On the latest What Works podcast, Ellen and I talk with Meg Heckman, a colleague of ours at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Meg is an associate professor and author who’s had a long career as a journalist. She spent more than a decade as a reporter and, later, the digital editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, where she developed a fascination with presidential politics, a passion for local news and an appreciation for cars with four-wheel drive.
Her book, “Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party,” documents the lasting impact of New Hampshire publisher and conservative activist Nackey Loeb. Loeb and her husband, the right-wing provocateur William Loeb, helped shape the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire presidential primary for many decades at their newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader. As you’ll hear, Heckman draws a straight line from Nackey Loeb’s support of Republican Patrick Buchanan in 1992 to the rise of Donald Trump a generation later.
In Quick Takes, Ellen calls attention to a piece in ProPublica by journalist Dan Golden about his history working for the local daily in Springfield, Massachusetts. Turns out the good-old-days in newspapering weren’t all good. Golden cautions against recreating them. ProPublica, a nonprofit, allows other outlets to republish its work, so you’ll find Golden’s essay on the What Works website.
I take a look back at an example of how diligent local news reporting can have an enormous impact nearly 45 years after the fact. Recently the EPA proposed a ban on trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent that’s been linked to leukemia, birth defects and other health problems. The road to that ban began in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1979, with a super-smart young reporter I had the honor of working with. I wrote about it for The Boston Phoenix back in 1998.
William Loeb in 1974. Photo via the Spencer Grant Collection / Boston Public Library.
I thought the final days of 2022 would be a good time to take stock of the state of Media Nation. I’ve put more of an effort into it since giving up my weekly column at GBH News last spring. Even though I stopped writing for GBH so that I could concentrate on writing the book that Ellen Clegg and I are co-authoring on local news, I’ve also tried to put more of an effort into the blog. It seems to have paid off.
According to the data, Media Nation received more page views in 2022 (243,489) than it had since 2014 (258,982). More visitors (160,548) dropped by than in any year for which I have data — the numbers only go back to 2013, and I’ve been blogging independently since 2005. I also published 329 posts in 2022, which is more than any year except 2021, when I published 530. I really don’t know what that was all about; it seems to me that I’ve been blogging more this year than last.
As you may know, this is the age of newsletters, and blogs are considered passé in many circles. So I’m pleased that 2,156 people have signed up for free email delivery of new posts to Media Nation, which makes this place a newsletter as much as it is a blog. I also have a small but hardy band of members who pay $5 a month to keep the blog going. If you’d like to join them, you can sign up here.
What follows are my top 10 posts for 2022. The most trafficked post was about revelations that the late William Loeb, the notorious right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, was a child molester. Five of the top 10 pertain to the Gannett newspaper chain, which went on a downsizing crusade in 2022 that made its previous efforts look almost benevolent. And away we go.
1. William Loeb’s stepdaughter says the toxic publisher was also a child molester,May 1 (8,820 views). Who would have thought that Loeb’s deservedly ugly reputation for racism, antisemitism and all-around hate-mongering could get any worse? Well, it did — so much so that his old paper, since rechristened the New Hampshire Union Leader, removed his name from the masthead.
2. Gannett goes on a massive spree of merging and closing papers weekly newspapers, March 17 (7,634 views). This will go down as the year when Gannett more or less got out of the weekly newspaper business in Massachusetts. The chain also made deep cuts at its 200 dailies, including its flagship, USA Today. But the weeklies, in particular, have been targeted for elimination.
3. While Gannett journalists brace for layoffs, those at the top rake in big bucks, Aug. 8. (6,273 views). Chair and CEO Michael Reed’s compensation has been an issue for years, but it seemed especially relevant at a time when his underpaid journalists were losing their jobs by the hundreds. According to company documents, Reed was paid more than $7.7 million in salary and other benefits in 2021. Compensation for other executives and for part-time board members was eye-popping as well. Who says the newspaper business doesn’t pay?
4. Gannett’s Mass. weeklies to replace much of their local news with regional coverage, Feb. 16. (5,120 views). To my mind, this was worse than shutting down and merging many of the weeklies. With the exception of just three papers (the Cambridge Chronicle, the Old Colony Memorial of Plymouth and the Provincetown Banner), Gannett eliminated virtually all local coverage, replacing it with regional beats such as climate change, the criminal justice system and food. Those are not unworthy topics, but who’s going to keep an eye on town hall? Fortunately, the year was also defined by the rise of new local news outlets in Marblehead, Concord, Newton and elsewhere — a trend I expect will continue in 2023.
