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THANKSGIVING FICTION: WE LIVE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE THE BAD GUYS WON

“Americans today live in a very real universe where the functional equivalent of Nazis—European colonists—committed genocide against Native American peoples…”

PASSENGERS AT RISK ON GREYHOUND, OTHER BUS LINES

Ex-Greyhound Bus by Omar Omar is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Modified by Jason Pramas.
Ex-Greyhound Bus by Omar Omar is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Modified by Jason Pramas.

 

No way to contact management in the event of driver medical or psychiatric emergency

 

My wife had a meeting in New York City over the weekend, as is sometimes the case, and decided to take a bus back to Boston on Sunday evening. Over our many years together, we have found that buses are generally the best—and certainly most economical—way to get between the two cities. We are aware of the prejudices that many people have against this mode of transportation, but we agree that they are wrong. Yes, buses can be cramped. Yes, you can’t really walk around on a bus once it’s on the road. Yes, there are no snacks or other amenities on board—beyond bathrooms that it’s usually best to avoid using for some obvious reasons.

 

But buses get you from A to B with a minimum of fuss. And in the case of the Boston-NYC route, they usually get you there in four to four and a half hours—depending on traffic. Roughly the same time (when all factors are considered) as taking the train or flying. At a fraction of the price.

 

Which is not to say we have not had many adventures and inconveniences traveling in this fashion. And those inconveniences virtually all happen upon trying to get from NYC to Boston on a Sunday evening. When masses of students return to the Hub after a weekend in the Big Apple. Huge lines at Port Authority are the order of those days, and bus companies press any vehicle that rolls into service to meet the demand. Your ticket may say your bus is leaving at a particular time. But the staff in charge of boarding buses and the dispatchers in charge of getting them out of the labyrinthine structure that is Port Authority play fast and loose with rules and schedules.

 

These days it’s no longer necessary to choose a bus company that stops at NYC’s main bus terminal at all. There are other lower cost options like MegaBus and BoltBus. And the “Chinatown buses” which wink in and out of existence—based as they are on exploiting immigrant labor… with maintenance records so poor that some of their buses have had major issues like literally catching fire while in motion over the years. But my wife and I avoid the cheaper buses on labor grounds and concerns about cost-cutting measures that could affect safety. Although MegaBus and the Greyhound-owned BoltBus apparently do have unionized drivers in the northeast.

 

So most of the time, we stick with ailing bus giant Greyhound. It’s been through multiple bankruptcies and various owners over the decades we’ve used it. But it’s still the most heavily unionized bus line—and union drivers and mechanics are typically far more likely to run a decent service then most nonunion shops. And we feel it’s worth paying an extra $10-20 each way to arrive safely at our destination. While departing from and arriving at (more or less) climate-controlled bus stations. Rather than having to wait outside in whatever weather for buses in NYC as with the cheaper bus lines. Even if we occasionally have a Sunday night trip that lasts hours longer than it should normally take—as it just did last week to my partner Chris Faraone. And even if I once had to help a driver that got lost on a foggy night years before GPS became ubiquitous—guiding him out of downtown Worcester to Boston’s South Station Bus Terminal several hours after we left NYC.

 

Wonky as that latter predicament was, I have only rarely felt unsafe on a Greyhound bus—and usually only for a brief moment or two due to traffic or road conditions outside my driver’s control.

 

But this Sunday, something happened to my wife on a Greyhound bus that severely shook our confidence in the company and left us worried about a problem we had never considered before. One which I think is worth sharing with the general public, Greyhound management, other bus company management, transportation union leadership, and government regulators—weak though they often are in this era of ever-diminishing government oversight of corporations.

 

My wife’s bus left Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City early at 5:50 pm on a scheduled 6:30 pm departure bound for Boston. We were in touch by text throughout what transpired next. 

 

She had told me that passengers were instructed to board about 20 minutes prior to that early departure time then had to wait for Greyhound to find a driver. A young woman driver was found, and the bus left just after that staffer boarded.

 

As the bus exited Port Authority, the driver announced that passengers should be patient with her because she was from New Orleans and had never driven from NYC to Boston before. The bus proceeded uptown as is generally the case when going to Boston—although Greyhound buses take any of several routes out of the city depending on traffic. 

 

However, my wife stated that the driver started getting confused about where to go fairly quickly. And the bus ended up circling around Harlem and the Upper West Side without proceeding east to bridges that would take it to highways going north. Instead driving west past the City University of New York’s main campus and onto Riverside Drive at one point, and then as far south as 80th and Broadway. At which time the driver started talking to someone on a phone.

 

The bus had been on the road about an hour and a half at that point. The driver made no attempt to communicate with the passengers and let them know what was going on. Or to ask passengers—many of whom, like my wife, know Manhattan and any of various routes to Boston well—for help navigating. Which is much more difficult to do these days anyway because Greyhound drivers now have a door between them and passengers. The easy communication between drivers and passengers of the pre-9/11 and -weekly mass shooting days is now gone. And that’s likely why no passengers—including my wife—tried to engage the driver as things went from bad to worse.

