Walter Robinson speaking at a New England First Amendment Coalition event
In the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Walter Robinson, a longtime investigative journalist and editor of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team. Robby, as he is known, was instrumental in uncovering the clergy sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in Boston and beyond. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. The team’s work was captured onscreen in the movie “Spotlight,” where Robby was played by the actor Michael Keaton.
Robby is a former colleague — he was a Distinguished Professor of Journalism here at Northeastern. He was also a 1974 graduate of Northeastern’s journalism program and participated in co-op.
Robinson covered and edited local news at the Globe. But he ranged wide. He reported from 48 states and 33 countries. He covered the White House during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. He was also the Globe’s Middle East bureau chief and covered the first Persian Gulf War.
In recent years, Robby has been focused on the local news crisis in a big way. He has been deeply involved in the New Bedford Light, an impressive nonprofit digital news outlet. He lives in Plymouth, so it’s perhaps no surprise that he is a key adviser to the board of directors at the new Plymouth Independent.
I’ve got a Quick Take on developments in the junkyard known as Twitter. Ellen reports on a new podcast out of Memphis called “Civil Wrongs.” It’s produced by a Report for America corps member that examines a racist massacre in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Elon Musk isn’t laughing with us. He’s laughing at us. Photo (cc) 2022 by Steve Jurvetson.
Update:Ivan Mehta of TechCrunch reports that Twitter may have already reversed itself on requiring log-ins to view tweets. I’ll test it later and think about whether I want to go to the trouble of restoring our Twitter timeline to What Works.
Today I want to return to a topic that I write about from time to time: the ongoing travails of Twitter under Elon Musk and the future of what I’ll call short-form interactive social media, which some people still refer to as “microblogging.” It’s something that’s of no interest to the vast majority of people (and if I’m describing you, then you have my congratulations and admiration) but of tremendous interest to a few of us.
You may have heard that a number of changes hit Twitter over the weekend, some deliberate, some perhaps accidental. They cut back on the number of posts you could read before encountering a “rate limit” of 600 per day for non-subscribers and 6,000 a day for those who pay $8 a month. Those limits were later raised. Now, very few people are paying $8 for those blue check marks and extra privileges, and you can reach 600 (or 800, or 1,000, or whatever it is at the moment) pretty quickly if you’re zipping through your timeline. It was and is a bizarre limitation, since it means that users will spend less time on the site and will see fewer of Twitter’s declining inventory of ads.
Twitter also got rid of its classic TweetDeck application, which lets you set up columns for lists, notifications and the like, and switched everyone over to a new, inferior version — and then announced that TweetDeck will soon be restricted to those $8-a-month customers.
Finally, and of the greatest significance to me and my work, you can no longer view a tweet unless you’re actually logged in to Twitter. We’ve all become accustomed to news outlets embedding tweets in stories. I do it myself sometimes. Well, now that has stopped working. Maybe it’s not that big a deal. After all, you can take a screenshot and/or quote from it, just as you can from any source. But it’s an extra hassle for both publishers and readers.
The problem
Moreover, this had a significant negative effect on What Works, the website about the future of local news that Ellen Clegg and I host. Just recently, I decide to add a news feed of updates and brief items to the right-hand rail, powered by Twitter. It was a convenient way of informing our readers regardless of whether they were Twitter users. And on Monday, it disappeared. What I’ve come up with to replace it is a half-solution: A box that links to our Mastodon account, which can still be read by Mastodon nonusers and users alike. But it’s an extra step. In order to add an actual Mastodon news feed we would either need to pay more or switch to a hosting service and put up with the attendant technical challenges.
What is Musk up to? I can’t imagine that he’s literally trying to destroy Twitter; but if he were, he’d be doing exactly what he’s doing. It’s strange. Twitter is now being inundated with competitors, the largest of which is Mastodon, a decentralized system that runs mainly on volunteer labor. But Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is slowly unveiling a very Twitter-like service called Bluesky (still in beta, and, for the moment, invitation-only), and, this Thursday, Facebook (I refuse to call it Meta) will debut Threads. If Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t screw it up, I think Threads, which is tied to Instagram, might prove to be a formidable challenger.