6. “A Civil Action”: The real story, Dec. 18, 1998 (4,738 views). Now this one is a real mystery. I wrote the piece for The Boston Phoenix just before the movie version premiered, reporting on what actually happened to the Woburn families who sued three industrial polluters after their children became sick with leukemia; two of the children died. Since Northeastern University now owns the rights to the Phoenix archives, I posted it on Media Nation in 2015 in order to make it more accessible. But I have no idea why it got so many views in 2022. All I can think of is that someone assigned it for a course.
8. A Long Island weekly had the goods on Santos several weeks before Election Day, Dec. 23 (4,152 views). This one is still resonating and may move up in the rankings before the year draws to a close. Following up on reporting by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, I found that The North Shore Leader had exposed some of the details about serial liar George Santos several weeks before Election Day — raising questions about why larger news organizations such as The New York Times and Newsday didn’t take notice.
10. Bob Garfield revisits his firing from ‘On the Media’ and brings his podcast to a close, June 21 (2,484 views). The public radio program “On the Media” has been one of my must-listens for many years, although I’m not happy that the program is less and less about the media. (There have been some recent signs of a return to form.) The chemistry between co-hosts Garfield and Brooke Gladstone was one of the things that made it special, even though we now know they hated each other’s guts. Garfield was fired in 2021 and accused of abusive behavior in the workplace, an accusation he more or less admitted to but defended anyway. And by the way, my post on Gladstone’s taking to the airwaves to say that Garfield got what he deserved was my most viewed (9,172 times) of 2021. The break-up of Gladstone and Garfield’s professional partnership obviously meant a lot to many people.
William Loeb in 1974. Photo via the Spencer Grant Collection / Boston Public Library.
The stepdaughter of William Loeb has accused the infamously toxic right-wing Manchester Union Leader publisher of sexually molesting her when she was just 7 years old. Nackey Gallowhur Scagliotti, 76, also said that Loeb sexually abused his 6-year-old daughter, the late Edie Tomasko.
“I am now in my seventies and, when I am gone, there may well be nobody left with a first-hand account of Loeb’s abuse,” Scagliotti wrote in a statement that was reported by Loeb’s old paper, since renamed the New Hampshire Union Leader. “It took me many years to learn this one true thing about family dynamics: when dark secrets are kept they have a caustic effect, not just for those who were participants or bystanders at the time, but across generations.”
In response, the Union Leader has removed Loeb’s name from its masthead. This is a huge deal. Even though Loeb died 40 years ago, the paper had never repudiated the caustic hate he espoused on his pages, and its editorial page remains an important (if toned-down) voice of New Hampshire conservatism. As the editorial puts it:
William Loeb has nothing to do with the current New Hampshire Union Leader, but he has much to do with its history. Loeb famously said, “I don’t care what people think of me, just so long as they think.” We are certainly thinking now.
We know now that William Loeb is not a man to be celebrated.
My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman, who wrote an excellent biography of Loeb’s widow and successor as publisher, Nackey Scripps Loeb, called “Political Godmother,” tweeted out a thread that offers some further insights:
1/n: William Loeb was a child molester. After decades of silence, his stepdaughter, Nackey Scagliotti, has gone on the record about the abuse she and her late half-sister, Edith Tomasko, experienced long ago. #MeToo#nhpoli#fitnhttps://t.co/XRELTeJyXQ
William Loeb had such disdain for New Hampshire that he wouldn’t even live there — he lived in a mansion on Boston’s North Shore. Despite his patrician background, he was a racist from the old school, once publishing his birth certificate on the front page of the Union Leader in an attempt to prove he wasn’t Jewish. He also published a headline that read “Kissinger the Kike?” For more on Loeb, I recommend Kevin Cash’s 1976 book “Who the Hell Is William Loeb?” Among other things, Cash hints that Loeb may have had Nackey Loeb’s first husband murdered. Who knows? But it seems significant that Cash was not sued for libel.
