Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting announced Thursday that they will merge early next year as a single nonprofit news outlet.

The merger — which has a closing date of Feb. 1 — will allow the two organizations to pool their strengths and expand their reach, leaders at both outlets said. Mother Jones has made a name for itself through its progressive magazine and website while CIR is best known for its podcast and radio show “Reveal.” Both are based in San Francisco and have been collaborators since they were founded in the 1970s.

“Mother Jones has a large digital reach and limited reach on audio platforms, and ‘Reveal’ is the reverse,” Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery said. “So by putting them together, it’s really a one plus one equals three situation.”

Conversations about a possible merger started earlier this year when leaders at both newsrooms were discussing issues facing the journalism industry, such as funding pressures, Jeffery said.

The past few years have been particularly tumultuous for CIR, which has undergone multiple rounds of layoffs — including one in April — and high leadership turnover. Merging with Mother Jones was an opportunity to create a news organization that had more diverse revenue streams and was subsequently more sustainable, CIR CEO Robert J. Rosenthal said.

“What was really crucial was the, what I call, infrastructure of sustainability that Mother Jones had, which is much more diverse — and candidly — more sophisticated than we had at CIR,” Rosenthal said. “I really frame this around opportunity and creating a much more sustainable … and a much more robust newsroom.”

The merger will combine Mother Jones’ 50,000 donors and CIR’s support from foundations, diversifying their revenue model. The two organizations have already raised $21 million spread over the next three years to help fund the merger.

The two outlets have collaborated previously. In October, for example, Mother Jones published an investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that was profiting off long term stays by foster children. “Reveal” then produced a podcast version. The merger will allow for “more coordinated” collaborations, Jeffery said: “We have pretty much every type of storytelling mechanism at our disposal now.”

After the merger, the Mother Jones magazine and website will continue to exist, as well as the Reveal podcast. Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein will keep her title, while Rosenthal will become CEO emeritus. Jeffery will also keep her title as she leads a combined newsroom of 73 journalists.

The merger will result in four layoffs on the administrative side due to redundancies, Rosenthal said, and the organization’s total headcount will be 118 people.

Mother Jones’ journalists are unionized with the United Auto Workers and will continue to work under their current contract. CIR’s journalists, who unionized earlier this year with the NewsGuild and do not yet have a contract, will have to decide how they want to be represented, newsroom leaders said.

“The opportunity to combine the very synergistic platforms — the strengths of the two organizations are very complementary — was just one that we felt was very important to seize because there will be more headwinds for all of us in the years to come,” Bauerlein said. “It seems an important time to get out of our habits and over our organizational egos and figure out how we can do the best job serving the public with news that they desperately need.”

By Angela Fu, media business reporter

Journalists at Southern California Alden papers strike

Dozens of journalists at publications in Southern California owned by investment firm Alden Global Capital walked off the job Thursday, marking the third media strike in the past week.

The workers are part of the Southern California News Group Guild, which represents roughly 120 journalists across 11 papers. The union has been negotiating its first contract since March 2022, and the workers say that the company’s stalling at the bargaining table has pushed them to hold a 24-hour strike.

“Some journalists here have put up with low pay for decades because they were asked to sacrifice for the sake of local news,” union vice chair Josh Cain said in a press release. “Meanwhile, Alden Global Capital continues to buy up local papers, only to gut them for profit. We know this company makes money. All we are asking for is our fair share.”

MediaNews Group, Alden’s newspaper publishing subsidiary, did not respond to a request for comment.

The strike comes one day after journalists at Law360 staged a one-day walkout over lengthy contract negotiations. Workers at The Washington Post also held a one-day strike last Thursday after contract negotiations broke down. On Thursday, the Washington Post Guild shared on X, formerly Twitter, that they were headed back to the bargaining table and credited the strike for the progress.

The NewsGuild — the parent union of SCNG Guild, the Law360 Guild and the Washington Post Guild — has staged 36 work stoppages this year. Strikes have become a common tactic among media unions frustrated by inadequate contract proposals and prolonged negotiations. Other industries have also seen an uptick in labor activity, and some have deemed summer 2023 “Hot Strike Summer.”

By Angela Fu, media business reporter

The Cotton op-ed resurfaces

A much-criticized op-ed published by The New York Times in the days after the police murder of George Floyd resulted in the resignation of a prominent staff member and swirling questions about what actually happened. On Thursday, that staffer published a long article with his side of the story and a critical view of the Times and journalism as a whole.

