Digital startups are a bright spot in the latest ‘State of Local News’ report, but rural areas are lagging 21 Oct 9:16 AM (yesterday, 9:16 am)
Finding news in the annual State of Local News report from Northwestern University’ Medill School can be a challenge because, frankly, it’s always the same depressing thing: newspapers keep closing; digital startups are rising, but not by enough to fill the gap; and be sure to tune in again next year, when the situation is likely to be even worse.
Still, there are a few interesting nuggets in the latest update, which was released Monday. In particular, I was drawn to some observations in the report about rural areas, which is where news deserts tend to be concentrated. News deserts, as defined by the project’s now-retired founder, Penny Abernathy, are counties without any locally based news organizations.
As newspapers continue to close, independent startups are filling the gap. But it’s uneven at best, with most startups concentrated in urban and suburban areas. The report puts it this way:
Over the past five years, we have tracked more than 300 startups that have emerged across the country. Support for both these new startups, which have opened in almost every state, as well as existing legacy outlets has come from a surge in philanthropic investment as well as public policy initiatives. Over the past year, such efforts have boosted a wide variety of news outlets. Overall, however, philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.
The report also finds that fewer than 10% of digital-only news organizations are in rural counties, and that the demographics of counties that do support digital projects “tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Of course, internet connectivity tends to lag in rural areas as well.
Given those realities, the authors observe that public broadcasting is uniquely positioned to help fill the news gap in rural America. Researchers found that primary public stations (that is, not counting repeaters) are on the air in 46% of news-desert counties and 53% of counties with only one news source.
“What’s needed is to increase that reporting network to match that distribution network,” said Zachary Metzger, director of the Medill State of Local News Project, at a webinar introducing this year’s findings. But we all know that public media are in no position bolster their journalism — not with Donald Trump and the Republican Congress cutting all federal support for public broadcasting for the next two years, a blow that adds up to $1.1 billion.
Philanthropy, too, is unevenly distributed. During the webinar I asked Metzger about the challenge posed by suddenly bereft public broadcasters seeking funds from the same pool of foundation grants that hyperlocal news projects have relied on. He replied that the real challenge will come two to five years down the line, when public broadcasters are competing with other nonprofits. (Perhaps we can hope that federal support will be restored after Trump is no longer in the White House.)
In addition, philanthropy tends to be nationally concentrated, while local philanthropy is strongest in affluent areas — no doubt a factor in why most startups are launched in those areas. The 10,000 largest national grants went to just 1,000 recipients, and 90% were in urban and metro areas, Metzger said.
In paging through the report, I found one other significant data point. Web traffic to the 100 largest newspapers has fallen by more than 45% over the past four years, according to Comscore. Only 11 experienced any growth. The report puts it this way:
This drop has coincided with technological changes that threaten to upend how readers interact with news sites. The widespread integration of generative AI into search engines, for example, has led to users seeing search results with headlines and content in summary form, without actually going to the underlying sources (which are pushed down further in search results). Already, this has particularly affected some of the largest revenue generators in an outlet’s portfolio, such as product reviews and “evergreen” journalism. Additionally, traditional news outlets are facing competition from new, emerging sources. In Medill’s poll of Chicago news consumers, nearly a third of respondents said that they received news from content creators.
During the news conference, Medill Professor Tim Franklin said the dropoff began in 2022 because of changes that Facebook made to its algorithm that played down news, compounded more recently by AI search, much of it via Google, which is now keeping traffic on its own site rather than handing it off to news publishers. The response by community journalists, Franklin said, has been “an increasing emphasis on building loyalty, not necessarily page views,” through newsletters, alerts and in-person events.
Finally, a longstanding complaint. If you look at the map above, you’ll see that Massachusetts is a veritable news oasis, with no counties that would qualify as news deserts. But we have just the barest vestiges of county government in Massachusetts. Instead, we have 351 cities and towns, each with its own city council or select board, school committee, police department and the like. Every one of those communities needs accountability journalism. Unfortunately, we are a state where one small town may have a strong local news outlet and another, bordering town has nothing. Medill’s methodology may work for much of the country, but it doesn’t work here.
Sara Fisher has a good summary of the topline findings at Axios. Those findings are also contained in a press release sent out by Medill, which I’m reproducing in full below.
