COMMONWEALTH BEACON was recognized for journalistic excellence this past weekend by the New England Newspaper & Press Association, taking home multiple awards for its work, including top honors for Best Overall Website and Racial, Ethnic or Gender Issue Coverage. 

The group’s annual New England Better Newspaper Competition honors standout work in print and digital media from news organizations across the region. This year’s winners were announced at a ceremony in Portland, Maine, on March 29. 

Director of Audience Engagement Yael Mazor took first place in the award for best overall website. The CommonWealth Beacon website underwent a redesign in 2023 in conjunction with the publication’s name change from CommonWealth. The new format includes a dedicated opinion section on the homepage as well as spots that feature in-depth stories and data-based reports.  

Reporter Bhaamati Borkhetaria won first place in the award for racial, ethnic or gender issue coverage for her story on the plight of people of color who entered the state’s marijuana sector under the “social equity” licensing preference for members of groups that had been disproportionately affected by the war on drugs when marijuana was illegal. Her story, “Social equity marijuana businesses sold ‘bag of dreams,” documented the rough road faced by these entrepreneurs amid falling pot prices and difficulty accessing capital.  

Former editor Bruce Mohl won second place for Investigative/Enterprise Reporting for his story “Why did MassDOT hang T employees out to dry.” an intrigue-filled whodunit about state officials who went strangely silent in failing to back employees facing false charges or to set the record straight with a reporter digging into allegations that top T officials were working remotely from far-flung, out-of-state locations.  

Reporter Gintautas Dumcius took second place for Local Election Coverage for his story on new political waves on the North Shore. “In Revere, Latino victory reflects a changing city” told the story of Juan Jaramillo, a Latino union organizer who won a seat on the Revere City Council, only the second person of color to ever win a council seat there.  

Reporter Jennifer Smith won second place in the Podcast category for “Pulling the thread on North Shore racial covenants,” an episode of The Codcast exploring covenants barring non-whites and sometimes poor European immigrants from owning property, an ugly history that was unearthed by the North Shore NAACP and a Beverly-based housing nonprofit, Harborlight Homes.

Third place awards went to: 

• Bhaamati Borkhetaria (Arts & Entertainment Reporting) for her story “Not easy turning artists into a political force on Beacon Hill,” a look at the challenges those in the creative sector face in lobbying for state funding.  
• Gin Dumcius (Crime and Courts Reporting) for “The last of Somerville’s old guard,” the tale of a small-time Somerville pol who faced big problems in federal court.
•  Jennifer Smith (Climate Change or Weather Reporting) for “A sea change on managed retreat,” which explored the reckoning coastal property owners are facing with the relentless advance of the Atlantic Ocean.  

“I’m immensely proud of the hard work and dedication these awards represent for the CommonWealth Beacon team,” said editor Laura Colarusso. “Day in and day out, this staff demonstrates a commitment to in-depth reporting and telling the stories that matter to the people of Massachusetts.”

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FROM NEW YORK to Bangkok, the Associated Press frequently breaks news as its reporters throw themselves into stories.

But the story of the not-for-profit wire service’s future plans for Massachusetts State House coverage – and the question of whether they expect to fill a now-empty seat in the press gallery – is apparently still being written after the departure of a longtime AP veteran. Steve LeBlanc, who covered the political rise of governors and the nitty-gritty of state budgets totaling tens of billions of dollars, quietly took a buyout from the news agency earlier this month, one of many to do so.

The AP, which turns 179 this year, has seen its share of budget pressures, layoffs, and unrelenting change brought about by technological upheaval. The agency still has “several” journalists in Massachusetts, a spokesman said Thursday, but did not provide a specific headcount.

The AP’s own media reporter noted, when the agency announced it was looking to cut eight percent of its staff in the weeks after the November election, that AP no longer claims to be the world’s largest news gathering organization and “doesn’t reveal the size of its staff.” Months before the election, AP was rocked when two newspaper chains, which like other major news outlets were paying for the services AP provides, said they were dropping the agency.

“One of the things that was always a source of pride and a real source of power and authority was its 50-state footprint,” said Glen Johnson, a former AP State House bureau chief before leaving for the Boston Globe and then the US State Department. “A big driver of that was its presence in all 50 state houses. The reality is, though, with the contraction of revenue industry-wide, the AP, like most other news organizations, has been forced to cut back its staff and reshape its priorities. In this day and age there’s a huge emphasis on digital and video coverage, and that is now the top priority for the AP in each state.”

That’s meant a shift away from coverage of state politics over the last several years, but Patrick Maks, the AP’s spokesman, said in an email they do still have a reporter covering the Legislature on Beacon Hill. They also plan to add another reporter to their team based in Boston. He did not respond to a follow-up question about whether that meant someone would be taking over LeBlanc’s desk in the press gallery on the fourth floor.

“There’s no substitute for being physically present where news happens and in a state house, there’s few things more powerful than being able to confront a newsmaker in person and at times other than official events. That only comes from proximity to power,” said Johnson, the former AP bureau chief who tag-teamed state politics coverage with LeBlanc under the golden dome.

“Some of the biggest stories I got as a state house reporter came because I bumped into somebody unexpectedly or saw something that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen,” he added.

