Patrick Soon-Shiong – Media Nation

Bluesky is having its moment; plus, Soon-Shiong reverses himself, and a local-news event in Ipswich

From the moment that Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022 and took a wrecking ball to it, millions of appalled users have sought alternatives. Mastodon, a decentralized nonprofit, got some early buzz, though it failed to gain mass traction. Threads, part of the Meta universe, has enjoyed some success, attracting 275 million users; but many of those users are also disenchanted with an algorithm that plays down news and politics.

Now Bluesky is having its moment. The most Twitter-like of the new platforms, Bluesky has experienced a surge of a million new users since the election, attracting the attention of The New York Times, The Associated Press, Slate and others. Its current user base of about 15 million makes it far smaller than Threads, but its customizable feeds, lists and starter packs, as well as its lack of an algorithm, have led many of us to conclude that it’s a better tool for sharing and discussing journalism.

As media writer Oliver Darcy puts it: “But while the masses might be joining Threads, power users in media and politics seem to now be preferring Bluesky. That is where the conversation is now forming. Even on Threads, one of the biggest topics of discussion this week is Bluesky.”

Bluesky got off to a slow start because for quite a long while you could only join by invitation. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s involvement was a poison pill for some, though he has since moved on. Today Bluesky is owned by a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company that nevertheless must adhere to some nonprofit-like principles such as “extending benefits to stakeholders like communities and employees,” as Kiplinger puts it.

In other words, Bluesky, unlike Threads and Twitter, is not under the control of an erratic billionaire.

Twitter/X still has nearly 500 million users worldwide, but it has been overrun by trolls, bots and various right-wing extremists, including Musk himself. The Guardian created a stir Wednesday when it announced that it was mostly leaving Twitter, calling it a “toxic media platform.” But many news outlets continue to make heavy use of Twitter.

Six to 10 years ago, when Twitter was at its most useful, it was a gathering place for liberals, conservatives and moderates. Unfortunately, neither Threads nor Bluesky has been able to replicate that vibe, as their user bases are overwhelmingly liberal and progressive. And thus our national discourse continues to become more polarized.

Soon-Shiong comes clean

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the other billionaire newspaper owner who killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the election, is now saying that his daughter was right all along when she cited Harris’ pro-Israel position in the war in Gaza as the reason that his Los Angeles Times did not weigh in on the presidential race.

“Somebody had asked me, ‘was that the reason?’ I said, ‘well, that wasn’t the only reason.’ Clearly, that was one of the reasons, and there are many other reasons, but I think that should be exposed really transparently about all the reasons,” he told CNN reporters Liam Reilly and Hadas Gold.

Soon-Shiong had previously denied a claim in The New York Times by his daughter, Nika, that the family had decided not to endorse because of Gaza. Instead, he said that he wanted his paper to move away from endorsements, and that he killed the Harris endorsement because the editorial board had ignored his directive to put together a nonpartisan guide to Harris’ and Donald Trump’s stands on the issues.

Now it appears that Soon-Shiong was being less than candid — or, as former LA Times journalist Matt Pearce writes, “Well, Patrick Soon-Shiong lied.” Pearce adds:

If you own large newspaper and have strong opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza, and those opinions about Gaza directly affect how you influence the newspaper’s engagement with politics and the public during an election, then you should probably print your opinion about Gaza in the newspaper you own instead of publicly dumping on your employees and claiming you’d asked them to do some other nonsense that you hadn’t actually asked them to do, and then lying to reporters about your opinions on Gaza not having influenced your political decisionmaking while publicly scolding your daughter for telling the New York Times hey my dad did this because of Gaza, which you followed by writing an internal email to your chief operating officer and executive editor to more or less elaborate at length that hey I did this because of Gaza (feelings which themselves have already gotten watered down in the only-sort-of-coming-clean interview with CNN).

The other billionaire non-endorser, of course, is Jeff Bezos, who canceled a Harris endorsement in The Washington Post at the last minute and claimed he had decided the Post should stop endorsing candidates.

