You can get wax packs or full sets of Garbage Rail Kids in the BINJ store here

The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) has produced multiple investigative features on the MBTA, in the process identifying tens of millions of dollars in questionable spending and imprudent financial decisions. Examples range from costly marketing campaigns that attempt to whitewash clear and pressing transit concerns, to coverage of the agency’s insanely complicated public-private partnerships which seem to benefit the latter far more than the rider.

BINJ continues to produce in-depth articles. At the same time, its editors also recognize the limited reach of longform and digital media, and are introducing Garbage Rail Kids as a way to connect with new readers and T riders in real life.

Put simply, Garbage Rail Kids are novelty/satirical collectible trading cards highlighting reporting done by BINJ — as well as other media and transit advocacy groups — on the MBTA and its infinite problems. Since many of the causes of so much ongoing consternation are forgotten if they’re ever adequately amplified in the first place, this project is intended to educate stakeholders and keep relevant reporting within reach of the public in a time of paywalls and diminishing enterprise journalism — all while having some laughs at the T’s expense.

Prototype packs of Garbage Rail Kids were passed out at train stations in Boston, Cambridge, Quincy, and Somerville all fall. This winter, BINJ will distribute thousands of free sample packs, and also offer a limited number of exclusive packs and full sets to donors online (see below). The proceeds from those sales will go to creating and printing additional cards and doing further reporting on public transit.

Announcements about upcoming free drops, ways to get them online and in person, and Garbage Rail Kids events are forthcoming.

Get Your Garbage Rail Kids Here

Our new novelty trading cards lampooning MBTA waste and mismanagement was originally published in BINJ Reports on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My site is called Talking Joints Memo, check it out

TALKINGJOINTSMEMO.COM

In case you have been looking for me, I’ve been writing about weed was originally published in faraONe the MEDIA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why are we blanketing one Massachusetts city in particular with focused housing crisis coverage this winter?

By Chris Faraone, BINJ Editorial Director

Almost everything we cover at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism ends in homelessness. Environmental injustice. Prison, re-entry, parole. The opioid epidemic. Institutional racism. The affordable housing crisis. When society fails to deploy adequate solutions and resources on these fronts, the end result is the end of the line. You’ve seen the story written fifty-thousand ways, often with common doomed conclusions equating the homeless with the hopeless.

But what if we took a much broader look at the bottom? Instead of simply focusing on so much desperation and highlighting a few token rags-to-riches tales as proxies for larger problems and answers, what if we deconstructed every aspect, from the mundane to the profane, and re-presented it all via smaller, more digestible pieces of a larger puzzle showing intersecting elements of poverty? That has been our thinking in reporting Cambridge Unhoused over the past several months and in strategizing an effective plan to engage the maximum number of readers.

For the remainder of this year and into 2024, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism will disseminate a series of articles, columns, explainers, and informational graphics documenting homelessness funding and services in Massachusetts with particular attention paid to Cambridge. Since the subject is complex and ever-changing, we will publish multiple short modular components that highlight specific issues or stakeholders but that also connect with other media made for this project (as well as some we are incorporating from storytelling allies we have met in the process).

All media produced for the Cambridge Unhoused series will be distributed to partner publications and on social media through the MassWire news service of BINJ, and will be featured on a dedicated project page that will serve as a portal to various puzzle pieces. In sum, we hope the final result is a tapestry revealing a larger picture of the unhoused climate with critical context for the purpose of encouraging fresh perspectives on an emergency situation that’s intensifying every year.

This format agnostic multi-reporter effort comes at a moment of great consequence, in a year when stories about the worsening plight for poor people and the forces that flank them are common enough to take center stage, or at least share it with immigration coverage. In May, homelessness in Western Massachusetts reached a five-year high. And while many commonwealth communities have made progress leveraging a strategy that subsidizes permanent supportive housing, in June, the federal policy that powers the Housing First program became a “new target of the right.”

In July, state-funded shelters in Mass “reached a new record” with nearly 5,000 families. Then in August, Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency amid a migrant shelter shortage, all while the number of older adults facing homelessness is reportedly “on the rise” in Mass. The state is considering a homeless bill of rights, but last week, the legal aid group Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a class action lawsuit to stop the state’s shelter system from capping the number of families it serves amidst such distress.