While empty seats are a common sight inside the press room nowadays, not all news outlets have disappeared. Reporters from the Boston Herald, the Worcester Telegram, GBH News, WWLP-TV of Western Massachusetts, Axios Boston, Politico Massachusetts, and Springfield-based MassLive all regularly take a seat. The State House News Service, an independently owned wire service that’s been around since the 1890s, has about a half dozen reporters next door, and WBUR has one. The Boston Globe has an office down the hall, located directly above the governor.

The Associated Press has had reporters on Beacon Hill for at least as long as State House News, according to State House Press Association records. “There have always been Massachusetts political leaders on the rise and the AP’s State House bureau chronicled that pretty closely,” Johnson said, listing off names like Tip O’Neill, the US House speaker who sparred with President Ronald Reagan; US Sen. John Kerry; and governors like Mike Dukakis, Mitt Romney, and Deval Patrick.

LeBlanc, Johnson’s former colleague who took the buyout, was there for the Romney and Patrick years, and the governors who followed. He declined to comment when reached via phone on Thursday. 

For people who know LeBlanc, it wasn’t surprising. He doesn’t like fanfare, preferring instead to cover the issues affecting people, as Johnson put it, from Pittsfield to Provincetown. “People in Massachusetts may not realize it, but Steve LeBlanc was a true public servant,” he said.

When the candy man meets the tax man

Gov. Maura Healey wants to salt sweets with a new tax.

The budget proposal her administration rolled out this week subjects candy to the state’s 6.25 percent sales tax, among other proposals. Just 11 states, including Massachusetts, exempt candy, according to WBZ.

Healey’s press release on the budget plan avoided mentioning the measure, as did the budget proposal’s executive summary. Governors are typically loathe to talk taxes, unless they’re talking about cuts. But tax hikes also don’t necessarily hurt reelection prospects, as Gov. Deval Patrick showed in 2010, a year after he increased the state’s sales tax to the current rate, up from 5 percent.

Healey was adamant with reporters on Wednesday that removing candy’s exemption is not a new tax. “What this is doing is simply saying when you go to the grocery store, instead of having candy treated like a purchase of bread and eggs and milk – essential groceries – that candy is now going to treated in the same way as when you go to the bakery in the back of the grocery store and pick up cupcakes for your kids,” she said.

News outlets didn’t buy it. From the Boston Globe to WBUR, the headlines noted the proposed new tax. (They also went with the larger bottom line for the budget, $62 billion, rather than the Healey administration’s preferred $59.6 billion, which does not include spending of millionaires tax revenue.)

Doug Howgate, the head of the business-backed Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation who closely analyzes budget proposals, said applying the sales tax to candy is a tax change.

Asked directly whether it’s a tax increase, Howgate’s answer was simple: If you buy candy, it is.

Whether the Legislature bites will be seen in the coming months as they put forward their own budget proposals, before hammering out a final version for Healey’s approval in the summer.

The post Political Notebook: The empty seat inside the State House press gallery appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

2024 WAS A YEAR OF TRANSITION. Offices toyed with the new reality of hybrid work patterns and the economic impact on city centers. The re-election of Donald Trump offered a bracing reality check for Democrats across the country, as even counties in deep blue Massachusetts veered away from the incumbent party. 

But a major disruption in the Bay State involved its health care systems, with the Steward Health Care bankruptcy imperiling community hospitals across the state and prompting an ugly reckoning with the role of private equity in health care systems. 

Several episodes of The Codcast explored the topic, starting with the zippily titled episode “Steward: A cautionary tale complete with a Snidely Whiplash.” Former editor Bruce Mohl talked with CommonWealth Beacon’s resident health care experts – and hosts of the Health or Consequences series on The Codcast – John McDonough of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute. 

Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre is “a new poster child of private equity,” McDonough said in February. The CEO is a modern Snidely Whiplash, McDonough said, “with his jets and his yachts and the amazing money he has taken out of this. It is just reprehensible behavior. We need to kind of clean the deck on this and have a little bit of a start over. These wealthy people who have abused this system, I hope they come out of this with nothing.”

Hattis and McDonough dissected Steward’s collapse throughout the year, recording Codcasts on the labor perspective into the crisis, how it interacts with the legacy of health care planning in the state, and Steward in court. Other health care-focused episodes examined the role of nonprofit community hospitals and the Merrimack Valley health care system.

Here are some of CommonWealth Beacon’s favorite and most-listened-to podcasts – covering health care to housing to human interest – along with links to the audio files and the stories we wrote about the conversations.

1. “Steward: A cautionary tale complete with Snidely Whiplash” – February

John McDonough of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute talk about what went wrong with Steward Health Care, and different paths out of the current situation.

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up.

2. “Pulling the thread on North Shore racial covenants” – January

The Dirty Deeds Project brought to light hundreds of racially restrictive covenants in home deeds on the North Shore. Kenann McKenzie-DeFranza, North Shore NAACP branch president, and Jean Michael Fana, Harborlight Homes advocacy and education manager, discussed the project, exploring how talking about ugly history can empower Massachusetts communities to confront it.

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up.

