“We believe that social media is the new arena for commenting, replacing the old onsite approach that dates back many years,” Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, then of Recode, wrote back then.

Seven years later, just as Twitter isn’t really a substitute for a public editor, social media has proven to be pretty much the opposite of a cure-all for toxic comment sections. In a recent panel, the editors of metro newspapers around the country discussed their thoughts on reader comments and their strategies for handling them.

They haven’t all taken the same path.

“It’s something we’re all grappling with,” said Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory, but “there is an expectation that people should have a say.” The Globe is in the process of hiring a community engagement editor to strategically approach comment sections; for now, the paper employs a moderating company that goes through comments, deleting some and blocking users when necessary. “We have a lot of smart commenters, people who really know what they’re talking about, and we take what they say very seriously,” McGrory said. “That is mixed in with a lot of people who are there to vent in ways that are not reflective of larger life.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer turned off reader comments on nearly all of its stories in February 2021. “It was not an easy call. Engagement and the time that people spend on the site is an important digital metric, and if people are allowed to comment, they’re obviously on the site longer,” said Gabriel Escobar, editor and VP of the Inquirer. But “in the end, it was so toxic — toxic in the general nature of the comments, but [also] toxic when it came to personalized attacks on the journalists.” Moderating tools “didn’t screen out the most vile comments,” he said. “In the end, we essentially cut them, and I don’t think any of us regret it.”

The Seattle Times turns off comments on “stories that are of a sensitive nature,” said Michelle Matassa Flores, executive editor of The Seattle Times. “People can’t behave on any story that has to do with race.” Comments are turned off on stories about race, immigration, and crime, for instance. What works better, Flores said, is prompting — soliciting comments ahead of a story’s publication and essentially pre-moderating them. That worked well, for instance, with a recent package of stories analyzing the Seattle Times’ coverage of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “We did a prompt, moderated those ahead of time, and then posted the thoughtful responses — which promotes more thoughtful responses, and it kind of feeds off itself in that way,” she said.

Similarly, in the instance of a package on Minneapolis’s juvenile justice system, the Minneapolis Star Tribune solicited reader feedback and stories ahead of time, said Suki Dardarian, the paper’s editor. “This is a story you want feedback on, but you know it will be too hard to moderate that. So we did an invitation for people to share your thoughts, and then we’re getting back to them and figuring out a way to incorporate their thoughts and feelings into our coverage.”

We’re looking to do a story on the present and future of comment sections on news sites, so consider this our prompt for feedback: What is your news outlet doing with comments these days?

If you launched recently, how’d you decide whether to have a comments section or not?

If your site’s been around for longer, have you faced the decision of whether to keep comments on, turn them off, or something in between? And if so, where did you come down?

Let us know by filling out this form, and we may get back in touch for more information.

He added: “There’s incredible competition for people’s time and their pocketbooks and their attention, and if the Globe is not interesting, searingly relevant, provocative on a day-to-day basis, we’re simply not going to survive as a news organization.”

The panel, “The Digital Transformation of The Metro Daily,” was hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, and was moderated by Jennifer Preston, who’s a senior fellow at Shorenstein’s Technology and Social Change Project and was formerly VP for journalism at the Knight Foundation. Besides McGrory, panelists included Suki Dardarian, editor and SVP of The Minneapolis Star Tribune; Gabriel Escobar, editor and SVP of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Michele Matassa Flores, executive editor of The Seattle Times; and Mizell Stewart III, VP of news performance, talent and partnerships for Gannett and the USA TODAY Network.

Some interesting excerpts from the panel are below. You can watch the whole thing once it’s posted here.

On pricing

On new formats

On print

On local vs. regional

One of the most serious limitations preventing Donyea from chronicling Black life and culture in New Jersey?

His editor telling him to remember he was writing for white audiences.

Journalists of color don’t just have to battle white newsroom power structures that marginalize and disempower them (see this recent thread). They also have to deal with the reality of the survival strategy presumed to be optimal for metropolitan and regional newspapers: targeting white audiences who will pay for a digital subscription.

Both explicitly and implicitly, the future of journalism, at least as imagined by white news media executives, is serving white, paying audiences, a preexisting problem made far worse by the market failure of local newspaper journalism and the distortions of the digital advertising market.

Sometimes this is explicitly said in the newsroom, as Donyea’s editor told him.

Sometimes, it slips out in public forums and conferences, as it did at the University of Michigan’s Symposium on Journalism and Politics in February, when a Midwestern news executive told an audience that I was in, “We don’t write for white subscribers, but it ends up being white people who read us.”

In other cases, pre-existing wealth gaps feed into the whiteness of a digital subscription base. The Boston Globe was the first metropolitan newsroom to sign up more digital subscribers than print ones. A Globe digital subscription costs $360 a year after initial discounts.

In Boston in 2015, the average white family had a median net worth of $247,000, while “Dominicans and U.S. blacks [had] a median wealth of close to zero.” It’s hard to imagine anything other than a white subscriber base fueling a newsroom whose customer service page notes that the print Globe is indeed compostable. (It should be noted that The Globe has recommitted to anti-racist coverage, appointed Black newsroom leaders, and is engaging in an experiment to recreate a contemporary abolitionist newspaper.)

A News Media Alliance survey on the willingness of audiences to pay in 2019 found that Minnesota residents would still consider paying for local news — but of the 500 or so people surveyed, 90% were white. Perhaps this reflects the makeup of the state (which is 83% white); de facto, the audiences willing to pay are white audiences.

But perhaps far worse, and far more insidious, are the implicit and coded ways that newsroom strategy and coverage priorities are set: bound up in decisions about what neighborhoods to dedicate coverage or which stories to prioritize, as I detail further in my new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism.

When the diversity numbers of any American metropolitan newsroom are compared to the population of the cities they presumably serve, it’s impossible to think that anyone other than white audiences are being targeted for coverage — and this isn’t likely to improve without substantial effort that goes beyond improving newsroom diversity.

The white populations in Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Dallas, and Philadelphia all make up less than 40% of each city’s total population, but white journalists make up 74% or more of newsroom employees, according to the 2017 ASNE media diversity survey data crunched by digital publication The Pudding.

According to the data, at The Chicago Tribune, 80% of all newsroom employees were white, as were 92% of newsroom leaders. The city of Chicago itself is 32% Black. Following the recent round of buyouts in the wake of the Tribune’s purchase by Alden, it’s hard to imagine these numbers improving.

When I sat in a newsroom meeting in March 2018, just before The Chicago Tribune left the Tribune building, the editors were all white. When they explained to me that high school sports were always a big draw for traffic, it was clear that the high school sports drawing eyeballs were not South Side schools with strapped athletic budgets and dwindling enrollments, but the whiter, wealthier suburban sports. A quick recent scan of the high school sports page revealed coverage of Naperville (72% white), Yorkville (82% white), and West Aurora (59% white).

Does the enduring whiteness of the Philadelphia Inquirer explain the way that the headline “Buildings Matter Too” slipped into a column? Perhaps. But the tone deafness also reflects the institution’s image of who that newspaper is for — white audiences.

Scholars, including myself, have failed over and over again in our research about how journalists understand their audiences. When journalists imagine their mother as their reader, it’s probably a white mother. Yet if you are to scan through our scholarship on audience research, rarely does this get pointed out as problematic; in fact, it’s barely noticed.

And even when journalists are aware of the problem, it’s hard to shift their approach. The Dallas Morning News offers another cautionary tale, particularly as it has taken considerable advice from newsroom consultants and newsroom strategists, including the American Press Institute.

Mike Wilson, former editor of the Dallas Morning News, explained to me in 2018, “The pursuit of digital subscriptions has honed our focus on what we are covering.” He then quipped about probably doing more coverage than he’d like in Plano, a wealthy suburb where the 1980s show Dallas was set; Plano might as well be code for “wealthy,” and, given the context, “white.” Nonetheless, he also noted that the newspaper was well-aware of its historical problems and was working to expand coverage of historically-marginalized groups.

This will be difficult. A 2017 audit of the newspaper’s coverage published in the Southwestern Mass Communication Journal found that “content … did not match the diversity of the surrounding community, which is 40% Latinx. People of color and women are symbolically annihilated through the coverage, which results in stereotypical framing of these groups.”

Some good news, though: to rectify this, the newspaper partnered in June 2020 with Texas Metro News, a Black-owned Dallas news outlet, and promoted long-time editor Leona Allen, a Black woman, to deputy publisher, with a mandate to focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

At The Los Angeles Times, journalists are battling against a history of white supremacy and the longstanding perception among communities of color that the paper only serves white Angelenos. In 1978, then-publisher Otis Chandler told an interviewer that the Times did not attempt to target Black and Latinos. “It’s not their kind of newspaper. It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. If you will, it’s too complicated.”

The LA Times has made tremendous gains in diversity under the new ownership and investment of Patrick Soon-Shiong, but the newly established Black and Latino caucus of the LA Times’ union (also new) demanded more — not just in terms of representation but also more coverage, arguing, “We don’t have enough Black journalists — or, more broadly, journalists of color — to cover our overwhelmingly diverse city, state and nation with appropriate insight and sensitivity.”

Given the demographic trends of Los Angeles, the survival strategy of the paper cannot depend on white audiences. Rather, “The Times will not survive without winning over subscribers who are not white, and the only way to do that is to have a diverse and inclusive workforce.”

If newspaper newsrooms are looking for a way to survive, one starting point is to consider the majority of the population that has so far gone underserved and as of yet, has little reason, yet, to consider subscribing. If journalism is supposed to serve democracy, it needs to serve the public that actually exists, not the public white newsrooms imagine.

You can see it across domains and across the country. For more than a decade, the “Ban the Box” movement has pushed to prevent employers from demanding information about people’s criminal records in their job applications — making it easier for those convicted to get a job that can get them on the right track. In 2018, Floridians voted overwhelmingly to give those convicted of a felony back the right to vote (though Republicans in the state did their best to obstruct it).

A new bill in Oregon would go further and allow the convicted to vote while incarcerated. In Illinois, reformers just passed a bill to end cash bail.

And a new wave of news outlets increasingly let prisoners tell their stories rather than have narratives around criminal justice dominated by prosecutors and police. “Reality” TV franchises like Cops and Live PD — long accused of serving as a PR machine for police — were canceled.

Mainstream journalism has had a lot to think about too. Not that long ago, it wasn’t uncommon for local newspapers to have a dedicated section of their websites devoted to publishing the mugshots of those recently arrested — a sort of clickbait eternal perp walk through your neighborhood. Despite a decade-plus of complaints, many of them survived into 2020, when sites like the Houston Chronicle, Tampa Bay Times, Sacramento Bee, and many of the New Gannett papers took them down amid protests.

Now, some are thinking more broadly: Should an arrest years ago continue to haunt someone as they move through their career? What about for people for whom charges were dropped — or who admitted their guilt, did their time, and want to move past their past? Are newspaper websites the mythical “permanent record” where all your misdeeds would be recorded for eternity?

In 2018, we told you about how The Plain Dealer in Cleveland1 was rethinking its practices: reducing its use of mugshots, not naming those arrested for minor crimes, and allowing people to request their information be removed from old stories in some cases. And now the movement is gathering speed.

On Friday, The Boston Globe announced a new program called “Fresh Start: Revisiting the Past for a Better Future”:

Following the nationwide reckoning on racial justice, the Globe is looking inward at its own practices and how they have affected communities of color. As we update how we cover the news, we are also working to better understand how some stories can have a lasting negative impact on someone’s ability to move forward with their lives.

Going forward, the Globe will allow all people to appeal their presence in older stories published on our websites. We’ll consider each case individually and, if warranted, take steps to update the story and protect the privacy of the individual. These steps may include republishing the story with new information or removing the story from Google searches. All final decisions will ultimately come down to the Globe’s editorial discretion.

We are not in the business of rewriting the past, but we don’t want to stand in the way of a regular person’s ability to craft their future. If you’re looking for a Fresh Start, please fill out the form below. We’ll be in touch.

The Globe asks for any documents that might help their decision-making process (like a record of charges being dropped, for instance, though that’s not a requirement) and: “Tell us why you want a fresh start and your information removed from a Globe story. Information you could include: how this story impacted your life, and what has happened to you since it was published.” Globe editors say they reached out to public defenders, victim’s rights advocates, ethics professors, and formerly incarcerated people in shaping their policy.

I hope you got a chance to see our Predictions for Journalism 2021 package, which ran in December and features a ton of interesting ideas about where the news is headed this year. Of the 157 (!) pieces we published, the most popular in terms of traffic was Ben Collins’ uber-timely one on the reclamation of “accidental conspiracists” who’ve fallen into the web of QAnon and its ilk.

But coming in at No. 2 was this piece by Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli with a provocative headline: Defund the crime beat.

The whole process of how the criminal–legal system is covered needs to be reexamined — from who sets the news agenda, to who determines what’s newsworthy, to whose voices are centered in coverage and which relationships are prioritized. We need beats that focus on communities impacted by systemic marginalization and keep people safe and healthy. And we need beats that help people navigate the criminal-legal system, access important social services, and better understand their rights…

The sooner journalists acknowledge that the crime beat needs to go, the sooner we can acknowledge and repair past harms, reimagine how newsrooms approach their coverage of the criminal-legal and carceral systems, and move in solidarity with communities whose perspectives and experiences have been excluded from local news.

What the Globe and others are doing certainly falls short of what Chappell and Rispoli are calling for. But it is evidence that the winds are blowing in their direction.

1. Technically, it was Cleveland.com — which is the website that publishes Plain Dealer stories — not The Plain Dealer. But after they killed off the entire (union) Plain Dealer newsroom and replacing them with (non-union) dot-com employees, I’m even less willing than I used to be to go along with that bogus charade.

If that sounds like a mashup of “Rounders,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “The DaVinci Code,” and “National Treasure: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist,” you’re not too far off. But that’s the log line for a series The Boston Globe began running Sunday: a serialized novella called “The Mechanic.”

The author is Ben Mezrich, best known for his nonfiction books on gambling and for having written the book that became the basis for “The Social Network.” (When I looked at his Twitter account this morning, the “Who to Follow” recommendations included both Winklevii.) He is also, importantly for these purposes, a Bostonian.

The Globe has published the first four chapters as of this morning; the remaining 18 will spool out over the next two weeks. It’s getting front-page treatment; it’s a great opportunity for any corrupt Boston pol to say, correctly, “That story on the front page of the Globe? Never happened.”

Serialized fiction has a long and storied history on newsprint. It was common in the 19th and early 20th century; more recently, it’s been a tool someone remembers to use every few years to get people hooked into a daily habit — an increasingly important factor after the shift from daily print to whenever digital.

In 1999, a 29-part novel by Roy Peter Clark ran in what were then The New York Times’ regional papers. (“The adventures of a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based investigative reporter on the trail of a doomsday cult with cataclysmic plans for the turn of the century.”) In 2007, The Washington Post ran a reporter-penned thriller called “Jezebel’s Tomb.” (“It features a journalist who investigates a bombing and tries to track down a mysterious 2,000-year-old document that may hold a dangerous secret.”) The Guardian serialized a Chris Ware graphic novella in 2014. The New York Times regularly ran serial fiction in the late 2000s, including works by Michael Chabon, Patricia Cornwell, and John Banville.

But those appeared in somewhat more normal times; the thinking here is that, when the world’s on fire, people could use a taut narrative to get lost in. As the paper put it: “The Globe’s commitment to covering the coronavirus pandemic continues unabated, as today’s paper and website make plain, but we thought a bit of a diversion might also be welcome.”

Enjoyed the first two installments of The Mechanic,’ by Ben Mezrich https://t.co/Ke3YOx5MGJ Thanks @BostonGlobe ! It’s great to read something other than CV19.

— johnnycrossfit (@johnnycrossfit) May 4, 2020

I’m a little obsessed with @benmezrich’s writing, so it’s pretty cool to have him partnering with the Globe for his latest project. https://t.co/aw0rYPauWn pic.twitter.com/hR1THxIluD

— Dan McGowan (@DanMcGowan) May 3, 2020

Today the Boston Globe, in an effort to offer "a bit of a diversion" for readers consumed by Trump's hourly fumbling, constant lying, and utter incompetence, begins a serialized fictional mystery by Ben Mezrich: "The Mechanic." https://t.co/C9cdJHiTEZ

— Harland Gundlefinger (@Gundlefinger16) May 3, 2020

The serialized new novel, The Mechanic, by @benmezrich will be published in the @BostonGlobe, chapter by chapter starting this Sunday for two weeks. Read along with this fun Boston mystery – stolen art, card sharks, ex-cons, and more. #themechanic https://t.co/ZCHGM7YLSv

— Linda Pizzuti Henry (@Linda_Pizzuti) May 2, 2020

While I am afforded the luxury of writing this story in good health from my apartment stocked (though not hoarded) with groceries, there are thousands of people here in and around Boston who are working essential jobs — from doctors and nurses to grocery store cashiers — and who make all of that possible for me and many others.

I’d been looking for a way to help people in my community when Boston.com (the free news site owned by The Boston Globe) launched Boston Helps, a service to connect people in need with people who are able to help.

As local news outlets suffer blow after blow in this pandemic, Boston Helps is a reminder that local news outlets are an invaluable resource in a person’s day-to-day life. While The Washington Post and The Guardian have compiled lists of general ways to help your community, Boston Helps connects you directly to a person that you can help.

This is a hugely trying time for all of us. But people who work in retail, in hospitality, who work in low paying jobs are going to be hit hardest & fast. @BostonDotCom has started #BostonHelps. If you need help, use it. If you can help, please do. https://t.co/CLTfWZyHPn

— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) March 16, 2020

Matt Karolian, the general manager of Boston.com (and a former Nieman Fellow), said the idea for the project came out of seeing the immediate needs that were coming up. Boston Helps gives helpers five ways to support a community member: paying for someone’s groceries; paying for someone’s essential toiletries; paying for meal delivery to someone’s home; paying for a rideshare service locally; or by giving money to help a Bostonian.

On the flip side, people who need these services can select which one they need the most.

“We knew at some point in time, other organizations would come online, that government services would catch up,” Karolian said. “Organizations that kind of traditionally service people in need would be able to spin up something and increase capacity, but just given what was happening and given the immediate need that a lot of folks were seeing, we thought we could just move quickly, within 48 hours, to get a resource together.”

Once someone who needs help or someone who can help submits their information in the Google Form, it gets fed into a conditionally formatted and color-coded Google Sheet. From there, it’s easy for Karolian and others on his team to match people up. He said that because things were moving so fast, they opted to use off-the-shelf Google tools.

“This is one of those things where I think it’s better to move quickly with a system that works than try to build something that’s pixel perfect, and then you’ll just spend all your time trying to build the tool as opposed to actually getting up there and helping folks,” he said.

Once a match is made, they provide the contact information of the person who needs a service to the person who has offered to help; it’s on them to get in touch and make the arrangement. Those who want to make a monetary donation are directed to a local nonprofit collecting funds.

“It was really important for us to try to ensure that everything that we’re doing is promoting all of the best practices in social distancing,” Karolian said. “We don’t necessarily want people meeting up. We drew some inspiration from Reddit’s Random Acts of Pizza which was an interesting model of people saying ‘Hey, I need dinner or food,’ and someone just going into a Domino’s app and being able to order them delivery. Those kinds of approaches are kind of what we’re trying to make here.”

So far, Karolian said that about 700 people have offered to help, while 125 have said they need assistance. He said he’s seen increased requests for help in the past few days and that a majority of the requests are for groceries.

A collective look at what type of assistance people have been requesting through the #BostonHelps program we launched on @BostonDotCom. Volunteer or request assistance here- https://t.co/QrSV66ivHh pic.twitter.com/MqPK8EHkhW

— Matt Karolian (@mkarolian) March 27, 2020

The idea is spreading. After talking with Karolian about Boston Helps, The Dallas Morning News’s marketing and product teams worked with an existing partner and launched a widget that does something similar. At the bottom of every DMN story about the coronavirus, users see two boxes where they can select that they want to help or need help. This feature is available to any United States media company that wants to implement it, chief product officer Mike Orren said.

“Ultimately, we’re more about getting people information and the resources they need,” Karolian said. “Oftentimes, that’s bringing you the news. And sometimes that’s doing things like this where we need to triage until the other organizations can get on their feet and operationalize it. We love our city and these are our neighbors. It’s a difficult time and if we can make a difference, we will.”

It's great to see @BostonGlobe connecting people who need help with people offering help. Here in Milwaukee, there's a teacher doing this and I'm seeing some casual organizing on @Nextdoor, but what other news orgs are doing this? https://t.co/hXdfD0W7Om

— Rachel Rohr (@LionTalk) March 18, 2020

When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll come back. It’s cyclical.” No one tells me that anymore. The old business is plainly rotting away, even as I find myself still documenting the scavengers who turn detritus into gold.

The surviving — growing, even — national news business is now profoundly and proudly digital. All the wonders of the medium — extraordinary storytelling interactives and multimedia, unprecedented reader-journalist connection, infinitely searchable knowledge, manifold reader revenue — illuminate those companies’ business as much as digital disruption has darkened the wider news landscape.

What is this world we’ve created? That’s the big-picture view I’m aiming to offer here today.

Those of us who care about journalism were happy to see the 2010s go. We want a better decade ahead for a burning world, a frayed America, and a news business that many of us still believe should be at the root of solving those other crises.

I call what follows below my epiphanies — honed over time in conversations around the world, with everyone from seen-it-all execs to young reporters asking how things came to be the way they are in this business. These are principles that help me make sense of the booming, buzzing confusion that can appear to envelop us. Think of it as an update to my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, now a decade old.

Here I’ve distilled all my own concerns and my understandings. I’ve taken a big-picture, multiyear view, knowing that like it or not, we’re defining a new decade. You’ll see my optimism here — both as a longtime observer and as a later-stage entrepreneur trying to build out a new model for local news. (I wrote about that back in October.) I do believe that we can make the 2020s, if not quite the Soaring ’20s, something better than what we just went through. But I balance my optimism with my journalism-embued realism. In many ways, 2020 stands at the intersection of optimism and realism — a space that’s shrinking.

So much has gone off the rails in the news industry (and in the wider society) over the past decade. Amid all the fin-de-la-décennie thinking, I think Michiko Kakutani best described the country’s 10-year experience: “the indigenous American berserk,” a borrowing from Phillip Roth.

So much of what happened can be attributed to (if not too easily dismissed as) “unintended consequences.” Oops, we didn’t mean to turn over the 2016 election to Putin. Gosh, we didn’t mean to alter life on earth forever — we just really wanted that truck. We just wanted to connect up the whole world through the Internet — we didn’t mean to destroy the institutions that sort through the facts and fictions of civic life.

As billions have disappeared from the U.S. newspaper industry, the words “collateral damage” served to explain the revolution that led digital to become the leading medium for advertising. That damage is now reaching its endgame.

The Terrible Tens almost precisely match the period I’ve been writing here at Nieman Lab. In that time, I’ve written enough to fill several more books — 934,800 words before this piece. Almost a million words somehow accepted by our loyal readers, who still, remarkably, laugh and tell me: “Keep writing long.”

Let’s then start the 2020s off right. With one eye on the last decade and another on the one to come, let me put forward 20 understandings of where we are and how we build from here.

That felt like huge news — but what if it really only represents the beginning of a greater rollup? Last month, I sketched out how five of the largest chains could become two this year.

And yet there are even worse potential outcomes for those of us who care about a vibrant, independent press. What if a Sinclair, bent on regional domination and with a political agenda, were to buy a rollup, and keep rolling?

In a way, GateHouse’s builder Mike Reed has done a lot of the heavy lifting already. From a financial point of view, the CEO of New Gannett has already done a lot of rationalization. GateHouse bought up a motley collection of newspaper properties, many out of long-time family ownership, and brought some standard operating principles and efficiencies to them. We can ask whether his big gamble of borrowing $1.8 billion (at 11.5 percent interest) from Apollo Global Management will prove out over the next few years. Or we can think of that megamerger as just prologue.

