On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos. Both are leading an expansion by the MassLive Media Group, which operates MassLive.com.
Macht, the president, previously led the digital transformation of the Harvard Business Review. Ramos is the vice president of content and executive editor of MassLive. Ramos comes to Massachusetts after leading newsrooms in Miami, Indiana, Memphis and Chicago.
MassLive is part of Advance Local, a privately owned chain that operates newspapers and websites around the country, including New Jersey, Alabama, Oregon. Advance also owns The Republican newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, but Josh and Ronnie tell us that MassLive — for which they have statewide ambitions — is operated separately.
Ronnie Ramos
In Quick Takes, I discuss an announcement Google made last week that could prove to be pretty harmful to local news publishers. Essentially Google is going to merge its search engine with Gemini, its artificial-intelligence tool, which is similar to ChatGPT. Soon, anything you search for on Google will give you not just links but an AI-generated answer. Most people aren’t going to bother with those links, thus depriving news outlets of much-needed traffic.
Ellen reviews the findings from a recent Pew Research Center poll that studied local news habits. It’s perhaps no surprise to see that the U.S. adults surveyed increasingly turn to websites and social media for their news.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I urge you to read Daniel Golden’s ProPublica feature about working in Western Massachusetts at the Springfield Daily News in the early years of his career. ProPublica allows republication, so we posted it Tuesday at What Works. Golden, who later worked at The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, is now a Boston-based reporter and editor for ProPublica, which is a well-known investigative news project.
What few people know is that the Springfield Republican, as the paper was once known (and is again), at one time was considered the finest newspaper in the region and better than its moribund brethren in Boston. Louis M. Lyons, in his 1971 authorized history of The Boston Globe, “Newspaper Story,” writes that Republican publisher Samuel Bowles was brought in to oversee the revitalization of the Boston Traveller in 1857, but that those efforts came to naught. Lyons explains:
[T]he project was undercapitalized, and Bowles’s thorny independence did not mix with Boston banking. In four months he returned to Springfield to make his provincial paper the most distinguished journal in New England. The Traveller slid back into being just another struggling Boston newspaper.
In 1905, the Massachusetts legislature considered a bill to require that the makers of patent medicines list their ingredients. The newspapers of that day gave the bill no coverage, Lyons writes, because they were highly dependent on advertising from all kinds of charlatans selling quack cures. Nationally, the patent medicine makers bought $40 million in advertising every year, and Massachusetts papers were threatened with the cancellation of those ads if the bill were to pass. Not surprisingly, the legislation went down to defeat, with only one paper in the state covered the issue: the Springfield Republican.
When Golden was working in Springfield, the city was served by the afternoon Daily News and the Morning Union, both of which were eventually acquired by the Newhouse chain. Eventually they were merged into one paper. Golden writes that the paper was eventually renamed The Republican, but it struck me as odd that the name had been lost in the first place. According to this Wikipedia article, the Sunday paper had retained the Republican name — which goes back to the paper’s Abolitionist origins — and the entire enterprise was renamed The Republican in 2003.
As Golden notes, The Republican — still a Newhouse paper — has shrunk considerably over the past two generations. But it has a lively and expanding website, MassLive, that covers statewide news and has been expanding over the past year.
Back when “Dilbert” was funny. Photo (cc) 2011 by pchow98.
Scott Adams is apparently trying to get “Dilbert” canceled by as many newspapers as possible. The Boston Globe should accommodate him immediately.
Adams has long been known as a Donald Trump supporter. Last week, though, he went well beyond praising the racist ex-president with a vile racist rant of his own, referring to Black people as a “hate group” and saying, “I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.” There was more. Martha Ross has the gory details at The Mercury News of San Jose.
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Among the newspapers dropping “Dilbert” is The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. “This is not a difficult decision,” wrote editor Chris Quinn. The Plain Dealer is part of the Advance Local chain and, according to Quinn, several other Advance papers have come to the same conclusion — including “newspapers in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Alabama, Massachusetts and Oregon.” The Massachusetts newspaper is The Republican of Springfield, which also publishes the MassLive website. I haven’t seen an announcement at MassLive yet.
Nor have I seen an announcement from the Globe, an independent paper owned by John and Linda Henry. As Quinn noted, it can take a while for a canceled feature to disappear from the print edition. But it can be canceled immediately on the digital side — yet “Dilbert” is in its usual spot today on the Globe’s website.
This shouldn’t be a hard call. As Quinn notes, the Lee chain dropped “Dilbert” from its 77 papers last year after Adams introduced a Black character whose role was to mock “woke” culture and the LGBTQ community. “Dilbert” has been living on borrowed time, and it has long since ceased to be funny.
