Please join me in contributing to Cambridge Day–an important online newspaper dedicated to covering the city. I’ve taken the liberty of replicating the appeal it posted three days ago at https://www.gofundme.com/f/throw-local-news-a-lifeline-save-cambridge-day .

—Anita M. Harris

Cambridge is on the verge of losing one of its last remaining sources of local news.

The Cambridge staff of the now corporate-owned Cambridge Chronicle was eliminated almost a year ago. Cambridge Day, an online newspaper run by Marc Levy since 2009, has the last full-time staff devoted to covering the city, but will cease publication without immediate community support. With that support, however, Cambridge Day could take a huge leap forward in quality and comprehensiveness.

We need your help now

Cambridge Day has provided local news about schools, city meetings, neighbors in need, development, zoning and construction as well as a calendar of events and goings-on with archives going back some 20 years. Without it, we become yet another community starved for discourse, engagement and connection. Cambridge’s civic life is in danger without an independent local press. 

Help us reach our $75,000 goal

We, the Cambridge Local News Matters Advisory Board, are seeking immediate “breathing room” funding to keep Cambridge Day going while Marc develops a long-term plan for its sustainability and growth. Marc and Cambridge Day need to recruit an experienced publisher, survey the community and recruit a board of directors, among other steps.

Please contribute today! 

The future of our local news depends on it. Please make a donation here. And please tell your friends and fellow citizens.

And in the spirit of community-based news, please share your ideas about what you’d like to read about in your local news and features you would find useful. Write us at cambridgedaymatters AT gmail DOT com.

Taking this community news survey could help in planning too! It includes questions about what residents would most like to read and learn about in their local news and what issues matter to them most. Take the survey here.

Thank you for your support. Here’s to keeping us collectively informed and engaged. 

Cambridge Local News Matters Advisory Board

Susanne Beck – journalist, former executive of a foundation and nonprofit, investment banker

Rick Harriman – former chair of the Cambridge Community Foundation, innovation consultant

Mary McGrath – award-winning public radio and podcast producer, a journalist for 30 years

Bob Simha – past director of planning for MIT for 40 years

Kristen Wainwright – former literary agent and marketing and ad executive

Cathie Zusy – civic activist, former president of the Cambridge Club and former museum curator

HERE’S THE GO FUND ME LINK :

https://www.gofundme.com/f/throw-local-news-a-lifeline-save-cambridge

—Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is an author, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA. Her latest book, The View From Third Street, , is a memoir/social history of her experiences cofounding the Harrisburg Independent Press in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during the 1972 Trial of the Harrisburg–just before Watergate.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, also in Cambridge.

As a blogger and journalist, I’ve been appalled by recent attacks on the free press by the current administration.

This is not to say that I haven’t been a critic of the press myself: soon after college, I became a journalist by founding a weekly alternative newspaper called the Harrisburg Independent Press (yes, aka “HIP“)–partly in response to the traditional media’s failure to address many social, economic, and political issues of the day. (I’ll be writing more about HIP in the months to come; I’m now working on a book about my experience, there) .

After a year in Harrisburg, I wrote for two alternative newspapers: the Boston Phoenix and the Real Paper, in Cambridge.

For various reasons (mainly that neither paper would hire me full time or even put my name on the masthead–well, the RP already had a woman reporter–she covered “women’s stuff” ) I decided that in order to get anywhere, I needed some establishment credentials so went to New York, for journalism school at Columbia.

Upon graduation , I stayed in New York–working first for a fellow who was a bit of a maniac (he drooled when he yelled at me), then for the city’s major Muzak station. ( I won awards for documentaries including one from a radical feminism perspective on prostitution and pornography in New York–more to come on that, as well) a. After that, for five years, I covered health, science, technology, law and justice –and other topics!–for MacNeil/Lehrer (now the Newshour), of PBS.