In June 2020, under the purview of editorial page editor James Bennet, the Times opinion section published a controversial op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton that called for a military response to the protests and civic unrest happening in American cities. Outrage grew and an editor’s note was appended to the op-ed that pointed out major flaws in the piece and said “the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger soon called the op-ed’s publication “a significant breakdown in our editing processes” and, within days, Bennet resigned from the Times.

At the time, Poynter’s Tom Jones pointed out several lingering questions: “Did he deserve to lose his job? Or was he railroaded by an internal revolt and external criticism from those who simply didn’t agree with the op-ed that led to his resignation? And what might it all mean for the future of, perhaps, America’s best newspaper?”

Now, Bennet has offered some of his own answers to those questions in a lengthy opinion piece for The Economist titled “When the New York Times lost its way.”

In publishing the Times op-ed, Bennet said he had the support of Sulzberger and Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of the Times, because Cotton’s view seemed to represent the opinion of the White House and perhaps a majority of Americans. But several days later, he said, “Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation. I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.”

In the Economist piece, Bennet momentarily addresses the flaws pointed out in the editor’s note on the Cotton op-ed, saying the note went “far further in repudiating the piece than I anticipated, saying it should never have been published at all.” But he seems to view the issue as a symptom of a much larger ailment. For more than 17,000 words, Bennet criticizes the Times — and journalism at large — for failing to “live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness.”

“The Times’s problem, he wrote, “has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.”

Whether you agree with him or not, it’s worth a read for the insights into a tumultuous moment at the Times and as another addition to the growing corpus of long takes on objectivity and journalism’s role in a democracy. Then again, maybe they’re all missing the point.

By Ren LaForme, managing editor

Media tidbits and links for your weekend review

• Tremendous reporting from CNN’s Clarissa Ward, who traveled to a newly set up field hospital in the southern portion of Gaza. It’s the first time a Western media outlet has obtained access to southern Gaza to report independently since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. As the CNN crew arrived at the hospital, Israeli bombs went off in the distance. A doctor told Ward that he’s used to hearing them drop 20 times per day, perhaps more. Ward then spoke, in Arabic, to an 8-year-old girl whose femur was crushed during an Israeli airstrike. Suddenly, a man and a 13-year-old boy — injured in the strike that Ward heard —were rushed in, “both missing limbs, both in a perilous state,” Ward said. The video is graphic, but shows “the overwhelming human toll in the tiny territory of Gaza.”
• Mark J. Rochester will be the next executive editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The Herald-Tribune’s Derek Gilliam reports that Rochester will “lead newsroom operations with a focus on watchdog journalism.” Rochester was most recently the managing editor for California-based nonprofit inewsource and has held editor positions at The Indianapolis Star, Newsday, The Denver Post, The Associated Press, and more. He starts Jan. 2.
• In a promo for his new show that he posted on X, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said, “You can ask us anything, although you won’t always like the answer. Welcome to the first episode of Ask Tucker.” I’d guess that he didn’t like the question former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson posted in response: “Why did you create a workplace so abusive and misogynistic that your former employer had to pay $12 million to make an ex-producer’s lawsuit go away?”
• Washington Post Supreme Court reporter Robert Barnes announced he will retire at the end of the year. Barnes has worked at the Post as a reporter and editor since 1987. “So lucky to have done what I love for nearly 50 years, the last 37 for @washingtonpost,” Barnes wrote on Twitter. “Thanks for reading all this time.”
• The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin wrote, “Since leaving Politico three years ago, the founders of the Washington news start-up Punchbowl News have made their mark with aggressive inside-the-Beltway coverage, breaking news on the Capitol riot, the messy ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.” Now Punchbowl News will acquire a startup that tracks legislation making its way through Congress, Mullin reported.
• Bloomberg News has an update on Russia’s detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in “Putin Says He Seeks ‘Acceptable’ Deal With US on Prisoners.”
• Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein with “‘We Wanted to Keep Chasing It’: How Student Journalists at Harvard and Penn Are Beating Big-Time Reporters to the Punch.”
• Al Jazeera with “Journalists’ deaths surge in Gaza but global 2023 toll drops, watchdog says.”
• Also from The New York Times, it’s Jenny Taitz with “How to Follow the News Without Spiraling Into Despair.” (The article was originally published July 7, 2022, but was updated this week.)
• The New York Times’ Eric Umansky with “The Failed Promise of Police Body Cameras.”
• CNN’s Casey Tolan, Audrey Ash and Rene Marsh with “The nation’s largest credit union rejected more than half its Black conventional mortgage applicants.”
• For New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, it’s Jordan Heller with “An Oral History of the George W. Bush Shoe Throwing, 15 Years Later: Revisiting the viral protest by an Iraqi journalist against a U.S. president.”

A personal note

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