MassINC’s board votes to recognize CommonWealth Beacon’s new union

Just a day after CommonWealth Beacon employees announced they were forming a union, the board of MassINC — the nonprofit that publishes CommonWealth — has voted in favor of recognition.

“We respect the rights of members of the newsroom to unionize and we look forward to working with the CommonWealth Beacon Guild and the entire CommonWealth Beacon team to build an impactful and sustainable public service news organization,” according to a statement by Joe Kriesberg, MassINC’s CEO, who serves as CommonWealth’s publisher.

CommonWealth Beacon is a nonprofit digital news outlet that was launched in 1996 as a quarterly print magazine and that now publishes news about state politics and public policy on a daily basis.

“This is the exact outcome for which we were hoping,” according to Chris Lisinski, a senior reporter at CommonWealth Beacon, who was quoted in a release issued by the union. “We’re honored that MassINC recognizes the hard work of our newsroom and our desire to collectively bargain to make it an even better place, both for ourselves and for all future employees.”

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MassINC’s board chair issues response to CommonWealth Beacon union drive

Eileen O’Connor, who is chair of the MassINC board, has passed along a statement about the union organizing drive that employees of CommonWealth Beacon have announced. MassINC, the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, is the nonprofit group that publishes CommonWealth Beacon. (Note: This is not the board that I’m on; rather, I’m on the CommonWealth Beacon editorial advisory board.)

We believe CommonWealth Beacon, the nonprofit journalism arm of MassINC, is a core part of our organization and we appreciate the outstanding work done by a small team of reporters. Their work covers complex policy issues facing Massachusetts and is central to the broader nonprofit mission. MassINC management was informed on Wednesday of their intention to unionize and needs time to engage the full Board of Directors before responding. Both MassINC management and the Board take this process seriously and look forward to working together with the staff to advance CommonWealth Beacon’s mission of public service journalism.

CommonWealth Beacon employees announce a union organizing effort

Employees of CommonWealth Beacon, a digital nonprofit news organization that covers statewide politics and public policy, has announced a union organizing drive, according to a statement that hit my inbox a short time ago. CommonWealth is part of MassINC (the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth), a nonprofit policy organization.

“Every single eligible staff member enthusiastically supports forming a union,” says the statement, adding: “Should management force us to go through a formal National Labor Relations Board election, we are certain the outcome will be unanimous support.”

Disclosure: I’m a member of the CommonWealth editorial advisory board, which was recently reorganized to assist with fundraising ideas. In light of that, I’ll leave this here and go right to the announcement. And of course I’ll add a statement from management should I receive one. (And now I have. Please take a look.)

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‘The People’s Paper’ offers a rollicking account of New York’s Daily News and its war with the New York Post

Photo (cc) 2026 by Dan Kennedy.

One recent Friday morning I picked up both of New York’s tabloids. The contrast was instructive.

The Daily News featured a grotesque murder on the front page. Inside was a mixture of local political news, more crime, and a smattering of national and international coverage from The Associated Press. The New York Post led with a goofy photo of state attorney general Letitia James, who — at least according to a whistleblower — had pursued a prosecutorial crusade against Donald Trump despite having no evidence. That was followed by page after page of celebrities, MAGA-friendly content zeroing in on familiar targets like Abdul El-Sayed, and manufactured outrages such as the rising price of Halloween candy and private-school teachers who must be getting paid too much because they wear expensive clothes.

As for which formula is more successful, that was settled a long time ago. The Daily News on the day I looked at it comprised 48 pages, whereas the Post was a relatively robust 68. The News’s print circulation is a paltry 29,000 on weekdays and 48,000 on Sundays, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. The Post’s: 112,000 on weekdays and nearly 125,000 on Sundays. But in this post-print era, it’s online where the comparison is the starkest. The Daily News’s website receives fewer than 5 million visits each month, reports the analytics firm SimilarWeb. The Post, meanwhile, has grown into a behemoth, with nearly 96 million visits a month — good for a spot in the top 10 among news websites, says Press Gazette, a British-based publication that reports on digital journalism.

The story of how the Daily News grew into a phenomenon only to fall apart at the hands of cultural and demographic change, bad ownership, and more nimble competition is told by Matthew Pressman in “The People’s Paper: The Rise and Fall of the New York Daily News,” a history of the News from its founding in 1919 to its current enfeebled state. Pressman, an associate professor of journalism at Seton Hall University, has written a rollicking tale that’s loaded with details ranging from the significant to the merely entertaining. It was all I could do to refrain from dog-earing and taking notes on every one of its 250 pages.

Read the rest at The Arts Fuse.

ABC News reportedly tried to cover up why it pulled a story about Donald Trump Jr.

Donald Trump Jr. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.

It’s always the cover-up.

Status and Semafor are both reporting that a claim by ABC News as to why it pulled an error-laden story about Donald Trump Jr.’s ties to a defense contractor is simply not true. The network says it deleted the story because it had accidentally been “published prematurely” before it was finished. Those damn content-management systems.

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But Natalie Korach writes for Status (sub. req.) that a spokeswoman for 1789 Capital, which lists Donald Trump Jr. as one of its partners and which invested in the defense contractor, says she spent the better part of last Wednesday going back and forth with ABC News as they vigorously defended the story. The article was finally pulled on Wednesday night with no explanation, only to reappear on Friday with some significant edits. “That narrative of incomplete reporting didn’t match up with the defense the editor gave me,” 1789 spokeswoman Alexa Henning told Korach.

