Media Nation

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When it comes to getting paid for my work, I am fond of quoting Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

Several years ago I began asking readers of Media Nation for their financial support in the form of $6 a month. As a small token of my gratitude, I send those supporters a weekly email newsletter with a few extra goodies — some exclusive commentary, photography, a round-up of the week’s posts and a song of the week.

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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.

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

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.

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

A perceptive analysis of why The New York Times struggles with the rise of MAGA authoritarianism

What is wrong with The New York Times? It’s a question that conservatives ask frequently, of course. But, over the years, it’s also become an obsession with liberals and the progressive left, whose more strident voices — frequently heard on Bluesky — claim that the Times is in thrall to Donald Trump in order to sell newspapers, advance a corporate agenda or whatever. You often hear the term “sanewashing” in these circles, referring to a practice of quoting Trump in a way that plays down his hateful rhetoric and deteriorating mental acuity.

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I’ve often been among those critics. In 2018, I wrote a commentary for GBH News referring to “the Timid Times” and comparing it unfavorably to the then-ascendant Washington Post, which was firing on all cylinders under executive editor Marty Baron. As I wrote: “The picture that emerges is of a news organization often out of sync with its mostly liberal audience and that is way too concerned about what conservatives might say.”

Continue reading “A perceptive analysis of why The New York Times struggles with the rise of MAGA authoritarianism”

INN’s NewsMatch program switches from an annual fundraising drive to a year-round effort

From “NewsMatch at 10: A Decade of Impact.”

For nonprofit news organizations, the most important time of the year is November and December, when the NewsMatch program goes live. An initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News, the program provides national funding as a percentage of money raised locally. It’s not a one-to-one match, but it provides crucial revenues to small (and large) projects as well as an incentive they can use in attracting donors.

Now INN is making a change. According to a new impact report, marking the 10th anniversary of the program, NewsMatch is moving to a year-round model. According to the report:

The next phase will focus on helping newsrooms build on that foundation with more advanced, flexible campaigns tailored to their goals and stage of growth. To support this evolution, NewsMatch is shifting from a single year-end campaign to a year-round model.

We talked to newsrooms about what they were looking for from this opportunity, and they emphasized the value of flexibility, experimentation, and shared learning. In 2027, we’re excited to pilot NewsMatch Catalyst Campaigns, supporting a select group of INN members as they test new fundraising strategies, deepen donor engagement, and build toward long-term sustainability.

According to the report, NewsMatch has raised more than $477 million for local news over the past 10 years, with INN itself growing from 27 investigative news organizations in 2009 to some 500 member outlets today. (INN was originally known as the Investigative News Network.)

Karen Rundlet, INN’s CEO and executive director, calls NewsMatch “the people-powered engine of the nonprofit news field, democratizing donations from a public that wants good, accurate information that helps them with daily decision making. People from all corners of the country donate to newsrooms via NewsMatch.”

Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a good overview of the impact report.

On the new ‘Beat the Press,’ we dissect Trump’s media ban and marvel over the Globe’s lesbian-bar story

Click here or on image to watch on Contrarian Boston.

We’re back with another edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” hosted by Contrarian Boston. Our lead topic this week is Donald Trump’s illegal ban on three news organizations, which seems to keep popping up even though it’s been knocked down in court.

Our other topics: the debut of Trump TV, which at one point was drawing an unimaginably minuscule audience of about 500 viewers; and why The Boston Globe’s story about a lesbian bar (sub. req.) that’s struggling with its longtime masking requirement went viral — and brought several thousand new subscribers to the Globe. Our guess is that it’s all about the revolutionary praxis.

We round out the show with our panel’s Rants and Raves. Mine is for California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who folded on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery lawsuit when Paramount major domo David Ellison threatened to move his operations out of the state. Their cowardice delivers CNN into the same MAGA-friendly hands that are wreaking havoc with CBS News.

Our host, as always, is Emily, joined by Contrarian Boston‘s Scott Van Voorhis and Jon Keller of WBZ-TV and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.

And that’s the way it isn’t: An embarrassing anecdote about Walter Cronkite’s years in Moscow

Walter Cronkite in 1976. Photo in the public domain.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend M. Gessen’s essay in The New York Times opinion section about their grandmother’s work as a censor for the Stalin regime. Among other things, she had the task of bowdlerizing Harrison Salisbury’s Times dispatches, a source of endless frustration for Salisbury.

One detail that caught my eye was this slam of Walter Cronkite, the saint of broadcast news, who was the Moscow bureau chief for United Press in the late 1940s.

Continue reading “And that’s the way it isn’t: An embarrassing anecdote about Walter Cronkite’s years in Moscow”

My Northeastern ethics students identify news stories that should get more attention

Sudanese refugees seeking food aid in neighboring Chad. Photo (cc) 2025 by the U.K. Foreign Office.

If you’ve been reading Media Nation for a while, you know that I like to ask my journalism ethics students to find stories that they think have been underreported. The definition is elastic. Even a prominently played story in The New York Times can be underreported if it isn’t repeated enough to enter the public discourse.

This semester I’ve got 29 advanced undergraduates, and I’ve boiled down their responses to 10 stories. What I looked for in presenting here was a range of topics and a diversity of media outlets, including stories published by non-mainstream outlets. I could have shared all of them, but I think this is a good sample.

UN Agencies Warn Humanitarian System in Sudan “Could Collapse,” UN News, Sept. 14. “Sudan has been embroiled in a brutal civil conflict since 2023 between rival militaries and their backers. Some 8.6 million people remain internally displaced and 19.5 million people currently face crisis levels of food insecurity, which has been compounded by maritime disruptions and drought caused by the El Niño weather pattern.”

Continue reading “My Northeastern ethics students identify news stories that should get more attention”

Talking about threats to shut the Toledo Blade, cuts at McClatchy and rural news deserts

The Blade building in Toledo, Ohio. Photo (cc) 2019 by David Wilson.

I had a chance to take part in a conversation Wednesday on “All Sides with Amy Juravich” on WOSU Radio in Ohio. Our topics included the Block family’s threat to shut down The Blade of Toledo if a buyer isn’t found, devastating cuts at the McClatchy newspaper chain, and the ongoing problem of rural news deserts.

Dee Drummond, a former Blade reporter now at the University of Toledo, and First Amendment lawyer Michael Berry were Juravich’s other guests, though we were not on at the same time.

If you’d like to give it a listen, you can click right here.