News deserts hit new high and 50 million have limited access to local news, study finds
Federal funding cuts to public broadcasting may accelerate local news crisis
EVANSTON, Ill. — The number of local news deserts in the U.S. jumped to record levels this year as newspaper closures continued unabated, and funding cuts to public radio could worsen the problem in coming months, according to the Medill State of Local News Report 2025 released today.
While the local news crisis deepened overall, Medill researchers found cause for optimism — more than 300 local news startups have launched over the past five years, 80% of which were digital-only outlets.
For the fourth consecutive year, the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications conducted a months-long, county-by-county survey of local news organizations to identify trends in the rapidly morphing local media landscape. Researchers looked at local newspapers, digital-only sites, ethnic media and public broadcasters.
This year’s report also includes an analysis of a timely issue: the potential impact of the federal defunding of public broadcasting on local news deserts. And for the first time, Medill researchers examined the decline in digital readership at newspapers.
Key findings from the Medill study:
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- The number of news desert counties rose to 213 in 2025, a jump from 206 in last year’s report. In another 1,524 counties, there’s only one remaining news source. Taken together, some 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news. Twenty years ago, there were about 150 news desert counties, with about 37 million Americans at the time living in news deserts.
- The rise in news deserts was accompanied by an increase in newspaper closures, which ticked up to 136 this past year, a rate of more than two per week. Medill tracked 130 in last year’s report.
- In a marked departure, most of this year’s closures came at smaller, independently owned newspapers — not those controlled by large chains — signaling that an increasing number of long-time family publishers are surrendering to economic pressures.
- Total jobs at newspapers slumped 7% in the past year. The industry has now lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005.
- More than 200 newspapers changed hands in the past year, down from the number of transactions last year but still a torrid pace by historical standards.
- Nearly 300 public radio stations and more than 100 public television stations are producing local reporting. In nine counties, public radio is the sole news source, making those areas especially vulnerable to becoming news deserts in coming months.
- Utilizing predictive modeling created by the school’s Spiegel Research Center, the Medill team found 250 counties at high risk of becoming news deserts over the next decade.
- Web traffic to 100 of the largest newspapers has plummeted more than 45% in the past four years, according to a Medill analysis of data tracked by the media analytics company Comscore.
- The report counted more than 300 local news startups in the past five years across virtually every state, demonstrating a surge of entrepreneurship that has come along with a wave of philanthropic support. The vast majority of those startups, however, are in metro areas, leaving rural and less affluent areas further behind.
- The number of local news sites that are part of larger national networks is continuing to multiply. This year, there are 849 sites across 54 separate networks, up 14% from the 742 individual sites across 23 networks. This growth illustrates the increasingly prominent role of digital network sites on the local news landscape.
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“This report highlights the historic transformation in local news,” said Tim Franklin, professor and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. “On one hand, news deserts are expanding, and closures are continuing apace. On the other, hundreds of startups are emerging. The questions are what will the local news ecosystem look like in a few years, and will parts of the U.S. be left behind?”
Zach Metzger, director of the Medill State of Local News Project, said, “Over the past two decades, we’ve seen a dramatic reshaping in local news. Unlike in previous years, however, the majority of papers shutting down now are smaller, family-owned enterprises. These are often the most trusted active local news sources, and their loss creates new challenges for local news access in many communities.”
The Medill State of Local News Project is funded by grants and gifts from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Microsoft, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Foundation, the Myrta J. Pulliam Charitable Trust and Medill alumni John M. Mutz and Mark Ferguson.
Student journalists stand up for freedom of the press; plus, censorship at Indiana University 20 Oct 6:51 AM (2 days ago)
Fifty-five student news organizations have signed on to an amicus brief challenging the Trump regime’s use of federal immigration law to revoke the visas of international students and deport them for speech that is protected by the First Amendment.
The brief was filed by a coalition led by the Student Law Press Center and joined by the Associated Collegiate Press and the College Media Association. Among the student news outlets lending their support to the brief are nine from New England, including our independent student newspaper at Northeastern, The Huntington News. The others:
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- The Dartmouth, at Dartmouth College
- The Harvard Crimson
- The Heights, at Boston College
- The Mass Media, at UMass Boston
- The Mount Holyoke News
- The Trinity Tripod, at Trinity College
- The Tufts Daily
- The Yale Daily News
In addition, 11 student newsroom leaders, including one from Bates College in Maine, have signed as individuals.