Eventually, I returned to Boston to teach and write; subsequently became a communications consultant, author, blogger, etc. etc., which I’ve now been for more than 20 years.

...in July 1973, an alternative weekly newspaper in Boston called The Real Paper offered this for a lead headline: “Women Derelicts: To Be Old, Homeless and Drunk.”

The story said there were as many as 1,000 poor women living on the streets of Boston. The tales were disturbing. Ordinary women with names like Mary, Ann, and Masha, living in squalor in abandoned buildings; too sick from drinking to work; selling sexual favors for $1 in bars and alleys. And always looking for a place to sleep.

One doctor quoted by reporter Anita Harris was skeptical there was a problem at all. “You must have been talking to the women’s libbers,” he told Harris. Yet it turned out the city’s welfare department had quietly started a homeless women’s division.

This story gripped [Kip] Tiernan and wouldn’t let go. It shined a light on a strange truth in the upheaval of the early 1970s: Women were unequal to men even in poverty.

Ultimately, Tiernan founded the shelter, which became a model for many others, nationwide.

Because I had lived in New York for so many years, I had no idea, until last month, that my article had had such an important impact.

This past weekend, the Globe published “Making a Difference,” a letter to the editor in which I thanked Healy “for her remarkably well-researched piece on Rosie’s Place and for tracing its founding back 47 years to an article I wrote, which until now, I had no idea had profoundly impacted the lives of so many women.

“These days, with the free press under assault, Healy’s article provides yet more evidence of the power of the press to make the world a better place — simply by telling the truth. Thanks, Beth Healy, for paying it forward.”

I hope to continue pay it forward…That is, to make a difference through this blog, my books, and other writing. I also hope that the free press will survive…flourish, even…to give the truth a voice in these difficult times.

Anita Harris is an author, blogger and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA. (She is not the British rock star, the Somerville School Committee member, or the Australian feminist writer).

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and digital marketing firm also based in Cambridge.

You might (or might not) know that many years ago…well, at the dawn of prehistory, in 1971, before Watergate, before Woodward and Bernstein, before the Internet and before the current president’s attacks on the free press… I  helped found a weekly  newspaper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  

The paper, called the Harrisburg Independent Press, or, HIP (unfortunate acronym, I still think) was created to cover the trial of the Harrisburg 8—a group of nuns and priests and such who were accused by then FBI director J Edgar Hoover of conspiring to kidnap Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger and blow up underground heating tunnels in Washington, DC (no, I’m not kidding)– and to report issues and concerns besetting the city, the state, and the nation.

Formed as a nonprofit, HIP was supported largely by subscriptions ($5 for six months, $8 a year) and advertising (the local dirty movie theater owners appreciated our not censoring their ads, tho one of them did ask us to airbrush a certain bodily area out of a photo).

The paper, which ran for nine years, became known for its muckraking, community and creative spirit. For example, in the very first year, our reporting led to the shutdown of a migrant camp and to new statewide labor regulations.  HIP also covered housing, education, prison reform, government corruption –as even sports and the arts.  Perhaps most notably, HIP beat the traditional press by uncovering safety problems at the nearby Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, as acknowledged in the national news.

Anyway,  I’ve been working on a memoir of HIP and my days of independent newspapering…and am most grateful to a group of former staffers who recently scanned and archived every issue. 

Those staffers, led by Jim Zimmerman, recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a Website where those issues will be housed and readily accessed by current and future journalists, researchers and other citizens. The team has set a goal of $6000—to be reached by COB August 18, 2019.

 With just over a month to go, they’ve raised more than half that amount.

I’m writing in hopes that you will donate to help them raise the rest of the dough by August 18 so that the project will be a go.

What’s in it for you?
Rewards!
If they reach their goal,

-For a $25 contribution, you get a CD of the complete set of issues—some 300, in all.

-For $100 you get a t-shirt with a HIP logo

-For $500 you get a poster suitable for framing: your choice of (1) the front page of the first issue from 1971, or (2)  the front page of the August 1978 issue: headlined “Meltdown: Tomorrow’s Disaster on Three Mile Island.”

