I want to call your attention to an outstanding deep dive into the news ecosystem of Fall River, Massachusetts. It was written for my Ethics and Diversity in the News Media class by Alexa Coultoff, a Northeastern junior who’s majoring in journalism and criminal justice. We’ve published it today at What Works, our website about the future of local news.
Research shows that communities lacking reliable local news were more likely to vote for Donald Trump last fall — not because they’re uninformed, but because the sort of blue-collar cities and rural areas that swung toward Trump are also more likely to be without a strong local news source. It’s correlation, not causation. But as Alexa writes, a stronger local news presence could help overcome the polarization that afflicts Fall River and, for that matter, the entire country.
I want to share with you an important op-ed piece written by six Northeastern University professors about the challenges facing higher education. One of those professors is my School of Journalism colleague Rahul Bhargava. Their essay appears in our independent student newspaper, The Huntington News. I urge you to read it in full, but here’s an excerpt:
Many university leaders nationwide believe that we can survive by complying to reduce the impact of cuts or by staying silent to avoid becoming a priority target. This blatantly ignores the immigrant and transgender students who are afraid for their safety, worrying their university will not protect them. This ignores the faculty whose research has already been made impossible merely because it mentions a now-banned phrase. It ignores the irreparable loss of reputation when our universities sacrifice fundamentally American values like freedom of speech. We must work together to ensure this doesn’t happen here at Northeastern.
Northeastern is among several colleges and universities where students and recent graduates have had their visas revoked. And on and on it goes.
I want to call your attention to this strong, eloquent editorial about free speech on campus that was published by The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper. It is, the piece says, the first time that the News’ editorial board has weighed in on an issue in six years. The editorial says in part:
While the Trump administration has yet to single out Northeastern University as it has Columbia University, Georgetown University or the University of Pennsylvania, we believe it is only a matter of time before our institution is targeted by the administration. The moment will come when the views expressed by one of our professors are denounced as “dangerous” or when the president brands the actions of a protesting student as “illicit,” making no legal effort to justify such an accusation.
In the words of Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun, the university’s mission “does not change with the times.” Neither does a student’s fundamental right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Northeastern’s mission is only as strong as our commitment to defending it. If we waver, hesitate or stall in standing up for our values, then Northeastern’s mission was never as ironclad as our administration would have us believe.
Our university must not preemptively submit to an atmosphere of fear.
The editorial board — reconstituted only within the past few days, according to editor-in-chief Sonel Cutler — also calls on the university administration to do more in speaking out against the current atmosphere of repression and to be more transparent about efforts it is reportedly taking in collaboration with other colleges and universities in Greater Boston.
Overall, the editorial is even-handed, well-written and passionate in its defense of democracy and the First Amendment.
Every semester I ask my media ethics and diversity students at Northeastern to identify stories in the news that they think haven’t received as much coverage as they should have.
It’s always an enlightening experience — all of these stories have obviously received some coverage, but in my students’ view they weren’t repeated and amplified enough to penetrate the public consciousness. Right now, of course, there’s the Trump factor, as we all ponder what important news is being undercovered because of the way that the White House is dominating the news.
My class comprises nine graduate students and advanced undergrads. Here’s what they came up with.
• O Canada. The Trump administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants is getting plenty of attention, but The Atlantic reports (gift link) that Americans are looking to leave as well: “U.S. citizens now represent the majority of clients looking for an exit, through foreign citizenship, permanent residence, or a visa that allows them to live abroad.” Indeed, three prominent Yale professors, including Timothy Snyder, the author of “On Tyranny,” said this week that they’re decamping for the University of Toronto.
• Tax privacy takes a hit. The IRS may soon reach an agreement with immigration officials to turn over tax data, including the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants, according to The Washington Post, which reports: “The proposed agreement has alarmed career officials at the IRS, … who worry that the arrangement risks abusing a narrow and seldom-used section of privacy law that’s meant to help investigators build criminal cases, not enforce criminal penalties.”
