By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Ellen Clegg and I were thrilled to have a chance to speak with Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr on her podcast, “Justice by Design.” We talked about our book, “What Works in Community News,” as well as the importance of community journalism and how it’s being revived in hundreds of places across the country. You can watch us on YouTube, listen here or subscribe using your favorite podcast app.
Big news from Down East as Lisa DeSisto, the CEO and publisher of the Maine Trust for Local News, has announced that she’s resigning. The Maine Trust is a nonprofit that owns the state’s largest daily paper, the Portland Press Herald, as well as three other daily papers and a number of weeklies. The papers themselves are for-profit entities.
According to Press Herald reporter Hannah LaClaire, DeSisto will leave by the end of the year. She’ll be replaced by Stefanie Manning, a Maine Trust executive who will assume the title of managing director. DeSisto said in a statement:
I have cherished my time leading this organization and working alongside such dedicated and talented colleagues. Serving our readers and supporting this incredible team has been a privilege. Representing the Maine Trust for Local News in the community has been an honor I will carry with me.
DeSisto leaves amid a time of transition at the Maine Trust. Longtime executive editor Steve Greenlee took a position at Boston University earlier this year and was replaced by Carolyn Fox, who had previously been managing editor of the Tampa Bay Times.
DeSisto hosted Ellen Clegg and me for a talk about our book, “What Works in Community News,” back in October. Ellen and I both have previous connections with Lisa — she and I were colleagues in the 1990s at The Boston Phoenix, where she was an executive in the advertising department, and Ellen worked with her after she moved to a top business-side position at The Boston Globe.
Lisa has been in Portland for 12 years and has been through several ownership changes. I visited the Press Herald in late 2015 to talk with her and others about a failed attempt by Boston-area entrepreneur Aaron Kushner to buy the paper in 2012; Kushner, who later bought the Orange County Register in Southern California, was one of the wealthy newspaper owners I profiled in “The Return of the Moguls.”
After Kushner’s bid in Maine fell apart, the paper was acquired by a wealthy Maine businessman named Donald Sussman, who in turn sold it to Reade Brower, a printer, in 2015. Brower sold the Press Herald and other papers he had accumulated to the nonprofit National Trust for Local News in 2023. The Maine Trust is a subsidiary of the National Trust.
Through it all, Lisa has been a source of stability and continuity. There’s no question that she’ll be deeply missed.
A collaborative effort among local ethnic news outlets in New Jersey picked up signs of a shift to Republicans in advance of the Nov. 5 election at a time when it seemed unlikely that Black and Latino voters would abandon their traditionally strong support for Democrats.
The collaboration was overseen by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Some of the stories were published in NJ Spotlight News, a statewide nonprofit that combines in-depth digital reporting and a daily newscast on public television. Ellen Clegg and I reported on both the center and Spotlight in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
The effort was highlighted recently by LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers in its newsletter. Stefanie Murray, who directs the center, told Chris Krewson, LION’s executive director, that “a few of the stories came out to be focused on how a Trump presidency was quite appealing to different ethnic groups in the state.”
For instance, a story co-bylined by reporters for Spotlight and Atlantic City Focus, a Black news organization, reported on Black Republicans “who said the Democratic Party has focused too much on social programs and government intervention without empowering individuals to achieve success on their own.”
Another Spotlight collaboration, with New Jersey Hispano, found that some Latinos were voting for Donald Trump because of the brutally high cost of housing, with one Peruvian immigrant, Gloria Candioti, saying she had not been able to buy after renting the same place for 20 years.
“I have thought about buying a property, but I have not been able to yet,” she said. “There is a lot of demand now, interest rates have gone up, house prices have been higher.”
Murray said Spotlight’s executive director, John Mooney, was concerned that reporting showing a shift toward Trump and other Republicans would not be borne out on Election Day. In fact, “they were spot on,” she observed, as Trump lost to Kamala Harris in New Jersey by just five points after trailing by double digits in 2016 and 2020.
Of course, forecasting the outcome of presidential elections is not the role of local news. What happened in New Jersey matters because what ethnic media and Spotlight found stemmed directly from dogged reporting on the concerns of Black and Latino voters. It turned out that was worth more than a bushel full of poll results.
