Journalists have been compared to priests and ditch-diggers, but a better parallel can be found on the high seas. Like sailors and the call of the running tide, reporters and editors have the rush of chasing a scoop.
But over the last two decades, the tide has been going out. Look no further than the Boston Globe, which once boasted foreign bureaus from Latin America to the Middle East. Now it has largely settled into existence as a much smaller, regional outlet that also has teams of journalists covering Rhode Island and New Hampshire, and a former London bureau chief who spends his time in Vermont. Its odd decisions to cover elections in the New England exurbs of New York and Georgia aside, the Globe retains a DC bureau.
Then there is the print edition that still comes seven days a week. “The truth is, the change has not happened as fast as I feared it would,” said Jon Chesto, the Globe’s prolific business reporter who came up through the Patriot Ledger and the Boston Herald, when both papers weren’t as skeletal as they are now. “We’re still hanging on.”
The Globe, bought by Red Sox owner John Henry in 2013, isn’t alone. Chesto on Tuesday sat on one of two panels at the State House that included colleagues from Politico, the Dorchester Reporter, and the Bay State Banner, among others. The “Meet the Media” gathering was put together by State House News Service and its morning newsletter MassterList, and sponsored by several public relations and strategy groups.
But if the Globe and the others are afloat, they’re furiously paddling underneath the water. “You’re battling the phone and all the other ways media come at us,” said Ronald Mitchell, a WBZ-TV veteran who joined with filmmaker Andre Stark to buy the Bay State Banner, which focuses on communities of color, from longtime owner Mel Miller last year.
The Internet broke the monopoly – or in some cities, a duopoly – major newspapers had on content and advertising. Boston is no longer a two-newspaper town, with multiple outlets more readily available to consumers across multiple screens. The reordering also left destruction in its wake, such as the 2013 shuttering of the Boston Phoenix, a free alternative weekly that was once rife with ads. Layoffs continue, and this year there have been cuts to Boston’s two public media stations, WBUR and GBH.
The resulting gaps in coverage hit a variety of places. Melrose, for example, a small city north of Boston, saw scant reporting on a recent $7.7 million tax override vote. (It failed, by the way.) The city used to have the Melrose Free Press, which died at the age of 119 in 2021 after its owner Gannett closed down the weekly. The headlines that dominate its successor website are focused on Cambridge, Framingham, and Wrentham.
Kelly Garrity, who writes the Politico Massachusetts Playbook, reviews the local news sites as part of her job, pulling together links to their stories below her scoops and insights in her daily email newsletter. “Honestly, it looks really rough right now in a lot of places,” particularly among the ones owned by national chains with little interest in deep coverage of a local community, she said. She singled out two outlets that stand apart from the corporate-owned crowd: the nonprofit New Bedford Light, and the Pittsfield-based Berkshire Eagle, which recently celebrated its eighth year of local ownership.
In Boston, the Dorchester Reporter’s Bill Forry said he’s seen readers and sources beyond the neighborhood weekly’s coverage area approach them, because they want to see more than what they’re getting in their part of the city. “We’re stepping into that void, I think the Banner is doing the same,” he said.
Mitchell, the Banner’s publisher and editor, said under new ownership they’ve also moved to diversify their revenue stream. “Mel had owned the paper for 57 years and it was like an old uncle, a crotchety one,” Mitchell said of Miller, the paper’s founder and longtime owner.
The sports pages, for example, are now sponsored by the New England Patriots Foundation, and Mitchell’s team has introduced digital advertising to the Banner’s website, bringing it into the 21st century, as he put it. “We’re not out of the gate yet but we’re surviving,” he said.
There are also smaller operators, like Scott Van Voorhis, a longtime journalist who started the development and politics newsletter Contrarian Boston in 2021.
“It’s a time of change and it’s also an opportunity for people to try different things out,” he said, while adding “some will survive, some won’t.”
Van Voorhis publishes his newsletter through Substack, a platform that allows him to charge for subscriptions. He recently was the first to report on a shakeup at the state agency known as MassDevelopment, as it faced the departure of its CEO, Dan Rivera.
According to Van Voorhis, scoops help drive reader subscriptions. “To me that speaks to the value of news,” he said.
The post Navigating Mass. media sector’s choppy waters appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.