Before we attempted to explain homelessness in Cambridge to readers, we had to understand the moving parts ourselves. We formed an ad hoc team of three to six of us depending on the month, and took notes on every article and report on the topic going back at least 10 years. Then we started interviewing a wide gamut of subjects, from overworked shelter directors, outreach employees, and volunteers, to politicians, business owners, public health officials, and people who have slipped on and off the grid around Cambridge for decades.

There’s the veteran who picked Harvard Square as his temporary hangout to avoid the dangerous drug-infested unknown of Boston proper. And the mother who gets so nervous that she throws up on cold nights when she’s facing a potential lottery that will determine if she sleeps under a relatively safe warm roof in Cambridge or has to trek into the badlands across the Charles River. Every tribulation is a heartbreaker; but while the voices of people who are currently experiencing homelessness as well as those of many who have slept in shelters in the past will be prominently featured in the series — including as writers, sources, and even physical distributors of content through Spare Change News — we hope to avoid the trap of publishing the kind of futile journalism prize bait that too frequently romanticizes street life and fails to follow up.

It’s easy to spark emotion with detailed portraits of poverty, and to undress the stressed service providers and blast overburdened bureaucrats. Instead of abandoning readers in a cloud of despair, though, we are aiming to accomplish something more with Cambridge Unhoused. In addition to mapping out the quagmire through several parts, we’re also searching for potentially helpful ideas and solutions that are taking place in other states and regions to include in upcoming coverage, plus identifying positives in Cambridge which could help elsewhere.

Finally, while reliable data about the unhoused population is scant, we are attempting to glean sharper estimates on numbers that are often wishy-washy, if they exist at all. If you can help or have data to add, please contact us. And if you haven’t heard from one of our reporters yet and have something important to share about these issues, don’t fret — this is not the end of our reporting. It’s only the beginning. You can reach us at info@binjonline.org.

INTRODUCING CAMBRIDGE UNHOUSED was originally published in BINJ Reports on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On March 16, 2021, I woke up and said something like, Oh, right, today’s the day I was supposed to make a documentary about the Dig surviving through this shittiest of years.

I hadn’t devised a specific plan, but generally I wanted to compile some sort of time capsule about the struggle we have endured to continue reporting the news. Our difficulties aren’t comparable to the family and personal hardships that too many people are still living through, but we’re among the last outlets that cover those for whom basic comforts amount to luxury amenities in good times, and considering that we’ve been going extra hard on that grind all year, it seemed like a video compendium was fitting.

To be completely candid, my initial motivation was to learn how to use the pro movie camera that I’m fortunate enough to have access to through the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), which three of us founded in 2015 to support local reporting. I also wanted to teach myself how to use professional editing software. But after recording my first couple of interviews, I began to realize that while those technical lessons are critical, again, this is the sort of thing that we ought to be documenting, and for a few reasons.

The first is probably quite obvious: The local journalism tailspin continues as the impact of the virus drags on, and we figured that since we’re that nimble scrappy indie weekly that could, there are probably some lessons for others in what we have done. I hope you watch my mini doc to see for yourself, but in short we have survived on a mixture of member donations, funding from BINJ, government loans, the sweat and passion of our many contributors, and endless workweeks for the three of us who run this ship.

But the most important thing that I believe this Dig video diary can offer is something I hadn’t realized was needed or possible until I started to edit the footage. And that’s an opportunity for those who read us to see who we are and get a glimpse of why we do what we do, plus a little bit of how we do it. At a time when reporters are simultaneously under attack from right-wingers who want to literally kill us and faux-leftist trolls acting like the fascists who they purport to disdain, it can’t hurt to show that there are actual people who pour their damn hearts into this publication.

Without further ado, it’s called Total Annihilation: How One Scrappy Independent Newspaper Weathered a Pandemic Year. I sincerely hope that you enjoy it. It wasn’t my original intention, but as it turns out, I made it for you.

