Tag: Northeastern University

Local online news publishers and editors speak out about the COVID-19 crisis

On By Dan KennedyIn Media

Commentary at WGBH News.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a particularly difficult challenge for publishers of community online-only news sites, whether they are for-profit or nonprofit. Over the weekend I emailed editors and publishers of several such news organizations to see how they are getting along. Below are their lightly edited answers in full.

Q: How are you dealing with the challenge of covering the COVID-19 pandemic in your community?

Paul Bass, who runs the New Haven Independent and WNHH Community Radio, which are both nonprofit organizations: We’re working like maniacs. We feel this is the time when the work we do — informing as well as stitching together community — is more important than ever.

Kate Maxwell, publisher of The Mendocino Voice, a for-profit that is moving toward a cooperative ownership model: We are covering it in all the ways we can come up with! We do have experience with prolonged breaking emergency coverage through wildfires and power shutdowns, unfortunately. We created a central landing page and are using multiple social media platforms to reach people, including livestreaming press conferences, interviews with public health officials and medical experts, and live tours of preparedness at medical facilities.

We’re writing multiple daily updates, creating several guides to information and resources, increasing our newsletter, live-tweeting important forums, increasing our Spanish translations and Spanish language interviews, and regularly surveying our readers, as well as taking live questions during events and interviews. We’re being careful to make our updates clearly dated, sharing information about state and federal changes, and keeping coverage in digestible and clear formats. We’ve gotten some great ideas from other LION publishers as well. 

We are hiring formerly underemployed but experienced local freelance reporters to expand our coverage.We are working quickly to hire even more reporters and implement ideas we had considered previously and in other sustained emergencies, such as text services. We are reaching out to public officials, business leaders and community groups to discuss how to best fact-check evolving information moving forward. We are also talking with everyone about how we can best support our community to provide a service that also lessens the blow of economic impacts of this pandemic, which will be hard on our already struggling local economy and health-care system. This includes considering what might happen in the case of multiple emergencies as we approach “wildfire season.”

Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a for-profit in Genesee County, New York: Early on, even before orders were issued, I recognized that I probably wouldn’t be going out of the house much to cover things. I had never done livestreaming before. I had never done a video interview and recorded it or livestreamed it. So I quickly figured out how to do all of that, and we did our first livestream interview on March 15.  We’ve done 15 or so since. Continue reading “Local online news publishers and editors speak out about the COVID-19 crisis” →

A professor copes, takes his class online, and wonders: ‘What comes next?’

On By Dan KennedyIn Personal

I knew the Apocalypse was at hand when I walked through the nearly empty Ruggles T station Monday morning — and there were no Jehovah’s Witnesses. Not that I suspected these smiling, well-dressed folks with their posters and pamphlets were afraid of catching COVID-19. They probably just figured there was no point in standing in the cold all by themselves while the city was shutting down around them.

As a journalism professor at Northeastern University, I’m well aware of how fortunate I am.

Read the rest at WGBHNews.org. And talk about this post on Facebook.

Do newspaper endorsements matter? Why a hoary tradition may be near its end

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics

My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman has written an important thread about political endorsements by news organizations. Her starting point is the Concord Monitor’s unusual decision not to endorse in the New Hampshire primary. (Heckman is a former editor at the Monitor.) Please read it and come back.

The Monitor’s non-endorsement is not the only break with the past that we’ve seen in recent weeks.

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A reinterpretation of Title IX threatens student journalism about sexual assault

On By Dan KennedyIn First Amendment, Media
Photo (cc) 2016 via Wikimedia Commons

My Northeastern colleagues Laurel Leff and Meg Heckman report on a new, serious threat to freedom of the press on college campuses: a federal reinterpretation of Title IX that puts faculty members at risk if they advise students who are reporting on sexual assault. They write at The Conversation:

At issue are increasingly common policies that require virtually every university employee to alert school officials if they hear even the slightest rumor of sexual misconduct — on or off campus — involving students or employees.

On most campuses, clergy members, mental health counselors and health care providers are exempt from such mandatory reporting requirements. University-affiliated journalists are not despite the fact that they also often need confidentiality to do their jobs effectively.

Yet, journalism professors routinely learn of possible sexual misconduct in their roles as advisors to student newspapers, or in critiquing students’ classroom work. (It’s also increasingly common for journalism educators to serve as editors in charge of school-sponsored news organizations designed to fill gaps in the local media ecosystem.)

