Northeastern University – Page 3

A new biography of John Hancock calls to mind Bill Fowler’s vivid ‘The Baron of Beacon Hill’

John Hancock, better known for his signature than for his accomplishments, is the subject of a new biography, reviewed by Ted Widmer in The New York Times.

“John Hancock: First to Sign, First to Invest in America’s Independence,” by Willard Sterne Randall, is, according to Widmer’s encapsulation, the story of “an 18th-century American who seemed preordained to follow the path of his father and grandfather into the ministry, but then swerved in another direction when his father died and a wealthy uncle offered to adopt him.”

Sounds interesting, but I wish Widmer had mentioned an earlier Hancock biography — “The Baron of Beacon Hill,” published in 1980 by my friend Bill Fowler. I read it as soon as it came out, so I can’t say I remember much about it 45 years later except that it was dauntingly well researched and a great read.

William M. Fowler Jr. was one of my favorite professors at Northeastern in the 1970s and was the inspiration for my deciding to get a master’s degree in American history at Boston University. My master’s thesis, “The Boston Massacre and the Press,” came straight out of my love for Colonial New England that Bill had sparked.

There was (and is) a group of journalism students from the mid- to late ’70s who were all members of the Bill Fowler Admiration Society. We took as many classes as we could with him, and we got him to write a column called “Bygone Boston” for the Northeastern News, as the student newspaper was then known (it’s now the independent Huntington News); he wrote a similar column for MetroNorth Magazine, a short-lived venture that I published in 1989 and ’90.

Bill is still doing well. The last time I saw him was about a year ago at the opening of the revamped Archival Center at Northeastern’s Snell Library. Unfortunately, he couldn’t attend a recent alumni reunion we held a few weeks ago because he was on a long-planned vacation.

I could not find any direct evidence that Randall cites “The Baron of Beacon Hill,” although I did find some indirect hints. I wasn’t going to spend $15 on the Kindle version to find out, but at some point I’ll be sure to look. In the meantime, I recommend Fowler’s earlier biography. According to Amazon, the hardcover can be yours for just $286.80.

How Sahan Journal is using AI to streamline its operations; plus, more on search, and screening pitches

Cynthia Tu of Sahan Journal. Photo (cc) 2025 by Lev Gringauz / MinnPost

Like it or not (and my own feelings are mixed), artificial intelligence is being used by news organizations, and there’s no turning back. The big question is how.

The worst possible use of AI is to write stories, especially without sufficient human intervention to make sure that what’s being spit out is accurate. Somewhat more defensible is using it to write headlines, summaries and social-media posts — again, with actual editors checking it over. The most promising, though, is using it to streamline certain internal operations that no one has the time to do.

Become a supporter of Media Nation for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter with all sorts of exclusive goodies.

That’s what’s happening at Sahan Journal, a 6-year-old digital nonprofit that covers immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota. It’s one of the projects that Ellen Clegg profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.” And according to Lev Gringauz of MinnPost (one of the original nonprofit news pioneers), the Journal has embarked on a project to streamline some of its news and business functions with AI. (I learned about Gringauz’s story in Nieman Lab, where it was republished.)

Bolstered with $220,000 in grant money from the American Journalism Project and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, the Journal has employed AI to help with such tasks as processing financial data of the state’s charter schools, generating story summaries for Instagram, and adding audio to some articles.

The real value, though, has come in bolstering the revenue side, as the Journal has experimented with using AI to retool its media kit and to understand its audience better, such as “pulling up how much of Sahan Journal’s audience cares about public transportation.”

“We’re less enthusiastic, more skeptical, about using AI to generate editorial content,” Cynthia Tu, the Journal’s data journalist and AI specialist, told Gringauz. Even on internal tasks, though, AI has proved to be a less than reliable partner, hallucinating data despite Tu explicitly giving it commands not to scour the broader internet.

And as Gringauz observes, OpenAI is bleeding money. How much of a commitment makes sense given that Sahan Journal may be building systems on top of a platform that may cease to exist at some point?

Two other AI-related notes:

➤ Quality matters. In his newsletter Second Rough Draft, Richard J. Tofel has some useful thoughts on the panic over Google’s AI search engine, which has been described as representing an existential threat to news organizations since it will deprive them of click-throughs to their websites.

Tofel writes that clickbait will be harmed more than high-quality journalism, noting that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been hurt less than HuffPost, Business Insider and The Washington Post. “If there is one overriding lesson of publishing in the digital age,” Tofel writes, “it remains that distinctive content remains the most unassailable, the least vulnerable.”

Though Tofel doesn’t say so, I think there’s a lesson for local news publishers as well: hyperlocal journalism should be far less affected by AI search than national outlets, especially for those organizations that emphasize building a relationship with their communities.

➤ Here’s the pitch. Caleb Okereke, a Ph.D. student at Northeastern, is using AI to screen pitches for his digital publication Minority Africa. He writes that “we are receiving 10x more pitches than we did in our early days after launch,” adding: “With a lean editorial team, we faced a challenge familiar to many digital publications: how do you maintain depth, fairness, and attention when the volume scales but the staff doesn’t?”

He and his colleagues have built a customized tool called Iraka (which means “voice” in the Rutooro language) and put it to the test. As he writes, it’s far from perfect, though it’s getting better.

“As of now, editors are using Iraka individually to provide a first-pass on submissions, testing its utility alongside regular human review,” Okereke reports. “Every pitch is still manually read, and no editorial decisions are made solely based on the model’s output. This staged integration allows us to observe how the tool fits into existing workflows without disrupting the editorial process.”

Northeastern professor develops map to help local news outlets track nearby protests

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 map is free, so give it a try.

Northeastern’s Carlene Hempel and Harrison Zuritsky tell us about the Flint Unfiltered project

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.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Northeastern opinion journalism students take on topics from dementia care to research about news

Click here for full-screen view

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’s Joseph Aoun adds his voice to a statement condemning Trump’s war on higher education

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.

Earlier:

Tracing the correlation between Trump support and the local news crisis in Fall River, Mass.

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.

Six Northeastern professors urge colleges and universities to spurn ‘appeasement’

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.

Northeastern’s independent student newspaper stands up for free speech on campus

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.

Emigration, segregation, privacy and AI: Northeastern students flag undercovered stories

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.