The HIP team is hoping that other alternative newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s will follow their lead so that the amazing journalistic work of those times will not be lost to future generations.

Here’s a link to the kickstarter page.

—Anita M. Harris

Anita Harris is a writer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA. A graduate of Cornell University and the Columbia Journalism School, she held a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and fellowships at Radcliffe, the Boston University College of Communications, and Tufts Universities. She taught journalism at Harvard, Yale and Simmons Universities. She is the author of Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity (WSU Press/Cambridge Common Press) and Ithaca Diaries, (Cambridge Common Press), a memoir/social history of Cornell University in the late 1960s. She is currently working on a book about the Harrisburg Independent Press.

On Friday, July 11, my friend Andrew Kreig spoke at the National Press Club in Washington about his new book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, which tackles intelligence agency influence on politics and the media.

Presidential Puppetry, is “a non-partisan exposé of the intelligence sector influence in the Obama administration’s second term,” he said.  Drawing from a century of history that includes the Romney and Bush family dynasties, it  argues that failures in news reporting will continue because both traditional and social media are heavily influenced by revenue sources little understood by the public, including most journalists and academics. Link to book preview video

In his talk, Kreig noted  that before the Washington Post was sold to Amazon CEO Jeffery Bezos last summer, the paper had, for many years, received just 4 percent of its revenue from circulation and 14-15 percent from advertising. Approximately 60 percent of Post revenue has come from an education subsidiary, Kaplan, which profits from lucrative but little-reported government relationships.

Similarly, Amazon.com, Bezos’ source of wealth, last fall obtained a $600 million contract to handle advanced computing needs for the CIA, Kreig said. The contract dwarfed the $250 million Bezos purchase price for the Post and further illustrates certain seldom-reported institutional ties between news-making agencies and news organizations.

In another example of close ties between government and the news media, Kreig noted that the president of CBS News is Andrew Rhodes. Rhodes brother, Ben, is Obama’s speechwriter, deputy national intelligence director and, as described by insider columnist David Ignatius in the July 11 Washington’s Post, “the closest thing he [Obama] has to a chief strategist.”

Earlier this month, Kreig pointed out, Ray McGovern, a CIA-analyst-turned peace activist, warned a separate audience at the Press Club that the mainstream media are suppressing vital news stories. According to McGovern, who spent 27 years as a CIA analyst with responsibility for daily briefings of two presidents, “Never has it been so bad in the 50 years I’ve been in this town” and “there’s one change that dwarfs all the others.”  What is that change? “We no longer have a free media,” McGovern said. “That’s big. It does not get any bigger than that.”

McGovern was first quoted in report published by the Justice Integrity Project, an organization Kreig founded in 2010 to probe courts, politics and media coverage (http://wwwow.ly/yT2Rw)

In Presidential Puppetry  Kreig documents how deep-pocketed corporations and other institutions have, for more than a century, shaped the public agenda with increasingly little scrutiny from watchdogs. The book draws on Kreig’s  two decades as an investigative reporter, lawyer and high-tech advocate based in Washington, DC.

In the book, Kreig alleges that what he calls “puppet masters” wield enormous influence over intelligence agencies, elected officials, and both traditional and social media. For example, he describes a pattern whereby many prominent elected leaders secretly served as CIA or FBI informants before they entered politics, thereby establishing relationships unknown to the public.

Such allegations are endorsed by an array of experts (www.presidentialpuppetry.com), including McGovern and former CIA analyst and retired journalist John Kelly, who is a board member of the Justice Integrity Project (http://www.justice-integrity.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=188&Itemid=153. Kelly is the last surviving reporter to have covered the 1960 JFK election victory party in Hyannis Port. He went on to work for CBS and NBC before becoming a CIA officer in Indochina during the Vietnam War era. In organizing and introducing last week’s dinner lecture, Kelly said the news media have become far too timid and institutionally compromised.