The amicus brief was filed in support of a lawsuit brought by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and “challenging two federal immigration law provisions that give him unchecked power to revoke legal immigrants’ visas and deport them for protected speech.” The amicus brief itself says:
Because the First Amendment and a commitment to promoting its lessons and values prohibit the demonstrated chilling effect that has swept across student newsrooms and stands to continue to do so otherwise, the Court should enjoin Defendants from deploying the Revocation Provision and Deportation Provision to attack students for engaging in protected speech….
At stake is nothing less than the ability of student journalists — citizen and noncitizen alike — to engage freely in the democratic enterprise that education is meant to foster. The Constitution demands no less.
Emily Spatz, the editor-in-chief of The Huntington News, writes in a “Letter from the Editor” that her journalists have struggled to find a balance between protecting students and reporting the news since Donald Trump returned to office in January:
Since the start of the second Trump administration, many international students have refused to talk to The News on the record, significantly limiting our ability to document how federal policies are affecting our campus. More alarmingly, four students have asked The News to remove opinion pieces critical of the Trump administration since early March — requests we have granted due to the legitimate fears about their status in the country. These concerns are not unfounded, as exemplified by the detention of Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts University.
Öztürk, as you recall, was the Tufts Ph.D. student who was grabbed off the street by masked ICE goons last March and illegally detained as retribution for an op-ed she helped write for The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel. She is currently free after spending nearly two months in a Louisiana detention facility, but she remains in legal jeopardy.
I think it’s worth pointing out that these student journalists are standing up for the First Amendment at a moment when another story about freedom of the press for college publications is in the news as well. Katie Robertson of The New York Times has a comprehensive summary of the firing of the paid adviser to The Indiana Daily Student, at Indiana University, after he refused to stop students from complying with an edict to remove all news from their special print editions and to instead publish actual journalism only on their digital platforms.
It’s a very strange story, made all the more strange because it appears the administration wants to make it look like they’re doing this strictly for economic reasons rather than to throttle the Daily Student’s ability to distribute news. Eric Rasmusen, a professor of business economics and public policy at Indiana University, has published a useful overview of the situation at his newsletter, writing:
The IDS [as the paper is known] has been in financial trouble for some years, and the University supplies a lot of its budget. He who pays the piper calls the tune, unless the rules are set out carefully. I have heard that there were a number of meetings between Media Dean David Tolchinsky and IDS people on the subject of having a newsless issue of the newspaper. Rumor has it that the Dean offered the compromise of having an issue with news for “the community” and an issue without news for the campus. That’s interesting because it shows the problem isn’t the extra cost of printing news pages, but the idea of letting Homecoming visitors see news at all.
I’ll also note that Ethan Sandweiss of public radio station WFYI reported in June that Republican Gov. Mike Braun had removed all three of the university’s trustees who were elected by alumni and replaced two “with polarizing and well-known conservatives.”
All of which is to say that student publications dependent on university funds are at great risk in the current authoritian environment — and especially for student publications at public universities like Indiana University.
To return to the amicus brief for a moment, every one of the 55 student news outlets that signed on are independent, including The Huntington News. As A.J. Liebling once said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Yes, even student publications that receive some of their money from the university (student fees in most cases) have First Amendment rights, but those don’t count for much when the damage has already been done.
I hope that the students at the IDS are making plans to go independent. In 2025, they don’t need an office, and they don’t need a print edition if they can’t sell enough ads to justify one. Most important, they’ll have their independence.
Maybe they’ll even feel free to sign an amicus brief standing up for their First Amendment rights.
A reminder that George Santos was exposed by a local news outlet whose reporting was ignored 18 Oct 5:15 AM (4 days ago)
Weeks after the 2022 congressional elections, The New York Times exposed George Santos as a world-class fraudster, documenting a trail of deceit that eventually led to prison. The Times is still bragging about it today, and the Santos saga is sometimes held up as an example of the rot that can fester when local journalism fails.
But as I wrote in December 2022, it was the Times that failed — and, to an even greater extent, Newsday, a daily newspaper that purportedly covers Long Island, including Santos’ district. Both papers ignored reporting by a local news outlet, The North Shore Leader, showing that there were massive plumes of smoke emanating from Santos’ campaign headquarters and that maybe someone ought to take a look and see if there were any flames coming out as well.
Now that Donald Trump has commuted Santos’ seven-year sentence for no good reason and plenty of bad ones, I thought I’d republish what I wrote nearly three years ago.