3. “Engagements: the business of the state?” – September

A series of articles about a buzzy Supreme Judicial Court case on the fate of a $70,000 engagement ring inspired this Codcast episode. Meredith Goldstein, love advice columnist for the Boston Globe, discussed the meaning of relationships, gender roles and marriage in the context of arguments before the high court on what happens to engagement rings when an engagement fizzles out.

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up.

4. “Doubling down on higher education” – July

Massachusetts Sen. Jo Comerford, the Senate chair of the Joint Committee on Education, dove into higher education policy, including the free community college measure included in the recent state budget, the full range of programs that support students, and the role of higher education in economic development and public life.

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up.

5. “Latino voters lead rightward shift in Mass.” – November

The 2024 election offered a bracing counter to “demographics as destiny” assumptions about voter behavior. As the country swung away from the Biden administration, citing painful inflation and cost of living issues, Latino voters led the pivot. Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia discussed the rightward trend of Latino voters, potential mechanisms behind the shift, and lessons learned for both political parties.

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up in English or leer en español.

6. “Eng predicts MBTA ridership will bounce back after service improves” – March

MBTA General Manager Phil Eng kicked off the year with ambitious plans to improve the quality of T commutes, with ridership still flagging thanks to the pandemic and plagued with slow zones. He talked about his first year running the T, why he’s optimistic about bringing riders back, and where things stood with train car manufacturer CRRC.

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up.

7. “AG Andrea Campbell talks local power and gambling boom” – April

The Supreme Judicial Court is considering whether or not Attorney General Andrea Campbell can force the town of Milton to abide by the new MBTA Communities housing law. She discussed the suit, why she believes that in housing disputes “the state trumps” local control, and her other first-year priorities as attorney general.

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up.

8. “Milton’s dilemma in the face of housing reform” – October

In arguments before the high court on the MBTA Communities law, justices wondered what the intention of the Legislature was in the first place. State Sen. Brendan Crighton of Lynn, who introduced the initial amendment, and zoning expert and consultant Amy Dain broke down the role of multi-family zoning in tackling the growing housing crisis and how lawmakers thought the law might be enforced.

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up.

9. “Ballot questions and battles royale” and “I’d take a ballot for you” – September

In a special live podcast crossover, The Codcast and The Horse Race considered the slate of 2024 ballot measures with ballot campaign veterans Lynda Tocci of Dewey Square Group, Conor Yunits of Issues Management Group, and Steve Crawford of Crawford Strategies. The discussion dove into the history of Massachusetts ballot initiatives and the mixed bag of 2024 referendums.

Listen to the Codcast and the Horse Race or read the write-up.

10. “Introducing CommonWealth Beacon editor Laura Colarusso” – November

As the year wrapped up, so did an era of CommonWealth (once a quarterly print magazine, now the digital civic news organization CommonWealth Beacon). We have a new editor – Laura Colarusso – to replace Bruce Mohl, who retired after 16 years at the helm. The CWB team and our readers started to get to know Laura through a Codcast conversation that ranged from Laura’s history as young Pentagon reporter to editor at Neiman Reports. As CommonWealth Beacon enters a new era, we leave you this year with Laura’s philosophy of public service journalism in her own words. 

Listen to the Codcast or read the write-up.

The post CommonWealth Beacon’s best Codcasts of 2024 appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

ALL ROADS lead to home, or perhaps the nearest T station.

Housing and transportation are both issues that roiled policymakers on and off Beacon Hill, as state officials sought to navigate crises on both fronts by passing a multibillion housing bond bill and debating ways to fund transportation as the MBTA faces a yawning budget gap. And the two are linked, as US Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it in a talk to the business-backed New England Council a year ago: Transportation is housing and housing is transportation.

“If we’ve got a transit system that works, it gets people to their jobs, it actually helps reduce pressure, if we can build up supply, reduces the pressure on housing and helps us bring down cost,” she said. “The problem we’ve got in Massachusetts is we’re broken in both directions. We don’t have enough housing and we have a 1955 transit system – and I’m not just talking about Eastern Mass. I’m talking about all across the state – that doesn’t work even at 1955 standards.”

So it’s not a surprise when we pulled together a list of this year’s top CommonWealth Beacon articles – stories that caught the eye of our readers and ones that we’re proud to have published – transportation and housing prominently figured in several of them. At the nexus is the MBTA Communities Act, which requires that a community within the MBTA service area have at least one zoning district where multi-family housing is permitted.

The state’s highest court has raised questions about whether the law is a toothless one, and Jennifer Smith looked into how the fight between Attorney General Andrea Campbell and the resistant town of Milton had a showdown inside the Adams Courthouse.

Another city had its own fight with Beacon Hill over whether the state’s use of a Days Inn motel as an emergency shelter for homeless families could be used as a reason to stop a proposal to build 300 units elsewhere in Methuen, Gintautas Dumcius reported.

Bruce Mohl, the CommonWealth Beacon editor who retired in November, broke the story earlier this year of a talk delivered by Gov. Maura Healey’s transportation chief, Monica Tibbits-Nutt, who offered an “unfiltered” take on her job. She raised the idea of border tolls, but amid the blowback, Healey swiftly issued her own statement saying she is not proposing tolls at any border.

Meanwhile, Michael Jonas reviewed a record-setting period for Boston as it saw the fewest homicides and shootings in the first quarter of the year, well before the city’s extraordinary stretch of low violence drew headlines in The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times.