There is a third billionaire non-endorser as well: Glen Taylor of The Minnesota Star Tribune, whose opinion editor announced back in August that the paper would no longer endorse. As my co-author and podcast partner Ellen Clegg wrote for What Works, that was enough to prompt outrage among former Strib opinion journalists, a group of whom published their own Harris endorsement independently.

Please come to Ipswich

If you’re on the North Shore, I’ll be moderating a panel of local-news leaders today at 6 p.m. at the True North Ale Company in Ipswich. The event is free, although donations are requested. Please register here.

The panel is being held to mark the fifth anniversary of Ipswich Local News, whose publisher, John Muldoon, will be a panelist. He’ll be joined by Kris Olson of The Marblehead Current, Erika Brown of The Manchester Cricket and Jack Lawrence of the soon-to-be-launched Hamilton-Wenham News.

At The Minnesota Star Tribune, a non-endorsement leads 15 former staffers to write their own

Last week, in a commentary for CommonWealth Beacon, I compared the outrage that greeted The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times over their non-endorsements with the relative calm with which a similar decision at The Minnesota Star Tribune was met.

I wrote that the problem with the Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and his counterpart at the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, was their last-minute cancellations of editorials endorsing Kamala Harris — and that the Strib had escaped similar opprobrium by announcing its decision back in August.

Well, not so fast. Because as Ellen Clegg reports at What Works, 15 former Star Tribune opinion journalists were so offended by the paper’s failure to endorse Harris that they wrote their own and published it online under the headline “The endorsement editorial the Star Tribune should have published.”

Ellen profiled the Strib in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Like the Post, the LA Times and, for that matter, The Boston Globe under John and Linda Henry, the Star Tribune is owned by a billionaire: Glen Taylor, who has received praise for building up the paper and transforming it into a profitable enterprise.

Earlier this year, the Star Tribune’s new editorial page editor, Phillip Morris, put an end to endorsements as part of a wide-ranging rethink of the opinion section. But Ellen writes that it’s unclear what role Taylor or publisher Steve Grove may have had in that decision.

Ellen also notes that Grove is writing a memoir and says: “Let’s hope that along with chapters about ‘reinvention, love, community, and what holds us together,’ he explains how he’ll stand up to powerful people who would prefer that the independent press heed their whims, and to the dark forces that want to extinguish it altogether.”

Correction: It’s Grove who’s writing a memoir, not Taylor, as I incorrectly wrote earlier.

Taking advantage of Jeff Bezos’ folly, publications tout Harris endorsements to sign up new readers

What is proving to be a debacle for The Washington Post is simultaneously turning into a boon for other news outlets. A week after Post owner Jeff Bezos killed an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, a number of other publications that endorsed Harris say that subscriptions are on the rise.

The Post lost 250,000 of its 2.5 million digital and print subscribers after the paper announced that it would no longer endorse candidates for political office. Bezos compounded his problems with an op-ed in which he defended the decision and whined about how hard it is to be a billionaire newspaper owner.

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Among the publications taking advantage was The Philadelphia Inquirer, which fortuitously published its endorsement of Harris last Friday, the same day that word of the Post’s non-endorsement was getting around. The Inquirer’s endorsement quickly made the rounds on social media — and, according to Sara Guaglione of Digiday, the paper immediately experienced a bump. She wrote:

After publishing its endorsement of Harris on Oct. 25, The Philadelphia Inquirer gained over 4,200 new digital subscribers, “about three times a typical week for us and our biggest week of new starts ever,” Inquirer publisher and CEO Lisa Hughes said in an emailed statement. The Inquirer also saw “a bump” in individual donations to its journalism fund with The Lenfest Institute, she added. Donations to The Inquirer’s High-Impact Journalism Fund are up about 15% since the endorsement, according to a company spokesperson, without providing exact figures.

