On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Bill and Linda Forry, co-publishers of the award-winning Reporter newspapers in Boston. Bill serves as editor, and Linda focuses on business development and strategic partnerships.
The Reporter newspapers include the weekly Dorchester Reporter as well as Boston Irish and BostonHaitian.com. The publications and their websites are part of a media business owned and operated by the Forry family since 1973.
The Forrys were recently in the news. The Reporter is one of 205 news organizations in the U.S. to win an inaugural Press Forward grant to expand coverage of Boston’s underserved communities.
I’ve got a Quick Take on public radio. Put bluntly, public radio is in trouble, and not just NPR, which may be our leading source of reliable free news, but also public radio stations across the country. An important recent essay in Nieman Reports argues that the way forward for public radio stations may be to double down on local news.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on the Nieman Lab predictions for the media industry in 2025. Every year, Nieman Lab asks a select group of people what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Sam Mintz, the editor of Brookline.News, a digital outlet Ellen helped launch, is one of the prognosticators.
Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.
On this last day of 2024, I’m taking a look back before we plunge ahead into the new year. Media Nation’s 10 most viewed posts for the year range from my takedown of an intellectually dishonest critique of NPR, to CBS News’ reprimand of an on-air host for being too confrontational with a guest, to news that The Boston Globe is seeking to acquire Boston magazine. So let’s get right to it.
1. Fish in a barrel: Berliner’s case against NPR is based on false and out-of-context facts (April 11). Uri Berliner, a top editor at NPR, created a stir when he accused his employer of liberal bias in a long essay for The Free Press. The problem was that his examples didn’t hold up to scrutiny. To name just one: Berliner wrote that NPR failed to confess its sins after special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia, which isn’t even remotely what Mueller reported. There was a lot more disingenuousness where that came from. Berliner ended up resigning his post at NPR and going to work for — yes, The Free Press.
2. Less news, more happy talk: Why CBS News’ reprimand of Tony Dokoupil is so ridiculous (Oct. 8). Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates popped up on the CBS morning newscast to promote latest book, “The Message,” and faced an unexpectedly tough grilling over his anti-Israeli views from co-host Tony Dokoupil. Among other things, Dokoupil told Coates that his book woudn’t be out of place “in the backpack of an extremist.” Coates gave as good as he got, and he probably sold a few more books than he otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CBS News management called Dokoupil on the carpet — probably because his attempt to commit journalism contradicted the light banter that defines the morning-news format.
3. A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis (Jan. 29). A Globe report about the death of a new mother at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital had something in common with the same forces that have hollowed out much of the local-news business. The mother’s death may have been caused by the hospital’s lacking a basic piece of equipment that had been repossessed because its corporate owner, Steward Health Care, wasn’t paying its bills. Steward, in turn, had been pillaged by a private-equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which is the same outfit that helped the notorious newsroom-gutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital acquire Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers in 2021.
Something has gone wrong with public radio. After years of standing as the shining exception to an otherwise shrinking news landscape, multiple stations over the past year have implemented budget cuts and lowered their ambitions.
Locally, both WBUR and GBH News have laid off employees (most of GBH’s cuts were in its local TV programs). Elsewhere, operations such as WAMU in Washington, WNYC in New York and Colorado Public Radio have all been hit by a rapidly changing economic environment.
Pulling it all together is Gabe Bullard, a veteran of public media who has written an in-depth story for Nieman Reports arguing that the problem with public radio is that, well, it’s on the radio. The internet destroyed the distribution channels for newspapers. Radio seemed immune. But now, COVID-induced changes in commuting patterns plus the rise of podcasts mean that dramatically fewer people are listening to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” while they’re in the cars. Bullard writes:
When COVID restrictions lifted, many listeners continued commuting, but they did it less — two days a week instead of five, for example. Others had grown used to new routines built around podcasts, and many were driving cars that defaulted to Bluetooth connections instead of FM radio. By 2023, the number of people listening to radio had dropped 21 percent from 2018. In 2024, Edison Research found that listeners spent more time with their phones than with the radio, and more time with on-demand audio (podcasts, audiobooks, playlists, YouTube) than linear (streaming or broadcast radio).
