Editor’s note: Welcome to another segment of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” now a regular Contrarian Boston feature. Today, we do our rants and raves, from a freelancer who got a little too much help from AI in writing a book review for The New York Times, to Bari Weiss’s dismantling of CBS Radio, where legendary journalists like Edward R. Murrow, William L. Shirer, and Eric Sevareid rose to fame in the 1930s and 1940s.
Emily Rooney was joined by Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, The Boston Globe’s Lylah M. Alphonse, editor of Globe Rhode Island and Globe New Hampshire, and Scott Van Voorhis, editor and founder of Contrarian Boston.
And thanks to Tonia Magras, principal owner of Hull Bay Productions, who produced today’s piece. Tonia was the supervising producer for “Beat the Press” when it was on GBH and is the principal owner of Hull Bay Productions.
If you would rather use a different platform, you can also watch “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” on Contrarian Boston’s YouTube channel.
Edited transcript:
Emily Rooney: Time for our rants and raves of the week. All right, Dan, you’re there. I’ll start with you.
Dan Kennedy: [01:25:26.07]
Okay, well, I have this wonderful editor’s note from The New York Times because it combines plagiarism and AI in one classic editor’s note. All it lacks is fabrication. There was a book review that was written by a freelancer named Alex Preston who had taken part of a review that they had read in The Guardian and repurposed [01:25:56.18] it into The New York Times. And when they were confronted about this, they said, oh, well, I was mixing up my notes with AI and I didn’t realize what I had done. So it just made for one of the great editor’s notes. And, and now, you know, they’re in trouble with The New York Times and The Guardian. It may be hard getting work in the future. If you’re Alex Preston.
Emily Rooney [01:26:20.01] -
Yeah, I didn’t know whether I was stealing from a person or AI. All right, uh, Scott, what do you got?
Scott Van Voorhis [01:26:29.07] - Well, I have a—it’s a mild rant, just the situation with the Vermont Digger, which I know Dan has really followed over the years. But just, I mean, on one, they are— I guess you— I don’t know if you still call them a startup, but they were, uh, 15 years old, started up by, uh, Anne Galloway, who was a reporter at the Rutland Herald, she got laid off and she just started the Vermont Digger at her kitchen table. It’s been an inspiration for people trying to start their own publications. [01:26:59.21] It’s grown. They have 30 staffers. Globe had a story raising some big questions about the Digger’s future - now they have these contentious union negotiations. Management is clearly complaining about some of the tactics, saying that the union used the word targeting or target in a Reddit post. There was a lo of expansion, and now there is a budget deficit they’re dealing with. There’s been turnover of top editors. So they’re looking [01:27:30.01] for a new interim editor now, looking for a new editor. And I, you know, it’s hard to know is this stable enough? Have they really figured out the business model enough yet to really do the things they want to do in terms of, I don’t know, pay and benefits?[ 01:27:48.08] I mean, people have to make a— be able to be paid decently. It’s certainly been a problem in journalism, but it was disconcerting. And then finally, there was a local columnist who clearly has somewhat of an ax to grind. He said he got fired from the, from the Digger for using the word dick in a Twitter post. Who knows? So, but, but he did offer his perspective, which was, look, the Digger started off very focused on breaking news and investigative stories [01:28:18.10] and focused on the political scene at the Vermont State House. And, and, and there was a big investigative story — it was about Jay’s Peak where they had the big visa scandal with foreign workers. And he felt they were trying too hard now to try to cover all the state and maybe not paying attention to their core audience. So, I don’t know. So I hope that they pull through because it’s an important publication.
Dan Kennedy: [01:28:40.04] If I may interject a little bit. VT Digger is 17 years old at this point, so it’s hardly a startup. Uh, you have to pay people a living wage, and I don’t know exactly what’s going on inside Digger, but I do know that I’ve been getting emails from deep within the bowels of the newsroom for years. Complaining about what a difficult work environment had been created. And I think that’s the reason that a union was started. I should note that the outgoing chief [01:29:13.10] executive, Sky Barsh, who was quoted in that Globe piece, was making $145,000 a year as of 2024, according to their 990 filing with the IRS. Now, that’s not a fortune, but it’s, you know, a good wage for a good job. And I think that the journalists who were actually doing the work need to be paid a living wage as well.
Emily Rooney: [01:29:39.04] -
Good point. All right, Lylah, what do you have?
Lylah Alphonse: So I have a rave for Poynter for a story by Angela Fu about how Poynter and Axios Richmond kind of cracked open the AI company Nada. Nada, as the Poynter article notes and as Dan reported as well, Nada’s clients include The Boston Globe and other places like the Institute for Nonprofit News. And it turns out that Nada, which is supposed to use AI to help you with things like headlines and SEO, [01:30:12.06] in smaller areas, they were also trying to eliminate news deserts and they had created 11 sites collectively known as Nada News. And it turned out those sites, instead of using AI and using journalists to fill the news deserts, were scraping content from actual local journalists. So it’s good in this age where we all have to kind of embrace our robot overlords and find a way to use this tool in a way that helps. I was really pleased to see good journalism that [01:30:42.12] took a look at the potential harm from things like this. Now, as Dan reported, we, The Globe, did decide that even though Nada’s contract with us said that they could not use any Globe content to train their LLMs, they’ve still decided to discontinue working with the tool.
[01:31:02.04] -And so we don’t know quite what’s next there. But I think that it’s good to take a harder look at the potential pitfalls of tools like this, even as we figure out how to make the best use of the benefits.
Emily Rooney: Yeah, that was a good point. All right. Well, finally tonight, today I have a rant for Bari Weiss. We’ve ranted on her a bit, but for the dismantling, the total dismantling of CBS Radio, she says it’s an obsolete medium, which may be true. I mean, we know there is an effort in Congress to save AM radio. I don’t know whether that’s going to be successful or whether it’s necessary. But the point about CBS Radio is not the medium. It’s the actual news-gathering operation. It’s [01:31:44.04] big, it’s profound. You know, when I hear people say they get their news off of TikTok or YouTube or some of these lesser sites, they’re all cultivating or culling this stuff from places like CBS Radio. This is a machine and it gets, it puts out tons of material, short clips and long clips. We all remember, you know, the dramatic days of World War II and hearing those reports from Europe, and that was all CBS Radio. And those things live in infamy. And [01:32:14.15] I have to say right now that this will be a hole. This won’t be a news gap. This is not going to be something that’s just going to be filled in by places like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. [01:32:26.08] This is, this is a loss, a big loss of news gathering, and forget about the medium. So I think it’s a mistake. I know there are other radio outlets that, you know, but, but a lot of them, as Dan has pointed out, are controlled by, you know, huge media conglomerates that put a spin on it, like Sinclair and those. And I know there’s an effort at CBS to do the same thing, but it hadn’t happened in the radio division yet. All right.
That is it for Beat the Press. Catch us on Contrarian Boston or of course, YouTube. We’re talking about YouTube. You want to get it there? Thanks to Scott Van Voorhis, Dan Kennedy, and Lylah Alphonse. See you next time. I’m Emily Rooney.