I heard about this for the first time last week. I immediately went through a mental checklist as I tried to remember whether any of my students was working on a story about sexual misconduct. They weren’t. But I’ve dealt with such stories in the past, and apparently I will not be dealing with them in the future.

This is an outrageous attack on the First Amendment. It even pertains to NPR affiliates associated with colleges and universities, which is to say most of them. What’s needed, as Leff and Heckman write, is a state law “exempting university-affiliated journalists and journalism educators from mandatory reporting requirements when they are advising student journalists.”

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A Northeastern study takes the measure of our controversy-driven political coverage

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics
Illustration by Emily Judem for WGBH News

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

For observers of the media, there are few spectacles more dispiriting than the way the press covers presidential campaigns. Rather than digging into what really matters, such as the candidates’ experience, leadership ability and positions on important issues, reporters focus on controversies, attacks on one another, gotcha moments and, of course, polls, polls and more polls.

Now a study conducted by the School of Journalism at Northeastern University has quantified just how bad things are. Looking at about 10,000 news articles from 28 ideologically diverse news outlets published between March and October, my colleagues and I found that coverage of the Democratic candidates “tracks with the ebbs and flows of scandals, viral moments and news items.”

Our findings were posted last week at Storybench, a vertical published by the School of Journalism that covers media innovation. The data analysis was performed by Aleszu Bajak with an assist from John Wihbey. Among the key points in our report:

• The televised debates have driven some of the issues-based coverage. For instance, mentions of the candidates’ positions on immigration and health care increased during and immediately after the debates but then quickly subsided.

• Kirsten Gillibrand made reproductive choice one of her signature issues — and after she dropped out of the race, that issue faded from media coverage. Similarly, coverage of gun control was tied mainly to Beto O’Rourke’s now-defunct campaign. LGBTQ rights and climate change have been virtually ignored.

• The Ukraine story has dominated recently coverage of the Democratic candidates, with much of it focused on President Trump’s false accusations that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden acted corruptly.

Of course, to some extent the media can’t help but be reactive. It would be irresponsible not to cover what the candidates are saying about themselves and each other. But the press’ urge to chase controversies at the expense of more substantive matters shows that little has been learned since its disastrous performance four years ago.

As Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy wrote in an analysis of the 2016 campaign, coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was unrelentingly negative, creating the impression that the controversy over Clinton’s emails was somehow equivalent to massive corruption at Trump’s charitable foundation, his racist remarks and his boasting about sexual assault as revealed on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.

“The real bias of the press is not that it’s liberal,” Patterson wrote. “Its bias is a decided preference for the negative.”

It doesn’t have to be that way. Earlier this year, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen proposed campaign coverage built around a “citizens agenda.” Rosen proposed that news organizations should identify their audience, listen to what they believe the candidates should be focusing on, and cover the race accordingly.

“Given a chance to ask questions of the people competing for office, you can turn to the citizens agenda,” Rosen wrote on his influential blog, Press Think. “And if you need a way of declining the controversy of the day, there it is. The agenda you got by listening to voters helps you hold to mission when temptation is to ride the latest media storm.”

Some coverage of presidential politics has been quite good. Quality news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have published in-depth articles on challenges the candidates have overcome and how that helps shape their approach to governing. The Boston Globe has been running a series called “Back to the Battleground” in which it has reported on four key states that unexpectedly went with Trump in 2016. Reports aimed at making sense of the Ukraine story, explaining Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All plan and the like are worthy examples of campaign journalism aimed at informing the public. But such efforts tend to be overshadowed by day-to-day horse-race coverage.

The latest poll-driven narrative is the rise of Pete Buttigieg, who’s emerged as the clear frontrunner in Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom survey. You can be sure that he’ll be watched closely at this week’s televised debate. Will his rivals attack him? Will he fight back? Can he take the heat?

Little of it will have much to do with what kind of president Buttigieg or any of the other candidates would be. The horse race is paramount. Who’s up, who’s down and the latest controversies are what matter to the political press.

The data my Northeastern colleagues have compiled provides a measurement of how badly political coverage has run off the rails. What’s needed is a commitment on the part of the media to do a better job of serving the public interest.

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How the media are setting the 2020 agenda: Chasing daily controversies, burying policy

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics

By Aleszu Bajak, Dan Kennedy and John Wihbey

It’s a paradox of examining political coverage. Are news media just reporting what the political candidates are talking about? Or does political journalism really set the agenda by selecting stories around specific news items, scandals and issues du jour?