After all, the same logic that drove the GateHouse/Gannett deal pervades the near-uniform thinking of executives at all of the chains. Job No. 1: Find large cost savings to maintain profitability in light of revenue declines, in the high single digits per year, that show no sign of stopping. And the easiest way to do that is merging. A merger can massively — if only once — cut out a lot of HQ and other “redundant” costs.

It buys some time. And newspaper operators are craving more time. “Ugly” is the simple description of the 2020 newspaper business offered to me by one high-ranking news executive. Revenue declines aren’t improving, so the logic remains. The only questions are: How much consolidation will there be, and how soon will it happen?

Heath Freeman, head of journalistic antihero Alden Global Capital, has already begun to answer that question. The hedge-fund barbarians aren’t just inside Tribune Publishing’s gates — they’re settled in around the corporate conference table. Alden’s cost-cutting influence drives the first drama of the year: Can Chicago Tribune employees fend off the bloodletting long enough to find a new buyer for their newspaper before it’s too late? They know that, despite a national upswell in public support for the gutted Denver Post in 2018, Alden was able to remain above the fray and stick to its oblivious-to-the-public-interest position.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is trying to thread a needle of financial reorganization. Then there’s Lee, operator of 46 largely smaller dailies. All of them are subject (and object) of the same financial logic.

While financing remains tough to get, at any price, there remains an undeniable financial propulsion to bring many more titles under fewer operations.

There’s no law preventing one company from owning half of the American daily press. And no law prevents a political player like a Sinclair — known for its noxious enforcement of company politics at its local broadcast properties — from buying or tomorrow’s MergedCo — or orchestrating the rollup itself.

After a decade where we’ve seen the rotten fruit of political fact-bending, what could be more effective than simply buying up the remaining sources of local news and shading or shilling their coverage? Purple states, beware! Further, the price would be relatively cheap: Only a couple billion dollars could buy a substantial swatch of the U.S.’s local press.

Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry.

It sometimes seems like we’ll run out of epithets — “the Thanos of the newspaper business,” “the face of bloodless strip-mining of American newspapers and their communities,” “industry vulture,” “the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain” — for Alden Global Capital. Then someone helps us out.

“Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry,” one very well-connected (and quite even-keeled) industry executive told me dispassionately. “It just destroys the story we try to tell of the great local journalism we need to preserve.”

Think about the big picture. The industry is flailing; behind closed doors, it’s throwing a Hail Mary, trying to win an antitrust exemption from Congress. It argues that in the public interest, it should be allowed to negotiate together (rather than as individual companies) with the platforms. It wants the big payoff they’ve dreamed of since the turn of the century: billions in licensing from Google, Facebook, and Co.

It pines for and makes comparison to the kinds of licensing revenue that both TV broadcasters and music publishers have been able to snag. But thus far, that’s been a heavy lift in terms of negotiation or public policy. But Alden adds more weight, letting governments or platforms say: “Wait, you want us to help them?”

Which leads to…

Can a duopoly licensing deal be the “retrans” savior of the local news business?

In 1992, local TV companies were in a bind. Cable and satellite companies had to pay the ESPNs and CNNs of the world to air their programming. But local TV stations — available for free on the public airwaves — got nothing for having their signal distributed to cable customers.

But that year, federal legislation allowed local TV stations to demand compensation from cable and satellite systems — retransmission fees. Essentially, distributors paid stations for the right to their programming, including local news — despite the fact that anyone with an antenna could get their signal for free.

What started out as a small supplemental revenue stream now amounts to about 40 percent of all local TV station revenue, according to Bob Papper, the TV industry’s keen observer and data/trend collector through his annual RTDNA survey. “Retrans money is skyrocketing, and that should continue until it levels off in 2023-24.” This year, it will likely add up to $12 billion or more.

Advertising revenue has been fairly flat for local TV companies (setting aside for a moment the two-year cycle in which election years pump them full of political cash). Digital revenue hasn’t been much better, accounting for only six or seven percent of station income, Papper says — way less than newspaper companies earn.

And yet these local TV businesses are stable, profitable, and facing nothing like what’s happened to newspaper newsrooms. Papper notes the wide variance across stations in the depth and breadth of their news products. While many still stick with the tried-and-tired formulas, his surveys of station managers list “investigative reporting” as their No. 1 priority. When it’s funded, it’s a differentiator in crowded TV markets.

It’s that retrans money that makes all the difference.

Clearly, the news industry is a major supplier of high-engagement material to the platforms — a supply that helps energizes their dominant ad businesses. While both Google and Facebook have deployed a motley fleet of news industry-supporting initiatives, they’ve steadfastly refused any large-scale “licensing” arrangements.

If there’s increased public pressures on the platforms as the society’s digital high turns part-bummer, and if the political environment were to change (a President Elizabeth Warren, for example), it’s not hard to imagine the tech giants ponying up a billion here or there for democracy-serving news, right? (Both Google and Apple count more than $100 billion in cash reserves, net of debt, with Facebook holding more than $50 billion.)

Google, when asked over the years why it doesn’t pay license fees, talks about the complexity of the news market, among other objections. Expect a new argument: You want us to pay an Alden, or a Fortress Investment Group?

The financialization of the press may indeed makes the daily newspaper “public service” argument more difficult to make. While still true — though now wildly uneven in its actual daily delivery — it might be an artifact of a bygone age. The question may turn from “Will platforms finally pay license fees?” to “Who can make a good argument that they deserve them?”

The first metric that matters is content capacity.

In our digital world, just about everything can be counted. So many numbers adding up to so few results for so many.

Look forward and we can see that content capacity is and will be among the biggest differentiators between the winners and losers of the news wars. In fact, I’d call it a gating factor. Publishers who can offer up a sufficient volume of unique, differentiated content can win, assuming they’ve figured out ways for their business to benefit from it.

People aren’t the problem, no matter what the headcount-chopping Aldens of the world have preached. People — the right journalists and the right digital-savvy business people — are the solution.

In models as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Athletic, The Information, the Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe, we see this truism play out.

Certainly, having more skilled journalists better serves the public’s news needs. But the logic here is fundamentally a business one. In businesses increasingly dependent on reader revenue, content capacity drives the value proposition itself.

Rather than reducing headcount — and thus spinning the downward spiral more swiftly — increasing headcount can lead to a magic word: growth.

The news business will only rebound when it seeks growth.

Across America’s widening expanse of news deserts, we don’t hear many whispers of that word, growth. The conversation among owners and executives is pretty consistent: Where do we cut? How do we hold on?

That’s meant more M&A. More cutting print days. More cutting of business operations. More cutting of newsrooms. All in an effort to preserve a diminishing business — whether the underlying mission is to maintain even a semblance of a news mission or just to milk the remaining profits of an obsolescent industry.

Of course, local news publishers poke at new revenue streams to try to make up for print ad revenues that will likely drop in the high single digits for the fourth year in a row. But the digital ad wars have been lost to Google and Facebook. Marketing services, a revenue stream pursued with much optimism a few years ago, has proven to be a tough, low-margin business. Digital subscription sales are stalled around the country, not least because of all that cutting’s impact on the product. Most see no path to a real “replacement” revenue stream. (Maybe CBD-infused newsprint?)

Cutting ain’t working. Decline feeds decline.

Only an orientation toward growth — with strategies that grab the future optimistically and are funded appropriately — can awaken us from this nightmare. Replace “replacement” strategies with growth strategies and these businesses look different.

Happily, we do have growth models to look at. Take, most essentially to the current republic, our two leading “newspapers.”

Today, The New York Times pays 1,700 journalists. That’s almost twice as many as a decade ago. The Washington Post pays 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013.

The result: More unique, high-quality content has driven both publishers to new heights of subscription success, the Times how with three times as many paying customers as it had at its print apex. Readers have rewarded the investment, and those rewards have in turn allowed further investment.

It’s a flywheel of growth — recognizable to anyone who’s ever built a business, large or small. What it requires is a long-term view and patience. And, of course, capital in some form — which shouldn’t be a problem in a rich country awash in cash. But what it also demands is a belief in the mission of the business, an in-part seemingly irrational belief that the future of the news business can, and must, be robust.

Some big numbers tell the big story.

• We may have underestimated the dominance of the New Gannett. According to Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, the leading newspaper broker, the new Gannett now owns:
  • 20.4 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers
  • 26.3 percent of all U.S. daily print circulation
  • 24.8 percent of all U.S. Sunday print circulation

  So in rough terms, it controls a quarter of our daily press. The chart below, produced by the brokerage, compares the megamerger to the industry’s previous big deals on the basis of percentage of newspapers owned and percentage of circulation controlled. It should send a chill down every American spine.



• There are probably fewer than 20,000 journalists working in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms. There’s not even a semi-official tally anymore, but that’s a good extrapolation from years past, given all the cutting since. That compares to 56,900 in 1990 — when the country had 77 million fewer people than today.
• The daily press still depends on the print newspaper for 70 percent or more of its revenue. That’s after 20 years of “digital transition.”
• The daily newspaper industry today takes in more than $30 billion less per year than it did at its height.
• $1 trillion: The market value reached by Alphabet (Google) last week.

The brain drain is real.

What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers?

Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.

It’s hard enough to take on all the issues of business and social disruption with a staff that can meet the challenge. Increasingly, though, it’s hard for news companies to attract and retain the talent they need, especially in the business, product, and technology areas that will determine their very survival.

Who wants to work in an industry on its deathbed? Especially in an already tight job market.

What do the people who could make a difference in the future of news want? Fair compensation, for sure, and local news companies often pay below-market wages, on the TV side as much as in newspapers. Perhaps more important, they want a sense of a positive future — one their bosses believe in and act on every day. That’s a commodity scarcer than money in this business.

No industry has a future without a pipeline of vital, young, diverse talent eager to shape the future. And that’s especially true in the live-or-die arts of digital business. As the just-released Reuters Institute for Journalism 2020 trends report notes, “Lack of diversity may also be a factor in bringing new talent into the industry. Publishers have very low confidence that they can attract and retain talent in technology (24%) and data science (24%) as well as product management (39%). There was more confidence in editorial areas (76%).”

At the same time, we’ll be watching the flow of experienced talent as it moves around the industry. As Atlantic Media continues to grow and morph under the Emerson Collective, a number of its top alumni are moving into new positions elsewhere. Longtime Atlantic president Bob Cohn now takes over as president of The Economist — an early digital subscription leader, the storied “newspaper” now seeks growth. Meanwhile, Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Atlantic Media’s innovative Quartz, has taken on a so-far-unannounced big project at The New York Times’ Opinion section, where the appetite for impact has grown appreciably.

Finally, as The Guardian ended the decade with happy reader revenue success, Annette Thomas becomes CEO. Thomas has earned accolades for her innovative work in science publishing. These three, plus numerous others moving into new jobs as 2020 begins, can now bring their decades of digital experience to the job of getting news right in the ’20s.

Print is a growing sore spot; expect more daycutting.

Just for a moment, forget the thinned-out newsrooms and consider a fundamental truth: The physical distribution system that long supported the daily business is falling apart.

The paperboys and papergirls of mid-20th-century America have faded into Norman Rockwell canvases. As Amazon’s distribution machine and Uber and Lyft suck up available delivery people across the country, publishers say it’s increasingly hard to find paper throwers. (And why not? Paper-throwing sounds like a sport from another age.)

Why not just throw in with the logistics geniuses of the day, and partner with them to deliver the papers? The newspaper industry has indeed had talks with Amazon, buyer of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks over the past two years. We’ll probably see some local efforts to converge delivery. But think about who still gets that package of increasingly day-old news delivered to their doorstep? Seniors — who want the paper bright and early, complicating delivery partnerships.

Not to mention that, with print subscribers declining in the high single digits every year, deliverers now need to cover a wider geography to deliver the same number of papers — and that problem will only get worse.

To add an almost comic complication to the challenge of dead-tree delivery: California’s AB5 just went into effect. Its admirable aim is to bring fairer benefits to those in the gig economy. But its many unintended consequences are now cascading throughout the state — spelling millions more in costs to daily publishers while wreaking havoc among freelancers.

Is seven-day home delivery now a luxury good? Or just a profit-squeezing artifact? Either way, it’s become clear that publishers’ years of price increases for seven-day aren’t sustainable. One of my trusty correspondents reported this last week that he’s now paying $900 a year for the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal. There are Alden-owned papers charging more than $600 a year for ghost titles, produced by a bare handful — sometimes two — journalists.

As print subscriptions have declined, publishers have continued to price up. That’s death-spiral pricing, with a clear end in sight and boatloads of money to be made on the way out the door.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “the end of seven-day print” and how publishers have been modeling and noodling its timeline. There’s been lots of trimming around the edges, mainly at smaller papers; McClatchy’s decision to fully end Saturday print is a harbinger of what’s to come. The company planned the end of Saturdays meticulously, with a keen eye toward customer communication, and proved to both itself and the industry that it can be done.

(Let’s allow time here for a brief chuckle by European publishers who have been successfully publishing “weekend” papers for decades.)

But cutting Saturday alone doesn’t save you a lot of money. Those twin pressures — on one hand, needing ever-larger cost savings, on the other, the collapsing distribution system — mean we’ll see more ambitious and adventurous cutting in the year to come. They’ll do while swallowing the existential fear one CEO shared: “They are scared to death this will end the habit.”

How big a deal is all this — the declining mechanics of print distribution? Very big.

Consider that The New York Times — the most successfully transitioned of newspaper companies — still only earns only 43 percent of its revenue from digital. Most regional dailies still rely on print for 75 to 90 percent of their overall revenue. If the physical distribution system starts failing faster, how much of that print-based revenue — circulation and advertising — can be converted to digital?

At a national level, the direct connection between readers and journalists has never been stronger.

Listen to the commercial breaks of The New York Times’ breakaway hit The Daily. A lot of them aren’t commercial spots, but what we used to call house ads in the print business. Maggie Haberman talking about Times’ reporting in the era of press vilification; Rukmini Callimachi sharing the danger and cost of reporting from terror-stricken parts of the world.

These ads aren’t about making the newsroom feel better — they work. The Times now has more than three times the total paying customers than it did at the height of print, with 3.9 million digital news subscribers paying the Times. Why? The journalists and the journalism.

In the halcyon days of print, advertising drove 75 percent of the Times’ revenue, a number that often hit 80 percent for local dailies. Now the digital world has forced — but also enabled — the Times to forge a very direct connection between its journalists and readers. Readers understand much more clearly that they are paying for high-quality news and analysis. They value expertise and increasingly get to know these journalists individually, whether through podcasts or other digital extensions.

Journalists believe more than ever that they are working for the reader, with the Times the trustworthy intermediary. The new more direct relationship between reader and journalist fosters growth. And the same is true similarly for The Washington Post, The Athletic, and The Information, in different forms.

If the local news world had followed suit, we’d say that the age of digital disruption has been a boon for journalism overall. Clearly, it hasn’t. This lesson is a guidepost for the decade ahead.

Advertising remains a vital — but secondary — source of revenue for news publishers.

The war’s over; the platforms won. With Google and Facebook maintaining a 60 percent share of the digital ad market (and 70 percent of local digital ads), publishers no longer expect to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The drama drawing the most attention: How much will Amazon eat into The Duopoly, as Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise summed up “the five trends that threaten the Google/Facebook duopoly” at AdAge.

Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom of the moment, that doesn’t mean advertising is no longer a part of publishers’ diversified revenue streams. Yes, reader revenue is clearly the driver for successful publishers of the ’20s, but advertising — best when sold and presented in ways that don’t compete directly with the platforms — will be in the passenger seat.

The evolving formula of the early ’20s is a mix of 65 to 70 percent reader revenue, 20 to 30 percent in advertising, and then an “other” that includes things like events. While this model may be more diversified, it’s not made of discrete parts. The better publishers get at profiling their reader-revenue-paying customers, with increasingly better-used first-party data, the better they can help advertisers sell. At this point, it’s a wobbly virtuous circle of money and data, and the successful publishers will find ways to round it.

A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension.

The word of the moment in almost every conversation about local news is “nonprofit.” At so many conferences and un-conferences about the news emergency, the notion that there’s a commercial answer to rebuilding the local business seems almost out of bounds.

What created this anti-profit sensibility? Acknowledging the power of the duopoly, to be sure. But that’s not the only rationale. For generations, many journalists considered themselves proudly unaware or uncaring about the business. Now the ascendance of Google and Facebook has given too many permission to eschew advertising as a significant, if secondary, support of reporting.

Secondly, the industry’s Heath Freemans and Michael Ferros, among too many others, have stained a local news business that was once both proudly profitable and mission-driven. Profiteering is now associated by many with local news.

Nonprofit news, too, though requires capital — just like any kind of growing service or product. Somebody has to actually pay journalists. So those advocating nonprofit news as the new future have turned to philanthropy. They look to foundations, national and local, to finance this vision. Nationally, more than $40 million has now flowed into the American Journalism Project, headed by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton. Most of that’s come from national foundations. The AJP announced its first grants in December, a down payment on what it envisions as a fund of up to $1 billion.

Now we’ll see if AJP can significantly move the needle on what is plainly needed: replacement journalism. As it tries to catalyze a movement, it hopes to multiply the philanthropic response to the news crisis. It’s a hope we can share. AJP’s pitch is straightforward: Communities should support news the same way they support public goods like the ballet and the opera, things that in many cities plainly couldn’t sustain themselves as creatures of the market.

That’s a worthy thought, but with two big issues attached.

One: There’s not much of a tradition of such support. Newspapers made so much money for so many years that they were the ones who started foundations, not the ones asking them for money. Relatively few communities’ foundations are oriented in that direction — and foundations don’t change direction or priorities speedily.

Two: Scale. So much local news coverage has been lost that it would take substantial and ongoing philanthropy to even begin to resupply community news. There’s not a lot of evidence yet of a readiness to do that.

To be sure, hundreds of dedicated journalists have build smaller operations in cities across the country. LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News are looking for new and better ways to support and nurture them. But the old world is disappearing far faster than a new one is being created.

Ace industry researchers Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb recently laid out their thinking, which should serve as a reality check for all who care about the next decade of local news.

Yet even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

But it was the concluding paragraph of their Nieman Lab prediction that really best summed up this epiphany looking ahead to the end of this decade.

A New(s) Deal for the 21st century: If all forms of philanthropic support for local news are truly not enough, we predict that by the end of 2030, we’ll be seeing large-scale policy changes to publicly support more sources of local news. It may not seem like we’re that close on this one, but trust us, it could happen.

I know Hansen and Holcomb are trying to spark a note of optimism, but their realistic reading of the landscape should strike terror: A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension. Imagine this struggling country 10 years from now if the news vacuum has become the new normal and our communities are democratically impoverished.

My own view: All good journalism is good. Support it by philanthropy, advertising, events, reader revenue, or by winning lottery ticket. Given the peril, we all need to look more widely for support, not more narrowly.

The free press needs to be a better advocate of free peoples in the 21st century.

The Wall Street Journal has long proclaimed itself the paper of free people and free markets. That formulation has made a lot of sense over time in the face of state-run economies of various flavors. But it’s insufficient to meet the demands of today.

Free peoples — those able to speak, write, assemble, vote, and retain some dignity of privacy — make up an uneasy minority of the world’s population. Now the twin dangers of growing strongman despotism and tech-based surveillance societies threaten us all.

Most recently, The New York Times’ investigative report on facial recognition painted a deeply disturbing dystopian portrait. The piece came on the heels of many beginning to describe China’s “surveillance state,” an ominous system intend to enable lifelong tracking and rewarding of state-approved citizen behavior.

We’re moving from a decade of cookies gone wild to what until recently seemed to be Orwellian fiction.

Combine the tech with the spreading rash of authoritarianism afflicting the globe. From Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to, yes, our current White House, the 2010s produced strongmen who we thought had been relegated to the history books.

Who best to represent free people in the coverage of would-be despots and in the tech-driven threats to several centuries of hard-earned Western rights? A free and strong press.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera memorably told us in his 1980 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (John Updike’s masterful review of it is here).

Memory. Our job as journalists is to remember. To connect yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Like the climate crisis, the threat of a surveillance society registers only haphazardly among the American populace, even as California’s government and others begin to take it on.

We’ve seen the beginnings of a backlash against tech run amok, with Facebook’s role in the 2016 election a seeming turning point. But here we are again, as Emily Bell points out, going into another election with the same issues — and huge questions that go well beyond the social behemoth.

If news companies are, at their base, advocates for the public good, news companies must lead in securing a free society in the face of technological adventurism. Media needs to get beyond its self-interest — ah, first-party data! — and focus on the bigger picture.

Who better to take that stand than those who’ve long advocated free peoples and free thinking? Who better to do that — and perhaps be rewarded for it in reader support — than mission-oriented news media?

The press’ business revival is part and parcel of its advocacy for the people it serves.

Australia is burning, and Murdoch’s newsprint provided the kindling.

For years, Australian press watchers have pointed to the dangerous slanting of environmental news by much of the nation’s press. A majority of that press is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And those papers, joined too often by other media, have long skewed the facts of climate change. The result is a society ill-prepared for the nightmare that’s befallen it.

While this month has seen more complaints about Murdoch publications’ coverage, they’re in line with what that coverage has looked like for years. Now even scion James Murdoch has spoken out, as have some of Murdoch’s employees, seeing the heartbreaking, country-changing toll the fires have taken on Australia.

History will record Rupert Murdoch’s three-continent toll on Western civilization. The Foxification of U.S. news, Brexit support, and Australia’s inferno serve as only three of the major impacts Murdoch’s press power has had around the world. It is a press power weaponized and then turned on the very societies it is supposed to serve.

And don’t let the whirl of events let you forget the odious phone hacking scandal. “The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn,” former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reminded us this week in discussing the British press’ tawdry history with the royals.

Disney, for one, has recognized the toxicity of Murdoch’s remaining brand. Fox Corporation now owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, and 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. But “Fox” is no longer part of Twentieth Century Fox, the storied studio, and related assets that Disney bought from Murdoch last year. Now it’s only out of sync when it comes to time: 20th Century Studios. (Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up a wonderful history of the Fox brand in the U.S., beginning with a third of a Brooklyn nickleodeon 115 years ago, on Twitter.)

The Murdoch empire has generated plenty of good entertainment outside of its own brands — witness the Emmy-winning “Succession” and last month’s Bombshell. But we haven’t yet come to grips with how his publications’ fact-slanting has literally changed the faces of free societies.

Expertise rises to the top.

The end of the print era is killing off the generalist. Every daily newsroom has its legend of the reporter who could cover anything. Wake him up from a drunken stupor, point him (almost always him) out the door, and you’d get your story.

Great stories there sometimes were, but the legend exceeded the truth: Too much news reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep.

Flash forward to today: Ruthless digital disruption — of both reading and advertising — means that inch-deep stories have less and less value. (Remember back at the start of the last decade, the content farms — Demand Media, Contently, Associated Content — that were going to revolutionize journalism?)

If commodity journalism and sheer volume are out, one the most refreshing trends into the 2020s is single-subject journalism. It needs a better name, but the results have been profound. In topic after topic, the focus on expertise — in reporting, writing and increasingly presentation and storytelling — have produced their own revolution.

In health, we see Kaiser Health News excelling and expanding. In education, Chalkbeat (with its new five-year plan) and the Hechinger Report drill into the real issues of the field. They’re now being joined by the university/college-focused OpenCampus.org, seeking to bring the same level of experienced, knowledgeable journalism to the often-cloistered academy.

The Marshall Project squarely meets the many mushrooming questions around criminal justice in our society. InsideClimate News is growing to try to meet the interest, and panic, around a warming earth. More-than-single-subject-oriented ProPublica’s investigations, often done with partners, have done what great work is supposed to do: set and reset agendas. There are many more, including at the regional and state level, led by The Texas Tribune and CALmatters.

All together, they may add up to fewer than a thousand journalists at this point. But their impact is great, and I believe it will become greater as awareness and distribution increase.

As Google and Facebook have won the ad wars, pageview-thirsty commodity journalism has largely (and thankfully) met its demise. Now we’ll see how much the market — not just those foundations — will support real expertise in reporting.

Free media has better tech skills than state media.