Still, what made Twitter compelling was that it was essentially the sole platform for short-form interactive social media. The breakdown of that audience into various niches makes it harder for any one service to benefit from the network effect. I’ve currently got conversations going on in three different places, and when I want to share links to my work, I now have to go to Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky (which I just joined), not to mention Facebook and LinkedIn.
The solution
And speaking of the network effect: Twitter may be shrinking, but, with 330 million active monthly users, it’s still by far the largest of the three short-form platforms. Mastodon was up to 10 million registered users as of March (that number grows in spurts every time Musk indulges his inner sociopath), and Bluesky has just 100,000 — although another 2 million or so are on the wait list. What that means for my work is that just a handful of the media thought leaders I need to follow and interact with are on Mastodon or Bluesky, and, from what I can tell, none (as in zero) of the people and organizations that track developments in local news have budged from Twitter.
It will likely turn out that the social media era was brief and its demise unlamented. In the meantime, what’s going on is weird and — for those of us who depend on this stuff — aggravating. In some ways, I would like to see one-stop short-form social media continue. My money is on Threads, although I suspect that Zuckerberg’s greed will prevent it from realizing its full potential.
Portland Harbor after dark. Photo (cc) 2021 by Paul VanDerWerf.
Brian MacQuarrie of The Boston Globe has an overview of efforts to sell the Portland Press Herald of Maine and its affiliated daily and weekly papers.
Back in April, I wrote about the establishment of a nonprofit organization, the Maine Journalism Foundation, known as MaineJF, which was hoping to purchase the papers from owner Reade Brower. MacQuarrie reports that yet another nonprofit group, the National Trust for Local News, “is believed to be in the running.” I assume that the trust is looking to work with the MaineJF rather than compete, so that is potentially a promising development.
Last August, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the CEO and founder of the National Trust, was a guest on our podcast about the future of local news, “What Works.” Ellen Clegg and I spoke with her about her organization’s work in saving legacy newspapers from the depredations of corporate chain ownership.
The trust is perhaps best known for facilitating the sale of Colorado Community Media, a chain of weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs. Hansen Shapiro is also an advisory board member of The Lexington Observer, a hyperlocal nonprofit startup.
I don’t want to come off as a total Luddite when it comes to artificial intelligence and journalism. Well, OK, maybe I do. Because even though I have no problem with using AI for certain mindless, repetitive tasks, such as transcribing interviews and finding patterns in public records, I think we need to be cautious about using such tools to actually produce journalism — whether it be reports about real estate transactions (thus missing the opportunity to dig more deeply) or stories about high school sports. With that in mind, I want to call your attention to three troubling developments.
For those who thought the notion of robot reporters was still quite a ways off, the first development is the most alarming. According to a recent article at Nieman Lab by Sophie Culpepper, an independent publisher has been experimenting with just that in his spare time, and the results are, well, not bad.
Mark Talkington, who runs a hyperlocal start-up called The Palm Beach Post in California, has been feeding governmental meetings that are available on YouTube into an AI system designed by a friend of his. Importantly, it’s not an off-the-shelf product like ChatGPT or Google Bard. Rather, it’s been trained on reliable news and information from his coverage area, which reduces if not eliminates the likelihood of “hallucinations,” the term for false but plausible-sounding output produced by AI.
The example Culpepper quoted from reads like what journalism professors disapprovingly tell their students is an “agenda story” — that is, it begins with something like Members of the board of sewer commissioners began their meeting by saluting the flag rather than with a lead grounded in the most interesting thing that happened. Nor has Talkington actually published any AI-generated stories yet. He said in his interview with Culpepper that he’s concerned about AI missing out on body language and, of course, on the ability to snag an elected official in the hallway during a break in the meeting.