The “Puppetry” message is documented with 1,100 endnotes to help other researchers and reformers, Kreig said.  Its conclusion is that any reform must begin with an understanding of our hidden history. That is the theme of a 50-second preview video, entitled “Knowledge Empowers You.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KV8Mt2nV_A)

I knew Kreig when he reported  for the Cornell Daily Sun in the late 1960s.  He’s since worked in journalism, technology, and  law. His Boston background iincludes coverage of the Celtics in the 1980s and a clerkship with Boston-based federal judge Mark Wolf, who is best known for presiding over the Patriarca mob case and exposing the Whitey Bulger scandal(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_L._Wolf). Kreig holds law degrees from both Yale and the University of Chicago. From 2009 to 2011, he researched controversial Bush administration federal prosecutions as a Washington-based senior fellow for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

–Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

We are within days of the anniversary of the first revelations from Edward Snowden’s archive of NSA documents. The drum beat of new stories emerging from this trove continues even to this moment.¹ So, Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State might be greeted with a yawn, what could be new?

In fact, there is much that is new about how these stories have come to light and a very good overview of what we have learned about what Greenwald calls the US Surveillance State. This is a book in two parts. The first 89 pages read like a cross between a detective thriller and a spy story. There are hand offs of thumb drives at airport boarding gates, virgin computers, cell phones sealed off from the reach of the NSA by removing batteries or stuffed in freezers, meetings with a yet to be identified Snowden by an unsolved Rubik’s cube in hand. This part of the book also establishes who Snowden is and how he thinks and views the world and his place in it. This latter introduction of Snowden is completely consistent with the person we have already come to know through his video interviews broadcast a year ago.²

The second half (really it is 170 pages) is a well organized exploration of what has been revealed so far of the NSA’s goals and programs.

THE GIANT SUCKING SOUND – “COLLECT IT ALL”

It is chilling to understand that the internal ethos of the NSA is summed up by the phrase “collect it all” where “it” is all of the information flows in the telephone and internet in the world.  As expressed in the presentation slide “New Collection Posture” from 2010, this is implemented through six strategies: “Sniff It All”, “Know It All”, “Collect It All”, “Process It All, “Exploit It All, and “Partner It All”. Even if you have been following the revelations as published in the various news sources favored with direct access to the Snowden documents, it was hard to envision quite how comprehensive the vision of the NSA is.

BUREAUCRATS DRESSED UP AS JUDGES

Greenwald reiterates the well-known fact that so-called court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, set up by congress to oversee activities of the NSA, FBI and others engaged in intercepting communications is not even an effective administrative element. He notes that in 2012 the “court” did not deny a single on of the 1789 applications. As i have argued earlier³ this so-called court lacks most of the important features that our tradition requires of a court – openness, representation of the plaintiff by a lawyer, and ability to confront accusers. The FISC is just a bunch of bureaucrats dressed up as judges.

BENIGN META DATA

Another issue that Greenwald deals with is the claim by the government and its apologists in the media and academia that the collection of meta data is not really an intrusion on privacy – the NSA is not collecting the content of the communications.(( earlier I have twice commented on this issue: “NSA Vacuuming, Meta Data, Mistaken Misleading Metaphors” and “The Uses of Metadata – an experiment you can conduct with your own life’s metadata“)) In a very telling note Greenwald repeats other privacy activists challenge to those claiming that meta data is benign that they release the meta data for all of their phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications. None have thus far taken up this challenge.

Greenwald touches on many other topics: the role of corporations, surveillance of US allies, many NSA software tools to exploit their data warehouses, privacy in human identity, and more.

In closing, Greenwald’s book is an excellent overview of the issues presented to date by the work done to understand the Snowden documents. And, it is actually a great read with its detective/spy thriller opening that engages the reader so effectively in the drama of the early days of the Snowden whistle blowing.

