Jay Rosen – Media Nation

Rick Goldsmith tells us about ‘Stripped for Parts,’ his jeremiad against hedge-fund journalism

On the latest “What Works” podcast, I’m flying solo because co-host Ellen Clegg is recovering from knee-replacement surgery. But fear not — she was behind the scenes making sure this episode got recorded properly, and she edited what you are listening to. She’ll be back on the air soon.

Our guest is Rick Goldsmith, a veteran filmmaker who has taken a close look at the state of corporate journalism in America. His documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink” tells the story of Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund that has bought up many of our greatest newspapers and stripped them of their real estate and slashed their newsrooms.

He focuses on one of Alden’s papers, The Denver Post, and the rise of The Colorado Sun, a digital startup begun by former Post journalists. The story of what happened in Colorado is also one that we tell in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

The reason we’re having Rick on now is that you’ll be able to watch “Stripped for Parts” through Dec. 31 for free on the PBS app, which you can access through Apple TV, Roku, Google Play and most smart TVs. The various options for watching the film are explained here.

I’ve got a Quick Take about Jay Rosen, who retired earlier this year from New York University and is now taking on a new challenge. Jay is probably best known to his younger followers as an incisive media critic. But his true passion, going back to the 1990s, is finding ways to involve members of the public in the production of journalism. Now he’s doing it again with a project called News Creator Corps — and it could have implications for local news.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Public journalism redux: Post-academia, Jay Rosen returns to where he started

*Jay Rosen. Photo (cc) 2017 by the Moody College of Communication.*

Jay Rosen has been one of the major thinkers in journalism since the 1990s. Younger followers may think of him mainly as a media critic, and there’s no doubting his influence in that field. Through his blog, PressThink, and his social media presence (especially back in Twitter’s heyday), Rosen showed an uncanny ability to frame issues in a way that made a lot of us think about what we were doing.

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The “production of innocence” was his phrase for “a public showing by professional journalists that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of — and here we enter the realm of dread — political bias.”

Continue reading “Public journalism redux: Post-academia, Jay Rosen returns to where he started”

Why the rise of social media has given us a less happy, more polarized and dangerous world

In his 2010 book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” Nicholas Carr argued that our immersion in digital media is rewiring the way we think, turning us into distracted skimmers who are losing the capacity for deep concentration.

Yet social media was in its infancy back then. His lament in those days was aimed at a panoply of online distractions such as email that needed to be written, blogs that cried out to be read, streaming videos, downloadable music — in other words, anything but the task at hand. He mentions Facebook, but only in passing. Over the years, I’ve sometimes wondered what he would make of the explosion not just of Facebook but of Instagram, TikTok and their ilk now that they’ve taken over so much of our lives.

Well, my question has been answered. Earlier this year Carr published what is essentially a follow-up to “The Shallows.” Titled “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart,” the book surveys the mediascape of algorithmically driven tech platforms and finds that it is not just driving us to distraction but is creating a less happy, more polarized and more dangerous world.

Read the rest at Poynter Online.

ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on

*Terry Moran, right, interviews Donald Trump in April 2025. Public domain photo by Joyce N. Boghosian via the White House.*

How to behave on social media has bedeviled journalists and confounded editors for years. Marty Baron clashed with reporters Wesley Lowery and Felicia Sonmez over their provocative Twitter comments back when he was executive editor of The Washington Post, and those are just two well-known examples.

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The latest journalist to run afoul of his news organization’s social-media standards is Terry Moran, who was, until Tuesday, employed by ABC News. Moran was suspended on Sunday after he tweeted that White House official Stephen Miller and President Trump is each a “world-class hater.” The tweet is now gone, but I’ve included an image. On Tuesday, Moran’s employer announced that they were parting company with him, as NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes.

I think ABC was right to suspend Moran but wrong to get rid of him, and that media critic Margaret Sullivan got the nuances perfectly when she wrote this for her newsletter, American Crisis:

I’m amazed that Moran posted what he did. It’s well outside the bounds of what straight-news reporters do. It’s more than just calling a lie a lie, or identifying a statement as racist — all of which I think is necessary. Moran is not a pundit or a columnist or any other kind of opinion journalist….

