Northeastern University

It was a dark and metaphorically stormy night; plus, Northeastern students get the job done.

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.

God help us all.

Northeastern students try to vote — and some run into obstacles

Earlier today I asked my First Amendment students to fan out across the Northeastern campus and interview students about whether they had faced any voting obstacles. They posted their findings on Instagram. Most of those interviewed were from out of state and had tried to vote by mail.

Many of them reported an easy experience, but that wasn’t universal. One student from North Carolina, for instance, reported that in addition to having to pay for postage — not a big deal, but really? — she was required to have two witnesses sign her ballot and print out a photo of her driver’s license.

A Tennessee student said she registered to vote in Massachusetts after running into insurmountable obstacles in her home state. “To register for a mail-in ballot, I had to actually be in Tennessee and show my ID,” she said. “They told me that if I can’t come into the county office with an ID, I can’t vote which is just crazy.”

You can find most of my students’ interviews here. We had some technical difficulties, so you’ll find a slightly different mix here.

Nicholas Daniloff, 1934-2024

Nick Daniloff, right, and his family meet with President Ronald Reagan at the White House after his release from Soviet captivity. Official White House photo.

I met Nick Daniloff for the first time in either the late 1980s or ’90s. I can’t remember the circumstances exactly, but it was a Northeastern University event, and I recall that it was at the Boston Public Library. We had an active Northeastern journalism alumni group back then, so it may have been related to that.

Nick had joined the faculty after a long and distinguished career in journalism, capped off by his being imprisoned by the Soviet Union in 1986 on false espionage charges while working for U.S. News & World Report. I was sitting next to the then-director of our School of Journalism, the late LaRue Gilleland. Nick delivered a lecture that was informed by his deep learning and his calm but focused delivery. LaRue and I looked at each other. “He’s good, isn’t he?” LaRue said. Nick ended up succeeding LaRue as director.

Later I became a colleague of Nick, who died last Thursday at 89. He was someone we all looked up to as a role model. The students revered him, and so did we. He used to show up to our spring reception for graduating seniors every year in full academic regalia, partly as a joke — Nick had an exceedingly dry sense of humor — but partly to inject a note of seriousness into what was otherwise an informal and celebratory occasion.

In 2013, Nick earned the Journalism Educator of the Year Award from the New England Newspaper and Press Association, a well-deserved honor that was reported at the time by Debora Almeida in The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper. “I try to bring the real world of journalism into the classroom,” Nick told Debora. “A good journalism professor has real journalistic experience and didn’t just read about it.” He had some plans for his impending retirement, too: “I want to keep learning, read more Shakespeare, specifically his sonnets.”

Nick played a role in my being hired at Northeastern in 2005. He actually called my editor at The Boston Phoenix, Peter Kadzis, to inquire about me, which left me speechless when Peter told me about it because I hadn’t let him know that I might be leaving. Uh, oh. It all worked out, though.

Today I teach the journalism ethics course that Nick taught for many years. It’s an honor, and yet at the same time I know it’s impossible to live up to his high standards.

If a paywall prevents you from reading Bryan Marquard’s fine obituary of Nick in The Boston Globe, here is a gift link to Robert D. McFadden’s obit in The New York Times, which is also very good. I also recommend Nick’s 2008 memoir, “Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent.”

We will all miss Nick.

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.

Northeastern students weigh in on stories that ought to be getting more coverage

Andrea Martinez, chairwoman of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, stands outside the tribe’s polling location in Schurz, Nev., during the state’s 2024 primary election on June 11, 2024. Photo by Christopher Lomahquahu/News21.

When you page through the national and international news, it can sometimes seem like there is nothing going on except the presidential election campaign and the wars in Gaza (as well as the broader region) and Ukraine.

These are, in fact, news developments of monumental importance. But what would we be talking about if these issues were suddenly taken off the table? Once a semester, I ask my media ethics students to identify an undercovered story and explain why it should have gotten more attention.

It’s a big class — 30 students. And they are all smart and idealistic. I could easily highlight every story they found, but here is a representative sample of 11.

• Voting rights for Native Americans. Despite being recognized as U.S. citizens more than 100 years ago, Indigenous Americans in some places still face barriers to voting. Worse, some states are winding the clock backwards by making it more difficult for Native Americans to vote. This important reporting was produced by Carnegie-Knight News21, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available free of charge to other news organizations — including USA Today.