Way back in September 2010, I attended the fifth-anniversary party for the New Haven Independent, one of the original digital nonprofits. I wrote about the Independent in my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” and revisited it in “What Works in Community News.”
“It’s a powerful idea, which is that out-of-town corporations that could care less about us no longer own our news,” Independent founder Paul Bass told the crowd that night. “They no longer control our news. We the people control the news.”
The party was held in the offices of La Voz Hispana de Connecticut, the Spanish-language newspaper that is the Independent’s partner and landlord. Standing off to one side was Connecticut’s Republican Senate candidate in 2010 — Linda McMahon, the wife of professional wrestling mogul Vince McMahon and now Trump’s choice as secretary of education.
McMahon said very little. I was using a really crappy camera that night, but I did get one picture of her behind Bass that is sort of OK.
McMahon was handily defeated that November and then lost again two years later. Now, despite no obvious credentials, she will be joining the Cabinet, assuming she’s confirmed by the Senate.
Last week I flagged an article in Nieman Reports on the economic crisis facing public radio. In a response both to me and to Gabe Bullard, who wrote the Nieman story, Andrew Ramsammy argues that our prescription for reviving public radio — a renewed focus on local journalism — is not enough.
Ramsammy, the interim president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, writes on LinkedIn:
The reality is this: it’s not about what’s delivering the news—it’s about who’s delivering it, and whether the audience connects with them. Public radio’s future depends on abandoning outdated models of institutional authority, embracing the personality-driven dynamics of today’s media landscape, and empowering the next generation of creators — not just as contributors, but as co-owners and collaborators in a shared vision of success. The days of legacy gatekeepers are over. It’s time to rethink everything.
Ramsammy’s essay is well worth reading in full.
When Kate Maxwell and Adrian Fernandez Baumann launched The Mendocino Voice in 2016, they were hoping to bring some in-depth journalism to a county that was undercovered due to deep cuts at newspapers owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Indeed, both Maxwell and Baumann had left jobs at Alden papers before launching the Voice.
And yes, they were able to do some enterprising reporting. But they also found that they had to devote a considerable amount of attention to Northern California’s increasingly weird weather. When I visited in March 2020, they were keeping an eye on a wildfire that Baumann told me had sprung up five months before what was typically wildfire season because of the unusually dry conditions.
Well, now the Voice and other news outlets in Mendo County are keeping tabs on an atmospheric river that has dumped heavy rain on the region and that threatens to create yet another weather-related crisis. (Ellen Clegg and I wrote about the Voice in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Maxwell and Baumann have moved on, and this past June the nominally for-profit site was acquired by the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation.)
The Voice this morning is dominated by stories about flooding. The lead article reports that sand for sandbags is available for residents and businesses seeking to protect their property from rising waters. “Residents and businesses must bring their own bags and shovels, unless noted otherwise,” reporter Sarah Stierch writes.
Below that is a brief story about power being restored along the coast, and that’s followed by a lengthier update headlined “Storm expected to bring ‘life-threatening’ floods to Mendocino County.” All those stories, by the way, were written by Stierch, which shows how hard folks at hyperlocal news projects have to work.
The Voice is not the only independent news organization in Mendo County. MendoFever, started in 2020 by a local resident named Matt LaFever, leads with a story published on Wednesday headlined “First atmospheric river of the season set to soak Mendocino County.” The article offers some nuts-and-bolts guidance on how residents should prepare. Public radio station KZYX offers an in-depth story by Emily Cox and updates on road conditions and power outages.
Finally, Alden’s Ukiah Daily Journal leads with — yes — the ongoing count in the presidential election. The most recent story listed under “Latest Headlines” is a five-day-old article about an art exhibit. Scroll down, though, and you’ll find a story published Wednesday morning reporting that the National Weather Service was predicting floods emanating from the atmospheric river. It is behind a paywall.