Our topic analysis of ~10,000 news articles on the 2020 Democratic candidates, published between March and October in an ideological diverse range of 28 news outlets, reveals that political coverage, at least this cycle, tracks with the ebbs and flows of scandals, viral moments and news items, from accusations of Joe Biden’s inappropriate behavior towards women to President Trump’s phone call with Ukraine.

Read the rest at Storybench, a media innovation vertical published by Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. And talk about this post on Facebook.

7 stories you might have missed while the media went wild over impeachement

On By Dan KennedyIn Media

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Impeachment has swallowed the news whole. In a world beset by climate change, right-wing populism, and rising tides of immigration, the overwhelming issue in the U.S. media is the burgeoning Ukraine scandal and whether it will take down President Trump.

As compelling as the impeachment story is, there’s a danger that these other issues will be overlooked. In the long run, the fate of our planet is considerably more important than the fate of our president.

Last week I asked my Northeastern University journalism students to identify an undercovered story and to explain their choice. Some of what they told me was predictable; some of it was surprising. Greta Thunberg’s climate activism? Of course. Gender-neutral Barbie dolls? Who knew? (And how cool is that?)

What follows is a list of seven major stories my students thought should have gotten more attention. The rankings are mine, but the ideas are all theirs.

7. Climate change. The question of whether the world will still be inhabitable decades from now comes in last on my list simply because it did get quite a bit of coverage last week. A major United Nations report and Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN Climate Action Summit were both major news events. But even though those topics weren’t exactly undercovered, climate change might have been — and probably should have been — the top story of the week.

“The warming climate is killing coral reefs, supercharging monster storms, and fueling deadly marine heat waves and record losses of sea ice” is how The Washington Post summarized the new report.

By week’s end, The Boston Globe published a massive multimedia feature on how climate change is affecting Cape Cod. There seems to be little doubt that global warming has emerged as a major issue for the media. Even so, it should be treated as by far the biggest story of our time — and last week’s developments should have received more attention than they did.

6. The vaping crisis. As with climate change, there was no shortage of stories about the vaping crisis, which has led to unexplained illnesses and deaths across the country. President Trump is seeking to ban most types of flavored e-cigarettes. In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker has imposed a four-month moratorium.

As with climate change, the vaping crisis would rank higher on our undercovered list except that it has in fact received a great deal of coverage. But has it been enough? Given how prevalent vaping has become, especially among young people, the story arguably deserves even more attention than it has received.

5. Gender-neutral Barbie. The toymaker Mattel announced last week that it would introduce a new set of gender-neutral dolls for, as The New York Times put it, “boys, girls and children in between.” The new line, called Creatable World, comes in different skin tones and hair styles and may be dressed any way a child likes.

“Toys are a reflection of culture and as the world continues to celebrate the positive impact of inclusivity, we felt it was time to create a doll line free of labels,” said Kim Culmone, a Mattel senior vice president, in a statement on the company’s website. “Through research, we heard that kids don’t want their toys dictated by gender norms. This line allows all kids to express themselves freely which is why it resonates so strongly with them.”

In a culture in which it’s still difficult, even dangerous, to be transgender (as we will see below), Mattel has taken a major leap forward toward celebrating all kids.

4. Unrest in Venezuela. Several months ago, the rising opposition to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was a daily news story. Then again, at that time the U.S. government was paying a great deal of attention to the unrest, with members of the Trump administration even suggesting that the United States might intervene militarily.

The White House has lost interest, and thus so, too, have the media. But the standoff between the authoritarian Maduro government and the opposition has not been resolved. As recently as late last week, the BBC reported that the U.N. Human Rights Council would investigate reports of violations, “including executions, disappearances and torture.”

It is often said that the U.S. press doesn’t cover the world; rather, it covers the United States in the world. The situation in Venezuela is every bit as disturbing as when the White House was interested in it. The media should cover it accordingly.

3. The right to be forgotten. The Court of Justice of the European Union last week issued a ruling that will have a significant, positive impact on free speech in the United States: the court ruled that European laws mandating the “right to be forgotten” could not be enforced outside the E.U.

The right to be forgotten requires Google and other search engines to delete information about certain people “when their privacy rights outweigh the public’s interest in having continued access to the information,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a U.S.-based free-speech organization. The court ruled that such laws cannot be enforced outside the E.U., which means that search results in the U.S. and elsewhere will remain intact.

“The ability of one nation to require a search engine to delist results globally would prevent users around the world from accessing information they have a legal right to receive under their own country’s laws,” said the EFF in a statement hailing the ruling. “That would allow the most speech-restrictive laws to be applied globally.” Thankfully, the European court decided otherwise.

2. Deal struck on asylum-seekers. According to the Associated Press, five European countries — France, Germany, Italy, Malta and Finland — agreed to allow migrants fleeing Libya to disembark from the ships that had rescued them. The deal, under which the migrants will be spread across the five countries, expires Oct. 8. But officials from the five countries hope other E.U. members will soon join them.

“Migrants aboard the Ocean Viking jumped in joy and relief after hearing that they will be allowed to disembark at the port of Messina, Sicily, a week after rescue,” the AP reported. “The 182 men, women, and children, including a newborn, aboard the humanitarian ship run by SOS Mediterranee and Doctors Without Borders were expected to arrive by Tuesday [Sept. 24].”

With massive waves of immigration from poorer to richer countries emerging as one of the defining narratives of our era, the five-nation agreement represented a rare, if temporary, piece of good news.

1. An “epidemic” of transgender killings. The New York Times last Friday published a chilling report: at least 18 transgender people, most of them women of color, have been killed in the United States since the start of 2019. The American Medical Association is referring to the killings as an “epidemic.”

Although the Times deserves credit for shining a spotlight on the violence, it should be noted that the story appeared on page 11 of the print edition — the very definition of undercovered. Nor have other news organizations given the story the attention it deserves.

The killings come at a moment when transgender people are more visible and mainstream than ever before. Unfortunately, that may be part of the problem, with LGBTQ activists saying that the killings could be in reaction to that trend. “The increased visibility is a signal for them that they need to double down in fighting back,” Beverly Tillery, executive director of the Anti-Violence Project in New York, told the Times. “We’re definitely seeing what we would call a backlash.”

The seven stories I’ve listed here are admittedly somewhat random. There were more chosen by my students that I could have picked from — an investigation by U.S. officials that found Syria used chemical weapons last May; the ongoing, nearly forgotten recovery from Hurricane Dorian; unresolved political stalemates in Britain and Israel; forest fires in Indonesia, perhaps related to climate change; EEE, a serious mosquito-borne illness that has broken out in parts of New England; and the news (OK, not exactly new) that U.S. cities are losing 36 million trees each year.

No doubt you could come up with your own list. The point is that it’s a big world out there. The media aren’t exactly ignoring these stories; everything on my list received some mainstream coverage. These days, though, you have to chop through the impeachment weeds to see what’s underneath. Let’s start chopping.

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The Lowell Sun sports editor’s farewell column was taken down. Here’s every word of it.

On By Dan KennedyIn Media

Note: The hedge fund-owned newspaper chain MediaNews Group recently laid off several people at its Massachusetts papers, including sports editor Dennis Whitton of The Sun in Lowell. Whitton posted a farewell column on The Sun’s website and linked to it on Twitter, but when I tried to read it, it was gone — taken down (by management), he said in a tweet. (The column did appear in print.) An anonymous person with access to the CMS forwarded it to me, and I was able to verify that it was authentic. Here is Whitton’s farewell:

40 years of memories

By Dennis Whitton

“And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun…”

— Pink Floyd, “Time”

LOWELL — It’s more like 40 years have got behind me. Where have they gone? What do I have to show for them? Can I get some of them back?

After 35 years as The Sun’s sports boss and another 5-6 behind that as a reporter, co-op, cub and otherwise, your intrepid correspondent will be leaving the building this afternoon for the final time.

Corporate cost-cutting is the culprit. Apparently I was making too much money to suit the suits, even with years of frozen wages. I didn’t realize I was making so much. I would have spent more.

Our assistant sports boss, Barry Scanlon, is in the same liferaft. That’s a real head-scratcher because Barry was the staff workhorse and he loved what he did for the most part and did it extremely well. Like me, he took maybe two sick days in 22 years. But he, too, was unknowingly making too much money.

My super-supportive wife Jan says I should use the term “let go” when talking about this stuff because it sounds better than “laid off.”

It probably also sounds better than fired, downsized, axed, canned, dumped, released and forced out, too. But any way you cut it, we’re down to the final countdown in a job I’ve held since before that ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs.

