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A Muzzle Award to Mass. POST for spurning data needed to track police misconduct

Photo (cc) 2015 by Tom Woodward. Digitally edited to remove license plate number.

In 2020, Massachusetts took what was billed as a major step forward in holding police officers accountable. Following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the state created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission “to improve policing and enhance public confidence in law enforcement by implementing a fair process for mandatory certification, discipline, and training for all peace officers in the Commonwealth.”

But according to an investigation by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, the POST Commission has not collected the employment data it needs to do its job. The story, by BINJ editorial director Chris Faraone and Sam Stecklow, an investigative journalist currently on a fellowship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute of Chicago, found that Mass. POST and its director, Enrique Zuniga, made a series of decisions that experts say undermine the agency’s mission. Faraone and Stecklow write:

Despite passing regulations that instruct it otherwise, POST’s database does not include the full employment history of all of the officers that are going through the state’s recertification process — only for officers who have had discipline sustained against them. This prevents the press and public from analyzing data about what are often known as “wandering cops,” who transfer between departments after committing misconduct.

Employment history data are basic information that 27 other states around the country, including Vermont, have released to a national reporting project.

“It doesn’t make any sense that the previous employment of these officers wouldn’t be tracked and recorded if the ultimate goal was to prevent police misconduct from occurring,” Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition,” is quoted as saying. “We’re only getting half the story without this information.”

Over the course of 3,500 words, Faraone and Stecklow go into great detail in explaining what data are missing and what the implications might be. As for the POST Commission, it has earned a New England Muzzle Award for only partially lifting the veil of secrecy that protects police officers who’ve been accused of misconduct.

The story, by the way, is the product of a partnership between BINJ and the Invisible Institute that Faraone explains here. Their investigation is being published not just by BINJ’s HorizonMass affiliate but also by The Shoestring in Western Massachusetts, Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World newsletter, and about a half-dozen hyperlocal weeklies and other publications.

And lest we overlook the mutual backscratching opportunities here, I’ve interviewed BINJ and HorizonMass co-founder Jason Pramas on “What Works,” our podcast about the future of local news, while Faraone and Stecklow give a shoutout to the Muzzle Awards in their article.

The Star Tribune unveils a Minnesota-wide rebranding and a new opinion mission

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis has been something of a doppelgänger for The Boston Globe as well as a model. Like the Globe, the Strib, as it is known, has emerged as a profitable, growing enterprise under the guidance of a billionaire sports owner.

In Boston, of course, that’s John Henry, who’s also the principal owner of the Red Sox. In Minneapolis, it’s Glen Taylor, the principal owner of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves. Both men have other sports interests as well. I wrote about Henry’s struggles with the Globe in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls”; the paper didn’t really take off until sometime after that. My collaborator Ellen Clegg wrote about the Star Tribune in our 2024 book, “What Works in Community News.”

The parallels don’t stop there. The Globe, formerly a New England-wide paper that had contracted to Eastern Massachusetts, has been expanding in recent years, with editions in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and more to come. Executives at the Strib have been working to re-establish the paper as a Minnesota-wide entity.

Now the Strib has taken the next step. In a post for our website, What Works, Ellen writes about the Strib’s rebranding as The Minnesota Star Tribune and the innovative approach being taken by the Strib’s new opinion editor, Phillip Morris. Among other things, Morris is building up an ambitious roster of community writers known as Strib Voices and has abolished political endorsements in favor of a deeper dive into candidates and issues — something Ellen, as a retired editorial-page editor at the Globe, takes a keen interest in.

I’d be surprised if the Globe drops endorsements. Indeed, the paper just unveiled its first endorsement of the 2024 election, backing Mara Dolan in the Democratic primary for Governor’s Council. But at a time when they are increasingly seen as an anachronism, and with even The New York Times ending local and statewide endorsements, I’d also be surprised if it’s not at least being talked about at the Globe.

The Times’ decision to stop local endorsements is just the latest blow to a venerable tradition

Endorsements of political candidates are fading into history. The latest blow was struck on Monday, when The New York Times said it would no longer endorse in local races (free link), although it will continue to endorse in the presidential contest.