 

So my wife, and other passengers, became concerned early into the journey. And then scared, as the driver ran at least two red lights, drove into two blind alleys and had to back the bus out, and almost hit a van. Punctuated by stopping the bus a few times on busy streets in evident attempts to figure out where to go on her own.

 

Finally, the person on the phone gave the driver correct directions to the Madison Ave Bridge and thence to Routes 87, 278, and 95. After which the trip proceeded as normal, and arrived about an hour late.

 

While the incident was going on, I posted a note about my concern with the threat to the safety of my wife, passengers, other vehicles and pedestrians to my personal Twitter account—and then shared it to my newspaper’s account—notifying both the @GreyhoundBus and @GHoundBusHelp accounts in the process. Help desk people on both accounts ultimately just told me to have my wife call Greyhound’s regular customer service lines. 

 

Fortunately, my wife and her fellow passengers got home safely. It seems like her inexperienced driver started driving erratically after getting lost in uptown Manhattan, and then got some kind of assistance from another driver or a dispatcher. She apparently had GPS, as one would expect in this day and age. But it either wasn’t working properly or she was in no state to make proper use of it to get her bus out of the city and on the road to Boston.

 

All of which leads me to my main reason for writing this column: While Greyhound has taken steps to protect drivers from attacks by dangerous passengers by placing doors next to the driver’s seat on its buses, what can passengers do if a driver has a medical or psychiatric emergency that puts them in danger? 

 

All communication channels that passengers like my wife could avail themselves of during Sunday evening’s incident seem to lead to Greyhound’s main customer service phone lines. And upon contacting said lines, my wife and other passengers’ concerns for their safety were not addressed in any way by Greyhound customer service representatives. They were simply told to call back in 24 hours and maybe get a credit or a refund or nothing at all, one supposes. Although the reps did confirm that their drivers have GPS and that the company had a tracker on each bus—and, critically, that they couldn’t talk to my wife’s bus’s driver while the bus was en route.

 

It was a situation that wasn’t quite bad enough to call the police to interdict the bus, but could have become one after it was too late to affect the outcome. A situation when a call from company management to tell the driver to stop the bus where she was and let the passengers off while they sent another bus and driver to relieve her of duty could have stopped things from escalating to a tragic conclusion where people on or off the bus could end up being hurt or killed.

 

I asked Greyhound media relations spokesperson Crystal Booker to comment on the record on these matters in time for my deadline, and she told me that Greyhound management might not be able to complete an investigation of the incident involving my wife in time for publication this week. So I will plan to write a second installment with the company’s response as soon as I receive it.

 

But for now, I must say that Greyhound, other bus companies, drivers unions (where they exist), and government regulators need to address this problem. In another transportation industry, so-called ridesharing, both Uber and Lyft—under pressure—have introduced “panic buttons” to their apps that connect passengers who feel in danger for any reason, including a driver’s actions, to local 911 services with a single touch. 

 

It seems like it’s past time for Greyhound and other bus companies to do something similar. Maybe some kind of panic button app that gives passengers a choice to either get in touch with a corporate office prepared to bring a problem driver to heel or contact local 911 depending on the severity of the situation.

 

Readers with opinions on this matter, or Greyhound or other bus company employees with information germaine to this discussion, should contact me at execeditor@digboston.com. Because this seems like a problem that needs all hands on deck until a workable solution is found. And my wife and her fellow passengers are hardly the first people to experience this problem. As a quick internet search of bus driver arrests for DUIs and the like—or avoidable accidents causing injuries and deaths—will inform even a casual researcher.

 

Apparent Horizon—recipient of 2018 and 2019 Association of Alternative Newsmedia Political Column Awards—is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s executive director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2019 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

DEESCALATING THE HARVARD CRIMSON BOYCOTT

Screenshot collage by Jason Pramas
Screenshot collage by Jason Pramas

 

 

Alternatives for feuding student immigrant advocates and journalists

 

As someone who has been both a journalist and a left-wing political activist for a long time, I suppose it’s inevitable that I would feel the need to weigh in on a debate currently raging between Harvard immigrant advocates and the independent Harvard student newspaper, the Crimson.

 

At issue is that paper’s coverage of a Harvard rally calling for the abolition of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement held by a coalition of campus activist groups led by Act on a Dream—“the premier immigrants’ rights advocacy group” at the elite university, according to its website.