A Long Island weekly had the goods on Santos several weeks before Election Day
Dec. 23, 2022
Josh Marshall, who’s been all over the George Santos story, has an update that casts media non-coverage of this fraud in an entirely new light. It turns out that there was a local news outlet reporting on several aspects of Santos’ fabricated history before Election Day.
You may recall that Santos is the newly elected Republican congressman from western Long Island who picked off a Democratic seat on the strength of his phony résumé. As best as anyone can tell, he’s been lying about his education, his career and maybe even whether he’s Jewish and gay. The New York Times exposed those fabrications on Monday, leaving a number of outraged observers to ask where the Times was last fall.
My own take was that the Times, as a national and international paper, couldn’t be expected to vet every candidate in New York State. At a certain point, you have to hold political candidates themselves responsible, and it appears that Santos’ Democratic opponent, Robert Zimmerman, didn’t do a very good job. As Marshall observes, the dossier Zimmerman’s campaign put together focused on the usual stuff — that Santos was a MAGA-loving Trump supporter — and missed the bigger picture.
But wait. A newspaper in Santos’ district called The North Shore Leader had it all along. Marshall posted the details on Thursday. As Leader reporter Niall Fitzgerald writes:
In a story first broken by the North Shore Leader over four months ago, the national media has suddenly discovered that US Congressman-elect George Santos (R-Queens / Nassau) — dubbed “George Scam-tos” by many local political observers — is a deepfake liar who has falsified his background, assets, and contacts. He is fact a wanted petty criminal in Brazil.
Fitzgerald doesn’t link to that earlier story, but the Leader endorsed Zimmerman nearly three weeks before Election Day and raised some serious questions about Santos’ background:
In 2020 Santos, then age 32, was the NY Director of a nearly $20 million venture fund called “Harbor City Capital” — until the SEC shut it down as a “Ponzi Scheme.” Over $6 million from investors was stolen — for personal luxuries like Mercedes cars, huge credit card bills, and a waterfront home — and millions from new investors were paid out to old investors. Classic Bernie Madoff “Ponzi scheme” fraud.
Santos’ campaign raises similar concerns. On paper Santos has raised over $2 million. But the money seems to have vanished — or never been there. Huge sums are listed with the FEC for personal expenses — like Brooks Brothers, Florida beach resorts, lavish restaurants and limo services — but many hundreds of thousands more disappear into a black hole of dubious “consulting fees.”
In other words, much of the Santos story was already out there before Election Day. It’s too bad that the Leader’s endorsement didn’t influence enough voters to drag Zimmerman across the finish line.
The Leader’s endorsement raises serious questions about the timing of the Times’ reporting. I was willing to give them a pass for not doing a scrub on Santos in the absence of specific information. Large news organizations rely on oppo research to signal them whether they need to do a deeper dive, and, as I said, Zimmerman’s oppo was lame. But the Times does cover metropolitan New York, and it should be a basic part of every metro newspaper’s duties to scan the local papers. The Leader’s endorsements ran in its Oct. 20 edition, more than enough time to gear up for an exposé.
Nor could the Times dismiss the Leader’s endorsement of Zimmerman as an act of partisan hackery. The Leader endorsed four candidates for the House, and three of them were Republicans. The Zimmerman endorsement laments that it couldn’t back a Republican in that district as well.
The Leader does not report its circulation to the Alliance for Audited Media, but according to the Leader’s About page, the paper was founded more than 60 years ago and reaches “thousands of Gold Coast readers.” Sounds like a fairly reliable source to me.
And let’s not let Newsday off the hook, either. Long Island’s daily paper, once regarded as among the best in the country, still has a substantial readership, according to the most recent figures filed with the AAM — 218,953 print and digital subscriptions on Sunday and an average of 191,413 on weekdays. I could find no evidence that Newsday examined Santos’ background in any substantial way in the run-up to the election. Don’t they read the weeklies?
At the very least, interns at the Times and at Newsday should be assigned to scan the local papers every day. If they had, it seems probable that someone would have seen the Leader’s reporting and amplified it before voters headed to the polls and elected a candidate who appears to be an utter fraud. Santos is even on the take from Russian interests, as The Daily Beast Reported — several weeks after the election.
It will be fascinating to see whether Santos can survive in office. At one time we’d be counting the days. But Kevin McCarthy needs him in his pathetic campaign for House speaker. Incredibly, Santos is likely to survive until the next election.
