — are crucially important parts of the local news ecosystem. We will definitely work to get them included in future revisions.”
What about for-profit digital-only news projects? Unclear. What about newspapers owned by publicly traded corporations, such as Gannett? They are excluded under one provision but seemingly included in another — a contradiction first reported by Richard J. Tofel, writing in his newsletter, Second Rough Draft. As for broadcast, Gothamist reports that they may have been left out by mistake. Or not.
The rules governing how the money will be distributed are still being drafted by the state, so it’s possible that the final product will look something like what Waldman and others were celebrating just a few weeks ago. At a minimum, the system should not favor print over digital or for-profit over nonprofit. Excluding corporate chains that have deliberately hollowed out their papers, such as Gannett, makes sense, too.
Whether we’ll get there or not remains to be seen. And, frankly, what’s happening in New York ought to be regarded as a warning for what can happen when the government gets involved in helping to solve the local news crisis.
Trump’s Chicago tower under construction. Photo (cc) 2006 by JeremyA.
A private equity firm that helped destroy local newspapers was also involved in building Donald Trump’s Chicago tower, a fiasco that was the subject of an in-depth investigative report over the weekend produced by The New York Times and ProPublica. The story, published in the Times, found that Trump may owe $100 million because he used “a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower.” That conclusion is based on an Internal Revenue Service investigation whose details the two news organizations uncovered.
The tower, built on the former site of the Chicago Sun-Times, was plagued by cost overruns and overly optimistic estimates of the revenues that would be brought in. But this post isn’t about Trump’s problems. It’s about this:
As his cost estimates increased, Mr. Trump arranged to borrow as much as $770 million for the project — $640 million from Deutsche Bank and $130 million from Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund and private equity company. He personally guaranteed $40 million of the Deutsche loan. Both Deutsche and Fortress then sold off pieces of the loans to other institutions, spreading the risk and potential gain.
GateHouse built a nationwide network of community newspapers, taking them in and out of bankruptcy twice and slashing newsrooms in order to goose revenues and fuel the acquisition of still more papers. That culminated in 2019 when GateHouse merged with Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, a $1.1 billion deal that saddled the new Gannett with an enormous pile of debt. Fortress kept right on profiting, Susca wrote, as the firm continued to extract millions of dollars in managment fees. And Gannett kept right on cutting. Susca put it this way in describing what Fortress and other masters of the universe have done to newspapers, and what that has meant for democracy:
Researchers have shown that investments in sustainability, diversity, and community suffer when profit is the only goal; companies involved in those efforts to improve the world around them may actually inspire hedge funds to target them; hedge funds see line items in those businesses that, if eliminated, could lead to more profits….
At a time when government accountability and truth itself are at a crucial nexus, news organizations in the private investment era have failed citizens as these organizations have boosted private investment funds’ bottom lines.
To organizations like Fortress, it makes no difference whether they’re helping to bail out Trump or destroy newspapers. The bottom line is the bottom line, and nothing else matters.
Gannett and USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va. Photo (cc) 2008 by Patrickneil.
Even by the rock-bottom standards of Gannett, what happened to Sarah Leach was shameful. Poynter media analyst Rick Edmonds reported last week that the country’s largest newspaper chain had hit the brakes on plans to restaff some of its smaller daily newspapers. And on Thursday he wrote that his source, Leach, was fired for “sharing proprietary information with [a reporter for] a competing media company.” Edmonds called the firing “outrageous!”
The Poynter Institute, a journalism training organization, competes with Gannett? Who knew?
So how was Leach, who’s based in Michigan and managed 26 Gannett newspapers in four states, identified as Edmonds’ confidential source? Edmonds writes: “As best Leach and I can figure, they must have tapped into her office email. ‘That’s the only way I can think of that they could have known,’ she said.” That is sleazy behavior by a news company, although we all know that employers have a right to read their employees’ email. That’s why many of the newsroom sources I’ve communicated with over the years use their personal email accounts. (As always, tips welcome, and anonymity guaranteed.)
I’m not bitter toward my former employer. It’s not Gannett’s fault. In many ways, it’s just the natural byproduct of media conglomerates owning publications in major metropolitan areas with hundreds of thousands of people … [ellipsis hers] and papers in much smaller towns who need local journalism just as much…. [ellipsis mine]
Let’s use this moment as a catalyst for a critical conversation about local media outlets and the audiences they serve. There has been an unprecedented loss of journalists and community newspapers across the country, and news deserts are growing larger and more numerous.