• Journalists killed by Israel. Two more journalists working in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces, Al Jazeera reports. Hossam Shabat, who worked for Al Jazeera, died after his car was targeted. Another, Mohammad Mansour, who worked for Palestine Today, was killed in his house, along with his wife and son, according to reports. “The deliberate and targeted killing of a journalist, of a civilian, is a war crime,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which reports that 173 journalists, mostly Palestinian, have been killed in the Israel-Gaza war. Other reports put the number of killed media workers at more than 230.
• Human trafficking or not? A high-priced brothel that catered to wealthy clients in Cambridge, Watertown and Washington has certainly gotten plenty of coverage, but there’s an important nuance that may have been overlooked. According to Cambridge Day, prosecutors have made “no distinction” between consensual sex work and human trafficking — casting a very different light on the sensational story, which has encompassed issues ranging from victimhood to privacy.
• Exploiting pregnant women. So-called crisis pregnancy centers lure pregnant women who may be considering abortion, and who instead find themselves dealing with anti-abortion activists. “The anti-abortion movement takes advantage of their economic vulnerability,” reports The New York Times (gift link), adding that some clients are required to take parenting or even Bible classes in order to obtain medical care that they need.
• AI and climate change. There’s so much cheerleading going on in the media about artificial intelligence that the environmental cost tends to get overlooked. The reality is that AI uses enormous amounts of energy and water (for cooling), thus contributing to climate change. And though some solutions are coming on line, the Harvard Business Review reports that the “adverse environmental impacts of AI disproportionately burden communities and regions that are particularly vulnerable to the resulting environmental harms.”
• Climate case is quietly dismissed. An under-publicized case came to a quiet end recently as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal brought by 21 young people who sued the federal government on the grounds that their constitutional rights had been violated through policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels. According to The New York Times (gift link), the Supreme Court’s action in the case of Juliana v. United States came after 10 years of legal maneuvering.
• Is it safe to fly? Plane crashes tend to be well-covered when they occur. But who is looking into the question of whether they are increasing in frequency, or the fears that passengers have about flying at a moment when it seems that safety can’t be ensured? The New York Times (gift link) pulled some of that information together by recounting three recent crashes, in Washington, Philadelphia and Alaska.
• Segregation in the South. This May will mark the 71st anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed school segregation throughout the U.S. Yet ProPublica reported recently that Alabama continues to be the home of numerous “segregation academies” — private schools set up for white families, while Black students attend increasingly segregated public schools. “ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating,” according to the report.
At a time when public trust in every major institution except local public libraries is below 50%, local television news has some advantages that other forms of media lack.
According to survey data that Geiger presented, local television news is trusted by about 41% of the public — lower than in previous years, but far ahead of the 29% who say they trust national television news. Ironically, he added that social media is the most used platform for news even though it is the least trusted.
“Usually if you don’t trust something, you don’t use it. But that’s not how this functions. That may feel like a woe-the-republic moment for you,” he said, observing that social media is the top go-to for news among every age group except those between 55 and 64. (Presumably that would hold true for those older than 64 as well, but that demographic was not included in his charts.)
“The path back to trust is going to happen at the local level,” Geiger said, adding that local television news is “the most important news institution in the country.”
Geiger was joined by Keren Henderson, an associate professor at Syracuse University, who presented some highlights from the latest “State of Local TV News” survey from the Radio Television Digital News Association, better known as RTDNA.
At a time when goals such as diversity in the work force are under fire from the Trump administration, Henderson’s data showed local TV news continues to lag. Currently, she said, about 42% of the U.S. population comprises minorities, which far exceeds the 28% minority percentage working for local television news. Some 77% of stations reported employing staffers who are LGBTQ, but when they were specifically asked about transgender staff, that percentage fell to about 18% — a decline from about 23% in 2024.
Currently there are 1,117 stations across the country airing local TV news, of which 695 are producing original programming with the rest being repeaters. That figure is essentially unchanged from 2024. In addition, she said threats to news workers were up 50%, leading to a decline in the use of solo multimedia journalists being assigned to go out and report stories.
Interestingly, the digital platforms that local TV newscasts have embraced the most are Instagram (91%) and YouTube (85%), with the much-hyped TikTok app lagging at 39%. Bluesky and Threads barely registered.