While Iran’s state media was spending days denying any possibility its military had shot down the Ukranian airliner, The New York Times found the likely truth early on. It assembled its own small group of experts. It used the best tech available. And it could report (under an increasingly common four-person byline) that an Iranian missile had in fact likely done the deed.

It wasn’t about suspicions, guesses, or bombast. It was about finding a truth in plain sight — given the human and technological resources to do it.

At first, Iranians believed their own media, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported from Tehran, that the downing was U.S. propaganda. But then, amazingly and overnight, Iranian citizens responded to the American-driven truth. They piled into the streets, seeing the mistake and its coverup for what it was: another sign that their government, without its own checks and balances, couldn’t be trusted.

Watch what privately owned newspapers do.

By necessity, we pay a lot of attention to the industry’s M&A mating games. These largely involve the dwindling number of publicly owned newspaper companies, which struggle both with operating realities and the need to convince shareholders to hang on through short-term earnings and dividends. They’re the biggest players, the most riddled by financialization, and the ones who have to report numbers publicly.

But given today’s realities, the stock market really isn’t the place for newspaper companies to be. Only long-term, strategic, capital-backed, and for the most part private or family-controlled businesses can make it successfully to 2030.

In the middle part of the 2010s, those papers got more focus. John Henry with The Boston Globe. The Taylor family with the Star Tribune. Frank Blethen, fighting the long fight in Seattle. And then they were joined by Patrick Soon-Shiong with the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

For the most part, we don’t hear much news out of these enterprises. They don’t have to report to markets quarterly, and they’ve taken more of a no-drama-Obama approach to the tough business. They are also, not incidentally, the leaders in digital subscription among local dailies. They remain important to watch.

Just as importantly, consider two newspaper chains that keep their heads down: Hearst and Advance. In the early 2010s, Advance made lots of news by cutting print days at its papers in New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It will likely soon get a fresher look: Long-time Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel announced last week that he’s stepping down. No successor has yet been named.

Hearst also remains intriguing. A very private company — and one now that now generates less than 10 percent of its revenue from newspapers — its very name bespeaks a long commitment. But the top two executives of what now is a profoundly diversified media company both grew outside of the news trade. Will it stand pat in its markets? Will it look for acquisitions? (The old GateHouse was its nemesis outbidding Hearst for the Austin and Palm Beach papers in 2018, but the Gannett deal should keep it out of the buying game for a while.) With antitrust enforcement apparently on the wane, will it try to build a cluster in the Bay Area around its San Francisco Chronicle? Or complete a Texas big-city triangle by adding The Dallas Morning News to its Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News?

Bankruptcy is nothing new in the newspaper industry.

McClatchy’s pension-led financial crisis in November surprised many. The words “potential bankruptcy” tend to focus the mind.

But consider this: By one close observer’s account, more than 20 daily newspaper companies have visited the bankruptcy courts since the Great Recession a decade ago.

Ironically, two of the ones that emerged became acquisitive consolidators. Today’s MNG Enterprises, driven by Alden’s in-court and out-of-court strategy, in fact declared bankruptcy twice in its various corporate iterations. GateHouse, re-birthed by Fortress Investment Group in 2013, was able to restructure debt totalling $1.4 billion — double what McClatchy now owes — and has gone to become the biggest newspaper company in the land, even able to buy the better-known Gannett name in the process.

So if McClatchy does indeed go into a pre-pack bankruptcy, the news won’t be that filing. It’ll be what the company does — as a business and journalistically — afterward.

We have to find a way to keep trillion-dollar stories in the public eye.

Through a year full of remarkable stories, perhaps the most remarkable was one that’s gotten little continuing attention.

In December, The Washington Post published “At War With The Truth.” It took the paper three years to pry loose the trove of documents through Freedom of Information requests. It is remarkable reporting, and one that put a price tag on our ignorance.

Here’s the lede: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The eerie parallels to the Pentagon Papers — a previous generation’s documentation of enormous waste, financial and human — were obvious. And yet it seems to have caused only small ripples in public discourse.

Politicians drive the daily news cycle, wielding wedge attacks on those — disabled, immigrant, poor — already falling through the now-purposely cut safety net. They say they do this in the name of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet this literal waste of $1 trillion pops in and out of the news in a politician’s second. This isn’t a question of politics; it’s a question of the public purse, and performing that watchdog role is our birthright as journalists.

As we reform and rebuild the journalism of the 2020s, we need to use the digital and moral tools of the day to hold power accountable and keep big stories alive over time. So far, we’ve barely touched the surface in connecting the latest happening to its deep historical context, making readers realize how a story connects to a larger issue or narrative, in ways both intuitive and knowledge-building.

I have confidence we’ll figure out how to do that in the 2020s.

“Mediatech” may be the new “convergence.”

There’s a new word taking hold out there: “mediatech”.

That’s how German behemoth Axel Springer is rebranding itself. CEO Mathias Dopfner and his team have rigorously pursued a transition away from print for more than a decade. “Mediatech” tells us both what they’ve learned and where they are going. In August, Dopfner’s new partner KKR bought out a minority interest in the company, taking it private and preparing it to be a bigger player this decade.

Springer, like its sometime partner Schibsted, will be one the big survivors in the brutal media game. Both have learned that modern journalism is now driven by both journalists and by technology. It’s the melding of the two — in audience definition, targeting, and service, and in product creation and delivery — that will determine the winners ahead.

Springer’s question for the ’20s: How much will the company keep investing in journalism itself, as it also pursues other digital business byways? Dopfner laid out the strategy, in friendly but direct sparring with Mark Zuckerberg, here.

Ah, life remains better in Perugia!

Travel coincidentally brought me to the doorstep of the most you-gotta-go-there journalism conference a couple of years ago. The name says most of it: the Perugia International Journalism Festival. Not a conference, or even an un- one, but a festival, inviting, of course, allusions to Nero fiddling. The truffled pasta and the views can’t be beat. The Sagrantino was magnificent.

The conference’s agenda and its exhibitor halls said it all. Walk into the main hall and Google and Facebook offered dueling expanses, with many enthusiastic company-clad representatives touting their latest and greatest. And half the agenda seemed to be, in apparently unintentional self-parody, sessions on how to work with…Facebook and Google. It’s the very best setting for platformitis.

In the time since, we’ve seen an even greater proliferation of news-aiding initiatives out of both companies. The new Reuters Institute study corroborates my own reporting, among publishers, of how that work is going and how it’s seen:

Google’s higher score [in the Institute’s own surveying] reflects the large number of publishers in our survey who are current or past recipients of Google’s innovation funds (DNI or GNI), and who collaborate with the company on various news-related products. Facebook’s lower score may reflect historic distrust from publishers after a series of changes of product strategy which left some publishers financially exposed.

The overall sense from our survey, however, is that publishers do not want hand-outs from platforms but would prefer a level playing field where they can compete fairly and get proper compensation for the value their content brings.

Short of that business-changing historic payout — see above — it’s unlikely that platform aid to publishers will itself significantly alter any of the trendlines in place.

There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscriptions.

Imagine if Reed Hastings has gone with advice of management consultants in the early 2000s, who might have “sized” the market for “on-demand” video and likely found it negligible. Netflix, nurtured on red envelopes, instead created a whole new category of customer demand — and willingness to pay.

As the company has grown, analysts have consistently undershot its growth potential, in the U.S. and globally. The company that was once asked “Will people really subscribe to on-demand movies?” reported on Tuesday that it now counts 167.1 million subscribers, and added 8.8 million in Q4 2019.

Upstart Disney (two words that don’t seem to pair) has already had its Disney+ app downloaded 40 million times. Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, Peacock, and more are all opening wallets.

What’s instructive to the future of the news business here? There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscription, though media reporters love to ask me that question. Create a value proposition that works and consumers will pay. Obviously, national and global scale — what the Internet provides — are hugely helpful. It is though the product proposition that drives payment.

For a moment, consider all the digital subscription success stories in news: The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and more. What if this is just prologue? Could better products — with more and more useful content, priced, sliced, and diced smartly — reproduce some of the scale success of streaming?

In a word, yes. And that’s our best hope for the decade ahead. Into the 2020s, bravely!

Your friendly, neighborly rich people are interested, though. Journalism philanthropy has quadrupled in the past ten years, according to recent nonprofit media reports, and 40 percent of revenue for news nonprofits comes from individuals and families. The commercial news space, starting with independent major metro newspapers and now spreading into the corporate chains, wants a piece of that action.

The Seattle Times was one of the first to significantly supplement its reporting budget using philanthropic dollars. Led by Sharon Chan, the Times worked with a local foundation to raise and shepherd $5 million for specific reporting projects. (Chan is now at The New York Times to perform a similar feat on a larger scale.) The Boston Globe recently built up an education investigative reporting team with a $600,000 grant from a local foundation here.

But can chain newspapers pull off the same trick that’s worked at locally owned papers in Seattle and Boston?

McClatchy is trying, following the playbook of building relationships with local philanthropists (and a local foundation to coordinate the tax-tricky donations) in order to support quality journalism that needs an extra financial boost. An early test: California’s Fresno Bee.

McClatchy — with outlets in 30 markets including Miami, Charlotte, Kansas City, and Fort Worth — faces the same challenges as any newspaper company these days: Its advertising revenue continues to fall (down 20 percent in Q2) and it has emphasized digital subscriptions. (It has 185,500 — up more than 50 percent year over year, but still not a giant number for 30 markets.) While McClatchy tries to suss out what might work locally — some Google News Initiative money is supporting an experimental trio of new sites, and CEO Craig Forman is still expecting “greater digital advertising revenues in the future” — there’s a newfound opportunity in The Fresno Bee’s local philanthropic community, focusing on education journalism.

“As you look at the fundamental challenges the news industry faces, as you hear the big sigh in my voice, our traditional advertising model is challenged. Certainly the print model is challenged,” Lauren Gustus, McClatchy regional editor, said. “We know that by doing work the community values, we can find a way forward. Asking people to support the Bee via digital subscription can be a path for us. However, that path is long. This effort can help serve as a bridge.”

This project comes with a $600,000 price tag for four journalists (some of whom must be fluent in Spanish) over two years. The Bee has already raised $246,000, from the Central Valley Community Foundation, the California Endowment, and various wealthy Fresno folks. It isn’t just a stopgap, though: The methods outlined in the plan for the money would be a pretty rapid adoption of best practices for audience engagement, transparency, and community relationships. Here’s how the Bee outlined the project with the Central Valley Community Foundation:

The goal is to create a broad conversation among parents, students, teachers and others in Fresno and the central San Joaquin Valley. We will do this by providing essential, solutions-oriented journalism and regular opportunities to engage.

This goal will be met by:

1. 1 weekly enterprise story with video and photos that build understanding of the challenges, successes and opportunities in our education communities.
2. 2–4 daily stories per week that leverage data, offer high-utility news or let readers know how they can engage over the same timeframe.
3. Potential publication across McClatchy’s five California news organizations — Fresno, Sacramento, Merced, Modesto and San Luis Obispo.
4. Regular in-person listening sessions.
5. A quarterly webinar, where we’ll share what we’re working on, what’s worked and input on the issues we should cover next.
6. Public events in Fresno to put the spotlight on this topic at least once a year.

“Our goal is to flip the script. How do we change the trajectory and quicken the pace of advancement in educational outcomes? We do it by working together,” Fresno Bee executive editor Joe Kieta said in a video announcing the initiative.

This is part of a broader fund with the community foundation, which is led by former Fresno mayor Ashley Swearengin. (It would be reasonable to assume that there are similar projects and partnerships in other McClatchy markets coming, I’m told.) The Fresno Bee is one of dozens of McClatchy outlets, but had the best — well, most unique — opportunity to pilot this method in the central region of California.

“We started to have the conversation with other community foundations in other communities that McClatchy serves,” Gustus said. “The community foundations want to make impact and if there’s an entity that’s going to work with them to make impact and to raise money to make an impact, generally that’s positive for both of them.”

The Bee also has the wild card of having its high-profile congressman suing the outlet (and a Twitter cow). Republican Devin Nunes, who has played a significant supporting role in various elements of the Trump-Russia investigation, filed a defamation lawsuit against McClatchy in April over an article mentioning others’ certain party behavior involving a winery he has invested in. He’s been outspoken about his hometown paper before, saying that the Bee works with “radical left-wing groups” to advance “fake news”.

The situation has placed quite a spotlight on the news outlet, but it’s also given the Bee an opportunity to draw financial contributions from supporters beyond a subscription or advertisement. “There are many people who read about The Fresno Bee’s coverage of Devin Nunes and wanted to help,” Gustus said. “Previously we didn’t have an outlet for those people. Now we do. That’s big — it reframes our relationship with the community.”

High-profile lawsuits, whether with news outlets or fake cows, don’t happen in every community. But this shift from a purely commercial transaction to one with philanthropy on the financial sidelines presents a new mindset for the company overall.

“We have an opportunity to engage our communities in a new relationship which ultimately can lead to a new model for local journalism,” she added. “I think that local communities are more prepared than ever to have that conversation with us. So where are we?”

“This is in many ways kind of a digital-age version of what we did many years ago in the suburbs,” Globe editor Brian McGrory told me in June. But now “you don’t have to be directly adjacent to Boston. We saw opportunity in Rhode Island where, quite honestly, great newspapers like The Providence Journal were seeing significant cuts, and that market is particularly engaged in news. We saw the opportunity to create a digital regional enterprise by heading down there and hiring local reporters.”

Well, now the Globe is going back to the suburbs: The outlet announced it’s doubling down on coverage of neighboring Newton, Mass. This city of about 90,000 people, along the Charles River west of Boston, has a median household income of $119,000, the highest of any city of its size in the commonwealth.

(Newton is also home to the Boston Marathon’s infamous Heartbreak Hill and enough people of note to earn its own “List of people from Newton, Massachusetts” Wikipedia page. Matt Damon! Priyanka Chopra! Atul Gawande! Harriet Beecher Stowe! Timothy Leary! Mary Baker Eddy! Sumner Redstone! Anne Sexton! David Mamet! Isaac Asimov! Jack Lemmon!)

But instead of hiring longtime local journalists, the Globe is working with Boston University’s (unpaid) journalism students as part of a college course. The Globe also has paid co-op and internship programs that pull in a lot of college students in the area, but their work on this project will only be for course credit.

Newton already has local coverage from a Newton TAB, a site in GateHouse’s WickedLocal network with no paywall. (Top stories Wednesday afternoon include a an elementary school’s renovation, Newton teachers planning a protest in contract negotiations, and a local doctor receiving a lifetime achievement award.) While Newton residents are more likely to already be Globe subscribers than are Rhode Islanders an hour away, the Globe is clear that this is a push for more subscribers — by going back to hyperlocal reporting.

“While many regional news organizations continue to cut local coverage, this partnership with Boston University will allow the Globe to deepen its coverage of Newton and test whether this attracts and retains subscribers, which are business imperatives for long-term sustainability,” the announcement Wednesday said. The Globe hit the milestone of more digital than print subscriptions in May with 112,000 subscribers.

Gail Spector, a former editor of the Newton TAB and longtime Newton reporter, will teach the BU class, which will primarily be made up of juniors and seniors and is a core requirement for journalism majors. The course description (meeting 8 a.m. Tuesday mornings, if you want in!) promises students “you will learn and practice in-depth reporting in a community. You will develop sources, walk the streets, cover a beat, attend meetings, shoot photos and provide readers with public interest journalism. This is a working newsroom.”

The students’ reporting will be part of a special section for Newton on the Globe’s site with other full-time reporters’ work (starting early next month) and a weekly newsletter. The Globe’s Newton section already highlights the (same) elementary school renovation, a local architect’s obituary, and Newton’s mayor considering limits on youth use of e-cigarettes.

It’ll be a valiant effort, but perhaps more of a test kitchen for the coverage relying on student labor rather than hiring full-timers. Many of the BU students will likely be new to the Boston area (let alone Newton), as BU gets students from all 50 states. More local journalism is not a problem; the Globe may see Newton as more fertile subscriber ground needing just a nudge more content rather than more practiced investigative or political reporters like Rhode Island has.

(While on a different scale, it’s not that far off from how The New York Times has thought about its investment in Australia and Canada coverage. These are markets that already find a lot of the newspaper’s content appealing — so maybe a little more focused attention could convert a lot of almost-subscribers into subscribers.)

Local blog UniversalHub had some resident reactions:

Instead of hiring professionals to be reporters the Globe instead is using unpaid interns who get “course credit”.

The globe can play it off as “preparing future journalists for a career” while saving $$$, smothering competition, and never having to worry about any of that pesky Union talk ever again.

No one is recapping meetings — not GateHouse local papers and not the Patch. Getting recaps of gov’t meetings is very important for staying informed. Currently, if we’re lucky, the local public access cable station will broadcast tapes of the meetings but most people don’t have time to listen to them all. The local papers used to provide coverage of school committees, city councils/aldermen/selectmen, important committees, etc.

Investigative reporting is great to have, but first we need the basics — and we’re no longer getting them.

After past investments in covering marijuana, the Catholic Church, and health and life sciences (and spinning off the latter two), the Globe’s newest vertical can be found about 50 miles down I-95. Three Providence journalists with more than four decades’ combined experience reporting on Little Rhody news are now officially a remote part of the Globe’s newsroom, writing for residents of the state and not just Bostonians. The Globe is making a bet that the Ocean State is fertile new ground for new subscribers (and they don’t have to worry about printing and distributing newspapers for them).

“This is in many ways kind of a digital-age version of what we did many years ago in the suburbs,” Globe editor Brian McGrory said. But now “you don’t have to be directly adjacent to Boston. We saw opportunity in Rhode Island where quite honestly great newspapers like the Providence Journal were seeing significant cuts and that market is particularly engaged in news. We saw the opportunity to create a digital regional enterprise by heading down there and hiring local reporters.”

The reporters are Amanda Milkovits, the Providence Journal’s longtime crime and safety reporter; Ed Fitzpatrick, a recent university spokesperson and former Providence Journal columnist (he and Milkovits started on the same day both at the Journal and now at the Globe); and Dan McGowan from WPRI 12, who spearheads a nearly 7,000-member Facebook group on Rhode Island politics and now the daily Rhode Map newsletter. Their coverage so far has ranged from a Q&A with the state’s senior U.S. senator, in-depth looks at a fancy-pants bridge/community convener that went $20 million over budget, struggles in the Providence public school system, and a profile accompanying breaking news of the local bishop’s homophobic tweet on Sunday. They all seemed terribly thrilled, when I talked to Milkovits and McGowan on Monday’s launch day, to be working for a news outlet that’s actually investing in its journalism.

“The intention of the Globe, and definitely my intention, is to tell more of the [Rhode Island] stories and tell different stories. It’s not to hurt the Journal,” said Milkovits, who spent almost two decades there. “I want the Journal to survive. I love that paper, and I think Rhode Island needs a newspaper. The relationship between the two — there’s room. There’s a lot of room for more journalism in the state.”

Mr. Henry, I know another paper that needs saving HT @IanDon @urbanophile: Boston Mag: Will John Henry Save the Globe http://t.co/9VB12i34Hc

— Amanda Milkovits (@AmandaMilkovits) February 22, 2014

“For the better part of forever, we weren’t focused on Rhode Island because the Journal was so strong. It didn’t leave a lot of room for us,” McGrory said. Now…well, things are different.

Rhode Island isn’t quite close to being a news desert, by UNC’s Penelope Abernathy’s standards. It has six daily newspapers and 20-plus weeklies for a population of 1.1 million. But total circulation dropped by 54 percent between 2004 and 2019, and it doesn’t help that GateHouse’s Providence Journal has consistently — like many other newspapers — dwindled. (GateHouse also owns The Newport Daily News down the road.)

GateHouse bought the Journal from Belo in 2014. At the time, its weekday circulation was 74,400. By 2018, that was down to less than 44,000, and another round of layoffs hit in February. What was once a total newsroom of more than 300, back in the 1980s golden age, now has fewer than 15 reporters on staff.

The Boston Globe, while it certainly has its own share of struggles, has seen continued growth in its digital subscription business: As of March 31, it’s now the proud parent of 112,241 digital subs. And those don’t come cheap at $360 per year after initial discounts, a price higher than The New York Times or The Washington Post.

And just as the Times has viewed Australia and Canada as prime targets for expanding its revenue footprint, the Globe — on a smaller scale, obviously — sees Rhode Island as territory to fuel further growth.

“I have so much respect for the folks at the Providence Journal. We’re not coming to work every day thinking that our goal is to squish the paper of record in Rhode Island,” McGowan said. He noted that in a Globe Google form asking Rhode Islanders for their story suggestions that received “hundreds” of responses, one replied “more of everything.” “Rhode Island is very small, but we publish way above our weight when it comes to the news and our on-the-ground journalists…That’s a testament to the other journalists in the market and the work that the three of us have already been doing.”

But the locals won’t go down without a fight: “We’re not about to cede Providence coverage or Rhode Island coverage to anyone,” the Journal’s new publisher, Pete Meyer, said in an April article about the previous publisher’s retirement. WPRI pointed out the story did not directly reference the Globe, though Meyer also said he “would double down to protect our turf” and was “up for a good fight.”

The most important word for the newspaper industry in 2019 has been consolidation, as Ken Doctor has documented here many times. That’s generally been about huge, nation-spanning scale: little chains getting eaten by bigger chains that get merged into enormous chains. Much of that has been about regionalized efficiencies: five or six nearby dailies that can now share a printing press, an ad-sales team, and an executive structure.

But there’s also a more local path: a relatively strong paper deciding to expand into nearby markets where the daily’s ownership might be more focused on cost-cutting than producing a good product.

The Advocate in Baton Rouge is probably the best example of this we’ve seen. Bought by wealthy businessman (and occasional politician) John Georges in 2013, The Advocate has seen the rest of south Louisiana as rich expansion turf. It launched The New Orleans Advocate (actually shortly before Georges’ purchase) to compete with The Times-Picayune when it cut back print days. It launched the Acadiana Advocate to compete with the declining Daily Advertiser in nearby Lafayette; earlier this year raided the Advertiser’s newsroom to hire away most of its best-known reporters. The Advocate now publishes in three markets stretched out over about 150 miles. And when The Times-Picayune announced it was giving up and selling to Georges last month, it was clear the strategy had some staying power.

It’s interesting to think about in what other markets a strategy like this might make sense. Could Hearst’s Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News decide to go hard for the audience of Austin’s GateHouse-owned daily? Glen Taylor’s Star Tribune looking to reach further into the upper midwest? Would The Seattle Times want to pursue hometown readers in Oregon (where Portland’s Oregonian has also cut print days), eastern Washington, or Idaho? A version of this sort of manifest destiny happened in the 1980s and 1990s, when a few big dailies aspired to distribution across an entire region — but it’s a lot cheaper to try if you’re pushing electrons instead of paper.

Rhode Island is a first step for the Globe, but McGrory acknowledges they’re considering expanding into more markets in New England. Dan Kennedy originally pointed out that the URL for the vertical, bostonglobe.com/rhodeisland, redirects to bostonglobe.com/metro/new-england/rhodeisland. “The Globe has looked north far more than it’s looked south,” McGrory said, with decent circulation and coverage in Maine and in New Hampshire, especially with the presidential primaries. Many of the potential targets, like Providence, are currently served by GateHouse, which is currently in merger talks and has become well known for its cost-cutting. Just last week, GateHouse announced it was condensing 50 of its Massachusetts weeklies into 18 regional papers.

Already the Globe team’s Rhode Island reporting — available in the newsletter, the website, and soon an interview-based podcast — signals that the Globe is aiming for impactful stories that fill in the blanks around what a pinched team at a sliced local outlet might do. There’s also plenty of crime reporting, Milkovits’ specialty. (“We didn’t hire her to be a crime reporter, but hiring her gives us the benefit of seeing what the crime is, and it’s an issue that affects people…on the guttural level,” McGrory said.) And there’s a curious “travel guide” currently featured on the vertical’s landing page that he says is just there while the team builds up content.

“First and foremost, we are writing about Rhode Island for Rhode Islanders,” McGrory said. “We didn’t want to throw people in there from the outside and didn’t want them to think that we’re Bostonians looking at them through a fishbowl.”