I would hate to see Moran — with his worthy career at ABC News, where he’s been for almost 30 years — lose his job over this. I hope that the honchos at ABC let a brief suspension serve its purpose, and put him back to work.

Unfortunately, this is ABC News, whose corporate owner, Disney, disgraced itself earlier this year by paying $15 million to settle a libel suit brought by Trump over a minor, non-substantive error: George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll when, in fact, he’d been found liable for sexual abuse. The federal judge in the Carroll case even said in a ruling that the jury had found Trump “raped” Carroll in the ordinary meaning of the term. But Disney couldn’t wait to prostrate itself before our authoritarian ruler.

So when Moran violated ABC News’ social-media policy, as the organization claimed, he no doubt knew he could expect no mercy.

Continue reading “ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on”

Bob McChesney was a media thinker whose idealism could have led to a better world

Earlier this morning I looked up a review that I wrote for The Boston Phoenix of Robert McChesney’s breakthrough 1999 book, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy.” I had to laugh, because Bob was right and I was wrong, and for a reason I wouldn’t have expected. Over the years I had come to regard myself as more realistic than progressive media reformers like Bob, whose fertile mind produced all sorts of idealistic proposals for improving the media. In this case, though, he was the realistic one.

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Bob McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a leading progressive thinker in media-reform circles, died last Tuesday at 72. His friend and longtime collaborator John Nichols has a moving remembrance in The Nation, writing:

As new political and societal challenges arose in an ever more chaotic moment for America and the world, Bob explained how they should be understood as fresh manifestations of an ancient danger: the concentration of power—in this case, the power of the media, in the hands of old-media CEOs and new tech oligarchs, all of whom cared more about commercial and entertainment strategies than democratic and social values.

To get back to that review: In the Oct. 1, 1999, edition of the Phoenix, I wrote about two important books about the media by then-rising scholars. Jay Rosen of New York University had just published “What Are Journalists For?,” an exploration of his involvement in the public journalism movement, which sought to involve citizen as collaborators in how the media cover their communities. McChesney’s book examined the effects of monopolistic corporate control of the news media, building on the earlier work of Ben Bagdikian, author of the oft-updated “The Media Monopoly.”

Continue reading “Bob McChesney was a media thinker whose idealism could have led to a better world”

New York City to boost student journalists; plus, listening to voters, and a hacking update

Now here’s a great idea. In New York City, a public-private partnership is spending $3 million to boost journalism in the city’s high schools. The program, called Journalism for All, aims to quadruple the number of Black and Latino students who are studying journalism, according to Claire Fahy of The New York Times (gift link).

High school newspapers, whether in print or digital, have been on the wane in New York and across the country in recent years, although the Student Press Law Center told the Times that the extent of the decline has not been reliably tracked.

Among other things, Journalism for All will help launch student publications by providing them with $15,000 in seed money. In addition, four students from each of the schools that are being served will be able to take part in summer internships at local news organizations.

Fahy reports that California, Illinois and Texas are also providing assistance to high school journalism programs. As I wrote this summer for CommonWealth Beacon, efforts are being made to revive a special commission to study the local news crisis in Massachusetts after the first attempt disappeared down a black hole.

Nurturing high school journalism programs and publications in Massachusetts ought to be something that gets serious consideration.

Listening to Vermont voters

It’s back to the future in Vermont, where the state’s public media operation is covering the election campaign by listening to voters and focusing on the issues they say are important rather than dwelling on the horse race and polls.

Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that journalists for Vermont Public, comprising television, radio and digital, “have spent the year speaking to more than 600 residents at diners, gas stations, and concerts about state and local politics across all 14 Vermont counties.”

It’s an effort known as the Citizens Agenda, but it’s hardly a new idea. Originally known as public journalism or civic journalism, the notion of shaping political coverage around the concerns of actual people was briefly popular in the 1990s. Among other things, the Globe itself engaged in a public journalism effort in covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is advising Vermont Public on implementing the Citizens Agenda; Rosen was also a leader of the public journalism movement in the 1990s, even writing a book about it called “What Are Journalists For?”

