I’d like to make a proposal for your consideration and would welcome your thoughts, suggestions, and criticisms. I don’t know if this is original or if it has been considered in some form before; but, in any event, I’m moved to make it.
Thomas Jefferson said, “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”
When it comes to this matter here in Newton, we have to consider that we fail as a community. We all acknowledge that the local weekly newspaper is not only vacuous when it comes to timely and relevant news coverage, with a complete dearth of investigative reporting, but also that it offers incumbent mayors an unedited and unquestioning mouthpiece for their pronouncements. Coverage by the largest regional newspaper, while somewhat improved, also remains spotty at best and appears to be tangential to their strategic business interests. The various city agencies and councilors have their own email and web outlets, but these are products of those organizations and individuals, not subject to editing or supervision by independent third parties. NGOs do a fine job in informing their members, but again understandably with a tilt towards their own agendas. The League of Women Voters of Newton does an admirable job in studying and covering civic affairs, but does not seem to garner an enthusiastic following.
The commercial failure of for-profit excellent news outlets is a common problem across the country, and there has been a vibrant response by some to establish and maintain non-profit organizations to take their place. At the national level, we have Pro Publica and (in my recent field) Kaiser Health News. Locally in Boston, arguably the most competent media outlets covering public affairs are Commonwealth Magazine and WBUR. All of these places devote substantial resources to coverage and investigations and have proven to be sustainable institutions. They bring together an on-going combination of foundation support and donations from companies and individuals; and they maintain high standards of writing, editing, and editorial independence.
I’d like to suggest that Newton is a wealthy enough community to create a similar institution for ourselves, a new on-line entity (or a conversion of this one) to provide our citizenry with a means to be a more well-informed electorate. What would it take? Since production costs of an on-line service are minimal compared paper newspapers or magazines, the costs are mainly related to staffing. What would it take to offer the public a vibrant and excellent team to carry out the task, and to create an organization that would attract the kind of talent needed? The complementary question is what we all would be willing to pay/donate for it? I think the answers to those two questions converge nicely.
Let me frame it this way. Do you think there are 2000 families in Newton who would be willing support such an entity to the tune of a $10/month donation? If so, that produces an annual budget of $240,000. That, plus a number of more generous start-up donations, could provide sufficient funds to hire two full-time reporters and one part-time assignor/editor and one part-time fundraiser. (I’m not necessarily including student interns because, although they are free, they require lots of supervision.) Start-up costs, like filing letters of incorporation and setting up accounts, could certainly be handled by in-kind donations by local professionals. A unpaid board of trustees would hold fiduciary responsibility. The public offering, as with the above-mentioned news outlets, would be to provide the service to any and all with no subscription fee.
It my belief that an organization of this sort could make a substantial contribution to the depth of public understanding and therefore the quality of civic discourse in our city. I think it’s worth a try. Your thoughts?
Let’s be clear about what Dr. Levy is after here: This is an individual who as some issues with the Mayor and is using as cover the lack of local press as the basis for creating in the most community spirited manner possible a forum which would better achieve his aims. Not an unreasonable objective I suppose, though the pretense is, typical for Dr. Levy, rather off-putting. Try GoFundMe.
My aims, @Elmo? What do you suppose those to be? (BTW, I’m not a doctor.) What do you mean by “pretense?” Ditto for “cover?”
I’ll tell you what my aim is: An informed electorate that participates positively in municipal matters. End of story. I’ve lived here in my neighborhood since 1981, and that aim has generally not been broadly fulfilled. I see divisions between north and south, among age groups, and the like–and I think there is greater potential for unity and cooperation and enthusiasm that could be enhanced by what I propose.
My personal interests are to have a terrific senior center, maintaining open space and park land, improving athletic facilities across the city, excellent schools, and promoting city government that is expert, responsive, and responsible.
Now, please get to the merits of my idea instead of casting aspersions about motivations.
@Paul,
A number of active Newton residents (specifically: me, Greg Reibman, Anne Larner, Matt Hills, Amy Sangiolo, Andy Levin and Jerry Reilly) spent about a year looking at what you’re suggesting and trying to determine if it’s possible. There are many successful examples of non-profit news sites in the country, with the New Haven Independent at or near the top.
Here’s one of the big challenges: You might be right that a news site could operate on a $240,000 annual budget but it would take a lot of money to get it started. While a $10 a month subscription from 2,000 families sounds feasible, it would be a huge undertaking to make that happen. You’d need to hire someone to get it up and running. They’d have to fundraise, build the site, form partnerships, hire talent, and launch a marketing campaign. We realized quickly that even if we could raise $200K per year (which we never ascertained was possible), we’d need someone to work for free while we were trying to raise the funds. That person would have to be credible and a large enough presence in the community to solicit large donations.
In order to get the kind of news coverage you desire, you need solid journalists who will stick around. You’d have to compensate competitively, which would probably cost more than $240K/year when you factor in benefits. At the very least, you’d need a full-time editor and two reporters. If you want them to be invested in the community, they’d need an office here. Journalists, particularly young ones, are going to produce much better work if they have colleagues to learn from. (Community journalists take a lot of heat from the community and the sense of camaraderie that a news room provides is invaluable.) A news site would also need legal support and liability insurance.
That’s just the logistics. The politics is an entirely different matter. There are people in the community who’d rather control the narrative through listservs and social media. (In fact, we heard exactly that perspective from a very engaged community member.) While many people will say they’d like to see more news coverage, what they often mean is they’d like to see more coverage of their point of view.
I’m not saying it’s impossible and I don’t think any of us ruled it out in our discussions. But it’s not as clear cut as it seemed when we started meeting.
I agree with Gail’s comments on this. For there to be broad based support for this, you would need to provide content that was of interest to a diverse audience with different opinions/interests. I personally subscribed for many years to the Boston Globe, and at some point years ago I felt that the paper had become way too partisan so I cancelled my subscription. The same thing goes for the Herald, but on the opposite side of the partisan divide. I won’t pay for that either. In the end I search out news from both side, and for the most part the “truth” lies somewhere in the middle. For this idea to be of interest to me, it would need to be run by true journalists, which unfortunately these days is a dying breed.
Great topic. I agree with Gail’s highly informed opinion. And I really appreciate what she’s doing for Newton with the young journalists.
I’d like to comment on a very small part of Paul’s lead-in at the top of the thread…
The TAB relinquishes any journalistic integrity it might still have when they routinely afford an elected official–in this case Mayor Fuller– an unedited, unrebutted, Page 2. platform. It should stop right now. If it continues into the next election cycle, it would be highly inappropriate and it could easily be argued that the monetary value of the Page 2. space constitutes a campaign contribution.
Gail gives a very good summary of what this new model for a 21st-century Newton newspaper would look like. In addition to the full-time editor and two reporters she mentions, perhaps there could be a slew of correspondents as well — people who have experience writing for newspapers and similar publications, and who could contribute the occasional news or feature story.
It would be wonderful to have dedicated staffers to cover town government and other news that is the good, solid “dark meat” of local papers. But that’s only one aspect of small-scale/community journalism. You need to find the people in town who have interesting stories to tell, and you need to be able to tell those stories well — not just the feel-good, local-hero stuff, or new-business-opens-its-doors, but stories with some complexity to them, that challenge the reader. Of course the full-time editor and writers can do those, but like I said, helps to have other folks on call who aren’t necessarily bound by the daily or weekly deadlines.
A comment was removed from this page because it included a cut and paste of an entire article from behind the Boston Herald’s paywall.
Media sites depend on paid subscribers to pay for their journalism. Republishing an entire article — or even substantive excerpts — undermines that model.
Greg,
Well can it be stated that insofar as what Independent Man states above, V14 get’s the job done except for its oftentimes lack of balance and diversity in terms of conservatism. An example from today is V14’s apparent reluctance, on request, to report on the Boston Herald reporting on a disagreement between the Newton Democrat City Committee Chair and the Democrat Ward 6 Chair over its Holiday Invitation’s Trump “Savage” rhetoric, whereby the Ward 6 “chairwoman is doubling down on calling President Trump a “savage” in a holiday party invitation.”
Oh Jim (don’t you have anything else to do?). You can post a link to a story, you just can’t republish it.
Jim, I think the link vs paste is a copyright law issue. I remember being dinged in a similar way a few years ago. You don’t have a license to republish the article. You are posting on a public forum, which is a publisher. The folks that run Village 14 probably have an obligation to take it down under copyright law.
Actually Fig, it’s more principled than legal.
News sites that have paywalls depend on subscribers to pay their journalists. Reprinting an entire article or most of an article harms their business model. Not something I can endorse.
Thank you Paul for putting forward this detailed and thoughtful proposal, and Gail for an equally thoughtful and detailed description of the financial and logistical challenges to making something like this viable. An even bigger challenge is getting something in place that will break through to the clear majority of Newton residents and homeowners who haven’t a clue as to what’s going inside our City Government, including a large subset that appear to have no real interest in finding out. I think this is bigger than just resurrecting the old Newton Tab, or Newton Graphic for that matter. Some fundamental changes have taken place in this city, some driven by life here in Newton and even more by an incredibly more stressful work, school and family environment
I say this in sadness from serving on the Newton Highlands Neighborhood Area Council for the past 8 years. We get a lot of people at our monthly meetings when there is an issue that seems to affect them personally, but almost nothing when the issue is broader and involves the welfare of the entire village. There are a lot of wonderful and dedicated people who are deeply involved in this community, but it’s still a small minority as attested to by the dismal turnout in our municipal elections. Again, I think part of any strategy has to pinpoint why so many of our citizens seem to be so disinterested in what motivates so many of us. Otherwise, we might find that any new form of communications only motivates those of us who are already involved.