In 1972, Loeb published a letter from then-President Richard Nixon’s dirty-tricks operation falsely claiming that Sen. Ed Muskie, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, had poked fun at “Canucks,” a derogatory term for French-Americans, a large ethnic group in New Hampshire. Muskie showed up outside the Union Leader’s headquarters and raged against Loeb — and, depending on whose account you believe, started to cry. Muskie’s campaign unraveled after that, leading to the nomination of Nixon’s preferred opponent, Sen. George McGovern.
The ugly tale told by Nackey Scagliotti adds to the Loeb lore, and certainly not in a good way. According to the Union Leader account, as well as conversations I’ve had with Meg, the story had been making the rounds for years, but couldn’t be pinned down as long as Scagliotti was unwilling to go on the record.
The Haverhill Gazette in the early 1900s. Photo via WHAV.
The Haverhill Gazette marked its 200th anniversary in 2021, and WHAV Radio has taken note of the occasion in a lengthy tribute. The Gazette, an independently owned daily for most of its existence, launched WHAV in 1947 under the auspices of a publisher who was distantly related to the Taylor family, which then owned The Boston Globe. The station was revived about 15 years ago and converted to a nonprofit, low-power FM station (it also streams) by local advertising executive Tim Coco, who continues to run it as an independent source of news.
Coco and David Goudsward trace the Gazette from its founding in 1821 to the present day. I had no idea that Haverhill’s favorite son, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, was the editor for a brief period in the 1830s.
A long series of events that led to the shrinkage of the Gazette began in 1957, when William Loeb, the notorious right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union Leader (now the New Hampshire Union Leader), took advantage of a strike at the Gazette by starting a competing paper, the Haverhill Journal. Coco and Goudsward write that the Gazette was sold to a consortium comprising The Eagle-Tribune, then of Lawrence, now of North Andover; The Sun of Lowell; and Vermont’s Burlington Free Press.
John Greenleaf Whittier. Image via the National Portrait Gallery.
Although the arrangement somehow managed to pass antitrust muster, I’m old enough to recall stories that The Eagle-Tribune and The Sun weren’t going to let the Gazette get too good. The Gazette changed hands several more times and in 1998 was sold to The Eagle-Tribune. Today, the Gazette is a weekly. Both the Gazette and The Eagle-Tribune, which remains a daily, are owned by CNHI, a corporate newspaper chain based in Montgomery, Alabama. As Coco and Goudsward write of the Gazette:
It is better off than the thousands of newspapers that have succumbed in recent years, but still a shadow of its former self — the victim, first of consolidation that reduced it from a robust daily to a weekly, and then of the loss of its advertising base to electronic media.
For several years, I followed news coverage in Haverhill quite closely, as it was the first community chosen by the Banyan Project in which to launch a cooperatively owned news organization, to be known as Haverhill Matters. The idea never came to fruition despite years of planning. During those same years, Coco was building WHAV into a vital source of local news and information, both over the air and online.
Later this year the Banyan Project is scheduled to roll out its first cooperatively owned news site in the city of Haverhill, to be called Haverhill Matters. Banyan founder Tom Stites’ vision is to serve what he calls “news deserts” — low- and moderate-income communities, mainly urban, that are underserved by traditional media. What follows is the first of several blog posts in which I will attempt to assess the media landscape in Haverhill as it exists today.
The Eagle-Tribune, whose headquarters are in North Andover but which is historically associated with Lawrence, publishes seven days a week, including a separate Haverhill edition every day except Monday and Saturday. The Gazette, founded in 1821, was an independent daily for much of its history. A newspaper strike in 1957 led to a debilitating battle with the notoriously right-wing publisher William Loeb, who launched a rival daily, the Haverhill Journal. As described in a recent essay by Tim Coco, president and general manager of the nonprofit radio station WHAV, by the mid-’60s the Journal had ceased to publish and the Gazette was left in a diminished state. The Eagle-Tribune acquired the Gazette in 1998 and converted it to a weekly.
According to the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM), The Eagle-Tribune’s average paid circulation for the six-month period ending March 31 of this year was 33,296 on Sundays and 32,101 on weekdays. As with many papers, circulation has been dropping in recent years; for the same six-month period ending on March 31, 2010, circulation was 40,800 on Sundays and 39,947 on weekdays. It is worth noting that all or most of The Eagle-Tribune’s content is available for free at its website, www.eagletribune.com.