 

The action took place on Thursday, Sept 12, and drew about 100 attendees. The Crimson wrote a very straightforward news piece about it the next day. Just like I did dozens of times covering all kinds of left-wing protests over the years. The two student reporters quoted the protesters at length, as I would have. They then asked ICE for a quote, as I myself did for literally every story I ever wrote—and there were many—on protests against the federal agency. ICE didn’t reply. Like its press liaisons refused to reply any of the times I asked them for a quote. Like they refuse to reply to many news outlets that ask them for quotes. Which is disgusting practice for a government agency in a democracy, full stop. 

 

The immigrant activists and their allies immediately got angry at the Crimson. Not because of any error of fact. Or because they thought they had been slighted in some way. But because the reporters contacted ICE for comment. 

 

They demanded that the Crimson agree to stop calling ICE for comment going forward.

 

The activists met with Crimson editors about the matter, and the editors refused to back down. Unsatisfied, the activists organized a petition on change.org entitled “Harvard Crimson: Stop Calling ICE for Comment.”

 

In the petition text, the activists said, “We are extremely disappointed in the cultural insensitivity displayed by The Crimson’s policy to reach out to ICE, a government agency with a long history of surveilling and retaliating against those who speak out against them.” Following a link to examples of such retaliation, the activists continued, “In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping them off, regardless of how they are contacted.”

 

The activists concluded: “We demand that The Crimson: 1. Apologize for the harm they inflicted on the undocumented community. 2. Critically engage with and change their policies that require calling ICE for comment. 3. Declare their commitment to protecting undocumented students on campus.”

 

Over 900 people, and a number of Harvard student groups, signed the petition. The activists called for Harvard students “to boycott the paper by refusing to return requests for comment,” according to the Washington Post—one of several major news organizations that have covered the dustup.

 

Two top Crimson editors responded with “A Note To Readers” in which they stated “Let us be clear: In The Crimson’s communication with ICE’s media office, the reporters did not provide the names or immigration statuses of any individual at the protest. We did not give ICE forewarning of the protest, nor did we seek to interfere with the protest as it was occurring. Indeed, it is The Crimson’s practice to wait until a protest concludes before asking for comment from the target of the protest—a rule which was followed here. The Crimson’s outreach to ICE only consisted of public information and a broad summary of protestors’ criticisms. As noted in the story, ICE did not respond to a request for comment.”

 

The editors concluded, “We understand that some readers may disagree with The Crimson’s policies. But our mission is facts, truth, narrative, and understanding. In our view, consistent application of a commonly accepted set of journalistic standards is the best way to fairly report on the campus in a sensitive and thorough manner.”

 

That statement was published on Oct 22. Since then, the activists have not relented. They have essentially made their campaign against the Crimson a major focus of their activism for this school year. 

 

On Sunday, the Harvard student government, the Undergraduate Council, narrowly passed a somewhat vaguely worded statement calling on the Crimson to change its policy: “We condemn actions or policies that endanger undocumented and immigrant students on campus, and we encourage the Harvard Crimson to revisit their policies and make adequate changes. It is imperative for the Harvard Crimson to commit to journalistic practices that do not put students at risk. With this stated, we understand that upholding journalistic standards within the Crimson is vital; however, we do not believe that upholding such standards and ensuring the wellbeing of students are mutually exclusive.”

 

The statement concluded: “The Undergraduate Council commits to exploring methods for continued safety for undocumented students and other student activists in interacting with the Crimson; such methods include but are not limited to reviewing and publicizing Harvard Public Affairs and Communications Crimson trainings, and working to make reporting policies more accessible and public.”

 

In the student newspaper’s article on the council statement, Crimson President Kristine E. Guillaume responded: “Fundamental journalistic values obligate The Crimson to allow all subjects of a story a chance to comment. … This policy demonstrates a commitment to ensuring that the individuals and institutions we write about have an opportunity to respond to criticisms in order to ensure a fair and unbiased story.”

 

And that’s where things stand as of this writing.

 

Having looked over the positions of the parties to this dispute at some length, I’m sympathetic to both. As a journalist, I have to agree that the Crimson not only did nothing wrong in its protest coverage, but also produced a well-written and eminently fair piece of journalism that I’d happily run in DigBoston. Far better than the articles the Daily Free Press—a student newspaper I once worked for—wrote about my fellow Boston University activists and me during the campus anti-apartheid movement in the mid-1980s. Mocking us at every turn… even as its editors threw me off the staff for being too sympathetic to political movements they disagreed with (and, as I was told on the quiet, because the BU administration under John Silber threatened to pull university ads in the paper if I wasn’t removed). 

 

As a longtime advocate for undocumented immigrants, and immigrant communities in general, I understand implicitly why the Act on a Dream activists want to protect undocumented students involved in calling for the abolition of ICE—a position that I support—from harm.

 

However, I think that the activists have chosen the wrong target in their just effort to make America safe from a reactionary law enforcement agency created in the wake of the tragic 9/11 attack. An agency whose leaders—that fraction of its employees who do their jobs with unmatched racist and nativist zeal, and the politicians who give it marching orders—I dearly hope to one day see up in the dock on charges of crimes against humanity for its baby concentration camps on our southern border.