It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea today.

Hacked emails, then and now

One of the odder developments in the 2024 campaign is that three news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico — have reportedly received hacked emails from the Donald Trump campaign but have chosen not to publish anything from them, as Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported (gift link) in August for the Post.

Obviously this is quite a departure from 2016, when the news media eagerly passed along emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then as now, the leaks come from a foreign adversary — Russia eight years ago, Iran today. Then as now, the actual content of the emails may be of little interest.

I suppose we shouldn’t complain if news executives learned a lesson from 2016, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the media helped Trump on both occasions.

Then, last week, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared one of the hacked documents on his Substack newsletter — a Trump campaign dossier on all the embarrassing things that JD Vance had said about Trump over the years.

Klippenstein tried to share his newsletter item on Twitter and got blocked and banned. I posted a workaround and got locked out of my account until I deleted the offending post. Meta has been blocking anyone’s attempts to post a link as well, though they haven’t caught up with my Threads post yet.

In any event, you can download the dossier from Klippenstein’s newsletter. I haven’t read it, but I have paged through the table of contents, and it looks highly entertaining though not especially new. (“Vance Wrote That He ‘Loathed’ Trump’s ‘Obvious Personal Character Flaws,’” p. 76).

I assume Tim Walz is boning up ahead of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.

Biden’s age and health: A legitimate story that was marred by media excess

We were on our way back from a family gathering in upstate New York when we learned that President Biden had stepped aside from his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. I was checking social media at the Lee rest stop on the Mass Pike eastbound; I think I was about an hour behind. We’d been anticipating the moment for days, if not weeks. Still, it came as a surprise.

I’m hearing some people grouse that Biden should have acted sooner, but this had to be incredibly difficult. No doubt he believes he can still do the job. What he couldn’t do was govern and campaign simultaneously. Nor was it reasonable to expect voters to believe he could serve more than a fraction of a second term. He’s now given us the best chance of beating Donald Trump and the authoritarian menace he represents.

Harris is an accomplished leader who, after all, is already the elected vice president. Opening up the process to some sort of vague celebrity bakeoff could have led to disaster. Can Harris win? I don’t know. Every possible choice was a risk, but I think giving her a chance of claiming the nomination quickly is less of a risk than continuing with Biden or having an open convention. (To be clear: It will still be an open convention.)

There’s one important media angle to all this that I think needs to be addressed. It really looks like Biden was driven out of the campaign by the press, and that’s not a good perception. There have been stories over the past year or two suggesting that Biden shouldn’t run for re-election because of his advanced age, the three most notable being a Mark Leibovich piece in The Atlantic in 2022, an Ezra Klein commentary in The New York Times this past February, and a Wall Street Journal article in early June. But Biden’s age-related problems have been a 24/7 obsession since about 9:10 p.m. on June 27, when it became clear in the presidential debate that something was seriously wrong.

Many diehard Biden supporters have erupted in fury at the media, and especially the Times, for publishing story after story after story about Biden’s infirmities while not dwelling nearly as much on Trump’s far worse deficits. There are many on the left who’ve come to the conclusion that the corporate media — I’m not using quotation marks because there really is a corporate media — want to see Trump back in office for ratings and circulation. I don’t think that’s the case. Biden’s age, questions about his cognitive health, and fading electoral prospects were a huge and entirely legitimate story. But that doesn’t mean the media covered themselves in glory.

My own belief is that the media — again, led by the Times — were shocked and horrified by the prospect of Trump’s return to the White House, so they embarked on an overwrought effort to bring Biden’s campaign to a close. The Times put it this way in an editorial today: “Had he remained at the top of the ticket, he would have greatly increased the likelihood of Mr. Trump retaking the presidency and potentially controlling both houses of Congress as well.” That’s not just a statement of truth; it’s also an explanation for the media behavior we’ve seen over the past three weeks.

Jon Keller of WBZ-TV asked me the other day if this was evidence of “bias.” I responded that yes, I suppose it was. But it was bias in favor of democracy, something that media observers such as Margaret Sullivan and Jay Rosen have been calling for from the start of the campaign. This is not Bill Clinton versus Bob Dole in 1996. Trump represents an existential threat to democracy.

