Seattle Times – Media Nation

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.

The Star Tribune, now under new leadership, will bolster its coverage of Minnesota

Amid the evisceration of large regional newspapers at the hands of corporate and hedge-fund owners stand a few notable exceptions. The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and several others are among the major metros with committed local ownership that have managed to survive and even thrive. So, too, with the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, which under billionaire owner Glen Taylor has undergone a renaissance, transforming itself into a profitable business and a Pulitzer factory.

Now the Strib is growing. As Ellen Clegg writes at What Works, new CEO and publisher Steve Grove is expanding the paper’s reach into the more rural parts of the state, where the lack of reliable news and information is especially acute. Ellen writes:

The expansion plans are nothing if not ambitious. The newsroom has posted jobs for reporters in north central and southwest Minnesota and is expanding existing teams in communities outside the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Back in the downtown Minneapolis office, the Strib is launching a “Today Desk” to track breaking news online and beefing up that reporting team. Grove is also in the market for a greater Minnesota columnist to roam the state’s rural communities and report on trends — the kind of coverage that has been harder for small nonprofit media startups to sustain.

The Star Tribune is one of the projects that Ellen and I write about in our book “What Works in Community News,” which was published today by Beacon Press.

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A for-profit newspaper asks its readers for donations in the name of its journalists

Several readers called this Washington Post piece to my attention over the weekend. It’s about a fundraising drive recently held by the Tampa Bay Times to offset some of the advertising revenue it lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Post reporter Elahe Izadi observes that the idea isn’t entirely new. The Seattle Times has engaged in community fundraising drives, and The Times-Picayune and The New Orleans Advocate (one entity) received $1 million over the summer from the Ford Foundation. For that matter, The Boston Globe pays for some of its education reporting with a $600,000 grant from the Barr Foundation.

What makes the Tampa Bay project unusual is that the paper asked for people to donate in support of individual journalists, by name. That makes me a little uncomfortable, and I hope the next time they do this they abandon that particular wrinkle.

As you may know, the Tampa Bay Times, a for-profit newspaper, is owned by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism education institute. Back when Nelson Poynter melded the Times and the institute together, the expectation was that the newspaper — rolling in cash — could use some of its revenues to support the institute.

Needless to say, that stopped a long time ago. The Times has struggled for the past few years, and has cut back its print edition to twice a week. It’s still a great ownership model, though, emulated several years ago when Philadelphia Inquirer owner Gerry Lenfest donated his paper to the nonprofit Philadelphia Foundation. After Lenfest’s death, the organization that was set up to own the Inquirer and make investments in journalism was renamed the Lenfest Institute.

By the way, I really like the front page of today’s Tampa Bay Times. Let’s just hope they’re not fundraising off a commemorative issue later this week. Go Sox!

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Stomp out clichés and aim for ‘austerity of language’

By Bill Kirtz

If you feel under par, work your fingers to the bone, and know it’s time for a change, click on the Cliché Site to trade tired phrases for compelling images.

That was one of myriad tips from top nonfiction writers last weekend at Boston University’s annual narrative journalism conference.

Organized by BU journalism department writer-in-residence Mark Kramer, the conference drew some 400 writers and editors from around the world. They discussed everything from viral content to social justice reporting to humanizing even the worst criminals.

Kramer preached his well-known gospel of “austerity of language: elegant, taut” prose that convinces readers they’re in the hands of an engaging storyteller. “Go on a to be hunt,” he said. “Get rid of whens and as’s. Lose clichés and metaphors.”

Keynote speaker Jill Abramson, a former New York Times executive editor now teaching at Harvard, repeated the good writing mantra: “Show, don’t tell. Collect anecdotes and revealing detail.” She called Gay Talese’s 1966 classic “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” the epitome of the narrative genre.

Abramson had good news and bad news as journalism faces a “rapid riptide of change.” The good: long, ambitious reporting is in high demand. She singled out BuzzFeed’s “wonderful” criminal justice series and former Times colleague Jeff Gerth’s exposé of Hillary Clinton’s private emails as exemplars of excellent coverage delivered over new platforms. Gerth, a two-time Times Pulitzer winner now with ProPublica, co-wrote the March 27 article with Gawker reporter Sam Biddle.

The bad news, according to Abramson: worldwide legal threats to freedom of the press. She noted that a study of corruption in Russia under President Vladimir Putin hasn’t been published in Britain because of fears of legal action.

