A news organization can’t do its job as well as it should unless its journalists are as diverse as the community they cover. The giant newspaper chain Gannett, for all its faults, has long enjoyed a reputation for taking diversity seriously. Now the company is being sued by former white employees who claim they were laid off while less qualified Black staff members kept their jobs. Taylor Telford reports (free link) for The Washington Post:
The case is among the first to test the legality of corporate diversity practices in the wake of a June Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. That decision has sparked a wave of litigation aimed at racial considerations in the workplace, including claims that corporate efforts to increase diversity have disadvantaged White employees.
I’m sympathetic toward anyone who loses their job, but I’m not sympathetic to the argument that the plaintiffs are making. News organizations are like police departments and school systems in that racial diversity is an intrinsic part of serving their community. Who is seated at the table when decisions are being made about what stories to cover and how to cover them? I hope this lawsuit doesn’t go anywhere, but I suspect my hopes will not be fulfilled.
Former headquarters of the Telegram & Gazette. Photo (cc) 2011 by Daderot.
With a population just north of 200,000, Worcester is the second largest city in New England; surrounding Worcester County is home to more than four times that number of residents. Yet the 157-year-old Telegram & Gazette, the daily newspaper of record in Central Massachusetts, has lost most of its paid readership under the ownership of Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain.
According to Statements of Ownership that the T&G filed with the U.S. Postal Service on Oct. 1, average weekday paid circulation of the print edition stands at 8,698. The paper also reported an average of 4,133 paid electronic copies for a total paid average weekday circulation of 12,831. On Sundays, the numbers are 12,403 for print, 4,054 for electronic, and 16,457 for total paid average circulation. And as I pointed out the other day, digital circulation is reported using guidelines from the Alliance for Audited Media, which are somewhat inflated since AAN allows for some double-counting of print and digital.
Ten years ago, the T&G enjoyed paid circulation (print plus digital) of 74,000 on weekdays and 78,000 on Sundays, according to a story published just after then-new owner John Henry visited the paper’s offices, which means that circulation is down about 80% over the past decade. The aftermath of that meeting proved to be contentious, with T&G folks coming away from it believing that Henry — who acquired the paper as part of his purchase of The Boston Globe — had promised not to sell unless he could find a local buyer.
“It’s good to hear John Henry is focused on finding the right owner for the newspaper,” T&G publisher Bruce Gaultney was quoted as saying after meeting with Henry.
Henry later told me that he believed he’d promised only that he wouldn’t sell to GateHouse Media chain, which was notorious for laying off journalists and slashing coverage. Henry ended up selling to a Florida chain, which in turned handed it off to GateHouse, now Gannett. And Gannett has gutted the T&G, as it has so many of its properties.
Worcester is not a news desert. It has a number of other outlets, including the Worcester Business Journal, MassLive, the fledgling nonprofit Worcester Guardian, a GBH News bureau and several smaller outlets, including a lively aggregation service called The016. The once-mighty Telegram & Gazette, though, is barely a shadow of its former self.
Federal Square in Worcester. Photo (cc) 2015 by Dan Kennedy.
Update: This is getting complicated, so let me give it another shot. Bill Shaner, who writes the newsletter Worcester Sucks and I Love It, reports that the Guardian has lifted its About page almost verbatim from The New Bedford Light, a large, well-established nonprofit. But it should be noted that the very first line of the Guardian’s ethics and practices policies — not the same as its About page — is this: “We will subscribe to standards of editorial independence adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News and the New Bedford Light.” The attribution should be clearer and included in the About page, too.
New England’s second largest city will soon be getting its own nonprofit news organization — but there’s a twist. The sponsor behind The Worcester Guardian is the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, a business group whose involvement, on the face of it, is incompatible with the independence that accountability journalism requires.
