Tag: WordPress

How Claude AI helped improve the look and legibility of Media Nation

Public domain illustration via Pixabay.

For quite a few years I used WordPress’ indent feature for blockquotes rather than the actual blockquote command. The reason was that blockquotes in the theme that I use (Twenty Sixteen) were ugly, with type larger than the regular text (the opposite of what you would see in a book or a printed article) and in italics.

But then I noticed that indents didn’t show up at all in posts that went out by email, leading to confusion among my subscribers — that is, my most engaged readers. I decided to find out if I could modify the blockquote feature. WordPress allows you to add custom CSS to your theme, but I know very little about how to use CSS. I could have asked in a WordPress forum, but I tried to see if I could get an answer from AI instead.

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Northeastern has given us all access to the enterprise version of Claude, Anthropic’s AI platform. It’s a mixed blessing, although I’ve found that it’s very good as a search engine — often better than Google, which is now also glopped up by AI. I simply make sure I ask Claude to add the underlying links to its answer so I don’t get taken in by hallucinations. But Claude is also known for being quite good at coding. What I needed was low-level, so I thought maybe it could help.

Indeed it could. I began by asking, “In the Twenty Sixteen WordPress theme, how can I change the CSS so that blockquotes do not appear in italics?” Claude provided me with several options; I chose the simplest one, which was a short bit of custom CSS that I could add to my theme:

blockquote {
     font-style: normal;
}

It worked. A subsequent query enabled me to make the blockquote type smaller. Then, just last week, I noticed that any formatting in the blockquote was stripped out. For instance, a recent memo from Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry contained boldface and italicized text, which did not appear when I reproduced her message. The formatting code was there; it just wasn’t visible. Claude produced CSS commands that overrode the theme. You can see the results here, with bold and italic type just as Henry had it in her message.

I make some light use of AI in my other work. When I need to transcribe an audio interview, I use Otter, which is powered by AI. I’ve experimented with using AI to compile summaries from transcripts and even (just for my own use) an actual news story. Very occasionally I’ve used AI to produce illustrations for this blog, which seems to draw more objections than other AI applications, probably because it’s right in people’s faces.

Just the other day, someone complained to me on social media that she was not going to visit a local news outlet I had mentioned because she had encountered an AI-produced illustration there. When I asked why, she replied that it was because AI relies on plagiarism. Oh, I get it. Sometime this year I’m hoping to receive $3,000 as my share of a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic because one of my books, “The Return of the Moguls,” was used to train Claude.

And let’s not overlook the massive amounts of energy that are required to power AI. On a recent New York Times podcast, Ezra Klein and his guests observed that AI is deeply unpopular with the public (sub. req.), even though they’re using it, because all they really know is that it’s going to take away jobs and is driving up electricity costs.

But AI isn’t going anywhere, and if we’re going to use it (and we are, even if we try to avoid it), we need to find ways to do so ethically and responsibly.

Targeting comment spam

I’ve been deluged by comment spam the past few days, so I’ve turned on a toggle that requires users to be registered and logged in before they can comment. In case you are prompted to take an extra step to post a comment, that’s the reason.

The Herald’s print numbers keep dropping while digital holds steady; plus, media notes

The Boston Herald Traveler plant sometime in the 1950s. Photo (cc) 2013 by City of Boston Archives.

Paid print circulation continues to fall at the city’s second daily newspaper, the Boston Herald, while paid digital subscriptions are essentially unchanged over the past year. That information was gleaned from published statements that the Herald filed with the U.S. Postal Service this past September as well as the previous September.

Last week I reported that the dominant daily, The Boston Globe, is losing print customers more quickly than it’s adding digital subscribers — a departure from previous years, when digital was growing rapidly. The paper is predicting a return to faster growth in 2025.

I’m reporting on the Herald’s numbers with less information than I would like, but I believe I have enough to make some accurate apples-to-apples comparisons.

Unlike the Globe, and unlike virtually every daily newspaper I’ve ever looked at, the Herald’s postal statements include Sunday numbers in its average circulation totals. If I had access to the Alliance for Audited Media’s reports, I could find separate totals for Sundays and weekdays. Last October, for instance, Mark Pickering, writing for Contrarian Boston, found that the Herald’s average paid weekday print circulation was 16,043, a decline of more than 20% over 2022. Sunday circulation, he reported, was 19,799 last year, a drop of more than 16%.

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Pickering was relying on numbers that the Herald had reported to AAN. Unfortunately, AAN ended free log-ins for journalists and researchers a couple of years ago. And when I asked for four reports last week regarding the Herald and the Globe, I was told that it would cost me $200. No thank you.

So that brings us to the seven-day print numbers that the Herald reported to the Postal Service. According to reports filed on Sept. 20, 2024, the Herald’s average print circulation during the preceding 12 months was 13,092 — a substantial drop of 2,566, or more than 16% over the previous year.

Now for digital circulation. As I wrote last week, the digital numbers that newspapers report to AAN and the Postal Service involve some double-counting and are actually higher than the internal numbers. Globe spokeswoman Carla Kath told me that the paper’s paid digital circulation is currently 261,000, an increase of 6.5% over the previous year but substantially below what’s on the postal (and AAN) statements.