1. NSA Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html accessed 06012014 [↩]
2.  http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-videoand http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jul/08/edward-snowden-video-interview both accessed 06012014 [↩]
3. “FISA Court – Not a Court – an Administrative Rubber Stamp – Bureaucrats Dressed Up as Judges” http://currentmatters.markorton.com/2013/07/fisa-court-not-a-court-an-administrative-rubber-stamp-bureaucrats-dressed-up-as-judges/ [↩]

–Mark Orton

This review was originally posted at

Current Matters

thoughts on the passing scene from Mr. Wonderful’s World

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA. Mr. Orton is a HarrisCom advisor.

Today at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on  Politics, Public Policy and the Press,  ProPublica  “distributed reporting” editor  Amanda Michel described a new form of newsgathering in which a few editors solicit and manage thousands of volunteers who research and write stories on a myriad of topics.

ProPublica is the nation’s largest nonprofit media organization to focus on investigative reporting. Founded in 2007, it is supported  mainly by a $10M a yearly grant from the Sandler Foundation.

The  method was developed by the Huffington Post during last year’s presidential campaign for a series entitled “On the Bus.”  Michel directed that effort, which employed 5 journalists who worked with some 12,000 citizens.

Michel was hired in May by  the New-York-City based  ProPublica, which employs 32 journalists and is led by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Its managing editor is Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon and former investigative editor of The New York Times.

As ProPublica’s “distributed reporting” editor, Michel first used “crowd sourcing” and collaborative journalism methods to report on the impact of the federal stimulus bill. She is now integrating those newsgathering techniques into ProPublica’s other investigative efforts.

 To do so, she places queries on the ProPublica Web site, requesting assistance from the organization’s members, who are scattered throughout the US (and, possibly, abroad). They contribute their time “much as they would to a church or the humane society,”  Michel said.  

 ProPublica editors collect information from  the Internet and from members in the field–relying on journalists and volunteers for interpretation, analysis, and writing, Michel said.

 To maintain quality control, the editors set forth certain reporting requirements and “play the numbers game”–that is, they may ask several people to look into the same topic or report on the same event.  

Completed stories are  provided at no cost to ProPublica’s newspaper partners. One story about wrongdoing on a California Nursing Board first appeared in the Los Angeles Times and later ran on the ProPublica Web site.

Current  investigations described on the ProPublica Web site  include “Buried Secrets, Gas Drilling’s Environmental Threat”; “Contractors in Iraq Are Hidden Casualties of War;” ” Strained by Katrina, Hospital Faced Deadly Choices” and “Problem Nurses Stay on the Job as Patients Suffer.”

Other news organizations such as the Wall Street Journal and  WNYC radio, have recently hired journalists to serve as “putreach editors,” to develop “networked” or  “citizen journalism.”  The Cable News Network  and  Yahoo use similar techniques to engage the public in newsgathering, Michel said.

At today’s seminar, when a BBC editor cautioned that the “networked”  method could easily be subverted by unsavory forces seeking to present disinformation,  Michel  countered that that’s already a problem in traditional newsgathering. “Reporters are often ‘played’ by sources,” she said.

Based on my  background in the alternative press, (the Harrisburg Independent Press, AKA “HIP,” was a nonprofit) I think it’s exciting that members of the public can now help the media enhance understanding of the world we live in.  However, like at least one  seminar participant, I wonder  how long people will remain interested in contributing their time for free. 

Still,  for journalists concerned about losing their jobs to unpaid competitors,  not all is lost:  ProPublica is one of the few news organizations that is now actually hiring!

Here’s a link to another writeup about the seminar. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/news_events/archive/2009/michel_12-01-09.html

Let me know what you think!

—–Anita Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA. We also publish HarrisCom Blog.

I’m pleased to report that Cambridge Community Television has once again received the Overall Excellence in Public Access Programming Award from the national Alliance for Community Media in its Hometown Video Festival.

