On March 6, Gates sent requests for comment to Boeing and the FAA outlining his findings about a flawed safety assessment. Boeing said it would work on providing answers. Then, on March 10, another 737 MAX, this time operated by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed six minutes after lifting off from Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Boeing quickly found itself at the center of a global media storm. Countries around the world grounded the planes; last Wednesday, the US, belatedly followed suit. Around the same time, Gates finished writing his piece about the flawed safety check—but Boeing and the FAA had still not commented, and the links between the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes remained murky. On Thursday, Gates and three colleagues learned about, then reported, a potential similarity between the incidents based on evidence found at the Ethiopian crash site and relayed by an expert. On Friday, Gates finalized the safety-test story he’d been working on since last year, and it was published on Sunday.

ICYMI: A copyeditor was looking at early Charlottesville images Saturday. While doing so, he made a big realization.

Like many local news reporters in the US, Gates—a former math teacher who is now in his 16th year with The Seattle Times—works a beat dedicated to a dominant local company or industry. “To survive as a regional paper, The Seattle Times has to offer readers news it cannot get elsewhere,” Gates tells me in an email. “Since this is the home of Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks, it strives to own coverage of those mega corporations. Coverage of Boeing has historically been huge for The Seattle Times.”

There’s no shortage of national coverage of those companies—Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and others have broken important stories on the Boeing beat. But Gates feels his local base offers him a distinct advantage. “I have sources aerospace reporters elsewhere can only dream about,” he says. “Not just inside Boeing but also its suppliers and its unions. And the FAA office responsible for certifying Boeing planes. And our readers include a very large, knowledgeable aerospace base.”

In a dire economic climate for local news, specialized beats and the reporters on them, are, logically, under threat. Reporters like Gates are reminders that America’s local newspapers can be crucial repositories of public-interest journalism. When they falter, national titles are sometimes able to pick up the slack. But we shouldn’t rely on that. The logical endpoint of America’s local-news crisis isn’t just less reporting on local courthouses and councils—it’s less scrutiny for major companies and arms of the federal government, too.

ICYMI: WSJ reporter explains why he was fired

Below, more on local news:

• Gitmo: In early February, The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, the only US reporter covering Guantanamo Bay on a full-time basis, was one of 450 employees to be offered a buyout by McClatchy, the Herald’s owner. Rosenberg, whose position at the Herald was being supported by the Pulitzer Center, subsequently left the paper for The New York Times.
• Et tu, Facebook: A Facebook service aiming to serve local news to users has been hamstrung by a lack of available local news, the company said on Monday. Facebook found that 40 percent of Americans live in areas where the service cannot be supported; it pledged to share its data with academics researching the “news desert” phenomenon. As many observers were quick to point out, the local news crisis has been greatly exacerbated by Facebook’s ad monopoly and content policies.
• Alt-alt-weeklies: Local alt-weeklies have been hit particularly hard by the dire local-news climate: last month, for example, the Seattle Weekly, for whom Gates used to write, announced it was going out of print. For CJR, Allison Braden looks at “alt-alt-weeklies”—publications that have grown from the ashes of shuttered alt-weeklies.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo banned the State Department press corps from a rare call with reporters, reserving access for “faith-based media only,” CNN’s Michelle Kosinski and Jennifer Hansler report. The State Department subsequently refused to provide a transcript of the call—which concerned religious freedom in the Middle East—or confirm which outlets were invited to participate.
• William Barr, the attorney general, has asserted the state-secrets privilege in an old lawsuit brought by Twitter, which claims the government has violated its First Amendment rights by blocking it from publishing details of the government surveillance requests it receives. Yesterday, Twitter found itself on the receiving end of a very different lawsuit: Devin Nunes, the pro-Trump congressman, is suing the platform for allowing defamatory attacks against him. Nunes, who says Twitter has a “political agenda,” also sued three users, including @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow.
• Donna Brazile, the controversial former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, is joining Fox News as a contributor. “I know I’m going to get criticized from my friends in the progressive movement for being on Fox News,” she said. “Will I agree with my fellow commentators at Fox News? Probably not. But I will listen.” In 2016, Brazile was working as a CNN contributor when she leaked information about an upcoming town hall broadcast on the network to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
• American Media Inc., which publishes The National Enquirer, paid $200,000 to Michael Sanchez for the story of his sister’s affair with Jeff Bezos, the Journal’s Michael Rothfeld, Joe Palazzolo, and Alexandra Berzon report. (So much for Bezos’s dark musings about the US and Saudi governments.) Bloomberg, meanwhile, looks at odd goings-on at Chatham Asset Management, the hedge-fund owner of AMI and the Enquirer.
• Last month, Goodloe Sutton, the white editor of Alabama’s weekly Democrat-Reporter newspaper, drew condemnation over an editorial calling on the Ku Klux Klan to “ride again.” Amid growing national clamor, Sutton agreed to be replaced as editor by Elecia Dexter, a black office clerk at the paper who did not have prior journalism experience. Now, after only a few weeks in post, Dexter is stepping down, citing continued interference from Sutton, who still owns the paper. “It’s sad—so much good could have come out of this,” she tells the Times’s Sarah Mervosh.
• For CJR, Matthew Kassel asked 18 journalists how they record their interviews. “How journalists memorialize their interviews seems to be divided, in many ways, along generational lines, with older reporters relying more on their notebooks and younger reporters clinging to their recording devices,” Kassel writes.
• Earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel and Kim Masters reported that Kevin Tsujihara, the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros., promised to promote the career of Charlotte Kirk, a British actress with whom he had had a sexual relationship. Yesterday, Tsujihara, who had been set to take on more responsibility following Warner Media’s merger with AT&T, stepped down from the studio.
• Over the weekend, Hamas security officials detained and “brutally beat” seven Palestinian journalists over their coverage of cost-of-living protests in Gaza, sources from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate tell The Times of Israel and AFP. The protests’ organizers reportedly called the demonstrations non-political, but they have nonetheless been interpreted as a challenge to Hamas’s rule in Gaza.
• For CJR, Nithin Coca writes that the rare change of government in Malaysia last year has had profound, positive consequences for the media. “The country has since seen a blossoming of press freedom—an exception in a region where greater censorship and state control is becoming the norm,” Coca reports. “Parliament repealed a broadly criticized law imposing criminal penalties for ‘fake news.’ Mainstream media outlets… are now free to cover increasingly controversial topics.”
• And Solidaritet, a newly launched socialist news website in Denmark, will charge members different rates based on their income, Nieman Lab’s Christine Schmidt reports.