I’m not dismissing this out of hand. The press release issued by the Chamber says that the Guardian will be governed by “an independent board of directors and a community advisory board,” and that the project will seek membership in the Institute for Nonprofit News. INN is not going to approve the Guardian’s application unless its leadership is satisfied that the Chamber will not be in a position to dictate or interfere with coverage. Here, for example, is an excerpt from INN’s model code of ethics:
Our organization retains full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic and business interests of our organization. We maintain a firewall between news coverage decisions and sources of all revenue. Acceptance of financial support does not constitute implied or actual endorsement of donors or their products, services or opinions.
In addition, Dave Nordman, the former executive editor of the city’s daily, the Telegram & Gazette, has signed on as a consultant to the project. Nordman is an outstanding journalist. Dave has been a Northeastern colleague for the past couple of years, serving as executive editor in the university’s office of external affairs.
The Worcester area has been something of a news desert for years, as Gannett has hollowed out the T&G. It sounds like the Chamber is trying to do the right thing, and I wish the Guardian well.
In his report on the launch for the Boston Business Journal, Don Seiffert writes that the Chamber will help the Guardian get started with a $50,000 donation. Below is the Chamber’s press release.
“The Worcester Guardian will deliver free civically oriented journalism on an array of topics important to Worcester and the Central Massachusetts region,” said Timothy P. Murray, the chamber’s president and CEO.
The Worcester Guardian has applied for membership in the Institute for Nonprofit News, which has over 425 affiliates nationwide, including 38 in Massachusetts.
Readers will be able to access stories free of charge through the Worcester Guardian’s website, social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) – as well as free email newsletters.
“As is the case in other communities this will take time to scale and will require resources and support from the business community, various institutions and nonprofits, as well as everyday readers,” Murray said. “It will be work, but I am confident the community will respond and support this important initiative that will seek to tell our collective story locally, statewide and across the country on a daily basis.”
Since 2000, more than 2,200 newspapers across the country have closed, including over 360 alone since just before the start of the pandemic, according to the New York Times. In Worcester, the Telegram & Gazette has seen steady cutbacks under corporate ownership since being sold by the Stoddard, Fletcher and Booth families in 1986.
“The decline of local news both here in Central Massachusetts and across the country is unhealthy to our civic well-being,” said Christine Cassidy, the chamber’s board chair. “Consistent with the chamber’s role over its nearly 150-year history and our mission in seeking to better our region, the chamber will lead the facilitation over the next 18 to 24 months in establishing an independent and sustainable nonprofit news organization.”
This will include establishing an independent board of directors and a community advisory board for the new 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
To ensure the Worcester Guardian follows proper journalistic guidelines from the outset, former Telegram & Gazette executive editor David Nordman will serve as a consultant to the new nonprofit news organization.
“I am excited to assist with this important initiative,” Nordman said. “Free, nonprofit, independent news provides a dynamic new platform to tell the Central Massachusetts story and report on important issues impacting Worcester and the region.”
The New York Times today reports on the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google. The federal trial is scheduled to get under way next Tuesday.
The lawsuit, according to the Times’ David McCabe and Cecilia Kang, revolves around accusations that Google monopolizes search by paying off the likes of Apple and Mozilla to make Google their default search engine. But I think a group of newspaper publishers are pursuing a more interesting antitrust case against Google (and Facebook), charging that Google’s control of every aspect of online advertising technology has allowed the giant platform to drive down ad prices and leave media organizations on the sidelines.
Facebook is part of the suit because the publishers claim that Google and Facebook have colluded in order to keep Facebook from setting up its own competing ad system. Separately, Gannett has sued Google, but not Facebook, over the same issues.
Mathewson Farm in Johnston, R.I. Photo (cc) by John Phelan.
When we think about revenue sources for local news, we tend to focus on the obvious — ads, subscriptions, events and, for nonprofits, voluntary memberships and grants. What we often overlook are public notices, also known as legal ads, taken out by government entities to inform the public that a job is being put out to bid or a meeting is being held. Mandatory public notices also include foreclosures, the disposition of public property and other business.
