On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Kade Krichko, the founder of Ori magazine, a beautifully crafted premium print publication devoted to grassroots storytelling across the globe. (Ellen Clegg is recovering from knee replacement surgery but is producing behind the scenes. She’ll return to the air soon.)
Kade describes himself as a world wanderer with a knack for misadventure. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, ESPN, Vice and Outside, among other publications. He admits to loving a good story, and writes, “If the tale has a pulse, I’m listening.” Kade is a Northeastern University graduate and a part-time lecturer in the School of Journalism. He created and taught a course in Sports, Media and Digital Storytelling.
Jon Keller. Photo via WBZ-TV.
I also check in with longtime political journalist Jon Keller. Jon was recently laid off by WBZ-TV (Channel 4) after a 20-year career there. He was one of five staff members who lost their jobs as part of what appears to be a deep corporate purge by David Ellison, whose Skydance Media company bought Paramount earlier this fall. CBS is part of Paramount, and WBZ is part of CBS.
Jon is not going away, fortunately, and is still writing for MASSterList and Boston magazine. He has some sharp observations on the role of local TV news in covering state and city politics.
Later on in the podcast, I’ve got a Quick Take about the latest bad news from our tech overlords. The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the new AI-powered web browsers designed to replace Chrome and Safari are able to circumvent a news organization’s digital paywall. Not always — it depends on the technology that was used to build the paywall. But at a time when publishers are already losing traffic because of AI, this is a direct assault on the business model for journalism in the digital age.
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.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, has rescinded a gag order that had prevented the city’s police department from issuing press releases without the approval of her office. The contentious order was one of two reasons that the mayor, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, was given a New England Muzzle Award earlier this year.
The original, restrictive executive order was enacted on January 10, under former Police Chief Jon Murad, who did not seek reappointment. It required all BPD press releases, including emergency alerts, to be submitted to the mayor’s office for approval before public dissemination.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
What sealed the Muzzle, though, was that the mayor then called an invitation-only news conference without letting at least two outlets that had been critical of her know about it. Those outlets were Seven Days and Vermont News First. Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, who writes for Vermont News First, told me last winter that he believed only local television newscasts had been invited.
• Good/bad/good news in Dallas. Last week I wrote that the notorious cost-cutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital was ready to swoop in and upset the pending sale of The Dallas Morning News to the Hearst chain, a privately held company known for quality regional and statewide journalism. Now Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab that the sale to Hearst is back on track. “This morning,” Benton wrote Monday, “the DallasNews Corporation (formerly A.H. Belo) announced that its board had ‘reviewed and rejected’ Alden’s offer. (It also added a ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan, just in case Alden tries anything funny.)”
• An overdue Globe update. Last week The Boston Guardian and Contrarian Boston reported that two Boston Globe journalists, along with two South End residents who were accompanying them, had been attacked while on assignment as they were reporting in the notorious Mass and Cass area of Boston. The story was subsequently picked up by Universal Hub, Hub Blog and Media Nation. But there was no mention of it in the Globe until this morning, as part of a larger story by the two journalists, reporter Niki Griswold and Barry Chin. Griswold wrote:
While reporting this story, two Globe journalists were confronted by at least three men on the Melnea Cass bike path as they toured the area on a July afternoon with [Brian] McCarter and another longtime South End resident. The men approached and threatened the group after spotting the Globephotographer taking pictures from a distance. The men, two holding hammer-like tools, followed the group, which took shelter in a nearby building.
The incident prompted Globe editor Nancy Barnes to issue a memo to the newsroom about security precautions.
• The wages of sin. Paramount wasted no time in making up for some of the $16 million it paid to Donald Trump in order to settle a bogus lawsuit the president had brought against “60 Minutes” — a settlement widely believed to pave the way for a merger with Trump-friendly Skydance Media. Last week WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in Boston announced that a number of employees had been offered buyouts, while longtime reporter Beth Germano said she’d retire and health reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall said she’d been laid off, according to Ross Cristantiello of Boston.com. “I gotta believe it has something to do with the merger,” union official Fletcher Fischer was quoted as saying. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, local television news stands out as an exception. Moves like this, though, erode that trust.