Sincerely,

CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, DIGBOSTON

digboston.com

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LOCAL ANNIHILATION was originally published in faraONe the MEDIA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My new series of quick (and hopefully helpful) tips for reporters

Journalists Have Questions

But They’re Really Busy

Let’s Cut To The Chase

In Fewer Than 60

That’s the quick and easy premise of these new videos I am making whenever I have an extra few minutes. Journalism in 60 Seconds is a series of hot takes covering everything from interviewing techniques to newsroom technology. It’s part of a channel I am building, faraONe the MEDIA, in an effort to provide accessible and critical information about the media and journalism that people would actually want to watch.

I still work two jobs—as the E-i-C at DigBoston, and as the editorial director at BINJ. So these videos won’t be daily anytime soon. But I have already recorded 10 more and sketched out notes for the next 20, and hopefully now that I put these up I’ll be motivated to get a bunch more edited. It’s been fun so far, and if you have a request for a topic, please don’t hesitate to contact me here on Medium and/or via Twitter.

Check Out More Videos & Subscribe To faraONe the MEDIA Here

JOURNalism in 60 Seconds was originally published in faraONe the MEDIA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

READ THE WHOLE ESSAY HERE: https://medium.com/@Fara1/retort-for-america-d6ac79dd22b8

BINJ Ed Director’s critique on Report For America … was originally published in BINJ Reports on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

https://medium.com/@Fara1/retort-for-america-d6ac79dd22b8

A critique of Report For America … was originally published in faraONe the MEDIA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why is no one questioning the program that countless communities, foundations, and media makers are banking on to rescue local investigative journalism?

I was working as a part-time editor in Boston and still freelancing in 2014 when I first harnessed the mighty force of crowdfunding. Looking to explore a wild tip into a corrupt county in mountainous southern Oregon and unable to do the story on the budgets offered by a few New York-based outlets, I raised $8,500; hired a researcher, fact-checker, and copy support; and booked a flight. Despite only having as much funding to complete my whole project as a major might spend in a single afternoon on an investigative dive, my ad hoc squad unearthed thousands of documents, connected dots, and exposed a web of scoundrels behind an elaborate mortgage scam.

At the tail end of my second fact-finding trip out West, I rolled south to San Francisco, where I spent two days in 2015 at a conference for my newspaper’s trade organization, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN). That year our legion linked up with the Media Consortium (TMC), a since-defunct alliance of diverse progressive publications ranging from issue-based outfits like Rethinking Schools to bigger general ops like the Nation.

With the Oregon experience still heavy on my mind, I was motivated by the possibilities of reporting funded in alternative ways. So in California, while listening to knowledgeable voices from seasoned nonprofits extol their creative strategies, I hatched an idea for an incubator that boosts local news and journalists. I named it the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, or BINJ for short, and right away recruited partners to help build a replicable system.

As I would come to learn, at roughly the same time, another team was forming around a proposal that, at least in some respects, appeared similar to the BINJ concept. But as both of our babies have matured into beacons of hope, to varying degrees, on an increasingly barren landscape, I’ve come to realize just how different they are and what that difference means for how the greater journalism apparatus should be retooled for sustainability.

THEIR WAY

While my crew was still brainstorming, Steve Waldman, an accomplished researcher and former journalist for US News and World Report whose extra-reportorial stints have included advising and writing a book on AmeriCorps, was putting the finishing touches on “a new model for saving local journalism, borrowing from national and community service programs.” Published on his Medium page on July 9, 2015, with a summary run by Columbia Journalism Review the following week, the Report For America (RFA) white paper made a significant splash.

In addition to relationships that Waldman already had in the startup, service, and nonprofit worlds, early on in his endeavor he linked with esteemed media thinker Charles Sennott, a Boston Globe alum who founded Global Post and the GroundTruth Project, both of which have germinated loads of journalism in the dryest news deserts worldwide. With Sennott signed on as a co-founder and RFA pulled under the GroundTruth umbrella at WGBH, a PBS powerhouse in Boston, Waldman attracted many of the most sought-after backers in technology and media, from the Google News Lab to the Knight Foundation. So much momentum snowballed in the past two years, and in 2019 RFA will place 60 reporters in newsrooms across the United States through three programs:

• “Classic,” for which RFA holds “annual national competitions, recruiting both reporters and news organizations from around the country,” and places the winning reporters in various news rooms for one-year stints that could stretch into two.
• “Regional or Local Corps,” in which RFA is “working with local foundations and philanthropists to set up special corps in certain areas.”
• “Issue Based Corps,” in which RFA will establish “special corps to field local reporters covering health care, education, veterans affairs, the environment, religion and criminal justice.”