The Seattle Times published its endorsement of Harris this past Tuesday, a day when it could take full advantage of the outrage that had broken out over Bezos’ action and by a similar action at the Los Angeles Times ordered by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Under the headline “Hell, yes! The Seattle Times edit board endorses Kamala Harris for president,” the paper’s publisher, Frank Blethen, and Kate Riley, the editorial-page editor, devote nearly as much space to disparaging the Post and the LA Times as they do to touting Harris’ credentials. (The Blethen family owns the Seattle Times.) Blethen writes:

We take our journalism and community service very seriously. We have been preparing our fifth generation for Times leadership when I step down at the end of 2025. And members of the sixth interned in our newsroom this summer.

So it is with consternation that I and editorial page editor Kate Riley learned that the publishers of two of America’s most venerable newspapers on both coasts decided not to weigh in at all, even though their editorial boards were preparing Harris endorsements.

In contrast to the Philadelphia and Seattle papers, The Boston Globe endorsed Harris back on Oct. 18, too early to take much advantage — but it’s trying nevertheless.

“Jim Dao, our editorial page editor, has been actively sharing our position on endorsements this week,” said Globe director of communications Carla Kath by email. “We are pleased with our growth in subscribers over the past few days with new subscribers indicating that they subscribed because we maintained our tradition of endorsements.” In a follow-up, though, she added, “We are not sharing numbers at this time.”

Digiday’s Guaglione reported that The Guardian has also benefited from the Post’s folly. The Guardian endorsed Harris on Oct. 23; after Bezos’ cancellation became public, Guardian US editor Betsy Reed sent an email to readers asking for donations. Guaglione wrote:

By Oct. 28, U.S. readers had pledged roughly $1.8 million to the Guardian, according to a company spokesperson. The Guardian brought in $485,000 in reader donations that Friday, a U.S. daily fundraising record. Saturday brought in even more — $619,000 in reader donations.

I’m among The Guardian’s new donors. I actually canceled the Post months ago after my employer, Northeastern University, began offering free digital subscriptions to faculty and students. Otherwise I would not have canceled the Post despite my anger at Bezos — but I did figure that the moment was right to show support for another news organization. (I was also a weekly media columnist for The Guardian from 2007 to ’11.)

During the 2016 presidential campaign and throughout the Trump presidency, news organizations benefited from an increase in subscriptions, donations and audience. Although a second Trump presidency would be far too high a price for our democracy to pay, we may be seeing the early stages of that happening once again if the worst comes to pass.

Clarification: The Seattle Times endorsed Harris on Sept. 1; that editorial is behind a paywall. The “Hell, yes!” endorsement is a follow-up, and is free.

A consumer’s guide to the poorly understood tradition of newspaper endorsements

The newspaper world was rocked last week when two billionaire owners, Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times followed by Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post, killed endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris against the wishes of their editorial boards.

Harris supporters erupted in outrage, with many of them vowing to cancel their subscriptions and demanding to know how two wealthy men could be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of the editorial process. Aren’t media moguls supposed to be rarely seen and never heard?

Now, it’s true that Bezos’s and Soon-Shiong’s actions were outrageous, but that’s because of the high-handed, disrespectful manner in which they handled the endorsements. In fact, it is perfectly acceptable for newspaper owners to involve themselves in the editorial pages. The problem is that we journalists are not very good at explaining the ethics of our trade, and we too often act arrogantly toward the public we purportedly serve. As a result, endorsements are poorly understood.

Read the rest at CommonWealth Beacon.

The fallout from the Post’s gutless decision; plus, my 2018 book portrayed a very different Bezos

Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.

The fallout over Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris has been widespread and withering, according to Hadas Gold and Brian Stelter of CNN.

Internally, 15 Post opinion writers signed a piece calling the decision (gift link) a “terrible mistake.” (The tease says 16, so perhaps the number is still growing.) Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty have weighed in separately. Ann Telnaes has a gray-wash cartoon headlined, inevitably, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned. The legendary Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement called the decision not to endorse “surprising and disappointing.”