Public notices represent a significant source of revenue for community news organizations — and they can be weaponized. The Boston Globe recently reported on one such example in Rhode Island. Amanda Milkovits wrote that the city of Johnston has removed public notices from the weekly Johnston Sun Rise and moved them instead to the daily Providence Journal, even though the Journal charges much higher fees and is read by few people in Johnston.
The mayor, Joseph Polisena Jr., told Milkovits that he wanted public notices to reach a broader audience, especially to let construction companies know about bids. But the city has also been at odds with the Sun Rise and its editor/reporter, Rory Schuler. Publisher John Howell was quoted as saying that Polisena once told him, “I’m not going to support somebody who is working against me,” and that the mayor said he wouldn’t advertise as long as Schuler was with the paper. (Polisena denied the charges.)
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The loss of city public notices is costing the Sun Rise some $12,000 a year. Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told the Globe that the city might be violating the First Amendment if it could be shown that Polisena’s actions were retaliation for negative coverage.
What’s happening in Rhode Island is hardly unusual. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed a bill through the legislature that allows local governments simply to post public notices on their own websites — a cost-saving measure that also has the effect of making legal ads less visible. DeSantis’ disdain for the news media is well-known.
Colorado College journalism professor Corey Hutchins often tracks fights over public notices in his newsletter, Inside the News in Colorado. Recently he reported on a move by city officials in Aspen to designate the Aspen Daily News, which is locally owned, as the city’s “newspaper of record” over The Aspen Times, a daily owned by the Ogden chain, based in Wheeling, West Virginia. That peculiarity of Colorado law carries with it some major implications. Hutchins writes:
Newspapers that earn a city’s “of record” stamp means they are the ones a city pays to place legal notices and advertising. State law requires governments to publish certain things in local newspapers in order to keep residents abreast of public business. Being a city’s paper of record also can give a newspaper a sense of gravitas in a community.
In other words, more money for the Daily News, less for the Times, which became embroiled earlier this year in a dispute with county officials who were unhappy with the Times’ coverage of a billionaire’s development plans. (Hutchins does not claim there is a link between the county and city actions.)
According to Susan Chandler, writing for the Local News Initiative, such battles are under way across the country, with increasing pressure to move public notices from news outlets to government websites. Richard Karpel, executive director of the Public Notice Resource Center, told Chandler that these initiatives are part of Republican attacks on journalism, saying:
I don’t think the concept of legal notices is controversial. There needs to be a nonpartisan way to officially announce what the government is doing. What’s controversial is how it happens. We’ve seen it become more of a partisan issue in the last five or 10 years. In some states, there are Republicans who are in battle with the media as part of their political strategy. To that extent, it has become partisan.
In Massachusetts, change may be afoot as well. Currently, state law requires that public notices be placed in print newspapers, which has become increasingly difficult as the Gannett chain has closed and merged many of its weekly papers. A number of communities are being well served by nonprofit startups, but those tend to be digital-only. State legislators are considering ways to amend the law to allow public notices to be placed in web publications, especially in communities where there is no viable print paper.
I’ve consulted with state Rep. Ken Gordon, whose district includes Bedford, the home of a vibrant digital publication, The Bedford Citizen, but no print newspaper since Gannett closed the Bedford Minuteman about a year and a half ago. The town now publishes its public notices in The Sun of Lowell, which has virtually no presence in Bedford. Also of note: On the “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Ed Miller, editor of the startup Provincetown Independent, a print and digital publication. Miller argues that the print requirement for public notices is essential, at least in places that still have a print newspaper.
Public notices aren’t sexy. It’s much more satisfying to talk about a local news outlet that has built a successful events business or has found a way to boost digital subscriptions. But they are essential. Not only do they provide as much as 20% to 25% of a small local newspaper’s revenues, but they an important part of accountability. Public notices on a government website can be hidden away or even changed. Since Colonial times, public notices have helped local journalism thrive and have kept citizens informed. The laws governing public notices need to be updated — but not overturned.