Whenever there is a breaking story of national interest, it’s smart to check out what local news organizations are reporting. Like much of the country, Mendocino County has been all but abandoned by corporate journalism. Fortunately, independent outlets are doing a good job of keeping residents informed with “useful news,” as the Voice puts it.
Following Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday night, I’ve seen calls on social media to support independent news organizations like ProPublica and The Guardian rather than traditional outlets. It’s a good idea, though I value the work done by mainstream journalism as well.
But let me suggest a different approach to funding media: using your subscription money or tax-deductible donations to support news at the local level. I’ve been writing about the local news crisis for a decade and a half, and during that time I’ve come to believe that one of the reasons we’re so polarized is that low-quality national news has moved in to fill the vacuum created by the decline of community journalism.
Civic life depends on reliable news and information. Without it, you have people showing up at school committee meetings to complain about phony, Fox News-driven issues like transgender sports and critical race theory rather than test scores and the cost of funding a new teachers’ contract.
Academic studies have shown that a lack of local news leads to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization and what my research partner, Ellen Clegg, and I like to call the “corruption tax” — that is, lenders demanding a higher rate of return when municipalities in news deserts seek to borrow money for such worthy causes as a new middle school or fire station. The lenders, it seems, want a premium if no one is going to keep an eye on how their money is being spent.
Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.
The news desert problem is serious and getting worse. According to the latest State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School, some 3,200 print newspapers have disappeared since 2005. Most of them were weekly papers that provided exactly the sort of coverage needed to build and maintain a sense of community.
At the same time, though, hundreds of independent news projects have launched in recent years. Most but not all are digital-only; many are nonprofit, some are for-profit.
As it happens, this is the time of year when it makes the most sense to support local news, especially nonprofits. Every year, the Institute for Nonprofit News, through its NewsMatch program, provides funds to nonprofits to match some of what they are able to raise within their communities. This year’s campaign began Nov. 1. As INN explains:
Eighteen national and regional funders have pledged $7.5 million to NewsMatch, the largest grassroots fundraising campaign to support nonprofit news in the U.S. Since 2017, participating news organizations in the INN Network have leveraged $31 million in NewsMatch funding to help generate nearly $300 million in support from their communities. All of these newsrooms have met INN’s membership standards for financial transparency, editorial independence, and original public service reporting. Not every nonprofit news outlet meets those standards and is able to become an INN member.
Ellen and I wrote our book, “What Works in Community News,” to profile independent local and regional news organizations that are finding ways to serve the public despite the ongoing financial challenge of paying for journalism. We also talk with news entrepreneurs and thought leaders on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Our hope is that the people and projects we highlight will inspire others to fill the information gap in their own communities.
Philanthropy will remain an important source of funding for some time to come. We should assume that long-stalled federal efforts to provide tax credits for local news aren’t suddenly going to start moving forward during the Age of Trump II. Efforts in states that include New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California are worthwhile but limited.
Ultimately the news desert problem will be solved, or not, without government assistance. If your community has an independent news outlet, please support it. And if it doesn’t, I suggest you look into what it would take to get involved in starting one.
Last week, in a commentary for CommonWealth Beacon, I compared the outrage that greeted The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times over their non-endorsements with the relative calm with which a similar decision at The Minnesota Star Tribune was met.
I wrote that the problem with the Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and his counterpart at the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, was their last-minute cancellations of editorials endorsing Kamala Harris — and that the Strib had escaped similar opprobrium by announcing its decision back in August.
Well, not so fast. Because as Ellen Clegg reports at What Works, 15 former Star Tribune opinion journalists were so offended by the paper’s failure to endorse Harris that they wrote their own and published it online under the headline “The endorsement editorial the Star Tribune should have published.”
Ellen profiled the Strib in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Like the Post, the LA Times and, for that matter, The Boston Globe under John and Linda Henry, the Star Tribune is owned by a billionaire: Glen Taylor, who has received praise for building up the paper and transforming it into a profitable enterprise.
Earlier this year, the Star Tribune’s new editorial page editor, Phillip Morris, put an end to endorsements as part of a wide-ranging rethink of the opinion section. But Ellen writes that it’s unclear what role Taylor or publisher Steve Grove may have had in that decision.
