DEAR PUBLIC EDITOR
The New York Times won’t run my letter asking them to acknowledge alt media so I published it here
I’m not arrogant or naive enough to think anyone at the New York Times knows or cares about who I am or what I do. But since their public editor Margaret Sullivan ran a column that completely missed the point on a topic in my wheelhouse, I thought there was a chance that I might at least get a personal email response to a letter I wrote her last week. I even abstained from using foul or aggressive language, and only tweeted at Sullivan once — in a friendly manner— to see if she had any plans to answer. Crickets.
Nonetheless, the column in question — the public editor’s “search for local investigative reporting’s future” — deserves to be mocked publicly. It’s a lazy afterthought that Sullivan apparently strung together from an interview or two and some criminally trite takeaways from her screening of Spotlight — a dramatization of events that happened more than a decade ago. She’s not the first hack to write a disposable thought piece to justify expensing movie tickets, but since this particular turd hit home for me, I’m retrieving my rant from the Gray Lady’s trash pile.
Re.: “The Search for Local Investigative Reporting’s Future”
Margaret Sullivan doesn’t have to search any longer for the future of local investigative reporting. It’s right here in the same city where the Boston Globe piggybacked the work of journalist Kristen Lombardi — now a senior reporter with The Center for Public Integrity, whose Nicholas Kusnetz Sullivan mentions in her column — in unearthing revelations that were recently portrayed in the film Spotlight. Like Bill Moyers said earlier this year in a speech at the New York Public Library, “A Boston Phoenix reporter [Lombardi] broke the story about sexual abuse within the city’s Catholic Church nine months before the Boston Globe picked up the thread. The Globe intensified the reporting and gave the story national and international reach.”
I don’t simply like informing people that the Phoenix broke that story because I am also an alum of the now-shuttered institution, which is unfortunately mocked in Tom McCarthy’s film. I mention the genesis of that reporting because as the current news and features editor of DigBoston, the city’s sole remaining alternative newspaper, and as the co-founder of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), I spend seven days a week helping independent media makers — the kind who often initially report the local and grassroots headlines that outlets like the New York Times and the Globe build into Pulitzer Prize-winning projects — get the respect and pay they deserve.
As for the future of local investigative reporting … the public editor writes:
More and more, nonprofit news organizations, digital start-ups, university-based centers and public radio stations are beginning to fill the gap — sometimes in partnerships. But they probably won’t fully take hold while newspapers, even in their shrunken state, remain the dominant media players in local markets. And many longtime journalists wonder if they can ever offer the same depth and breadth as the best newspaper staffs.
Vague reservations of condescending anonymous longtime journalists aside, many entities are not only filling gaps, but some of us are even supporting existing media infrastructure. In the case of BINJ, so far we’re working with more than a dozen outlets — in multiple languages — to provide the kind of deep digs and data dives they can’t otherwise afford to do. Unlike many university-based journalism incubators, we are also employing freelancers in the process, and developing the next generation of feature writers who would have otherwise come up through the Phoenix system like Lombardi (and several Times reporters through the years as well).
Though we’ve only been up and running for six months, BINJ has already had significant success on both the investigative and community engagement fronts. The work done at this level is often cast out of the spotlight or left on the cutting room floor, but if there really are to be solutions to the challenges in local reporting, the process should include giving the independent media some credit where it’s due.
Sincerely,
Chris Faraone, Director of Editorial, BINJ