Abramson sees storytelling platforms consistently shifting, with platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram giving nonfiction writers new tools and outlets.

One of those is BuzzFeed, where Mark Schoofs, a Pulitzer winner at The Village Voice, now leads an investigative unit as the site augments viral content with some 130 domestic and foreign news staffers,

Schoofs said social justice reporting hasn’t changed much since Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell and others started muckraking powerful institutions more than 100 years ago. As ever, he said, it is based on “the desire to change, to expose a wrong, to have your journalism matter.”

He said these stories may start with “outrage,” but you have to skewer sacred cows if their assertions are incorrect. “You’re not in the tank for any one ideology or group. Test your assumptions versus whatever you see on the ground.”

He loves immersive participatory journalism and stories that have wrongdoing at their heart, calling David Barstow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Times series on Wal-Mart bribery one of the best in recent years.

Exposing wrongdoing? Fine. But why humanize evil-doers?

Beth Schwartzapfel examines the inner lives of rapists and murderers because “just calling someone a scumbag is lazy, way too easy. He’s a person” and understanding him can be a valuable way to examine what made him do it.

Schwartzapfel is a staff writer with the Marshall Project, a new nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers the criminal justice, system; she is also a frequent freelancer. She tries to get beyond obvious good guy/bad guy distinctions, asking what if Truman Capote’s groundbreaking “In Cold Blood” had ignored the killers and concentrated only on their victims.

Profiling a man who’s served more than three decades for a murder he committed as a teenager, she doesn’t gloss over what he did. She includes graphic descriptions of the crimes and always details the victim’s family’s grievous loss.

“Don’t give [inmates] a soapbox,” she said. “Being sympathetic is not being their advocate. Let readers come to their own conclusions” about whether they deserve parole. “Show how they’re human, not how they’ve been wronged. That’s up to the reader to decide. I tell them ‘I see it as my task to make you human.’”

As an example of a profile that goes far beyond the image of a stock villain, she praised Albert Samaha’s Village Voice profile of a New York City detective who framed innocent men to boost his conviction rate.

Some dismiss memoir as an unreliable narrator’s narcissistic ramble through the past. But in “Big Little Man,” Alex Tizon created a highly praised blend of history, memoir and social analysis.

“Many people dismiss memoir as easy, and a lot of the time memoir is just a cheaper form of storytelling — but it doesn’t have to be,” said Tizon, who won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting while at The Seattle Times. “Report the hell out of your own story,” he advised, having interviewed about 40 people for his book’s exploration of Asian-American masculinity.

To write a memoir, he said, “you have to risk being a fool unless you’re writing public relations. Include the painful parts. I put my siblings at a certain risk — what to leave out? I had to ask, ‘Could I live with this if a sister never spoke to me again?’ The truth is impossible, but my aim is to be as truthful as possible.”

Bill Kirtz is an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

Poynter analyst hails Globe’s prospects

Earlier this month, before the New York Times Co. announced it was putting The Boston Globe up for sale for the second time in four years, Poynter Institute business analyst Rick Edmonds sat down with Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab for the lab’s weekly podcast, “Press Publish.”

Toward the end of their nearly hour-long conversation, Benton asked Edmonds which newspapers he thought had the brightest prospects over the next few years. Edmonds responded that he could think of four major metros that were getting it right: the Globe, the Seattle Times, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Tampa Bay Times — formerly and still better known as the St. Petersburg Times.

(It should be noted that Poynter owns the Tampa Bay Times, although I think anyone would point to that paper as one model for how to do it right.)

What Edmonds meant: the four papers had done a better job than most of maintaining the quality and depth of their journalism while at the same time achieving some measure of success financially. Earlier in the podcast, Edmonds voiced his enthusiasm for flexible online paywalls such as the Globe’s (now becoming less flexible).

As another prominent newspaper analyst, Ken Doctor, observes, a lot of newspapers are likely to be sold in the months ahead. The business has recovered slightly since the depths of 2009 and prices are low. Of course, prices are low because the long-term prospects for newspapers remain grim. Still, there are no doubt a number of prospective owners who have enough money and ego to think that they will be the great exception.

Seen in that light, the Globe is a prime property that can be acquired for an attractive price. “The Globe isn’t going anywhere,” Globe columnist Kevin Cullen writes. “It’s changing owners.”