I am atypical, but when you put enough atypical cases together they can add up to a trend. I used to be a heavy public radio listener, spending long hours driving back and forth to Boston. After we moved closer to the city in 2015, I started taking public transportation and spent my commutes reading news on my phone rather than listening to the radio. We no longer even have a radio at home, although I do listen to GBH and WBUR (as well as podcasts and books) on my phone — but not nearly as much as I did when I was stuck in my car.
The upshot, Bullard writes, is that local stations and NPR have eliminated more than 400 jobs in the past two years, and sometimes they’ve gotten rid of digital ventures that seemed like the key to the future — such as WAMU’s decision to close down the DCist local website.
Fortunately, WAMU’s decision was something of an anomaly. Colorado Public Radio continues to operate Denverite, WHYY in Philadelphia still operates the mobile-first local website Billy Penn and Chicago Public Media’s acquisition of the Chicago Sun-Times has kept that city’s second daily newspaper alive. Which is a good thing, because, as Bullard argues, the key for public radio may be in offering more local journalism: “What stations can offer that’s different from podcasts is reporting from a listener’s own community.”
Not too many years ago, the economic outlook for public radio was so bright relative to newspapers that station operators were urged to look at their stations as though they were the No. 2 paper in their city — or, in some cases, the dominant news outlet. In 2023, Thomas Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote an essay titled “Can Local Public Radio Help Fill the News Gap Created by the Decline of Local Newspapers?” His answer: Yes, although new funding sources would need to be identified. (I wrote a response to Patterson for our What Works site.)
Now public radio is fighting for its economic life, and the return of Donald Trump to the White House may make the situation even worse. So what is the way forward? Truly local coverage is a non-starter because of the need to appeal to a wide audience. But doubling down on regional news (which is really what Bullard and Patterson are talking about) is a possible way out of its dilemma.
With journalism at major metropolitan newspapers disappearing behind paywalls, public radio’s advantage is that it’s freely available to everyone. Of course, it’s also heavily dependent on donations from foundations and ordinary listeners, and you should support your local station if you’re able. But as Bullard argues, the days of flipping the switch to national programming from NPR and watching the money roll in are over.
There have been rumblings for a while that it was time for news organizations to bring back the position of ombudsperson, also known as the public editor — an in-house journalist who would look at issues in coverage and render a judgment.
At one time the job was fairly common at many larger news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. But as the business model for journalism deteriorated, the position was increasingly seen as a luxury.
On Tuesday, The Dallas Morning News took a step in the right direction, hiring a public editor who will be independent of the newsroom and report directly to the publisher: Stephen Buckley, a journalism professor at Duke University, who is a longtime journalist and has worked for The Washington Post, the Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute. His first column will be published on May 12. According to a press release:
Through active reader engagement and a regular column, Buckley will use an independent lens to help provide readers with understanding and clarity and hold the News accountable for adhering to its high standards. Buckley will be an observer and advocate while informing readers how the News reported controversial topics and issues as they arise.
In an interview with Tom Jones, who writes Poynter’s daily newsletter, Buckley called his hiring “a really bold, counterintuitive move. And the motivation is exactly right, which is: the most important issue for our industry is reestablishing trust with the public.” Oddly, Buckley also said, “I don’t represent the newsroom and I don’t represent the readers.” The public editor’s position has sometimes been described as that of a reader representative. But if Buckley wishes to emphasize his independence, that’s not a bad thing.
A year ago I called for the Globe to restore its long-abolished ombudsman position after the paper published a flawed investigation of MBTA executives who worked from distant locales. It turned out that the story wrong was about some of those executives, and it led to the departure of veteran investigative reporter Andrea Estes. The Globe has never explained what went wrong or why Estes, a respected journalist, was fired. Estes is now doing good work as a reporter for the nonprofit Plymouth Independent.
More recently, Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr wrote that it was time for news organizations to bring back the public editor, taking note specifically of the oft-voiced criticism that The New York Times’ political coverage is too often marred by both-sides-ism — a criticism I’ve been making for many years. For a long time, the Times employed excellent public editors, culminating in Margaret Sullivan, its penultimate and best in-house critic. But the position was abolished after Sullivan’s successor, Liz Spayd, clashed with the newsroom over a few questionable judgments she offered.
