Tag: InDepthNH

Northeastern news project wins $100k grant; plus, more on the Herald, and AI hell in Melrose

We have some exciting news about one of our sister projects at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Scope, a professionally edited digital publication that covers “stories of hope, justice and resilience” in Greater Boston, has received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a major philanthropic initiative funding local news.

“Since its launch in late 2017, The Scope has become a national leader in leveraging university resources to help solve the news desert crisis. This grant is a vote of confidence in our model,” said Professor Meg Heckman in the announcement of the grant. “Rebuilding the local information ecosystem is a big job, and we’re thrilled Press Forward sees the School of Journalism as a vital part of the solution.”

Heckman has been the guiding force behind The Scope for several years now. Joining her in putting the grant application together were the school’s director, Professor Jonathan Kaufman, and Professor Matt Carroll.

The Scope was one of 205 local news outlets that will receive $20 million in grant money, according to an announcement by Press Forward on Wednesday. Several of the projects are connected in one way or another to What Works, our project on the future of local news:

• Santa Cruz Local (California), which competes with a larger and better-known startup called Lookout Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz Local co-founder Kara Meyberg Guzman and Lookout Santa Cruz founder Ken Doctor were both interviewed for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” as well as on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.”

• The Boston Institute for Nonprofit News, an investigative project that publishes stories on its own website as well as in other outlets. Co-founder Jason Pramas has been a guest on our podcast. Several other Boston-based outlets received grants as well: the Dorchester Reporter, a 40-year-old weekly newspaper; Boston Korea, which serves the Korean American Community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and El Planeta, a venerable Spanish-language newspaper.

• The Maine Monitor, a digital project that covers public policy and politics. Now-retired editor David Dahl has been a guest on our podcast.

• InDepthNH, published by the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. The site focuses on public policy and politics, and its founder, Nancy West, has been a podcast guest.

• Montclair Local (New Jersey), a hyperlocal website that is one of the projects we write about in “What Works in Community News.” In 2009, the Local merged with Baristanet, one of the original hyperlocal news startups, which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City.”

• Eugene Weekly (Oregon), an alternative weekly that suffered a near-death experience earlier this year after a former employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. I wrote about that here and at our What Works website.

More on the shrinking Herald

Earlier this week I wrote about the latest paid circulation figures for the Boston Herald based on its recent filings with the U.S. Postal Service. I lamented that the numbers weren’t as complete as I would have liked because the Alliance for Audited Media was no longer providing its reports for free to journalists and researchers, as it had done in the past.

Well, it turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door. I now have recent reports for both the Herald and The Boston Globe. The AAM figures don’t significantly change what I reported about the Globe, but they do fill in some gaps for the Herald.

For March 2024, the most recent AAM report that’s available, the Herald’s average weekday paid print circulation for the previous six months was 12,272, a decline of 2,247, or nearly 15.5%, compared to its March 2023 totals. Sunday paid print circulation, according to the March 2024 report, was 15,183, down 2,690, also 15%.

As I explained earlier, AAM tallies up paid digital circulation differently from a newspaper’s internal count; among other things, AAM allows for some double-counting between print and digital. Nevertheless, its digital figures are useful for tracking trends.

In the March 2024 report, according to AAM, the Herald’s total average weekday paid digital circulation was 30,009, which actually amounts to a decrease of 2,250, or about 7%, over the previous year. Sunday paid digital in March 2024 was 29,753, down 1,952, or about 6.1%.

Needless to say, that’s not the direction that Herald executives want to be moving in — although I should note that, in its September 2024 post office filing, the Herald reported a slight rise in its seven-day digital circulation compared to the previous year.

What fresh hell is this?

The Boston suburb of Melrose is not a news desert. It has a newspaper, the Melrose Weekly News. But, like many communities, it would benefit from more news than it’s getting now, especially after Gannett shuttered the venerable Melrose Free Press in 2021.

So … artificial intelligence to the rescue? In CommonWealth Beacon, Jennifer Smith introduces us to the “Melrose Update Robocast,” which uses fake voices, male and female, to talk about local issues based on information that’s fed into it to produce an AI-generated script. (Note: Smith interviewed me for the piece, though I didn’t make the cut. I’m also on CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)

“In a way, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” “Robocast” creator Tom Catalini tells Smith.

Yet all across Massachusetts, independently operated news sites with real human beings are springing up to cover local news. Community journalism is how we connect with each other, and an AI-generated podcast can’t do that.

In Medford, where I live, we haven’t had a local news source for two years. But we do have a podcast, “Medford Bytes,” hosted by two activist residents who convene important conversations about what’s going on in the city, including a recent interview with the mayor about three contentious ballot questions that would raise taxes in order to pay for schools, road repairs and a new fire station.

That’s the sound of community members talking among themselves.