 

The Crimson journalists have literally nothing to do with making undocumented students at Harvard—or anywhere in the US—unsafe. If anything they are helping them with fair coverage of student activist actions in defense of undocumented students. 

 

So I think the best course for the activists would be to drop their petition drive and boycott, and focus on the real enemy, ICE… and the politicians and nativist movements that make its existence possible.

 

Though I also think that the Crimson could help diffuse the situation by agreeing to publicly list some ways it is willing to alter its reporting practices to avoid harming article subjects like undocumented immigrants. Practices that I typically list under the rubric of the “compassionate journalism” that we try to follow at Dig when dealing with individuals and communities we adjudge to be oppressed by powerful forces like ICE. Or the Republican Party. Or Democratic Party leadership. Or multinational corporations. Or any of the various mafia organizations. 

 

Like only publishing photos of designated activist spokespeople at political actions in support of undocumented immigrants. And not publishing photos—purposely blurred or otherwise—that show the faces of rally attendees.

 

Or not posting updates about political actions involving undocumented immigrants to the social media accounts of the Crimson or any of its staffers while they are still going on.

 

Or allowing undocumented immigrants to be quoted using a nom de plume or nom de guerre, as long as the Crimson editors know their real names.

 

Or delaying publication of certain stories if early publication is highly likely to result in harm to undocumented immigrants.

 

Those are reasonable accommodations that violate neither the Crimson staffers’ First Amendment rights nor their audience’s right to know about important Harvard developments in a timely fashion.

 

What is not reasonable is telling the Crimson—or any news outlet—that its staffers cannot contact ICE or any party to any story being reported for comment.

 

Ultimately, if immigrant activists and their allies remain unhappy with the Crimson—for whatever reason—there is one alternative course they can pursue entirely on their own. Perhaps the best option of all. Like my fellow BU left activists and I did over 30 years back with our bu exposure, they can start their own student news outlet. And they can run it however they want. And they can go head to head with the Crimson in covering issues of the day at Harvard and beyond. And readers can decide which publication does a better job of covering one of the most important social movements of our age on that campus.

 

Which would be great outcome to an unfortunate fracas. In an age when this nation is losing newspapers every week, rather than gaining them.

 

Apparent Horizon—recipient of 2018 and 2019 Association of Alternative Newsmedia Political Column Awards—is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s executive director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2019 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

SOMERVILLE NEWS GARDEN HOLDS FIRST PUBLIC EVENT

Lynne Doncaster addresses crowd at Somerville News Garden event. Photo by Derek Kouyoumjian.
Lynne Doncaster addresses crowd at Somerville News Garden event. Photo by Derek Kouyoumjian.

 

Seeks more participation from Somerville residents

 

It has been nine months since DigBoston and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism partnered with the Somerville Media Center to organize an event asking Somervillians what kind of coverage was missing from their city’s remaining news media. The February 2019 Somerville Community Summit ultimately attracted 115 locals—many of whom were members or staff of 22 co-sponsoring civic organizations—to give powerful testimony to 15 professional journalists about six topic areas that they thought were getting short shrift. In an age when the consolidation of news media by a handful of giant corporations and the rise of digital media owned by another handful of big companies have done tremendous damage to local news production… in Somerville, and around the nation. Turning municipalities into what media researchers call “news deserts”—areas that no longer have professionally produced news outlets.

 

That first event was the result of the lived experience of my Dig and BINJ colleagues—Chris Faraone and John Loftus—and me over the nearly four years to that point during which we tried (with some success) to provide Boston-area communities with reportage that would otherwise be absent from the regional news ecology. We noticed local cities and towns having their newspapers of record (some of them over 100 years old) gobbled up by the huge media conglomerates, squeezed for profit, and then—often as not—discarded like so much refuse. Leaving Mass municipalities without the news that is the lifeblood of our democracy.

 

And we believed, as we still believe, that the more community news organizations that were forcibly shrunk to a fraction of their former capacity or shut down outright, the more that democracy is in danger.

 

So, we decided that it was important that we initiate a community organizing effort in the wake of the February summit to help Somerville rebuild its news infrastructure—strengthening the independent news outlets that remained, and possibly creating new news media to replace what was lost. All with the goal of helping a community talk to itself about issues of the day. In the way that it and communities around the nation had done for over two centuries since the founding of our republic.

 

As I said in my Dig editorial on the first event, Somerville Community Summit: Convening a City to Improve Its News Media, such a grassroots effort could not be primarily led by paid organizers from an organization like the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. The effort could be sparked by a group like BINJ, but its success or failure would lie with local volunteers who would either step forward to help improve news production in Somerville in their own interest… or not.