Bhaamati Borkhetaria, who has been covering the Massachusetts marijuana sector, dug into whether the state’s pledge to give a hand to people hit hard by the war on drugs was working out the way it was meant to.

There are also stories about the last of Somerville’s old guard, what it means to be an artist competing to lobby Beacon Hill, the effect of tutoring on pandemic learning loss, and the controversy of end-of-life legislation through the eyes of someone living in pain.

If you aren’t already a subscriber to our weekday Download email newsletter, where we’ve featured some of these stories, or our Sunday CommonWealth Voices newsletter of top opinion pieces, please consider doing so here. We also have a weekend roundup of the week’s stories that you might have missed, called “The Saturday Send.” Feel free to share the link with others who you think want to be in the know on Massachusetts-focused reporting and commentary. If you’d like to become a CommonWealth Beacon supporter, you can do that here.

The post The top ten CommonWealth Beacon stories of 2024 appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

IT’S A GRIM moment for American democracy. The president-elect suggested he might rule as a dictator and trust in the federal government is at historic lows.

How did we get here? The list is long, but one factor feels particularly insidious: the decline of local news.

Since 2005, 3,200 print newspapers have shuttered, with 130 disappearing last year alone. They continue to close at a rate of more than two per week, according to a new report from the Medill School at Northwestern University, and now almost 55 million people have little or no access to local news.

But on a Saturday afternoon last month, something unusual happened against the backdrop of so many newspaper deaths. In the halls of an old factory in Waltham, a packed crowd witnessed one being born.

“Our objective is really to bring nonpartisan news coverage back to the city, so all of us can become more engaged in civic and cultural life,” said June Kinoshita, a Waltham resident and one of the co-founders of The Waltham Times.

More than 120 people attended the community forum at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation to formally launch the non-profit news outlet. The Times has been publishing regularly on its website since September. It has hired a part-time journalist and several freelancers, and began publishing a weekly email newsletter that has 100 new people signing up each week, according to Kinoshita, a former editor at MIT Technology Review and Scientific American.

The goal is to hire a full time, professional editor and a handful of journalists that will be supported by volunteers doing marketing, IT and administrative work. The founders intend to raise money through donations, grants, memberships and local advertising.

The site does not have a paywall. By next fall, the team behind the new venture plans to begin sending a free weekly print edition to every household in Waltham.

The Waltham Times is the latest entry in an emerging sector of nonprofit local news outlets. Some two dozen Massachusetts communities are now home to citizen-led news enterprises aiming to fill the void left by the shuttering or hollowing out of community newspapers that once served as key pillars of the local civic infrastructure.

While Boston itself is flush with news outlets, including large organizations with big  budgets and staffs, from the Boston Globe to WBUR and GBH, in the metro area where nearly 5 million people live, there are fewer and fewer newsrooms dedicated to individual cities and towns.

A snapshot of data in Greater Boston from the Northwestern University report shows dozens of remaining local papers have been folded into Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, known for its cost-cutting measures, including laying off journalists.

News about Waltham can be sparse. As of December 11, Gannett-owned Wicked Local’s top story on the city was about a Waltham man’s arrest for threatening to blow up a Belmont woman’s home, published on November 20th.

Patch Media, a digital-only local news company, covers communities across the country, including Waltham. Waltham Patch has one editor for the city, and he also covers Framingham, Natick, Braintree, and all of Cape Cod. He lives in Rhode Island.

What happens when a city doesn’t have robust local news coverage?

Zach Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern’s Medill School, said the effects are profound.

“Voter participation and voter turnout that tends to decrease,” he said. “Incumbents tend to be re-elected more often and run unchallenged more often. Split ticket voting, where candidates are chosen across party lines disappears, and instead people just tend to vote along the party lines,” he said. “In the absence of local news,” Metzger said, “the national level politics and national level partisanship become local politics. And the sort of partisan divides that we’ve been seeing within our national politics, those start to influence local elections and local politics as well.”

Towards the end of The Waltham Times’s community forum, members of the audience were asked what stories they wanted covered. Immediately, hands shot up. Why did a freshman soccer team get cut? What’s happening to the tree canopy in the city? Why did it take three years to fix the bumps in the road, and where is all the tax money going?

In a moment where 36 percent of Americans have no trust in the media, The Waltham Times’s aim to bring high-quality, unbiased, community-focused coverage to the city is meaningful. At the launch event, Kinoshita, the co-founder, and her colleagues emphasized the importance of an objective, factual news source for the city, and the hunger for local news in the crowd was palpable.

I have no illusions that one local newspaper can heal the divisions in the country, unravel extremist movements, or convince an incoming president to reconsider his threats to  throw journalists in jail over coverage he doesn’t like.

But a more informed community with vigorous news coverage inevitably brings politics back to the local level, and gives more of us a common ground from which all of us can participate in democracy together.

While there are many reasons to despair, the birth of a new local newspaper gives me something I haven’t felt much of lately: hope.

Jesse Steinmetz is a freelance reporter and public radio producer in Waltham.

