Jon Keller, left, and I kicked around some media topics on WBZ-TV back in 2018, when we were both a little less gray.
Old friend Jon Keller was laid off Thursday by WBZ-TV (Channel 4) as part of wide-ranging cuts at Paramount-owned CBS, writes Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan (sub. req). Keller, a political analyst at the station for 20 years, was one of five staff members who lost their jobs, although he was the only on-air journalist.
Earlier this year the station laid off medical reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall, and veteran reporter Beth Germano retired. The departures represent a significant blow to the station given that television news depends on recognizable, trusted journalists.
Sketch of Trump and Epstein by Mike Goad using Sora AI
This morning I want to highlight an astonishing passage in The Wall Street Journal’s new report (gift link) that Donald Trump’s name does indeed show up in the Epstein files:
They told the president at the meeting that the files contained what officials felt was unverified hearsay about many people, including Trump, who had socialized with Epstein in the past, some of the officials said. One of the officials familiar with the documents said they contain hundreds of other names.
They also told Trump that senior Justice Department officials didn’t plan to release any more documents related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender because the material contained child pornography and victims’ personal information, the officials said.
Let’s unpack this a bit. The files contain “unverified hearsay” about Trump, which sounds like it could be really bad, although possibly untrue. And the documents include child-sex-abuse materials. Thus we have the president of these United States being tied to some sort of unproven bad behavior that is somehow connected with, or at least adjacent to, the sexual exploitation of children.
Wow. And of course this comes on the heels of last week’s Journal exclusive (gift link) that Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein a “bawdy” letter on the latter’s 50th birthday that included a reference to “another wonderful secret.”
Last week I listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast with journalist Will Sommer (gift link) about Epstein, QAnon and the conspiracy theories at the heart of Trump’s appeal to the unhinged right. To summarize, an Epstein cover-up is the one thing for which Trump’s base will not forgive him. You may say, well, eventually they forgive him for anything, but Sommer makes a compelling argument that this really is different: They forgive him for anything because they see Trump’s role as exposing an international pedophile ring controlled by secretive elites, including top Democrats. Once that’s gone, there’s nothing left.
And right on cue, the “QAnon Shaman,” Jake Angeli-Chansley, turned on Trump this week.
It’s very bad for Trump, and it seems likely to get a whole lot worse. The question is how many others will be hurt along the way.
Globe journalists attacked
Two Boston Globe journalists on assignment and two South End residents who were accompanying them were attacked last week by alleged drug dealers near the notorious intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, known as Mass and Cass. The incident was reported by Jules Roscoe in The Boston Guardian and by Scott Van Voorhis, who writes the newsletter Contrarian Boston. Van Voorhis writes:
First, a drug-addled man, swinging a nasty-looking metal rod studded with nails, threatened them. Before long, Globe City Hall reporter Niki Griswold and photographer Barry Chin and their neighborhood sherpas were surrounded by a group of what appeared to be drug dealers on bikes, demanding that they delete their pictures and turn over the camera.
One of the neighborhood residents bravely confronted a 300-or-so-pound dealer as he started towards the Globe’s photographer. The Good Samaritan flipped the thug to the ground when the man appeared to reach for a weapon, sources who were at the scene told Contrarian Boston.
The Globe has not yet reported on the incident. Nor has Mayor Michelle Wu contacted the residents, according to the two accounts, though they reportedly have heard from City Councilor Ed Flynn, state Rep. John Moran and Wu’s mayoral challenger, Josh Kraft.
Gin Dumcius moves on
Congratulations to longtime political reporter Gin Dumcius, who’s moved to State House News Service in order to take the helm of the insidery MASSter List newsletter. Until recently, Dumcius had been a staff reporter for CommonWealth Beacon.
CommonWealth, meanwhile, is advertising for a senior reporter to replace Dumcius. I’m on the board of advisers, and I think this is one of the top opportunities in the country for someone who wants to do serious reporting about politics and public policy.
The Boston Globe’s free daily newsletter for college students and young professionals, The B-Side, made its debut this morning. Like similar offerings, it’s light and breezy, with an emphasis on stories aimed at appealing to the demo (“Does your employer pay for your MBTA pass?”) as well as on things to do.
The B-Side is joining a crowded field of similar newsletters from Axios Boston, WBUR, GBH News, the Boston Herald and 6AM City — and that’s not even getting into the political newsletters from Politico, State House News Service and CommonWealth Magazine. (Have I missed any? I hope not.)
What I’m talking about here is a certain type of newsletter. The Globe has multiple newsletters already, and so do the other news organizations I mentioned. It’s a matter of tone and emphasis, heavy on emoticons and bullet points, aimed at engaging an audience that might have never considered buying a digital newspaper subscription or tuning in to a public radio station. My students and I got an early peek last month; my reaction then and now is that it’s interesting, like its competitors, but that I’m not in the target audience.
