The hedge fund Alden Global Capital, notorious for hollowing out its newspapers, is shutting down eight weekly newspapers in Minnesota. Louis Krauss of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune reports that six of the papers are part of the Southwest News Media group and two are under the auspices of Crow River Media.
“The closings will leave the communities without their long-time local papers,” Krauss writes. “Two of the papers, the Shakopee Valley News and Chaska Herald, have been published for more than 160 years, while the Jordan Independent was founded 140 years ago.”
Alden owns 68 dailies and more than 300 weekly publications through its MediaNews Group as well as another seven larger-market dailies through Tribune Publishing. Tribune recently sold The Baltimore Sun to David Smith, the head of Sinclair Broadcasting; Smith’s first act was to meet with his staff and berate them. Alden also owns New York’s Daily News but for some reason has separated it from its Tribune holdings. In Massachusetts, Alden owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.
A number of startup projects that we wrote about in “What Works for Community News” were founded by people who quit an Alden-owned paper rather than continue to put up with round after round of cuts. Examples include relatively large outlets like The Colorado Sun and small projects like The Mendocino Voice and Santa Cruz Local.
Now it looks like some opportunities are about to open up in Minnesota for entrepreneurial-minded journalists.
New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2012 by AlexiusHoratius
By Dan Kennedy
The Boston Globe published a story Friday about a New Hampshire state representative named Jonathan Stone, an ex-police officer who — according to recently released records that he tried to keep secret — “spoke of killing police and raping the chief’s wife and children.”
As the Globe notes, the story was broken on April 5 by Damien Fisher of InDepthNH, a nonprofit news organization that covers politics and public policy in the Granite State. Fisher’s story begins:
Republican Rep. Jon Stone’s New Hampshire law enforcement career ended when he threatened to kill fellow police officers in a shooting spree, and murder his chief after raping the chief’s wife and children, all while he was already under scrutiny for his inappropriate relationship with a teen girl, according to the internal investigation reports finally released this week.
Yikes. Fisher writes that he first filed a right-to-know request in 2020, and that the records were ordered released last month by New Hampshire’s Supreme Court. InDepthNH executive editor and founder Nancy West was a guest on our “What Works” podcast in November 2022.
In Ohio, DIY pink slime
Jack Brewster of NewsGuard, a project that tracks the rise of pink slime news sites, has written an essay for The Wall Street Journal (free link) that is at turns harrowing and hilarious. Spending just $105, he put together a website powered by artificial intelligence that’s designed to look like a local news outlet. Per his specifications, the site, which he called the Buckeye State Press, was designed with a right-wing bias, favoring Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno over the Democratic incumbent, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Brewster used an Israeli-based service called Fiverr.com to build the site, which in turn was programmed by a Pakistani freelancer named Huzafa Nawaz. Brewster writes:
From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total. The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it.
I’ve been following developments in pink slime off and on for the past decade, and what I’ve found is that they are pretty inept. That proved to be the case with Brewster’s experiment as well — at one point his site hallucinated Brown’s attendance at a local fig festival. At some point, though, these projects are going to evolve into effective sources of political propaganda, which we all need to be concerned about.
Google plays hardball in California
As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m skeptical of legislative attempts to force Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for the journalism that they repurpose. If anything, the notion has become more nonsensical over time, as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has made it clear that it would just as soon eliminate news content on platforms like Facebook and Threads.
Google is a different matter, but no less complicated. News publishers want money from Google, but at the same time exactly none of them add the necessary code to their sites which would make them invisible to Google, because they’re dependent on traffic from the giant search engine, too.
Still, it’s hard not to be outraged by Google’s latest tactic. According to Jeremy B. White of Politico, Google is blocking access to some local news content in parts of California as it fights against state legislation that would force them to pay news organizations. White writes:
“We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism,” Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, Jaffer Zaidi, said in a Friday blog post. Zaidi warned the bill could “result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”
Well, I guess so. These are the tactics of a thug, and yet another sign that the tech giants have amassed way too much power.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan talks with Josh Stearns, the senior director of the Public Square Program at Democracy Fund.
The Democracy Fund is an independent foundation that works for something very basic and increasingly important: to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges. Josh leads the foundation’s work in rebuilding local news. The Democracy Fund supports media leaders, defends press freedom, and holds social media platforms accountable. (Ellen was stuck in traffic somewhere on the Zakim Bridge in Boston for the duration of this show, but she’ll return for the next episode!)
In our Quick Takes, Dan poaches on Ellen’s territory and reports on a development in Iowa, the Hawkeye State. When two local weekly newspapers near Iowa City recently got into trouble, their owner found an unusual buyer: The Daily Iowan, the independent nonprofit student newspaper. Now there are plans to supplement local coverage with contributions from student journalists.