This all sounds like great news, and indeed much of it is. I will highlight pluses, but this is not another injudicious celebration of Waldman and Sennott’s genius. Because instead of any fair, honest, or obvious criticism of RFA, there has been a coronation and rush by some of the wealthiest foundations to blindly throw money at the program, which aims to train and place more than 1,000 reporters in its first five years. Ironically, it’s largely assisting the kind of essential community shops that, until recently, banner funders have at worst hobbled by propping startup competitor carpetbaggers, and at best humored with microgrants.

You might say the success that RFA is having on the funding front was a forgone conclusion. Waldman’s 2015 report, an endless hodgepodge that reads like media grant app Lorem Ipsum, was underwritten by the venerable Ford Foundation. Since its release, the project has magnetically attracted others with the same historical reluctance Ford has to directly support outlets. Not to mention a propensity for seeding and cheerleading for the latest flavor of the month, then deserting them like so many crowdfunding platforms, browser-based fake news-detecting fact checkers, engagement tools, and other fads.

In his June 2015 RFA breakdown on Medium, Waldman wrote [emphasis his], “Report for America should foster controversy.” He’s specifically referring to integrity and independence, and why public interest journalism shouldn’t be funded by states, cities, or taxpayers. But I think it is time for the concept to itself spur some controversy, or at least conversation, since RFA has been co-signed by innumerable well-respected media entities — from J-schools to trade pubs to the New York Times — without facing any serious public skepticism.

Upon close inspection, Waldman’s white paper is trite and stinks of cherry-picked puff potpourri. In an ocean of supportive stats, there are several points that could be countered using research from the same foundations that have tripped over each other to back RFA. “In short,” Waldman wrote in 2015, incredulously, “journalism is doing great — except when it comes to reporting that is labor-intensive, local and civically-important but unlikely to generate massive amounts of traffic required for a mass-market advertising business model.”

Even if such statements were truer than they are subjective and self-serving, Sennott and Waldman aren’t air-dropping new business models over Appalachia. Instead, they are parachuting troops in. With the millions they are raising, RFA is fast becoming a leading central training and dispatch command center. To decide who gets help, the program presides over an annual Hunger Games. Meanwhile, as RFA sparks competition among applicants, in its own development efforts, the founders bypassed any bluster and staged an impressive philanthropic coup.

Until now, I have avoided pitching such a pointed criticism so as to avoid looking jealous or spiteful (for the record, I am both). In the grand scope of nonprofit media, BINJ is a minimally plugged-in underdog, while Waldman and Sennott, on the other hand, recently appeared on a CNN podcast to bolster their cause. I caught the interview, and since even the network’s typically deft media observer, Brian Stelter, basically gave RFA a free pass, I figured that I might as well fall on the funding sword and speak up.

FRONTALLY CONFRONTING

Before I cut much deeper, it is important to say that I’m rooting for Report For America. I’m not just saying that in the way that a Democratic mayor might claim that they hope the Republican governor of their state succeeds. I actually mean it, and I’ve even sent the application link for RFA to editors and publishers in my orbit, and recommended that some of our more experienced writers check out the available positions.

As big as RFA’s already grown, failure could give way to an abysmal crisis with significant reverberations. It’s just one of many ploys to lift the industry that have been floated, only RFA was hatched by an emphatically connected team, plus it’s funded to the teeth, buttressed by a star-studded roster of professors and practitioners, and at the center of attention among influential commenters. If things go south, everything like it could also be written off, with opportunities possibly vanishing for projects that so much as slightly resemble RFA. That would be a total shame, because despite fundamental flaws that I will skewer further down, Waldman has some admirable ideas.