Adams is obviously trying to get canceled so he can go on some sort of right-wing grievance tour. This is not a matter of respecting all views — Adams did everything but don a sheet and terrorize his Black neighbors. (Oh, wait. He doesn’t have any. He also said he’s moved to a nearly all-white community in order to get away from Black people.) It’s time for mainstream news outlets to part company with this vicious hatemonger.
Ed Kubosiak Jr. has been terminated from his position as the editor of MassLive following an investigation into a domestic violence claim, according to Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal. Kubosiak had been suspended several weeks earlier.
MassLive is the website of The Republican newspaper in Springfield. The properties are owned by Advance, a privately held media company that has pursued some interesting strategies in trying to figure out a viable business model for local news. The Massachusetts approach has been to position MassLive as an entity that’s separate from the newspaper, pushing into the Worcester area and even into Greater Boston. The idea of a free, good-quality alternative to The Boston Globe is an interesting one; several years ago, though, MassLive began charging for some of its journalism, which would seem to defeat the purpose.
In New Jersey, Advance has built a digital hub of more than 100 journalists to feed its print newspapers. In Alabama, though, they’re getting out of the print business altogether. (I wrote about those developments back in November.) And in the Cleveland area, Advance has engaged in union-busting. So it’s a mixed bag.
In any event, Kubosiak’s role at MassLive was crucial — he was the vice president of content, essentially serving as the top editor. It will be interesting to see what if any changes Advance makes in its approach now that the company has to hire a replacement.
Tom Breen of the New Haven Independent covers real-estate transactions the old-fashioned way. Photos (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
At least two New England newspaper publishers have begun using artificial intelligence rather than carbon-based life forms to report on real-estate transactions.
The Republican of Springfield, online as MassLive, and Hearst Connecticut Media, comprising the New Haven Register and seven other daily newspapers, are running stories put together by an outfit called United Robots. MassLive’s stories are behind a hard paywall, but here’s a taste from the Register of what such articles look like.
United Robots, a Swedish company, touts itself as offering “news automation at massive scale using AI and data science.”
Last year I wrote about artificial intelligence and journalism for GBH News. I’m skeptical, but it depends on how you use it. In some ways AI has made our lives easier by, for instance, enhancing online search and powering the inexpensive transcription of audio interviews. But using it to write stories? Not good. As I wrote last year:
Such a system has been in use at The Washington Post for several years to produce reports about high school football. Input a box score and out comes a story that looks more or less like an actual person wrote it. Some news organizations are doing the same with financial data. It sounds innocuous enough given that much of this work would probably go undone if it couldn’t be automated. But let’s curb our enthusiasm.
Using AI to produce stories about real-estate transactions may seem fairly harmless. But let me give you an example of why it’s anything but.
In November, I accompanied Tom Breen, the managing editor of the New Haven Independent, as he knocked on the doors of houses that had been foreclosed on recently. The Independent is a digital nonprofit news site.
A note Breen left behind asking the resident to call him. (Phone number removed.)
Breen has spent a considerable amount of time and effort in housing court and poring through online real-estate transactions. From doing that, he could see patterns that had emerged. Like Boston and many other cities, New Haven has experienced an explosion in real-estate prices, and a lot of owners are flipping their properties to cash in. In too many cases there are victims — low-income renters whose new landlords, often absentee, jack up the rents. Breen takes the data he’s gathered and rides his bike into the neighborhoods, knocking on doors and talking with residents. It’s difficult, occasionally dangerous work. Once he was attacked by a pit bull.
We didn’t have much luck on our excursion. No one was home at either of the two houses we visited, so Breen left notes behind asking the residents to call him.
“If investors are swapping properties at $100,000, $200,000 above the appraised value and tens of thousands of dollars above what they bought it for two days prior,” Breen told me, “all that can do is drive up costs that are passed down to the renters — to the people actually living in the building.”
The result of Breen’s enterprise has been a series of stories like this one. The lead:
Tenants of a three-family “lemon” of a house on Liberty Street are wondering how two landlords managed to walk away with $180,000 by double-selling a property that they say remains a dump.
You’re not going to get that kind of reporting from artificial intelligence.
Now, of course, you might argue — and some have, as I noted in my GBH News piece — that AI saves journalists from drudge work, freeing them up to do exactly the kind of enterprise reporting that Breen does. But story ideas often arise from immersion in boring data and sitting through lengthy proceedings; outsource the data collection to a robot, and it’s likely that will be the end of it.
Bad sign: Here’s how Breen and I were greeted at one foreclosed-upon property. (Names removed.)
At the corporate chains that own so many of our newspapers, there’s little doubt that AI will be used as just another opportunity to cut. Hearst and Advance, the national chain that owns The Republican, are not the worst or most greedy newspapers chains by any means. But both of them have engaged in more than their share of cost-cutting over the years.