Six years ago, The Washington Post announced that it would begin producing stories about high school football games using artificial intelligence. The expanded use of Heliograf, the Post’s “in-house automated storytelling technology,” would allow the news organization “to cover all Washington, D.C.-area high school football games every week,” according to a press release. The press release linked to an example of such coverage — a mundane article that begins:
In the second quarter, The Patriots’ Paul Dalzell was the first to put points on the board with a two-yard touchdown reception off a pass from quarterback William Porter.
Yet now, with AI tools having improved considerably, Gannett is running into trouble for doing exactly the same thing. Writing for Axios Columbus, Tyler Buchanan reports that The Columbus Dispatch had suspended AI-generated local sports coverage after the tool, LedeAI, came in for criticism and mockery. As Buchanan observes, one such article “was blasted on social media for its robotic style, lack of player names and use of awkward phrases like ‘close encounter of the athletic kind.’”
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Has AI gone backwards since 2017? Obviously not. So what went wrong? It’s hard to say, but it could be that the generative AI tools that started becoming available late last year, with ChatGPT in the forefront, are more finicky than the blunt instrument developed by the Post some years back. In theory, generative AI can write a more natural-sounding story than the robotic prose produced by Heliograf and its ilk. In practice, if an AI tool like LedeAI is trained on a corpus of material loaded with clichés, then the output is going to be less than stellar.
Clare Duffy of CNN found that Gannett’s use of AI was not limited to Columbus. Other outlets that ran LedeAI-generated sports stories included the Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky; AZ Central; Florida Today, and the Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Duffy reported that one story, before it was revised, included this Grantland Rice-quality gem: “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday.”
There’s another dynamic that needs to be considered as well. The Washington Post, a regional newspaper under the Graham family, repositioned itself as a national digital news organization after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013. Regional coverage is secondary to its mission, and if it weren’t covering high school football games with AI, then it wouldn’t be covering them at all.
By contrast, you’d think that high school sports would be central to the mission at Gannett’s local and regional dailies. Turning such coverage over to AI and then not bothering to check what they were publishing is exactly the sort of move you’d expect from the bottom-line-obsessed chain, though it obviously falls short of its obligation to the communities it serves.
Poynter media columnist Tom Jones, a former sportswriter, raises another issue worth pondering — the elimination of an important training ground for aspiring sports journalists:
There is still a contentious debate about how publishers should use AI. Obviously, journalists will be (and should be) upset if AI is being used to replace human beings to cover events. As someone who started his career covering high school football, I can tell you that invaluable lessons learned under the Friday night lights laid the foundation for covering events such as the Olympics and Stanley Cup finals and college football national championships in the years after that.
At a moment when AI is the hottest of topics in journalistic circles, Gannett’s botched experiment demonstrated that there is no substitute for actual reporters.
By the way, I asked ChatGPT to write a six- to eight-word headline for this post. The result: “AI-Generated Sports Coverage Faces Scrutiny: What Went Wrong?” Not bad, but lacking the specificity I was looking for.
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.
Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the wealthy surgeon who owns the Los Angeles Times, has delivered yet another daily newspaper into the greedy hands of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Soon-Shiong announced Monday that he’d sell The San Diego Union-Tribune to Alden’s MediaNews Group. By my count, the Union-Tribune becomes the 10th paper that Soon-Shiong has helped turn over to Alden. As Sara Fischer and Andrew Keatts report for Axios, the new owners immediately announced cuts to the newsroom.
When Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018, the Union-Tribune was thrown in as part of the deal. Soon-Shiong was hailed by optimistic media observers as someone who, like Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post and John Henry at The Boston Globe, would provide his papers with the runway they needed to become self-sustaining enterprises.