• While my biggest beef with RFA is that it isn’t using enough of its resources to equip small fries for survival after this line of funding dries up, Waldman and Sennott are cleverly finding and getting in front of regional foundations in places where they are planting corps members and helping to get those philanthropies in the habit of funding journalism beyond PBS.
• One clear criticism of RFA is that rather than proactively finding and securing journalists from the communities that its newspaper partners cover, they are dispatching (mostly) established reporters from out of town. Having run into my own problems securing the right people for specific assignments in a market as massive as Boston, I can understand why it’s unrealistic to expect RFA to locate muckrakers-in-waiting everywhere it expands. Considering those limitations, it is encouraging that RFA promises, “Once in the host organization, the corps member would be managed completely by the local editor.”
• And of course there is the actual reporting done by the corps members and newsrooms they are supporting. The output of Eric J. Shelton at Mississippi Today, for example, is the sort of community coverage every block, city, and region stands to benefit from. RFA is helping ace media makers make media that wouldn’t otherwise get made, and that’s never a bad thing.

My nitpicking notwithstanding, RFA is making strides, even if it isn’t always stepping in the direction of teaching more people to fend for themselves in a media apocalypse. For every dynamite invention Waldman offers, there’s another that neglects to reflect the perspective of prospective local partners. Like this learned bit of science from his 2015 white paper that employs all of the right words, but that could also be used to describe RFA if you sub “Report For America” for “technological innovation”:

Large philanthropists often shy away from direct funding of journalism. They figure that scarce resources should go to creating new, sustainable models that will endure. … Donors invariably want to make a permanent impact, which means funding new platforms or new structures.

This approach is hard to argue with but if donors adopt a Pollyannaish view that technological innovation can solve all problems of media disruption, they will avoid frontally confronting some of the market failures that are not susceptible to that type of remedy.

NO REPORTER LEFT BEHIND

There are any number of reports, opinions, articles, and spreadsheets that can be leveraged to praise or prey on service initiatives like AmeriCorps and Teach For America, both of which have guiding principles and practices that Waldman drew from in designing RFA. On the positive side of that spectrum, there are individual success stories galore. On the damning end, there are embarrassing organizational blunders, takedowns by those who view TFA as anti-union, and a popular sentiment encapsulated in a 2018 headline in the Onion: “Teach For America Celebrates 3 Decades Of Helping Recent Graduates Pad Out Law School Applications.”

Between the cautionary tales and open jokes about the value of such programs, one might imagine that an enormous proposal based on some of its key elements would raise eyebrows. Instead, the funders backing Report For America seem to have not looked beyond Waldman’s account. A former senior advisor to the CEO of the Corporation for National Service, the RFA co-founder concedes, “There has been some criticism of Teach for America and other youth service programs that they rely too much on on-the-job training,” and writes, “There is surprisingly little research, alas, on whether this has actually led to sustainability .” But ultimately offers more hunches than numbers: “It is clear that the matching requirements have at least led to diversified revenue streams”; “Most school districts that get Teach for America teachers very much want to keep them year after year.”

Like other top-down fix-it formulas before it, RFA pits struggling outlets against one another. The tactic follows in the philosophical footsteps of programs like No Child Left Behind that reward winners and penalize losers. In Waldman’s words: RFA strives “to support institutions that really need and want the aid and can put corps members to good use. In theory this happens through the competitive grant making process and is reinforced by the need for a local match which is something an organization will only attempt to do if they value the work being done.”

It’s tough love in this meritocracy, and according to its gospel: “Report for America will provide half the cost of the reporter’s annual salary, the local news organization will provide one quarter, and a quarter will come from a local supporter (individual donor, university, family trust or foundation). If the corps member continues for a second year, the funding formula shifts so the local news organization pays a somewhat larger share.”

Those familiar with the finances of typical small newspapers will explain that it can be impossible to secure an additional 20-or-so grand on top of a dwindling budget. Especially for a true independent, or a nonprofit in a struggling city. Yet in the tournament for RFA funding, such hardship applicants face off against National Public Radio affiliates and outlets owned by some of the same mega clusters that are strangling our industry.

