Imagine that you run a local news site and a protest breaks out in your community. You cover it, but you’d like to place it within a broader context. How many other protests are taking place near your city and town? What are they about?
Our Northeastern colleague Rahul Bhargava, a professor in the School of Journalism, has come up with a way of tracking demonstrations. He’s developed a map that can be embedded so community news outlets can show their readers what’s taking place nearby. You can set the map so that it depicts protests anywhere from within five to 100 miles. Rahul writes for Storybench, our media-innovation publication:
[I]t appears that local reporters are covering protests in their area, but not often connecting them to larger movements. That might be because coalitions like #50501 aren’t as well known as unions and long-standing activist groups; they don’t have communications people with long-standing relationships to journalists.
One approach to help reporters make those links for readers, and put individual events in a broader context, is to use data about local protests. Connecting this weekend’s rally to events over the last few weeks might connect dots for audiences that are seeing public displays of resistance. I wondered if I could quickly map protests in my area based on existing data sources.
The map is based on data compiled by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), a nonprofit, and the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), part of the Harvard Ash Center.
The Flint Unfiltered team. From left: Claire Adner, Emily Niedermeyer, Alaa Al Ramahi, Professor Carlene Hempel, Steph Conquest-Ware, Mary Raines Alexander, Alexa Coultoff, Harrison Zuritsky and Asher Ben-Dashan.
On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Carlene Hempel and Harrison Zuritsky. Our colleague Carlene, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, recently led a reporting trip to Flint, Michigan. Harrison and other students produced a stunning internet magazine called Flint Unfiltered that takes a deep dive into the causes and effects of Flint’s economic downturn and toxic water crisis.
Since 2009, Carlene has been leading students on reporting trips, where they work as part of a traveling press corps. She has taken groups to many countries, including Egypt, Syria, Cuba and Panama. Harrison, a second-year student with concentrations in journalism and data science, joined her on the Flint trip.
Click on image to access the digital magazine.
Like so many at Northeastern, Carlene has a background that includes academic achievement as well as wide-ranging professional experience. She has been a professor for 20 years and holds a Ph.D. from Northeastern. She started her career reporting for The Middlesex News in Framingham, Massachusetts, now the MetroWest Daily News, and The Boston Globe. She then moved to North Carolina, where she worked for MSNBC and The News & Observer of Raleigh.
I’ve got a Quick Take from Maine. Reade Brower, the former owner of the Portland Press Herald, is going to have three of his weekly papers printed at the Press Herald’s facility in South Portland, giving a boost to the National Trust for Local News, the nonprofit that now owns the Press Herald and several other Maine papers. Brower’s also followed through on a plan to open a café at one of his weeklies, the Midcoast Villager, in a unique effort to boost civic engagement.
Ellen weighs in on a new study of local news by Professor Joshua Darr of Syracuse University, a friend of the pod. Darr teamed up with three other researchers to do a meta analysis of surveys on media trust. They made a number of findings, but the headline is that Americans trust local newsrooms more than national news outlets. This is especially true if the local news outlet has the actual name of the community in its title. But there’s a downside: that automatic trust also allows pink slime sites to take hold.
One of my favorite classes at Northeastern is a course called POV: The Art and Craft of Opinion Journalism, drawing on my experience at The Boston Phoenix, The Guardian, GBH News and other outlets.
The class, which comprises graduate students and advanced undergrads, covers personal essays, reviews, op-ed-style commentaries, blogging (or, if you prefer, newsletter-writing) and social media. We also have some great guest speakers. The final project consists of a longer piece of enterprise journalism combining research, interviews and a strong point of view.
I’ve put together a presentation of my students’ final projects from the semester that just ended. I’m always interested to see what my students gravitate toward. Here you’ll find stories about dementia care, privacy in gay nightclubs, eating disorders and why news organizations should pay more attention to journalism research.
What you won’t find is much in the way of Trump-related journalism. I’m not surprised. Over the years I’ve learned that our students have broad interests, and that politics is just one of those interests. In any event, these are wonderful, and I hope you might take the time to read a few of them.
Northeastern University’s president, Joseph Aoun, has added his voice to a strong statement from college and university leaders opposing the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on their institutions. Madison Evangelist has the details at The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper.
The statement, titled “A Call for Constructive Engagement,” has been signed by 416 education leaders as of 11 a.m. Those signing include Harvard president Alan Garber, whose defiance of Trump has made his university a national symbol of resistance. Other local signers are Melissa Gilliam, president of Boston University; Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT; Jay Bernhardt, president of Emerson College; Marissa Kelly, president of Suffolk University; and Marty Meehan, president of the University of Massachusetts.
The statement, sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, begins:
As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education. We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses. We will always seek effective and fair financial practices, but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.
For those of us who are part of the Northeastern community, Aoun’s action is welcome news. My students and I have talked about how quiet the administration has been about Trump’s depredations, and I’ve been hoping we’d hear more at some point. Well, here it is.
And not that Harvard needs any more kudos, but it was really its refusal to go along with Trump’s authoritarian demands that stiffened the backbones of university leaders everywhere.
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.