• The dangers of vaccine hesitancy. As I write this, I’m dealing with the after-effects of my Moderna COVID booster, which I got Monday along with a flu shot. Even now, though, I’d much rather put up with a little discomfort than get COVID. Here is a CBS News story that traces the history of vaccines from Benjamin Franklin to Jonas Salk to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s taken his anti-science views mainstream as a presidential candidate and, now, as a Donald Trump surrogate.

• Lost in space. The fate of two astronauts who are stuck on the International Space Station has gotten more attention lately, but it seems like we heard very little for months. I hesitate to call it a crisis, since it doesn’t seem that the two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are in any danger. But according to The New York Times, they will have wait until next year to come home on a SpaceX capsule rather than a Boeing vehicle, as originally planned.

• Let there be (too much) light. The pervasiveness of artificial light harms animals, including those of the human variety, since it’s a major contributor to overwork and maladjusted body clocks. Light pollution makes it more difficult for astronomers to do their jobs and wreaks havoc with the navigation systems of marine animals such as sea turtles. A story in National Geographic lays out the problem and suggests some steps that can be taken to ease it.

• Black women and breast cancer. In the modern media environment, it’s not just news organizations that are producing useful journalism. For instance, a blog post at the Mayo Clinic website informs us that Black women are “41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women,” even though they are a lower risk. The reason: breast cancer is more likely to be detected in Black women at a later stage, making it more difficult to treat.

• A horrifying protest goes unnoticed. You would think that when someone who demonstrates in favor of Palestinian rights lights himself on fire and dies of his burns, that story would get a great deal of attention. Yet the tragic story of Matt Nelson, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli consulate in Boston on Sept. 11, has attracted little notice. The left-leaning news site Common Dreams covered it, as did the Cape Cod Times, which noted that Nelson had ties to the Cape. Nothing in The Boston Globe, though; NBC Boston ran a brief story, and there was very little else, at least not in the local media.

• A recognition of public service. At a time when working for the government is disparaged, as it has been pretty much since the Reagan era, it’s useful to be reminded of the good work that many public servants perform. The Federal News Network reported last week on the 2024 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, known as the “Sammies,” which recognizes federal employees who have achieved excellence. How did a student find this story? She told me that she was reading The Washington Post and came across a link. The Post, of course, is the hometown paper for the federal government.

• Threatening the right to read. Book-banning doesn’t quite fall into the category of an undercovered story, but we don’t know as much about it as we ought to — especially on the state level and exactly what books are being banned. Word In Black, which describes itself as a “groundbreaking collaboration of 10 legendary Black news publishers,” reports that Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Utah and Tennessee are among the states that have restricted the books that public school students can access related to sex and Black history.

• Trump’s blood lust. This story from Rolling Stone is more than a year and a half old — but that’s what makes it important. As Trump was in the final months of his term in 2020 and early 2021, he embarked on an unprecedented spree of federal executions. As the story puts it, “Before 2020, there had been three federal executions in 60 years. Then Trump put 13 people to death in six months.” The article is behind a paywall (I accessed it through a library database), but for anyone who is horrified by the continued use of the death penalty, it would make sense to be reminded of Trump’s record during the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign.

• A deadly storm in Vietnam. It’s not unusual for our news feeds to be filled with weather-related stories, from the mundane (will it rain this weekend?) to serious coverage of floods and wildfires. Overseas, though, is another matter. Did you know, for instance, that Typhoon Yagi has claimed 143 lives in Vietnam, and many more people are missing? According to The New York Times, Yagi is just the latest example of a storm that was made more extreme because of climate change.

• The war on terror’s awful legacy. As a country, we have moved on from our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without ever coming to terms with the legacy of those conflicts. The New Yorker, with support from the Pulitzer Center, has gone back and reported on war crimes committed by U.S. forces, putting together a database of “the largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 — nearly eight hundred incidents in all.” These incidents include murder, sexual assault and other forms of abuse. It is interesting, to say the least, that Vice President Kamala Harris has gratefully accepted the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of the so-called war on terror. We should not forget what happened during those years.

Local news round-up: Cuts in Tampa, innovation in Maine and a new editor in New Bedford

The old Tampa Bay Hotel, now part of the University of Tampa. Photo (cc) 2007 by Ebyabe.