Still, the media excesses were notable, especially a Times report that a physician who specializes in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House repeatedly. That was just irresponsible journalism. It didn’t pan out, and no evidence has emerged that Biden has Parkinson’s. Another example of excess was published by The New Yorker last week, in which nine physicians were allowed to speculate anonymously about the state of Biden’s neurological health. Now, I have to say that the story was interesting and possibly shed some light. But that doesn’t mean it should have been published.

President Biden said he will address the nation later this week. He could do Harris a lot of good if he acknowledges that he’s leaving not because of the media, not because fundraising had dried up, not because Nancy Pelosi told him to, but because his age and his health had finally caught up with him. And the media should ask themselves how they once again managed to turn a legitimate story into the only story for the past three weeks, embarrassing themselves and calling their judgment and fairness into question.

Biden has been an outstanding president, and he cements his legacy by knowing when it’s time to leave. He deserves our respect and gratitude. We are all going to miss his steady hand come next January, regardless of who succeeds him.

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Dan Gillmor’s next project: Promoting democracy and freedom of expression

Dan Gillmor. Photo (cc) 2018 by New America.

Citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor is moving on to a new phase of his career. Gillmor, whose 2004 book, “We the Media,” inspired a generation of activists, is retiring from Arizona State University, and will be working on a project aimed at promoting democracy and freedom of expression. He writes:

I am absolutely convinced that journalism’s most essential role at this critical moment goes far, far beyond what it’s doing. The status quo in political (and related) coverage consists of sporadically noting that gosh-maybe-there’s-a-problem, while sticking mostly to journalistic business as usual. The status quo is journalistic malpractice.

If I’m not mistaken, Gillmor was the first to refer to the public as “the former audience,” a phrase later picked up by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen and many others, to describe the idea that the internet enables members of the public to communicate easily with journalists and among themselves. This idealistic vision was later corrupted by the giant tech platforms, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful — and maybe at some point we can get back to that.

Gillmor inspired not just non-journalists but journalists as well. Boston newspaper veteran Bob Sprague, the retired founder of the nonprofit digital news organization yourArlington, in the Boston suburbs, told Ellen Clegg and me on our “What Works” podcast that he decided to start covering his community shortly after reading “We the Media.”

In 2006 I wrote a profile of Gillmor for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon) after he founded the Center for Citizen Media at Harvard Law School, a project that has since ended. Here’s what he told me about his vision for citizen media:

If the right people join in the conversation, it will inevitably get richer and richer. The practical problems are many. How do you get knowledgeable people to join? How do you moderate things, if it’s a large conversation, [in a way] that pushes forward the subject? How do you elevate the signal out of the noise? I happen to think that’s one of the core issues we need to address in citizen media. How do you address the fact that most people don’t have the time to read every comment on every relevant blog?

We still see the spirit of Gillmor’s original ideas here and there. One of the projects that Ellen and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News,” is The Bedford Citizen, yet another project in Boston’s suburbs. Unlike Bob Sprague, who was already a longtime journalist, the Citizen was started by three volunteers, only one of whom had any journalism experience. Since then the nonprofit website has growing into a professional news organization with a paid editor.

There’s also the Documenters project, which pays members of the public to cover public meetings — a key ingredient that was missing from the original notion of citizen journalism.

Congratulations and good luck to Dan Gillmor on his latest venture.

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In Colorado, an intriguing experiment — and a disturbing anti-press move by the GOP

The Colorado Statehouse in Denver. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

Two stories about journalism from Colorado this morning, one intriguing, one disturbing. The state’s media ecosystem is one of the subjects of our book, “What Works in Community News.”

• Intriguing. Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins reports: “More than two dozen Colorado newsrooms have launched an unprecedented collaboration to better cover the 2024 elections.” These news outlets, led by the Colorado News Collaborative, have embraced what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the Citizen’s Agenda, whereby journalists will report on the issues that the public is most concerned about and gear their coverage around what they learn. It’s a more substantive approach than the horse-race model of political coverage, which focuses on polls and day-to-day sparring among the candidates.

