Jesse Floyd – Media Nation

Last Thursday I was taking part in an event at Belmont Books when several members of The Belmont Voice’s board walked in. The bookstore was hosting a conversation with Endicott College journalism professor Lara Salahi and me to mark the publication of her new book, “News-Academic Partnerships: The Great Experiment Powering Local Journalism’s Comeback.”

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The folks from the Voice had hoped to be there at the start; instead, they were meeting to discuss what to do about a lawsuit filed against the Voice by an independent U.S. Senate candidate who was demanding that the nonprofit weekly cover his campaign. The lawsuit, filed by Belmont resident Shiva Ayyadurai, claims that the Voice is discriminating against him because he is a “Brown-skinned, ‘Low-Caste’ Indian immigrant,” and that the editor, Jesse Floyd, failed to make good on a promise to cover his bid to defeat Democratic Sen. Ed Markey.

Continue reading “Why a lawsuit against The Belmont Voice is likely to run afoul of the First Amendment right not to publish”

Something I stress with my journalism students is the importance of having your own home on the internet, either in the form of a newsletter or a blog, so that you have a repository for your work.

But you’ll notice I didn’t say “permanent” repository. Probably the two most widely used platforms, Medium and Substack, are owned by corporate entities that could disappear or change their terms in various onerous ways.

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For Media Nation I use WordPress software with a hosting service, GoDaddy, which at least in theory is a safer bet. But something could go wrong with WordPress so that there would no longer be anyone to provide critical security updates. Or GoDaddy could Go Out of Business. The Internet Archive is invaluable, but it doesn’t scrape everything. The bottom line is that you have to stay on top of things if you want to keep the tumbleweeds from blowing into your digital homestead.

Which is why I was interested to read this interview with Brandon Tauszik, a fellow with the Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford, who is involved in designing low-cost ways for journalists to preserve their work.

Continue reading “Combatting link rot; plus, media notes from the Philippines to Arlington National Cemetery to Belmont, Mass.”