But he said he could see using it to take notes and, eventually, to cover meetings that his thinly stretched staff can’t get to. And that’s how it begins: with a sympathetic hyperlocal publisher using AI to extend his reach, only to see the technology adopted by cost-cutting newspaper chains looking to dump reporters.
My second example might be called “speaking of which.” Because Gannett, whose 200 or so daily newspapers make it the largest corporate chain, announced recently that it, too, is experimenting with generative AI. Helen Coster of Reuters reports that, at first, AI will be used to generate content like bullet points that summarize the most important facts in a story, and that humans will check its work. That feature will be rolled out in the chain’s flagship newspaper, USA Today, later this year.
Gannett is hardly the only news organization that’s playing with AI; The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and others are all looking into ways to make use of it. But Gannett is notoriously tight-fisted and, as Coster notes, has slashed and burned its way to tenuous profitability. “Gannett’s journalists are fighting to ensure that they aren’t replaced by the technology,” she wrote. “Hundreds walked off the job over staff cuts and stagnant wages on June 5. Generative AI is a sticking point in some negotiations with the company, the union said.”
The third warning sign comes from Sebastian Grace, who passed along a truly disturbing item that the German tabloid Bild is laying off about 200 journalists while ramping up its use of AI. (Seb recently wrote a fine piece on journalism and AI for our website What Works: The Future of Local News.) Although those two developments at Bild are said to be unrelated, Jon Henley of The Guardian writes that Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Bild’s corporate owner, Axel Springer, has said that ChatGPT and its ilk could “make independent journalism better than it ever was — or replace it.”
Axel Springer, by the way, also owns Politico, an important U.S. outlet for news about politics and public policy.
Do I think AI will soon replace reporters who do the hard work of going out and getting stories? No — at least not right away. But we’ve been losing journalists for 25 years now, and it seems certain that AI will be used, misused and abused in ways that accelerate that trend.
Sue Cross at the recent INN Days gathering in Washington. Photo by Will Allen-DuPraw and used with permission.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sue Cross, the veteran journalist who will step down as executive director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) by the end of 2023. Sue has led INN since 2015, and has overseen a period of tremendous growth. There were 117 nonprofit newsroom members listed in the INN’s 2015 annual report. This year, INN has 425 member newsrooms.
She has also been a driving force in the NewsMatch program, a collaborative fundraising project that has helped raise more than $270 million for emerging newsrooms since its launch in 2016. Before joining INN, Cross was a journalist and executive at The Associated Press. Cross says we are in a golden age of news innovation, and she hopes to continue to lend her support. She also says she hopes to spend time on personal projects.
Ellen has a Quick Take on the launch of the Houston Landing, a nonprofit digital site serving Greater Houston. I provide an update on efforts to extract money out of Google and Facebook in order to pay for news.
Since early 2021, Google has faced legal challenges over its control of digital advertising. Essentially, the tech giant stands accused of violating antitrust law by controlling all aspects of the ad market. As Paul Farrell, the lawyer for a group of seven newspapers in West Virginia, told Gretchen A. Peck of the trade publication Editor & Publisher:
They [Google] have completely monetized and commercialized their search engine, and what they’ve also done is create an advertising marketplace in which they represent and profit from the buyers and the sellers, while also owning the exchange. Google is the broker for the buyer and gets a commission. Google is the broker for the seller and gets a commission. Google owns, operates and sets the rules for the ad exchange. And they are also in the market themselves.
The suit filed by Farrell on behalf of the West Virginia papers was later joined by about 200 papers and included Facebook, which was accused of colluding with Google in order to receive preferential treatment. Attorneys general in Texas and several other states filed a separate suit, with BuzzFeed News reporting that the CEOs of Google and Facebook “personally signed off on a secret advertising deal.” The Justice Department got involved, and the European Union is suing Google on similar grounds.