Public journalism redux: Post-academia, Jay Rosen returns to where he started 16 Oct 5:13 AM (6 days ago)
Jay Rosen has been one of the major thinkers in journalism since the 1990s. Younger followers may think of him mainly as a media critic, and there’s no doubting his influence in that field. Through his blog, PressThink, and his social media presence (especially back in Twitter’s heyday), Rosen showed an uncanny ability to frame issues in a way that made a lot of us think about what we were doing.
The “production of innocence” was his phrase for “a public showing by professional journalists that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of — and here we enter the realm of dread — political bias.”
“Not the odds, but the stakes” was Rosen’s attempt to move news organizations away from covering politics as a poll-driven sporting event and more on its actual consequences. “The stakes, of course, mean the stakes for American democracy,” Rosen explained. “The stakes are what might happen as a result of the election.”
But alongside Rosen’s media criticism was an earlier, arguably more important mission — an effort to find ways to involve members of the public more directly in journalism through his work on public journalism (sometimes called civic journalism) in the ’90s and, later, through Assignment Zero, described by the Citizendium as “an experiment in crowd-sourced journalism, allowing collaboration between amateur and professional journalists to collectively produce a piece of work that describes correlations between crowd-sourced techniques and a popular movement.” (The phrase “crowdsourcing” was coined by my Northeastern colleague Jeff Howe.)
Now Rosen is returning to those roots. After retiring as a journalism professor at New York University last June, he has taken a post as president of News Creator Corps, a new organization that will work with content creators — the sort of folks we called citizen journalists 20 years ago — to help them adopt some of the tools of journalism without giving up their independence. As he observes, creators have managed to build trust even as the public’s trust in traditional news organizations declines. He writes:
[S]uppose we offer to teach the basics to those in the creator class who might be interested. By “basics” we mean anything that makes them a more reliable and effective provider of news and information. Could be cultivating sources. Checking facts. Conducting interviews. Reaching more people in your community or content niche. What to know if you’re expanding to a platform new to you.
The point would not be to tilt more students toward the journalism schools; instead we try to meet creators where they are. Find out what they want to know, mix in what they need to know, and point the way to better practices, especially in sharing accurate and trustworthy information. Again: this would not be about minting new members for the journalism profession. We have a lot of programs like that.
He adds: “Are there partnerships to be had between newsrooms and creators? Yes, there are partnerships to be had. Can the creator class replace the profession? I say no, it cannot, and should not. But there’s an ideal mix between the two that has yet to be found.”
It will be interesting to see how News Creator Corps intersects with the hyperlocal journalism community. Most of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about in “What Works in Community News” were founded by professional journalists who had become disillusioned with the endless cuts being imposed by corporate newspaper owners.
But not all. The Bedford Citizen, in Boston’s western suburbs, was started by volunteers with little experience in journalism and only later added paid staff. And there are many outlets serving their communities that are essentially one-person operations; the proprietors are trying to learn the basics of journalism on the go.
So best of luck to Jay, who has long been a professional friend as well as someone who has helped inform the way I think about journalism and its role in a democracy.
I’ll be talking about news and democracy in Stoughton, Mass., this coming Monday 15 Oct 11:57 AM (7 days ago)
South of Boston folks: I’ll be speaking on “News and Democracy in a Time of Crisis” at the Stoughton Public Library in Stoughton, Massachusetts, on Monday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. This free and open event is sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Sharon-Stoughton. Hope to see you there!
Surveillance cameras in Brookline, Mass., raise serious questions about civil liberties 15 Oct 4:14 AM (7 days ago)
The surveillance state has come to Brookline, Massachusetts. Sam Mintz reports for Brookline.News that Chestnut Hill Realty will set up license-plate readers on Independence Drive near Hancock Village, located in South Brookline, on the Boston border. The readers are made by Flock Safety, which is signing an agreement with the Brookline Police Department to use the data. The data will also be made available to Boston Police.
Two months ago I wrote about a campaign to keep Flock out of the affluent community of Scarsdale Village, New York. The story was covered by a startup local website, Scarsdale 10583, and after a period of months the contract was canceled in the face of rising opposition. Unfortunately, Scarsdale Village is the exception, as Flock Safety, a $7.5 billion company, has a presence in 5,000 communities in 49 states as well as a reputation for secretive dealings with local officials.
Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub reports that the state’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2020 that automated license-plate readers are legal in Massachusetts. Gaffin also notes that, early this year, police in Johnson County, Texas, used data from 83,000 Flock cameras across the U.S. in a demented quest to track down a woman they wanted to arrest for a self-induced abortion. Presumably Texas authorities could plug into the Brookline network with Flock’s permission.
Mintz notes in his Brookline.News story that Flock recently opened an office in Boston and that its data has been used by police in dozens of Massachusetts communities. He also quotes Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts as saying that though such uses of Flock data as identifying stolen cars or assisting with Amber Alerts isn’t a problem, “Unregulated, this technology facilitates the mass tracking of every single person’s movements on the road.”
The cameras could also be used by ICE in its out-of-control crackdown on undocumented (and, in some cases, documented) immigrants. This is just bad news all around, it’s hard to imagine that members of the public would support it if they knew about it.
Mass. legislator proposes crackdown on street takeovers that would include spectators 14 Oct 4:57 AM (8 days ago)
I’m not ready to give a New England Muzzle Award to state Rep. Steven Xiarhos, R-Barnstable, just yet. But a proposal he talked about last week in response to so-called street takeovers in five Massachusetts communities raises concerns about freedom of speech.
In a story reported by John L. Micek and Heather Morrison for MassLive, Xiarhos said he planned to file two bills aimed at cracking down on participants. One would upgrade the penalty for assaulting a police officers from a misdemeanor in most cases to a felony. The other would prohibit street takeovers and, as the MassLive account puts it, would punish “spectators and participants alike.”
Spectators?
That second proposal is reportedly based on a 2022 Florida law that prohibits street takeovers. The relevant section of the law says:
A person may not: Drive any motor vehicle in any street takeover, stunt driving, race, speed competition or contest, drag race or acceleration contest, test of physical endurance, or exhibition of speed or acceleration or for the purpose of making a speed record on any highway, roadway, or parking lot….
A person may not be a spectator at any race, drag race, or street takeover prohibited under [the law as quoted above].
“You need to respect police officers. They’re risking their lives for us 24/7,” Xiarhos was quoted as saying. The MassLive story continues:
“I believe they’re part of a plan to cause havoc,” Xiarhos said of the takeovers, which are organized through guerilla-style posts on such social media sites as Instagram. “And when you allow someone to get away with things, it gets worse.”
“So we need to get tougher on them. And when they get caught, they need to be held in custody,” he continued. “Stop paying their bail and put them behind bars. That’s how you stop things. It’s not that hard. There’s only a few people that do wrong things. So get tougher on them.”
Now, the takeovers are clearly becoming a problem. As Molly Farrar reported for Boston.com, they popped up on Saturday, Oct. 4, in Boston, Fall River, Middleborough, Dedham and Randolph, in some cases accompanied by fireworks and, in the Boston incident, a police cruiser being set on fire. Gov. Maura Healey has vowed to take action.
The text of Xiarhos’ two bills is not available on his website, and perhaps they’re still being drafted. But when it comes to freedom of speech, we do not need to emulate Florida. Xiarhos also told WFXT-TV (Channel 25) anchor Kerry Kavanaugh that similar legislation has also either been filed or enacted in 22 states, including California. It would be interesting to know how many others include a spectator provision.
No one should be at risk of arrest simply because they’re there. And let me state the obvious: Such a provision could be used against journalists as well. I’ll be watching to see what Rep. Xiarhos actually files.
Hat tip to Andrew Quemere for flagging this on Bluesky.
John and Kristen Muldoon are retiring from their nonprofit newspaper in Ipswich, Mass. 13 Oct 3:57 AM (9 days ago)
In the world of independent local news startups, 10 years is an eon. That’s how long John and Kristen Muldoon published The Local News, a nonprofit print weekly that covers Ipswich, on Boston’s North Shore, as well as several surrounding communities.
Now they’re moving on. Fortunately, they’ve worked out a succession plan. Trevor Meek, who’s worked as a reporter for the paper since 2023, is the new editor, and Eric Gedstad, who has a background in communications, marketing and government, will be the executive director (that’s nonprofit-speak for publisher).
“Yes, they’ll still be contributing to the paper,” Meek writes of the Muldoons. “And no, they’ll never be able to escape my desperate texts and panicked emails. But their day-to-day presence — their gallows humor, sharp instincts, and steady hands — will be sorely missed.”