NPR still has a public editor, Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, and she demonstrates why the position is valuable. She was a guest on last week’s public radio program “On the Media,” offering some thoughtful insights into the recent controversy over former senior business editor Uri Berliner, who resigned from NPR after writing an error-filled essay about what he regards as the network’s liberal bias.
For many news organizations that are still facing financial challenges, bringing back a paid in-house critic may seem like a bad idea. Large newspapers like The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are losing money and cutting staff. But The New York Times and the Globe are profitable and growing. At a moment when trust in the media is at a historic low, hiring a public editor can represent a small but significant step to restoring that trust.
New York will become the first state to offer a tax credit aimed at helping local news organizations. According to Rebuild Local News, which has been pushing for several different tax credits at the federal and state levels, the New York legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul have agreed to a budget provision that will set aside $30 million a year for three years in order to offset the cost of hiring and retaining journalists.
Although the plan is multi-faceted, there are two aspects that I think are especially worthy of note.
The first is that calling it a “tax credit” is something of a misnomer — rather, it’s a payroll credit available to all news publishers, including nonprofits, which don’t pay taxes, and for-profits operating at a loss, which are also exempt from taxes under most circumstances. Zachary Richner, the founder of the 200-member Empire State Local News Coalition, explained that in a recent appearance on “E&P Reports,” a vodcast hosted by Mike Blinder, publisher of the trade publication Editor & Publisher. Given the importance of nonprofit startups in helping to solve the local news crisis, it makes sense to include them.
The second is that newspapers owned by publicly traded corporations are ineligible for assistance. That would exclude Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, which is notorious for its slash-and-burn approach to managing its newsrooms. According to the chain’s website, Gannett currently owns 12 daily newspapers in New York, including well-known titles such as the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester and the Times Herald-Record of Middletown.
Gannett shouldn’t be rewarded for destroying newspapers, but the provision does lead to some anomalies. For instance, Alden Global Capital, which, like Gannett, is notorious for driving up profits by hollowing out its newspapers, would presumably be eligible for assistance because it is a privately held hedge fund rather than a public company. On Twitter/X, I asked Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, whether Alden would be able to put its hands on some state money. His answer: “Yes. I think so.”
Alden’s MediaNews Group chain owns four dailies in New York, including The Record of Troy, and The Saratogian. Alden also owns New York City’s legendary Daily News, which is listed as being part of MediaNews but which I understand is managed separately.
If I might speculate, it could be that there are several privately held chain owners in New York that are doing good work and that proponents of the credit didn’t want to exclude them. The largest privately held national chain doing business in New York is Hearst, whose Times Union of Albany is a well-regarded paper (but is not part of the Empire State coalition). In any case, even if Alden’s papers get some of the money, it provides an incentive for them to do the right thing.
Some other details of interest, quoting Rebuild Local News:
No newsroom can get more than $320,000.
The subsidy to newsrooms will be based on the number of employees. The benefit will be up to $25,000 per employee (50% of the salary up to a $50,000 wage.)
$13 million for firms with fewer than 100 employees, $13 million for bigger ones, $4 million for new hires.
As I said up top, there have been a number of tax credits proposed to help local news outlets over the past few years. The best known, the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, would have created credits not just for publishers but also for subscribers and advertisers. President Biden included a credit for publishers in his Build Back Better bill, which died at the end of 2021.
The question, as always, is whether government assistance to local news is a good idea. U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., recently filed legislation to defund NPR in response to former senior editor Uri Berliner’s error-filled lament that the network has fallen in with the progressive left. Tenney, as it happens, is a lead sponsor of the Community News and Small Business Support Act, a bipartisan bill that would create tax credits for local publishers and advertisers.
Mike Blinder raised the issue of government interference with Richner and Waldman, who was also a guest on Blinder’s recent podcast. They responded, essentially, that the New York tax credit was worded in a neutral manner so that news organizations could not be punished for their specific content.
I agree that tax credits are about as neutral and arm’s-length as you can get in insulating journalism from government pressure. But it’s always going to be a challenge. Given that the New York credit expires after three years, you can be sure there will be a debate over whether to renew it as the expiration date approaches. That, in turn, will give politicians an opportunity to redefine eligibility requirements — and there’s always a possibility that some assessment of content might be part of that.