The post Good news about news in Waltham appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

IT’S NO SECRET to anyone working in journalism that the industry is in flux, to put it gently. And here at CommonWealth Beacon, this fall has also been a time of transition completely apart from the usual and unusual political shifts each November. Last week, we said goodbye to our editor of 16 years – Bruce Mohl – and welcomed Laura Colarusso into the role.

I (Jennifer) tend to be the main podcaster of our crew here at CommonWealth Beacon, so when it came time to introduce readers to our new editor, we thought Laura and I might just have a conversation on The Codcast about journalism and its modern role. 

It’s a chance for you to get to know her, and a chance for me to pick her brain about the way she’s thinking about our small but mighty newsroom heading forward. Her vision of journalism as a fundamentally public service profession stood out from the jump.

“I think the focus of journalism should be to help people better understand the world around them, make informed decisions as citizens, and create, ultimately, a community,” Laura told me. “I think the service part of public service is really key, because it’s about creating knowledge and information that serves a community, however that’s defined. That’s what I mean in theory, but for CommonWealth Beacon, I really think it means telling people about their government and what the government is doing for them, but also how their tax money is being spent, and how the policies that the government puts into place ultimately affect their lives.”

It can be useful to think of the journalist as something of a scientist, she said. 

“I think really implicit in this is the idea that there’s a rigorous adherence to ethical standards and treating the reporting process almost like the scientific method,” she said. 

Laura comes to us after more than three years at Nieman Reports, which is the Harvard University Nieman Foundation magazine focused on the journalism industry. Before that, she was digital managing editor at GBH News and a digital opinion editor at the Boston Globe.

It was helpful to me to hear how Laura’s decades in the field – called to journalism after college and by now having worked in “everything from television to newspapers, magazines, radio, and digital-only, and covered a wide variety of topics from the military, to climate change, to the gender pay gap, to local politics” – have shaped her journalistic ethos and her approach to seeking out important stories. Below are a few excerpts from our conversation, which you can listen to in full here. 

On “objectivity” in journalism:

“To me, objectivity is not the right word. I know that there’s a big debate about it in our industry right now. I think trying to sum it up in one word is really unhelpful because people are going to have their biases, but if you’re focused on the reporting process itself, and you’re making sure that you’re talking to a range of people, that you’re contextualizing the information that you have … then I think you have a pretty rigorous reporting process. And you might actually come to a place where it’s not balanced, you don’t have two sides equally weighted, but you have something that is somewhat objective because you’ve gone through a process that allows you to really interrogate yourself, your biases, and the information that you’re gathering.”

On a story coming together:

“I think I’ve just sort of developed a sense for what an audience is for a particular publication and what a good story would be for that audience. I hope it’s not corny to say that when a good story idea comes together, there’s a small spark of joy. The story meeting is my favorite part of my job. I love getting together with reporters, editors, just bringing the group together and bouncing ideas off of each other. … And then, you know, there’s also a bit of panic or terror, because once we know we’ve got a good story idea, I don’t want anybody to beat us. I’m really competitive that way. ”

On trends in the journalism industry:

“One thing that I somewhat worry about is trading off innovation for reporting. Technological innovation is so important in so many aspects of life, and in journalism too, but I think sometimes we think that the innovation is gonna get us out of this crisis because we can do good reporting with fewer journalists. And we can – technology has helped us with that to a certain extent – but at the end of the day, if we go back to the public service aspect of the job, I think that it is very community-oriented. And you need people in communities. … Maybe you might have a financial paper that can write up an earnings report with AI, but that’s not going to help you create that bond with a reader or a listener or a watcher that allows them to feel like you’re a trustworthy news organization.”

On coverage in Massachusetts:

“Every state has seen a decline in the number of news organizations. I think we might be slightly better off than others. … But Massachusetts isn’t unique in that in the areas where there’s less population density, where there’s less wealth, it’s harder to keep local news organizations. So you tend to see more rural communities not have coverage. … One other nuance to get at here is even when you still have a news organization, sometimes they’re ghost papers or ghost organizations where it might be a national chain that owns the paper and it’s really more of a regional hub. So they’re not doing local news – they’re doing sort of regional news that’s pulled in from a lot of different places because they’re trying to save money. Maybe they have one reporter or one editor on the ground, but they don’t actually have news people there covering the local community.”

On hope for the industry: 

“When the hard work is done, the reporting definitely breaks through. I’m thinking of the New York Times and the New Yorker’s exposés on Harvey Weinstein. That launched a movement. ProPublica shined a light on the ethics scandals at the Supreme Court. … The student newspaper at the University of Florida uncovered how the president, Ben Sasse, had been making all these sweetheart deals with friends in Washington and that his office’s budget had grown by some factor that was quite large. So there’s still a lot of really good work being done. I think I take comfort in that, even when the industry is facing pretty difficult headwinds, polarization in this country is real and it’s something that we all are grappling with. There’s still really excellent work being done that is breaking through and making change. And I think the more we focus on that, the more we focus on what we can control, the better off we’ll be.”

For more with CommonWealth Beacon editor Laura Colarusso – on covering the Pentagon after 9/11, what Walter Lippmann can teach us about modern journalism, and responsible reporting in an era of diminished media literacy – listen to The Codcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The post CommonWealth Beacon’s new editor on public service journalism appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

CommonWealth Beacon editor Bruce Mohl retired last week after 16 years. Longtime opinion contribtor Jim Aloisi offered this tribute and reflection on the mark he made.