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Externally, Max Tani of Semafor reports that some 2,000 Post subscribers had canceled by Friday afternoon.

If Bezos is still capable of shame, then the most wounding reaction had to be that of his former executive editor, Marty Baron, who took to Twitter and posted:

This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

Make no mistake: Bezos owns this decision. New York Times media reporters Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson write that the Post’s opinions editor, David Shipley, and even the ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, tried to talk him out of it, although they note that a Post spokeswoman disputed that and called it a “Washington Post decision.” Continue reading “The fallout from the Post’s gutless decision; plus, my 2018 book portrayed a very different Bezos”

Jeff Bezos, too, shows Trump ‘anticipatory obedience’; plus, death for sale, and Billy Penn at 10

Jeff Bezos. Photo (cc) 2019 by Daniel Oberhaus.

An increasing number of news organizations are becoming fearful in the face of a rising tide of fascism. The Washington Post today joined the Los Angeles Times in deciding not to endorse in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. David Folkenflik of NPR reports:

The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, would publish a note to readers online early Friday afternoon.

Shipley told colleagues the editorial board was told yesterday by management that there would not be an endorsement. He added that he “owns” this decision. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.

As with the LA Times, there has been no change in ownership at the Post, and both papers routinely have endorsed Democratic candidates in the past. The Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, courageously stood up to Trump in the face of threats during Trump’s rise in 2015 and ’16 and throughout his presidency. But the Post has been adrift in recent years, and the Bezos of 2018 is clearly not the Bezos of 2024.

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In CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter cites the historian Timothy Snyder’s warning about “anticipatory obedience,” quoting Snyder as writing that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” That appears to be what has happened with Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Now, it’s true that the very notion of newspaper endorsements may have had their day. Newspaper chains such as Alden Global Capital and Gannett have moved away from them. The New York Times, weirdly, has given up on state and local endorsements, where the editorial board’s views might be welcome, while continuing to endorse in national races. Nonprofit news outlets can’t endorse without losing their tax exemption.

But for the LA Times and the Post to take a pass on the presidential race this late in the campaign smacks of giving in to the punishment they might be subjected to if Trump returns to office. Anticipatory obedience, in other words. A thoughtful, considered explanation months ago as to why they were ending endorsements would be another matter, but this is anything but that.

Meanwhile, the Times Union of Albany, New York, part of the Hearst chain, endorsed Harris today, writing:

For all Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about the weaponization of government, it’s Mr. Trump who has threatened to fire thousands of diligent career civil servants, fill the federal workforce with his loyal minions, use the Justice Department to hound political adversaries, and sic the military on citizens who protest against him.

This is not the talk of a person fit to be president for all Americans. On the issues and on character, it’s Ms. Harris who can be entrusted with the power and responsibility of the presidency.

This has been a shameful week for the LA Times and The Washington Post, and now it’s been punctuated by a much smaller paper’s willingness to step into the breach.

Merchants of death

One of the worst consequences of the local news crisis has been the rise of the oxymoronic paid obituary. Sorry, but obits are news stories with journalistic standards. If someone is paying for it, then it’s not an obit, it’s an ad — a death notice, in other words.

Bill Mitchell has a stunning piece up at Poynter Online about the venerable Hartford Courant, now owned by the cost-slashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital. It seems that a respected former staff reporter named Tom Condon died recently — and the Courant, rather than producing its own obit, picked up the one published in CT Mirror, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available for a fee to other news outlets. What’s more, the Courant has now slipped that obit behind a paywall.

The Courant’s website also carried an obit written by the Condon family for Legacy.com, according to Mitchell, who writes:

Paid obits, often written by and paid for by family members, have been boosting the sagging revenues of newspapers for a couple of decades. (The Courant charges about $1,200 for an obit the length of the one submitted by the Condon family, with an extra charge for a photo.) In 2019, Axios reported that more than a million paid obits were producing $500 million annually for newspapers, a small but significant chunk of overall advertising and circulation revenues then totaling about $25 billion a year.