The average starting salary in local TV news was just a little more than $39,000. Not surprisingly, Henderson said, 80% of those leaving the field reported low pay as the main reason. Another 64% cited work-life balance and 52% cited burnout.
Overall, it was a rather dispiriting presentation, which led graduate student Lisa Thalhamer, who moderated the session, to end by asking Geiger and Henderson what makes them hopeful.
Henderson cited her teenage children, who are engaged and paying attention to the news — what she referred to as “that level of energy of caring about the world.”
Geiger said he’s hopeful that engaging more with the audience and helping them to understand how journalism works could offset the overall decline, with “facts being the building blocks.” He added: “There is a mechanism to do that.”
On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Marta Hill, an extraordinary young journalist who I got to know during her time at Northeastern.
Marta is currently a graduate student in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program at New York University, where she’s also the editor-in-chief of Scienceline. In that role, she works with her peers at NYU to produce what she describes as “an accessible, down-to-earth science publication.” Marta is originally from Minneapolis, which makes it almost a tragedy that my co-host, Ellen Clegg, a fellow transplant from the Twin Cities, couldn’t be with us. (Ellen will be back for our next podcast).
At Northeastern, Marta served in various capacities at The Huntington News, an independent student newspaper, including a one-year stint as editor-in-chief. She was also in my media ethics and diversity class in the fall of 2023. Whenever I teach ethics, a week gets devoted to talking about the harassment that journalists face both online and in real life. It’s a problem that’s been getting worse in recent years, and it’s something that young reporters in particular really have to think about before deciding whether to go into journalism full-time.
Marta decided she wanted to explore the issue of harassment and student journalism more deeply in the form of an honors project, and I was her adviser. She wrote a wide-ranging reported article, and a shorter version of that article was recently published by Nieman Reports, part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Her article, titled “J-schools Must Better Prepare Students for Handling Harassment,” lays out some concrete steps that journalism educators can take so that their students are not caught off guard when they encounter harassment at their student news outlet or on the job.
My Quick Take is on a nonprofit initiative to bring more and better news to Tulsa, Oklahoma, a thriving metro area with nearly 700,000 people in the city and surrounding county. The area is currently served by the Tulsa World, a daily paper that’s part of the Lee Enterprises chain, which, like most corporate newspaper owners, has a reputation for aggressive cost-cutting. The new nonprofit, the Tulsa News Initiative, is built around a venerable Black newspaper, but there’s more to it than that.
Mike Beaudet on a student reporting trip to Peru that he helped lead in 2024.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mike Beaudet, longtime investigative reporter for WCVB-TV (Channel 5) in Boston and a multimedia professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
Mike has won many awards for his hard-hitting investigations and runs a project aimed at reinventing television news. On March 21-22, he’ll lead a conference at Northeastern called “Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit.” Mike’s students are producing content for everything from Instagram and YouTube to TikTok. As he explains, local television news, still among the most trusted and popular forms of journalism, must transition from linear TV in order to reach younger audiences who’d prefer to watch video on their phones.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the National Trust for Local News. Co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro exited the nonprofit suddenly last month. That came amid reports that the Portland Press Herald and other papers that the Trust owns in the state of Maine might soon announce budget cuts.
(Cuts were announced at the Maine papers after this podcast was recorded. Although the newsrooms were spared, Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe reports that 49 employees will lose their jobs and that print will be pared back significantly in favor of digital.)
Now comes more bad news. Colorado Community Media, a group of 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs, is closing two papers and is losing money, writes Corey Hutchins in his newsletter, Inside the News in Colorado. Those papers were the National Trust’s first acquisitions in 2021. The Trust’s mission is to buy papers that are in danger of falling into the clutches of corporate chain ownership. It’s a worthy goal, but the Trust has obviously hit some significant obstacles.
Ellen has a Quick Take noting that Harvard University is shutting down Harvard Public Health, the digital home to stellar longform journalism about public health. At a time when the very facts of science are challenged on social media every day, this is disheartening news.
The Huffington Post’s “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” headline has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.” 2016 photo via the Voice of America.