 

Which is why it has been great to see the positive response we’ve gotten to the community organizing campaign—the Somerville News Garden—that we launched via BINJ in late June. Twenty-five Somerville residents stepped up at the first meeting, and about 15 of those folks have become very active with the garden in the intervening months. With the result that the role of BINJ staff has started getting less central to the endeavor.

 

All to the good given that the news garden already has four projects in progress: the Somerville PR Wire that is almost ready to launch a volunteer-curated website that will put a feed of pitches and event listings from community members in front of all the area journalists interested in covering Somerville on a regular basis, a quarterly volunteer-run PR Clinic that will train Somervillians on how to talk to local journalists about issues and happenings they’d like to see covered, a Research Group that has just begun deploying its first survey instrument to Somerville residents to find out what kind of news they consume about the city and where they get it from, and a Neighborhood Media School that has already recruited educators to teach our first batch of inexpensive courses on journalism and news analysis starting this winter.

 

Everything the Somerville News Garden does is meant to be transparent and replicable. So whether our experiments succeed or fail, communities around the country will be able to follow our roadmap and create their own news gardens wherever a news desert is threatening democracy.

 

In that spirit, I am pleased to give a quick report about the news garden’s first public event—held last Saturday at the ever-fabulous and community-spirited club ONCE Somerville—Real News, Fake News, No News: Reviving Local Journalism in Somerville. But I’d like to set a precedent for truth-telling from the get-go. Because as both a journalist and a longtime labor and community activist, I have noted a tendency for otherwise well-meaning nonprofit community organizing efforts to ever and always “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative” when discussing their progress.

 

And I’ve stated previously that I don’t think it helps anyone—least of all people interested in duplicating our effort elsewhere—to hear nothing about the news garden but happy-talk of the the type too many nonprofits often aim at major funders. Due, in the main, to the fear of losing big donations by failing to succeed at every turn. An unrealistic expectation at the best of times.

 

As such, I will start by saying that I thought Real News, Fake News, No News was a qualified success. The main aims of the event were—having already solidified the commitment of the first group of Somerville News Garden volunteers—to attract more Somerville residents to become active with the effort, to provide some public education on the crisis in journalism at the national and local levels, to have a good discussion with community members about specific issues and happenings that they think need more coverage in area news media, and to let attendees be the first people to take our survey.

 

I think news garden volunteers had varying turnout targets on their minds as they put posters up around the city and activated various social networks, but I was hoping for 40-60 people—given that we knew in advance that some community activists would be working on the Nov 5 municipal elections and that Real News was happening on a nice sunny Saturday, Nov 2. 

 

We ended up with 42 participants. About 25 of whom were new. So that was good. Though not as good as we were hoping. We had enough people to have an acceptably large audience for the excellent presentations by Professor Gino Canella of Emerson College and lifelong Somerville resident and sometime journalist Lynne Doncaster (followed by some great comments by audience members who had worked with the Somerville Journal, Somerville News, and Somerville Times back in the day), and two breakout groups with nice conversations—led by Jane Regan of the newly revived Somerville Neighborhood News at Somerville Media Center—about “Headlines We’ve Never Seen” (resulting in several new article ideas for local journalists to cover). Which then ensured that a reasonable number of participants (led by our Research Group convener Leanne Fan) took our new Somerville Media Consumption Survey (which has already given us some great data and inspired us to start to disseminate the survey instrument widely around the city).

 

My concerns about the event, however, are twofold. First, although we did direct outreach to the same civic groups that turned out for the Somerville Community Summit, most of them did not respond to our call to attend the Real News event. Which makes sense. Because, a) we were reaching out to staff and active members of those groups who are already busy with their own work, and b) we did not have an audience of journalists on hand this time for those groups to pitch article ideas to. Lessening their desire to attend. But it’s going to be difficult to solve Somerville’s accelerating news crisis without active community groups involved. So the Somerville News Garden needs to find ways to partner with them going forward that are more obviously and directly beneficial to all sides.

 

Second, it’s hard to expect volunteers (no matter how committed) to handle community organizing campaigns—or serious public events like Real News—while going to school, holding down jobs, and taking care of kids and grandkids. The news garden has one paid staff person, me, attached to it from the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Yet, again, staff can never substitute for a growing number of engaged volunteers when it comes to organizing a community like Somerville to better talk to itself. Fortunately, news garden volunteers did indeed conceive of the Real News event basically from soup to nuts, and did much of the work to put it together. But I still had to step in and nudge things along from time to time. Something else we need to work on.

 

Now that the event is over and we have interest from over a dozen of the new attendees in starting to work with the news garden, everyone has to try hard to shore up the commitment of the initial volunteers, integrate the new volunteers, and make sure that all those folks can handle work on our four projects without everything devolving into a staff-driven endeavor. Which I think would be the end of the news garden initiative. Because staff-driven campaigns are all too often “astroturf” efforts (fake grassroots) rather than the actual grassroots efforts that are needed to effect long-lasting positive change at the community level.

