Ginia Bellafante’s friend has a very odd definition of what it means to tune out the news. In a recent New York Times article on liberals who have decided their mental health would be better if they stopped paying attention to the news (gift link) in the Age of Trump II, Bellafante writes:
When I spoke with a friend in Brooklyn a day or two after Donald Trump won, he told me he had committed to reading only the print paper — and just in the morning, forgoing any possible all-consuming afternoon digression into whatever might be up with Tulsi Gabbard. When I checked with him earlier this week, he was still maintaining the ritual and it felt good, he said.
Someone who reads a newspaper every day, whether in print or in digital, is actually at the high end when it comes to news consumption. Compared to most people, he is extraordinarily well-informed. Although Bellafante doesn’t tell us what he cut out of his news diet, if he’s decided to forego cable news and politically oriented social media, he may be even better informed than he was when he was jacked in to the national conversation for many of his waking hours. As I like to say, friends don’t let friends watch cable news.
When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 while losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, it set off a frenzy of news consumption and the rise of the #Resistance — hyper-well-informed liberals and progressives who devoted much of their time and emotional energy to opposing Trump through actions such as the 2017 Women’s March. News consumption soared. You can’t stay it didn’t matter; Trump did, after all, lose to Joe Biden in 2020. Continue reading “There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth”
Cambridge City Hall. Photo (cc) 2010 by andrew_cosand
Government assistance for journalism exists along a continuum. Media scholars such as Paul Starr and Victor Pickard have observed that the American press got an enormous boost starting in Colonial times by way of generous postal subsidies — a benefit that lasted until several decades ago, when market fundamentalists began demanding that the Postal Service cover its expenses. Public notices — advertisements that government agencies and corporations are legally obliged to take out in order to publicize certain types of meetings, contracts, bids and the like — are another form of subsidy.
As the local news crisis has deepened, other ideas have been put forward. As Ellen Clegg and I write in our book, “What Works in Community News,” an independent board in New Jersey, the Civic Information Consortium, has awarded some $5.5 million to fund reporting and information projects over the past few years. In California, a $25 million appropriation is paying the salaries of recent master’s degree journalism graduates at UC Berkeley to cover underserved communities over a three-year period. Legislators in New York and Illinois are moving toward approving tax credits for local news publishers to hire and retain journalists after similar efforts at the federal level have stalled.
The challenge is to keep government assistance as indirect as possible so that journalism can maintain its vital role as an independent monitor of power. Which is why an idea that’s being discussed in Cambridge goes too far.
Boston Globe reporter Spencer Buell writes that the City Council is considering a proposal to set aside $100,000 a year in public money to support local news over the next three years. If enacted, the money, to be administered by an independent board, could be awarded to Cambridge Day, a longtime and well-regarded local newspaper, as well as other outlets. Among the proponents: Cambridge News Matters, a nonprofit that has been working with Cambridge Day and could partner with others as well. (Disclosure: I’ve offered some advice and counsel to Cambridge News Matters when I’ve been asked, and I told them just recently that I thought this was a dubious idea.)
Mary McGrath of Cambridge News Matters told Buell: “We heard loud and clear that quality local journalism is critical to democracy, that you can’t have a cohesive community without an informed citizenry. The business model to deliver this kind of journalism is broken.” Buell also interviewed me. Here’s what I told him:
We want local news organizations to be able to cover government and other institutions and keep an eye on them — not always in an adversarial way, but always in an independent way. If you’re going to have a direct transfer of money from local government to local news organizations, you’ve lost that. So I just don’t think this is a good idea.
Philosophical objections aside, what’s being discussed is pretty short money to put journalistic independence at risk. As Buell notes, Cambridge News Matters hopes to raise several million dollars in private donations over the next few years. The Boston area is home to many local news startups that were launched in response to the giant newspaper chain Gannett’s abandonment of its weekly newspapers, including the Cambridge Chronicle. None of them, whether nonprofit or for-profit, has had to rely on direct government funding.
I’m a longtime admirer of Cambridge Day and its editor, Marc Levy, as well of McGrath and the folks at the nonprofit. I would love to see more local news coverage in Cambridge than Marc is currently able to provide, and I have no doubt that everyone involved in this would make strenuous efforts not to be influenced by any government funding they might receive. But I just don’t see how this is the way to go.
Cambridge City Hall. Photo (cc) 2007 by Thomas Steiner.
Over the course of several months, I’ve talked with a few people in Cambridge about the dearth of local news in that city. Its only newspaper, Gannett’s Cambridge Chronicle, has been without a reporter since last year. The leading news outlet, Cambridge Day, does good work, but it was essentially a one-person operation headed by Marc Levy on a volunteer basis. I encouraged Marc and two members of a group seeking to start a nonprofit, journalists Mary McGrath and Susanne Beck, to try to work together.
Now it looks like that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Cambridge Day, which Levy founded in 2009, has published a story announcing that the nonprofit group is going to head up a fundraising campaign with a goal of raising $75,000. “The fundraising is not only to ‘save’ Cambridge Day, but to help it take a leap forward in quality and comprehensiveness,” according to an article published by the Day on Tuesday. The campaign will be headed up by an organization called Cambridge Local News Matters. It’s not clear what Marc’s role will be moving forward, but it’s surely a good sign that he wrote the article announcing the changes.
You could go back several decades, to when the Chronicle was independently owned and competed with the Cambridge Tab, and even then it was often said that Cambridge was the largest city in the country (population: 118,000) without a daily newspaper. The Day has been indispensable since its founding, and I wish Marc and his new partners all the best.