 This is the eighth time in CCTV’s twenty-one year history that the station has received this award, recognizing the diversity and quality of CCTV’s programming, as well as its relevance to the Cambridge community.

CCTV competed in the highest budget category, against much larger access centers in major cities throughout the United States. Numerous CCTV producers also received high accolades in the festival:

Project Documentary’s The Dames, about Boston’s roller derby team, placed first in the Sports Entertainment category; teens participating in CCTV’s youth program were also recognized: Josh Washington and William Sheffield for their original teleplay “Homies”, Julie Pan for “King Open Extended Day Program”, Cody Romano for “Dawn”, and Alex Ayabe for his music video “Guarantee”, which he produced at Cambridge Educational Access.

 Laura Asherman also received an Honorable Mention for her video “You Contribute to Global Warming”. Watch some of our finest programming from 2008 in this video! You can also view the full list of winners at http://2009.acmhometown.org/

I’ve taken several excellent courses at CCTV–in Dreamweaver, Excel, and MS Publisher; also on video shooting and editing.  If you join, fees  are nominal–you get $100 worth of courses for $55–less if you put in volunteer time; more if you’re not a Cambridge resident.  It’s a great way to learn about new technologies,  learn television production, produce videos–even host your own TV program. Check it out!

Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA. HarrisCom also publishes www.blog.harriscom.com

While conservative commentator Laura Ingraham said yesterday on the Today Show that  President Obama has accomplished little of worth in his first two months in office, CBS  Evening News Producer Rick Kaplan would strongly disagree.

At a seminar held on Tuesday at  Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, Kaplan said that Obama’s record  so far has been “extraordinary.”

The “first 100 days” is a construct that began with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and can be a useful time for judging what policies are most important to a president– before Congress and  administration insiders have  a chance to “carve out turf”… and “start bickering,” Kaplan said.

In his view, Obama has used this period well.

The President  has frozen all of former President George W. Bush’s last minute  “midnight regulations,” ended the  “gag rule” prohibiting mention of abortion in organizations receiving federal funds; put  forth ethics and lobbying bills; and passed the $800B TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) legislation, Kaplan said.

Equally impressive was  Obama’s performance at the recent G20 Summit in London.  “I’ve never seen anything like it,”  Kaplan said. At the meeting of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, “people  listened and were impressed. When he stood up, it was a proud moment for America.”

At news conferences, “he let the other guy go first. He grabbed President Sarkosi and the President of China; he huddled with them and [got] them to agree on a contentious set of…offshore policies. He makes the deal and at the end, both Sarcozy and the Chinese leader are smiling.

“In a meeting with the Russians on an arms deal, he gets a promise for a summit.  He meets with the South Koreans to talk about their concerns about [that day’s] North Korean missile launch….”

“And as he’s leaving…in an ‘organized leak,’ he said he would allow Cuban nationals to go and see their families and give them money.

“It was extraordinary to see him work the room in a respectful, aggressive, impressive. way. The leaders didn’t all agree with him, but they liked and respected him.”

“He’s had an extraordinary run in just 60 days. He never shows tension, never seems impacted one way or another or angry. He’s the ‘coolest guy in the room.”

Still, Kaplan said, not all is rosy.

For example,   the  President had known  known for weeks that bonuses were to be paid in Wall Street firms receiving bailout money, which made Obama’s  expressed “outrage” seemed hypocritical.  The press “let him off the hook a bit… It’s great to have dialogue, and the press corps is nervous about shaking up the relationship”  at a time [of economic crisis] where everyone is looking for stability.”

Asked (by me) what he foresees for the future of print media, Kaplan said that papers like the Boston Globe must survive,  and that the current “unwinding” could turn out to be healthy in the long run. It will likely lead to new models and  put an end to newspapers driven by owners who are more concerned about investors’ profits than their own communities, Kaplan said.

AMH

The New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA.