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Union to WashPost readers: Please don’t click today

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On December 7, 2023

In Media

Photo (cc) 2016 by Dan Kennedy

The union representing Washington Post employees has asked that no one engage with Post content during a 24-hour strike that began today at midnight. “On Dec. 7, we ask you to respect our walkout by not crossing the picket line: For 24 hours, please do not engage with any Washington Post content,” the Washington Post Guild said in a statement. “That includes our print and online news stories, podcasts, videos, games and recipes.”

The Post, which soared during the Trump presidency, is now losing money and shedding jobs. Management, currently in the midst of eliminating 240 jobs, has threatened layoffs if not enough staff members accept voluntary buyouts. Oliver Darcy of CNN has the full story.

Just as I would not cross a physical picket line, so will I not check in with the Post today. I urge you to (not) do the same.

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Despite warning signs, Lewis may prove to be an inspired choice as Post publisher

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On November 6, 2023

In Media

Will Lewis (photo via LinkedIn)

The Washington Post has named a new publisher to replace Fred Ryan, who left earlier this year amid widening losses, falling circulation and a reported rift with executive editor Sally Buzbee. Ryan will be succeeded by Will Lewis, and there are some flashing lights we ought to pay attention to.

For one thing, Lewis was knighted by King Charles III on the recommendation of Boris Johnson. For another, he is a former top lieutenant to Rupert Murdoch, although he denies that he and Murdoch are close. Weirdly, a Post profile of Lewis says that “Lewis disagrees with media descriptions of him as a former ‘Murdoch lieutenant,’” but it’s a simple fact. It doesn’t mean that he still speaks to Murdoch or that he doesn’t have his own set of values.

Lewis is the founder, CEO and publisher of a project called The News Movement, which the Post describes as “a social-first media business providing nonpartisan news to Gen Z.” The homepage offers BuzzFeed-style clickbait, but Lewis also has a background in serious journalism.

In other words, there are warning signs, but Lewis may turn out to be an inspired choice. That said, Post owner Jeff Bezos’ hiring record is mixed. Ryan always struck me as not quite right for the job, something confirmed by former executive editor Marty Baron in his book “Collision of Power.” Among Ryan’s last acts was presiding over the death of the Post’s gaming vertical, one of the few features the paper offered that appealed to a younger readership.

Bezos’ pick for editorial page editor, David Shipley, has not improved the Post’s opinion section, which, with few exceptions, has been dismal for many years. The jury is still out on Buzbee. She was well-regarded in her previous job as executive editor of The Associated Press. Her performance at the Post strikes me as solid, but I’m not sure what her vision is. Perhaps her tense relationship with Ryan held her back.

Final fun fact: The New York Times beat the Post in breaking the news about Lewis’ hiring. Yes, I know it can be difficult to report on your own institution, but good grief.

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Book review: Marty Baron has written a plea for journalism that isn’t afraid to tell the truth

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On October 27, 2023

In Media

Photo (cc) 2017 by Álvaro García Fuentes

For more than eight years, The Washington Post experienced a second golden age. From late 2013, when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the storied paper for $250 million, through the early months of 2021, when Donald Trump left the White House and a new administration began to settle in, the Post was firing on all cylinders. Thanks to Bezos’ strategic investments in technology and an expanded news report, the Post emerged as a real competitor to The New York Times for the first time since the 1970s.

That second golden age also overlapped with Martin Baron’s time as executive editor of the Post. In his new book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” Baron tells the story of those years, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the end of the legendary Graham era; how Bezos quickly transformed a shrinking, mostly regional newspaper into a national digital media outlet; and the challenge of covering Trump, whom Baron frankly, and repeatedly, calls an “authoritarian.”

I’ve covered Marty Baron off and on for years, back when he was editor of The Boston Globe and I was the media columnist for The Boston Phoenix, and later when I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century.” Baron is both accessible and accountable, but he can also be intimidating and a bit defensive. He deserves his reputation as the best editor of his era, not just at the Times but at the Globe and, before that, the Miami Herald.

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The gap between the NY Times and the WashPost continues to widen

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On October 11, 2023

In Media

Two consecutive headlines in Nieman Lab’s daily newsletter Tuesday drove home the growing gap between The New York Times and The Washington Post. The first: “The Washington Post is reducing its workforce by 240 positions.” The second: “The New York Times opinion section has tripled its size since 2017.”