I’m back from vacation, and this morning I have a round-up of some items about the state of local news. Unfortunately, my top story is not good. The Tampa Bay Times, a news organization that does it the right way, is nevertheless facing a 20% cut to its payroll.

The paper, which has won 14 Pulitzer Prizes over the years, will offer buyouts to its 270 full-time employees, a number that includes 100 journalists. Top executives will take 10% pay cuts through the end of 2024, with chair and CEO Conan Gallaty taking 20%.

The Times has long since given up on daily print; it currently publishes print editions on Wednesdays and Sundays, and is digital-only the rest of the week.

What’s distressing is that the Times has an admirable business model. It’s a for-profit paper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, a highly regarded journalism-education organization. The original idea, though, was that some of the Times’ profits would be used to subsidize Poynter. Those profits have long since dried up, forcing Poynter to raise money on its own. That model is the opposite of a newer hybrid, The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute, which was specifically set up to support the Inquirer and other news organizations.

The Times writes that “print advertising and circulation have declined steadily and digital revenue growth hasn’t made up for the shortfall.”

With other major Florida newspapers in the hands of bottom line-obsessed entities such as McClatchy (the Miami Herald) and Alden Global Capital (the Orlando Sentinel), it’s vital that the Tampa Bay Times survives and thrives.

The Maine event

I had not realized that Reade Brower was still in the newspaper business until I received a press release earlier this week announcing an innovative venture on the coast of Maine.

Brower sold The Portland Press Herald and its affiliated newspapers last summer to the National Trust for Local News — then turned around and helped assemble a company called Islandport Media. Now he and another veteran publisher, Kathleen Fleury Capetta, are combining four newspapers into the weekly Midcoast Villager, which will debut in September.

The four papers are the Camden Herald, The Free Press, The Republican Journal and The Courier-Gazette. Islandport’s holdings also include The Ellsworth American, a respected weekly newspaper that will not be part of the merger.

When I hear news like this, I worry that it’s a cost-cutting move and that the new entity will concentrate more on regional news than hyperlocal coverage. The press release, though, says that the company has been hiring, and will supplement the paper with targeted community newsletters. Brower and Fleury Capetta have something else in mind as well:

The publication will further invest in the community by opening the Villager Café in downtown Camden in 2025. The cafe will offer breakfast, lunch and coffee, but will also serve as a community center that hosts events related to local journalism, brings people together to talk about complex issues, and showcases local talent with concerts, readings, discussions and more. People are hungry for social connections; the cafe and the publication will bring people together and provide a greater sense of belonging for community residents.

This is a phenomenally great idea, reminiscent of the burgers-beers-and-news formula unveiled several years ago by The Big Bend Sentinel in Texas. Civic engagement and news consumption are intimately tied together, so giving residents a reason to gather and talk about local issues will surely help the newspaper as well.

“We really believe that we just have to save local news, and this is an effort to do that,” Fleury Capetta told Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan.

Let there be Light

There’s some very good news at The New Bedford Light, a high-profile nonprofit that covers the South Coast of Massachusetts: Karen Bordeleau, a former executive editor of The Providence Journal, has been named editor. She’ll work alongside the current editor, Andy Tomolonis, until he retires next year, according to an announcement by CEO Lean Camara.

Bordeleau is a fellow graduate of Northeastern University’s journalism program. Not to reveal her age (or mine), but back in the 1970s we both worked as co-op students at Rhode Island’s Woonsocket Call, which, sadly, was merged into The Times of Pawtucket last October.

Congratulations to Karen — and to the Light, which has acquired a first-rate editor to succeed Tomolonis and, before him, founding editor Barbara Roessner.

Meg Heckman on gender, ‘viability’ and the pitfalls of covering female politicians

Then-Sen. Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.

My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman writes for WBUR’s Cognoscenti about the challenges facing the media in covering Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, arguing that we ought to be wary of discussing Harris’ “viability” — a “vague term [that] is often code for a lingering — and likely inaccurate — perception that women are somehow less electable than men.” She continues:

The viability question comes packaged with observations about a candidate’s “likability,” “broad appeal” and “strength.” Can she win over moderate suburban voters? Does she look presidential? Is she authentic? These factors do matter, especially when the narrow path to victory winds through a few swing states — think back to 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and lost the election — but they also carry a specific type of misogyny, one that’s cloaked as pragmatism and deeply internalized across the political spectrum.