Gannett owns about 200 weekly daily newspapers across the U.S., anchored by USA Today. The company also owns a diminishing number of weekly papers, and has closed or merged many of them in Eastern Massachusetts, sparking the rise of a number of local news startups. Gannett likes to claim that it’s simply shifting from print to digital, but — to name just one example — try finding any Medford or Somerville news on its Wicked Local website for those cities. Gannett dailies in this region include the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, The Providence Journal and the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham.
Back in February, Gannett’s chief content officer, Kristin Roberts, and chief sales officer Jason Taylor appeared on “E&P Reports,” a vodcast hosted by Editor & Publisher’s Mike Blinder, to tout the chain’s recommitment to local news. And maybe that’s continuing at the larger dailies, but who knows? I’m not blaming Roberts and Taylor, who are quality executives with solid backgrounds. But Gannett’s behavior continues to be reprehensible — not only for firing Leach but for trimming back its latest commitment to local news and for running the vast majority of its papers into the ground, leaving communities without the news and information they need.
A couple of other local news tidbits:
•AI local news comes to Boston. My writing and podcast partner Ellen Clegg spotted this one: Hoodline, which uses artificial intelligence to cover two dozen cities, including Boston, is cranking out tidbits from locales such as Boston, Everett and Bridgewater. The stories have bylines, but when you click through, you find a little “AI” next to the name. For instance: “AI By Mike Chen,” which raises the possibility that Chen is a bot — a practice we’ve seen elsewhere. (If he’s an actual journalist who’s been hired to vet this stuff, my apologies.) Here’s what Hoodline has to say about its use of AI and its “In-House Writing Collective,” which sheds some light on who Mike Chen may or may not be:
We view journalism as a creative science and an art that necessitates a human touch. In our pursuit of delivering informative and captivating content, we integrate artificial intelligence (AI) to support and enhance our editorial processes. This includes organizing information and aiding in the initial formatting of stories for the editorial phase. Our stories are cultivated with a human-centric approach, involving research and editorial oversight. While AI may assist in the background, the essence of our journalism — from conception to publication — is driven by real human insight and discretion.
It turns out that Hoodline has been around since 2018, with Disney among its original backers. Although automation was part of its DNA from the beginning, presumably its use of AI has become a lot more aggressive since the rise of modern tools such as ChatGPT in late 2022.
• Charges dropped in Dartmouth. New Hampshire state authorities have dropped charges against two student journalists for The Dartmouth. Charlotte Hampton and Alesandra “Dre” Gonzales had been arrested on May 1 while covering pro-Palestinian protests even though they were wearing clearly visible press credentials, according to the independent student newspaper.
Student journalists have been producing some of the most important coverage of both the protests and the counter-protests that have broken out in response to the war between Israel and Hamas.
The pixels were barely dry on my post about the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Lookout Santa Cruz when I learned about plans by founder Ken Doctor to launch a second Lookout Local site in Oregon’s Eugene area. The Oregonian reported last month that Lookout Eugene-Springfield will launch in late 2024 or early 2025 with a newsroom of 20, of whom 15 will be journalists. That’s more firepower than Gannett’s Eugene Register-Guard can muster. Indeed, The Oregonian published a pretty depressing report on that paper a year ago that began:
The Eugene Register-Guard, once one of the best newspapers in the region, today has no local editor, no publisher, no physical newsroom and little love from a dismayed citizenry. The news staff that once exceeded 80 now stands at six.
As was the case in Santa Cruz, California, Doctor’s reputation in the news business is standing him in good stead. He said he has already raised $2.5 million for his Oregon project and plans to scrounge up another $1.5 million. Doctor is a graduate of the University of Oregon’s journalism school, so this is something of a homecoming for him.
Doctor also has a long post up at Nieman Lab about efforts in California to bolster local news. Like longtime media analyst Jeff Jarvis, Doctor opposes efforts to extract money from Google and Facebook, noting that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has made it clear that it doesn’t need news, and that going after Google would harm the uneasy balance between the good and bad that the company has done for (and to) journalism.
Instead, Doctor is looking to New York State, which recently created tax credits for news publishers who create and retain jobs. The key, he writes, is to ensure that those credits go to California-based publishers rather than to out-of-state conglomerates. And though he doesn’t name names, he’s presumably referring to the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, with whom he competes in Santa Cruz, and Gannett.