On Tuesday, Google’s legal woes grew that much more complicated as Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, filed its own lawsuit against Google in federal district court. Writing in USA Today, Gannett’s flagship publication, chair and CEO Mike Reed accused Google of “monopolization of advertising technology markets and deceptive commercial practices.” He added:
The core of the case and our position is that Google abuses its control over the ad server monopoly to make it increasingly difficult for rival exchanges to run competitive auctions. Further, Google’s exchange rigs its own auctions so Google’s advertisers can buy ad space at bargain prices. That means less investment in online content and fewer ad slots for publishers to sell and advertisers to buy. Google always wins because it takes a growing share of that shrinking pie.
In addition to USA Today, Gannett owns about 200 daily papers and other publications across the country, including local papers such as the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham and The Providence Journal.
So why did Reed decide to file his own lawsuit rather than joining antitrust efforts that are already under way? It’s a good question, and it’s one that Editor & Publisher’s Mike and Robin Blinder asked him about in their vodcast, “E&P Reports.” Reed’s answer: “You know, as far as us going by ourselves, we just felt like we had the right size, we had the right legal counsel, and we felt like we didn’t want to wait.”
Jeff Jarvis, a well-known digital media observer and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, was critical of the Gannett suit, telling E&P:
It is tragic that once-great Gannett is resorting to protectionism and retribution against its competitors rather than have a strategy for innovation and growth in a changed marketplace. There are legitimate questions to be addressed regarding Google’s power in both sides of the advertising market and authorities in both Europe and the U.S. are investigating them. But for Gannett to blame Google’s alleged monopoly for its present troubles is just sad.
But you can disparage Gannett for decimating its newspapers while still supporting legal efforts to hold Google to account. Few media observers have been more critical of Gannett than my What Works partner Ellen Clegg and I. Greed and crushing debt have led the chain to cut its journalistic capacity far more deeply than would have otherwise been necessary. Yet it’s simply a fact that very little digital advertising money has flowed to the news business, and that lack of innovation on the part of the news business is only partly to blame. If news publishers and government investigators are able to show that situation is either partly or wholly the result of illegal practices on the part of Google (and Facebook), then there’s no reason why Gannett shouldn’t be one of the beneficiaries, regardless of the company’s otherwise loathsome behavior.
Moreover, the antitrust route strikes me as far more promising than congressional efforts to force Google and Facebook to pay for the news they repurpose. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act on a bipartisan 14-7 vote, according to Ted Johnson of Deadline. The JCPA would allow the news business to bargain collectively with Google and Facebook for a share of their revenues. Even if the JCPA passes the full Senate, though, it seems unlikely to prevail in the Republican-controlled House. A similar law in Australia has served mainly to enrich press baron Rupert Murdoch, and there’s no guarantee that the JCPA would bolster journalism at the local level.
Regulating a monopoly often leads to unintended negative consequences. Breaking one up, as Gannett and its numerous co-plaintiffs would like to do, can spark innovation. Local news today is getting by through a combination of paywalls, low-value programmatic ads and — in the nonprofit sector — foundation grants, membership fees and events. Nothing would be more welcome than to see that bolstered by a reinvigorated ad market.
Andy Thibault and Billie Holiday delivering The Winsted Citizen
On this week’s podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Andy Thibault, editor and publisher of The Winsted Citizen in Connecticut. The Citizen is a monthly print newspaper serving Litchfield County and the surrounding area. The paper’s digital presence is minimal, although it does publish The Winsted Citizen Blog. But that’s about to change, Thibault says. He’s going digital.
Starting a news organization is never easy, but the Citizen hit a brief speed bump. A speed bump named Ralph Nader, a native of Winsted who was initially the prime mover behind the paper but who got caught up in a dispute over how much financial support he was going to provide. According to Andy, he and Nader are now working together cooperatively and everything is moving ahead just fine.
Jack Walsh, a graduate student in Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, joins us to talk about his recent profile of the Chelsea Record, a 150-year-old weekly paper in the small city of Chelsea, Massachusetts. You can find Jack’s story on the What Works website and read his newsletter, Local News Matters, on Substack.