Ellen also notes that Grove is writing a memoir and says: “Let’s hope that along with chapters about ‘reinvention, love, community, and what holds us together,’ he explains how he’ll stand up to powerful people who would prefer that the independent press heed their whims, and to the dark forces that want to extinguish it altogether.”
Correction: It’s Grove who’s writing a memoir, not Taylor, as I incorrectly wrote earlier.
News that Advance Local is closing its print newspapers in New Jersey is sad on one level. On another level, though, it marks the continued evolution of the chain’s digital-first strategy, which I reported on in the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News.”
Ellen and I also talked about Advance’s digital focus on our podcast this past May with Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos, the top two executives at MassLive, the chain’s statewide online news organization in Massachusetts.
According to Lola Fadulu and Tracey Tully of The New York Times (gift link), Advance will end the print editions of three daily papers in New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey Times. A weekly, the Hunterdon County Democrat, will also end its print run. Another daily, the Jersey Journal, which covers Jersey City, will shut down altogether. According to a statement from Advance:
“Today’s announcement represents the next step into the digital future of journalism in New Jersey,” said Steve Alessi, President of NJ Advance Media. “It’s important to emphasize that this is a forward-looking decision that allows us to invest more deeply than ever in our journalism and in serving our communities.”
Alessi said that that ceasing print publication will allow NJ Advance Media to reallocate resources to strengthen its core newsroom. He said that the newsroom has more reporters than it did a year ago and has plans to continue to grow in 2025 as the organization looks to bolster reporting in previously under-covered areas of the state.
That strategy reflects the direction that Advance was moving in back in March 2022, when I interviewed Chris Kelly, who at that time was the interim editor of NJ.com. Advance was already taking a one-newsroom approach, putting NJ.com first and then doling out stories to its print edition. It was a strategy that had allowed NJ.com to build up strong statewide and regional coverage, Kelly said, although he conceded that it meant hyperlocal coverage was lacking. Here’s an excerpt from our book:
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In New Jersey, as elsewhere, the newspaper scene today is much diminished. The Star-Ledger remains the largest paper in the state, with a weekday print and digital circulation that averaged nearly 125,000 and a Sunday circulation of about 140,000. Next up is The Record, which covers northern New Jersey (35,000 on weekdays, 40,000 on Sundays) and the Asbury Park Press (27,000 on weekdays, 39,000 on Sundays), both of which are owned by Gannett. Observers we spoke with gave those papers reasonably high marks for the quality of their reporting, but the breadth of their coverage was regarded as lacking. The Star-Ledger, owned by Advance Publications, is worth a closer look. Advance is a privately held company based in New York and controlled by the Newhouse family. It is best known for its magazine division, Condé Nast, which publishes prestige titles such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. But the company operates a number of daily newspapers as well, including The Birmingham News of Alabama, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland and The Oregonian of Portland.
Advance runs its newspapers in regional groups, emphasizing paid digital subscriptions over print. In New Jersey, that means The Star-Ledger and two smaller dailies, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey News, as well as a number of other Advance publications, are all part of NJ.com. A unified newsroom feeds stories to its digital hub and to its print newspapers. Some of those stories are specific to a particular region and might only run in one paper; others, more general in nature, might run statewide. All of them are posted at NJ.com, which, as of early 2022, was attracting about 1.5 million daily visits. What it means is that NJ.com is able to field the largest editorial staff in the state — about 115 journalists — as well as offer robust statehouse, investigative and data reporting. The advantage is that Advance is able to provide its audience with strong statewide and regional coverage. The disadvantage is a shortage of day-to-day accountability journalism at the community level.