Mike Blinder tells us about his latest project — a vertical dedicated to public media

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher magazine, which is now much, much more than a magazine. It’s a cutting-edge multimedia source of information on innovation in our industry. Mike hosts E&P’s weekly vodcast series, “E&P Reports.” He’s also been a guest on this podcast previously, and today’s he’s back to talk about a new venture.

Blinder has a new vertical on public media called Public Pulse. It’s newsy and filled with insider information. It aggregates the latest on stories like conflict ignited by Uri Berliner at NPR, and features reporting on trends like the collaboration of universities and public radio stations. There’s already an excellent publication in this space called Current, and Public Pulse is a welcome addition to that.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a big award going to MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. The nonprofit Memphis news outlet, which we profile in our book, “What Works in Community News,” will receive the Lorraine Branham IDEA Award from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. We discuss other media criticism up for awards as well.

Dan gives a shoutout to a New Hampshire news project previously featured on the podcast. InDepthNH recently revealed some pretty disturbing details about a state representative — and it came only after a four-year quest to obtain public records. It demonstrates why journalists need to be persistent.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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Local news round-up: Disturbing revelations in NH, plus pink slime and Google’s thuggish tactics

New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2012 by AlexiusHoratius

The Boston Globe published a story Friday about a New Hampshire state representative named Jonathan Stone, an ex-police officer who — according to recently released records that he tried to keep secret — “spoke of killing police and raping the chief’s wife and children.”

As the Globe notes, the story was broken on April 5 by Damien Fisher of InDepthNH, a nonprofit news organization that covers politics and public policy in the Granite State. Fisher’s story begins:

Republican Rep. Jon Stone’s New Hampshire law enforcement career ended when he threatened to kill fellow police officers in a shooting spree, and murder his chief after raping the chief’s wife and children, all while he was already under scrutiny for his inappropriate relationship with a teen girl, according to the internal investigation reports finally released this week.

Yikes. Fisher writes that he first filed a right-to-know request in 2020, and that the records were ordered released last month by New Hampshire’s Supreme Court. InDepthNH executive editor and founder Nancy West was a guest on our “What Works” podcast in November 2022.

In Ohio, DIY pink slime

Jack Brewster of NewsGuard, a project that tracks the rise of pink slime news sites, has written an essay for The Wall Street Journal (free link) that is at turns harrowing and hilarious. Spending just $105, he put together a website powered by artificial intelligence that’s designed to look like a local news outlet. Per his specifications, the site, which he called the Buckeye State Press, was designed with a right-wing bias, favoring Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno over the Democratic incumbent, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Brewster used an Israeli-based service called Fiverr.com to build the site, which in turn was programmed by a Pakistani freelancer named Huzafa Nawaz. Brewster writes:

From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total. The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it.

I’ve been following developments in pink slime off and on for the past decade, and what I’ve found is that they are pretty inept. That proved to be the case with Brewster’s experiment as well — at one point his site hallucinated Brown’s attendance at a local fig festival. At some point, though, these projects are going to evolve into effective sources of political propaganda, which we all need to be concerned about.

Google plays hardball in California

As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m skeptical of legislative attempts to force Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for the journalism that they repurpose. If anything, the notion has become more nonsensical over time, as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has made it clear that it would just as soon eliminate news content on platforms like Facebook and Threads.

Google is a different matter, but no less complicated. News publishers want money from Google, but at the same time exactly none of them add the necessary code to their sites which would make them invisible to Google, because they’re dependent on traffic from the giant search engine, too.

Still, it’s hard not to be outraged by Google’s latest tactic. According to Jeremy B. White of Politico, Google is blocking access to some local news content in parts of California as it fights against state legislation that would force them to pay news organizations. White writes:

“We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism,” Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, Jaffer Zaidi, said in a Friday blog post. Zaidi warned the bill could “result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”

Well, I guess so. These are the tactics of a thug, and yet another sign that the tech giants have amassed way too much power.

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A local news activist lashes out at big funders: ‘Psst! Look under your seat!’

An actual news desert. Photo (cc) 2008 by Stefano Brivio.

As nonprofit news becomes an increasingly important part of community journalism, there’s a rift developing between large foundations and small publishers who say that they’re being left behind. Sophie Culpepper wrote about this recently for Nieman Lab, and a new organization called the Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets has been founded to represent those overlooked media outlets.

The most recent development on this front is a scorching piece at Local News Blues by Alice Dreger, an author, historian and a founder and former publisher of East Lansing Info. Dreger takes note of the recent Knight Media Forum, whose organizers she describes as being more interested in developing software tools of dubious merit than in providing operating funds to hyperlocal publishers. She writes:

The KMF has always been a towel-slapping, country club locker room with waiters coming by to offer bacon-wrapped shrimp, but this year was particularly troubling. As local news publishers are desperately trying to keep from laying off staff and closing up shop, representatives of the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and their joint Press Forward venture got up on stage to assure the world they’re going to save us.