I’ve written about this before, including a suggestion I made last year that the Post should reconnect with local news. As someone who covered the early years of the Post’s revival under Jeff Bezos, I find the current situation sad. Both the Post and the Times flourished during the Trump presidency, but the Times has continued to soar in the post-Trump years (yes, I know we’re not really in the post-Trump years) while the Post has sputtered, losing money and circulation.

We need two great general-interest national newspapers. If the Post is going to get back in the race, it needs to find a way to differentiate itself from the Times. For a few years, the Post difference was a tougher, more truth-telling brand of political coverage, but these days both papers seem pretty much the same. I don’t blame Sally Buzbee, who succeeded the legendary Marty Baron as executive editor. The vision — and the resources — have to come from the very top.

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Marty Baron on Trump, the media and the original meaning of objectivity

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On October 5, 2023

In Media, The Return of the Moguls

Marty Baron, right, with then-Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen. Photo (cc) 2017 by the Knight Foundation.

I downloaded Martin Baron’s book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” on the first day that it became available. I expect it’s going to take me a while to read it, but I plan to review it once I’ve made my way through its 576 pages. The Post under Bezos and Baron comprise the longest section of my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” although — since it ends with Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory — I did not cover how the Post navigated the Trump presidency.

Based on what others are writing, and on interviews that Baron is giving during the early days of his book tour, it sounds like journalistic objectivity is a major theme of “Collision of Power.” Baron has written and talked about this before, as he did in an address this past spring at Brandeis University. And what his critics don’t give him enough credit for is that he subscribes to the proper view of objectivity defined by Walter Lippmann more than a century ago.

In Baron’s view, like Lippmann’s, objectivity is the fair-minded pursuit of the truth, not both-sides-ism, not quoting a variety of views and leaving it up to the poor reader or viewer or listener to figure it out. For instance, here’s Baron’s answer when he was asked by CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy about how good a job the press is doing in its coverage of the Republican Party’s meltdown into lunacy and authoritarianism:

I think the coverage of the latest chaos has been very good, based on what I’ve read. It portrays the Republican Party as Chaos Central, which it is. The party is proving to be ungovernable, and that is wreaking havoc on the country as a whole. The bigger issue is Trump. I’d like to see substantially more coverage of what a second Trump administration would do upon taking office. Who would be put in cabinet posts? Who would be put in charge of regulatory agencies?

No doubt Trump would embark on an immediate campaign of vengeance. Plans are already in the works. What would that mean for the FBI, DOJ, the courts, the press — really for all the institutional pillars of our democracy? Some stories have been produced, though not enough in my view. Those sorts of stories would serve the public better than yet-another interview with Trump himself. Look, the party that now levels evidence-free charges of “weaponization” of government openly boasts of how it would weaponize government against its perceived enemies.

I don’t want to copy and paste all of Darcy’s interview, so I’ll leave it at that. But do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Baron touches on several other important topics, including Fox News, artificial intelligence and X/Twitter, and he’s got smart things to say about all of them.

Meanwhile, here’s a surprise: The Washington Post has published a long feature by former Post reporter Wesley Lowery on the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Massacre, 109-year-old Viola Fletcher. Lowery, who’s now based at American University, left the Post in 2020 after he and Baron clashed over Lowery’s provocative tweets. It never should have come to that; Lowery, a gifted journalist, was essential for his coverage of the first Black Lives Matter movement and helped the Post win a Pulitzer Prize for its data journalism project tracking police shootings of civilians. My media ethics students are reading Lowery’s new book, “American Whitelash,” this spring.

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Isaacson’s screw-up over Crimea will hurt his book — and limit the damage to Musk

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On September 12, 2023

In Media

Walter Isaacson. Photo (cc) 2012 by Ed Uthman.

How big a deal is it that we now know Elon Musk did not cut off Starlink internet access to the Ukrainian military but, rather, refused to activate it so that Ukraine could stage an attack on ships in the Black Sea off Russian-held Crimea? I don’t know that it amounts to all that much; by Saturday, when I wrote about it, we already knew that either was a possibility. Regardless, Musk was freelancing his own foreign policy in contradiction of U.S. interests.

On the other hand, it’s a very big deal for Walter Isaacson, who wrote in his new biography of Musk that Musk did indeed order that existing access be cut off. Isaacson has been backpedaling every since. Isaacson was very clear in the book, writing that Musk “secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast.” Isaacson now says that he misunderstood what Musk told him.

CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy published a tough piece on Isaacson in his daily newsletter, noting that Simon & Schuster, Isaacson’s publisher, will correct future editions of the book. The Washington Post, which ran the relevant excerpt, has updated and corrected it as well. Darcy writes:

The correction has cast a pall over the biography from Isaacson, a highly respected author who has written acclaimed biographies on historic visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane University and former head of CNN, has for years enjoyed such a sterling reputation in the media industry that newsrooms have often taken his reporting to be fact.

In fairness to Isaacson, Musk is a slippery character who often changes his story. Isaacson reported, for instance, that Musk told him he made his decision after speaking to the Russian ambassador, but added that Musk has apparently hinted to others that he spoke with Vladimir Putin himself. Still, this is pretty damaging. Musk and his allies will use it to discredit all of Isaacson’s book, which will end up having far less impact than it otherwise would have.

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Gannett’s failed attempt to cover school sports with AI raises eyebrows and questions

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On September 1, 2023

In Local News, Technology

Photo (cc) 2014 by MHS Wildcat

Six years ago, The Washington Post announced that it would begin producing stories about high school football games using artificial intelligence. The expanded use of Heliograf, the Post’s “in-house automated storytelling technology,” would allow the news organization “to cover all Washington, D.C.-area high school football games every week,” according to a press release. The press release linked to an example of such coverage — a mundane article that begins:

The Yorktown Patriots triumphed over the visiting Wilson Tigers in a close game on Thursday, 20-14.

The game began with a scoreless first quarter.

In the second quarter, The Patriots’ Paul Dalzell was the first to put points on the board with a two-yard touchdown reception off a pass from quarterback William Porter.

Yet now, with AI tools having improved considerably, Gannett is running into trouble for doing exactly the same thing. Writing for Axios Columbus, Tyler Buchanan reports that The Columbus Dispatch had suspended AI-generated local sports coverage after the tool, LedeAI, came in for criticism and mockery. As Buchanan observes, one such article “was blasted on social media for its robotic style, lack of player names and use of awkward phrases like ‘close encounter of the athletic kind.’”

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Has AI gone backwards since 2017? Obviously not. So what went wrong? It’s hard to say, but it could be that the generative AI tools that started becoming available late last year, with ChatGPT in the forefront, are more finicky than the blunt instrument developed by the Post some years back. In theory, generative AI can write a more natural-sounding story than the robotic prose produced by Heliograf and its ilk. In practice, if an AI tool like LedeAI is trained on a corpus of material loaded with clichés, then the output is going to be less than stellar.

Clare Duffy of CNN found that Gannett’s use of AI was not limited to Columbus. Other outlets that ran LedeAI-generated sports stories included the Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky; AZ Central; Florida Today, and the Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Duffy reported that one story, before it was revised, included this Grantland Rice-quality gem: “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday.”

There’s another dynamic that needs to be considered as well. The Washington Post, a regional newspaper under the Graham family, repositioned itself as a national digital news organization after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013. Regional coverage is secondary to its mission, and if it weren’t covering high school football games with AI, then it wouldn’t be covering them at all.

By contrast, you’d think that high school sports would be central to the mission at Gannett’s local and regional dailies. Turning such coverage over to AI and then not bothering to check what they were publishing is exactly the sort of move you’d expect from the bottom-line-obsessed chain, though it obviously falls short of its obligation to the communities it serves.

Poynter media columnist Tom Jones, a former sportswriter, raises another issue worth pondering — the elimination of an important training ground for aspiring sports journalists:

There is still a contentious debate about how publishers should use AI. Obviously, journalists will be (and should be) upset if AI is being used to replace human beings to cover events. As someone who started his career covering high school football, I can tell you that invaluable lessons learned under the Friday night lights laid the foundation for covering events such as the Olympics and Stanley Cup finals and college football national championships in the years after that.

At a moment when AI is the hottest of topics in journalistic circles, Gannett’s botched experiment demonstrated that there is no substitute for actual reporters.

By the way, I asked ChatGPT to write a six- to eight-word headline for this post. The result: “AI-Generated Sports Coverage Faces Scrutiny: What Went Wrong?” Not bad, but lacking the specificity I was looking for.