ICYMI: Why the left can’t stand The New York Times

Had Fox brought Judge Jeanine to justice? The network wouldn’t say, but CNN’s Brian Stelter reported, based on a conversation with a source, that Fox had, indeed, formally suspended Pirro over her Omar comments. The New York Times’s Michael M. Grynbaum soon confirmed that reporting. According to Stelter, Fox has not fired Pirro. It’s not yet clear when her show will return. Nor was it clear when, or why, the decision was taken. Fox publicly condemned Pirro’s remarks the day after they aired—an unusual move for the network. Some observers speculated that Friday’s horrifying mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, may have been decisive given the Islamophobic tenor of the scandal. “Maybe [Fox] had a nightmare vision,” Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU, tweeted. “Pirro on a short leash, but getting urged on by Individual One [Trump], with the NZ attacks as fuel for a wildfire she could start with one remark.”

ICYMI: New Zealand massacre—Journalists divided on how to cover hate

Others, including Stelter, suggested pressure from advertisers likely factored into Fox’s calculus. As The Hollywood Reporter’s Jeremy Barr reported early last week, at least four corporate advertisers dropped Pirro after the Omar episode. At the same time, advertisers also fled Tucker Carlson’s show after Media Matters for America, a left-wing media monitoring group, dug up and published offensive comments Carlson made on Bubba The Love Sponge’s shock-jock radio show. Last Wednesday, Media Matters organized a noisy protest outside Fox News’s Manhattan headquarters, timed to coincide with an ad-pitch meeting going on inside. “The boycott and Media Matters is having an effect on them, and I really think it’s a bottom-line effect,” David Zurawik, a media writer at The Baltimore Sun, told Stelter on Reliable Sources yesterday.

Fox is no stranger to ad pressure following on-air controversy. Laura Ingraham faced an advertiser boycott last year; Sean Hannity faced three. In December, at least 18 companies yanked commercials from Carlson’s show after he said immigrants make the US “poorer and dirtier and more divided.” The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi wrote, during that episode, that these boycotts have tended to be like snowstorms: “initially disruptive and attention-getting but usually ephemeral.” Sustained outrage is a long-term ratings—and revenue—draw for Fox; in the short term, the network has been known simply to move ads to less controversial shows. It’s rarer for hosts to go off air, but hardly unprecedented. In the past, Bill O’Reilly, Jesse Watters, and Ingraham have all taken abrupt “vacations.” Stoking controversy is obviously tiring work.

As Farhi noted, sustained ad boycotts have forced change in the past: in 2011, a two-year campaign forced Glenn Beck off Fox. And as Zurawik said on CNN yesterday, moving ad inventory away from prime time is not a sustainable tactic. Nonetheless, it would be naive to expect that Fox’s benching of Pirro will prove a tipping point. We’ve seen this dance before: Fox, under advertiser pressure, makes a short-term concession, tries to keep it low key, then reverts things to the way they were before. Pirro was not granted the vacation excuse. But we shouldn’t be surprised if she’s soon back and picking up where she left off.