Still, the New York system seems like an experiment worth trying, and I’d like to see it spread to other states.
The New York Times has the story. Berliner posted on social media, “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new C.E.O. whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.” Dishing out, not able to take it, etc.
Old-school paywalls. Photo (cc) 2008 by Dan Kennedy.
•Are we really doing this again? Richard Stengel argues in the paywall-protected Atlantic (free link) that news organizations should publish their journalism for free during the 2024 campaign lest readers be driven to non-paywalled sources of misinformation and disinformation. He provides no advice on how these news organizations are supposed to pay their journalists, and he makes no mention of the many high-quality sources of free news that still exist — among them The Associated Press, NPR, the PBS “NewsHour,” The Guardian, BBC News, local public radio and television stations, national network newscasts and local TV newscasts. You may disdain that last suggestion, but surveys show that local TV news is the most trusted source of journalism we have, and it’s an important source of breaking news.
•Still more on the internal crisis at NPR. Alicia Montgomery, who held several high leadership posts at NPR before moving to Slate, has written her own essay about what’s wrong with the network’s culture, partly in response to Uri Berliner, partly to get a few things of her own off her chest. Montgomery’s essay is nuanced, and she acknowledges that NPR’s culture can be more than a little twee. But here’s the money quote: “In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” That certainly reflects my experience as a listener — that though NPR may tilt left on culture, its coverage of politics too often indulges in both-sides-ism at its most reductionist. And here’s yet another piece prompted by Berliner’s essay, this one by NPR anchor Steve Inskeep.
•Two digital news giants walk into a room… Richard Tofel, a founder and former president of the investigative nonprofit ProPublica, recently interviewed Evan Smith, a founder and the former CEO of The Texas Tribune, the largest statehouse nonprofit in the U.S. My colleague Ellen Clegg, who wrote about the Tribune for our book, “What Works in Community News,” offers her perspective on the encounter — which took place not in a room but in Tofel’s must-read newsletter, “Second Rough Draft.” As Ellen writes: “When two legends in digital publishing sit down to talk in unvarnished terms about the past, present and future of nonprofit journalism, it’s worth noting. And reading.”
Two new developments in the ongoing brouhaha at NPR over Uri Berliner’s essay accusing the network of left-wing bias in its news coverage:
• NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that Berliner has been suspended without pay for five days for failing “to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists.”
This strikes me as the worst of all possible outcomes — making Berliner a martyr while keeping him on staff. At least in theory, an NPR editor ought to be able to voice concerns about the network’s ideological direction while remaining employed. But by running to Bari Weiss’ conservative opinion outlet, The Free Press, and by voicing his complaints as loudly and as frequently as possible, Berliner has made it extremely difficult to do his job. How can he edit his underlings’ work, especially if they are people of color or members of another underrepresented community?
• The New York Times reported Monday that NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, posted some provocative tweets, including one calling Donald Trump a racist (editor: he is a racist), before coming to the network. Awkward? Yes. But this is her first job at a news organization, and she’s on the business side rather than the editorial side.
Naturally, Berliner can’t stop running his mouth, telling Folkenflik: “We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about. And this seems to be the opposite of that.”
Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.
Nearly 40 years ago I heard a lawyer tell a jury something in court that has stuck with me: If there’s a rotten fish floating around the top of the barrel, you’re under no obligation to reach in to see if there’s something better underneath. He was more eloquent (if no less graphic) than I, but you get the idea. If someone bolsters their argument with false or distorted facts, then you should feel free to disregard their larger point.
That’s why I want to return one more time to NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner’s long essay in The Free Press about what he regards as his employer’s move to the fringe left. Mainly he seems to be worked up about diversity workshops and a change in NPR’s audience from one that was more or less balanced ideologically to one that is overwhelmingly liberal and progressive — which, as I wrote earlier this week, is more a consequence of the great national sorting-out than of anything NPR itself has done.
But there were also three factual assertions he made. One is flat-out false; one is devoid of crucial context; and one is questionable. So here we go.
• False.Berliner writes that special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had engaged in collusion with Russia, writing, “Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.”