Recently a source in The Boston Globe newsroom forwarded to me a memo sent to the staff about the paper’s performance in Google search during 2024. “We get 25%-27% of our traffic from Google; it’s a significant way we reach people who don’t come to the Globe on their own,” wrote Ronke Idowu Reeves, the paper’s SEO editor. (SEO stands for search-engine optimization.)
As you might imagine, the big SEO winners in 2024 were the Karen Read trial, the phrase “who won the debate” (perhaps a reference to both presidential debates), the Celtics victory parade and Steward Health Care.
The memo, though, prompted another thought: What is the purpose of SEO in the age of paywalls? As you probably know, the Globe has an especially strict paywall, with no quota of gift links for the month. I emailed Reeves and asked her whether SEO was successful in getting casual visitors to sign up for a digital subscription given that they couldn’t read even the one story they’d searched for. She forwarded my email to spokeswoman Carla Kath, who told me by email: “Yes, a good number of people do read and subscribe to our stories that they encounter on search. But, because the scope of search is constantly changing, we are always adjusting how we approach it.”
It’s something I’d like to dig into more deeply at some point since it’s fundamental to the economics of digital news. Twenty years ago, paywalls were rare, and the idea behind SEO was to drive massive audiences to your stories so that they’d see the ads that accompanied them. The first iteration of The Huffington Post stressed SEO heavily, and its infamous 2011 headline “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.”
I find my Northeastern journalism ethics students’ analyses of the news fascinating and insightful, so I want to share with you their latest. I asked them to find a piece of journalism related to the inauguration — straight news, opinion, whatever — and share it along with some commentary of their own. They came up with a great mix of mainstream and alternative sources, and all of the pieces are worthwhile. It’s a small class, so I’m going to present the eight that I received plus one I thought was worth adding to the mix.
On day one, Trump pits his administration against transgender people, by Orion Rummler and Kate Sosin, The 19th. Student comment: “I think a lot of journalists and platforms will have to test the limits of our good friend neutral objectivity over the next four years, especially when it comes to reporting on the trans community. With trans rights being a popular and divisive issue right now, a lot of questions about objectivity come to mind…. If news organizations continue to give a lot of space to this ‘debate’ on trans rights (although trans people represent less than 2% of the US population), it almost validates the idea that there is a debate to be had on whether or not trans people deserve to exist.”
Three ways Democrats are breaking with tradition before inauguration,by James FitzGerald, BBC News. Student comment: “Democrats have emphasized the importance of peaceful transfers of power but are seemingly following in Trump’s footsteps by abandoning the traditions in place…. Democrats following Republicans’ lead in breaking with tradition could further destabilize democracy and the public’s trust in institutions.”
Pomp, Policy, and Pardons, by Jon Allsop, Columbia Journalism Review. Student comment: “I’m still burnt out from the first four years of Trump, to be honest, so I appreciate round-ups like this CJR one.”
Bishop Asks Trump to “Have Mercy” on Immigrants and Gay Children,by Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Tim Balk and Erica L. Green, New York Times. Student comment: “As member of LGBTIAQ+ community, hearing President Trump talk about taking away millions of people’s right, including my own, was dehumanizing…. It was courageous of the Bishop to speak out in that particular enviroment — most of the people invited might have been too afraid to do so — therefore I applaud her for that.”
Welcome Home, by Tom Scocca, Defector. Student comment: “What I enjoyed most from this article was its forthrightness. Scocca understands that getting to a point like this means that almost everyone, whether consciously or not, has played a part. To elide that while laying out ethical issues as they currently stand is itself unethical.”
6 takeaways from Trump’s inaugural address, by Aaron Blake, Washington Post. Student comment: “From the journalist’s perspective, I think fact-checking is a fundamental part of journalism, but it became even more critical under the Trump administration. Given his frequent use of misleading statements and false claims, journalists had a greater responsibility to verify information and contextualize his rhetoric.”
Trump’s Inauguration Speech Threatened New Depths of State Cruelty,by David Renton, Truthout. Student comment: “While I, personally, may not need a terrible amount of convincing to believe Trump’s intentions are cruel, I think this simple and concise piece would do a fine job of leading anyone to understand this underlying connection. That being said, most ardent supporters would likely entirely dismiss every claim. So maybe Renton is preaching to the choir.”