Monash University media lecturer Bill Birnbauer recently wrote in the Conversation, “dozens of state and city-focused news organizations have annual budgets of $200,000 or less, and a survey of Institute for Nonprofit News members found 9 percent had no more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.” In his own writing Waldman acknowledges, “Nonprofits remain very reliant on foundation funding, and few appear to be rapidly approaching a sustainable business model.”

But if the founders are aware of that need to empower, why are they functioning just like a middleman? Setting up a new bureaucracy and application process between funding sources and recipients? With RFA’s panels of judges picking the winners and losers?

THE ALTERNATIVE

While RFA is pushing corps partners and nonprofits to seek out well-endowed local benefactors, for their own funding Waldman and Sennott have reached for the stars and struck lightning. As someone tasked with raising money for reporting, I understand that it’s important to pull gifts in from as many people and places as possible, and that several of those donors may be far from perfect. But it is nonetheless worth recognizing all the honchos flanking RFA — advisory board members range from Bob Woodruff to a director from the Charles Koch Institute — as well as which behemoths are writing the big checks.

To his credit, Waldman has been up front about reparations he believes tech giants should pay to the sector. According to his 2015 RFA blueprint, “So far, the biggest contributors [to journalism] have been the fortunes created by robber barons of the 19th century (Ford, Rockefeller, Knight), with insufficient involvement from the winners of the digital economy, such as Apple and Google.” Such thinking seems naive, while Facebook, which is supporting RFA, hardly deserves a ticker-tape parade for fixing the problem it helps deepen daily, but I nevertheless firmly believe the founders, who in the aforementioned interview with Brian Stelter said their relationship with Facebook has gone better than expected.

In addition to the social network and other Silicon Valley allies, RFA has sought unlikely bedfellows politically. National Review Editor Rich Lowry is an advisory board member, and last December Sennott and Waldman published a call to action on his site titled, “Conservative philanthropists should help fund local reporting, and young conservative writers should consider becoming local journalists.” The piece is a disastrous attempt at pandering that may reveal, however inadvertently, one reason so many foundations that are presumably staffed by Democrats have ponied up big bucks for RFA. “Part of why the national media missed the rise of the Trump voter,” the founders wrote in the conservative magazine, “is that newsrooms outside of these more liberal enclaves have been hollowed out.”

Their questionable olive branch to right-leaning reporters notwithstanding, there’s no doubt that the program’s central mission is to stimulate more journalism. That’s a good thing overall, but it’s not the same as sprouting self-sustaining units that will live forever after. Outside of the critical foundational support of trade organizations like the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) and Local Independent Online News (LION), plus the democratic NewsMatch campaign and select university-based outliers like the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, there isn’t close to enough proactive assistance for the scrappy local outlets that so many claim to value. RFA, with its exclusive selection process and five-figure burden for partners, will not fill this void. Nor will ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, even if like RFA it’s bound to yield exceptional journalism.

I actually met Waldman at Montclair State, on the day that he released his paper at the 2015 ENGAGE Local conference hosted by the Center for Cooperative Media. I also presented at the summit, though my pitch was a lot less sexy; my team was simply focused on forging a community-based outfit that was nimble, free of university affiliation, and most of all inclusive. Back then, I didn’t realize just how many others were hungry for resources to replicate and plans to follow. That’s exactly what we wound up developing, though, and since we are accessible, a lot of them have come to us for help.

As of last year, incubators modeled in the BINJ mold in cities including Santa Fe (New Mexico Fund for Public Interest Journalism), Baltimore (Baltimore Institute for Nonprofit Journalism), and Little Rock (Arkansas Nonprofit News Network) are crowdfunding and reporting, as are startups closer to our home that we’ve consulted, like the Shoestring in Northampton, Massachusetts. We even built something called BINJ-in-a-Box to show others how we have done everything from forming an initial team to recruiting and retaining talent to engaging readers and fundraising.

While RFA is shipping cod across the country, we are teaching people how to fish. Whereas we are putting power in the hands of local news organizations, Waldman and Sennott have established yet another competition conduit for foundations that want to say they fund front-line reporting but are afraid to dirty their hands.