In terms of influence, this has it exactly backwards. May we presume that the Times will endorse the Harris-Walz ticket this fall? Yes, we may. Meanwhile, readers in New York City and across the state — admittedly a shrinking share of the Times’ 10 million-plus subscribers, most of them digital — might genuinely want some guidance in deciding whom to vote for in state and local contests.

But there’s no turning back. Increasingly, communities are served by nonprofit local news organizations, which risk losing their tax-exempt status if they endorse candidates or specific pieces of legislation. As Tom Jones notes at Poynter Online, papers owned by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund stopped endorsing in 2022. Those include some of the largest papers in the country, such as New York’s Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and The Denver Post. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, has cut back on opinion, including endorsements.

A newspaper endorsement is a recommendation to vote for a particular candidate written in the institutional voice of the news organization. At larger newspapers, editorial boards comprising the staff of the opinion section and sometimes some outside members make those decisions in consultation with the publisher. In many cases these boards interview the candidates before making their decision.

The opinion section of a newspaper is entirely separate from the news staff, with the editor and the editorial-page editor reporting directly to the publisher, who may or may not be the owner of the paper as well. Publishers have been known to overturn the editorial board’s recommendation — that’s their prerogative. At smaller papers these lines tend to get blurred. At now-defunct Boston Phoenix, where I worked for many years, the editorial board comprised publisher Stephen Mindich and the news staff. Then again, the Phoenix, as an alt-weekly, mixed opinion and reporting, so the wall separating news from commentary didn’t really exist.

There was a time when rich men bought newspapers mainly so that they could express their political views, with the news section taking a back seat to the editorial page. These days, though, endorsements are often regarded by political reporters as a hindrance in their efforts to convince candidates who were not endorsed by the opinion section that they will cover them fairly. My conversations with students over the years have led me to believe that they are skeptical of the whole notion of a news outlet speaking as an institution, and that they’re more comfortable with signed opinion pieces such as those that typically appear on the op-ed page.

When a local news organization chooses not to endorse, either on principle or to keep the IRS at bay, it loses an opportunity to share its expertise with its audience. For instance, the nonprofit New Haven Independent covers a city that is served a 30-member board of alders, as the city council is known. How is anyone supposed to keep track?

But there are other steps a news outlet can take. It can put together a guide to where candidates stand on the issues and link to that guide every time it publishes a story on that particular race. The guide can take the form of a series of articles or an issues grid — or both. And I should add that the Independent covers city politics with depth and fairness.

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, Ellen Clegg and I talked with Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby about endorsements on our “What Works” podcast back in 2022. Ellen, who’s a retired editorial-page editor for the Globe which continues to endorse in state and local elections, is pro-endorsement; Jeff is against them. I’m (uncharacteristically) in the middle.

I’ll be talking about the future of local news this Monday in Fitchburg

I’ll be speaking this Monday, Aug. 12, from 1 to 2 p.m. on “What Works: The Future of Local News” as part of the Summer Institute for Journalism Education at Fitchburg State University. The event will be held at the Fitchburg Historical Society at 781 Main St. and is free and open to the public.

I’ll discuss what caused the local news crisis as well as “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about possible solutions. The three-day conference features a great lineup of speakers from journalism, public access television and academia, so I hope you’ll check it out. Please register here.

On our last summer podcast, a round-up of topics before we hit the beach

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I are talking with … each other. There’s lots happening in the local news space, and we want to hit some highlights.

We also have a programming note: This will be our final podcast this summer. We’re going to make like the French and take the rest of August off. Before signing off, though, we discuss the state of play for newsletters (who knew email is the killer app?); podcasts (we’re still free and we still do it for love, not money); and advertising (some newspapers are charging a fee if you’d like your digital feed served with no advertising.)

Ellen has a remembrance of Jack Connors, a legendary Boston advertising mogul and backer of local news who once tried to buy The Boston Globe. She also finds a refreshing stream of news about local people, businesses, and government on the home pages of hyperlocal outlets in swing states.

