Month: April 2006

I didn’t want to let the week go by without mentioning a few developments on the “what’s happening to the newspaper business” front. No übertake from Media Nation. Nevertheless, here are a few things you should keep an eye on.

The week began with a perversely fascinating story in the New York Times. Steve Lohr reported that some news services are deliberately sticking flat, dull headlines on the Web versions of their stories so they’ll be more likely to get chosen by the robots at Google News, Yahoo News and the like. Lohr explains:

In newspapers and magazines, … section titles and headlines are distilled nuggets of human brainwork, tapping context and culture. “Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines, and Google comes along and says, ‘The heck with that,’ ” observed Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee.

“Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960’s singer” is example of an evocative headline designed for human eyes. The bots’ choice? “Obituary: Gene Pitney.”

Also last week, Christopher Lydon’s consistently excellent public radio program, “Open Source,” did an hour on the future of the newspaper business. You can read a summary and download the audio here. Lydon’s lead guest was Alan Rusbridge, editor of The Guardian, the British newspaper that has become something of an international phenomenon thanks to its well-executed Web version.

Rusbridge made the rather astonishing assertion that The Guardian’s 14 million American readers exceeds the online circulation of the Los Angeles Times. I guess it makes sense; though the Times is a great paper, it’s seen as essentially regional. The Guardian’s frankly liberal orientation, easy-to-navigate Web tools and emphasis on smart but short articles are bound to make it a favorite in Blue America.

Rusbridge made one other observation that leads me to my final destination. Lydon at one point noted that, as publicly owned companies begin to flee the newspaper business, nonprofit foundations such as the one that owns the St. Petersburg Times (and runs the Poynter Institute) may become the wave of the future. Rusbridge agreed, and noted that The Guardian is actually owned by such a foundation.

Yet one of the outstanding examples of such subsidized journalism — the Christian Science Monitor — would appear to be in some danger, as the financially troubled Christian Science Church last week announced a series of moves aimed at putting the church on more stable footing.

The Monitor is a terrific paper with an international focus that has already morphed into a pretty much Web-only news source. (When was the last time you saw a paper Monitor?) The Boston Globe’s Tom Palmer reported (fee req.) on Friday that the church intends for the Monitor to be self-sufficient by 2009 after having received millions of dollars in subsidies in recent years. But it’s hard to imagine how that could happen without seriously downgrading the journalism.

The church would be an ideal patron for the Monitor’s journalism. It’s a shame that its own financial problems may make that impossible.

Pitching lines, season to date:

• Bronson Arroyo, 2-0, 1.98, 13.2 IP, 11K
• David Wells, 0-1, 15.75, 4 IP, 1K
• Matt Clement, 1-1, 9.00, 11 IP, 8K

OK, Wells is coming off surgery and will probably turn it around, and Arroyo will return to earth at some point. But does anyone have a good feeling about Clement?

My friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate says that the New York Times is up to its old tricks in the matter of professional gossip Jared Paul Stern. Writing in the Boston Phoenix, Silverglate argues that the Times would rather buy into the prosecution’s salacious spin than to consider the possibility that Stern, until last week a columnist for the New York Post, was actually set up by Ron Burkle, the billionaire he’s been accused of shaking down.

Though one might contend that Burkle v. Stern has already gotten too much coverage, Silverglate relates it to some rather more important matters: the persecution of former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, terrible coverage for which the Times later apologized, and Judith Miller’s gullible reports on Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda. Silverglate could have added to that list the Times’ years-long obsession with Whitewater, the Clinton scandal that wasn’t. (The Times’ voluminous Stern coverage is online here.)

Stern himself now says he was the victim of a sting operation in which Burkle attempted to make it appear that Stern was offering to ease up on the nasty gossip items in return for a $200,000 (more or less) bribe. What complicates all this is that Stern was quite frankly looking for Burkle to invest in his clothing company; it’s just that he claims there was no quid pro quo. Earlier this week, in an interview with Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, Stern explained his side of the story:

“On reflection, it was an error in judgment to continue the business discussion about the clothing company” while also talking about “the coverage that he was getting in the paper,” said Stern, who was captured on tape comparing the arrangement he was proposing to the “Mafia.” “I did absolutely nothing remotely illegal and never intended any kind of extortion.”

Obviously, this doesn’t look good: Stern comes off as a sleaze who got caught, and is now trying to slice the salami as thinly as he possibly can. And even though we’ve seen only snippets of a long conversation between Stern and Burkle, those snippets would appear — as Timothy Noah observes in Slate — to be “extremely damaging to Stern.” Noah adds, “One finds oneself wondering how Stern could possibly explain himself.”