Since there is no referee in sight, and because I think RFA should be checked before it diverts too much more funding that should go straight to doers on the ground, I’m throwing down the gauntlet. Rants like this one get me dirty looks at journalism conferences and threaten my organization’s funding; but while I hate to put grants for my crew and the programs we have helped open elsewhere at risk, I’m also done waiting for peers to speak up. There are lots of editors and publishers who have similar feelings, and while they’re evidently smart enough to avoid angering the pooh-bahs who direct the lion’s share of journalism funding, I’m more interested in nudging those stubborn bastards to water the grassroots from the ground up.

There has been a lot of venom shot over these past couple of weeks about that rotten menace Facebook. From nightmares on the PR front over chief Zuckerberg’s embarrassing (non)reaction to the latest Russian election tension to public outrage about the extent to which the platform reaches deep into our lives to scrape our data and humanity, it’s nice for those of us who work in news and have been beaten into social media submission to see there may be some light in this dark basement after all.

All that vitriol is fine and well-deserved. But if you think that Facebook is the leading culprit in the case of Who Killed Journalism?, then I may just know a Russian bot or two who’s in the process of selling your digits off to dogs.

So, who is to blame? As I wrote in a piece titled “A Publicist Shaming” last year, to the consternation of more than a few leeches among us, if we’re talking about money leaving journalism and enriching undeserving interlopers, we have to skewer and acknowledge those who fall under the publicist and media relations umbrella.

For those who don’t receive a hundred thousand painfully unlettered press releases every week as I do, here is how the process often goes behind the scenes, at least on the local level: 1 — A publicist approaches business owners who know very little about how the media world spins, and promises said client to get them good coverage in the brightest outlets; 2 — Business owners then hand over several thousand bucks a month, much of which formerly went to the publications and stations that the publicist said they can woo; 3 — Depending on the connections and skill of the publicist, they will succeed to some arbitrary degree in their mission to get the business some ink, whether in their own words via outlets that do zero diligence and reprint press releases, or through any number of other compromised avenues, from brute force on whatever platform’s hopping to the dreaded sponsored post or advertorial.

I’m sure that I don’t need to say this, but if you’re a business owner and you’re reading this, please know without any doubt that any publicist who claims to have an in with me or anybody on my team is full of shit. Do some of us have friends who work in media relations? Sure. But nine times out of 10, unless they have something that we would cover anyway, they leave my ass alone because they know that I will bark at them. (On a side note, props to those who have been less than greedy, and who direct their clients to place ads with us in addition to using their services. We’re a small paper, ads are reasonably priced, and everyone can win here.)

Listen, I’m not being unreasonable. The fact is there are very few independent outlets left kicking ass out here, and we are pretty damn unique in both the readers we attract and in the nature of our coverage, from investigations to the arts. Things are stable at the Dig for the first time in years, in part thanks to ads stemming from cannabis legalization. We also started a nonprofit, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, to help with heavy lifting, and that’s been instrumental in our march through trying times, but it’s nevertheless going to take more than donations from the public to keep engines like ours burning. Until we start getting more inquiries from businesses that want to advertise than we get emails from the publicists they hire to scam journalists with cheap shit like free beer and gift bags that don’t pay the bills, this problem will persist. As will my ranting. I promise.

Originally published at digboston.com on March 29, 2018.

A MESSAGE TO BIZ OWNERS ABOUT THE PUBLICISTS THEY HIRE was originally published in faraONe the MEDIA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are beyond proud to present ‘Pilgrims: 50 Years of Anti-Nuclear Mass. An Oral History’

Read the e-book online here:

https://medium.com/binj-reports/pilgrims/home

Get your free copy of the print version here:

https://medium.com/binj-reports/pilgrims-50-years-of-anti-nuclear-mass-an-oral-history-6c45afe3421d

And if you’re in the Plymouth-Cape Cod are on Saturday, March 10, be sure to stop by our event in Barnstable Village:

https://www.facebook.com/events/2035141813375486/

A Project More Than A Year In The Making was originally published in BINJ Reports on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.