As Ron Mitchell and Andre Stark, the new owners of The Bay State Banner, mark a little over a year of publishing New England’s leading newspaper for the Black community, they’re also making a major change in format: the tabloid-sized paper is going broadsheet. As Don Seiffert reports in the Boston Business Journal, the Banner is now being printed by the Times Union, in Albany, New York. Leave a comment | Read comments ..read more

Stephen Buckley There have been rumblings for a while that it was time for news organizations to bring back the position of ombudsperson, also known as the public editor — an in-house journalist who would look at issues in coverage and render a judgment. At one time the job was fairly common at many larger news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. But as the business model for journalism deteriorated, the position was increasingly seen as a luxury. On Tuesday, The Dallas Morning News took a step in the right direction, hiring a public editor ..read more

“Pittsfield in the near Future.” Photo of 1906 postcard (cc) 2010 by Steve Shook. The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is celebrating its eighth anniversary as a locally owned independent newspaper. In 2016, a group of business people and community leaders rescued the Eagle from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital and began restoring it. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when the Eagle was regarded as one of the best small dailies in the country. I can’t say for sure how it stacks up these days, but given the dismal state of the news business overall it may very well ..read more

Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2015 by Upstateherd. The murder trial of Karen Read is, without question, one of the strangest spectacles we’ve seen in Massachusetts for a long time. Read has been charged with driving over her boyfriend, former Boston police officer John O’Keefe, and leaving him to die in a snowbank. Read counters that she’s being framed — that, in fact, O’Keefe was beaten up, bitten by a dog and dragged outside. Adding to all of this is a murky federal investigation of the Norfolk County district attorney’s office and the involvement of Aiden Kearney, the Turtleboy blo ..read more

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who’s been an indispensable voice of reason since Oct. 7, has another must-read column (free link), this one urging Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia rather than proceed with an all-out assault against the Gazan city of Rafah. Leave a comment | Read comments ..read more

Three media-related follow-ups to this morning’s post on the arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters at Northeastern University. • As I noted earlier, university spokeswoman Renata Nyul issued a statement in which she cited “virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews’” as a precipitating factor in ordering that the encampment be dismantled and the police be brought in. Now there are reports that “Kill the Jews” might actually have been uttered by a pro-Israel counter-protester. GBH News reporter Tori Bedford tweeted, “I did hear ‘kill the Jews,’ said by a counter-protester holding an I ..read more

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher magazine, which is now much, much more than a magazine. It’s a cutting-edge multimedia source of information on innovation in our industry. Mike hosts E&P’s weekly vodcast series, “E&P Reports.” He’s also been a guest on this podcast previously, and today’s he’s back to talk about a new venture. Blinder has a new vertical on public media called Public Pulse. It’s newsy and filled with insider information. It aggregates the latest on stories like conflict ignited b ..read more

Rube Goldberg drawing via Wikipedia Richard J. Tofel has been looking into the details of legislation that created a $90 million fund to ease the local news crisis in New York State, and he has some questions. The two most important: Are newspapers owned by publicly traded companies truly excluded, as initial reports would suggestion? And what, exactly, is a newspaper? As I wrote the other day, the program would seem to exclude Gannett, a publicly traded corporation that owns 12 daily newspapers in New York, including the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester and the Times Herald-Record of Mid ..read more

The Berkeley Beacon, the student newspaper at Emerson College, has a live blog covering the arrest of students who have been camping out to protest on behalf of Palestinian rights in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war. More than 100 protesters have been taken into custody, the Beacon reports, citing the Emerson chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Student journalists have received a lot of much-deserved praise for their coverage of these encampments. In particular, the Columbia Daily Spectator has established itself as the go-to source for reporting on protests at Columbia University. U ..read more

Photo (cc) 2023 by Todd Van Hoosear There are many reasons that can be cited for the crisis in which much of the news media finds itself. Essentially, though, journalism is attempting to adjust to two massive black swan events. The first was the rise of the internet, which destroyed much of the business model for newspapers and magazines by transferring the vast majority of advertising revenues to Craigslist, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yes, some publications have survived and even thrived by persuading their readers to pick up the costs in the form of digital subscriptions. But we are a lo ..read more