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How an ex-Florida man is flooding Mass. political news with anonymous, right-wing pink slime

If you take a look at Mass Daily News right now, you’ll see a lead story about nearly $50,000 in campaign donations from Eversource executives to Gov. Maura Healey.

It’s hardly a match for Jordan Wolman’s CommonWealth Beacon story suggesting that Healey’s public criticism of Eversource is just an election-season ploy (he’s got the receipts), and it’s merely a rewrite of a Republican Party press release. But it’s not nothing, either. Some press releases deserve to be amplified.

Other stories on the Mass Daily News homepage feature crime, critical stories about undocumented immigrants and a commentary claiming that Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue bested Healey, a Democrat, during their debate moderated by WBZ-TV’s Jon Keller earlier this week.

So what is Mass Daily News? Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has learned that the man behind the anonymous site is named Simon Pacheco — a former Florida man who registered his company in Wyoming in order to flood the Massachusetts political mediascape with rightwing, AI-enhanced pink slime.

It’s quite a story, and kudos to Ryan for figuring out Pacheco’s role.

Update: Simon Pacheco tells his side of the Mass Daily News story. Naturally, it’s accompanied by an AI image. He says it’s not “pink slime,” and no, it doesn’t meet every criteria. But it’s partly AI-written, and until Saturday it was anonymous. So … pinkish slime? And yes, less pink today than it was before Aidan Ryan identified him.

Why you should become a financial supporter of Media Nation today

Samuel Johnson

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Clay Wirestone tells us how opinion journalists brought voice and authority to local news in Kansas

Clay Wirestone ignores the cookies. Photo by Sherman Smith.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Clay Wirestone, the opinion editor of the Kansas Reflector, a digital nonprofit that’s part of the States Newsroom network. His first book was published Sept. 29. It’s called, aptly enough, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now.” His second is scheduled for 2028.

Wirestone seems to be on a first-name basis with Kansas opinion journalists past and present, and he profiles a number of them. He knows the state well: he graduated from the University of Kansas and lives in Lawrence with his husband. He also edited news at The Topeka Capital-Journal and spent more than a decade at New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor,  where he worked with my Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman, a past guest on this podcast.

I’ve got a Quick Take about yet another new book — “Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America,” by Nick Mathews. I reviewed it recently for The Arts Fuse. Mathews offers some interesting insights into what happens to community life when there’s a shortage of reliable news and information.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on an excellent Substack post by media observer Richard J. Tofel on the recent massacre at the McClatchy newspaper chain, which is being gutted by its private-equity owner. It’s like a slasher movie, and the slasher has come for newspapers that were great in their heyday.

You can listen here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

I’m newly optimistic about the future of CNN. I just hope that David Ellison means what he says.

Skydance chief executive David Ellison, right, and his father, Larry Ellison. Photo in the public domain.

A few weeks ago I lamented Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which brings CBS News and CNN under the same corporate roof, writing, “The immediate upshot is that two of the three major cable news outlets — CNN and Fox News — are now in the hands of executives who are friendly to Trump, with MS NOW the only holdout.”

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This week I’m choosing to be optimistic, although I’m well aware that my relatively sunny take on this week’s events might prove to be unrewarded. Mainly I’m encouraged that David Ellison, the head of Skydance (as the renamed company is known), has decided to keep Mark Thompson as chief executive of CNN.

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How Rob Curley’s plan to take The Spokesman-Review nonprofit ended in a newsroom revolt

Rob Curley, Michael McCarter and David Dunn-Rankin discuss the future of newspaper opinion content at the 2025 America’s Newspapers Mega-Conference in Orlando. Moderated by Editor & Publisher’s Mike Blinder, the panel is featured in Episode 281 of “E&P Reports.”

By Wilson Criscione and Daisy Zavala Magaña

This report was produced in a collaboration between InvestigateWest and RANGE and republished by permission.

When The Spokesman-Review announced plans to transfer Spokane’s 143-year-old, family-owned newspaper to a nonprofit founded by Executive Editor Rob Curley, it took over the front page.

“The People’s Paper,” read the April 16, 2025, headline, saying ownership would transfer “to you, the community.”

Key to the plan was Curley, the folksy self-proclaimed “journalism nerd” who burst into Spokane a decade ago, declaring a love for Gonzaga University basketball rivaled only by his love for Disney. The transition to Comma Community Journalism Lab was cast in media industry publications not only as a way to save Spokane’s daily newspaper, but as part of a growing movement to resurrect dying papers by making them less dependent on ads and corporate ownership and more on philanthropy and community partnerships. As proof of concept, the paper had already added several so-called “community-funded” journalists to its staff.

Note: I’ve followed Rob Curley’s career for years and met him at the Orange County Register in 2015 while researching my book “The Return of the Moguls.” I shared excerpts about Curley from “Moguls” in August, after he was placed on administrative leave as executive editor of The Spokesman-Review. — DK

But in The Spokesman-Review newsroom this summer, that hopeful vision ran into persistent concerns about Curley’s leadership. More than a dozen current and former employees, along with contemporaneous records reviewed by InvestigateWest and RANGE, reveal how the newsroom had raised concerns about Curley’s management for years, culminating in his suspension from the paper on Aug. 7 and a vote of no confidence from the union, the Spokane Editorial Society. He is currently on leave as the paper conducts an internal investigation.

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