I’VE BEEN A somewhat regular contributor to Commonwealth Beacon since 2013.  Like many opportunities in my life, this role was not one I had contemplated or sought out. My writing for CommonWealth began because its editor, Bruce Mohl, reached out and challenged me to move out of my comfort zone. I will always be thankful to Bruce for doing that, and opening up a new chapter in my life.

Bruce reached out to me when he noticed a comment I wrote in response to an article on transit advocacy. He called me, said he liked my comments, and wanted me to consider turning them into a brief commentary. I said yes, and thus began what is now over a decade of writing regular opinion pieces for CommonWealth.

When Bruce reached out to me it was only a few years after I had left public office, a time when I still experienced a form of post-public service PTSD. It had been a challenging time, leaving a high-pressure, high-profile job that I cared deeply about for new opportunities that paid better but satisfied a lot less. 

The last thing on my mind in those years was emerging from a self-imposed exile and re-entering the public arena. Bruce helped pave my pathway back to civic life, and I’ll be forever grateful.

The experience for me has been thoroughly satisfying. I like to write, and I enjoy the editorial and revision process. Bruce is a first-rate editor. His suggestions for revision, his corrections, and his occasional questions and gentle push-backs always and inevitably improved my writing. 

He brings an editor’s keen eye for content that will inform and engage. He knows the importance of writing in a way that is accessible, so readers will understand the underlying issues. Bruce has shown himself to be the exemplar of a good editor: I have improved as a writer because of his guidance.

Over the past decade I came to understand that the CommonWealth audience was exactly the audience I wanted to reach. That audience may be smaller than those drawn to the Globe or other online platforms, but it is highly influential. If you’re writing about — and hoping to influence — the public policy debate in Massachusetts, the people you want to reach are reading CommonWealth Beacon.

As editor of CommonWealth Beacon, Bruce has skillfully navigated the new era of digital information platforms. He’s a newspaper guy at heart, but he brought the skill set of a journalist to the task of building a powerful online presence. 

We would occasionally meet for lunch at the Parker House, the quintessential Boston place to meet and exchange information. During one of those conversations we talked about the growing interest in podcasts, and soon thereafter, Bruce introduced The Codcast to CommonWealth followers. The Codcast began as an experiment but quickly became an important weekly contribution to the civic dialogue.

Bruce and executive editor Michael Jonas have made CommonWealth Beacon the respected, indispensable news and opinion outlet for anyone with an interest in Massachusetts state and municipal government and public affairs. They bring the dogged determination of good reporters, always looking to track down the untold story, focused on the facts, and eager to score a scoop if one is on offer.

Bruce has broken more than one important news story, making CommonWealth a must-read for anyone desirous of being plugged into what’s really happening both transparently and behind the scenes.

So many of us who care deeply about the city of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who believe in the importance of solid, objective news reporting, and who enjoy a well-curated opinion page, will miss Bruce’s editorial guidance and leadership. 

Easygoing in temperament, professional at all times, and generous in spirit, Bruce has left an enduring mark on journalism in 21^st century Massachusetts. Nothing better could be said of anyone in that oft-maligned profession.

James Aloisi is a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation.

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THE NEWSPAPER WORLD was rocked last week when two billionaire owners, Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times followed by Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post, killed endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris against the wishes of their editorial boards.

Harris supporters erupted in outrage, with many of them vowing to cancel their subscriptions and demanding to know how two wealthy men could be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of the editorial process. Aren’t media moguls supposed to be rarely seen and never heard?

Now, it’s true that Bezos’s and Soon-Shiong’s actions were outrageous, but that’s because of the high-handed, disrespectful manner in which they handled the endorsements. In fact, it is perfectly acceptable for newspaper owners to involve themselves in the editorial pages. The problem is that we journalists are not very good at explaining the ethics of our trade, and we too often act arrogantly toward the public we purportedly serve. As a result, endorsements are poorly understood.

With that in mind, and with the final day of voting barely a week away, here’s a guide to what you need to know about political endorsements and newspaper editorials in general.

• Owners have the final say. In decades past, rich men — and they were nearly always men — bought papers mainly so they could exercise political influence. In fact, the Post was founded in 1877 by a 38-year-old New Hampshire native named Stilson Hutchins whose main interest was to get involved in Democratic Party politics.

These days, large newspapers like the Post, the LA Times, and, for that matter, The Boston Globe have editorial boards comprising the paper’s opinion journalists, sometimes joined by a few members of the community. It’s the board that generally decides on whom to endorse. In most cases the owner and the board are sympatico, but occasionally the owner will overrule the board and endorse a different candidate. When that happens, we don’t usually hear about it.

At both the Post and the LA Times, management announced last week that endorsements would be ended altogether, and that, too, would not be outrageous except for the circumstances under which these announcements came about. Back in August, The Minnesota Star Tribune, yet another paper with a billionaire owner, said that it would no longer endorse candidates, and news of that move barely created a stir. Newspapers owned by the Gannett chain and by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital have been moving away from endorsements. Nonprofit news organizations are on the rise, and they can’t endorse lest they lose their tax exemption.