As was the case with many media outlets in the spring of 2022, the NJ.com newsroom was closed as a consequence of the COVID pandemic. We met Chris Kelly, NJ.com’s senior director of news, features, topics and innovation, who was serving as interim editor, at a restaurant near his home in Maplewood. [He is now managing producer of entertainment.] He spoke animatedly about Advance’s strategy for covering New Jersey. “My argument in the eight years that I’ve been here is that you’ve got to basically become a statewide news outlet and almost move from man-to-man coverage to zone coverage,” he said. “We just simply cannot sustain a reporter covering Maplewood, covering Millbrook. I’m not unaware that doesn’t come without the downside of, yeah, we cannot cover every council meeting, we are going to miss things. But that’s been the strategy that mostly seems to be working and has allowed us to kind of sustain at the level we’re sustaining.” He also lauded Advance’s commitment to enterprise journalism, telling us: “The one thing that I can say is, if we’ve got a story that we’ve got to get, we’re going to get it, and we’re going to keep doing it. That level of commitment, the financial support, the legal support has been unwavering since I’ve been there.”
“What Works in Community News” will soon be available in paperback! The nice UPS driver delivered some advance copies to Ellen and me on Wednesday. The list price is $19.95, which is $10 less than the hardcover edition, and, according to Bookshop.org, you can pre-order it now for shipping on Nov. 12. There’s an audio version, too, which is perfect for those long fall walks as you ponder how to launch an independent news project in your community.
We have some exciting news about one of our sister projects at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Scope, a professionally edited digital publication that covers “stories of hope, justice and resilience” in Greater Boston, has received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a major philanthropic initiative funding local news.
“Since its launch in late 2017, The Scope has become a national leader in leveraging university resources to help solve the news desert crisis. This grant is a vote of confidence in our model,” said Professor Meg Heckman in the announcement of the grant. “Rebuilding the local information ecosystem is a big job, and we’re thrilled Press Forward sees the School of Journalism as a vital part of the solution.”
Heckman has been the guiding force behind The Scope for several years now. Joining her in putting the grant application together were the school’s director, Professor Jonathan Kaufman, and Professor Matt Carroll.
The Scope was one of 205 local news outlets that will receive $20 million in grant money, according to an announcement by Press Forward on Wednesday. Several of the projects are connected in one way or another to What Works, our project on the future of local news:
• Santa Cruz Local (California), which competes with a larger and better-known startup called Lookout Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz Local co-founder Kara Meyberg Guzman and Lookout Santa Cruz founder Ken Doctor were both interviewed for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” as well as on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.”
• The Boston Institute for Nonprofit News, an investigative project that publishes stories on its own website as well as in other outlets. Co-founder Jason Pramas has been a guest on our podcast. Several other Boston-based outlets received grants as well: the Dorchester Reporter, a 40-year-old weekly newspaper; Boston Korea, which serves the Korean American Community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and El Planeta, a venerable Spanish-language newspaper.
• The Maine Monitor, a digital project that covers public policy and politics. Now-retired editor David Dahl has been a guest on our podcast.
• InDepthNH, published by the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. The site focuses on public policy and politics, and its founder, Nancy West, has been a podcast guest.
• Montclair Local (New Jersey), a hyperlocal website that is one of the projects we write about in “What Works in Community News.” In 2009, the Local merged with Baristanet, one of the original hyperlocal news startups, which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City.”
• Eugene Weekly (Oregon), an alternative weekly that suffered a near-death experience earlier this year after a former employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. I wrote about that here and at our What Works website.
Earlier this week I wrote about the latest paid circulation figures for the Boston Herald based on its recent filings with the U.S. Postal Service. I lamented that the numbers weren’t as complete as I would have liked because the Alliance for Audited Media was no longer providing its reports for free to journalists and researchers, as it had done in the past.
Well, it turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door. I now have recent reports for both the Herald and The Boston Globe. The AAM figures don’t significantly change what I reported about the Globe, but they do fill in some gaps for the Herald.
For March 2024, the most recent AAM report that’s available, the Herald’s average weekday paid print circulation for the previous six months was 12,272, a decline of 2,247, or nearly 15.5%, compared to its March 2023 totals. Sunday paid print circulation, according to the March 2024 report, was 15,183, down 2,690, also 15%.
As I explained earlier, AAM tallies up paid digital circulation differently from a newspaper’s internal count; among other things, AAM allows for some double-counting between print and digital. Nevertheless, its digital figures are useful for tracking trends.