 

Genuine community commitment will be critical if we’re going to do more public events in all of Somerville’s neighborhoods and get more buy-in from all the different populations that make up the city. Right now, the news garden is primarily reaching white, educated homeowners with a habit of reading newspapers—most of whom are older and have lived in Somerville for a long time. We need to reach younger people, immigrants, and a variety of other folks if the news garden is going to truly represent the community it’s aiming to assist. Each of those groups has different interests and consumes different kinds of news in different media. One solution on the journalism front will decidedly not fit all.

 

These are the challenges the Somerville News Garden currently faces. And at the end of the proverbial day, our new organization will only succeed if significant numbers of Somervillians think that local news is important enough to put volunteer time into saving. We’re getting a fine response in our first few months of organizing. But 42 people at a well-advertised public event is not 60 people. Or the 115 we got at the last February’s community summit. 

 

All of which is to say that Somerville residents reading this are cordially invited to join the Somerville News Garden and work with us to strengthen local journalism in the interest of democracy. Interested? Our email is somervillenewsgarden@binjonline.org. Let’s talk.

 

Click here to sign up for Community Journalism Crash Course workshop sessions with journalist and educator Jane Regan at Somerville Media Center, Nov 12 or Nov 14.

 

Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston—and executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

EDITORIAL: DIGBOSTON SEEKS FALL INTERNS

 

(Interested candidates, please read this whole editorial)

 

At DigBoston, we like to have a lot of interns working for us at all times. Particularly college journalism students who will soon be seeking jobs as full-time newspaper or magazine reporters. Prior to June, over the first couple of years after my partners Chris Faraone, John Loftus, and I acquired this paper, we had taken as many as eight at once. But when we didn’t find ourselves overwhelmed managing that many talented young people, we figured, “Why not take more?” So this summer we had 17 interns—16 reporters and one marketing specialist. Plus two more reporting interns working remotely who didn’t participate directly in our internship program.

 

That worked out very well. And we’d like to do the same thing this fall—which is why I’m writing this editorial. But I think it’s worth running through our rationale for wanting to host such a large group of aspiring journalists again before continuing to my pitch for new talent.

 

There is general agreement that there is a crisis in American journalism. And I write about it frequently in these pages. The old advertising-driven economic model for commercial news outlets is collapsing—helped along by the rise of digital media giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon—even as consolidation of remaining outlets by a shrinking number of giant media corporations is accelerating the downward slide of regular mass layoffs of journalists in advance of the shuttering of thus-hollowed-out newspapers and magazines on cost grounds. Nonprofit and cooperative economic models have not yet proved to be viable alternatives for struggling independent news operations. And public funding for journalism is not yet on the political table. 

 

The result of this unfortunate situation is nothing less than the gutting of American news media. According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center: “From 2008 to 2018, newsroom employment in the U.S. dropped by 25%. In 2008, about 114,000 newsroom employees—reporters, editors, photographers and videographers—worked in five industries that produce news: newspaper, radio, broadcast television, cable and ‘other information services’ (the best match for digital-native news publishers). By 2018, that number had declined to about 86,000, a loss of about 28,000 jobs.”

 

But the story is worst for print newsrooms—the very sector that many journalism students looking to intern with us are most interested to work in, and home to the longform reporting that all other media outlets rely on: “This decline in overall newsroom employment has been driven primarily by one sector: newspapers. The number of newspaper newsroom employees dropped by 47% between 2008 and 2018, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000.”

 

This is bad news indeed. For working journalists and aspiring journalists, yes, but also for our beleaguered democracy. Which relies on the “Fourth Estate”—journalism, broadly writ—to hold powerful individuals and institutions accountable to the will of the people on matters large and small. A democratic society no longer able to support a robust and (at least nominally) independent news sector, whatever it wants to call itself, will not remain a democracy for very long.

 

Yet journalism schools continue to pump out more trained journalists than in previous years, an effect partly explained as a “Trump bump” reaction to our polarizing president. According to a December 2018 survey of nearly 500 journalism and media educators in 45 states conducted by the Education Week Research Center in coordination with the Journalism Education Association, “student interest in journalism is growing or holding steady.”

 

On the one hand, it’s easy to feel like said schools are doing a disservice to journalism students, preparing many of them for reporter jobs that no longer exist. Plus it’s certainly true that too many corporatized colleges are more than happy to take advantage of any academic trend that results in more paying “customers.”

 

But on the other hand, our democracy needs more journalists—especially considering how many paid reporting jobs America has lost of late—not less. And failing to train the journalists we need is doing a disservice to that democracy.

 

Which is why DigBoston is so committed to running a large internship program. We strongly believe that America should remain (or truly become, given our broadly left-wing orientation) a democracy and that having more journalists in every city and town is one way to help ensure that outcome. 

