I’ll be speaking on a panel about lead poisoning this Wednesday, April 24, at Haverhill Community Media. The panel, from 7 to 9 p.m., will feature state Rep. Andy Vargas, the primary sponsor on a bill advocating for lead pipe safety; Andrea Watson, founder of Lead Free MA, which is sponsoring the discussion; Wanda Carolina Santos, vice president of community living for a center serving adults with disabilities, and Laura Spark, environmental health program director at Clean Water Action. I’ll be talking about the importance of local news in reporting on environmental contamination. During the ..read more

Public notices may not be the sexiest part of the local news business, but the revenue they bring in is crucial. Also known as legal ads, these notices — usually placed by local government to announce public hearings, bids and other business — must, in most states, be published in a print newspaper. But this requirement has come under question in recent years as more and more communities find themselves without a viable print paper. Why not let them advertise in a digital news outlet? Recently Virginia became the first state to allow that option. ARLnow, a digital site that covers the Arlingt ..read more

After Elon Musk starting taking a sledgehammer to Twitter in late 2022, I gravitated to two alternatives — Mastodon and Post. Well, Mastodon is still going strong, though it’s very much a niche service. (I guess all social media in 2024 is niche except TikTok, and I’m not on it.) Post, though, seemed to have no constituency right from the start, and I quickly gave up on it. Now it’s gone. These days I’m most active on Threads, and you can find me here. Leave a comment | Read comments ..read more

NJ Spotlight News is based at NJ PBS in Newark. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy. The ongoing shakeout in public media continues. The trade publication Current reported earlier this month that WNET, the nonprofit giant that controls public radio and television stations in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey, has eliminated 34 positions since December. Among the operations affected is NJ Spotlight News, a hybrid operation comprising a website covering public policy and politics in New Jersey and a daily newscast that is broadcast on NJ PBS. Spotlight executive director John Mooney told me ..read more

Wednesday might have been the best day of the spring to see the flowering Bradford pear trees along Boston Avenue in West Medford and the Hillside neighborhood, which also happens to be the route that I walk occasionally to the Medford/Tufts Green Line Station. The Green Line takes me directly to Northeastern, and I learned something that had escaped me before — the trolley platform is also lined with Bradford pears. Leave a comment | Read comments West Medford Medford Hillside Northeastern ..read more

The New York Times has the story. Berliner posted on social media, “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new C.E.O. whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.” Dishing out, not able to take it, etc. Leave a comment | Read comments ..read more

Old-school paywalls. Photo (cc) 2008 by Dan Kennedy. • Are we really doing this again? Richard Stengel argues in the paywall-protected Atlantic (free link) that news organizations should publish their journalism for free during the 2024 campaign lest readers be driven to non-paywalled sources of misinformation and disinformation. He provides no advice on how these news organizations are supposed to pay their journalists, and he makes no mention of the many high-quality sources of free news that still exist — among them The Associated Press, NPR, the PBS “NewsHour,” The Guardian, BBC News, lo ..read more

Two new developments in the ongoing brouhaha at NPR over Uri Berliner’s essay accusing the network of left-wing bias in its news coverage: • NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that Berliner has been suspended without pay for five days for failing “to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists.” This strikes me as the worst of all possible outcomes — making Berliner a martyr while keeping him on staff. At least in theory, an NPR editor ought to be able to voice concerns about the network’s ideological direction while remaining employed ..read more

I don’t know what we thought was so damn funny, but Ellen and I enjoyed having a chance to talk recently with G. Wayne Miller and Jim Ludes, the hosts of “Story in the Public Square,” about our book, “What Works in Community News.” The program is produced by Rhode Island PBS and the Pell Center at Salve Regina University. Leave a comment | Read comments ..read more

The hedge fund Alden Global Capital, notorious for hollowing out its newspapers, is shutting down eight weekly newspapers in Minnesota. Louis Krauss of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune reports that six of the papers are part of the Southwest News Media group and two are under the auspices of Crow River Media. “The closings will leave the communities without their long-time local papers,” Krauss writes. “Two of the papers, the Shakopee Valley News and Chaska Herald, have been published for more than 160 years, while the Jordan Independent was founded 140 years ago.” Alden owns 68 dailies and ..read more