Berliner has essentially adopted then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s gloss of the Mueller report, which itself was false. When the full report came out, and when Mueller himself finally testified before a congressional committee, we learned that the truth was more complicated. First, “collusion” is not a legal concept. Second, there was massive evidence of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. Third, there was evidence that Trump had obstructed justice and had attempted to obstruct justice only to be stopped by those around him.
Become a supporter of this free source of news and commentary for just $5 a month.
“In his report, Mueller said his team declined to make a prosecutorial judgment on whether to charge Trump, partly because of a Justice Department legal opinion that said sitting presidents shouldn’t be indicted,” according to this detailed fact-check by The Associated Press, headlined “Trump falsely claims Mueller exonerated him.” The AP added that Mueller “deliberately drew no conclusions about whether he collected sufficient evidence to charge Trump with a crime. He merely said that if prosecutors want to charge Trump once he is out of office, they would have that ability because obstacles to indicting a sitting president would be gone.”
• Lacking crucial context. Berliner blasts NPR for failing to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the waning days of the 2020 campaign and for failing to come clean when it was later found to be genuine, writing: “The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.”
As proof, Berliner links to a Washington Post story that was published in March 2022 — that is, a year and a half after the New York Post published its initial story. That’s how long it took for The Washington to verify at least part of the hard drive’s content as genuine. The story notes: “The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post.” There’s also this:
Some other emails on the drive that have been the foundation for previous news reports could not be verified because the messages lacked verifiable cryptographic signatures. One such email was widely described as referring to Joe Biden as “the big guy” and suggesting the elder Biden would receive a cut of a business deal. One of the recipients of that email has vouched publicly for its authenticity but President Biden has denied being involved in any business arrangements.
In other words, The Washington Post was not able to find a single verified email tying President Biden to his son’s business dealings, leaving anything beyond that to the he-said/he-said that we already knew about.
In addition, Berliner makes it sounded like NPR was unique in holding back on the laptop story in October 2020. But as The New York Times reported, even the New York Post — which, after all, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — had trouble getting it out there. The reporter who wrote most of it refused to let the paper put his byline on it “because he had concerns over the article’s credibility.” Another staff member whose byline did appear did little work on the story and didn’t realize her name would be on it until after it was published.
Even worse, Fox News, Murdoch’s 800-pound gorilla, reportedly took a pass on it, according to Mediaite, because the Trump operative who brought it to them, Rudy Giuliani, could not provide “sourcing and veracity” for the emails.
Contrary to Berliner’s complaint, the restraint that NPR showed was no different from that of any other news organization — including Fox News. No more than a small portion of the emails on hard drive have ever been verified, and none of those emails suggest any wrongdoing on the part of President Biden.
• Questionable. Berliner takes NPR to task for accepting without reservation the theory that COVID-19’s origins were most likely from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China, rather than from a leak at a nearby lab, complaining that “politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.”
Admittedly, this complaint by Berliner is more legitimate than his other two examples. More than four years after the virus was discovered, we still don’t fully understand its origins, and it’s a fact that the story got caught up in our toxic political environment. As I wrote for GBH News in June 2021, the media — in their haste to dismiss a right-wing conspiracy theory that COVID was created as part of a Chinese bioweapons program — leaned too hard in the other direction, rejecting any possibility that COVID had come from anywhere other than the Wuhan market.
That said, deep dives by the media over the past several years have turned up nothing definitive, and it still seems more likely than not that COVID sprang up from the market rather than from a lab experiment gone awry. Once again, I think Berliner is being too hard on his employer.
Which appears to be the point. By going public with his complaints about the culture inside NPR, Berliner may have accomplished the impossible: He’s made it so that his continued tenure at NPR is untenable while at the same time rendering himself unfirable. I detect a resignation and a fat contract with Fox News in Berliner’s immediate future.
NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin has responded to Uri Berliner’s long piece in The Free Press lamenting what he regards as the network’s move to the progressive left. New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin obtained a memo she sent to the staff and broke the story old-school — on Twitter/X. The top line:
I and my colleagues on the leadership team strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism and the integrity of our newsroom processes. We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows to do to cover a wide range of challenging stories. We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of our country and our world.
scoop: NPR editor in chief Edith Chapin responds to Uri Berliner’s essay in @TheFP: “I and my colleagues on the leadership team strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism…” pic.twitter.com/VLz2DOkGvI