In the March 2024 report, according to AAM, the Herald’s total average weekday paid digital circulation was 30,009, which actually amounts to a decrease of 2,250, or about 7%, over the previous year. Sunday paid digital in March 2024 was 29,753, down 1,952, or about 6.1%.
Needless to say, that’s not the direction that Herald executives want to be moving in — although I should note that, in its September 2024 post office filing, the Herald reported a slight rise in its seven-day digital circulation compared to the previous year.
The Boston suburb of Melrose is not a news desert. It has a newspaper, the Melrose Weekly News. But, like many communities, it would benefit from more news than it’s getting now, especially after Gannett shuttered the venerable Melrose Free Press in 2021.
So … artificial intelligence to the rescue? In CommonWealth Beacon, Jennifer Smith introduces us to the “Melrose Update Robocast,” which uses fake voices, male and female, to talk about local issues based on information that’s fed into it to produce an AI-generated script. (Note: Smith interviewed me for the piece, though I didn’t make the cut. I’m also on CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)
“In a way, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” “Robocast” creator Tom Catalini tells Smith.
Yet all across Massachusetts, independently operated news sites with real human beings are springing up to cover local news. Community journalism is how we connect with each other, and an AI-generated podcast can’t do that.
In Medford, where I live, we haven’t had a local news source for two years. But we do have a podcast, “Medford Bytes,” hosted by two activist residents who convene important conversations about what’s going on in the city, including a recent interview with the mayor about three contentious ballot questions that would raise taxes in order to pay for schools, road repairs and a new fire station.
That’s the sound of community members talking among themselves.
Facebook’s brain-dead algorithm is censoring important public-safety information, reports WHAV in Haverhill, Massachusetts. WHAV is a nonprofit news organization with a low-power/online radio station as well as a website.
According to WHAV general manager Tim Coco:
In the last week, a local news warning about the sinkhole along the southbound lanes of Interstate 495 near Ward Hill was flagged as spam and removed by one social media site. Another blocked WHAV story was news of possible restoration of Haverhill’s 1845-era (gun) powder house. The tech giant behind these removals piles on with intimidation by writing “Repeatedly breaking our rules can cause more account restrictions.”
Even more mind-boggling, Coco writes, is that when the Haverhill Police Department attempted to share WHAV’s item on the sinkhole, Facebook removed that, too.
This is nothing new for Facebook. In “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, we tell the story of an emergency route during a wildfire that the sheriff’s department had shared with The Mendocino Voice in Northern California. The Voice posted it on its Facebook page, one of its primary distribution channels — and then watched in alarm as it disappeared. In the excerpt below, we talked with Kate Maxwell, then the publisher of the Voice, and Adrian Fernandez Baumann, then the editor:
The sheriff’s department asked the Voice to get the word out that people living in the national forest would run into danger if they tried to evacuate through the nearby community of Covelo. It was potentially lifesaving information, but Facebook took it down. “It had like a thousand shares in an hour,” said Maxwell. “Facebook flagged that post and deleted it.” The article was restored about a half-hour later following an uproar from the community. Maxwell said she never got a good explanation of what happened, even after talking with someone from Facebook at a conference. Maybe it was because the algorithms identified it as fake news. Maybe, as Baumann speculated, it was because the article included a reference to “Indian Dick Road.”
Coco doesn’t identify Facebook as the culprit, but the screenshots that he posted are clearly from that platform. He’s asking his readers and listeners in the Haverhill area to stop relying on social media for WHAV stories and instead to subscribe directly to the news outlet’s daily email newsletter.
Coco, by the way, is in our book and has been a guest on the “What Works” podcast.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is also getting swamped with complaints about entirely harmless posts being removed from its Threads platform because of algorithmic decisions being made with no human involvement. I can speak from personal experience, too. Twice over the past year or so, I’ve responded to questions asking about great song lyrics, and I’ve gone with “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” from Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Both time, my posts were removed from Facebook and Threads, and I was given a warning.
So let me repeat something I’ve said a number of times: News organizations should not rely on social media any more than absolutely necessary. Do what Coco is doing: Push newsletter subscriptions, because that’s a platform that you control and own.