• Here’s some fresh AI hell. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain as well as a steady source of terrible news about layoffs, closures and other cuts, is offering buyouts to many of its journalists so that it can replace them with artificial intelligence. Sean Burch of The Verge quotes a memo from Mike Reed, who writes in his characteristically inimitable style: “Given our static revenue trends, we need to adjust our organization to effectively meet the needs of our business today and position ourselves for sustainable growth in the future as we continue to use AI and leverage automation to realize efficiencies.”
Gannett’s weeklies are pretty much gone, but it still publishes several dailies in New England, most notably The Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, as well as about 200 dailies across the country, anchored by USA Today.
Correction: Sorry for rushing this. I’ve fixed a few botched names.
Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) and I talked about Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill The Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and what that might say about the future of newspaper endorsements.
Events overtook my conversation with WBZ-TV political analyst Jon Keller. These two segments ran earlier today, before President Biden stepped aside from the 2024 campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. I hope you enjoy this anyway.
Always fun to be a guest of Jon Keller’s on WBZ-TV (Channel 4). Today we talked about coverage of presidential politics, the lack of transparency among some local government officials, and the ongoing rise of independent community journalism. Please have a look here and here.
It was a story made for local TV news. An unidentified man walked into an unlocked home in Northbridge on Sunday afternoon, sauntered around for 16 minutes while young children were inside, and then left without taking or disturbing anything. Video of him entering and then leaving was captured by a Ring home security camera.
The story also raises some questions about tone and emphasis. The man was a person of color in a community that’s more than 90% white. Did that contribute to the sense of alarm that some of the news reports conveyed?
Alerted to the story by George Chidi, a Northbridge native who now writes a Substack newsletter called the The Atlanta Objective, I watched reports on WBZ-TV (Channel 4), WCVB-TV (Channel 5), WHDH-TV (Channel 7), NBC10/NECN and WFXT-TV (Channel 25). In most of them, you had a sense that danger lurked, and that it is of paramount importance that the police identify the person.
Several, though, raised the possibility that the man had simply walked into the wrong house — and, based on video from around the neighborhood, the extent to which many of the houses looked alike was striking.
Channel 25 gave the story a whopping three minutes. But reporter Wale Aliyu, one of two Black journalists to cover the story (the other was Todd Kazakiewich of Channel 5), made the most of it, offering context that wasn’t available elsewhere. He opened by describing just how weird the story was. “I’ve never left an interview scratching my head the way I was tonight,” he said. The homeowner, Tarah Martell Schweitzer, who came across mainly as frightened in the other reports, offered comments that were more nuanced in Aliyu’s story:
I really am trying to see the good here and that it really was an honest mistake, because it doesn’t make sense to me in any other way. I don’t think somebody would case somebody’s house in the middle of broad daylight on a Sunday with people home. There were two motorcycles and a car in the driveway.
She even joked about asking the intruder to come back and help her and her husband finish assembling the swing set they were putting together.
Chidi told me via Facebook Messenger that he was troubled by the alarmist tone that he detected in the NBC10 coverage and on social media. “I’m sensitive to this because I grew up here. Literally,” he said. “That house is in the back yard of where I grew up.”
To be fair, no one wants to find out that a stranger has been walking around the inside of their home while their kids are inside and they’re out back unaware of what’s going on. And, since home video was available, it’s the sort of fare that’s irresistible for TV news directors.
The trick is to offer the right perspective. It was a strange story, not especially scary, that almost certainly was about a guy who walked into the wrong house by mistake. Indeed, as he is walking up to the door, he is staring intently at his smartphone, probably trying to figure out if he was at the right address.
Neither The Boston Globe nor the Boston Herald published anything about it, though the Globe’s free website, Boston.com, had a brief item. This was a pure made-for-television diversion, more entertainment than news, and that’s the way it should have been played. Kudos to Aliyu and Channel 25 for getting it right.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
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