Given that, I’d like to know what the Herald’s internal count of digital circulation shows. But publisher Kevin Corrado did not respond to an email seeking clarification, so I’m going to go with the postal statement. And according to that statement, the Herald’s average seven-day digital paid circulation is now 27,894, just 655 more than it was a year ago.

For some reason, the 2023 number is slightly lower than what Pickering reported at Contrarian Boston a year ago for both weekdays and Sundays, which suggests an unexplained discrepancy between what the Herald reported to the postal service and to AAN.

All told, the Herald’s average paid circulation as reported to the postal service, print plus digital, is now 40,978, a decline of 1,919, or about 4.5%.

Media notes

• Media critic Margaret Sullivan, whose lengthy résumé includes a stint as The New York Times’ public edtior, weighs in with some thoughts on a bizarro juxtaposition of Times headlines about presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The headlines: “In interviews, Kamala Harris continues to bob and weave” and “In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics,” which is another way of saying that the Orange Authoritarian is a fan of eugenics.

As Sullivan writes, the Harris head is “unnecessarily negative, over a story that probably doesn’t need to exist,” while the Trump head “takes a hate-filled trope and treats it like some sort of lofty intellectual interest.” Liberals and progressives on social media, especially on Threads, have been up in arms at what they see as the Times’ soft treatment of Trump. Though I think much (OK, some) of that criticism is overwrought, there’s no disputing that the paper blew it with the two headlines Sullivan cites.

• Speaking of the Times, executive editor Joseph Kahn was interviewed on NPR in recent days by “Morning Edition” co-host Steve Inskeep. Kahn was asked to address criticism from the left, including the Times’ obsessive coverage of President Biden’s age and its weird both-sidesy treatment of the candidates’ housing plans. (Harris: Build more; Trump: Deport the occupants.)

“In people’s minds, there’s very little neutral middle ground. In our mind, it is the ground that we are determined to occupy,” Kahn said. He added: “It’s not about implying that both sides have absolutely equal policies on all the issues. It’s about providing well-rounded coverage of each of the two political parties and their leading candidates.” Read or listen what Kahn has to say and see if you agree.

• This blog is built on WordPress, open-source software that powers many news websites. Unlike Twitter, Meta or Substack, WordPress has always seemed like a non-evil alternative. You can set up your blog at WordPress.com, a commercial hosting service, or do it yourself using the free WordPress.org software. I’ve done both, and currently Media Nation uses dot-org.

Now all that is being threatened. Longtime digital journalist Mathew Ingram, who’s gone independent, has a terrific post up about the battle between Matt Mullenweg, a wealthy entrepreneur who controls both dot-com and dot-org, and WP Engine, a major third-party hosting service that I don’t use. “In a word, it’s a godawful mess,” Ingram writes. “And every user of WordPress has effectively been dragged into it, whether they wanted to be part of it or not.”

Beehiiv, anyone?

• The PRESS Act, which would create a federal shield law to protect journalists from being forced to identify their anonymous sources except in rare cases, has been endorsed by The New York Times. I’ve written more about it here.

Why I’m asking you to become a member of Media Nation

At the beginning of 2021, I decided to shift my online activities — I was going to blog more and use Facebook and Twitter less. At the same time, I decided to start offering memberships to Media Nation for $5 a month, following the lead of Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson, pundits such as Andrew Sullivan, reporters such as Patrice Peck and others.

Most of these other folks are using Substack, a newsletter platform. I figured I had sunk way too many years — 16 — into writing Media Nation as a blog, and I didn’t want to switch to a platform that’s reliant on venture capital and could eventually go the way of most such companies. So here I am, still blogging at WordPress.com, and asking readers to consider becoming members by supporting me on Patreon.

And yes, I have been blogging more as I try to stay on top of various media stories, especially involving local journalism, as well as politics, culture and the news of the day. Just this week I’ve written about Larry Flynt and the First Amendment, Duke Ellington’s legacy, a new partnership between The Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald, and a Louisiana reporter who’s been sued for — believe it or not — filing a public-records request.

If you value this work, I hope you’ll consider supporting it for $5 a month. Members receive a newsletter every Friday morning with exclusive content.

And if you’ve already become a member, thank you.

A big year for Remy-related blog posts at Media Nation

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Photo (cc) by Paul. Some rights reserved.

On Tuesday I posted WordPress’ robo-generated report on my year in blogging. But you knew I wasn’t going to stop there, didn’t you? For the past several years I’ve been writing an end-of-the-year round-up of my top 10 posts. It’s always interesting to me to see what resonates most with my readers.

These lists always come with caveats, and this year’s has a big one. Starting last spring, I began offering what I thought were my better blog posts to my friends at WGBHNews.org, who published them first and promoted them on social media. Though I later reposted them on Media Nation, they had already lost a lot of their juice by that point. So it’s hard to know what my top 10 list really means. Maybe I should call this list “The Best of the Rest.”