You can listen to our conversation here and access an AI-generated transcript. You can also subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Newsletters move to the fore as tech platforms spurn community journalism

If we’ve learned anything about news publishing in recent years, it’s that the giant tech platforms are not our friends. Google is embracing artificial intelligence, which means that searching for something will soon provide you with robot-generated answers (right or wrong!), thus reducing the need to click through. Facebook is moving away from news. Twitter/X has deteriorated badly under the chaotic leadership of Elon Musk, although it still has enough clout that President Biden used it to announce he was ending his re-election campaign.

So what should publishers do instead? It’s no secret — they’re already doing it. They are using email newsletters to drive their audience to their journalism. A recent post by Andrew Rockway and Dylan Sanchez for LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers reports that 95% of member publishers are offering newsletters, up from 81% in 2022. “The decline in referral traffic,” they write, “will likely lead to more direct engagement by publishers with their audiences.”

Some observers worry about newsletter overload as our inboxes fill up with email we may never get around to reading. That’s potentially a problem, but I think it’s a more serious problem for larger outlets, many of which send out multiple newsletters throughout the day and risk reaching a point of diminishing returns. By contrast, users will value one daily newsletter from their hyperlocal news project with links to the latest stories.

Newsletters are crucial to the success that Ellen Clegg and I have seen both in the projects we write about in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Essentially, we’ve seen three newsletter strategies.

By far the most common approach publishers use is to offer a free newsletter aimed at driving users to their website, which may be free or subscription-based. The Massachusetts-based Bedford Citizen, for instance, sends out a daily newsletter generated by its RSS feed and a weekly human-curated newsletter. The Citizen is a free nonprofit, but once they’ve enticed you with their top-of-the-funnel newsletter, they hope they can lure you into becoming a paying member. Ellen and I interviewed executive director Teri Morrow and editor Wayne Braverman on our podcast last February.
The Colorado Sun, a statewide nonprofit, offers a series of free and paid newsletters, while the website itself is free. The paid newsletters represent an unusual twist: Some of them feature deeper reporting than you can get from the website on topics such as politics, climate change and outdoor recreation. At $22 a month for a premium membership, users pay no more than they would for a digital subscription to a daily newspaper. Editor Larry Ryckman talked about that in our most recent podcast.
In some places, the newsletter is the publication. An example of that is Burlington Buzz, a daily newsletter that covers Burlington, Massachusetts. Founder, publisher and editor Nicci Kadilak recently switched her newsletter platform from Substack to Indiegraf, and her homepage looks a lot like a standard community website — which shows that it’s a mistake to get too caught up on categories when newsletters have websites and websites have newsletters. Ellen and I talked with Nicci last year.

What’s crucial is that news publishers have direct control of the tools that they use to connect with their audience. Gone are the days when we could rely on Facebook and Twitter to reliably deliver readers to us. We have to go find them — and give them a reason to keep coming back.

Correction: Burlington Buzz has moved to Indiegraf, not Ghost.

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Larry Ryckman on how The Colorado Sun is working to serve a large and diverse state

Larry Ryckman. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk to Larry Ryckman, editor and co-founder of The Colorado Sun, the subject of a chapter that I wrote for our book, “What Works in Community News.” The Sun was launched by journalists who worked at The Denver Post, which had been cut and cut and cut under the ownership of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that the Post staff called “vulture capitalists.”

The Sun was founded as a for-profit public benefit corporation. A PBC is a legal designation covering for-profit organizations that serve society in some way. Among other things, a PBC is under no fiduciary obligation to enrich its owners and may instead plow revenues back into the enterprise. And we’ve found that for-profit models are rare in the world of news startups. But that changed last year, when the Sun joined its nonprofit peers. Ryckman explains.

In our Quick Takes, I give a listen to a New York Times podcast with Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist who wrote “Bowling Alone” some years back. In a fascinating 40 minutes, Putnam talks about his work in trying to build social capital. He never once mentions local news, but there are important intersections between his ideas and what our podcast and book are focused on.