To which Silverglate would reply: People in Stern’s position do manage to explain themselves, all the time. That’s why they have trials. It is impossible to get at the truth until we’ve heard all sides of the story. Silverglate writes:

To anyone experienced in criminal law, it is all too obvious what was going on here: Burkle was instructed to try to put certain words into the target’s mouth. Just as obviously, the sting failed: Stern resisted the bait and stuck to his proposal rather than adopt Burkle’s suggestion of a “protection” arrangement. The real story here is the collaboration of the businessman, his private henchmen, and their federal prosecutor and FBI allies to try to set up a sleazy but not criminal gossip columnist for a federal bust. They failed to euchre Stern, but they seem to have succeeded with the Times.

Stern can’t help but look bad because the standards of the gossip world are so low — especially as practiced by the New York Post. It doesn’t help that Stern is apparently as shallow as they come. This piece in the New York Observer will inspire laughs or nausea, depending on your inclination. But as I argued in my earlier item, it’s hard to see how Stern looks any worse than his goodie-grubbing boss, Page Six editor Richard Johnson.

Silverglate’s overriding point is that, however cosmically unimportant the Stern affair might be, the Times is nevertheless doing it again. It’s hard to do much real journalism when your snout is buried so deeply in the government’s trough.

Home runs to date:

• Bronson Arroyo, 2
• Wily Mo Peña, 0

I hear Arroyo can pitch a little, too. Maybe he can play right field.

Along with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the Iranian regime is the scariest on earth. I’ll go so far as to say it’s scarier than North Korea. As best as anyone can tell, Kim wants nukes to ensure that the world will leave him alone. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, seems like a dead cinch to nuke Tel Aviv as soon as he has the capability. We actually find ourselves in the rather excruciating position of hoping that Ayatollah Khamenei, the real power in Iran and not exactly a nice guy himself, is able to keep the Holocaust-denying hothead in check.

Which is why it was so depressing to read Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker blockbuster, this one reporting that the White House is increasingly talking about going to war against Iran, and is refusing even to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. The generals, according to Hersh, are up in arms at this insane idea. The administration appears to have learned nothing from its tragic misadventure in Iraq.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest tragedy of Iraq is that it has completely hampered our ability to do anything about genuine threats such as Iran and North Korea. Who could trust the White House now? I happen to be one of those who believes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did not lie about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda; rather, they were the victims of their own insular beliefs. But, in the end, what does it matter? No matter what they say now, it will come off as Chicken Little warning us that the sky is falling. Again.

William Arkin, the Washington Post’s national-security blogger, referring both to Hersh’s story and to this front-page Post article, acidly observes:

A war with Iran started purposefully or by accident, will be a mess. What is happening now though is not just an administration prudently preparing for the unfortunate against an aggressive and crazed state, it is also aggressive and crazed, driven by groupthink and a closed circle of bears.

Sadly, “aggressive and crazed” sounds just about right.

Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan doesn’t seem too worried about the chances of Bush and Cheney nuking Tehran anytime soon, believing, instead, that they are merely trying to scare the Iranians, the Europeans both. But who knows with these guys? Indeed, here’s how Kaplan closes:

[M]aybe there’s no gamesmanship going on here, maybe Hersh is simply reporting on a nuclear war plan that President Bush is really, seriously considering, a “juggernaut” that might not be stopped. If it’s as straightforward as that, we’re in deeper trouble than most of us have imagined.

Did Hersh get it right? His story is, for the most part, anonymously sourced, and as Arkin notes, short on details. Still, who can argue with Hersh’s record? In the opening weeks of the Iraq war, he took a lot of heat for passing along the generals’ fear that the war was getting bogged down in unexpected ways — a concern that seemed greatly exaggerated after the first phase of the war was wrapped up quickly.

Several weeks ago, though, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote (sub. req.) a much-commented-upon column in which he noted that it’s now clear — and, in fact, it was clear then — that the unconventional resistance that U.S. troops encountered during those opening weeks was the beginning of the insurgency. And that the commanders on the ground understood it needed to be dealt with, even if Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks did not. Brooks does not name Hersh, but he should have. For it was Hersh’s journalism that proved particularly prescient.

Last night I caught a few minutes of Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source,” which devoted a full hour to the topic. It looks like mandatory listening. I’m going to grab the podcast and give it a listen tomorrow morning. As Lydon said last night, this is the only story that adults are thinking about at the moment.