No paid circulation figures are available from the AAM for either the Haverhill edition of The Eagle-Tribune or for The Haverhill Gazette. Currently, though the Eagle-Tribune Publishing Co. is telling prospective advertisers that the Gazette has a circulation of 3,900 (pdf) — down from 6,350 in 2007 (pdf). Eagle-Tribune editor Al White declined my request for an interview. But according to a knowledgeable source, The Eagle-Tribune’s circulation in Haverhill is somewhere around 5,000, perhaps a bit less.
Despite its relatively modest size, The Eagle-Tribune has a distinguished history, having won Pulitzer Prizes in 1988 and 2003. Both of those awards predated CNHI’s 2005 acquisition of the paper and its affiliated newspapers, which include three other dailies — The Daily News of Newburyport, The Salem News and the Gloucester Daily Times. In recent years, those papers — like many newspapers nationally — have undergone several rounds of layoffs and budget cuts. Since 2009, editorial staff members have been required to take unpaid furloughs for one week each quarter, according to several sources inside the company.
In Haverhill, CNHI’s cuts hit home in March 2012 when the downtown office was closed. “It has always been my goal to put as many people under as few roofs as possible while maintaining the quality of our newspapers,” then-publisher Al Getler wrote in a message to readers, adding: “With today’s technology, our reporters no longer need to sit behind a desk in an office to get their job accomplished.”
The loss of a downtown presence, though, meant that residents could not drop by with news items or story tips. Some newspaper owners hold a different view regarding the desirability of a downtown presence. For instance, the New Haven Register, which no longer needs its office-park location after outsourcing its printing to the Hartford Courant in 2012, is looking to relocate to a downtown office so that it would be more accessible to the public, according to an article by Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent.
With very few exceptions, virtually all Haverhill articles in both The Eagle-Tribune and the Gazette are produced by two staff reporters, itself a diminution from years past. An editor at The Eagle-Tribune spends most of his time overseeing Haverhill coverage.
In most communities served by a daily and a weekly, the papers compete for stories. But in Haverhill, common ownership has led to a different approach — mostly hard news in The Eagle-Tribune and soft features in the Gazette. Thus Haverhill readers must buy both papers if they wish to be fully informed.
In my experience, content analyses are of limited value since qualities such as accuracy, context and thoroughness are difficult to assess without deep knowledge of a community. Nevertheless, I examined the two papers’ Haverhill coverage for April of this year. What follows are a few observations about each.
The Eagle-Tribune
Daily coverage focused heavily on governmental sources of news. I counted 55 bylined stories that were entirely about or mostly about Haverhill. Of these, 20 emanated from city hall; 10 involved public safety or the courts; and six involved the school committee or other school authorities. Enterprise stories — that is, stories generated solely by journalists and not tied to any particular event — were virtually non-existent.
April, of course, was the month when the Boston Marathon bombings took place. The Haverhill edition ran several related articles, including one on a vigil and another on six Haverhill police officers who assisted with operations in Watertown, where bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was ultimately taken into custody.
Routine police news and press releases are published inside the Haverhill edition. “Haverhill in a Minute,” a round-up of such items, lets people know what’s going on in the community, with announcements from organizations such as Northern Essex Community College, churches and various civic organizations.
Also during April there were three unsigned editorials that touched on Haverhill topics and several letters to the editor from Haverhill residents.
The Haverhill Gazette
The Gazette each week comprises 14 pages that are geared toward light features and photo essays. Characteristic features during April included a story on how reduced fees were leading more Haverhill High School students to play sports; the rise of outdoor dining at downtown restaurants, attributed to an initiative by Mayor James Fiorentini; and a volunteer effort to repair 15 homes owned by low-income or disabled residents.
Every week the front page includes an anonymously written column called The Lamp Post, a breezy compilation of observations, shoutouts and mild gossip. An example: “Drivers waiting at red lights at the intersection of Ginty and Bailey boulevards are getting frustrated, and who can blame them?” Another example: “Sacred Hearts School had a celebration to kick off the Red Sox home opener on Monday. The school’s kindergarten classes had a special lunch and activities, including a parade.”
The Gazette also includes a much longer, more complete version of the police log, parts of which also appear in the daily Haverhill edition; editorials; historical photos; a column by a retired local journalist; listings from the local council on aging and Haverhill Community Television; and large photo essays on youth sports and other activities.
***
In terms of quantity, types of stories covered and general approach, the two papers offer local journalism that — based on my experience as a longtime observer of local journalism — is no better and no worse than what is available in many communities.