4 takeaways from Trump’s second inaugural address,by Domenico Montanaro, NPR. Student comment: “What caught my eye in the article is that Trump spoke of very specific plans for the next four years during his official address to the country. However, this was all on a script he read off a teleprompter. Later on, he gave a non-scripted speech to supporters to purposely reveal more plans. The questions I, as a journalist have, start with, if journalists have to be transparent with the public, why does the president not have to? Should a president not be held to a higher standard when dealing with the public? Why is Trump not being criticized more for this?”
And, finally, my own find:
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Oliver Darcy, Status. My comment: “Darcy documents all the national media figures who’ve been highly critical of Donald Trump in the past but who rolled over for him on Monday…. I thought Darcy did a great job of combining reporting, opinion and attitude. By focusing on how the media covered the inauguration rather than the inauguration itself, he provided valuable insights into an aspect of the day that wasn’t center stage.”
Media notes
• Too much Trump? Joshua Benton, writing at Nieman Lab, introduces a daily newsletter from Vox that catches you up on the major Trump news of the day without wallowing in it. The Logoff, produced by a top Vox editor, Patrick Reiss, comprises one short item and then hands you off to something more uplifting at the close. I’ve signed up, and I think it will definitely be useful for some people, though it’s probably not enough for someone who needs to be immersed in the news — like Reiss, for instance. Or me.
• This was CNN. Mark Thompson, the news network’s chief executive, explains his plans to implement cuts on the broadcast side, beef up digital and stave of the apocalypse as the audience for linear TV continues to shrink and age. Thompson may have saved The New York Times in his last job. But based on what he says in his interview with the Times’ Benjamin Mullin (gift link), I’d say his mission to save CNN sounds infinitely more complex, and perhaps undoable.
• The end of social media. It is surely worth noting that all of our major social media platforms are now in thrall to Trump — Twitter/X, TikTok and Meta’s various services, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Bluesky (where I’m most active these days) and Mastodon are barely a blip. Writing at 404 Media, Jason Koebler argues that what we need are decentralization combined with interoperability. It’s a great idea — and firmly rooted in a democratic vision for media that has been receding almost from the moment that the internet evolved into a mass medium.
I got up early this morning after a restless night to see that our fears had become reality. There is no sugar-coating this. Democracy was on the ballot, and democracy lost. The rule of law is giving way to an era of authoritarianism.
No recriminations. As I wrote Tuesday, Kamala Harris proved to be a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. Do I have quibbles? Sure. I was surprised and disappointed that her running mate, Tim Walz, proved not to be an asset. After he performed poorly in his debate with JD Vance, he pretty much disappeared. But no one votes for running mates. I also thought Harris spent a bit too much time with Liz Cheney and not enough with actual Democrats.
But every candidate has to make choices; some work out, some don’t. It wouldn’t have mattered. Voters who ultimately went with Trump decided they want a racist, insurrectionist strongman who hates who they hate. I could go on, but not this morning.
By far the highlight of my Election Day was spending time with our Northeastern journalism students involved in producing a half-hour newscast as part of a national project organized by Student News Live. The students were either part of our fledgling Society of Professional Journalists student chapter, NUTV or both.
Also doing a great job were Northeastern students who covered Election Day for The Scope, our digital social justice publication, and for The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper. I expect their coverage will keep rolling in throughout today.
Northeastern students after Tuesday’s newscast at NUTV
A few other observations:
• It was a big night for poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight and its founder, Nate Silver, who has moved on and now runs a similar project. For the past month, they’ve had the race in a dead heat with Trump given slightly better odds of winning most of the time. Also: That Iowa poll meant nothing.
• Too early to tell how big a factor the Electoral College played in this. In 2016 it carried Trump to victory even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. Four years ago Joe Biden barely squeaked through despite a decisive victory in the popular vote. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time, but we just don’t know yet.
• Living in Massachusetts, or in any Deep Blue state, will give us some protection from what’s to come. But my heart goes out to people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, immigrants, the people of Ukraine and anyone else who is going to be hit with the full force of what’s to come.