It’s outrageous, and it’s not because newspapers are profiting from death. Rather, charging for obits is fundamentally no different from charging for any other type of news, and it corrupts what is supposed to be a journalistic endeavor.

The Courant and Alden are hardly alone in this. But for the paper to rely on another news organization to cover the death of one of its own really drives home just how far we’ve traveled down a very bad road.

Lessons from Billy Penn

Ten years ago, the digital journalism pioneer Jim Brady launched Billy Penn, a mobile-first news outlet covering Philadelphia. A few months later, I was in Philly to interview Brady and Chris Krewson, Billy Penn’s first editor, for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”

Billy Penn was eventually acquired by WHYY, Philly’s public radio station. Brady is now vice president of journalism for the Knight Foundation, and Krewson is executive editor of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers.

Krewson has written an informative and entertaining piece for LION on “10 things I’ve learned about independent publishing since launching Billy Penn in 2014.” Probably the most important of those lessons is that it took longer for Brady and Krewson to make a go of it than they were able to give — the project finally broken even in 2021, but by then WHYY was in charge.

That remains a problem for today’s start-ups, Krewson writes, although he’s hopeful that new philanthropic efforts such as Press Forward will give them the runway they need to build toward sustainability.

More fallout from the LA Times; plus, the Sun shines in Colorado, and news deserts spread

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.

News that the Los Angeles Times would not endorse a candidate for president has quickly ballooned into yet another crisis for Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s feckless and irresponsible owner.

Mariel Garza, the Times’ editorials editor, quit on Wednesday, reports Sewell Chan in the Columbia Journalism Review. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

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Chan, by the way, is a former editorial-page editor at the Times. He was recently named editor of the CJR after previously working as editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune.

Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon, responded to the criticism with a post on Twitter suggesting that he wanted to publish a side-by-side analysis of Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s strengths and weaknesses, but that the editorial board refused to comply:

In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.

Needless to say, the purpose of a newspaper’s opinion pages is to express opinions, not to offer “non-partisan information.”

Now, let’s back up a bit and look at the role of owners at large metropolitan newspapers like the LA Times. Ethically, owners should stay clear of news coverage, but Soon-Shiong reportedly violated that edict by interfering with a story about a friend whose dog had bitten someone, of all things. Natalie Korach reported in The Wrap earlier this year that the incident played a role (along with deep cuts in the newsroom) in executive editor Kevin Merida’s decision to quit in January of this year.

On the other hand, owners are free to exert their influence on the editorial pages. Indeed, at one time the lure of exercising political influence was one of the main reasons that rich people bought newspapers. So Soon-Shiong did not act unethically in killing an editorial endorsing Harris for president. Even so, his actions were high-handed and disrespectful, and by acting as he did at the last minute — instead of, say, announcing a no-endorsement policy earlier this year — he precipitated a crisis. In fact, as Max Tani noted in Semafor on Tuesday, the Times had endorsed in state and local races just last week.

Another consideration is the effect that endorsements actually have on political campaigns. A good rule of thumb is that the smaller and more obscure the race, the more that a newspaper’s opinion might actually influence the outcome. A presidential endorsement is the opposite of that, which Garza acknowledged in her resignation letter:

I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many “Trump is unfit” editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her.

But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.

Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state — and one of the largest in the nation still — declined to endorse in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.

Garza gets at something that is at least as important as influencing voters. An endorsement is how a news organization expresses its values. And what Soon-Shiong has expressed is that his newspaper is going to remain neutral at a time when a fascist (according to two generals who served under Trump, John Kelly and Mark Milley, language that Harris herself has now adopted) is seeking to return to office.

Newspapers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe have endorsed Harris. Yet, in a potentially ominous sign, The Washington Post so far has not.