As Kris Olson, a co-founder and consulting editor at the Marblehead Current, put it in an email to me, “John is essentially being replaced by two people…. That gives you a sense of how much John was doing.”
John Muldoon has written that The Local News began to find its stride in 2019, when Bill Wasserman, a North Shore journalism legend, became a supporter by donating $100,000 and by helping the paper with advertising, which enabled the operation to have a regular print edition.
Wasserman had previously owned The Ipswich Chronicle and a string of other weeklies only to watch them wither under a series of corporate chain owners that culminated in their acquisition by GateHouse Media, now Gannett. (I worked briefly for North Shore Weeklies under one of those chain owners way back in 1990.) Wasserman died in 2021 at the age of 94.
Somewhere along the line, the Muldoons decided to turn their paper into a nonprofit, with John explaining, “The key reason there was to protect the paper for the public from the depredations of any future corporate owner.”
The Boston Globe’s Billy Baker wrote about The Local News in 2024, reporting that the print edition was being sent to 9,300 homes in Ipswich and neighboring Rowley without charge.
John and I have corresponded over the years, and I got to meet him and Kristen last November at a local-news panel at an Ipswich brewpub, where all such events ought to be held. The Muldoons have made an enormous contribution to the North Shore, bringing real news coverage back to places that had largely been ignored for years.
Best wishes to both of them on their well-deserved retirement.
Ellen Clegg surveys how the Memphis media are covering Trump’s troop deployment 11 Oct 7:40 AM (11 days ago)
My What Works partner Ellen Clegg has written a new post on how the Memphis media are dealing with Trump’s troop deployment. She’s got updates from The Commercial Appeal, the Daily Memphian, the Tennessee Lookout, MLK50 and the Institute for Public Service Reporting and the Memphis Flyer.
The Globe’s print circulation drops again, but it says paid digital ‘is thriving’ 10 Oct 3:17 AM (12 days ago)
The Boston Globe’s paid print circulation continues to fall, and the paper has stopped reporting numbers for digital subscribers — although a spokeswoman says that paid digital “is thriving and surpassing expectations.”
The print numbers come from the Globe’s annual “Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation,” which it is required to publish under postal regulations. The Sunday Globe numbers appeared this past Sunday and the weekday numbers were reported on Monday.
The Globe’s average weekday paid print circulation for the 12-month period ending in August 2025 was 51,626. That’s a decline of 5,824 over the previous year, when the figure was 57,450, and a total drop of 13,351 from two years ago, when it was 64,977. In percentage terms, daily paid print circulation is down 10.1% over last year and 20.5% over two years ago.
On Sunday, the most recent 12-month average for paid print is 89,809, down 12,894 (from 102,703) compared to the previous year and down 26,647 (from 116,456) compared to two years ago. The percentage drops are 12.6% over the previous year and 22.9% over the past two.
Of course, what really matters at the Globe, and at most other newspapers, is paid digital circulation. Unfortunately, I have nothing to share, as the Globe has stopped providing those numbers. Don Seiffert reported in the Boston Business Journal last June that the Globe was no longer including paid digital in the numbers that it makes available to the Alliance for Audited Media. He quoted a Globe spokesperson as saying that its digital-subscriber base “continues to grow at a steady pace” and that the paper will share those numbers “periodically, most likely around significant milestones.”
In the past, the Globe has shared its internal numbers for paid digital with journalists. But when I asked for them this week, Globe spokeswoman Carla Kath told me by email, “While I can’t share exact figures right now, our subscription business is thriving and surpassing expectations. We will continue to share our subscriber numbers at key milestones.”
Last fall, the Globe said that paid digital circulation had reached 261,000, up from 245,000 the previous year. Chief executive Linda Henry has set a long-term goal of 400,000 paid digital subscribers.
In the absence of any paid digital numbers, I’ll note that Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab recently reported that the Globe’s website received 8,691,001 visits in June of this year, making it the 13th most heavily trafficked newspaper site in the U.S. That was down 18.9% from the previous month, when the Globe was No. 7. (Large month-to-month fluctuations in web traffic are not unusual.) That’s impressive for a paper with an exceptionally tight paywall, something that limits casual traffic.
If Globe executives want to boost digital subscriptions, I’d suggest that they offer a few free shares each month, as many other papers do. If non-subscribers could have a chance to sample the Globe’s journalism, they might decide it’s worth handing over their credit-card information.