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It’s been a mixed bag. Soon-Shiong’s main interest has been the LA Times, but he’s gone back and forth between investing and cutting. By no means has the Times been hollowed out as if it had been owned by, oh, let’s just say Alden Global Capital. But he’s run a lean ship, with the Times announcing just a few days ago that the recent sale of its press meant that game stories, box scores and standings would be eliminated from its print edition, according to Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing.
Selling off the San Diego paper to one of the worst possible buyers is reminiscent of John Henry’s decision to sell the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester to a Florida chain back in 2014. As I recount in my book “The Return of the Moguls,” folks at the T&G thought Henry had promised not to sell unless a local buyer could be found; Henry told me his only promise had been not to sell to GateHouse Media. In any case, GateHouse managed to acquire the T&G within months and immediately began hollowing it out. GateHouse later morphed into Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain with about 200 dailies, which is notorious for its cost-cutting.
Alden Global Capital’s two newspaper chains, MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, make it the second largest owner with about 100 dailies. Alden is often described as the worst newspaper owner in the country, denounced as “vulture capitalists” who slash news coverage and sell off real estate in an attempt to squeeze out as much revenue as possible. Locally, Alden owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.
Soon-Shiong was perhaps the central player in Alden’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing. Whereas MediaNews Group comprises mainly smaller papers, plus a few large dailies such as The Denver Post, Tribune owns eight of the largest, most iconic papers in the country, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and, closer to home, the Hartford Courant.
In the spring of 2021, Tribune, then comprising nine papers, was up for grabs, as it had been many times before. Stewart Bainum, a Baltimore hotel magnate, was attempting to buy the chain and sell off some of its properties to what he hoped would be public-spirited local owners. His main interest was in saving the Sun. Also bidding for the papers Alden. The hedge fund actually offered less money than Bainum, but its offer was reportedly less complicated as well.
The Tribune board ended up voting to sell the papers to Alden — a move that could have been halted by just one board member. Soon-Shiong, who was on the board, abstained, and he did so in a way that mean his vote essentially counted as a yes. As The Washington Post reported at the time, Soon-Shiong submitted his ballot without having checked the “abstain” box; if he had, his vote would have been counted as a “no.”
Bainum went on to found the nonprofit Baltimore Banner. Tribune, meanwhile, spun off one of its most prominent papers, the Daily News of New York, which remains part of the Alden empire as a separately owned entity.
So what’s next for The San Diego Union-Tribune? Nothing good, you can be sure. Voice of San Diego, a nonprofit news site, headlined its story “LA’s Richest Man Sells Union-Tribune to Feared ‘Chop Shop.’” Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis interviewed the news-business analyst Ken Doctor, who predicted that San Diego will not be rid of Alden anytime soon.
“People get confused because these people are cut-throat capitalists,” Doctor told them. “But their papers are making money and they’re holding onto them for the time being.”
I don’t want to come off as a total Luddite when it comes to artificial intelligence and journalism. Well, OK, maybe I do. Because even though I have no problem with using AI for certain mindless, repetitive tasks, such as transcribing interviews and finding patterns in public records, I think we need to be cautious about using such tools to actually produce journalism — whether it be reports about real estate transactions (thus missing the opportunity to dig more deeply) or stories about high school sports. With that in mind, I want to call your attention to three troubling developments.
For those who thought the notion of robot reporters was still quite a ways off, the first development is the most alarming. According to a recent article at Nieman Lab by Sophie Culpepper, an independent publisher has been experimenting with just that in his spare time, and the results are, well, not bad.
Mark Talkington, who runs a hyperlocal start-up called The Palm Beach Post in California, has been feeding governmental meetings that are available on YouTube into an AI system designed by a friend of his. Importantly, it’s not an off-the-shelf product like ChatGPT or Google Bard. Rather, it’s been trained on reliable news and information from his coverage area, which reduces if not eliminates the likelihood of “hallucinations,” the term for false but plausible-sounding output produced by AI.