 

However, we cannot yet afford to pay interns. We are by no means immune to the crisis in journalism, and inherited a newspaper that has needed to be gradually stabilized since 2017 before now being able to even start to think about expanding our operation. And eventually offer at least some paid internships. Allowing us to better meet our goal of always having the most diverse group of interns possible by every metric, including class. A goal we’re actually doing pretty well at reaching season to season thus far. Though we can always improve on that front.

 

So, interning with us means participating in a very open exchange. We ask reporting interns to work just a few hours a week—basically producing one article at a time—alongside jobs or other internships that do pay and school (although we also have some interns that are not currently in school). We let them start and finish their time with us whenever they want (a two-month stay being typical). We treat our interns as reporters. As “equals with less experience,” as I’ve long typified it. When they’re working with us, their article subjects do not know they are interns. We encourage them to pitch us stories they are interested to cover, and we also offer assignments to them as they come in. 

 

Reporting interns write for us as long as they like and leave us with good clips with an established newspaper for their resumes. Plus, and probably most importantly, they become part of our talent network—people we know and have worked with, and people we can recommend for jobs elsewhere, or maybe even hire ourselves one day. Every two weeks, we ask them to attend “pitch meetings” with Chris and me. If they can make those, great. If not, we can work around that. Most of the knowledge transfer between staff and interns takes place by working together.

 

And that’s the basic deal. We also have other kinds of interns from time to time, as mentioned in passing above. As such, if you’re a journalism student (or a marketing, graphic arts, photography, design, media studies, English, etc. student), and you’re interested to intern with us, we’d love to hear from you.

 

All candidates for fall internships can email Chris and me at internships@digboston.com with “INTERNSHIP APPLICATION” in the subject line. Please include a paragraph or two about why you’d like to intern with us and what kind of internship you’re interested in. Then add links to three clips (if you want to be a reporter, or three artworks/photos/designs if you want to work with us on the design side, or three marketing campaigns if you want to help us with that, or appropriate proof that you have skills in whatever other area you’d like to help us with), and a link to your resume. That’s it. No need to write long letters to us.

 

Our internship program is increasingly competitive, no lie. We don’t take all applicants. We are obviously looking for reporters more than other kinds of interns. But if you believe in our mission, love journalism and democracy, and have some skills to back up your aspirations, then you will have a good shot.

 

We look forward to your applications. Good luck.

 

Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston.

EDITORIAL: DIGBOSTON JOINS MOVEMENT TO SLOW GLOBAL WARMING

Earth held up by a human hand in space

 

Calls for regional consortium of news outlets to improve and expand climate change coverage

 

Last month, during the fearsome heat wave that saw Boston temperatures soar to 98 degrees Fahrenheit for two days in a row, 400 chickens died in New Hampshire.

 

According to the Boston Globe, they succumbed to “heatstroke at Vernon Family Farm in Newfields, N.H., around 5 p.m. Saturday when the temperature peaked and the farm could not save them…” The article went on to explain that temperatures got up to 90 degrees in Newfields that day. But chickens cannot take heat over 106 degrees. And, despite the best efforts of the farm staff to keep them cool, the birds expired. 

 

A New Hampshire Union Leader article provided more detail. Farm owner Jeremiah Vernon said that the heat index (a measure of how hot it really feels when relative humidity is factored in with the actual air temperature) on his farm just after 5 p.m. on July 20 when the chickens died was over 110 degrees—and added that another southern NH farm lost 300 chickens the same day. He also mentioned that “the farm has spent about $2,000 to buy generators and circulation fans to help prevent illness in the event of another summer heat wave.” Something he had obviously never had to consider over the farm’s previous 10 years of operation. Several of which were each the hottest years on record in turn worldwide.

 

As 2018 was. And 2019 may be. June was the hottest month on record. And then July was, too. Global average temperatures are continuing to climb. Month by month. Year by year. There is some fluctuation. Some cooler months and years. But only cooler relative to the ever-hotter new normal. The general trend is upward. And the speed of that climb is accelerating.

 

Even so, the death of hundreds of chickens from overheating was an unusual enough occurrence to be worth reporting in major New England newspapers. But apparently not alarming enough to mention the role that global warming is playing in increasing the number and severity of hot days summer by summer. Despite happening in the same month that the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report, “Killer Heat in the United States: Climate Choices and the Future of Dangerously Hot Days.” Which used the best available scientific data to make the following predictions for New Hampshire:

 

Historically, there have been three days per year on average with a heat index above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. This would increase to 23 days per year on average by midcentury and 49 by the century’s end. Limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit] above pre-industrial levels could reduce the frequency of such days to 17 per year on average.

 

By the end of the century, an estimated 970,000 people would be exposed to a heat index above 90 degrees Fahrenheit for the equivalent of two months or more per year. By limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, all residents would avoid such days of extreme conditions. 