It’s not something Dan would like to see everywhere — after all, we want to make sure there are jobs for student journalists after they graduate. But at least in this case, it sounds like the Iowa solution is going to be good for the weekly papers, good for the students and good for the communities they serve.
A good opinion section builds community. It’s an argument that Ellen makes over and over. As editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, she eliminated the last vestiges of nationally syndicated columnists and pushed the pages toward mostly local content. That has continued under her successors at the Globe, including the current opinion editor, James Dao.
Now Gretchen A. Peck of Editor & Publisher has checked in with three top journalists who are working for their papers’ opinion sections — Julieta Chiquillo, deputy editorial page editor at The Dallas Morning News; Peter St. Onge, editorial page editor at three North Carolina papers, The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer of Raleigh and The Herald-Sun of Durham, as well as opinion editor at McClatchy; and Lorraine Forte, opinion editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.
They all make similar points: local opinion journalism based on rigorous reporting is a crucial part of a local or regional newspaper’s mission. “I think it’s part of what gives the newspaper a personality and creates a sense of community,” Forte told Peck. “Otherwise, you’re just a collection of news stories.”
Indeed, the Sun-Times restored political endorsements about 10 years ago after briefly abolishing them. Many chain-owned dailies have gotten rid of endorsements because they’re a lot of work and because the owners don’t want to alienate any of their readers. There’s an additional problem as well: the new generation of nonprofit local news outlets can’t endorse without losing their tax-exempt status. Yet in many cases readers are looking for guidance — perhaps not on the big races, but certainly on more obscure offices like city council, school committee or select board.
Several years ago, Joshua Darr and his colleagues studied what happened when a Gannett daily, the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, eliminated national opinion content and replace it with local opinion for one month. Darr, who’s now at Syracuse University, and his colleagues found a small but measurable decline in partisan polarization after that month, as Ellen wrote at the time. Darr later talked about his findings on our podcast.
As someone who worked full-time in opinion journalism for many years at The Boston Phoenix, The Guardian and GBH News, I strongly believe that fair-minded point-of-view writing needs to be part of any news organization’s mission — and that it’s at least as important at the local level as it is on national issues.
The Colorado Statehouse in Denver. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
Two stories about journalism from Colorado this morning, one intriguing, one disturbing. The state’s media ecosystem is one of the subjects of our book, “What Works in Community News.”
•Intriguing. Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins reports: “More than two dozen Colorado newsrooms have launched an unprecedented collaboration to better cover the 2024 elections.” These news outlets, led by the Colorado News Collaborative, have embraced what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the Citizen’s Agenda, whereby journalists will report on the issues that the public is most concerned about and gear their coverage around what they learn. It’s a more substantive approach than the horse-race model of political coverage, which focuses on polls and day-to-day sparring among the candidates.
Unprecedented? Not really. The Citizen’s Agenda is a revival of the public journalism movement of the 1990s, and Rosen was at the center of that, too. It faded away back then, although it never disappeared entirely. See, for instance, Dan’s account of this 2013 event on education reform sponsored by the New Haven Independent. The Colorado experiment, though, represents what could be the most fully realized example of public journalism in many years.
•Disturbing. Colorado Sun political reporter Sandra Fish was removed from a meeting of the state Republican Party “after being told that party Chairman Dave Williams found her ‘current reporting to be very unfair,'” according to Sun reporter Jennifer Brown. Although Fish had received a text from a party official telling her not to come, she showed up anyway and was able to obtain a press credential — only to be identified an hour later and escorted from the scene by a sheriff’s deputy.
“This is not a partisan issue,” Sun editor Larry Ryckman wrote in an email to subscribers. “The Founding Fathers understood that a free press is a pillar of a healthy democracy – and not just when reporters write stories politicians might like. That’s why they enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The public has a right to know. Public officials should be accountable and willing to have their words and actions scrutinized in the light of day.”
Half full or half empty? Photo (cc) 2014 by bradhoc
Among the projects that almost made it into “What Works in Community News” was the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Public Media, which merged two years ago. It struck us as a leading example of how public media could step up to preserve local and regional news, especially after the city’s leading paper, the Chicago Tribune, fell into the hands of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
Now the combined enterprise is laying people off. Dave McKinney of WBEZ, which is part of Chicago Public Media, reports that about 15% of 62 union content creators at the radio station are losing their jobs, and that four positions on the business side at the Sun-Times would be cut. In all, 14 jobs will be eliminated.
McKinney notes acidly:
The job cuts coincide with the debut of a $6.4 million, state-of-the-art studio at WBEZ’s Navy Pier office and follows a double-digit-percentage pay increase for Chicago Public Media’s top executive. Additionally, other high-level executives departed the not-for-profit news organization in December.
The announcement follows cuts and threats of cuts at a number of public media outlets around the country, including WAMU in Washington, Colorado Public Radio and, in Boston, WBUR and GBH, neither of which has announced layoffs but have pointedly said cuts may be coming.