If I sound bitter you’re reading me wrong. With all the technology now in play it’s a young person’s game. I’ve probably overstayed my “sell by” date and now I’m looking forward to the next chapter. Of the book I’m reading. Sitting on the beach.

At least the ax wasn’t performance-related. I know that because the suits in question have no idea what Barry and I did or how we did it. In the end we were numbers on a spreadsheet. There is one major downside to the affair: According to the exit agreement, my discounted employee newspaper subscription will be rolled over to the regular customer rate at the end of the month. Damn.

Everybody knows newspapers are yesterday’s news, useful mainly to parents making scrapbooks for their high school heroes. In the Internet age there isn’t much we can tell you in the rag that you couldn’t have found out 12 hours ago. Advertisers know this, which is why newspapers are circling the drain. Which is why we’ve been let go, and a number of other good people before and after us.

Those were the days.

In looking back for this “farewell column” that the aforementioned Jan has pressured me to write, I realize nearly all of my most interesting times in the game came in the previous century. After that I became a cynical curmudgeon.

So in a nutshell, and with apologies for the overuse of the dreaded pronoun “I,” here are some of my memories:

One of my first assignments as a Northeastern (Class of ’80) co-op student in the Sun sports department was the 1978 Beanpot. Of course the Blizzard of ’78 hit and I was stuck wandering Boston for five days. At least I didn’t bail. A true newspaperman.

In October of that same year I was in the overflow “press box” on the left field roof at Fenway Park when Bucky Dent’s home run cleared the fence so close to me I could almost read Bowie Kuhn’s signature on the baseball.

I covered a lot of Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics games in that time period (much of it while still in college) and even went on several Sox road trips when Charlie (not yet Chaz) Scoggins was on vacation. Milwaukee, Baltimore, Cleveland, the Bronx, Arlington, Texas — all the garden spots. I rode the team buses (Luis Tiant was a hoot. Nobody talked to Yaz. The nicest guy was Jack Brohamer) and stayed at the team hotels.

Jack Costello, the editor whose family owned the paper, wasn’t averse to spending money, at least where travel was concerned (lunch was another matter). Now we don’t even go to the Garden because it costs too much to park.

In September of 1979 I was off to Syracuse for a feature story on Ayer’s Joe Morris, who was setting records for the Orange. From there I detoured down to Madison Square Garden where I covered Larry Bird’s first exhibition game with the Celtics. Still have the press pass to prove it.

In 1982, the paper sent me to Kitchener, Ontario, for three days to do a profile of junior hockey superstar Brian Bellows because the Bruins had the first overall pick in the draft. The stories came out OK, but the B’s went and drafted Gord Kluzak instead.

Jack sent me to Augusta National to cover five Masters Tournaments, ending with Tiger’s historic win in 1997. Got to play the course in 1990 and made birdie on the par-3 sixth with a rented Cannon 5-iron to six feet. Been living off that story ever since. Also got to take the ferry over to Long Island for two U.S. Opens at Shinnecock Hills.

Speaking of golf, in 1999 we were double-teaming the Ryder Cup in Brookline until I told Dave Pevear on Saturday night to go ahead and cover the Patriots’ game on Sunday rather than come to the U.S. funeral at TCC. A case of over-managing.

In 1980, I remember covering the horrendous clubhouse fire at Rockingham Park. It was the morning after I hit the last race, with Skip Row paying $10.20 (I kept the program).

Closer to home there was a story on Dave Boutin, a ULowell catcher from Pawtucketville who was dying of cancer. That one has always stuck with me. Dave and his mother Fleurette were a source of inspiration, even for a cynic. Absolute profiles in courage.

In 1987, they sent me to Pasadena, Calif., for Super Bowl XXI to do stories on Ayer’s Joe Morris (again), by now the Giants’ star running back. From there Mr. Costello had me drive down to San Diego to do a piece on Dennis Conner, who had brought the America’s Cup back to the States in historic fashion.

Dennis was not even in the country, but there was some good yachting talk with various officials at the leather-and-mahogany San Diego Yacht Club. Nothing like some good yachting talk on the company’s dime. At least I got to see the actual Cup.

Westford golfer Pat Bradley always made time for me whenever I needed a story. I attended her Hall of Fame induction dinner in Boston in 1991 (still have the commemorative wine glass) — and shockingly ran into her atop Mt. Washington last year after she had hiked up through thick fog at age 67.