So endorsements may be fading away. The problem with Bezos and Soon-Shiong is that they acted at the last minute, overturning their editorial boards and convincing absolutely no one that there was any principle behind their decision beyond not provoking the wrath of former President Donald Trump. Indeed, both papers had already published endorsements in state and local races.

Given that, we should all be outraged at Bezos at Soon-Shiong — but not for what they did. Rather, their offense was the way they did it.

• Owners should steer clear of news coverage. Although it is acceptable for owners to get involved with the editorial pages, it is universally regarded as a serious ethical breach for owners to interfere with news coverage. This is sometimes described as the separation of church and state, which can be confusing, because the wall between news and advertising is also referred to as the separation of church and state.

Soon-Shiong has reportedly violated this sacrosanct rule on occasion. Earlier this year the LA Times’s executive editor, Kevin Merida, resigned, and supposedly one of the reasons for his departure was that Soon-Shiong had demanded that he kill a story about a friend of his whose dog had bitten someone. (I am not making this up.) Merida also left amid major cuts to the newsroom, so it wasn’t just the wayward canine that led him to conclude he’d had enough.

In contrast to Soon-Shiong, Bezos was a model owner from the time that he bought The Washington Post in 2013 until fairly recently. He stood up courageously to Trump’s threats against the Post and enjoyed a reputation for not interfering in coverage of his business interests, including Amazon and the Blue Origin rocket company.

But sometime after Trump left office and the Post’s legendary executive editor (and former Boston Globe editor), Marty Baron, retired, the paper began bleeding readers and money. At least outwardly, Bezos has seemed to be losing interest in the Post. Last year he hired a new publisher, Fleet Street veteran Will Lewis, and has stuck by him despite Lewis’s involvement in several ethical lapses, including an alleged cover-up in the U.K. phone-hacking scandal that has led to an investigation by Scotland Yard.

There is still no evidence that Bezos has ever interfered in the Post’s news coverage. But given the way he handled the Harris endorsement, he should now be regarded as someone who’s on probation.

• Endorsements don’t matter, except when they do. For all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the canceled Harris endorsements, they were hardly likely to move any votes, especially given that the Post and the LA Times appeal mainly to a liberal readership already committed to voting for Harris. A presidential endorsement is more a statement of values than it is a genuine effort at persuading voters.

A contrarian endorsement — imagine The New York Times coming out for Trump — might make a few heads turn. Still, voters generally don’t need any guidance when it comes to presidential candidates or, arguably, prominent statewide positions such as governor or U.S. senator.

With more obscure offices and ballot questions, though, endorsements can make a real difference. Most of us would want to know who our local newspaper supports for, say, city council, select board, or school committee. For that matter, I’m glad that The Boston Globe’s opinion pages published “yes” or “no” endorsements of the five statewide ballot questions. You can read only so many competing points of view. A clear opinion from journalists who’ve taken the time to study the issues can be welcome guidance.

The Globe, by the way, is among a diminishing number of papers that continue to endorse up and down the ballot. The New York Times, weirdly enough, announced recently that it would no longer endorse in state and local races, where its imprimatur might be taken seriously, but that it would continue to endorse in presidential races — as it did, joining the Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Houston Chronicle, the Times Union of Albany, New York, and a few others in backing Harris.

So what is the future of endorsements? Two years ago, Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby joined Ellen Clegg and me on our podcast, What Works: The Future of Local News, to discuss exactly that subject. Jacoby opposed endorsements; Clegg, a former Globe editorial-page editor, favored them; and I was somewhere in the middle.

One idea that Jacoby suggested was that news outlets publish a grid fairly early in an election campaign showing where candidates stand on the issues. Then, whenever there’s a story about that particular race, it can link back to that issues grid.

I think it’s a great idea. I can also tell you that my journalism students are skeptical of newspaper editorials in general, never mind endorsements. The unsigned opinion piece, written in the institutional voice and handed down as though it were the word of God, may have seen better days.

Once we get past last week’s miserable developments at The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, maybe we can get back to the vital work of figuring out how we can better serve our communities.

Dan Kennedy is a professor of journalism at Northeastern University and the author, with Ellen Clegg, of What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate. Follow their updates and podcast at whatworks.news. Kennedy is also a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory board.

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A NEW LOCAL PODCAST covering Melrose debuted this month. Over about 15 minutes, an unnamed man and woman chat about recent city zoning meetings and how the local government is approaching smart growth and sustainable development goals in the Boston suburb. 

But the hosts are not flesh-and-blood human beings. The Melrose Update Robocast was made by dropping public documents into an artificial intelligence program that then generates a conversation about the issues with these fake people. Its creator isn’t trying to hide that, even leaving in small quirks to signal an inhuman feel, like the AI-generated logo that adds an extra “e” to the end of Melrose. 

“AI caught my attention in a new and energizing way, like most people, right when ChatGPT was released,” said Robocast creator Tom Catalini of Melrose. Catalini is a former host of the local cable access show “Let’s Talk Melrose, Melrose,” a mostly pandemic-era project discussing local goings-on, which ran for 200 episodes and ended on Valentine’s Day 2024. “One of the thoughts I had – having been somebody who’s somewhat interested and attentive and a little bit engaged in conversations around the community – is I pretty quickly wondered if there was an [AI] application in that space.”