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Marty Baron’s forthcoming book on Bezos and the Post gets a boost from Kirkus

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On July 19, 2023

In Media

The first review of Marty Baron’s forthcoming book is out, and I’m relieved. According to Kirkus Reviews, The Washington Post that Baron describes in “Collision of Power” is the same one I saw on display when I was visiting the Post and conducting interviews — including with Baron — in 2015 and ’16.

In “The Return of the Moguls,” I wrote about a news organization that had been reinvigorated by new owner Jeff Bezos (by his money, of course, but also by his energetic work on the consumer and technology side) and executive editor Baron, whose staff was relentless in exposing the truth about then-candidate Donald Trump’s fraudulent charity and, later, the existence of a tape on which he’s heard boasting about sexual assault. Most important, Bezos was described by everyone, including Baron, as respecting the independence of the newsroom and not interfering with editorial decisions.

So why am I relieved? Although it seemed unlikely, I harbored some worry that Baron was being overly diplomatic with me, and that now, after he’s retired from the Post, he was going to tell the world what it was really like to work for Bezos. The  Kirkus review, though, makes it clear that there’s little distance between what Baron told me and what he’s written in “Collision of Power,” subtitled “Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post.” According to Kirkus:

Although focused on metrics and finances, Bezos staunchly supported editorial independence and journalistic integrity, a stance that put him on a collision course with Donald Trump, who expected Bezos to rein in the Post’s coverage of him and his administration. When that did not happen, he unleashed the “raw abuse of power” for which he was notorious.

The review concludes that Baron has written “an impassioned argument for objective journalism.” This is going to prove controversial at a time when objectivity is under attack. But in an address at Brandeis University earlier this year, Baron defined objectivity in its truest, most Lippmann-esque form. It is, at its best, fair-minded, independent truth-seeking. It’s not quoting “both sides” and letting the poor reader try to figure it out.

“The idea is to be open-minded when we begin our research and to do that work as conscientiously as possible,” Baron said at Brandeis. “It demands a willingness to listen, an eagerness to learn — and an awareness that there is much for us to know.”

I’m not sure whether Baron would agree, but I’m going to take it a step further and argue that even opinion journalism can be objective if it’s undertaken in the right spirit. I tell my students that if they’re producing an opinion piece, they need to acknowledge differing views and inconvenient facts and address them. If they do that, then they’re being objective. After all, Walter Lippmann himself worked the opinion side of the street for most of his career.

Baron’s book comes out Oct. 3.

How the Globe and Beacon Press helped Daniel Ellsberg publish the Pentagon Papers

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On June 19, 2023

In Media

Daniel Ellsberg. Photo (cc) 2020 by Christopher Michel.

There are a couple of Boston angles to the Pentagon Papers, the government’s own secret history of the Vietnam War. The documents were leaked to the press in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, who died Friday at the age of 92.

Most people know that the papers were published first by The New York Times and then by The Washington Post. The story of the Post’s race to catch up with the Times is depicted in “The Post,” a 2017 film starring Tom Hanks. What is less well known is that The Boston Globe was the third paper to publish the documents. Former Globe editor Matt Storin wrote about the Globe’s role in a 2008 reminiscence (free link):

It was a significant milestone in the effort of the Globe’s editor, Tom Winship, to lift a formerly modest local paper to national prominence. Before that day in 1971, the Globe had won a single Pulitzer Prize. Since then, it has won 19 more. [And seven more since then.]

It was no accident that the Globe was one of the first three papers, either. “I definitely chose the Globe … because it had been great on the war,” Ellsberg told Storin. The tale Storin relates is pretty wild. Ellsberg, who had access to the documents as an analyst with the RAND Corp., had made a copy of them. The news of the documents’ existence was broken by Globe reporter Tom Oliphant after he interviewed Ellsberg, which in turn led Ellsberg to make still more copies and start disseminating them to the press before the FBI could come calling.

The whole story, including phone-booth document drops and the decision to hide the papers in the trunk of a car parked at the Globe, is well told by Storin.

The other Boston angle is that Beacon Press, a small independent book publisher that is part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, published the Pentagon Publishers after a number of other houses passed on the opportunity because of the legal risks involved. The Beacon Blog quotes Gayatni Patnaik, Beacon’s current director:

Daniel Ellsberg’s incredible fortitude stands as an example for all who believe in fighting for democracy and government accountability and who oppose war and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We are incredibly proud to have taken the stand we did in releasing the Pentagon Papers. Today, over 50 years later, we are still guided by the principles that led to that brave decision.