Unlike the public manner in which the LA Times’ non-endorsement has played out, there’s no indication of what’s going on at the Post. Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that the Post’s silence is starting to raise eyebrows, as well as new questions about its ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. Darcy writes that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, “has repeatedly been targeted by Donald Trump over the years” and “is not alone amongst the rich and powerful who may prefer to stay as far away from politics as possible this election cycle.”

Let’s hope the Post is heard from soon.

The Sun is shining

A little over a year ago, The Colorado Sun announced it was switching from a hybrid for-profit/nonprofit ownership model to nonprofit governance. At the time, co-founder and editor Larry Ryckman (now the publisher) said that whatever misgivings he might have about the nonprofit model, it gave the Sun an easier story to tell to prospective funders.

“Whether I agree with it or not, whether I even like it or not, the reality is that many individuals, many institutions and philanthropic groups, have concluded that journalism should be nonprofit,” Ryckman told me in an interview for Nieman Lab. “I have my own thoughts on that, but that is reality.”

Well, now the switch has paid off. Ryckman announced earlier this week:

The Colorado Sun has been awarded a $1.4 million grant from the American Journalism Project. AJP is a national nonprofit whose purpose is to boost nonprofit journalism around the country, and it has thus far committed $62.7 million to 49 news organizations across 35 states.

The grant will be spread over three years, and the funds will be used to strengthen the long-term sustainability and future expansion of The Sun. This will include growing our fund development efforts and bolstering our business operations to allow us to deepen our impact in Colorado, while laying the foundation for the next era of high-quality, nonprofit journalism in our state — ensuring that Coloradans have the news they deserve for generations to come.

Before becoming a nonprofit, the Sun was a public benefit corporation, a for-profit that operates under certain restrictions and requirements. It also had a relationship with a nonprofit organization, which allowed donors to support the Sun’s journalism with tax-deductible contributions.

The Sun, by the way, is one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I feature in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Ryckman has been a guest on our podcast as well.

The crisis continues

The Colorado Sun’s good news notwithstanding, the local news crisis continues unabated and may be getting worse. That was the message at a webinar Wednesday to mark the release of the third annual State of Local News report from the Medill School at Northwestern University.

“The crisis in local news is snowballing,” said Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. Franklin said that more than 3,000 newspapers have closed since 2005, about a third of the total, with a concomitant decline in newspaper jobs, which he called “a staggering loss.”

Zach Metzger, who runs the project now that founder Penelope Abernathy has retired, added: “News deserts are continuing to expand.”

I plan to look more closely at the data and write a follow-up at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a thorough overview of the new report.

What does it mean to ‘publish’ in the age of Section 230? Plus, Olivia Nuzzi update, and media notes

What does it mean to “publish” something? In the pre-social media era, that question was easy enough to answer. It became a little more complicated in 1996, when Congress passed a law called Section 230, which protects internet providers from liability for any third-party content that might be posted on their sites.

But those early online publishers were newspapers and other news organizations as well as early online services such as CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. None of them was trying to promote certain types of third-party content in order to drive up engagement and, thus, ad revenues.

Today, of course, that’s the whole point. Algorithms employed by social media companies such as Meta (Facebook, Instagram and Threads), Twitter and TikTok use sophisticated software that figures out what kind of content you are more likely to engage with with so they can show you more of it. Such practices have been linked to, among other things, genocide in Myanmar as well as depression and other mental health issues.

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So again, what does it mean to “publish”? I’ve argued since as far back as 2017 that elevating some third-party content over others could be considered publication rather than simply acting as a passive receptacle of whatever stuff comes in over the digital transom.

A print publication, after all, is legally responsible for everything it encompasses, including ads (the landmark Times v. Sullivan libel decision involved an advertisement) and letters to the editor. It would be neither practical nor desirable to hold social media companies responsible for all third-party content. But again, if they are boosting some content to make it more visible because they (or, rather, their unblinking algorithms) think it will get them more engagement and make them more money, how is that not an act of publishing? Why should it be protected by federal law?