The artificial intelligence tool du jour – Google’s NotebookLM – is all over the internet with its handy document summary tools and buzzy artificially generated podcast-esque conversations. 

ChatGPT felt clunky when it came to analyzing local policy documents, Catalini said, but something about NotebookLM’s voices felt more “credible” even as they remain slightly inhuman and generic-sounding. So he popped zoning documents into NotebookLM, created a podcast conversation, and hit publish on Spotify.

Catalini’s home of Melrose is, like many cities and towns, feeling the pinch of journalism’s contractions.

At one point, the Boston suburb of about 29,000 people had some decent coverage options – a weekly paper, a dedicated Patch reporter, and occasional coverage from the statewide papers or NPR radio stations. Now the local Patch – a digital news site – is mostly focused on statewide or neighboring community news. The Melrose Weekly News – a family-owned chain – features notices and short profiles of local businesses and events, sports scores, and obituaries. The shuttered Melrose Free Press, which operated for 119 years until 2021, reroutes to the generic Wicked Local homepage, which no longer has a dedicated Melrose tag.

City policy can occasionally make it to statewide and even national attention, as it did when Melrose followed Brookline’s lead by passing a generational tobacco ban. But, increasingly, city websites themselves or local conversational podcasts can become the main source of news.

Catalini sighs describing the Melrose news options over the 25 years since he moved with his wife to the city, which felt “robust” at the time. Now, almost nobody is covering hyper-local news like override votes or digging into the overwhelming documentation around proposed zoning policy, he said.

“In a way, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” he said of the Robocast. “I think there’s a greater need for local reporting, as the world becomes more complex and more information is available to us, and the issues are more nuanced, and everything’s happening at a faster pace. I would argue that the need for local journalism and reporting is greater, not less. And this approach, while I’m excited about it, I don’t think that it is in any way a replacement.”

Catalini’s experiment in Melrose is in conversation with other recent attempts to address apparent local news shortages in Massachusetts through AI. A local start-up last year pitched AI-written articles covering Arlington meetings, though there have been no posts on that site since June and the local news outlet YourArlington has been in operation for almost two decades. 

Like other AI tech, NotebookLM’s friendly-sounding artificial voices can feel like a potential balm for underserved news areas, as long as the creators and listeners want to push past concerns about the accuracy and business model of the underlying technology. 

Large language model styles of AI, like the omnipresent ChatGPT, are known to hallucinate facts and citations because they create text based on the most likely series of words. Their success, according to multiple lawsuits targeting AI language and image generators, depends on a mass-scale theft of copyrighted material to train these tools raking in tens of billions of dollars in venture capital funding. The power needed to sustain artificial intelligence is pushing emissions up, even sparking a plan from Microsoft to reopen the notorious Three Mile Island nuclear site to help power its AI systems.

Sarah Scire, deputy editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, discussed the rise of AI in newsrooms on an episode of The Codcast last winter. The lab isn’t completely cool to the idea of incorporating AI tools into news, describing it as a way to help under-resourced newsrooms where reporters simply can’t get to every civic meeting under the sun.

“I think that the problem with these AI-generated articles is that the writing is bad and the reporting isn’t accurate, and those are two pretty critical things for journalists and for journalism,” she said. Compared to human writing, she said, the AI-generated prose is “dull, it’s unoriginal, and it’s more often than not wrong in ways that can be hard to detect both for the journalists who are using the technology and for the readers themselves.”

Scire said the “human hand” is an essential part of keeping AI on the straight and narrow.

Initially, there was very little posted information about what kind of AI was used to create the Melrose Robocast. It was pitched as local issues sifted through by artificial intelligence to “get to the gist of things quickly and easily. Let the robots read all the documents and analyze the meeting transcripts.”

Catalini has updated the podcast description with a note that the content is fully AI generated without human fact checking, made by loading publicly available documents and meeting transcripts into NotebookLM. He may or may not continue the project, which was at its core a tech experiment stemming from a frustration at living in a functional news desert.

In more and more places like Melrose, “we’ve got nothing else,” Catalini said. “So if I’m marching across the desert for four months and you offer me warm chocolate milk, it’s gonna taste good, even though I’d like a gallon of ice cold water. So this is something. It’s not nothing.”

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LAURA COLARUSSO, the editor of Nieman Reports, will be taking over as editor of CommonWealth Beacon in November.

Colarusso will be replacing Bruce Mohl, who is retiring after nearly 16 years in that role.

Nieman Reports is one of three publications published by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. It focuses on thought leadership in journalism. Colarusso has served as editor since January and prior to that as senior editor since July 2021.

A graduate of Columbia University and Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, Colarusso has also worked as digital managing editor at WGBH and digital opinion editor at the Boston Globe.

“CommonWealth Beacon has a long history of creating outstanding journalism that helps the people of Massachusetts understand their government and the changes taking place in the world around them,” Colarusso said in a statement. “I couldn’t be more excited to join this organization at such a critical time for our democracy, and I’m looking forward to leading CommonWealth Beacon as we work to connect with broader and more diverse audiences, and deliver even more high quality news and information to our readers.”

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