So how is The Boston Globe going to convince Rhode Islanders to trust — and maybe even pay money to — their northern neighbor?

Doing the same job I’ve always done.

— Dan McGowan (@DanMcGowan) April 13, 2019

“We had hundreds of new Rhode Island subscribers before we even launched the initiative, just based on word that we had hired these three,” McGrory said. Live events and a Providence newsroom presence will also be part of the concoction. And just doing the regular work of local journalism while living in the same area that they serve as reporters doesn’t hurt. Fitzpatrick caught this scoop while out at lunch:

Lincoln D. Chafee, the Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat who served as Rhode Island’s governor and as a US senator, is now a member of the Libertarian Party…A Globe reporter ran into Chafee on Tuesday as he was having lunch at the Wayland Square Diner with his brother, Assistant US Attorney Zechariah Chafee. He said he was back in Rhode Island for his niece’s wedding.

In this edited Q&A — assembled from my interview with Thompson for this accompanying story — I asked Thompson about the wider takeaways others might take from the Times’ success.

With legalization in Colorado came a number of sites to cover both the legal and economic issues and, shall we say, news-you-can-use — most prominently The Cannabist from The Denver Post. Quite a few more have followed as various decriminalization and legalization efforts have spread from state to state. (Currently, 33 states allow for the medical use marijuana, and 10 have legalized recreational use.)

For those who like their pot coverage blockchain-enabled, there’s the independent Cannabis Wire, now run on the Civil platform. Social video pioneer NowThis offers…NowThis Weed. (Sample videos: “This Huge 8.5-Pound Taco Can Feed 8 People”; “This Guy Lights His Bong With A Laser”; “Man In Colorado Makes Pipe Out Of Snow.”) There’s WeedWeek and Proper, The Fresh Toast and Civilized (which “aims to be the Vanity Fair of marijuana culture”). And north of the 49th, The Globe and Mail is using Canadian legalization to build out a number of products, including a $1,000-a-year email newsletter titled and for the “Cannabis Professional,” while other newspapers start verticals like the Winnipeg Free Press’ The Leaf.

America’s state-by-state patchwork of laws has opened up the opportunity for local outlets, like The Denver Post, to be early movers in the space. And today, here in Massachusetts — where the first legal recreational sales are scheduled for tomorrow morning — The Boston Globe joins their number.

A new section of BostonGlobe.com dedicated to pot issues launched today, “dedicated to covering the politics, business, use, and impact of cannabis in the Northeast with a primary focus on the New England states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.” The Globe has already had a “This Week in Weed” newsletter for some time.

The vertical — which doesn’t seem to have a catchy New England-y name like “The Other Green Monster” or “Potholes” or “Spahk the Dank in Hahvahd Yahd” or “How Do You Like Dem Apple Bongs” — will be staffed by two full-time reporters, an editor, and a digital producer. “The Globe aims to provide coverage that will be indispensable reading for politicians, lobbyists, businesses, and activists in the Northeast while also being informative and a must-read for interested consumers,” said Matt Karolian, the Globe’s director of new initiatives, general manager for the cannabis subsite, and (it should be noted) a recent Nieman Fellow.

While the vertical may not have a name, it has a Twitter handle — @marijuananews — that illustrates the scale of the ambition at play here. I am going to assume that the fact it follows exactly 420 people is not an accident.

Twenty years later, after the Senate Watergate Committee opened its hearings and news accounts had pilloried Richard Nixon, he still held a 44 percent approval rating. Even about a year later, as he awaited his getaway helicopter, a quarter of Americans thought highly of him.

Now, 45 years later, the 45th president finds himself seemingly cornered by criminal convictions of his associates, the most unflattering of tell-all portraits, and one of his own anonymously belittling him in the pages of The New York Times, Trump tests the bottom of 40th percentile in recent polls.

This history matters, as we try to put into perspective the week’s escalation in the unprecedented war between a presidency and the press. As the Financial Times put it in a headline Friday, “Media challenges Trump for control of the news cycle.”

Is that what’s going on? Is that our takeaway in this collision of this president, the press and polls?

That’s where the historical evidence offers a lesson. We won’t likely be able to pinpoint turning points for quite awhile. Historians tell us that large parts of the American populace long maintained their support of those we now see as historically disgraced. Polling often seems to show a false sense of stability — steady, steady and steady…until it’s not, as Nate Silver has pointed out.

Historian and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham provided that perspective in an All Things Considered interview a couple of weeks ago.

“Thirty percent of the country is going to be with the incumbent I think no matter what. If they carry him out in handcuffs, 30 percent of the country is going to say it was a witch hunt; it was a frame-up,” Meacham said. “The thing to watch is, where is the 60, 65 percent of the country that is not part of a die-hard base for this particular person?”

Do we see movement in that group, as the rat-a-tat of criminal conviction, indictment, and an ever-aggressive press continues to make a difference?

The most recent polls show some, albeit uncertain, approval/disapproval movement. To Meacham’s point, though, the majorities lining up in opposition to a Manafort pardon, to a Sessions ousting, and to a termination of the Mueller investigation seem to be slightly growing.

What is the press’s role in this epic drama?

It is, at its best, the strong and steady hand at keeping the public informed. No surprise, it is the twin Watergate-tested news institutions of The New York Times and The Washington Post that continue to lead that informing.

The “senior official in the Trump administration” didn’t choose The Wall Street Journal or Fox News. The Journal certainly would have been authoritative enough, but, even after a decade of Rupert Murdoch ownership, it’s still not remotely close to competing with The New York Times in national authority.

In choosing The New York Times to distribute the anonymous op-ed, “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration,” the Republican writer reaffirmed what we’ve only seen reinforced in the last two years: The Times still stands for credible, accountable, agenda-setting news reporting and analysis. The right-wing pseudo press may decry it, but, day after day, they follow it. They remain reactive.

The dozens of interviewees who provided The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward their insider’s view of this White House could have said no to 11 p.m. requests for interviews. But enough of them didn’t. Why? As Alicia Shepard put it: “Because he doesn’t make things up.” Decades of Woodward books and of Washington Post journalism — for most, the two are indistinguishable — still demand attention and command belief in stubborn facts.

Take this Gary Tuchman CNN piece, interviewing diners at the Dew Drop Inn in Mobile, as they observe the public disparagement of their hometown boy Jeff Sessions by the president. The 2:37 video is immediately classic, but tune in at 1:00 and see Tuchman as local Mark Dodson is asked about Trump’s disparaging of Sessions and of southerners.

“It’s upsetting and very discouraging that in fact he would do that, if in fact, he did that, if you believe it,” says Dodson, after Tuchman notes Trump’s “stupid Southerner” comment, as reported in Woodward’s book.

Tuchman asks, “So, do you believe the book?”

“I’m not sure. In Washington, what can you believe?”

Tuchman wouldn’t let him off the hook.

“Who would you believe more, a guy like Bob Woodward or the president of the United States?”

Hesitantly, Dodson answers, “If I were honest about it, I’d probably believe Mr. Woodward.”

If you listen to Times op-ed editor James Dao’s explanation on The Daily, it’s so straightforward as to make the question of publication a non-question. The Times depends on confidential, anonymous-but-known-to-be authoritative sources, to bring us the news, facts and analysis. In this case, the Times editors applied the same kind of thinking editors do every day. Newsworthy? Verified? Contributes to public understanding? Check, check, check. (The Times answered reader questions about the op-ed here.)

Those who say the op-ed offers “nothing new” miss a point. It is the very corroboration here (as On the Media’s Bob Garfield pointed out) that increases its import.

Is the op-ed writer a hero or a coward, or both? What message was trying to be sent; what was received? Shouldn’t the writer go public? All great questions, but not for the Times to decide. This is the reality of “We report, you decide” journalism.

The polls will go up, and the polls will come down. It’s the steadiness and steeliness of the American press that can lead us out of this morass. That requires, of course, a robust business under the press.

So how good is this op-ed for the Times’ business? The op-ed is approaching 20 million pageviews, but that astounding number still represents spit in an ocean.

Almost a decade ago, the Times began to forswear page-spinning goals in favor of reader revenue. The Times has consistently, amid many challenges of digital disruption, maintained that reader-first strategy. Now that service is recompensed in the most direct and enduring way: By having readers pay for the journalism itself.

Today, Times readers — 3.8 million subscribers, digital and print — contribute about 63 percent of all Times revenues. Will the op-ed help the Times’ business? Yes, but in the medium and longer term — this isn’t the old days of selling single copies off a blockbuster story or series.

It’s not just high-ranking Republicans who still recognize the primacy of The New York Times in the nation’s life, it’s the readers.

How does the Times measure that effect?

Number one, it bolsters the most important goal of the Times: retention of all those subscribers, pre- and post-Trump Bump. Number two, it will help, sale by sale, in acquisition.

We can call it brand-building. When The New York Times authentically fills its mandates as a national leading news source, it burnishes its brand. And brand equals long-term value, both to readers and for advertisers.

The Times isn’t alone here. Both the Post and CNN can claim similar service and benefit. Then, there’s been a host of reader-first (some increasingly digital subscription-focused) news companies playing significant roles. Those include The Atlantic, NBC, BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Vox, NPR, Mother Jones, and New York Magazine. It is in the diversity of digital age-enhanced national press that we see the value of wider news reporting and analysis of it.

They’ve led the way, even as we see the results of the decade-long diminishment of newspaper chains’ DC bureaus. Once, those operations often broke national stories; in recent months, only the McClatchy DC bureau’s Trump coverage seems immediately memorable. Still, the Boston Globe-led effort to defend the press against the President’s “enemy of the people” statements — one signed onto by more than 400 dailies — managed some reassurance of local newspapers’ backbone at this unprecedented time.

We don’t do journalism to win popularity contests. We do the work before history has done its adjudication. That’s why we call it the first draft of history.

The Times and the Post are, however, alike in one crucial way that disinvites comparison to other local news products, which is that their importance hinges on their coverage of national, not local, news. Both papers use their city as a lens on the world, and much of their respective coverage reflects the view through that lens. As a result, both have become indispensable in their coverage of U.S. politics, trade, and the economy. The only other paper that can reasonably claim this local-out perspective in 2018 is The Wall Street Journal.

Whereas other news products compete locally, the Times and the Post compete nationally and enjoy large markets of voracious news consumers around the world. Doctor estimated in February that the Post earns around $100 million annually from digital subscriptions, at approximately $100 per reader and 1 million readers, a number CNN the Post passed a year ago. Weekday circulation of the Post peaked in 1993 at 832,332; Sunday circulation peaked at 1,152,272. With just its digital product, the Post has surpassed its peak paying weekday audience and is approaching — or has perhaps already surpassed — its peak paying Sunday audience.

Likewise, The New York Times has expanded its digital audience; it counts 2.9 million digital subscribers, a figure that also includes subscribers to its crosswords and cooking products. That bundle of products makes a direct comparison to the Post’s totals more challenging, but the Times’ diversity of digital products — including Wirecutter, a popular digital-only consumer review site — is its signature. If the Post is like Amazon, happy to sell individual slices of its vertically integrated whole, the Times is perhaps more like Apple, bringing its ethos and voice to a more diverse array of products.

The Times and the Post are the rare breed of newspapers able to use digital disruption to their own advantage. While in one sense, the internet has taken a great deal from newspapers — it has terrorized print circulation and most kinds of advertising — it has also given new strength to those news organizations that do have a truly national platform. But where does that leave regional dailies like those recently acquired by billionaires in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Boston? Certainly less sure of their foothold and envious of the fortunes of the likes of the Times and the Post.

One path could lie in the towering map of New England that greets those entering the headquarters of The Boston Globe — if a newspaper could leverage its digital reach to better serve an entire region, it could potentially turn the threat of the internet into a strength, albeit on a scale smaller than The New York Times or The Washington Post. With its regional importance, the Los Angeles Times has had success building its digital subscription base, reaching 105,000 digital subscribers as of September 2017, though its accomplishments pale in comparison to those of The New York Times and The Washington Post. And these gains came amid a terrible pattern of turmoil for the L.A. Times that seems perhaps to have concluded this summer with the purchase of the paper by Patrick Soon-Shiong. The largest of the regional papers in the United States, the L.A. Times has at points set its sights on instead being the smallest of the national papers.

While the D.C. bureaus of local newspapers as a group have shrunk or vanished in the past decade, the L.A. Times and Boston Globe have continued to cover national politics and economic issues. The L.A. Times lists 23 editors and reporters on its international and national desks, 16 in its D.C. bureau, and 14 on its politics desk. At face value, more reporters covering those in power seems like a net asset to society. Los Angeles certainly needs an editorial team to hold its elected officials accountable to their constituents. Still, those responsible for the L.A. Times news product must carefully navigate the tension in allocating resources between national news — some of which will certainly be covered elsewhere but which could bring a national scale of pageviews — and local news that may otherwise go unreported but that would naturally attract a narrower audience.

It was against the backdrop of Lewis D’Vorkin’s chaotic tenure that the newsroom voted to unionize, publisher Ross Levinsohn was placed on leave during an investigation of his workplace behavior at prior employers, and Tronc reached an agreement to sell the paper and its recently adopted sibling, the San Diego Union-Tribune. Still, the staff of the LA Times might not take a deep breath just yet. After making a $70.5 million investment in Tronc, Soon-Shiong told Bloomberg in 2016 that he hoped to bring “machine vision” to the L.A. Times: “For example, a reader could pan a camera across a physical newspaper and the photos could be turned into video. Focus the camera on a photo of basketball star Kevin Durant or Donald Trump and ‘you’d hear him speaking or Kevin Durant would be dunking,’ he said.” If D’Vorkin sought to marry Instagram to Forbes at the LA Times, Soon-Shiong seems eager to breathe new life into the CueCat, the barcode-scanning device publishers gave for free to their readers in the hope of boosting engagement and bringing e-commerce revenue to print media.

In fairness, Soon-Shiong’s concept does away with the inelegance of the printed barcode and the computer-connected barcode scanner, replacing them with printed images and the reader’s smartphone, placing such an experiment closer to the trendy realm of augmented reality than to the retrospective uselessness of the CueCat. Yet the user’s action is essentially the same: find something interesting in print; learn more on the web. In further fairness to the machine-vision idea, most newspapers are brainstorming ways to bridge the gap between print and digital, not ways to make the print product more valuable and more connected. But the newspapers that are flirting with augmented reality are still only flirting — The New York Times’s occasional technology experiments, like its 2018 Winter Olympics feature, feel high-touch and expensive, and do not appear to feature into the print edition.

Assuming Soon-Shiong takes a more moderate approach to leading the evolution of the news products at the L.A. Times, it could come to resemble John Henry’s Boston Globe in some ways. Among regional papers, with nearly 100,000 digital subscriptions, the Globe only narrowly trails the L.A. Times. The Boston metro area, however, has only barely a third of the population of the Los Angeles metro area, with 4.5 million and 12.8 million residents, respectively, in 2016. And while New England as a whole is home to about 14.44 million people, California is home to 37.2 million by itself. The cultural demographics of California versus New England could yield further opportunities for the L.A. Times, which also produces Hoy, a daily Spanish-language newspaper.

The Globe, of course, has had recent and well-documented struggles with its printed product. When it changed printing plants in summer 2017, problems with the transition left many subscribers without their newspapers. And as of March 2018, the Globe’s annual seven-day subscription cost appeared set to climb to levels that would make it the most expensive newspaper in the United States — though not far from the price of a midrange gym, and on a daily basis, still cheaper than most drinks at Starbucks. Perhaps, as Dan Kennedy says, print is destined not to be a mass-market product — “print is becoming a niche product for people willing to pay for it.”

In Minneapolis, Glen Taylor’s Star Tribune has managed to collect about 50,000 digital subscriptions, roughly as many as the Chicago Tribune, and avoid the level of scrutiny or intrigue that coastal papers now owned by billionaires have faced. Taylor purchased the Star Tribune in 2014, five years after it emerged from bankruptcy, a victim of the steep decline in value of newspapers since the 1990s and the great recession. His purchase of the paper was praised by R.T. Rybak, then the mayor of Minneapolis, and welcomed by the NewsGuild, which represents the Star Tribune’s reporters. The Star Tribune has since become a strong example of funnel-driven consumer marketing, which treats the subscription process like a conventional e-commerce experience, and has invested in data tools and technology to identify the readers most likely to pay for subscriptions.

Conversely, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2015 in secret. His purchase of the paper was revealed by its own reporters. The $140 million sticker price outstripped Taylor’s $100 million price tag for the Star Tribune and doubled John Henry’s $70 million for The Boston Globe, which led to speculation that his motives were to use the newspaper to promote his own political agenda. That theory was borne out by his request, as negotiations to purchase the paper were coming to a close, that Review-Journal reporters monitor three judges in the city, one of whom was overseeing a lawsuit that imperiled Adelson’s casinos. The New York Times called this an “ominous coincidence.” By early 2016, newsroom anxiety had given way to firings and resignations; a new publisher and editor were appointed; and stories involving Adelson were routinely killed. The market size, about 1.9 million people, of the Las Vegas metro area pales in comparison to Minneapolis–St. Paul, with its 3.3 million. This underscores the odd nature of Adelson’s purchase. Adelson’s net worth, as reported by Forbes, was $31.8 billion in 2016, far higher than Taylor’s $1.9 billion, making his purchase of the Review-Journal a far smaller fraction of his net worth than Taylor’s. Adelson has the means and the motive to take a major metropolitan newspaper and turn it into a puppet.

Why does a billionaire decide to buy a newspaper? Of the five considered here, four purchased papers in their hometowns or adopted hometowns. Bezos grew up in Miami and built Amazon in Seattle; his purchase of The Washington Post underscores the national importance of that paper rather than show a billionaire committing an act of civic charity. Each of the five men in question exhibited some combination of civic-mindedness, profit motive, and raw self-interest in using the power of the news organization for their own purposes, though those purposes range from holding the government accountable to suppressing negative coverage of related business ventures. Thus far only Gerry Lenfest, the owner of the Philadelphia Media Network who donated the Inquirer and Daily News to the Lenfest Institute before passing away this month, officially abandoned profit motive as his rationale for owning a newspaper. In contrast, many newspaper owners emphasize their view that newspapers should be profitable and link their profit potential to their sense of civic pride: If our readers truly care about their community, we can have a profitable newspaper.

The motivations of billionaires hearken back to a core question of whether our society needs newspapers — or just news. Why not apply one’s civic pride, resources, and business acumen to a new way of distributing news, one not so decimated by declining print revenues and advertising? There’s also a sense of inequality in the fate of newspapers: Will cities with struggling local media and no interested saviors simply become local news deserts? How does that impact the accountability of state and local governments? Still, newspapers that have had the advantage of such a patron — especially the Globe and the Star Tribune — have much more experience growing reader support of their digital products than most other papers. As such, they are the furthest down the path between reliance on advertising and reliance on reader support. Those that trail might look to them as examples to follow.

In October, Canada is set to become the first G-7 country to fully legalize the recreational use of cannabis nationwide. (Uruguay legalized it back in 2013, and a top Georgia court made it legal there a couple weeks ago.) As each province irons out its own policies, Canada will be entering uncharted territory when it comes to how marijuana should best be regulated, grown, marketed, sold, and consumed. How to best cover a Canadian industry that’s growing with global consequences, is also uncharted territory.

For The Globe and Mail, it’s an enormous business story that touches every part of its newsroom, from reporters in regional bureaus to the investigations team. Medical marijuana has been legal and regulated in Canada now for nearly two decades, and the Trudeau government had been making overtures around recreational legalization for some time.

“Our coverage evolved slowly at first, with the legalization of medical marijuana. We’d done some coverage around problems in the supply chain, and problems in quality of product. But I’d say we probably didn’t get really serious about covering the business of cannabis until early 2017, when the government’s timeline became clear,” Derek DeCloet, who leads The Globe and Mail’s business coverage, told me. “More companies grew up, went public, got large. There were acquisitions. They made financing moves for their businesses. Activity increased markedly in 2016. So last year, we started to cover it more intensely.” That included dedicating one reporter, Christina Pellegrini, entirely to the business of cannabis.

“To be honest, I don’t have the formula for you for how we’re organizing it,” DeCloet said. “It’s a thing that has evolved quickly enough that we’ve also been doing things a little bit on the fly as well.”

One new reporter will likely be focused significantly on the government/policy side of cannabis (e.g., controlling sales through government entities versus encouraging many more private retailers). Others will focus on the business side (e.g., cannabis companies will try to build brands the way beer and wine companies have done — what will that look like?). Or the corporate side (e.g., there are lots of individual companies; maybe mergers are coming, maybe some companies will crash). Then there’s a consumer side as well (e.g., what’s the etiquette around consuming marijuana?). The Globe and Mail’s wider newsroom stands at around 260 people.

The paper’s overall cannabis coverage push includes a three-pronged approach, according to Neal Madan, managing director of corporate development and strategic planning at the Globe. First, it’ll continue to build out coverage for a newish cannabis hub on its main site (like many Globe stories, some of these are also behind a hard paywall).

It’ll invest in events, with a series starting August 22 that explores the Canadian landscape after legalization. And it’ll soon launch a very pricy subscription product, initially in email newsletter form, which will be its own premium tier on top of a regular Globe and Mail subscription. The newsletter is set to launch sometime in September and will start at $999 CDN per year.

“It’s pretty clear the cannabis industry will be an area of frenetic activity. The world’s eyes will also be on Canada as we become a hub of financial activity in this sector,” Madan said. “We’ve been tracking internal data around readership that shows us cannabis is one of our most searched and highly read topics. Readers are consuming it in large quantities, both in terms of the number of articles that they’re looking at, as well as the amount of time they spend on them.”

He wouldn’t share subscription targets, saying only “it’s fair to say that this is being priced appropriately for a premium, professional-grade product,” and “our idea is that we can add value to this area that lives by standards of the Globe, and we think that this has tangible value.”

As a privately held company, the Globe and Mail doesn’t release specific numbers on its finances or subscribers or readers. The company says it’s profitable, at least as of this J-Source story from December. (There’ve been whispers, though, that The New York Times has more Canadian digital subscribers than the Globe, or any other Canadian news organization.)

The premium newsletter is supposed to be an “even deeper dive that’s distinct from our regular cannabis coverage on our site,” Madan said, into “regulatory rules, corporate development and operating strategies, M&A activities, research and development, robust industry data, and analytics.” The Globe has been in touch with various industry professionals to gauge interest in such a product; potential subscribers include everyone from people working in the cannabis industry to policymakers and financial or legal advisers.

“When we evaluate any potential new product, we try to address questions using external and internal data, while also drawing upon own experience and intuitions,” Madan said. “Does the Globe have credibility in this content area? Is there a sizable audience interested in this subject matter? Do they have a need for this specific product, or can we create a need? are there enough people willing to pay for it so as to make it profitable?”

Usable industry news will be more conducive to a high-priced subscription product.

“I think what [the Globe and Mail is] doing is smart,” said Nushin Rashidian, a co-founder of the subscription-driven publication Cannabis Wire, which covers the socioeconomic, policy, and research issues facing the global cannabis industry. (Rashidian was also a lead researcher on the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s work on platforms and publishers.) “Canada’s industry is roughly the size of California’s, but their real value proposition is the fact that all these companies are going global or going to go global, so their potential subscriber base is actually massive. These companies are exporting to Germany, they’re looking at Brazil, Australia.”

The Cannabist, once a standout project from The Denver Post, has struggled to maintain its editorial offerings (cuts delivered by Digital First Media’s owner Alden Global Capital certainly didn’t help). The Canninfornian, a project of a group of Digital First newsrooms in California, doesn’t seem to have a strong business model to back it, either. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, NJ.com has been selling its premium Cannabis Insider newsletter for $29.99 per month (or $299.99 for an annual subscription). The Boston Globe seems to be making moves for a dedicated cannabis section, based on its job postings for a cannabis reporter, as well as a dedicated section producer.