Unprecedented? Not really. The Citizen’s Agenda is a revival of the public journalism movement of the 1990s, and Rosen was at the center of that, too. It faded away back then, although it never disappeared entirely. See, for instance, my account of this 2013 event on education reform sponsored by the New Haven Independent. The Colorado experiment, though, represents what could be the most fully realized example of public journalism in many years.

• Disturbing. Colorado Sun political reporter Sandra Fish was removed from a meeting of the state Republican Party “after being told that party Chairman Dave Williams found her ‘current reporting to be very unfair,'” according to Sun reporter Jennifer Brown. Although Fish had received a text from a party official telling her not to come, she showed up anyway and was able to obtain a press credential — only to be identified an hour later and escorted from the scene by a sheriff’s deputy.

“This is not a partisan issue,” Sun editor Larry Ryckman wrote in an email to subscribers. “The Founding Fathers understood that a free press is a pillar of a healthy democracy – and not just when reporters write stories politicians might like. That’s why they enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The public has a right to know. Public officials should be accountable and willing to have their words and actions scrutinized in the light of day.”

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20 years ago, James W. Carey wrote that journalism must fight for democracy

The late media theorist James W. Carey has been an enormous influence on my thinking. His insight that news is as much a ritual aimed at reinforcing tribal loyalties as it is a communications medium helps explain why Donald Trump’s supporters are impervious to factual information about their hero. As Carey wrote:

If the archetypal case of communication under a transmission view is the extension of messages across geography for the purpose of control, the archetypal case under a ritual view is the sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality…. We recognize, as with religious rituals, that news changes little and yet is intrinsically satisfying; it performs few functions yet is habitually consumed. Newspapers do not operate as a source of effects or functions but as dramatically satisfying, which is not to say pleasing, presentations of what the world at root is.

Recently I read an essay of Carey’s that I wasn’t familiar with. Titled “A Short History of Journalism for Journalists: A Proposal and Essay,” it is a paper he wrote in 2003 while he was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, part of the Harvard Kennedy School. These days, papers written by Shorenstein fellows are freely available online. Sadly, Carey’s is not, though I was able to download it with my academic credentials; it was published in 2007 by the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics.

Much of Carey’s paper traces the symbiotic relationship between the rise of journalism and the emergence of urban life and a public sphere. Toward the end, though, this call to action emerges:

The origins of journalism are the same as the origins of republican or democratic forms of governance — no journalism, no democracy. But it is equally true that without democracy, there can be no journalism. When democracy falters, journalism falters, and when journalism goes awry, democracy goes awry. The fate of journalism, the nation-state, and the public sphere are intimately intertwined and cannot be easily separated. In the modern world, in an age of independent journalism, this is a controversial assumption, for it seems to commit journalists to the defense of something, to compromise their valued nonpartisanship. It claims that journalists can be independent or objective about everything but democracy, for to do so is to abandon the craft. About democratic institutions, about the way of life of democracy, journalists are not permitted to be indifferent, nonpartisan, or objective. It is their one compulsory passion, for it forms the ground condition of their practice. Without the institutions or spirit of democracy, journalists are reduced to propagandists or entertainers.

This calls to mind the work of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen (himself a Carey devotee) and journalist Margaret Sullivan, both of whom have called repeatedly for the press to take on a pro-democratic, truth-telling role in the face of Trumpism’s open embrace of authoritarianism. It also shows why we need a recommitment to the original idea of objectivity — that is, a fair-minded pursuit of the truth, not the mindless both-sides-ism that has become its caricature.

We are at a critical moment. There is, of course, no shortage of truthful reporting about Trump’s many transgressions. But that reporting needs to be front and center, and not balanced with ridiculous stories about the House Republicans’ plans to impeach President Biden (without making any mention of the reality that there is no reason to do such a thing) or polls showing that the economy is doing far worse than it really is without any mention of the media’s role in shaping that perception.

Carey was right, and he was well ahead of his time. Journalists need to fight for democracy, because it is the one fundamental precondition on which journalism depends.

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