Greg:
I was always taught long ago that fair use didn’t include copying the entire article, and that even if you make little money on this, it is a public forum with ads. If Jim had posted a few paragraphs, I think that is fair use. But he went around the pay wall, published it on another site with ads. I don’t think you have a fair use exception here.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-rule-copyright-material-30100.html
Of course, the Herald isn’t coming after Jim or Village 14. But I still think you have a legal obligation to remove the content if it isn’t in fair use.
Not a copyright lawyer and not a journalist. So perhaps I’m taking too literal a reading.
Thanks to all, especially @Gail, who is so well informed about such matters. Let me posit an alternative possibility. In the product and service start-up world, we deal with a concept called MVP, minimal viable product, just good enough to get people engaged and then enhanced over time. In contrast, you seem to be discussing what a full fledged version of this could be. Is there a way to start smaller? In terms of recruiting reporters, let’s also think creatively about good journalists who might be raising children or post-retirement who would welcome the chance to ply their craft close to home and on a flexible schedule. We don’t necessarily need people who are on the hoped-for path to a Pulitzer. In short, think smaller, more flexible, and creative. Thoughts?
Paul, I like your idea of starting small and thinking creatively about recruiting journalists. I’m sure there must be residents who would be willing to give it a try. Julia Malakie, if she hadn’t just been elected to the city council, comes to mind because of her great live tweeting at various council meetings.
It would still be hard to find those with objective journalism experience who would regularly attend council meetings or do any investigative behind the scenes reporting without being paid or having an editor and a newsroom. But you could try.
While this would be a valuable addition to the community, I think you’d have trouble convincing people to commit to $10/month until they see that it’s worth the money to them. You need a way to advertise it well enough for people to get interested enough to explore it and see if they like it, and then they have to like it enough to pay the subscription fee on top of what they’re already paying for other news outlets or other services.
I think the problem is that the internet killed off newspapers whose majority of revenue came from classified ads. I don’t think newspapers ever made money from subscription fees. This is why getting people to pay for content has been so difficult and why many newspapers struggled ( and still struggle ) to get subscribers. In print you had the full page ad, ($$$), and the classified where you paid by the word. And the job/ help wanted section. Newspapers had a monopoly on this. The internet with Craigslist, Monster.com, zip recruiter, etc. broke the monopoly. So now, people who paid 50 cents for a paper are calling subscriptions a “pay wall”. People expect content to be free. It seems that only a few larger papers. Have managed to stay online (NYT, Wall Street Journal ) but I don’t think their revenues are what they used to be. The same happened with music, where even big pop stars ( e.g. Taylor Swift ) have pulled their music from Spotify because of the low pay on the internet.
You get what you pay for, and most people want to pay nothing. And nothing is what they get.
As Gail Spector mentioned above there area number of successful non-profit news sites but they all operate on a totally different business model than newspapers – usually some combination of subscription fees, donations, and grants primarily.
The new initiative with the Boston Globe Newton News began as an effort to do just what Paul is suggesting – i.e. a Newton dedicated non-profit news site. After more than a year of effort with not much to show for it, the Boston Globe opportunity to launch Newton News was the best alternative we could come up with.
That said, I think Paul Levy is exactly right about the need and value of a dedicated news site. While its a bit of a daunting task to put together in a sustainable way, it’s clearly possible since there are some communities that have pulled this off.
I’d urge you on Paul in pursuing this and I know that there are a significant number of people who would be willing to help in various ways if a workable model could be put together.
I’m going to zag here. I don’t think people want to be informed, they just want their bias confirmed. Society is busy and people are reading headlines… not long-form investigative pieces. We have the society, politics, and culture, we deserve.
An informed electorate, what a lovely phrase. I would be willing to subscribe, not donate, $20 a month. Anything to get rid of click bait.
At a holiday party last week, a group got onto the discussion of Webster woods and a land swap with Boston College. Many in the room were unaware that the City owned a golf course, Newton Commonwealth, or why. They also thought that Cabot Woods, or Edmunds Park, off Blake Street, were already owned by Boston College, since it abuts. Prior Mayors seemed to have done a great job promoting 13 villages , not so much unifying one city.
So let’s unify this City. Get out the information that we need, and let’s pay for it, so it’s worth something. Per Richard Frank
Paul Levy said:
“In terms of recruiting reporters, let’s also think creatively about good journalists who might be raising children or post-retirement who would welcome the chance to ply their craft close to home and on a flexible schedule. We don’t necessarily need people who are on the hoped-for path to a Pulitzer.”
Thanks to Paul for underscoring the point I made earlier in this thread about having a cohort of contributors to supplement whatever full-time editorial staff there might be in the envisioned Newton digital newspaper.
Re Paul’s “Pulitzer” comment — which I’m sure was made for sake of illustration — I think it’s important to know that not every journalist is hell-bent on winning that Pulitzer or other grand prize, or landing a job with the New York Times, or overthrowing the government, etc. That doesn’t mean these journalists lack for ambition, only that their ideal is to simply be able to pursue and write good stories and be paid a decent wage for the effort.