 

Historically, there have been zero days per year on average with a heat index above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This would increase to six days per year on average by midcentury and 19 by the century’s end. Of the cities with a population of 50,000 or more in the state, Dover and Nashua would experience the highest frequency of these days. Limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would cap the frequency of such days at two per year on average.

 

Both the Globe and the Union Leader wrote articles highlighting the report’s findings, to their credit. But neither article echoed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ oft-repeated point that only limiting temperature rise 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels can prevent such calamitous outcomes. And neither publication mentioned global warming as a likely causal factor in the death of the chickens—given that the heat index got up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit the day the doomed birds perished—in their coverage of that story. Even though the UCS report states that the historic average number of days with a heat index over 100 in New Hampshire is “zero.”

 

This year there was at least one such day. So that isn’t normal. And although it’s difficult to peg particular weather events to global warming, it is thus definitely worth mentioning the strong possibility of a connection in this case. For a very good reason beyond the importance of keeping the societal discussion of global warming going hereabouts: The birds’ deaths add to a growing mountain of evidence that global warming is already beginning to threaten food production. 

 

Like it or not, chickens are an important part of our food supply. But increasingly severe weather caused by a swiftly-heating planet is triggering major floods, major droughts, devastating wind storms, vast wildfires, and the spread of once-tropical insects and diseases—all of which harm crops and food animals, and put our future food security at risk. As sea level rise is starting to impinge on growing lands in low-lying areas. Making the NH chickens the equivalent of canaries in a coal mine when it comes to warning us of the looming danger to planetary food supplies—and highlighting a major problem with allowing average temperatures to continue spiraling skyward.

 

However, the planet is not getting hotter on its own. It is heating up because governments and major corporations are allowing the amount of carbon that human civilization is burning in the form of oil, gas, and coal to continue to increase. Putting more and more carbon dioxide—the main greenhouse gas—into the atmosphere every year. Despite those same governments and corporations paying lip service to the importance of decreasing the amount of carbon we burn. While the scientific consensus is now agreeing that the only way for our civilization—and perhaps humanity itself—to survive the rolling apocalypse that is human-induced global warming is to bring the net amount of carbon emissions (after somehow deploying carbon capture technologies on an industrial scale) to zero by 2030. A mere decade hence.

 

Yet in June, Bloomberg reported that “Global carbon emissions jumped the most in seven years in 2018 as energy demand surged, according to BP’s annual review of world energy…” So even huge climate criminal multinationals are aware that carbon emissions have continued to climb unabated—except for a short period after the 2008 financial collapse when manufacturing and transport slowed for a time across the globe.

 

All of which is to say that journalists need to do a much better job of covering global warming and its many dangerous effects. Too many stories like the sad premature death of the NH chickens do relate to climate change. But that critical angle too often goes unmentioned. And people then go about their daily lives thinking that global warming is something that will only affect humans in the far future or not at all.

 

WBUR just ran an interesting story on a network of major news outlets in Florida—a traditionally conservative state gradually coming to a political consensus that climate change is real—that have committed to collaborative coverage of the very obvious and constant effects of global warming in that low-lying subtropical farm state. Reporters and editors at those operations have decided that it’s their responsibility to work together to give this most dangerous of crises the constant attention it deserves.

 

And that’s clearly something that we need to do here in New England. 

 

Especially in the Bay State, where the Union of Concerned Scientists projections are even more dire: “Historically, the heat index has topped 90 degrees in Massachusetts seven days a year, on average.” But if there is no global action to significantly lower carbon emissions, that number would increase to “an average of 33 days per year by mid-century and 62 by century’s end.” Furthermore, the Commonwealth “currently averages no days when the heat index tops 100 degrees,” but without changes to global emissions that figure would rise to “10 days by mid-century and 26 days by century’s end.”

 

So I’m writing to commit DigBoston to three things.

 

First, this publication is going on record in joining the environmental movement aimed at slowing human-induced global warming—stopping it no longer being possible. My colleagues and I accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is a terminal threat to Earth’s biosphere and to our species. 

 

Second, we will strive to run more and better coverage of global warming in our own pages. And we will do everything we can to provide regular information on ways people can join together to build the movement to mitigate it.

 

Third, we are declaring our desire to help start a consortium of news outlets interested in working collectively to improve and expand coverage of global warming in New England. Alternatively, we will happily join an existing effort along those lines, should one we’re unaware of be underway.

 

Environmental journalists interested in writing for us—and environmental activists and organizations that wish to submit op-eds—are invited to email Chris Faraone and me with pitches at editorial@digboston.com

 

And editors, publishers, and producers of news outlets interested in starting talks aimed at creating a reporting consortium on global warming in New England are strongly encouraged to contact us at the same email address.

 

We’re all overdue to take such steps. But journalists in the northeastern US can help change a lot more hearts and minds about the need to make slowing climate change a societal priority, if we work together. 

 

Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston.

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