Thanks to Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub for flagging that item. And by the way, Beacon is also the publisher of “What Works in Community News,” co-authored by Ellen Clegg and me, which is scheduled to be released in early 2024.

The Fred Ryan era at the Post had run its course. Killing Launcher proved it.

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On June 13, 2023

In Media

Photo (cc) 2016 by Dan Kennedy

Back in January, The Washington Post was struggling, and publisher Fred Ryan had some difficult decisions to make. What he chose was to eliminate 20 newsroom positions and leave another 30 openings unfilled. Oh, and there was this: He decided (or, at the very least, agreed) to phase out Launcher, a Post vertical devoted to covering video games, and lay off the site’s five staff members.

At a time when the Post was fighting for ways to differentiate itself from its larger rival, The New York Times, Launcher should have been considered a key part of that strategy. Gaming is the largest entertainment medium, larger than movies and music combined. And Launcher was doing well. As editor Mike Hume tweeted, the move was “sad, upsetting, and perhaps most of all, mindboggling,” adding that Launcher had drawn “tens of millions of users, the majority first-time readers of The Post and almost all of them under the age of 40.”

Kat Bailey put it this way at IGN:

In the video game world, Launcher made a name for itself as a high-quality games media site with a focus on first-rate reporting, often taking the lead on difficult stories beyond the scope of the traditional enthusiast press. It stood out as one of the few examples of serious games reporting in a legacy newspaper, often landing major interviews and exclusives as a result.

It’s been obvious for quite some time that the Post needs a major reset. After years of growth, profits and what owner Jeff Bezos once called “swagger,” the paper has been stumbling since Donald Trump left the White House. Paid digital subscriptions are down from about 3 million to about 2.5 million, traffic to its website is on the wane, and the paper is losing money.

So it may have been met with a huge sigh of relief when Ryan announced Monday that he was stepping down as publisher and CEO. “I’m deeply grateful to Fred for his leadership and for the friendship that we’ve developed over the years,” Bezos wrote, according to an account of Ryan’s departure in The Wall Street Journal. Ryan told the staff in a note: “Together, we have accomplished one of the most extraordinary transformations in modern media history. We have evolved from a primarily local print newspaper to become a global digital publication.”

I didn’t interview Ryan when I was reporting on the Post’s revival in 2015 and ’16 for my book “The Return of the Moguls.” (I didn’t interview Bezos, either, but that’s a long story involving emails, snail mail and phone calls. Suffice to say he doesn’t give interviews to anyone, even the Post.) I spoke with then-executive editor Marty Baron and then-chief technologist Shailesh Prakash, who were leading the Post’s revival. I made a few attempts to connect with Ryan, but it didn’t happen. In any case, Baron and Prakash were the ones who were doing the transformational work.

So I was fascinated with Charlotte Klein’s account of the Post’s decline in Vanity Fair earlier this year. Bezos had paid a rare visit to the Post, and everyone was wondering what it all meant. At the time, it seemed like Ryan was feeling empowered with legends like Baron and Prakash having moved on. There was even talk that Baron’s replacement, Sally Buzbee, was musing with her inner circle that she might leave if Ryan didn’t stay in his lane. But in reporting on Ryan’s departure Monday, Klein writes that Buzbee had smoothed things over in recent months even as Bezos has been a more visible presence.

“Bezos, I’m told, has brought refreshing candor to the discussions, in which he’s asked about things like the Post’s paywall strategy and, notably, plan for growing subscriptions,” Klein writes. “At times, he sharply questioned Ryan, one of the sources said.”

For now, the Post will be led by an interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The way forward is not clear at all. Being just like the Times, only smaller and not as good, is not a business strategy. The Post is still a great newspaper, rivaled only by the Times and The Wall Street Journal. But it needs to find its own identify, as the Journal has with an emphasis on business news and a right-wing editorial page. (I’m not suggesting that the Post emulate the Journal’s opinion section; the Post’s is bad enough already.)

More than anything, the Post needs to identify coverage areas that the Times has ignored and doesn’t seem to be interested in. Like, you know, video games. Did I mention that it’s the largest entertainment medium in the country, and that Launcher was bringing in tens of millions of young readers before the Post decided to shut it down? Yes. Yes, I did.

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