Below, more on Pirro and Fox:

• Very Online: Trump’s demand that Fox reinstate Pirro came in a bizarre Twitter thread that resembled a pep talk for the network. “Keep fighting for Tucker, and fight hard for @JudgeJeanine. Your competitors are jealous—they all want what you’ve got —NUMBER ONE,” the president wrote. “Don’t hand it to them on a silver platter. They can’t beat you, you can only beat yourselves!” Also yesterday, Trump took aim at Fox weekend anchors Arthel Neville and Leland Vittert, asking if they were trained by CNN; called on the federal government to investigate Saturday Night Live (again); and retweeted an account with a QAnon avatar, amid a slew of other weird missives.
• Rhetoric and receipts: While Trump took time to defend Pirro amid her Islamophobia scandal, the massacre of Muslims in New Zealand seemed to be less on his mind. Chris Wallace, a real journalist at Fox, pressed Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, hard on the president’s history of anti-Muslim rhetoric, citing various examples of inflammatory language. “The president is not a white supremacist,” Mulvaney said.
• The boycott debate? During the Carlson boycott in December, Politico’s Jack Shafer argued that ad boycotts aren’t an appropriate tactic for targeting news organizations. “Journalists are independent of the companies that buy the advertisements adjacent to their copy. But then advertisers are independent, too—of the journalists whose pages and minutes they subsidize with ads,” Shafer wrote. “The boycotters don’t see that independence. An ad, for them, is an act of agreement with content.”
• Mouse eats Fox: Elsewhere in the Fox-verse, the sale of company entertainment assets to Disney is finally expected to close Wednesday. According to Vanity Fair’s Nicole Sperling, the deal could cost 4,000 to 10,000 jobs.

A quick PSA: The Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights at Columbia Journalism School is hosting its inaugural symposium with Jelani Cobb, the center’s director, on Monday, April 1, at 4.30pm. Panelists include Carol Anderson, Martha Mendoza, Jenni Monet, Ginger Thompson, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. For more information, click here.

Other notable stories:

• The weekend news cycle was dominated by responses to the Christchurch massacre, which started overlapping debates about Islamophobia and right-wing extremism, the role of social media in spreading hateful thought, and what the media should and should not report on. On Friday, CJR’s Mathew Ingram recapped the latter debate: “information is everywhere instantaneously, and the media no longer has the kind of gatekeeper role it used to have,” and yet “the press has a clear responsibility not to pour gasoline on a roaring internet blaze of racism.” As Ingram notes, “almost everyone agreed that posting the actual video of the killings was beyond the pale.” Writing for the LA Times, Virginia Heffernan had a contrary take. “Should we really be ‘protected’ from footage that documents white supremacist terrorism as vividly as anything can?” she asked.
• Joseph Menn, a technology reporter at Reuters, revealed last week that Beto O’Rourke, who just announced a presidential bid, participated, as a teenager, in the Cult of the Dead Cow, an infamous group of computer hackers. In a behind-the-story piece, Reuters said O’Rourke confirmed his membership of the group in November 2017, “on the understanding that the information would not be made public until after his Senate race against Ted Cruz in November 2018.” (Menn was working on a book about the Cult of the Dead Cow.) The disclosure drew fury on right-wing Twitter, including from Cruz. On Friday, CJR’s Alexandria Neason had questions, comments, and concerns about Vanity Fair’s recent O’Rourke cover story.
• Rudy Giuliani, once ubiquitous on TV as the president’s legal attack dog, has mostly been absent from our screens since January 20, when he bungled his “victory lap” over the special counsel slapping down a controversial report from BuzzFeed. Giuliani tells Axios’s Jonathan Swan that he decided to stay off-screen so as “not to upset the apple cart” with Mueller’s team. Swan, however, hears that Trump has griped in private about Giuliani’s ineffectiveness, and suggested he stay off TV for a while.
• The Times’s Mark Mazzetti and Ben Hubbard report that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman authorized a secret campaign to silence dissenters in 2017, over a year before state assassins murdered Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The campaign, which was to involve surveillance, kidnapping, detention, and torture, was partially carried out by the same team that killed Khashoggi. American officials call it the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group.
• For CJR, Sarah Feldberg writes that a class-action lawsuit alleging the misclassification of California truck drivers as independent contractors, rather than employees, is having a knock-on effect on freelance journalists in the state, some of whom have been cut loose by publishers anxious to ensure compliance. “Heralded by labor groups as protecting the rights of vulnerable workers and confronting the abuses of the gig economy, [the suit] has also created widespread confusion about who’s exempt, who’s in trouble, and what the ruling will mean for freelancers,” Feldberg reports.
• Earlier this month, a Texas judge ordered the deportation of Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a Mexican journalist who claimed asylum in the US after facing threats related to his work. Last week, Michigan Reps. Debbie Dingell and Fred Upton wrote to Immigration and Customs Enforcement asking that the decision be overturned, the Detroit Free Press’s Niraj Warikoo reports. Last year, Gutiérrez Soto reflected on his experiences in ICE detention in a first-person piece for CJR.
• And for CJR, Charles Davis evaluates The Intercept’s billionaire-dependent business model following a painful round of layoffs at its parent company, First Look Media, last week. On Friday, yet more job losses hit the journalism world: the Cleveland Plain Dealer said it’s cutting 12 editorial staff.

ICYMI: A mosque massacre is livestreamed