“We’re certainly not alone in covering this, but I think we’re probably alone in the level of investment we’re putting into it going forward,” DeCloet said. “It’s not untilled terrain, but it’s quite new terrain, so there’s a lot we have to do to cover it properly. We think the industry has a lot to learn as it goes from being primarily a black-market industry to a legal industry. We’ve got a lot to learn.”

We begin with a news hook: Last Wednesday, The Washington Post posted a job opening that reveals the legendary newsroom to be in the hunt for an “accomplished journalist” to “be the voice and personality of a daily podcast.” It is, in many ways, a completely unsurprising development. Since Jeff Bezos bought the news organization in 2013, the Post has been especially aggressive and nimble in building stuff out across all sorts of platforms: Reddit, YouTube, the Amazon-owned Twitch. Audio too, of course. Now, under the leadership of Jessica Stahl, the Post has built out a modest portfolio of podcasts that generally adheres to a playbook containing moves commonly practiced elsewhere. There’s a news-hooky Trump podcast (Can He Do That?), there’s more evergreen material that plays toward the strength of the newsroom (Presidential, Constitutional), there are a few interesting collaborations with audio-native organizations (Historically Black with APM Reports, Edge of Fame with WBUR). The Post even has a daily podcast already, The Daily 202’s Big Idea, which is a sprightly audio adaptation of the Daily 202 newsletter produced specifically for smart speakers.

(Fun fact: those podcast and smart speaker experiences aren’t The Washington Post’s first experiments in audio. In the mid-2000s, the news organization once collaborated with Bonneville International to launch Washington Post Radio, a network of news radio stations covering the DC area. The venture, which was then touted as “NPR on Caffeine,” was short-lived, but it did briefly house The Tony Kornheiser Show. You know what, if I were the Post, I’d try it again.)

So, the Post’s pursuit of a daily news podcast is a move I’d expect the organization to make. Certainly, it’s a bet worth taking, but it’s also worth remembering that a bet is a bet is a bet: there is the potential for high upside, and there is always a chance it could be a bust.

Last week saw two pieces that shed a ton of new light into life at both ends of the spectrum.

First, on Wednesday, the house of Vanity Fair dropped a Joe Pompeo special in the form of a brief profile on The Daily’s meteoric rise. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you probably know the broad historical details of the production already, but here are some data points that are new:

• Audience. “The Daily was the most-downloaded new show on Apple Podcasts last year, with 5 million listeners a month at the latest count, more than 1 million of whom tune in every day.” Note that qualifier “new” — meaning that there are bigger shows on the platform in 2017, and they were all already established.
• Revenue. “Chief operating officer Meredith Kopit Levien wouldn’t discuss how much money The Daily is making so far, but a sales proposal that I got my hands on for June sought $290,000 per month to be part of the show’s monthly sponsorship rotation, which generally includes several advertisers. A person with knowledge of The Daily’s finances told me the show will book ad revenue in the low eight figures this year.” For what it’s worth, that’s waaay above I was conservatively estimating for the year.
• Possible expansions. “The Times, in fact, is already thinking about what a California Daily would look like, or a New York Daily, a Global Daily, and related products that focus on tech or culture, and so on.” Sam Dolnick, the Times’ assistant managing editor, also noted the possibility of future spin-offs in the vein of Caliphate, which has reportedly bagged over 18 million downloads to date. That limited series debuted in mid-April, ran across ten chapters, and wrapped mid-June.

So that’s what you stand to gain. Now, inverse to Pompeo’s glowing look at The Daily is the Lenfest Institute’s solid post-mortem on the death of Season Ticket, WBUR and the Boston Globe’s daily sports podcast, which simply never returned after wrapping its pilot season in early February. (I previously wrote about the production when it first launched last fall.) Written by (former Nieman Lab staff writer!) Joseph Lichterman, it’s a fascinating breakdown that’s well worth the read both as a look into how a daily podcast can fail as well as a lesson in how, sometimes, you just have to know when to call it quits.

Some findings from the write-up that stood out to me, and some things it made me think about:

• WBUR and the Globe cancelled Season Ticket for a simple reason: the podcast never hit the listenership goal it set for itself. WBUR’s Iris Adler told Lichterman they had identified that the podcast needed to hit more than 1 million downloads per months to be considered sustainable. While actual numbers were not disclosed, the audience was described to be “not huge.”
• The most notable difference between Season Ticket and comparable productions: the size and operational focus of the team. According to the Lenfest write-up, the podcast was produced by three WBUR staffers, with the Globe’s Christopher Gasper and Scott Thurston working on the show in addition to many other responsibilities. In contrast, most of WBUR’s daily radio shows are staffed by six to twelve people, and as Lichterman also pointed out, The Daily has eight full-time staffers working on it. It’s also worth pointing out that The Daily is host Michael Barbaro’s full-time responsibility.
• One thing that wasn’t really discussed in the write-up that’s pretty important: the marketing plan. This isn’t limited to the budget — interestingly enough, one thing I’ve consistently found in podcast-land is that everybody seems to think that everybody else has a bigger marketing budget than they do — but rather, it’s more about the plan to get the word out on the show that goes beyond promotion on the Apple Podcast carousel. I imagine that’s a huge differentiator for the momentum of shows like The Daily and Vox’s Today Explained.
• Finally, there’s the matter of the product itself. Season Ticket was developed to be “a more thoughtful alternative to Boston’s hot take-driven sports talk radio stations.” Part of the theory behind the show’s lack of traction seems tethered to its nature as a local podcast. “By definition, if it’s a local podcast you’re going to have a smallish audience,” Adler told Lichterman. I totally get the argument, but I’m personally not convinced that’s true… yet. Especially when it’s a piece of sports media. But that’s for another column.

Let’s back-track a bit: why am we comparing a daily news podcast to a daily sports podcast? Is it appropriate to analytically connect the two things? Obviously, I’m going to argue yes, because I believe that the core challenge of the daily news podcast doesn’t lie in the fact that it’s news, it lies in the fact that it’s daily. Besides, both sides perform many of the same functions: delivering information, supplying analysis, sustaining attention, providing an experiential space to digest the material, and so on. (Then again, you could also argue that there have been a lot of not-so-great learnings that have flowed between the two sides. One need only look toward the talking head similarities between ESPN’s First Take and certain CNN segments to get a feel for this.)

Anyway, back to the point. What, exactly, should The Washington Post keep in mind when moving forward with its daily news podcast adventures? Some of this we’ve already discussed: make sure the team is adequately staffed and purely focused on the task, be sure to market, and know when to call it quits, should it come to that. But I also think that there is another crucial dimension to consider: what hasn’t been done that needs to be done already?

Where does the daily news podcast go next? So there’s this moment from a This American Life episode in June, called “It’s My Party and I’ll Try If I Want To,” that I find myself coming back to over and over again. If you haven’t listened to it, here’s the context: a good chunk of the episode follows this one contender for the Democratic nomination to go after the 19th congressional district in New York, which is said to be up for grabs in the midterms. The contender’s name is Jeff Beals, and he’s a Bernie Sanders-style progressive who is portrayed as being largely under-supported by the party infrastructure. But no matter, because at one point in the story, Beals starts to get some momentum. And that’s when he drops this bit of personal philosophy: “You realize that a campaign is not a thing you run. It’s a thing you unleash.”

Now, Beals didn’t end up winning the nomination during the late June primaries. But just because you failed doesn’t mean you’re wrong. More to the point, just because Beals didn’t win the primaries doesn’t render the framework he brought into the campaign any less true. (See also: Billy Beane in Moneyball).

This is the point of the column where I make an absurd leap to connect two seemingly disparate dots. Much of the issue with… oh, I don’t know, establishment party politics, I suppose, is the fact that it has the tendency to serve its ostensible target audience the same things over and over again, even if it’s literally a different candidate altogether. There’s a lot of “This Is What We Stand For” that’s broadly consistent with ideas and arguments from the past, albeit with some incremental iterations over time, and there’s relatively little “Wait, You’ve Heard This Already?” or “Well What Do You Want?” happening.

I feel similarly about a lot of new news products, from new publications to new newsletters to, of course, new podcasts. And there’s just this prevailing, unshakeable feeling that everybody’s drilling for oil in the same spot because some other guy found oil there already. On several occasions over the past year, upon hearing news or a rumor of a daily news podcast in the works by a new team, my near-inevitable response has been: “Haven’t we done this already?”

When considering the prospect of assembling a new contribution to the growing daily news podcast genre, you essentially have two initial moves: (1) you build something that directly competes with Up First or The Daily at the level of being the new “front page” of the day — in which case, you better bring it — or (b) you capitalize on some under-exploited edge. Or to put it another way: you identify and pursue a pocket of pent-up demand that has yet to be, in Beals’ terms, “unleashed.”

There are many directions to take when considering edges. For example, you could think of them in terms of subject matter, like how there has been a steadily growing cohort of daily finance and business news podcasts, which includes Axios’s Pro Rata, MarketSnacks, and The Indicator from Planet Money. The interesting thing about this spread is how each show seems oriented toward a different audience segment within the spectrum of financial expertise: professionals, casual audiences, and somewhere in between. There is a ton of room there to horizontally move between industries and vertically between assumed level of listener expertise.

But there is, I think, still quite a bit of frontier left to explore in terms of time. There is a small segment of the daily news podcast universe that’s testing the opportunities and limits of “day-parting”: a concept carried-over from broadcast radio that understands audiences to have different needs and consumption preferences at different times of the day. I think it’s fair to say that the bulk of daily news podcasts seem particularly oriented toward the morning commute, with drop times centered around the early morning on the east coast so that listeners are able to wake up to a freshly baked pod waiting for them in their feeds before they jump into their car or submit to the New York subway system. Vox’s Today, Explained and Techmeme Ride Home are both explicitly designed to target the evening commute.

But even the targeting of different commutes still seems, in various ways, an imprecise handling of two very real challenges that compound one another: the fact that an episode’s newsy material can be rendered irrelevant shortly after publication, and the fact that different time zones are subject to different relationships with temporal perspective of the episode. I’ve spent the past month or so living on the West Coast, and I’ve generally come to accept that my daily news dispatches will be somewhat stale by the time I listen to them. It’s simply… a different experience compared to my listening experience on the East Coast.

That The Daily is considering a California edition — a geographic avenue, in a reflection of its newsletter strategy — is an intriguing one, but the trickiness lies in the multiplication of labor and the potential splitting of audiences. Take a few steps back, and one begins to see a harrowing conundrum: do you increase the quantity of the product output to better meet specific needs, or do you turn inward, leaning into the evergreen, and betting harder on the power of the host’s appeal? In a way, it’s a first-world problem for The Daily. Then again, it’s also a potential opportunity for a budding competitor.

Show notes.

• Sundance Now, the streaming platform that typically serves video, will apparently be adding original podcasts to its inventory mix. Its first production, a fiction project called Exeter, will debut in September, Deadline reports. Will Sundance Now subscribers actually know Exeter exists when it drops? We’ll find out. Or not.
• Bodies, a new podcast that comes from KCRW’s Independent Producer Project, went live last week. It’s by Allison Behringer, who you might remember as the creator of The Intern.
• “Forget photo shoots. Why GQ and Gucci are betting on culty podcasts.” (Wall Street Journal) The Devil Wears Bombas. Mack Weldon? Whatever. As a side note, I thought the point of these things was to look at things?
• My buddies at Vulture are doing a whole True Crime week, and one of their first podcast-centric pieces is this whopping 52-show-long list of crime-related podcasts. Some aren’t super crimey, but if it fits, it sits, I suppose. I’ve got a piece lined up for this that’ll drop sometime later in the week, so keep an eye out for that.

Early stage opportunities. Two things to flag:

• Stitcher is launching a fellowship designed to “help recruit diverse talent and promote inclusivity in podcasting.” The program will be for this fall, and only one person will be accepted for the pilot run of the fellowship. Pay is $25/hour.
• PRX’s Project Catapult is back for a third round, and is now accepting applications.

And now, for something completely different. One thing I’ve been thinking through lately is what, exactly, does it operationally mean to be an independent network, perhaps in the vein of Radiotopia or RelayFM? More to the point, how do its responsibilities evolve as the environment around it continues to industrialize? Particularly as we continue to see podcasting perhaps inevitably grow to reflect the structures of every other kind of media industry — or industry in general. (I mean, it happened to tech. And comic books. And punk rock, I guess?)

For some insight into how independent outfits function within an industrialized creative world, I reached out to Alia Almeida, a marketing manager who has held roles across the book publishing world, including a stint at the independent publisher Akashic Books. Almeida went long on the topic, and I thought there were a bunch of ideas in her response that can be directly applied to the podcast world.

So I’m running it in full:

The goal of all publishing is to create a book, make it known to society, with a digestible value/price point, and get people to read that same book. The role of independent book publishers, though, is to ensure what they’re putting out is of value to society. Indie books are iconoclasts or disruptors…These publishers are filling a space on the shelf that we didn’t even know was empty.

It’s funny because what happens is that the Big Five companies like to paint themselves as these better equipped groups who can take chances and acquire these (disruptive) kinds of books. But due to the bureaucratic processes endemic to those companies, what generally follows is a rejection with the explanation of “[x] book is too niche,” or alternatively, those books end up getting smaller marketing and publicity budgets. And so if more is done for a book, it’s because those marketing and publicity people truly believe in the book and love it. Believe me — that is the case in so many instances. To qualify, Big Five companies do get behind different books…but it happens less often since they’re such behemoths.

Since independent publishers are smaller, it’s easier for everyone in-house to pivot on a title. At an independent house, you can acquire a book for less money, and still get that book treated as the Next Big Thing. And it’s lovely to see a book engender so much in-house appeal that they get more resources across marketing, publicity, and sales.

In the grand scheme of book publishing, independent presses are defined by their speed. They can be nimble and timely in ways bigger publishers cannot. As a result, the work of independent book publishers is more oriented around cultural experiences. In order to be timely — in order to make an impact — you must be on top of the media and the culture to ensure a book’s relevance and ability to attract the right audience.

Like the Big Five, some independent publishers have backlists that blew up, allowing them to acquire more experimental manuscripts (such as Abrams and Press Here, Akashic Books and Go The F*ck To Sleep, or Grove Atlantic and A Confederacy of Dunces). Another trend we’re seeing with the bigger independent houses is that they are feeling big to acquire (see the Quarto Group acquiring Harvard Common Press) or they lose the head of their company and are forced to get acquired (see Perseus Books sold to Ingram and Hachette Book Group). Which is typical of an industry, right? When you are a large company the only way to grab new technology or fresh blood is through company acquisition…or to stay in the game, you must merge.

You would think as a result that these smaller — what feels like micro-presses because of all these mergers and acquisitions — houses have no chance against growth… but they’re still standing tall! And they’re still publishing the freshest of takes, and they’re doing it in their way.

The smaller presses have the most fleshed out missions. You know the book’s agenda based on the publisher’s agenda. Look at Akashic Books’ quick motto, “Reverse-gentrification of the literary world,” and then look at their backlist. You’ll think “wow, they’re really standing by what they’re saying.” Another excellent example is Melville House, which turns out thoughtful (and usually political) books in response to the American consciousness. See A Citizen’s Guide to Impeachment, which came out in September 2017 in response to the 2016 U.S presidential election. They even sent a copy to every member of the House and Senate. It was such a punk rock move…and honestly, indie publishing is punk. These are the staunch houses and presses that simply won’t go gently into the night.

Thanks, Alia.

So, I’m not going to break this down and spell out the whole “main takeaways” or “what podcasts can learn from indie publishers” thing. You can draw the big adaptable ideas yourselves. Look, I don’t like telling people what to think! I believe in you! You’re great.

Miscellaneous bites

• Someday, someone will write the definitive piece on what’s up with politicians dabbling in podcasts. “As the global climate overheats, politicians are warming up to eco-podcasts.” (New Statesman)
• Looks like Roman Mars is out pitching a 99% Invisible book! (Twitter)
• For the substantial portion of Hot Pod readers who think about crime-related stories and podcasts: “Down with the daily crime story.” (Popula)
• Tangentially related: The Los Angeles Times published the publishing world’s entry into what is being called the Summer of Scam, and it features a cameo from Current and a couple of public radio stations. Not the craziest story in the summer of scam — that honor still goes to The Cut’s piece on “Anna Delvey” — but definitely one of the more peculiar ones. (LA Times)

This signing of authors like Lewis to audiobook-first deals appears to be a ramping up of an alternate original programming strategy, one that sees Audible leaning more heavily into the preexisting nature of its core relationships with the book publishing industry and the book-buying audience. It might also be a consequence of a reshuffle at the executive decision-making level: In late 2017, the Hollywood Reporter broke the news that chief content officer Andrew Gaies and chief revenue officer Will Lopes had unexpectedly stepped down resigned from their posts. (Later reporting noted that the resignations happened in the midst of a harassment probe.) The ripple effects of that sudden shift in leadership is probably only hitting us now, and in this form. I’ll be tracking the extent to this new product line overlaps with or, indeed, ends up superseding what’s been happening with the Channels stuff.

All of this matters, of course, because all of it is related. I believe the way to think about this is to see all audio content providers — from the conventional podcasts of the open ecosystem to everything on Audible to whatever Anchor will become to Headspace plus whatever subscription-first audio platforms come over the horizon to the entire digital music ecosystem — as fighting from the same cochlear real estate. A few weekends ago, I fell behind on podcast listening due to falling into an utter binge-rabbit hole of the audiobook version of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, and I daresay I haven’t been able to catch up to my listen list since.

Part Two: Book-adjacent. So that was a story about a big book publishing entity investing in strictly digital products. Next, we have a story about a book publishing entity investing in a strategy that hits both audio and book publishing in tandem.

I’ve written previously about the experiments happening over at Macmillan, where its new Tor Labs imprint had developed a fiction podcast — called Steal the Stars, written by The Message’s Mac Rogers — that was published through the company’s podcast network and was also simultaneously novelized for traditional distribution. I thought it was a really smart idea, noting that it scratches at the idea that different platforms simply serve different consumer slices that may never really overlap. This style of multi-platform execution expands Steal the Stars across a wider surface area and further deepens its ability to financially benefit from a single core creative enterprise. That’s the working theory, anyway.

Anyway, Macmillan is coming back for more in this mode of production. The publisher is developing a six-part fiction podcast called The Girls based off an upcoming young adult novel: Courtney Summer’s Sadie — which is, interestingly enough, described to be a “Serial-inspired” young adult thriller, at least according to Bustle. I’m told that the podcast is being designed to stand alone, but that those who consume both the podcast and the book will be treated to different perspectives within the same story-line. Expanded universe, Rashomon-kind of stuff, I suppose.

I asked Kathy Doyle, vice president of podcasting at Macmillan, for some specific detail on how the publisher has viewed the performance of Steal the Stars and other experiments within the company that tie the fates of podcasts and books. She wrote back:

We’re definitely leveraging what we learned with Steal the Stars as we produce for The Girls. In fact, Steal the Stars celebrates its one-year anniversary on Aug. 1 and we’re gearing up for another round of marketing and promotion for the series, which continues to get interest from national media, advertisers, and listeners — that’s the beauty of an evergreen audio drama. The series, to date, has had nearly 1.4 million listens and we’re continuing back-list sales efforts for the Steal the Stars books.

Another strong example of our book-podcast synergy is with our Savvy Psychologist podcast, one of the biggest on our QDT network. We released a book, How to Be Yourself, about social anxiety in March authored by that host, Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, and it went into a second printing. When we review sales data, we see that 50% of sales are for the audio edition, when we might typically see a figure of about 10% for a trade book.

The Girls is set to launch on August 1, with the trailer dropping tomorrow. The novel, Sadie, is scheduled to drop on September 4.

For technical context: Steal the Stars was hosted on Megaphone, while Savvy Psychologist is on Libsyn.

Part Three: Podcast-first. Over at The Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman has a great overview up on the podcast-to-book adaptation trend that’s been picking up lately alongside the podcast-to-film-and-television trend. Aside from listing out several notable projects making the jump, there’s a bit in Gamerman’s piece that provides a nice expression of the risk-ratio factor that I believe is a big part of why we’ve been seeing podcasts heating up as a resource for adaptations:While some books have sparked bidding wars between publishers, the titles don’t tend to carry the high stakes of a Hollywood venture. “If you have 100,000 people listening to a podcast — which is a very modest-sized podcast — and half of them buy the book, the publisher would be thrilled,” said Anthony Mattero, a book agent at Creative Artists Agency (though he noted that publishers will also measure sales against the price of the manuscript).

But the article also offers a peek into a shadow looming over this trend. It’s highlighted in this quote:

With niche podcasts on everything from witches to monster trucks, more publishers are seeing opportunity. “The market for weirdness is untapped,” said Kate Napolitano, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The question: With more resources, attention — and, perhaps most importantly, stakes — flowing into the podcast ecosystem, will its capacity for weirdness be preserved?

The possible campaign on the horizon: Keep Podcasts Weird.

Related: “How ‘The Adventure Zone’ Went From ‘D&D’ Podcast to Graphic Novel.” (The Hollywood Reporter)

Beantown. Last Thursday, The Boston Globe announced that its famed investigative unit Spotlight is working a limited-run podcast series that will explore the complicated story of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots player who was convicted of murder in 2015 and later committed suicide in prison.

The podcast, which will play out in eight parts, is scheduled to drop in the fall. It comes out of a collaboration with Wondery, which is extending its strategy of partnering up with newspapers to break their investigative projects out into longform, multipart podcast series broadly situated within the true-crime genre. The prime model for this is, of course, Dirty John, Wondery’s successful collaboration with the Los Angeles Times that’s now also heading to television — in two separate forms, no less — and the company has since rolled out a collaboration with the South Florida newspaper Sun-Sentinel. That project is called Felonious Florida.

The Spotlight podcast is The Boston Globe’s second creative partnership on a Boston-oriented podcast. The other is Season Ticket, a daily sports podcast that the Globe developed in collaboration with WBUR. Given the increasingly strong cluster of podcast operations in the city, I’m expecting more Boston-flavored podcasts on the way.

Frontin’. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is holding its fourth-annual podcast upfronts September 6 in — where else? — New York City. This year’s venue will be at Convene in midtown Manhattan, marking a departure from the Time Inc. building venue of years past. Slate is slated to keynote, and presenters include Midroll, WNYC, iHeartMedia, and NPR, among others. I’ll probably be there.

Here’s the website for details, and here’s my writeup on the upfront back when I attended in 2016, and here’s my column on the notion of upfronts in podcasting in general. Let’s see what changes and what stays the same.

Smart Audio Report snippets. The latest edition of NPR and Edison Research’s smart speaker report drops tomorrow and, as always, they’re staging a webinar to go through the findings of this year’s survey study.

NPM was kind enough to share some early numbers, if you’re interested in that kind of thing:

• “For first adopters, the smart speaker is now the number one way they listen to audio, and 38% of newer, early mainstream users say they purchased the device hoping to reduce screen time.”
• “While first adopters demonstrate more advanced smart speaker use — controlling home security and other household devices — early mainstream users are quickly relying on the technology for a wider range of daily activities — ordering food, making calls, getting traffic reports, researching products and shopping.”
• “News is one of the most in-demand genres of content among all smart speaker owners, and 3-in-5 who plan to buy another smart speaker want to buy it in order to listen to news in more rooms of their home.”

Here’s the one I find particularly notable: “Among all smart speaker owners, the most preferred formats for audio advertisements are skills/features created by a brand, host-read ads on podcasts, product endorsements and sponsor or underwriter announcements during public radio.” Furthermore: “81% of all smart speaker owners like/would be open to skills from brands.”

On a related note: This Medium post by GENInnovate’s Freia Nasher has a lot of really good observations, and some nifty ideas: “Hi Alexa, is the monetisation conversation moot?“

Start your engines. Heads up, all you producers in the crowd: The sixth edition of KCRW’s Radio Race is now open for registration. The 24-hour production challenge will take place from 10 a.m. Pacific August 25 through 10 a.m. Pacific August 26. Shouts to last year’s winner, River Rats from Miami (Wilson Sayre and Chris Barr).

And while we’re on the subject of KCRW: The Organist podcast is now back with its fifth season. Rootin’ for you, Mr. Leland.