I’ve got a Quick Take on Gannett. Recently, many union journalists at Gannett staged a one-day strike over layoffs and cutbacks in benefits. Yet there are some interesting moves being made at the top of the company as well, with two news leaders being added to the senior executive team. Is the chain actually looking to bulk up its journalism?
Ellen discusses a recent poll about local news and accountability journalism. Surprisingly few Americans believe that local news media hold public officials accountable, according to a national poll commissioned by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. This shows the devastating impact of the hollowing out of community news. And it calls into question whether local journalism is fulfilling one of its primary missions.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Brant Houston, who is hard to describe in one sentence: he’s an author, an educator, an investigative journalist, an expert in data-based reporting, and a co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the Institute for Nonprofit News.
His new book, “Changing Models for Journalism,” chronicles the history of change, disruption and reinvention in our industry over the past two decades. These are themes we explore on this podcast, and in our own forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.” Brant takes us back to the early days of digital and recounts the early optimism, and the early misconceptions, about the promise and the peril of the internet.
I’ve got a Quick Take on Pink Slime Journalism 3.0. We’ve seen an explosion of websites that might be called Pink Slime 2.0 as political operatives have sought to take advantage of the decline in real local news. That followed Pink Slime 1.0 — an outbreak about a decade ago of local news being produced by low-paid workers in distant locales, including the Philippines. Now, NewsGuard reports that dubious online content powered by artificial intelligence is spreading.
Ellen looks at the numbers in the 2023 impact report on local news by the INN. And there’s some good news: As the nonprofit journalism field expands, the resources to sustain these newsrooms are expanding, too.
Local news board members Greg Bestick of the Harpswell Anchor, Fred Perry of Brookline.News and Virginia McIntyre of The Concord Bridge. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.
Residents looking to start news organizations in their communities usually look to digital first. Even at the local level, advertising revenues are not what they used to be, and the cost of offering a print newspaper — both in terms of money and complexity — often isn’t worth it.
Yet the traditional notion of publishing a weekly newspaper remains attractive on several levels. Readers like it. Advertisers prefer it. And in many states, public notices placed by governmental agencies, a lucrative source of revenue, are restricted to print papers.
So I was interested to learn that print is part of the discussion at three nonprofit local news startups that were featured at a panel discussion, “The Re-Emergence of the Community Newspaper,” held during the recent conference of the NorthEast Association of Communications Executives, held in Meredith, New Hampshire.
The Harpswell Anchor in Maine and The Concord Bridge in Massachusetts have offered print right from the beginning. Brookline.News in Massachusetts is digital-only but may offer a print edition in the future. (Disclosure: Ellen Clegg, my research, podcast and writing partner, is also a founder and co-chair of Brookline.News.)
Greg Bestick, president of the nonprofit board that publishes the Anchor, said print was not something he and his fellow founders especially wanted to offer. What changed their mind, he explained, was that a survey of the community revealed that 95% wanted something they could hold in their hands.
“We weren’t thrilled about that,” Bestick said, “but we did say we’d be much more robust online than the previous owner.”
Unlike The Concord Bridge and Brookline.News, which were both launched in response to massive budget cuts by the newspaper chain Gannett, The Harpswell Anchor had been a locally owned for-profit newspaper until several years ago. The paper ceased publication during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bestick said. The new iteration of the Anchor has had an operating surplus from the start, he added, and won 11 awards from the Maine Press Association during its first year.
Virginia McIntyre, a member of The Concord Bridge’s board, said the founders of that site were enthusiastic about print right from the start. “We wanted something people could have on the kitchen table,” she said, adding: “It’s nice to have something that the family can see as a whole. Our advertisers also like having an ad that hits every household.” The print edition of the Bridge, she explained, is mailed for free to each of Concord’s 8,700 households.
Discussions about starting a community news outlet began after Gannett decided in early 2022 to eliminate nearly all local journalism from its Massachusetts weeklies. The Concord Journal is still published, but it’s filled with regional stories from throughout Gannett’s network. Because of that, McIntyre said, many residents had no idea about important developments such as the hiring of a town manager and a $110 million middle school project. Although the Bridge includes feature stories and coverage of school sports, she said that the goal is to inform the public about day-to-day goings-on.