“We are in it with you, and together we will crack the code of sustainability,” said Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, the president of the Knight Foundation. You know, the Knight Foundation — the behemoth sitting comfortably on a multi-billion-dollar endowment.

Psst, Maribel! Look under your seat!

She also quotes Nancy West of InDepthNH as saying that Knight seems more interested in artificial intelligence than in paying for news. West, a past guest on our podcast, “What Works,” promptly republished Dreger’s piece. That led to a response from John Palfrey, the president of the MacArthur Foundation, which is the lead foundation in Press Forward. “Thanks for the tag and the feedback,” he wrote on Twitter/X. “I know the team will bear these critiques in mind as grantmaking ramps up.”

The bottom line is that there isn’t enough national money for everyone. Dreger notes that Press Forward has decided to make a priority of funding projects that serve communities of color, which I think makes a lot of sense, even if that leaves other projects behind. Ultimately, nonprofit news outlets have to educate philanthropic organizations in their own backyards that quality journalism is as worthy of funding as youth programs and the arts. And yes, I realize that’s easier to do in some places than in others.

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Emulating its R.I. strategy, The Boston Globe next year will move into N.H.

The State Capitol in Concord, N.H. Photo (cc) 2010 by Jimmy Emerson, DMV.

There was news in Mark Shanahan’s Boston Globe story on the decline of the once-great Providence Journal under Gannett ownership: the Globe is opening a New Hampshire bureau sometime in 2023, a move similar to what it’s done in Rhode Island.

At one time the Globe took New England coverage seriously, even publishing a Sunday section called New Hampshire Weekly. On a recent episode of our podcast about local news, “What Works,” Nancy West, executive director of the investigative news organization InDepthNH, said she would welcome a Globe comeback in the Granite State.

“I loved it when the Globe came up and was doing important reporting,” she said, citing in particular the paper’s coverage of a cardiac surgeon at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester whose horrendous malpractice record was obscured by his status as an operating-room star. “Was I a little jealous? My first instinct is jealousy, of course,” West told us. “But then I’m just really pleased that the word is getting out.” She added: “I would love to have the Globe come back. I would love to see it because we just need talented reporters on the street. And I think competition is healthy.”

Unlike Rhode Island, New Hampshire’s two major daily newspapers, the New Hampshire Union Leader and the Concord Monitor, are independently owned. Both, however, have endured significant cuts to their reporting capacity in recent years. As West says, another news organization focused on the state would be welcome.

As with Rhode Island, New Hampshire is an opportunity for the Globe to sell more digital subscriptions without the hassle of bygone days, when it was necessary to truck papers across New England.

So where might the Globe go next? Vermont strikes me as a stretch. Connecticut? Probably not. Much of the state roots for the Yankees, and Hearst CT has a growing digital operation. Maine? Possibly, although the Globe has collaborated on some stories with the Portland Press Herald. I’m not sure they’d want to compete. If they do, David Dahl, a former top editor at the Globe who’s now editor of the nonprofit Maine Monitor, told us on “What Works” that he’d love to work with his old paper. “We’re open to any partnership discussions that we would have,” he said, “and if they want to affiliate with us, they’re more than more than welcome.”

The most logical move for the Globe after New Hampshire would be an expanded presence in Central Massachusetts — ironic given that Globe owner John Henry acquired the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester when he bought the Globe in 2013 only to sell it to out-of-state interests. The T&G eventually landed in the hands of GateHouse Media, which merged with Gannett; like most of Gannett’s properties, the T&G has been gutted.

At a time when the decline of advertising and fears of recession are leading to cuts even at once high-flying newspapers like The Washington Post, it’s heartening to see that the Globe continues to focus on expansion.

Nancy West talks about her entrepreneurial journey and the state of journalism in N.H.

Nancy West of InDepthNH

On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Nancy West, executive editor of InDepthNH.org. 

Nancy was an investigative reporter during her 30-year career at the New Hampshire Union Leader. Nancy founded the nonprofit New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism in 2015, and has taught investigative reporting at a summer program for students at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a recent article by Dan Froomkin in Washington Monthly. Froomkin, who is now editor of Press Watch, used to work for The Washington Post and has been critical of owner Jeff Bezos. Froomkin is taking aim at the content management system developed by the Post under Bezos. The Post licenses this system to other news outlets around the country. That kind of market power worries Froomkin.

My Quick Take is on the state of journalism in Vermont, a subject we talked about on a recent podcast with Anne Galloway, the founding editor of VTDigger, a well-regarded digital startup. Dan’s topic is about a good piece of media criticism. Bill Schubart, a journalist who writes a column for VTDigger, wrote a column critiquing a recent New Yorker piece by Bill McKibben on Vermont journalism. But Schubart also looked inward and wrote that Digger itself is having problems.

You can listen to our latest podcast here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.