S-Town lawsuit. The estate of John B. McLemore, the subject of S-Town, is suing the creators of the Peabody-award winning podcast, arguing that they “exploited details of his private life for financial gain,” the Associated Press reports.

The suit was filed in Bibb County, Alabama by the executor of McLemore’s estate, Craig Cargile. It names Serial Productions, This American Life, Chicago Public Media, and host/producer Brian Reed as defendants, among others. Cargile’s attorney told Al.com that the suit “stems from the state’s Right of Publicity Act, which prevents use of voice, name or other characteristics of a person without their permission.”

In an email response to the AP, S-Town executive producer Julie Snyder noted that she could not comment on the suit but says it lacked “merit.”

You can read the suit over here.

Anti. And now for something completely different.

So, there’s this new podcast app-doohickey that came out last week that really caught my eye. It’s called Wilson FM — a name I will forever associate with a volleyball (I’M SORRY, WILSON) — and the thing is billing itself as a “podcast magazine,” which on most days would be a piece of nomenclature that I’d find vaguely annoying. Except that a podcast magazine is exactly what Wilson FM is, and it’s also one of the more pleasurable player ideas I’ve seen in a long while.

The core mechanic isn’t anything particularly revolutionary, other than the fact that it’s remarkably simple. Every week, the app-magazine-thing serves you a new curated playlist of podcast episodes built around a different theme (most of the time). There’s one about art, there’s another about the Supreme Court, and then there’s a collection that’s really just threading together Lea Thau’s Love Hurts series. In other words, it’s a fancy podcast playlist provider, but putting it that way is a little like saying a magazine is a fancy provider of words. I mean, it is, but also, it isn’t, because something has to be said about how a thing feels in the use of it, and man, Wilson FM feels so…different. And as a result, interesting.

Granted, this just might be a situation where I’m responding extra-positively to a drop of water after weeks of drinking nothing but straight-up seltzer. Which is to say: Every podcast app that I’ve used more or less looks and feels the same despite new feature-concepts — say, a social layer — or an expanded suite of bells and whistles. Which as a matter of collective experience generally brings me to place where it’s a little like waking up every morning and relentlessly commuting in a city you once found interesting: After a certain point, you just stop seeing the world around you in new and renewably invigorating ways.

My positivity might also have something to do with how consumer software technology aesthetics seem to be largely situated within a same, sterile place. My buddy Kyle Chayka, a freelance writer who’s currently working on a book about minimalism, dubbed this aesthetic “AirSpace” in an essay for The Verge back in 2016, and you probably already know what he’s talking about: pastels, curved edges, any sharp sense of personality sandpapered away.

In contrast, Wilson FM is weird. Its visual sensibility evokes the new media section of an art school exhibit (or a moderately-sized modern art museum). Its app icon is a funny little scribble. Its squint-to-see-it font has a counterintuitive charm. All these quirks of expression are tied to the fact that the app is primarily the work of one person: Allan Yu, a New York-based designer who’s done stints at Google X, the search giant’s super secret R&D lab, and Svpply, a now-defunct social shopping site that was acquired by eBay in 2012.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for print design and aesthetics that have a point of view or opinion,” Yu tells me over email. “But I’ve been working in tech for quite some time and am just tired of this A/B-tested, data-proven, metric-driven design.” He continues:

I didn’t want to do that when it came to building something that was my own and close to my heart so the only ethos was Anti. The inspiration is Anti-tech, Anti-convention, Anti-UI/UX Design. I looked at a lot of print stuff that mainly contributed to the organization and focus of these Issue covers. Even the proportion of the cover is print-based and I use two typefaces from one of my favorite type foundry, Milieu Grotesque. I also wanted to elevate podcast aesthetics. I don’t understand why a content form with such richness sonically is watered down visually. In some ways, people do judge books by their covers and I wanted to make the covers better, so you’ll give that episode/podcast a chance.

The playlists on Wilson FM are generally built ad hoc, which Yu believes is the best way to do it. He tries to build them with his friends, and he writes the copy in a way that he feels is natural to the way he speaks. Personal touch, individual voice, all that kind of stuff.

In the physical world, Yu is a design consultant/working mercenary, doing gigs to keep things spinning as he builds out Wilson FM. He tells me that he intends to build Wilson FM out into a business. “We want to do it right and our way, which in context of tech businesses today, it means we want to grow it slow,” he told me. “We’re focusing more in the magazine model as we want to mainly be a voice for podcasts within the podcast community.” In this broader pursuit, he has a business partner, Cameron Koczon, who runs an engineering and design studio in Brooklyn.

That Yu hopes to build Wilson FM into a business — that this wasn’t just a side project or exercise — surprised me a little bit. A big part of me reflexively thinks something this specific and idiosyncratic has a hard ceiling that hovers low (*looks at Hot Pod, shudders*), regardless of what business model gets integrated into the app. But then again, a bigger part of me is in this for the specific and idiosyncratic, and someone’s going to figure out how to make that work and grow, then, hell, this is probably just about how you’d start: simply by being genuinely interesting.

Miscellaneous bites:

• Fans of the popular Australian true-crime podcast Phoebe’s Fall, take note: The team has a new project out now called Wrong Skin. (Apple Podcasts)
• On a related note: “All serious criminal cases deserve podcast-style scrutiny.” (Baltimore Sun op-ed)
• The dynamics and detail sketches in this piece can almost map directly onto podcasting: “The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one.” (The Verge)
• Apropos of nothing: Sounds like we’re due for a heavy fall season.

The bet: If you’re still reading a print newspaper in the 2010s, you’ve probably been doing it your entire adult life, and it’s a habit you don’t want to break. So rather than chase marginal readers, as papers did in the 1990s and early 2000s — “Let’s start a new weekly feature just for these young Gen X types!” — publishers pivoted to soaking their core readers for all their worth. Fewer subscribers but at a higher price meant roughly stable revenue.

But man oh man are newspapers testing that principle! Our hometown Boston Globe, an unusually expensive paper for a long time, is going through the roof, according to Don Seiffert in the Boston Business Journal:

The priciest regional daily newspaper in the U.S. is about to get pricier, with as much as an 80 percent increase possible for some home delivery subscribers…

A customer service representative at the Boston Globe’s subscription phone center told a Business Journal reporter Tuesday that the company is planning to increase its seven-day-a-week home delivery cost, after all discounts have expired, to $25.90 per week for subscribers in the Boston metro area.

That would add up to $1,347 a year to get a Globe on your doorstep every morning. (Or not get one, depending on delivery exigencies.) That would make the Globe the most expensive paper in the country, by some margin. The New York Times took some heat a year ago for announcing it would raise seven-day delivery in some parts of the country to $1,066 a year.

7-day home delivery of @nytimes in Ohio will now cost over $1,000 a year https://t.co/82kF3oPKeu pic.twitter.com/8pVF5i7BGN

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 1, 2016

This could well end up revenue-positive for the Globe. After all, it already has a super-expensive digital subscription (which tops out at $360 a year, again higher than the Times), it’s got an unusually attractive market, and it’s still a better paper than most of its competitor metros.

Plus, pushing people from print to digital doesn’t carry as absurd a revenue burden as it used to — the margins are certainly better on a digital sub than on trucking dead trees to people’s homes. And managing a large-scale shift in that direction — and reaping the huge production savings that would come with it — is in many ways the primary strategic task of American newspapers going forward.

But as more and more older readers grow proficient with their tablets and smartphones, it might also be wise not to give your remaining subscribers too many “Wait, I’m paying what to take the paper?” moments. And an 80 percent jump in cost certainly seems like something people will notice.

The $3 million, three-month-long pilot brings in 13 metropolitan newsrooms: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Miami Herald, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Omaha World-Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Tennessean, and Newsday.

These publishers will gather in person once a month, complete weekly trainings on digital subscription marketing, and design their own project for putting the trainings in action (supported by grant funding). But additional newsrooms across the country will also get access to some of the strategies through the Lenfest Institute, the Local Media Consortium (1,600 individual publications), Local Media Association (3,000 newspapers, TV stations, digital news sites, and radio stations), and the News Media Alliance (2,000 news organizations).

“The Accelerator has been designed by publishers for publishers,” Jim Friedlich, the Lenfest Institute’s executive director, said.

Of note: The News Media Alliance also just formed a political action committee to push U.S. lawmakers to focus on the “news media business and newsgathering interests” on behalf of the trade group’s members. Those interests indubitably include vying for audience and advertising dollars against Facebook and Google — as Facebook encourages publishers toward subscriptions in the accelerator.

“We’re saying, ‘Thank you, but we’re not there yet,” said NMA president and CEO David Chavern, in response to Facebook’s efforts.

Media heads have called for regulators to take a closer look at Facebook and other platforms. “In a Google and Facebook world, monetization of digital and mobile continues to be more difficult than we would have expected or liked,” CNN’s Jeff Zucker said yesterday. “I think we need help from the advertising world and from the technology world to find new ways to monetize digital content, otherwise good journalism will go away.”

Axios’ Sara Fischer pointed out that these “increased calls for regulation to curb the dominance of Google and Facebook make it easier for NMA to argue for repealing existing media competition laws that prevent news organizations from working together to negotiate better deals with major internet platforms.”

Mark Zuckerberg posited in January that if Facebook focuses on “concrete local issues, then we’d all make more progress together.” With the accelerator, Facebook is investing in that claim. The test for subscriptions in the Instant Articles included some local news organizations, such as The Boston Globe, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, and then-Tronc properties the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, as well as the (still-Tronc) Baltimore Sun.

Meanwhile, if you want to read up on recent subscriber behavior, a report was released Tuesday from the Media Insight Project from the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Drawing on more than 4,000 new subscribers to 90 local newspapers (though 65 percent of respondents were over age 65), the report found that 60 percent of respondents cited wanting access to local news as a factor in signing up. Twenty-five percent of respondents followed the news organization on social media before subscribing. Another key finding:

Print and digital subscribers are different. Digital subscribers in this study tend to be younger, male, and more educated than print readers. Digital readers are more often attracted by good coverage of a particular topic than are print readers (38 percent vs. 25 percent), and by noticing especially useful or interesting content (47 percent vs. 36 percent). Half of digital subscribers are triggered to subscribe by hitting a paywall meter, and they are more likely than print readers to be motivated by a desire to support local journalism (38 percent vs. 29 percent).

Since 2014, though, The Boston Globe’s editorial-page editor, Ellen Clegg, has been overseeing a gradual metamorphosis. Clegg, a veteran Globe journalist who replaced Peter Canellos after he left for Politico, has presided over a vibrant print redesign, the expansion of digital content, an innovative interactive feature on gun violence, and even a parody front page of what a Donald Trump presidency would look like. In an era when we all feel overwhelmed by a flood of information, Clegg is showing how editorial pages can cut through the noise and force readers to take notice.

For the past two years, the Globe’s opinion pages have published new year’s resolutions in the first Sunday edition of January. This year’s, headlined “We Resolve: What Readers Can Expect from the Globe’s Editorial Pages in 2018,” outlines an eclectic agenda, from keeping a close eye on Google and Facebook, to pushing for transportation improvements, to addressing racism “in all its forms.”

I asked Clegg where the idea for editorial-page new year’s resolutions came from and what she hopes it will accomplish. Our lightly edited email exchange follows.

Duopoly: Google and Facebook dominate the field of digital advertising — which is now the largest category of ad spending, surpassing TV in North America and the U.K. Google and Facebook have been taking almost 90 percent of all the digital ad growth in the market in the U.S. The remaining 10 percent or so is supposed to help support news media, as well as all other businesses dependent on advertising.

The immense damage done to news media by the duopoly is only collateral damage, but it’s immense damage nonetheless. It doesn’t matter if you are smartly diabolical in your intent, or a useful idiot, or even out to make a better world.

Consumer revenue: Inflated by the Trump bump, consumer (read: reader) revenue came out of the shadows in 2017.

Readers now supply The New York Times Times with 62 cents of every dollar it earns. Print advertising has become only the fourth-largest category of Times revenue. Subscription surges have been seen everywhere from the Times and Washington Post to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Minnpost, and the big regional local-news-supplying public radio stations.

As the meltdown in digital news media (see below) has surfaced, reader revenue and reader-related revenue (from events, e-commerce, and more) becomes utterly necessary. News organizations like CNN, Business Insider, and The Athletic reflect that reality in their decisions to ask readers for direct payment.

Roll-up: This was the year that long-time family newspaper companies said “uncle.” Gatehouse bought the Morris and Calkins companies, among other smaller companies, bringing its total of dailies to more than 140 — or more than a tenth of the remaining daily newspaper industry. In fact, Gatehouse, Gannett, and Digital First Media now own a quarter of those 1,350 or so dailies. In magazines, the Big Four is shrinking to the Big Three as Meredith swallows the larger Time Inc.

With digital disruption a primary force, the quest for scale reigns in almost all media enterprise. Fewer companies are deciding what we will — or won’t — get. And it’s worth noting that even the acquirers — Gatehouse and Meredith, for instance — are running negative in the year-over-year revenues in their core print businesses. Roll-up is more an exercise in profit-squeezing and cost-cutting than it is a strategy to build bigger, better products for customers.

Second paper: Just this week, Gatehouse scooped up the remains of the bankrupt Boston Herald for a scant $5 million. That once-independent voice will form part of Gatehouse’s megacluster business strategy and likely be reduced as a second daily Boston voice.

In the last year, a civic group of investors saved, for now, The Chicago Sun-Times as an independent voice. In the Twin Cities, we have to wonder how long owner Digital First Media will keep the Saint Paul Pioneer Press (one of my alma maters) alive; it’s already seen its staff sliced by more three-quarters to 50.

With formerly monopoly dailies seeking survival, it’s no surprise that “second papers” are becoming a vestige of another time. But it’s worth marking.

Viscera: This headline made my insides hurt: “LA Weekly staff ‘eviscerated’ by layoffs, says editor.”

2017 was a year of reckoning for some of the alternative weeklies. The Village Voice stopped print. The Houston Press abruptly closed. And, yes, L.A. Weekly’s staff was eviscerated, amid the fast pruning of much secondary print media in greater L.A.

Daily newspaper layoffs and buyouts have become almost too numerous and routine to report on. (Besides, how many people are actually following the demise of the local press?)

I regularly get emails from distraught staffers. Last week brought one saying another 10 journalists had been laid off at The Denver Post, bringing the staff to 90 at the single remaining daily in the country’s 19th-largest metro area. ASNE no longer conducts an annual census of jobs lost, but I’d guess there are no more than 24,000 daily journalists working their beats at print dailies — a cut of 33,000 since 1990, when the country had 80 million fewer people (and we thought we had resolved forever the Russian threat, as the Berlin and other Cold War walls crumbled).

It’s hard to say who’s essential to the newspaper enterprises these days. Alden Global Capital (well-described in “How many Palm Beach mansions does a Wall Street tycoon need?”) has made cutting an art form. It has laid off numerous editors and publishers, as well as hundreds of reporters, but this year, it outdid itself: As CEO Steve Rossi retired, it declined to fill his position, opting for a (presumably lower-priced) COO “reporting to the board.”

Cross-ownership: Nothing’s surprising about the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of decades-long regulations except its alacrity. Deregulation advocates — led by both newspaper industry and TV industry trade groups — have advocated for the dropping of rules against media ownership concentration. Even they, though, have been surprised by FCC chair Ajit Pai’s supposed casting-off of media ownership shackles — with net neutrality overthrow just one more major “side” issue for publishers.

The media cross-ownership rules — which have prevented dailies from owning major local TV stations, and vice versa — pose the biggest question. In a world of already advanced roll-up on the TV side as well as in newspapers, who will actually merge local properties, and how quickly? We see right-leaning interests lining up, but precious few individuals or groups that appear to have the wider public, and democratic, interest in mind and heart.

2018 is the year to watch as strategists assess “value” and “combination” anew. The “new convergence” — a smart combination of local text and video, TV and print — is certainly possible, but unproven. As likely: a disharmonic convergence against the public interest.

CasualFans: That’s a Tony Haile construct, one known among the news industry’s growing roster of audience development executives. In September, I asked, “Is that all there is to reader payment?” Would more than two or three percent of digital audiences ever pay for news content?

Haile, the founder of industry standard Chartbeat and now entrepreneur behind Scroll, aims at the next 10 percent, a group he identifies as “casualfans.” “It’s taken from cable TV bundling language where Superfans and Casualfans are pretty common usage,” he said.

As advertising craters, we’ll be looking to Scroll, LaterPay, and Jim McKelvey’s Invisibly to see if there’s a new cohort of people who will pay for news.

I’ve long liked Voice of San Diego’s construct. The intent of its membership program is to moving The Informed (all its readers) to The Involved (those who receive email newsletters, comment on the site, or attend events) to The Invested (those who buy memberships).

Listen: Kicking off with The New York Times’ The Daily, it was a big year for the newsy podcast. We’ll see what the regionals, including Gannett and McClatchy, produce from their own fledgling investments in audio.

Useful idiots: We weren’t so sophisticated in years past in cataloging our types of idiots. Yet this term — used by the Russians well back into Soviet times — is a phenomenon unexpectedly reborn in 2017. We don’t yet know how many of these useful idiots —
people who blunder into furthering foreign aims through their own stupidity, avarice, or gullibility — Robert Mueller’s team will identify, beyond the Flynns, Manaforts and Papadopouloses.

As Facebook, Google, and Twitter executives got hauled before Congress, they had to acknowledge their own complicity with the Russians, however clumsy and unintentional. Said Sheryl Sandberg: “It’s not just that we apologize. We’re angry, we’re upset. But what we really owe the American people is determination” to do a better job of preventing foreign meddling.

While these executives have been off doing other things — digital world domination for the most part — nefarious evildoers (to borrow a term from another era) eagerly exploited the systems they had built.

Fake: Now an epithet that Trump tosses at news he doesn’t like, “fake” is related to the odious “alternative facts” (though that now seems so early 2017). We can add alt, or alternative, to the list of spoiled language: Once signifying pleasant choice or another view, it’s become a battleground word, its usage more ascendant among neo-Nazis than the old “alternative press.”

Our “fake!” affliction doesn’t just hurt Americans. As the Times recently pointed out, “Meet the strongmen who’ve started blaming ‘fake news’ Too.” Such linguistic nonsense has real-world impact, not just on our discourse but on lives of those opposing authoritarianism around the world. In Myanmar, the government called its genocide against the Rohingya “fake news.”

Trust: The antidote, right? We can take some solace in the assertive, aggressive reporting led by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. While many trust movements, commercial and nonprofit, have taken flight, it is the big, old brands whose names themselves stand for trustworthiness among tens of millions of readers.

It seems like an eon ago that Times executive editor Dean Baquet talked to me about using the word “lie” in print, but it was only October 2016. As USA Today pointed out in its statement of horror: “Trump apparently is going for some sort of record for lying while in office. As of mid-November, he had made 1,628 misleading or false statements in 298 days in office. That’s 5.5 false claims per day, according to a count kept by The Washington Post’s fact-checkers.”

Another word: “Mistake.” As Carl Bernstein observed last week on CNN’s Reliable Sources, “Journalists make mistakes.” But serial mistakes by CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and CBS, well-cataloged by The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, provide fuel to the arsonists who would just as soon set fire to the news media as we know it.

Meltdown: Talking Points Memo publisher and editor Josh Marshall made his point in mid-November: “There’s a digital media crash. But no one will say it.” He called attention to the suffering businesses of digital ad–dependent “startup” news media. In the age of duopoly, there simply aren’t enough digital ad dollars to support what’s been built.

Advertisers are shifting their strategies as well. Take this week’s news about giant Unilever: It’s cutting its digital ad spend by about 30 percent as it better figures out its return ad investment. Reliance on digital advertising alone won’t work.

Arc: Throughout this turbulent year, The Washington Post has moved forward with the licensing of its next-generation content management system/digital platform. The Boston Globe and Tronc’s chain of properties will deploy Arc in 2018. We’ll see how much difference it can make in helping these publishers more effectively grasp new digital opportunity. With no real competitors, it could become an industry standard.

Truth. At year’s end, we may not realize quite how much we’ve been battered by nonstop news cycles, stalked by push notifications. It can be hard to stop and absorb a particularly insightful piece of writing or reporting before something else replaces it in our consciousness.

Still, Slate’s legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick’s piece from earlier this month has stuck with me. Asking “Is it too late for Robert Mueller to save us?” she wrote:

In weeks like this one, when it seems the Mueller investigation is quite literally the only authority and sanity we can look to, it’s hard to tell whether the net losses outweigh the wins, or whether the massive national game of deconstruction and deflection and deception is even the littlest bit disrupted by news that the special counsel is closing in on a legal conclusion. Maybe it’s really too late in the slide toward authoritarianism for any major legal outcome to change the game. We crave nonpartisan and serious authority figures like Mueller because we believe they can guide us through. But having seen this White House shatter norms around the free press, civility, international diplomacy, and truth-telling, it almost defies belief that the line in the sand, the stopping point, is Mueller…

At this moment when all options remain open, we should accept the possibility that Mueller may come to represent the highest and most binding expression of law and order in America. We also must acknowledge the reality that the highest and most binding expression of law and order in America might not matter enough, to enough people, to bring the Trump train to a stop.

Lithwick correctly identifies the weakness of so many checks and balances we thought were in place. Yet she underplays the role of the national news media. Our top journalists, with brave and smart leadership, have managed to stay focused on the stories of the year, and their work still drives much of the national conversation.

We don’t know which way these teeter-totters between the rule of law and those who would trample over it will go. Which way will the American seesaw move? How strong, and smart, will its news media be in applying fair and accurate pressure?

Photo of vertical stack of newspapers by J E Smith used under a Creative Commons license.

For the Times, the move is an effort to capitalize on what’s been a revitalizing moment for journalism. The “Trump bump” surge in subscribers that news organizations saw after last year’s election has proven to be more than a temporary phenomenon, both broadly and at the Times itself: The Times saw its digital subscriber count surge to nearly 2.5 million in the third quarter of 2017, a 59 percent increase over the previous year. Roughly 154,000 of those digital-only subscribers came last quarter alone. By tightening its paywall further, the Times is tweaking the knobs to convince more subscribers to pay up.

The Times joins many other large news organizations that have also made major tweaks to their paid models this year. In February, The Wall Street Journal stopped offering Google visitors free access to paywalled stories, ending a years-long capitulation to Google’s “first-click free” policy (Google ended that policy in October). The Washington Post has experimented with throwing new hurdles at non-subscribers, too, such as requiring them to submit their email addresses, and will soon stop free access for university-based readers. The Boston Globe cut its free articles from five every 45 days to just two..

The new paywall restrictions come as the digital advertising environment continues to darken for most companies not named Google and Facebook, which have snatched up most of the growth in digital ad spending. Seeing the writing on the wall, news organizations are increasingly looking to their readers to help make up for the losses on the ad side. (Wired, for example, said this week that it will introduce a metered paywall next year.)

Pretty remarkable https://t.co/aQSgZ866Qf pic.twitter.com/CROjnEqcSu

— David Uberti (@DavidUberti) December 1, 2017

This may help explain why news organizations, including the Times, aren’t letting the potential traffic declines from tighter paywalls dissuade them from making it harder for readers to access their content for free: Any ad revenue declines that result from fewer pageviews are likely to pale in comparison to the revenue gains from new subscribers. It’s hard to argue that it’s not an experiment worth conducting.

Whatever WBUR finds out, they can definitely add another feather to their cap of respectable partnerships, which the station’s podcasting operations, led by the formidable Jessica Alpert, appears to be turning into a core program strategy. Season Ticket comes out of a collaboration with The Boston Globe — it’s hosted by Chris Gasper, a sports columnist for the paper — and a quick overview of WBUR’s listings on the Apple podcast directory show that Season Ticket is one of three such projects now out in the open. The other two are the aforementioned Modern Love, with The New York Times, and the upcoming Edge of Fame, with The Washington Post. More, I’m told, are on the way.