Here’s a memo passed along by a trusted source from Andrew Grillo, the Globe’s director of new product and general manager of The B-Side:
Hi all,
We are excited to announce the launch of The B-Side, a new email and social-only product geared towards informing and entertaining new audiences. The B-Side’s focus is hyperlocal and will provide curated, authentic and relatable content that reimagines how local news is conveyed to the next generation of Bostonians.
As Boston’s population of university students and young professionals continues to grow, it is essential to evolve our coverage to meet this demographic where they are most engaged. The publication will focus on mobile-first formats, and will accompany its weekday newsletter with vertical video explainers, swipeable stories, and creator content.
The B-Side joins a growing portfolio of products that have launched out of BGMP’s innovation portal — the idea was crowned Innovation Week Champion in the Q4 2021. [BGMP stands for Boston Globe Media Partners.] Since inception, The B-Side has been refined and developed across all departments including marketing, revenue, editorial, and finance. Through this iterative approach, we have created a unique editorial product designed to engage the company’s future readership, and provide new revenue streams for the organization. This project showcases Boston Globe Media’s commitment to evolution and investment in new initiatives, and we are grateful of the internal support this project has received to achieve launch within one year.
Editorially, the team consists of three talented journalists. The content team is led by Emily Schario, a GBH alum and creative storyteller with expertise unpacking quintessential Boston stories across text and vertical video. Emily is joined by Multimedia Producer Katie Cole, a former BGM Audience Development team member, who runs the project’s social media and audience development strategy. The B-Side is edited and guided by Kaitlyn Johnston, one of the region’s most talented and forward-thinking editors.
We’d like to thank the organization’s support of this initiative, particularly the Senior Leadership Team who has guided this endeavor from inception to launch.
The Massachusetts Legislature did something Tuesday night to make it more difficult for tax money to be used to help pay for the Boston 2024 Olympics bid. But it’s not entirely clear exactly what — or how important it is.
Matt Stout in the Boston Herald quotes unnamed “lawmakers” as saying that the final budget deal produced by House and Senate negotiators “includes language preventing the use of state funds or tax expenditures for the 2024 Olympics.” His lede describes it as a “ban.”
But Andy Metzger of State House News Service offers a somewhat different spin, writing, “The budget … requires passage of a special act of the Legislature before any public funds can be spent to benefit the proposed 2024 Boston Olympics.” Maybe that amounts to the same thing, though it’s not clear.
The budget contains a provision requiring that any expenditure of tax dollars for hosting the Olympics in 2024 must first be approved by the Legislature after public hearings. The budget, of course, remains in effect for one year, through the end of June 2016.
Of course, one legislature’s actions are not binding on the next, and it seems pretty unlikely that the Boston 2024 folks are going to ask for public funds anytime in the next year. Which may explain why The Boston Globe’s budget story, by David Scharfenberg and Joshua Miller, makes no mention of it at all.
Or maybe not.
It strikes me that the measure was worth a mention, even if it’s largely symbolic. The implications of budget deals often become clearer in the days after they are reached. I hope we find out more about what actually happened Tuesday night.
Gov. Deval Patrick. Photo (cc) 2008 by Alison Klein of WEBN News and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
This story may take another day or two to ripen. But Gov. Deval Patrick’s firing of two members of the Sex Offender Registry Board has all the ingredients of a major donnybrook between The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.
Globe reporter Michael Levenson writes that Patrick fired the two officials in part because of their insistence that his brother-in-law register as a sex offender. The brother-in-law, Bernard Sigh, was convicted of raping his wife (Patrick’s sister) in 1993 and served a short prison sentence. The couple later reconciled, but the Herald made it an issue during Patrick’s first run for governor in 2006. Levenson writes:
Blaming the Herald and the Republican Party for the revelation, Patrick said the disclosure that his brother-in-law had been convicted of raping his wife, Patrick’s sister, more than a decade earlier in California “nearly destroyed their lives.”
In the Herald, Erin Smith and Matt Stout offer a similar account, including Patrick’s lambasting of their paper. A Herald editorial criticizes Patrick mainly for the week-long delay in explaining the reason for the two officials’ firing: “Eight years and multiple bureaucratic scandals in, how has this administration not figured out that honesty — from the outset — is the best policy?”
Finally, if you’d like to read a thorough account by a neutral reporter, I recommend Gin Dumcius of State House News Service. [Update: I don’t mean to imply that the Globe and Herald accounts today are not neutral; they both seem pretty straight. I simply mean that the two papers are rivals, and the Herald’s 2006 reporting may become an issue.]
So will this spark another chapter in the Hundred Years’ War between the Globe and the Herald? I think it mainly comes down to how vigorously Herald editors want to defend their paper’s 2006 reporting. As they say, stay tuned.