And it’s spreading. United Robots’ U.S. clients include the McClatchy newspaper chain and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, part of the Cox chain. No doubt the Big Two — Gannett and the groups owned by Alden Global Capital — won’t be far behind.
Tighter editing standards at Boston.com, improved online comments at the Boston Herald and well-deserved recognition for some first-rate political reporters. There’s so much good news on the local media front on this day-after-the-blizzard morning that it’s hard to know where to begin.
• Boston.com strives for civility. After a miserable stretch in which it falsely accused a Harvard Business School professor (and, gulp, lawyer) of sending a racist email to one of the owners of a Chinese restaurant and then mocked House Speaker John Boehner’s alleged drinking problem following an assassination threat, the folks at Boston.com sound determined to get it right.
We’ve made a pretty strong point about the fact that it’s OK to slow down. That we’d much rather not be first but get something right and be really thoughtful about it than rush to publish and bypass the discretion that should be required of any good content producer like ours.
The worst thing the Boston Globe-affiliated site could do is chase clicks. December turned out to be a boffo month for Boston.com, driven by its reporting on the Harvard professor’s harassment of the Chinese restaurant over a $4 overcharge — a righteous hit before it went off the rails. (T-shirts were involved, too.) According to Compete.com, Boston.com received nearly 3.7 million unique visits in December, way up from November’s 2.8 million. Compete’s numbers aren’t perfect by any means, but it’s safe to say Boston.com’s numbers were up a lot.
Yet quality matters. And according to Compete, BostonGlobe.com actually attracted more traffic than its free cousin in December, receiving more than 3.8 million unique visits — even though you have to pay a digital subscription fee to receive full access to the site (granted, free social sharing at BostonGlobe.com is pretty generous these days).
No doubt Gottlieb and company are going to stick with their plan to build a buzzy site with lots of viral content (here’s my alternative idea). But I’m glad to see that they understand what’s gone wrong and that they’re determined to do something about it.
One of Boston.com’s biggest problems is that it’s been flying without an editor (except for a few weeks last fall) since its relaunch last spring. That should be rectified as soon as possible.
• The Herald embraces Facebook. Online newspaper comments in general can make you despair for humanity. Over the years the Herald’s have been particularly loathsome. So kudos to publisher Pat Purcell and editor Joe Sciacca for switching to a Facebook-based commenting system.
Facebook isn’t perfect. Certainly there are issues with a news organization turning over its community platform to a giant corporation with its own agenda and priorities. But people are generally more civil and constructive when they’re on Facebook, in large measure because Facebook requires real names — and most people comply.
Check out the comments beneath Howie Carr’s ridiculous column on climate change today. Not bad at all. Only one of the first eight is pseudonymous. And if they’re not all exactly civil, they are less toxic than I’m accustomed to seeing at BostonHerald.com.
Can a real-names policy at BostonGlobe.com be far behind?
• Massachusetts’ best political reporters. Chris Cillizza, who runs a political blog for The Washington Post called The Fix, has named nine Massachusetts political reporters as among the best in the country. (Disclosure: The list was based in part on a reader poll, and I voted for friend of Media Nation Jon Keller, who’s among the winners — but every one of these is worthy.)
It’s especially nice to see a couple of reporters outside the Greater Boston orbit win recognition — Jim Hand of Attleboro’s Sun Chronicle and Shira Schoenberg of The Republican in Springfield. Congratulations to all.
• Last year I gave a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award to Max Kennedy for refusing to release Robert Kennedy’s papers. Bryan Bender, who did the original reporting on this story, is back, and finds that nothing has changed. What are the Kennedys trying to hide?
• The Springfield Republican has had to muzzle its editorial page as the paper’s owner ponders the possibility of selling the property to build a casino, according to Mark Arsenault. It probably won’t matter much — the Republican was pro-casino even before the possibility of cashing in came along. Still, this is an interesting conflict of interest to say the least.
• Sally Jacobs writes a long feature on U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s troubled childhood — and finds that his aunt bitterly disputes his account of how she treated him. I hope Brown today is reflecting on the propriety of questioning people’s recollections of their backgrounds. Life is complicated.
Occasional Media Nation commenter Bill Weye has written a detailed critique of how his local newspaper, the Springfield Republican, has covered the Phoebe Prince story. Weye offers a harsh analysis, pointing his finger at newsroom cutbacks and a court reporter whom he considers to be inexperienced.
I know nothing about the Republican. But whether Weye is right or wrong, his post strikes me as a well-thought-out take that is worth reading.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I urge you to read Daniel Golden’s ProPublica feature about working in Western Massachusetts at the Springfield Daily News in the early years of his career. ProPublica allows republication, so 