With this partnership-driven orientation, WBUR finds itself in the position where it could give Panoply — whose content strategy was once premised on such collaborations with media companies — a run for its money. But the challenge, as always, will be whether the station is able to draw talent to Boston as it grows its podcast team commensurate with demand…and, more importantly, whether it can retain them. It’s probably worth recalling, at this point, that Modern Love was originated by Lisa Tobin, who left WBUR last summer to be the executive producer of audio at The New York Times. Talent acquisition and retention is a problem for all in the industry, but one imagines it’s doubly so for any non-New York, non-Los Angeles shop at this point in time — even if Boston is a sub-four-hour train ride north from the self-declared Podcast Capital of the World. That’s a toughie.

Non sequitur, but this line of inquiry also pleasantly evokes the whole Amazon HQ2 dance, of which Boston is a participant. Man, what a weird thing to watch.

Cults! So, I’m keeping an eye on Heaven’s Gate, the 10-part documentary about the cult infamous for perpetrating the largest mass suicide ever to take place in the United States back in the nineties. The podcast, which launched last week, seems pretty spicy, and it happens to double as the sophomore effort for the creative team behind Missing Richard Simmons, the duo of Pineapple Street and Midroll. It’s worth pointing out, as I did with my Vulture writeup, that Midroll is more creatively involved this time around, with the company originating the show’s concept. (That wasn’t the case with Simmons. Dan Taberski, via First Look Media, had that honor. Taberski is listed in the Heaven’s Gate credits, though.)

But of course, the focus here is on Pineapple Street, who leads production. (Ann Heppermann, the cofounder of the Sarah Awards who is now on the company’s payroll, helms the rig.) The primary question here is whether Pineapple can go two-for-two with a hit feature. Which, I imagine, will help us attend to some other interesting questions: Was Missing Richard Simmons a fluke? Can Pineapple reliably stretch beyond its go-to move of extracting value from the star power of larger brands and celebrities, which appears to be its primary strategic angle? Aside from Missing Richard Simmons, the company’s portfolio is made up of shows built around The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, Lena Dunham, Janet Mock, Aminatou Sow, Matt Bellassai, Preet Bharara, and, obviously, Hillary Clinton. (Though, I suppose, you could argue that Missing Richard Simmons’ appeal was principally built on the draw of the titular celebrity, which cast a Godot-like shadow over the proceedings. In which case, there’s an argument to be made about Pineapple’s principal occupation being the interlocution of celebrity. It’s not a particularly strong argument, but it’s workable.)

Aaaanyway. You want to talk benchmarks? Let’s talk benchmarks. Figuring out a true number to beat is a little tough. Looking back at my notes, the clearest baseline for Missing Richard Simmons given was: “On March 28, a little over a month after the show first debuted, First Look Media told me that the podcast had been downloaded on average more than 1 million times a week since its release.” I guess that’ll have to serve our touchpoint for the first month.

The New York Times’ The Daily hits a milestone, outlines its future. Last week, the news industry analyst Ken Doctor pumped out two pieces on The Daily, one for Nieman Lab and one for TheStreet, and they give us a good snapshot of where the Times’ audio team currently sits and where it wants to go.

To begin with, Doctor reports that the morning news podcast has officially surpassed the 100 million download mark. As of the article’s pub date, October 17, The Daily had delivered 186 editions, which means the show has a 530,000~ download per episode average. Add to that two other key data points from Doctor’s piece in The Street — that The Daily was estimated to have hit 3.8 million unique visitors in August, and that the company is able to command ad rates comparable to pivot-inspiring levels of digital video — and you have an editorial product that stretches widely and draws deep dividends, both right now and in the days to come.

Doctor’s reporting also gives us a sense of NYT Audio’s immediate next steps: further expanding its headcount (now 16 full-time employees strong, seven of which hold production duties on The Daily according to Barbaro’s recent Longform interview), slapping on a digital engineering development arm to the team (!), stretching out The Daily to six editions per week, and rolling out more “extensions” of the program (presumably in the vein of The New Washington). He also notes two more things that I think are especially worth tracking: firstly, that the team is working on a “big narrative project” (isn’t everybody, though?), and secondly, that “within the next several weeks, Times readers will be able to access The Daily directly from their apps and browsers without using a separate podcast app.” This is incredibly significant, in that it illustrates a team meaningfully working to bypass the cumber of dedicated podcast apps to deliver its product to consumers. And it just so happens that, in doing so, the company will be able to keep those audiences within the universe of its primary mobile app, which puts them in a better position to spread the value generated by the podcast around the other aspects of the business. Further, it doesn’t take much to imagine the various audience and listening behavior analytics tools that will be layered on that built-in player, which will better aid the Times in carrying out the primary business goals of the podcast: to convert new subscribers, to retain existing subscribers, and to gather even more intelligence that will help them to do both those things.

I’m noodling on two more thoughts:

• This quote provided by Sam Dolnick, the paper’s assistant editor and one of the long-running champions for the audio division, stands out to me: “This is the birth of a franchise for us that can live on and on in many different mediums for a long time.” A bold statement, though it does support any such suspicion that, when it comes to organizing NYT Audio, you have The Daily on one side, and everything that’s not The Daily on the other. Recall that the audio team still ships other non-Daily-related podcasts: Still Processing (with Pineapple Street), Modern Love (with WBUR), Popcast, and The Book Review — none of which were mentioned in either piece by Doctor. Which raises the question: What are the futures of these shows? And what is the future of non-Daily podcast programming? Will that aforementioned “big narrative project” be rolled out under The Daily banner, or not? Question marks!
• I was chatting with a public-radio station operative at ONA a few weeks ago, who shared a sentiment that I’ve taken the liberty to brand on the back of my skull. To liberally paraphrase: Getting your first hit is one thing, what happens after is a whole other bag of bananas.

Three notes on measurement.

• I have a mea culpa for you. Contrary to what I noted in last week’s issue, the Apple in-episode analytics was never pegged to the iOS 11 release, with the upgrade always being slated for a vague “later in the year” target date. That’s a note-taking fumble on my part, and I regret the error. The deployment timeline makes sense, even if I airballed: For there to be workable and reliable in-episode listening analytics, iOS 11 adoption needs to achieve critical mass, and that often takes some time following iOS rollouts. Again, my bad.
• Keep a lookout: I’ve been getting sporadic reports from some publishers and independents that are experiencing rocky metrics readjustments well before this anticipated Apple change. The destabilizing shifts are thought to be tied to two other measurement changes, specifically: (1) Libsyn’s stats overhaul to become more compliant to IAB reporting standards, which took place in mid-September, and (2) Stitcher’s implementation of several changes — including a stats adjustment to fit IAB compliance, along with the presentation of “Front Page Impressions” as a separate metric — that kicked in earlier this month. For at least some publishers, the combination of the two have resulted in serious drops in performance data, though I have also heard of some upward revisions. I wasn’t able to pin down a specific change range that I’d be comfortable printing just yet, though. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.
• I suspect we’re in the midst of a situation in which various podcast platforms are moving to adopt the IAB standard, but are doing so at different rates. While this will ultimately lead to a more cohesive and accountable ecosystem in the long run, the uneven adoptions have immediately cultivated some serious dysfunctions and pitfalls for individual publishers — particularly those that are interested in switching vendors. A publisher recently opined to me about the drastic performance data readjustments it experienced after migrating from Audioboom to Megaphone earlier this year, which fundamentally threw off its revenue projections. That’s bad enough, but the publisher felt that its ordeal was further exacerbated by a lack of vendor transparency. “I have a bunch of theories as to what happened, but the fact that podcast platforms are so cagey about their measurement standards drives me insane, and it impacts the work we do,” that publisher told me. Audioboom tells me that the platform adheres to the first version of IAB standards that was published last year — which is distinct from the newer edition that was circulated last month for public comment — but also notes that podcasts that move away from Audioboom’s platform will no longer have access to additional listenership facilitated through the company’s app. Nevertheless, the larger issue remains: For some, it’s still hard to tell what’s what, and that’s a big problem.

I imagine it would be prudent to anticipate more turbulence to come.

Career Spotlight. I love running this feature, mostly because it’s often a miracle that even a fraction of anything ever happens the way you hope it would. This week, I traded emails with Robin Amer, a Chicago-based journalist, editor, and audio documentarian who is in the midst of leading the development of a long-form investigative podcast, The City, that she sold to the USA Today Network over the summer. Amer’s on the up-and-up, and it’s great to catch her at this point in time.

Bites:

• Radiotopia has kicked off its annual fundraiser. The campaign runs from October 23 to November 10, and its explicit goal is to increase its donor base to 20,000. (Campaign page)
• ESPN has cancelled Barstool Van Talk, which the company had adapted for its ESPN2 channel from Barstool’s Pardon My Take podcast. Apparently, they got what they thought they were getting, but realized it wasn’t something they actually wanted, I guess? (Variety)
• The Dinner Party Download has parted ways with American Public Media. The show was first launched as a podcast 10 years ago, and spent the last six being syndicated as a public radio weekend show. It will run its last broadcast on December 1. A sad development, but not to worry: details about the podcast future of hosts Brendan Francis Newnam and Rico Gagliano are “forthcoming.” Phew. (Announcement)
• With a $100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, the Charlotte, N.C. public radio station WFAE has “announced a plan to better connect with its audiences and develop fresh content using NPR One.” The station has hired Joni Deutsch, previously at West Virginia Public Broadcasting, as the on-demand producer to implement these efforts. It’s possible this might end up being the model of how most public radio stations will interface with the NPR One platform being positioned as “the (potential) future of public radio,” but who knows with these things really. (Press release)
• Speaking of NPR One, the platform makes an appearance in this stellar article about news personalization by Adrienne LaFrance. (The Atlantic)
• The CBC’s true crime podcast, Someone Knows Something, returns for a third season on November 7. It has reportedly garnered 32 million downloads across its first two seasons, which is made up of 27 dispatches. (Press release) As an aside, a cry for help.

can someone make something that isn’t a true crime podcast at some point please

i already hate people

— “Nick” (@nwquah) October 23, 2017

• The podcast adaptation of the L.A Times’ Dirty John helped drive 21,000 additional signups to the paper’s Essential California newsletter. (Digiday)
• LeVar Burton is now legally cleared to use his catchphrase from Reading Rainbow for his podcast with Midroll. You don’t have to take my word for it — you can find the background for this weird but entertaining story here.

These changes, while jarring to many readers, are part of the Globe’s ongoing strategy to “strike the right balance between giving users the opportunity to sample content and getting them to subscribe,” said Peter Doucette, chief consumer revenue officer at Boston Globe Media. “We’ve been constantly experimenting with finding that balance, because fundamentally we believe the Globe’s journalism is worth paying for.” A lot of people agree: The Globe’s digital subscriber count currently sits at roughly 84,000, up from around 65,000 a year ago. That’s the most of any local newspaper in the country.

Doucette said the Globe is happy with the early results of its latest tweaks, and has “no specific plans to restrict the paywall further.” But further changes seem inevitable considering the many changes BostonGlobe.com has gone through over the years in an effort to get more people to pay. The site debuted with a hard paywall in 2011, targeting its most committed, regular web readers and offering its print subscribers an exclusive extra. (The free, ad-supported Boston.com, in contrast, was aimed at a more casual audience). The Globe switched gears just three years later when it introduced a more leaky metered paywall, which The New York Times had by then shown could be a successful approach. Over time, the newspaper has continually tweaked and refined its approach, opening and closing exceptions to its paywall meter. In a recent effort, for example, the Globe has stopped counting Google AMP links towards the meter.

Tim Griggs, an independent media consultant and the former publisher of The Texas Tribune, said that the beauty of the metered paywall is that it gives news organizations plenty of flexibility to tweak how many free articles to offer readers, how often to reset the meter, what factors affect the meter, and how to message all of this to potential subscribers. If a hard paywall is a hammer, the metered paywall is a scalpel. “It’s an elegant solution when done with the right data rigor and the right user experience,” Griggs said in an email. “Many news sites aren’t so great at either of those things.” Indeed, former Globe executive and Nieman Fellow David Skok wrote for us last year about the importance of using reader data and predictive analytics to determine optimal times to raise or lower the paywall:

Imagine a reader browsing the web on their smartphone while on a train heading into work. They click on a link through Reddit and arrive on your news site where they are served a paywall. Using predictive analytics, we are quite certain that this Reddit mobile reader will not subscribe to your website. In fact, the reader may even post on Reddit just how much she despises your paywall. So, instead of wasting our time trying to get that reader to subscribe, what other kinds of value can you exchange with her that could be of mutual benefit? Perhaps it’s an email newsletter signup form that could begin an inbound marketing relationship? Perhaps it’s a video preroll ad with a high CPM to generate maximum ad revenue? Perhaps it’s a prompt for the reader to “like” you on Facebook so that they can help expand your reach?

There’s a lot of evidence news organizations are getting more nuanced with their approaches — and that over time has resulted in paywalls with fewer holes, not more. The Wall Street Journal, which has put most stories behind a hard paywall since the 1990s, recently closed a feature that let visitors skirt restrictions by pasting a story’s headline in Google. It also recently killed of a secret (yet surprisingly well-known) free login popular among those in media circles. With the moves, it joined The Washington Post, which has been testing efforts to close loopholes that let visitors access its content for free.

Premium news organizations in 2017 are in a constant process of opening and closing paywall loopholes, depending on their goals. Griggs illustrated how the early parts of this process worked at The New York Times, which from 2011 to 2013 evaluated how to handle and respond to “avoidance behaviors” such as cookie deletion. One finding was that people who deleted cookies to avoid the Times’ paywall were also more likely to subscribe than people who did not delete cookies — likely because those cookie deleters were also some of the most frequent readers. When news organizations recognize this kind of behavior, they’re able to try new ways of reaching those readers, such as targeting them with specific soft messaging. News organizations can repeat this process for each of the various workarounds, all of which necessitate their own specific approaches.

Griggs agreed that, as publishers get smarter about understanding reader behavior, their paywalls tend to get less leaky. “When you’re talking about a relatively new line of business, there’s a lot to study and learn, there’s a lot to test, and there’s a marketplace shift happening at the same time,” he said. “So you can understand and act on things you previously didn’t know.” (The Times, for example, designed its paywall to be comparatively porous at first in an effort to collect as much data as possible.)

Doucette said that publishers are “now entering a second generation of digital models.” In the first generation, publishers were just trying to prove out the concept that consumers would pay up. With that accomplished, many are now focused on optimizing and building on that model. “We’ve learned a lot in five years about what the levers are, how we can pull them and what are the tradeoffs,” Doucette said. “We understand a lot of things better than we used to. The changes are the natural evolution of that understanding.”

The story received a fair amount of attention when it was originally published online, but this Sunday a whole new audience will be exposed to the story by Stat reporter Eric Boodman.

Favorite thing I've read this week: For insect detectives, the trickiest cases involve bugs that aren’t really there https://t.co/2yHwpyy7HR

— AJ (@ajchavar) March 23, 2017

For insect detectives, the trickiest cases involve the bugs that aren’t really there: https://t.co/PJhN4A1Vqy pic.twitter.com/f7IKhrdwLW

— Longform (@longform) March 25, 2017

Boodman’s piece is the cover story for Sunday Stat, a new print product Stat is launching in partnership with The Boston Globe. The Globe and Stat are both owned by John W. Henry, and Sunday Stat will appear as a glossy 12-page tabloid that will be distributed with the paper this Sunday.

Though Sunday Stat is initially being published in the Globe, the site would like to bring it to other newspapers as well. Editor Rick Berke told me Stat is in discussions with other metro papers about possibly selling a print version of Stat coverage for them to reprint and distribute.

“There are a lot of cities around the country that have many people who work in science, medicine, and health, who would be interested in this coverage,” he said. “It’d be cheaper to get our section than to hire a full-time reporter because we can draw on all our reporters around the country and have it all ready to go. All you have to do if you’re a local paper is to print it, which is not cheap, but it’s cheaper than having your own reporter.”

The Boston-based Stat launched in the fall of 2015 in an attempt to take advantage of the large concentration of health science professionals in the city. (In 2014, The Globe also launched Crux, a Catholic site, with the same idea, but it stopped supporting the site last year.)

Boston Globe managing director Linda Pizzuti Henry (who is the wife of owner John Henry) told me Sunday Stat will be a “wonderful benefit for our subscribers.” Because the Globe owns its printers, the Stat supplement was “a very low-risk proposition” to try and grow Stat’s readership, Linda Henry said. The Globe has a Sunday print circulation of about 234,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

“It is still a digital-first publication, and it’s going to remain that way…For Stat, this is a wonderful complement and it’s going to introduce a whole new audience to Stat,” Henry said.

There are two full pages of ads in Sunday Stat, and Berke said there is already advertiser interest for a summer version of the supplement. The Globe’s sales team sold ads for Sunday Stat, and Stat worked with a designer from the Globe to put the tabloid together.

Sunday Stat is made up of mostly feature stories that aren’t time-bound and that were originally published on Stat’s website that are being repurposed for print. Boodman’s bug story, for instance was 3,000 words long when it was published online, but it had to be cut in half to fit in the print tabloid.

The Globe regularly reprints Stat stories online and in print, and there’s a Stat widget on the Globe’s homepage. Berke estimated that the Globe publishes half a dozen or so Stat stories in the paper a week — mostly in the business section. But the stories that are appearing in Sunday Stat haven’t appeared in the Globe before.

Berke said a print edition had been in the plans for Stat since the beginning, but he said it was “pretty unrealistic to build a brand new website, hire a staff, and do this whole big digital push — and then also do a print edition.”

Stat launched in 2015 as a free, ad-supported site. Last year, it introduced Stat Plus, a subscription product. Stat has also put on events, tried sponsored content, and looked for other ways to build a sustainable business model.

“The free digital model is a tough one,” Henry said. “Right now, print is not a really significant part of Stat’s revenue. Our hope is that it becomes part of the larger revenue mix.”

The Globe plan focuses on publishing stories earlier in the day, restructuring beats, creating new audience engagement and express desks, and thinking of print as its own distinct platform, not the dominant driver of all workflows.

“None of the changes detailed here will come as any surprise, though in total, they represent significant change,” McGrory wrote:

The basic goals are familiar as well: to be more nimble, more innovative, and more inclined to take worthwhile risk; to get our best journalism in front of readers when and where they want to read it, throughout the day and across all our platforms; to be relentlessly interesting, jettisoning any sense of obligation in our report; to once and for all break the stubborn rhythms of a print operation, allowing us to unabashedly pursue digital subscriptions even while honoring the many loyal readers who subscribe to the physical paper.

Indeed, the changes are the latest indication that American metro newspapers are coalescing around a relatively unified vision for the future.

Over the past two years, newspapers such as The Dallas Morning News, the Miami Herald, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune have all enacted similar initiatives. (Poynter’s Kristen Hare has done a great job reporting from these newsrooms and covering the changes.)

The Star Tribune has a Quick Strike team to cover breaking news and report stories that play well on social media. The Herald staff is working to use analytics and data more effectively to understand its readership. The Morning News moved its morning news meeting from 10:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. Each of those will sound familiar to those reading the Globe’s plans.

The Minneapolis, Dallas, and Miami dailies have participated in the since-renamed Table Stakes project, a $1.3 million Knight Foundation-funded project that launched in 2015 and brought together the Morning News, Star Tribune, and Herald, along with the Philadelphia newspapers, to work together to reimagine their processes and share best practices.

In February, Knight and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism — the nonprofit that owns the Philadelphia dailies and was started by H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest — announced that they were renaming the project as the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and adding $4.8 million in funding over three years to increase the number of participating newsrooms. The Lenfest Institute is led by Jim Friedlich, the CEO of Empirical Media, a consulting firm that was acquired by the Institute and worked with many of the newsrooms that are involved.

The goal is to have 16 newsrooms participating in the project by 2019. The Seattle Times, San Jose Mercury News, Houston Chronicle, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel are set to join this year.

“The more we saw success in the areas where we just started doing something, the more confidence we gained that we could actually turn things around,” Star Tribune senior managing editor Suki Dardarian told Ken Doctor in February. “I think for so long in this industry, those of us in the newsroom have felt powerless to change anything. It was all about the decline in advertising, and we just had to stand by as witnesses. But in every newsroom I’ve been in, I think the journalists have always wanted to participate in helping the business succeed, and maybe they just didn’t know how, or we couldn’t connect folks from department to department. There is this well of desire in the newsroom to help the business succeed. Now we’re finally able to do things because the model is shifting towards the subscriber. That’s our sweet spot. So what can we do, using metrics, to understand our audience more and to engage them more?”

All of these reinvention efforts are rooted in a better understanding of audiences. Metro newspapers are becoming more reliant on direct reader revenue as print advertising disappears and digital advertising increasingly becomes the domain of Facebook and Google.

A reliance on reader revenue is, of course, the strategy The New York Times has very publicly declared as its path to success. But while the Times has about 1.5 million digital subscribers around the world, metro newspapers have a much smaller audience to draw upon. The Globe has more than 70,000 digital subscribers, the most of any metro newspaper.

The privately held Globe doesn’t report its financials. However, A.H. Belo, which owns the Morning News, is a public company, and reported $66.1 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 — a 9.6 percent drop from the year before. But on a conference call with investors last month, CEO Jim Moroney said “first-quarter 2017 revenue trends compare favorably with the revenue trends we saw in the first nine months of 2016.”

So while the Globe is in a better position than most metro newsrooms, McGrory’s memo emphasized the need to craft coverage that is indispensable to its audience and ultimately convinces them that the journalism is worth paying for.

“We’re going to be more humorous, god dammit, and absolutely more humane,” McGrory wrote. “Boston is a big and fascinating place filled with savvy, often funny, and occasionally brilliant people. We need to reflect this even more, tap into it, and be part of it.”

We have posted full transcripts of the event here, but here’s an overview of some of what was discussed.

Disintermediation, demagoguery, and debility

Bill Kristol, the conservative political analyst and founder of The Weekly Standard, focused his remarks around three themes: disintermediation, demagoguery, and debility.

Social media and the internet have, Kristol said, crippled the media’s traditional role as gatekeepers of information:

The media is a mediating institution. That’s literally the case, and I think importantly the case in democratic politics. Obviously for reasons mostly technological, some of them maybe sociological and others, it’s less that today because of the Internet, social media. Social media is called social media, but when you think about it, it should be called social non-media, because this precisely removes the mediating function and it’s direct. Again, which is in many ways a good thing — but a problematic thing, I think, for politics.

The Trump administration should also encourage people to rethink their views of democracy and the roles various institutions play in the American system, Kristol said:

But in thinking about Trump, we do need to rethink a little bit, I think, our somewhat complacent view of democracy — you know, the more democracy the better, the more education the better, the more participation the better, and everything is moving in the right direction — the arc of history is going in a good way and we don’t have to worry about some of those things that the founding fathers worried about. And it’s amazing to go back and look at the Federalists — look at how many of the papers, especially the papers on the executive but also on the legislative power, are about precisely the threat of demagogues.

Kristol’s final point was that he was dubious of the power of the media. He illustrated his point by highlighting the fact that Republicans’ string of presidential wins in the 1980s came before the creation of Fox News:

When I speak to conservatives, I always remind them: when were the great conservative victories? Reagan in 1980, 1984, Bush 1988. Huge, lopsided victories, three of them in a row. Rush Limbaugh was not yet on talk radio. Fox News didn’t yet exist. The Internet didn’t yet exist. All these things — the conservative media didn’t exist. It really was The New York Times, The Washington Post, and three networks, which were mostly moderate-liberal at least. Nonetheless, that was the heyday of conservative policies. And incidentally, ever since Fox News took over and became such a big deal, Republicans have lost the presidential popular vote in every election but one, 2004.

Pushing up against journalism’s cardinal rules

Katie Kingsbury, managing editor of digital for the Boston Globe, described the day the Globe decided to break down a long-cherished wall between what was seen as opinion, and what was seen as straight news. After the Orlando nightclub shooting, Kingsbury said, she went into work feeling almost numb from the frequency with which mass shootings were happening in the United States. Could the Globe approach yet another tragedy differently?