What comes across is a certain comprehensiveness to the coverage, especially involving city government, but a lack of voices from the community and from the city’s neighborhoods. The bifurcated nature of the coverage is a problem, as it essentially requires residents to read both papers. The Gazette, by highlighting positive news in the community, fulfills some of the civic engagement functions of journalism better than The Eagle-Tribune. But that advantage is undermined by the absence of hard news.
Because Haverhill Matters is likely to take a different, more hyperlocal approach to coverage than either The Eagle-Tribune or the Gazette, there’s an opportunity for cooperation. For instance, it would not be hard to imagine the two papers’ repurposing some of Haverhill Matters’ neighborhood news on their websites.
For the moment, though, there do not appear to be any plans to form such a relationship. Eagle-Tribune editor White, as I mentioned earlier, declined to be interviewed. But Mike LaBonte, co-chair of the organizing committee for Haverhill Matters, told me in an email that the fledgling site’s expected reliance on paid advertising might preclude a partnership.
“Even though we plan to focus on the news areas they don’t cover well, collaboration may be tough since we are competing for the same ad dollars,” LaBonte said. “Personally I think it will just have to wait until we see what our strengths and weakness are a year or two from now.”
Banyan Project founder Tom Stites refers to Haverhill and cities like it as “news deserts” — that is, as communities so underserved by local journalism that government accountability and civic life are harmed. He and local activists hope to launch Banyan’s first online news co-op, Haverhill Matters, later this year. (I touch on Banyan in the Epilogue to “The Wired City.”)
Two generations ago, though, the mid-size industrial city, located in the Merrimack Valley near the New Hampshire border, was the scene of a daily newspaper war. According to an account recently published by the city’s online nonprofit radio station, WHAV, a newspaper strike led to years of debilitating rivalry between the established Haverhill Gazette and the upstart Haverhill Journal.
The Journal was started by the notorious William Loeb, owner of the Manchester Union Leader (now the New Hampshire Union Leader), in December 1957. The Gazette had temporarily ceased publishing after it was struck by members of the typographical union. And Haverhill merchants, worried that they had no place to advertise their Christmas wares, went to Loeb and asked him to do something. He published a couple of free shoppers, and then decided to start a full-fledged newspaper.
The WHAV article, by Tim Coco, is full of colorful details, especially concerning the federal antitrust case that grew out of the rivalry. In a nutshell, Loeb secretly paid businessmen to buy ads only in the Journal and to badmouth the Gazette at every opportunity. And the Gazette sold ads below cost, which can in some circumstances be illegal. But it was great for readers while it lasted. As Coco puts it at the beginning of his essay:
News media competition helps ensure the inner workings of every government department are exposed to the light of day and held accountable, every service club talk is covered and every military personnel homecoming is treated with reverence.
On the other hand, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Wyzanski, who presided over the antitrust hearings, concluded it was impossible for two daily papers in a city the size of Haverhill to operate profitably unless they offered “limited news coverage” and “inferior general quality.” The Gazette quickly ran into trouble, and in 1958 it was acquired by a consortium of newspaper publishers. The unstable rivalry persisted until Loeb shuttered the Journal in 1965.
Eventually the Gazette was acquired outright by The Eagle-Tribune, headquartered in North Andover but traditionally associated with Lawrence. The Eagle-Tribune started a daily Haverhill edition and converted the Gazette to a weekly. In 2005, The Eagle-Tribune and its affiliated papers on the North Shore were bought by CNHI, a Birmingham, Ala.-based chain. And as Coco notes, in March 2012, The Eagle-Tribune closed the Gazette’s Haverhill offices.
“After 191 years,” Coco writes, “The Haverhill Gazette no longer had a physical presence in Haverhill.”
Now, nearly a half-century after daily newspaper competition came to an end in Haverhill, the city is on the verge of becoming a hotbed of experimentation in community journalism. In addition to the Banyan Project, WHAV has launched something called the “Democracy, Independence and Sustainability Project.”
I’m hoping there’s going to be a lot more to come as 2013 unfolds.
Update: After I posted a link to this on Twitter, John Dodge let me know that another, lesser-known daily paper called the Independent published in Haverhill in the late 1970s. Begun by longtime Gazette staffers, Dodge says the Independent couldn’t survive because the DeMoulas supermarket chain wouldn’t buy any ads.