The Golden Gloves were my beat through the ’80s and into the ’90s. I covered Micky Ward’s amateur career (and later Ward-Gatti II), saw Mike Tyson destroy a poor local kid named Jimmy Bisson in 42 seconds in 1983, got to know the tireless Arthur Ramalho and his saint of a wife, Rita, and went on five or six National Golden Gloves trips.

The most memorable of those was in Albuquerque, N.M., when Gloves director Norm Lombardi, “chaperone” Jack Baldwin and I hopped on a small plane to Las Vegas one night. I had to call Ramalho’s hotel room to find out what happened to the heavyweight we had fighting in the tournament and cranked out the story from some cheap hotel off the strip where you had to duck under the TV set when you entered the room.

Norm was obsessed with that casino game where you plug in nickels and they fall into the bin and push other nickels over a cliff for a possible 20-cent payout. Obsessed.

From 1983-85 I left to work with another mentor, Frank Dyer, at the Boston Herald. We had a blast, but there was zero chance to write so I went looking and Lowell happened to be in need of a sports editor. At age 28 I took the job.

Which brings me to the old Sun All-Star sports banquets, usually held at the Windsor (now Lenzi’s) in Dracut. By actual count I did three banquets a year for 23 years until they were discontinued in 2008 — corporate cost-cutting was the culprit.

Introducing shy high school kids and reading about their accomplishments to beaming parents for two-plus hours a night was the drill. I dreaded it at the time but looking back it was a true highlight of my career.

We were able to talk with a ton of area coaches and AD’s and athletes and parents, and it no doubt helped our high school coverage, which was always The Sun’s bread and butter.

There were usually guest speakers, too. Tom Glavine was extremely nervous and kept repeating himself. Now he’s as polished as they come. His girlfriend at the time may have been overserved. Reggie Lewis showed up with a severe burn on his right hand.

A popcorn accident in the kitchen, he told us. Wink wink. Nod nod. Jim Calhoun spoke when he was still at NU and not yet the legend he became at UConn. And there were plenty more.

I covered a Marvin Hagler fight one winter night at the Worcester Centrum and got caught again in a raging blizzard. Unwilling to wait in a long line for gas, I negotiated my beloved but totally unreliable MGB roadster back to Lowell on absolute fumes, barely able to see out the windshield. It finally gave up as I pulled into the old Rex parking lot astride the Sun office. Loved that car.

The Rex was where a Lowell cop moonlighting as a snowplow driver hit my car one night and left a note on the windshield. Thus began a long friendship with Jack Dolan.

So in the interest of wrapping this thing up, let me throw out some other names of people who have helped me along the way, made the journey more enjoyable, and in some cases even became friends:

Jack Costello, Frank Dyer, Mickey Sullivan, Jim Moriarty, Gene Manley, Ken Hughes, Kendall Wallace, Meg Buckley, Shawn Smith, Peter Flynn, Paul Daley, Chris Scott, Jim Campanini, Bill Biswanger, the entire group of sports personnel, past and present, who turned the deadlines we faced every single day into child’s play.

Then there is my aunt Joyce Dalton in Wilmington, who faithfully clipped all of my articles from day one, regardless of topic, passed judgment and sent them down the family line through Auntie Moo.

I know there are others whose names will pop into my head as I drive home after writing this. If that’s you, I apologize.

But as the great Blues Traveler song goes: “It won’t mean a thing in a hundred years.”

— 30 —

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How Apple News Plus saddles publishers with the worst of Facebook and Spotify

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Technology

Apple News Plus presents publishers with both a Facebook problem and a Spotify problem.

Like Facebook, news content would be disaggregated and mashed up with whatever Apple decides to put in front of its subscribers. Like Spotify, subscription fees would be split so many ways that no single publisher could make much money, especially compared to what it theoretically might be able to pull in from its own digital subscription efforts.

I expand on both of those thoughts in this interview with News@Northeastern.

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Jack Driscoll, former Globe editor and distinguished Northeastern alum, dies

On By Dan KennedyIn Media

Very sad news tonight as The Boston Globe is reporting that one of its former editors, Jack Driscoll, has died. Among other things, Mr. Driscoll was among the most distinguished journalism graduates of Northeastern University — back before we had a formal journalism program.

Mr. Driscoll retired from the Globe in 1993 and had a long, productive retirement at the MIT Media Lab and as a pioneering citizen journalist. Kevin Cullen has the details.

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