This is the cover of the @BostonGlobe tomorrow – & they are 100% correct. #filibuster #holdthefloor pic.twitter.com/wO1CicfoWk

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 16, 2016

In addition to a front-page editorial, The Globe’s Make It Stop project also involved calls to action for readers, and a takeover of the Globe’s main Twitter account to tweet out names of victims of mass shootings since the ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. Many in the Globe’s newsroom were uncomfortable, Kingsbury recalled:

One of the most amazing things about Make It Stop is that we actually saw progress from it in a rather short time. Two days later, Kelly Ayotte, the senator from New Hampshire who had received the brunt of our texts and emails, changed her vote on an important gun control measure. No, the law did not change — but she changed her vote, and it felt like a huge victory.

But it also wasn’t a victory that everyone celebrated. Some of our colleagues distanced themselves from this project on social media. And a week later, I was asked to be on a panel at the Poynter Institute. I thought I was going to be talking about gun control that day. Instead, I was grilled for almost an hour about why I thought it was okay to do this — why the Globe thought it was okay to cross these lines.

Those were questions that were hard to answer, that day and since. I’ve thought a lot about them. Because you’re taught in Journalism 101 some fundamental tenets: Be accurate; be fair; don’t make yourself the story. By these measures, maybe Make It Stop had crossed some lines, had gone too far. Maybe.

But there are other responsibilities that we as journalists hold dear: Be a voice for the voiceless. Tell essential truths. Hold the powerful accountable.

For the Globe, Kingsbury said, “a group of young people at a nightclub enjoying themselves, being mowed down in cold blood” was a tipping point.

A glass one-tenth full

Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski led a conversation with Gerard Baker (editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal), Lydia Polgreen (editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post), and David Leonhardt (op-ed columnist at The New York Times and coauthor of the recent 2020 report). On the table was what journalism can do to regain the public’s trust, the use of the word “lie” and Baker’s continued defense of his cautionary memo against the phrase “majority Muslim country,” how best to cover a Trump administration that has rejected journalistic convention and tradition, over and over in the not yet two weeks since taking office.

“I continue to see the glass as one-tenth full rather than nine-tenths empty,” Baker said about the outlook for journalism. “There are a lot of people who dedicate themselves — it’s not a particularly financially rewarding life — but it’s intellectually and I would argue ultimately emotionally rewarding to pursue quality journalism. I think there are a lot of people out there who do it. And by all means support those people who are doing it — support good-quality journalism, subscribe to good-quality news organizations.”

Polgreen expressed similar optimism, and advocated for greater civic engagement from readers: “I think my hope, and the part that I hope to play, and I think that all of us need to play, is renewing our commitment to civic engagement. I think that we have had a kind of abdication to assumptions about growth and prosperity and that things are just going to get better and that we can outsource the management of our democracy to the professionals and everything’s going to be OK,” she said. “I think that the civic reengagement needs to happen in a much deeper level than just the information layer of it. I think we all need to wake up and realize that this is our country, and it’s our responsibility to go out there and take actions that forge bonds between people.”

For Leonhardt, engagement was the key word. “It’s not simply, “Please pay for what we do and give us money.” It’s, pay for the things that you think are best, and tell us what works and what doesn’t work,” he said. “And that is really what is different about this age: You have your own printing press. And as much as we pretend not to listen to you, and as much as the first reaction you may get from the media is, eh, bugger off. We do listen.”

Ordinary people, extraordinary work

Lolly Bowean, 2017 Nieman Fellow and Chicago Tribune reporter, suggested a path for journalism as a unifying force, through a story about LoQuator Dinkins, a woman on the south side of Chicago.

Now, I need to tell you that when I was growing up, I didn’t see reporters in my neighborhood unless there was something tragic or something violent that happened. So, in my own work, I’ve tried to make sure that I pay attention to communities and neighborhoods and try to highlight people like LoQuator Dinkins, who are doing the best that they can with the resources that they can. You see, when I’m when I write about someone like LoQuator Dinkins, a regular, ordinary, everyday person who is finding the best in themselves, I’m reminded of how great we are as people.

“Every day is a better day for access to information”

Even as journalism is under threat from changing business models and threats from the Trump administration, CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter said he is optimistic about the future of news.

Since the election, Stelter said he’s been “flooded by emails” from readers and viewers that say “We are not buying this attempt to delegitimize the press. We need you:”

I think those emails and the ratings and the traffic data all indicate an audience hungry, maybe even starving, for journalism right now. And that is why I reject this talkabout being post-fact, post-truth. People are watching. People are reading Lydia [Polgreen]’s Huffington Post, Katie [Kingsbury]’s Boston Globe — all of them seen huge surges in traffic. We all know about The New York Times and other outlets gaining subscribers as well. Just today, just this afternoon, while we’re sitting here, in my inbox, The Atlantic saying it set an all-time daily audience record on Sunday and then again on Monday. CNN: a million viewers every hour of the day on Sunday, again on Monday. Normally 500,000, 600,000, 700,000 is a good figure. These numbers are through the roof, online and on TV. And partly that’s because of the protests. Partly that’s because the country is hungry for information right now.

Still, Stelter recognized the threats facing the industry, and he noted that platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat, along with the now-constant news cycle have forced journalists to evolve and change the understanding of their jobs:

“Every day is a better day for access to information. And that, I think more than anything else, is a reason for young journalists to be optimistic — not to give up on this profession, as some of them tell me they’re considering, not to fear entering the profession of journalism, just because the president says he’s at war with it, but actually to seize the opportunity. Every day, there are people who for the first time in their lives have access to a smartphone and access to our work, to our stories, to our videos. I know I made the mistake of taking that for granted sometimes. But in this moment, I’m trying to remind myself and all of you, as Bill Kristol was saying in the very beginning, this access information, this ability to reach increasingly the whole world with our content.

Like most journalists I know, every morning, when I wake up, literally the first thing I do is check my phone. On the morning of Sunday, June 12, I found six emails from CNN — breaking news alerts. It wasn’t even 7 a.m. yet. Dozens of people had been killed in a nightclub shooting in Orlando. “This looks bad,” I said to my husband, “I’ve got to go to work.”

I was at the time the Globe’s deputy editorial page editor. My boss happened to be on vacation, and so as I was turning on the coffee machine and switching on my TV, I started to text and email the editorial board. We needed to write something quickly.

I’ve got to admit I’m a little bit embarrassed to say that my first reaction that day was not one of outrage. In fact, I was feeling something that many of you in this room might feel when these tragedies happen. I felt kind of apathetic — numb. And so did my team. We had just seen it too many times: San Bernardino. Charleston. Aurora. Sandy Hook. We had written polite opinion pieces after each of these events — demanding change, insisting on change. We had asked for more background checks. We had asked for smaller bullet cartridges. We had asked for better mental health screening.

What had that all added up to? Nothing. This was still happening. The details were different that morning, but the story was so familiar: a killer with access to military-style weaponry mows down innocent Americans in cold blood. We felt like we had nothing left to write.

And then something happened that almost never happens. In journalism, we have rules, and then we have cardinal rules. One of the cardinal rules for newspapers is that we try to keep our opinion pages and our newsroom separate. For the newsroom, that’s a way to protect them from being accused of bias, to maintain their objectivity. At the Globe, this maintains itself with the editorial page being tucked down a dark hallway that no reporter tries to venture. For context, up to that day, I’d probably been in the room with the paper’s editor, Brian McGrory, twice in the three years that I had worked at the Globe.

But that night, Brian sent a note. He suggested that this horrific event could not go unremarked upon, and that we as an institution needed to do something radically different. In fact, he went as far as to suggest that we should wrap the entire newspaper in an editorial, standing against this kind of lunacy.

To my mind, though, one of the most extraordinary parts about this is that he wanted to work together. He wanted the editorial page and opinion pages to work with the newsroom on it.

So the next day, we got in a room. Editors, particularly from the news side, seemed visibly uncomfortable. Some of them were squirming. And I’ll admit that I also kind of wondered what we were all doing there.

But I think we all felt a similar fatigue — a desire to do something that could possibly move the dial. In fact, one of the easiest decisions for us to make that morning was the title of our project: Make It Stop. We all wanted to make it stop.

It’s one of those things that a lot of us had gotten into our business to do: to have impact, to change the world, whether you worked for the opinion pages or the newsroom.

So how to actually accomplish that is a whole other matter. Politicians still need and value citizens voices. But you’ve got to reach them in ways that they cannot tune out. And at the same time, we wanted to reach far more than the inside-the-beltway. We wanted to reach as many Americans as we could, and we wanted to use as many of the Globe’s various platforms as we could.

So we went to work, and three days later after very little sleep, this is what we came up with.

.@BostonGlobe front page in response to Orlando nightclub shooting. 60 people across the Globe involved in #MakeItStop project #FutureofNews https://t.co/UHWLR0SeMm

— Shan Wang (@shansquared) January 31, 2017

Running off the presses as we speak, stay tuned. #MakeItStop pic.twitter.com/o8KN8h9Msy

— Boston Globe Opinion (@GlobeOpinion) June 16, 2016

So I should start by saying that 60 people across the Globe organization worked on this project. There were some reporters involved, but primarily it was editors, graphic designers, engineers, and social media experts.

We felt strongly, to start, that we needed to have a discrete call to action. We quickly settled on calling for a renewal of the assault weapons ban. For some of us, this clearly didn’t go far enough — but it was a concrete step. The U.S. had such a ban until 2004, and in fact actually protects ducks from assault weapons. Yes — the U.S. government makes sure that you cannot use an assault weapon to kill ducks, but not humans. And the Orlando shooting would never have been as deadly as it was, if not for the fact that a man yielding this type of weapon was able to shoot off 24 shots in 9 seconds. Of the 300-plus people in the pulse nightclub at 2:02 a.m. that evening, one-third were struck with flying lead.

We also wanted to create a graphics display to explain how we have gotten here — who profited from this type of weaponry and who in government allowed it to happen. We also wanted to push past reported stories of gunmaker revenue, past the sternly worded editorials that often fell on deaf ears. We also tried to give a sense of how deadly these weapons are.

We chose to call out six U.S. senators by name. None are diehard NRA members, making this a quite difficult decision. But instead they were moderates: They had voted against gun control measures in the past, but were vulnerable in close reelection fights and often represented fairly moderate districts. These are six people who we thought we could change their minds — and if we changed their minds, we could change the law.

Again, we pushed past convention. We created pre-populated tweets and emails for our readers to send to the senators directly, asking for change. More than 8,800 tweets were sent, more than 10,000 emails.

Finally, we took over the Globe’s Twitter account. We created the hashtag #makeitstop, and every five minutes, we tweeted out the name and age of every victim at every location of every mass shooting since the last assault weapons ban had been lifted in 2004. It took more than 30 hours to know every name.

Bart Oliver, 15 years old. Shot 3/12/2005, Brookfield, Wis. #MakeItStop

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) June 16, 2016

Connie Karr, 51 years old. Shot 2/7/2008, Kirkwood, Mo. #MakeItStop

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) June 16, 2016

Alex Sullivan, 27 years old. Shot 7/20/2012, Aurora, Colo. #MakeItStop

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) June 16, 2016

One of the most amazing things about Make It Stop is that we actually saw progress from it in a rather short time. Two days later, Kelly Ayotte, the senator from New Hampshire who had received the brunt of our texts and emails, changed her vote on an important gun control measure. No, the law did not change — but she changed her vote, and it felt like a huge victory.

But it also wasn’t a victory that everyone celebrated. Some of our colleagues distanced themselves from this project on social media. And a week later, I was asked to be on a panel at the Poynter Institute. I thought I was going to be talking about gun control that day. Instead, I was grilled for almost an hour about why I thought it was okay to do this — why the Globe thought it was okay to cross these lines.

Those were questions that were hard to answer, that day and since. I’ve thought a lot about them. Because you’re taught in Journalism 101 some fundamental tenets: Be accurate; be fair; don’t make yourself the story. By these measures, maybe Make It Stop had crossed some lines, had gone too far. Maybe.

But there are other responsibilities that we as journalists hold dear: Be a voice for the voiceless. Tell essential truths. Hold the powerful accountable.

Marty Kaiser, the former editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, often talks about how, at the end of the day, even journalism organizations must have thresholds to allow for moral outrage. For the Boston Globe, that threshold was a group of young people at a nightclub, enjoying themselves, being mowed down in cold blood.

We cannot shrug our obligation to call out these atrocities as ones our community and our news organizations will not abide.

“I would say we’ve exceeded any reasonable expectation of what we might have accomplished,” said John L. Allen, Jr., the longtime reporter on the church, who secured a deal with the Catholic service organization Knights of Columbus last March to keep Crux up and running, and who now heads the site. (The Globe’s IT support was crucial to Crux’s transition success, he said: Migrating a site from one set of servers to another “is as if you spill cheese on an outdoor grill and it soaks down to every layer of the grill, and you have to go in with a spatula and physically scrape it all off. It’s a very complicated process.”)

Crux’s higher traffic numbers are due in part to some very big news moments — Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia, which seems to suggest that divorced and remarried Catholics can receive communion and which remains controversial; World Youth Day last July; and, of course, the U.S. presidential election. Crux will cover the Trump administration in a nonpartisan way, Allen said: “We don’t want to be seen as either the voice of Catholics who like Trump, or the voice of Catholics who don’t like Trump. We want to be the place where both of them get fair play.”

One of the most notorious fake news stories of the election cycle was the “news” that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, which went viral. I asked Allen if there’s something about this Pope, in particular, that is somehow conducive to fake news stories: No, he said, it goes with the terrain. “Pope Benedict, years ago, there were a lot of fake reports around him, too,” he said. “Same thing about John Paul when he did his interfaith summit in 1986: There were lots of urban legends that came out of that. There was a storyline about how one of the religious groups that was there had engaged in animal sacrifice in a Catholic church. It was completely fake, and it had to be debunked. It’s just that it wasn’t a global phenomenon, and people weren’t doing Facebook posts about it, and you didn’t have 24/7 cable news back then.”

Allen does, however, see Crux as a place where fake religious news (here’s another example) can be debunked. “Fake news on the Catholic beat is, in some ways, a Godsend to us,” he said. “We’re the place a lot of people come to get the real story. It’s another niche we’ve kind of occupied — a rumor watch, I guess.”

Crux’s revenue is now roughly one-third advertising and two-thirds sponsorship. The Knights of Columbus is still the site’s principal partner, but Crux has also added several dioceses to its list of sponsors, and it’s looking for more in 2017. The Knights have never tried to influence coverage “even when some of our editorial decisions have caused them heartbreak,” Allen said. “We carried some pieces that were very favorable to Pope Francis in his line on communion for divorced and remarried people. That very much irritated some members of the Knights of Columbus; other [stories] have irritated other members, but they have stood by us.” Crux’s advertising sales are “slightly” above the level they were at the Globe.

Crux is now doing a radio show on the SiriusXM network, but Allen hopes to do more podcasts and video reporting this year, and he hopes that Crux — which recently hired an editorial assistant and is in the process of hiring a managing editor, bringing its team back to about the size it was at the Globe — can start breaking more news too. “We want to get back to what has always been one of Crux’s major areas of focus, which is anti-Christian persecution around the world,” he said. “We want to do more original reporting there, break more stories, and do more to make sure that story is on the map.”

Allen said he’s been surprised by how hard it is to lead a site — “the huge difference that exists between contributing to something and being in charge of something” — but it’s rewarding: “What’s happened to Crux demonstrates that it is possible to sustain a niche news platform with a kind of for-profit and nonprofit model,” he said. “Ad sales are a huge, absolutely indispensable element of our business model, but so is sponsorship. I think that’s the future of niche publications.”

As we feel the ever-louder banging on the doors of a free press, we should also hear, weirdly, another knocking. That’s the knocking of opportunity.

It’s not just the “journalistic spring” that Jack Shafer predicts as the conflicts and controversies of the Trump administration prove fertile ground for investigation. It’s the opportunity to rewrite the tattered social contract between journalists and readers, a chance to rebuild a relationship that’s been weakening by the year for a decade now.

That’s not just some wishful sentiment expressed in the face of the reality of Trump. We’ve seen it proven out over the past several months, and we must grasp this chance to reset an American press that has been withering away.

In both the immediate run-up to the election, and more so in its dramatic aftermath, we’ve witnessed one greatly ironic unintended benefit of Trumpism. More than 200,000 new subscribers signed up for New York Times subscriptions, many of them not even directly solicited — they just figured out it was the right thing to do. The Washington Post saw its own double-digit percentage increase in new subscriptions, and Jeff Bezos — sensing opportunity —- has just taken the dramatic step of adding more than five dozen journalists to the Post newsroom.

Readers opened their wallets more widely, as The Atlantic, ProPublica, The Guardian, NPR, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, and the Los Angeles Times have all reported increased public support.

What’s the lesson here?

Beyond “support,” readers clearly recognize value. They reward reporting, factual reporting, secure in the knowledge that certain news brands are more immune from the fakeries, forgeries, and foolishness than others. They see their own questions being answered with dutiful reporting and thoughtful analysis. The Times, in its 2020 report, long in the works, renewed the new social contract, as it designated $5 million for deeper and wider national government coverage, given the Trump ascendance.

Readers see courage and they support it. The Times and the Post led courageously in 2016, even as the din of press attacks got louder. (And, here, let us recognize the uneven but growing courage of CNN, its reporters and its hosts, for more insistently piercing the bellows of nonsense they encounter. At the same, time, let’s recognize the potential of CNN-taming implicit in Trump’s meeting last week with AT&T chief Randall Stephenson, the would-be buyer of CNN through the acquisition of its corporate parent, Time Warner.)

And, yet, all of that outpouring of post-election support still amounts to a meager down payment on what the American press needs. The national news media lives on the thread of profit. It is not “failing,” as in the Trumpian taunt, but it’s just hanging on, having absorbed financial blow after blow of digital disruption. At the local level — where all but four of the nation’s 1,375 or so dailies operate -— the unraveling is far worse.

Those dailies approached the election emaciated, their weakness exacerbated by 10 years of disinvestment. Make no mistake: Most of the U.S. daily press still returns profits. They just don’t return as much news, or reporting, or knowledge, as they used to.

Further, it’s in that local press that Americans long got their basic news, the basic facts that informed their voting habits. We can draw a straight line between the decline of the American local press and a populace whose factual ignorance has been further distorted by the polarization of democratic discourse. We may struggle to point out a few direct illustrations of that straight line, but the impact — civic and electoral — is only logical. We can’t cut the number of journalists in the American daily workforce in half — replacing the most locally knowledgeable with less experienced, lower-paid recruits — and expect no loss.

Looking forward, though, it’s that local press that we must look to cover the day-by-day repercussions of health, environmental, education, and racial justice policies and laws turned upside down. We’ll see mad spin coming out of Washington, and the national media will cover that. That national media, stretched as thin as it is, has little prayer to cover what seems likely to happen in the 50 states to the formerly insured, the women facing clinic closures, the aggrieved looking to federal legal insistence on fairness and justice, and the families seeking clean drinking water. Those are stories that must be unearthed, and told, across the country.

It’s a question that comes down to a single word: capacity.

Long-time media watcher Merrill Brown pointed recently to the drained ability of American news companies to adequately report on the administration that takes power today.

“There are not enough institutions in the American journalism community that are healthy enough to deal with what the Trump administration is likely to do in its early years,” he said on Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources on CNN a week ago. Speaking of both national and regional insufficiency, “We need more ProPublicas. We need more Jeff Bezoses. Philanthropists and investors need to be focused on how important media is, right now, during a dramatic change in government. We need more people to step up to the changes in journalism.”

Is it a news emergency? We can make a good case for that, but even if we want to classify it merely as a deepening crisis, let’s remember the advice of Rahm Emanuel as Barack Obama took over a country on the edge of depression in 2009. “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

I’ve had many conversations with those in and around the industry since the election, and there’s clearly a greater realization of this existential moment in American journalistic life, yet no singular sense of what to do.

Let me suggest we act on what we’ve learned.

First, that means recognizing the new power of the reader/journalist relationship, one underutilized by-product of the digital age. Though the national/global newspaper-based media (The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, which is finally finding its feet, bringing its business acumen to tougher Trump conflict of interest reporting) still struggle with the digital transition, they’ve each crossed over. More than 50 percent of their revenue comes directly from readers; that’s up from the industry average of 20 to 25 percent just a decade ago.

That not only provides them a more stable source of ongoing revenue, as digital ad markets prove increasingly troublesome — it also makes the point of journalists’ work crystal-clear. Journalists report and write to satisfy readers.

Finally, in the recent cases of Times and Post subscription spurts, paying readers have finally understood that deeper connection: My payment for the news will actually make a difference in what I know and what my community and country know.

So, on a national level, that message needs to be reinforced at every opportunity, just as John Oliver and Meryl Streep, among others, have begun to do. Another half million to a million digital subscriptions could well certify the successful digital transformation of national news outlets proving themselves indispensable to the democracy. That number now appears in reach, as we assess the progress noted in Monday’s New York Times 2020 report.

It is in local markets that the reader revenue lesson is going largely untested. Yes, most dailies have put up paywalls, but only a relative handful — mostly outside the major chains — have funded still-robust, if diminished, newsrooms. The common arithmetic I’ve described: Halve the product, double the price. Rather than invest in that reader/journalist relationship, too many companies simply milk the life of the disappearing print paper.

My simple proposition: More Americans will pay more for a growing, smarter, and in-touch local news source if they are presented with one. As the local newspaper industry has shriveled, most readers have never been presented with that choice. Rather they’ve had to witness smaller and smaller papers, and then less and lower-quality digital news offerings.

It’s not simply an “It’s the content, stupid” moment. Too many news publishers have failed to create products, especially smartphone ones, that display well even what these local companies today produce. That, though, is a topic for another day.)

Out of the welter of possibility in 2017, we need to see multiple tests of ramping up local quality, volume, and product. We need new scale brought back to local news reporting, which can now exploit the wonders of multimedia presentation, and do it far more cheaply than print could ever offer.

Will any of the local chain owners invest in a Bezosian long-term strategy? Already, I’ve heard discussion at the high levels of a couple of chains about the new public expectation of “watchdog journalism” and how to meet it — and benefit from it.

Will the trying-to-be-feisty independents — perhaps led by The Boston Globe with its own small bump to 70,000 paying digital subscribers and a broad reinvention plan taking shape — see Times- or Post-like rewards for their efforts? Will any of the larger public radio stations tie growing news capabilities to a kind of “news membership,” moving to fill the vacuum of news in their cities? How many local TV stations will test out the idea of becoming broader TV/digital news providers, and doing enough to get reader payment? What kind of stronger, regional roles might the likes of Kaiser Health News (health), The Marshall Project (criminal justice), and Chalkbeat (education) play? Can any of the most ambitious of LION’s 110 local member news sites step up their coverage to benefit significantly from the new reader/journalist virtuous circle?

In business — and news is a business — consumers expect the improved product to be offered first, and then to be asked to pay (or pay more) for it. That’s why we need to see the kind of investment — from investors to philanthropists, as Merrill Brown suggests.

It’s been astounding to me that so few people of wealth have come forward to rebuild the American press in digital form. Why will an Elon Musk, an early investor in newspaper entertainment product Zip2, pour hundreds of millions into space, cars, and batteries, but nothing into his local Silicon Valley news sources? For the most part, even the most sympathetic haven’t seen a sustainable model that they thought worthy of their time and money.

Now, though, that model cries out before us: Majority reader revenue, built on a nationally proven next-generation content-and-product strategy. That’s the carrot. The big stick: Unless a new model is worked out soon, know-nothingism will find fewer challenges across the expanse of America’s news deserts.

Majority-reader-revenue models won’t work overnight, and, there, the bridging aid of a small fleet of foundations that have so far failed to fund a new sustainability will be key. I believe they will renew their own spirits — if and when they see building success.

Finally, let’s consider the intangible of civic pride in this strangest of political times. John Oliver made subscribing to the Times and Post and supporting ProPublica hip. Clearly, he tapped an open reservoir of goodwill. As high hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets this weekend, apprehensive of the future, and looking for accountability, the appetite for aggressive news media — national and local — may never have been as high.

Who will step forward and rise to the occasion?