Meg’s conclusion: The media have gotten better, as shown by their mostly non-gendered coverage of Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign. But Vice President Harris, who has a genuine chance of becoming the first female president, presents a larger and trickier test.

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Northeastern’s Mike Beaudet talks with E&P about reinventing TV news

Our Reinventing Local TV News project, which is part of Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is getting a lot of attention from the trade publication Editor & Publisher. Professor Mike Beaudet, who heads the project, is the subject of a feature story in E&P and is the guest on this week’s E&P vodcast.

Beaudet, who’s also an investigative reporter with WCVB-TV (Channel 5), tells E&P’s Gretchen Peck and Mike Blinder that the goal is to come up with new ways of storytelling to appeal to younger audiences — a demographic that gets its news almost entirely by smartphone rather than a traditional television screen. Here’s how Beaudet puts it in an interview with Peck:

People are cutting the cord, and the whole idea of having “appointment television” has gone out the window, especially for younger people. That’s the challenge: We can’t rely on this audience to find local TV like you could in years past, as they get older, because they’re not consuming content the same way.

Mike and his collaborator, Professor John Wihbey, presented at our What Works local news conference at Northeastern last March. Given that local television is in relatively good financial health compared to the newspaper business, it’s vitally important that people like Beaudet and Wihbey come up with solutions before the problems of an aging audience become acute.

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One more on Biden, the media and the news conference

President Biden speaking at the NATO summit on Thursday. Photo via WhiteHouse.gov.

I joined my Northeastern colleagues Costas Panagopoulos and Nick Beauchamp in analyzing President Biden’s news conference and the media’s performance for Northeastern Global News. My take: The state of Biden’s cognitive condition is a huge and legitimate story, but it’s been marred by a journalistic feeding frenzy:

Looking back at the last several weeks, Kennedy says it’s almost as if “we’ve forgotten that anything else is going on in the entire world.”

“At some point when we look back on this, we’re going to say that there was a really important, substantive issue that had to be dealt with — that is, the question of whether the president is in cognitive decline — and yet the media still didn’t acquit itself very well,” Kennedy says.

Panagopoulos’ and Beauchamp’s assessments of the news conference itself: Biden was strong enough to help himself a little, but not strong enough to change anyone’s minds about whether he should stay in the race.

“It’s unlikely to silence calls for him to step aside,” said Panagopoulos. Added Beauchamp: “I don’t know if that’s going to be enough of a difference for people who are counting on his abilities. But I think he went out there and delivered what he was there to do.”

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The Huntington News reports on the aftermath of April’s Northeastern encampment

Centennial Common at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2008 by Piotrus.

The pro-Palestinian encampment at Northeastern University’s Centennial Common may have been broken up nearly as soon as it appeared, but the events of those 48 hours in late April still reverberate. Now The Huntington News, our outstanding independent student newspaper, has published a massive overview that focuses on the police response.

Reported by Annika Sunkara, Eli Curwin and Emily Spatz, the story examines how protesters were treated by law enforcement officials who were called to the scene to take down the encampment and arrest those who refused to leave. Those officials included Boston, Northeastern and state police. As portrayed in the article, the response comes off as somewhat chaotic, with needlessly rough treatment of the some of the protesters as well as confusion over how those with a Northeastern affiliation should be treated.

The reporting speaks for itself, but I do want to highlight this:

Police ordered all individuals, including press, medics and legal observers, to leave Centennial.

Several Huntington News reporters were told to leave the barricaded area under threat of their “student status.”

Boston police ordered at least five legal observers, who had monitored the encampment since it was established, to move outside of the barricade.

How the press was treated when the encampment was broken up and arrests began on the morning of Saturday, April 27, has been a matter of controversy. Police officers have an obligation to move observers out of the way so that they’re not a hindrance and are not in danger of getting hurt. On the other hand, those observers should not be moved so far from the scene that they don’t have a clear view of how the police are doing their jobs. Journalism’s obligation is to bear witness at such moments.

Urszula Masny-Latos, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild of Massachusetts, told the News that the police moved observers “as far from the scene as possible so [the police] would not be easily visible.” She also said that Boston police overruled campus officers “and forced NLG legal observers off the grounds where the arrests happened.”

The Boston Police Department reportedly did not respond to the News about their actions.

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