And away we go.

1. Is Jerry Remy’s broadcasting career finally over? (March 23). The answer, as it turned out, was “no.” But following a devastating story in The Boston Globe by Eric Moskowitz on Remy’s homicidal son, Jared, and the lengths to which Jerry Remy and his wife, Phoebe, had enabled his violent behavior, it sure looked that way, if only for a brief moment. Within days, though, Jerry Remy was back in the broadcast booth, yukking it up uncomfortably with Don Orsillo during Red Sox games. There was all kinds of internal intrigue to this. Both the Globe and the Red Sox are owned by John Henry, who is also a part-owner of Remy’s employer, New England Sports Network. (Page views: 7,714.)

2. Boston.com retracts claim about racist email from professor (Dec. 11). In early December, Boston.com had a phenomenon on its hands: contentious, legalistic emails from Harvard Business School professor (and lawyer) Ben Edelman complaining to a Chinese restaurant about having been overcharged by $4. But then the Boston Globe Media-owned site overreached. Hilary Sargent, who had written the original story, cowrote a follow-up reporting that Edelman had sent one of the owners, Ran Duan, a racist email. It couldn’t be verified, and the story was pulled back. It got worse: It turned out that Sargent had also designed a T-shirt making fun of Edelman that she was selling online. Sargent, the site’s deputy editor (the top editing job was vacant), was suspended for a week. David Bernstein has a good overview of the whole affair at Boston magazine. (Page views: 2,827.)

3. Boston.com’s anonymous sports blogger to be unmasked (March 24). (Page views: 2,648.)

4. Meet the Obnoxious Boston Fan (March 25). I am startled that these two posts received the attention that they did. After the Globe’s exposé about the Remy family, an anonymous Boston.com blogger who writes as the Obnoxious Boston Fan posted a harsh commentary about Remy. It struck me as inappropriate that a Globe-affiliated site would allow anonymous attacks on anyone. Globe digital adviser David Skok told me that Mr. OBF would soon drop the anonymity — and in my follow-up post, I was able to identify him ahead of the official unveiling as Bill Speros. (Page views: 2,178.)

5. Big moves as Globe prepares to expand its business section (Nov. 13). (Page views: 1,870.)

6. Eagan leaves Herald, will write for Globe’s Catholic site (July 30). (Page views: 1,685.)

7. Globe executive announces digital moves (July 29). Probably the biggest ongoing local media story is Boston Globe owner John Henry’s various investments in growth — a new weekly political section (Capital), a Catholic website (Crux) and an expanded business section. These three posts documented a few of those developments. (Page views: 1,609.)

8. Jared Remy joins his dad in attacking Margery Eagan (April 25). The fourth Remy-related item in the top 10. Eagan, then with the Boston Herald, had the temerity to criticize Jerry Remy in her column. Jerry Remy went after her on the air — and Jared Remy joined in from his prison cell. (Page views: 1,495.)

9. Globe to offer buyouts to some staff members (Aug. 1). Not all the news from Globe headquarters in 2014 was about investment and expansion. Even as the news organization grew, it announced cuts in other areas. (Page views: 1,338.)

10. Boston Herald loses libel suit over false prison sex story (March 19). The plaintiff, Joanna Marinova, was awarded $563,000 over a story that falsely claimed she had engaged in “sexual acts” with an inmate during a 2009 trip to Bridgewater State Prison. Marinova and state Rep. Gloria Fox had visited the prison in order to investigate claims of inmate abuse. (Page views: 1,187.)

Media Nation’s 2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 260,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 11 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Learning to love the new Google Maps

[googlemaps https://mapsengine.google.com/map/embed?mid=zPbsJYJWxk3s.kLMwberwzvPo&w=640&h=480]

For several years I’ve asked students in my digital journalism classes to do a group project involving Google Maps. It’s a pretty simple assignment. They go out and write reviews for their blogs about coffee shops near Northeastern, or pizza restaurants, or whatever we’ve all agreed to. Then they plot the location on a map and include a link to their review. The idea is to introduce them to the power of mapping and how it can be used as a tool for non-linear storytelling.

Recently I was faced with the prospect of using the new Google Maps, which struck me as significantly more cumbersome than the old version. I couldn’t find much in the way of good documentation online, so I put out a call on Twitter. That brought a response from Aleszu Bajak, the editor of StoryBench, a how-they-did-it site that’s part of our School of Journalism’s Media Innovation graduate program. Yes, Alezsu was probably within shouting distance when he replied to my tweet.

https://twitter.com/aleszubajak/status/532645402299080704

At first I was bewildered. But later on, it started to sink in. And I’m here to tell you that the new Google Maps is a terrific tool — better than the old one, though it seems to be missing a few features. What follows is a look at how we did our most recent project — a guide to Boston’s “Hidden Gems.” (The story has been picked up by Universal Hub.) I’ve written a how-to post designed for people like me, not for Google experts. So if you’d like to give it a try, please have a look. Instructions after the jump. (And here is Bajak’s own post on Google Maps.)

Continue reading “Learning to love the new Google Maps”