Ellen reports on an important transition at Sahan Journal in Minnesota, one of the projects we wrote about in our book. The founding CEO and publisher, Mukhtar Ibrahim, is moving on and a successor has been named. Starting in September, Vanan Murugesan will be leading Sahan. He has experience in the nonprofit sector and also has experience in public media.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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Northeastern’s Mike Beaudet talks with E&P about reinventing TV news

Our Reinventing Local TV News project, which is part of Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is getting a lot of attention from the trade publication Editor & Publisher. Professor Mike Beaudet, who heads the project, is the subject of a feature story in E&P and is the guest on this week’s E&P vodcast.

Beaudet, who’s also an investigative reporter with WCVB-TV (Channel 5), tells E&P’s Gretchen Peck and Mike Blinder that the goal is to come up with new ways of storytelling to appeal to younger audiences — a demographic that gets its news almost entirely by smartphone rather than a traditional television screen. Here’s how Beaudet puts it in an interview with Peck:

People are cutting the cord, and the whole idea of having “appointment television” has gone out the window, especially for younger people. That’s the challenge: We can’t rely on this audience to find local TV like you could in years past, as they get older, because they’re not consuming content the same way.

Mike and his collaborator, Professor John Wihbey, presented at our What Works local news conference at Northeastern last March. Given that local television is in relatively good financial health compared to the newspaper business, it’s vitally important that people like Beaudet and Wihbey come up with solutions before the problems of an aging audience become acute.

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Peter Bhatia tells us about the Houston Landing — including the turmoil at the top

On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Peter Bhatia. Bhatia is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor who is now chief executive officer of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit, non-partisan, no-paywall local news site that launched in spring of 2023. He has also been editor and vice president at the Detroit Free Press, from 2017-2023, and served as a regional editor for Gannett, supervising newsrooms in Michigan and Ohio.

His résumé includes helping lead newsrooms that won 10 Pulitzer Prizes. He is the first journalist of South Asian heritage to lead a major daily newspaper in the U.S. He has also been involved in some recent controversies, and, as you’ll hear, he doesn’t shy away from talking about them.

In Quick Takes, I talk about an important press-freedom case in Mississippi. The former governor, Phil Bryant, is suing Mississippi Today over its Pulitzer Prize-winning series on a state welfare scandal that got national attention and even managed to touch former NFL quarterback Brett Favre. Bryant says he needs access to Today’s internal documents in order to prove his libel case, and a state judge has agreed. Mississippi Today has decided to take the case to the state Supreme Court. It’s a risk, because it will set a precedent in the Magnolia State — for better or worse.

Ellen highlights an interview with Alicia Bell, the director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. Bell talked to Editor & Publisher about her upcoming report on what it will take to build a thriving local news ecosystem for BIPOC communities across the country. Her estimate: it will take somewhere between $380 million to $7.1 billion annually to truly fund BIPOC journalism across the U.S. That’s a big number, but Borealis is a pioneer in this space, and it’s important research as national efforts like Press Forward roll out.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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GBH News general manager Pam Johnston is leaving at the end of the month

Pam Johnston. Photo © 2021 by Dominic Gagliardo Chavez/GBH.

GBH News general manager Pam Johnston is leaving the station at the end of the month. A friend was filling me in even as Aidan Ryan was reporting on her departure for The Boston Globe. GBH News comprises the public media behemoth’s local programming across television, radio and digital. On the radio, GBH (89.7 FM) lags well behind WBUR (90.9 FM). Both stations emphasize NPR programming and local news; ’BUR is in the midst of buyouts and layoffs, and GBH may not be far behind.

Johnston’s announcement comes nearly four months after the Globe’s Mark Shanahan reported that GBH was in turmoil. Based on my own conversations with current and former station employees, I know that Johnston had both supporters and detractors among the staff. “With new leadership at GBH, there are new opportunities and new strategies for our newsroom,” Johnston said in an email to the staff that was obtained by Ryan. “I’m excited about what comes next. I will continue watching, listening, and cheering you on every step of the way.”

Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Johnston on the “What Works” podcast in March 2022. My standard disclosure: I was a paid contributor to GBH News from 1998 to 2022, mostly as a panelist on “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” the award-winning media program that was canceled under Johnston’s watch in 2021.

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