Earlier this week, investigative journalist Julia Angwin wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times (gift link) arguing that the tide may be turning against the social media giants, in part because of TikTok’s aggressive use of its algorithmic “For You” feed, which has been emulated by the other platforms. A showdown over Section 230 may be headed for the Supreme Court. She writes:

If tech platforms are actively shaping our experiences, after all, maybe they should be held liable for creating experiences that damage our bodies, our children, our communities and our democracy….

My hope is that the erection of new legal guardrails would create incentives to build platforms that give control back to users. It could be a win-win: We get to decide what we see, and they get to limit their liability.

I don’t think there’s a good-faith argument to be made that reforming Section 230 would harm the First Amendment. We would still have the right to publish freely, subject to long-existing prohibitions against libel, incitement, serious breaches of national security and obscenity. And internet providers would still be held harmless for any content posted by their users. But it would end the legal absurdity that a tech platform can boost harmful content and then claim immunity because that content originated with someone else. (Ironically, those third-party posters are fully liable for their content if they can be identified and tracked down.)

As Angwin notes, Ethan Zuckerman of UMass Amherst, a respected thinker about all things digital, is suing Meta for the right to develop software that would allow users to control their own experience on Facebook. Angwin also touts Bluesky, a Twitter alternative that allows its users to design their own feeds (you can find me at @dankennedy-nu.bsky.social).

We should all have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But the platforms that control so much of our lives should should have the same freedoms that the rest of us have — and that should not include the freedom to boost harmful content without any legal consequences because of the fiction that they are not engaged in an act of publishing. It’s long past time to make some changes to Section 230.

Olivia Nuzzi departs

Olivia Nuzzi’s separation agreement with New York magazine was heavily lawyered, according to reports, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. But the magazine’s statement that its law firm found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” in her work needs to be placed in context. Liam Reilly and Hadas Gold of CNN report on Nuzzi’s departure.

Nuzzi, you may recall, was involved in some sort of sexual (but not physical) relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that may have encompassed sexting and nude selfies — we still don’t know.

But as I wrote last month, after Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy became public, she wrote a very tough piece about President Biden’s alleged age-related infirmities while Kennedy was still a presidential candidate and an oddly sympathetic profile of Donald Trump after Kennedy had left the race, endorsed Trump and made it clear that he was hoping for a high-level job in a Trump White House.

Maybe Nuzzi would have written those two stories exactly the same way even if she had never met Kennedy. But we’ll never know.

Media notes

• Billionaire ambitions. Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times reports (gift link) that a Florida billionaire named David Hoffmann has bought 5% of the cost-cutting Lee Enterprises newspaper chain, and that he hopes to help revive the local news business. “These local newspapers are really important to these communities,” Hoffman told Mullin. “With the digital age and technology, it’s changing rapidly. But I think there’s room for both, and we’d like to be a part of that.” Lee owns media properties in 73 U.S. markets, including well-known titles such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Buffalo News.

• Silent treatment. Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose ownership of the Los Angeles Times has been defined by vaulting ambitions and devastating cuts, has stumbled once again. Max Tani of Semafor reports that the Times will not endorse in this year’s presidential content, even though it published endorsements in state and local races just last week. The decision to abstain from choosing between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Tani writes, came straight from Soon-Shiong, who made his wealth in the health-care sector. Closer to home, The Boston Globe endorsed Harris earlier this week.

• Reaching young voters. Santa Cruz Local, a digital nonprofit, has announced an ambitious idea to engage with young people: news delivered by text messages and Instagram. “We want to reach thousands of students with civic news and help first time voters get to the ballot box,” writes Kara Meyberg Guzman, the Local’s co-founder and CEO. The Local’s Instagram-first election guide will be aimed at 18- to 29-year-olds in Santa Cruz County, with an emphasis on reaching local college students; Guzman is attempting to raise $10,000 in order to fund it. Santa Cruz Local was one of 205 local news organizations to receive a $100,000 grant from Press Forward last week. Guzman was also interviewed in the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” and on our podcast.