“It’s not entertainment,” she said. “I always thought Concord was a boring place, and now I know it is.”
In contrast to Concord, Gannett shut down the Brookline Tab altogether, leaving a community of nearly 60,000 people just minutes from Boston without any local source of news. “The Tab was not good. But it was something,” said Fred Perry, a member of the Brookline.News board.
Brookline.News’ website didn’t go live until last week; a newsletter began covering the town just before the annual town meeting in April. Perry said he’s hoping that the project can start offering a print edition sometime this fall, praising “the wonderful examples on both sides of me,” a reference to Bestick and McIntyre. Several other board members, he added, are skeptical of print because of the cost, but he said he’s optimistic that print “can generate a significant surplus.”
The panel discussion was moderated by John Harrison, an executive with Wallit, a company that helps publishers manage digital subscriptions.
In many cases, digital-only makes sense. LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, an organization for digital news entrepreneurs, has more than 300 members. Many of the projects that Ellen and I are profiling in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News,” are digital-only, and they have no plans to add a print edition.
Yet print has persisted long past its anticipated expiration date. Perhaps the best way to think about it is that print is still worth doing — but only if it makes sense in terms of revenue, reader preferences and advertiser reach.
Correction: Updated with the proper spelling of Greg Bestick’s name.
Meet your new reporting staff. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.
A recent report by NewsGuard, a project that evaluates news organizations for reliability and transparency, found that clickbait generated by artificial intelligence is on the rise. McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis write:
NewsGuard has identified 49 news and information sites that appear to be almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software. A new generation of content farms is on the way.
The report didn’t specifically identify any local news websites that are using AI to write low-quality stories aimed at getting clicks and programmatic advertising. Perhaps non-local stories about health, entertainment and tech, to name three of the topics for which content farms are using AI, more readily fly under the radar. If you’re going to use AI to produce articles about the local tax rate or the women’s track team, you’re going to get caught pretty quickly when the results prove to be wrong. Still, the use of AI to produce some forms of local news, such as routine articles about real-estate transactions, is not new.
According to the NewsGuard report, there doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort yet to use AI in order to produce deliberately false stories, although there have been a few examples, including a celebrity death site that claimed President Biden had “passed away peacefully in his sleep.”
Call this Pink Slime 3.0. Version 1.0 was low-tech compared to what’s available today. Back in 2012, the public radio program “This American Life” found that a company called Journatic (pronounced “joor-NAT-ik,” though I always thought it should be “JOOR-nuh-tik”) was producing local content for newspapers using grossly underpaid, out-of-town reporters — including cheap Filipino workers who wrote articles under fake bylines.
Pink Slime 2.0, of more recent vintage, consists of hundreds of websites launched to exploit the decline of local news. Under such banners as “North Boston News” (!), these sites purport to offer community journalism but are actually a cover for political propaganda. Nearly all of them serve right-wing interests, thought there were a few on the left as well.
Pink Slime 3.0 threatens to become more insidious as AI continues to improve. As Seth Smalley wrote for Poynter Online, this is “pink slime on steroids.”
Of course, AI could prove to be a boon for local news, as Sebastian Grace wrote last week for What Works, our Northeastern journalism project tracking developments in community journalism. By eliminating repetitive drudge work, AI can free journalists to produce high-value stories that really matter.
Still, bottom-feeders like CNET — not exactly a content farm, but not much better than that, either — have already been caught publishing error-laden stories with AI. You can only imagine what sort of advice these content farms are going to give people about dealing with their medical problems.
OpenAI, which likes to portray itself as a responsible player in discussions about the future of AI, would not respond to NewsGuard’s inquiries. Neither would Facebook, which is amplifying AI-generated content.
The only thing we can be sure of is that a new, more insidious version of pink slime is coming to a website near you — if it hasn’t already.