The example Culpepper quoted from reads like what journalism professors disapprovingly tell their students is an “agenda story” — that is, it begins with something like Members of the board of sewer commissioners began their meeting by saluting the flag rather than with a lead grounded in the most interesting thing that happened. Nor has Talkington actually published any AI-generated stories yet. He said in his interview with Culpepper that he’s concerned about AI missing out on body language and, of course, on the ability to snag an elected official in the hallway during a break in the meeting.
But he said he could see using it to take notes and, eventually, to cover meetings that his thinly stretched staff can’t get to. And that’s how it begins: with a sympathetic hyperlocal publisher using AI to extend his reach, only to see the technology adopted by cost-cutting newspaper chains looking to dump reporters.
My second example might be called “speaking of which.” Because Gannett, whose 200 or so daily newspapers make it the largest corporate chain, announced recently that it, too, is experimenting with generative AI. Helen Coster of Reuters reports that, at first, AI will be used to generate content like bullet points that summarize the most important facts in a story, and that humans will check its work. That feature will be rolled out in the chain’s flagship newspaper, USA Today, later this year.
Gannett is hardly the only news organization that’s playing with AI; The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and others are all looking into ways to make use of it. But Gannett is notoriously tight-fisted and, as Coster notes, has slashed and burned its way to tenuous profitability. “Gannett’s journalists are fighting to ensure that they aren’t replaced by the technology,” she wrote. “Hundreds walked off the job over staff cuts and stagnant wages on June 5. Generative AI is a sticking point in some negotiations with the company, the union said.”
The third warning sign comes from Sebastian Grace, who passed along a truly disturbing item that the German tabloid Bild is laying off about 200 journalists while ramping up its use of AI. (Seb recently wrote a fine piece on journalism and AI for our website What Works: The Future of Local News.) Although those two developments at Bild are said to be unrelated, Jon Henley of The Guardian writes that Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Bild’s corporate owner, Axel Springer, has said that ChatGPT and its ilk could “make independent journalism better than it ever was — or replace it.”
Axel Springer, by the way, also owns Politico, an important U.S. outlet for news about politics and public policy.
Do I think AI will soon replace reporters who do the hard work of going out and getting stories? No — at least not right away. But we’ve been losing journalists for 25 years now, and it seems certain that AI will be used, misused and abused in ways that accelerate that trend.
Andy Thibault and Billie Holiday delivering The Winsted Citizen
On this week’s podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Andy Thibault, editor and publisher of The Winsted Citizen in Connecticut. The Citizen is a monthly print newspaper serving Litchfield County and the surrounding area. The paper’s digital presence is minimal, although it does publish The Winsted Citizen Blog. But that’s about to change, Thibault says. He’s going digital.
Starting a news organization is never easy, but the Citizen hit a brief speed bump. A speed bump named Ralph Nader, a native of Winsted who was initially the prime mover behind the paper but who got caught up in a dispute over how much financial support he was going to provide. According to Andy, he and Nader are now working together cooperatively and everything is moving ahead just fine.
Jack Walsh, a graduate student in Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, joins us to talk about his recent profile of the Chelsea Record, a 150-year-old weekly paper in the small city of Chelsea, Massachusetts. You can find Jack’s story on the What Works website and read his newsletter, Local News Matters, on Substack.
I’ve got a Quick Take on Gannett. Recently, many union journalists at Gannett staged a one-day strike over layoffs and cutbacks in benefits. Yet there are some interesting moves being made at the top of the company as well, with two news leaders being added to the senior executive team. Is the chain actually looking to bulk up its journalism?
Ellen discusses a recent poll about local news and accountability journalism. Surprisingly few Americans believe that local news media hold public officials accountable, according to a national poll commissioned by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. This shows the devastating impact of the hollowing out of community news. And it calls into question whether local journalism is fulfilling one of its primary missions.
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 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 — 
Mark Pothier, a top editor at The Boston Globe, is leaving the paper to become the 