If the LA Times’ owner had stepped up, the LA Local News Initiative might not be needed

Los Angeles with Mount Baldy in the background. Photo (cc) 2019 by Alek Leckszas.

The American Journalism Project announced this week that it’s raising $15 million to cover underserved communities in Los Angeles. The news was broken Tuesday by Axios media reporter Sara Fischer.

What’s been left unsaid (although Rick Edmonds of Poynter observes that it’s being hinted at) is that this is being driven by the abject failure of the Los Angeles Times’ celebrity billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, to step up and provide the region with the journalism that it needs. Indeed, among the board members of the new Los Angeles Local News Initiative is Kevin Merida, who quit as executive editor of the Times amid budget cuts and reports that Soon-Shiong was interfering with Merida’s editorial judgment.

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For a metropolitan area the size of LA, $15 million is a drop in the bucket, though presumably it’s meant as a down payment on what will be a larger effort. The money will be spread among a variety of existing projects and could fund new outlets as well. Monica Lozano, who chairs the initiative’s board, told Fischer: “We believe no one news entity can fill all of the information needs of communities as large, complex and diverse as Los Angeles. We needed to think about a model that would match that complexity and that diversity.”

Here’s how the American Journalism Project describes the initiative in its announcement:

The L.A. Local News Initiative will launch a nonprofit organization that will operate and support local newsrooms in Los Angeles to provide coverage at neighborhood, regional, and state levels in service of L.A. communities. The initiative aims to increase the volume of coverage that enables residents to take effective action and navigate life on a local level, and that represents all L.A. communities in public discourse. It will also increase accountability journalism that keeps in check the billions of dollars in government and private spending affecting the Angelenos.

What’s sad is that the AJP should have been able to direct its attention elsewhere if Soon-Shiong hadn’t proven himself to be a feckless and irresponsible owner. An unimaginably wealthy surgeon, he and his family purchased the LA Times in 2018 for $500 million. He appeared to be exactly what the Times needed after years of chaotic ownership.

Like John and Linda Henry at The Boston Globe, Glen Taylor at The Minnesota Star Tribune and Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post (who, as we know, has run into difficulties in recent years), Soon-Shiong was seen as someone who would invest a small share of his billions into rebuilding the Times so that it could re-emerge as a profitable and growing enterprise.

Instead, Soon-Shiong showed little of the patience and judgment needed to pull it off. Worse, he used his position on the board of Tribune Publishing to allow that chain’s nine large-market daily newspapers to fall into the hands of the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital, and later sold The San Diego-Tribune (which he’d acquired as part of the LA Times deal) directly to Alden.

Meanwhile, the Times has endured cut after cut under Soon-Shiong’s stewardship, including about 115 employees, or more than 20% of the newsroom, earlier this year.

As Rick Edmonds writes of the new initiative:

While the announcement does not criticize the Los Angeles Times directly, it has numerous veiled references to what the initiative’s founders find wrong with the legacy newspaper. Its first sentence says the initiative has been undertaken in response to “drastic losses in local journalism resources.”

The shame of it is that there are only so many philanthropic dollars out there, and the money and energy being invested in Los Angeles could have been directed elsewhere — if only Soon-Shiong thought of himself as a genuine steward of journalism in Southern California.

A billionaire owner is fine as long as it’s the right billionaire

I’ve been defending billionaire media owners of late, noting that, despite the recent backlash, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis and others are far better off for being owned by the ultra-wealthy than they otherwise would be. So let me recommend Richard J. Tofel’s latest post about an owner who is unfortunately turning into a glaring exception — Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is currently in the process of dismanting the Los Angeles Times. Tofel writes:

What has already happened in LA — and the worst for the Times is likely ahead, as it’s hard to see how the paper hasn’t now been launched into a downward spiral — is not so much a refutation of the notion that rich people can save important publications as a reminder that it matters which rich people are involved.

Exactly.

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