Chris Gabrieli was obviously furious with Tom Reilly after Reilly dumped him as his running mate in favor of one-day wonder Marie St. Fleur. But I couldn’t quite understand why Gabrieli would respond by jumping into the governor’s race. Wouldn’t Gabrieli only wind up hurting fellow outsider Patrick and helping Reilly?

Now I get it. WBZ-TV (Channel 4) is reporting poll results showing that Patrick has zoomed from 10 points behind Reilly to three points ahead in the past month — and that Gabrieli’s the reason, as he’s hurting Reilly a lot more than Patrick.

The race is starting to get interesting. The first Democratic debate featuring all three candidates will be held on Channel 4 on Sunday, April 23, at 8:30 a.m. (Ugh.) But now moderator Jon Keller writes that it will be rebroadcast on April 24 at 7 p.m., when it is sure to generate much bigger numbers.

Looks like Adam Reilly is thinking about this, too.

The Boston Herald may not be quite the solid local-news vehicle that it was during the 1990s. But it’s a better paper today than it was two years, the approximate moment that I think it hit its skin-and-sensationalism bottom. And it’s a better paper than I would have thought possible one year ago, when it was getting ready to shed about a quarter of its newsroom jobs.

One of the prime reasons that the tabloid is still worth a look will soon be leaving One Herald Square. Late last month the Herald’s assistant managing editor for business, Cosmo Macero, announced he was leaving to take a public-relations job at O’Neill and Associates. Within days, it became clear just how much Macero would be missed, when the Herald won the general-excellence award in its circulation category from the American Society of Business Editors and Writers. The Herald’s business team was also honored for its coverage of the Gillette sale last year. (The Globe competes in a larger circulation category, and Steve Bailey won recognition as the best business columnist.)

The Herald business section has several good, aggressive reporters, so I expect it will renew itself. Still, Macero was special, and he’ll be missed. I’m late to this, but I wanted to post something before Macero’s last day, which is coming this week.

As for the Herald itself — who knows? Investigative reporter Maggie Mulvihill, who left for a Nieman several years ago, surprised a lot of people by coming back. But now she’s leaving again, this time to go to WBZ-TV (Channel 4) — a huge loss. As we all know, publisher Pat Purcell has put the Herald and about 100 community papers he owns in Eastern Massachusetts on the market. After a flurry of speculation a few weeks ago that he’d decided to sell the community papers and keep the Herald, there’s been not a sound.

Yet the Herald perseveres, with a good sports section, solid business reporting and an occasional local news story that makes you sit up and take notice. (No, not Antonin Scalia’s chin flip. But this, from today’s paper, on ticket-happy troopers on the Massachusetts Turnpike, is definitely worth reading.)

With the Globe experiencing serious financial problems, it’s more important than ever that Boston remain a two-daily town. If the Herald weren’t around, the Globe’s owner, the New York Times Co., would be all the more tempted to hack away with reckless abandon.

My first thought about the New York Post gossip-column scandal is that Gayle Fee, Laura Raposa, Carol Beggy and Mark Shanahan must be eating their hearts out — or faxing their résumés to New York. Why shouldn’t they lust after some boodle of their own?

My second is that Jared Paul Stern, the gossip columnist charged with attempting to shake down billionare Ronald Burkle for $220,000, must feel like someone who’s been thrown into the volcano in a desperate attempt to appease the gods. It’s not that what Stern is accused of isn’t reprehensible — it is. It’s just that he doesn’t look a whole lot worse, qualitatively or quantitatively, than his fellow Page Six gossips. Especially his editor.

The Post’s archrival, the New York Daily News, broke the story last week (technically, the Post itself broke it on its own Web site), reporting that Stern and Burkle had met over Burkle’s complaints that Page Six was writing unflattering fiction about him. According to the Daily News, Stern responded that a $100,000 down payment and $10,000 in 12 monthly installments could ensure him all the good coverage he wanted.

But the thing is, no one is coming out of this looking good. On Sunday, for instance, the Daily News reported that Page Six editor Richard Johnson and his staff are regularly lavished with high-value gifts. The story continues:

Johnson was feted at a bachelor party last month that cost in excess of $50,000 hosted by soft-core porn king Joe Francis at his palatial estate in Punta Mita, on Mexico’s glorious Pacific coast. More than 2,000 miles from New York, the resort area boasts 343 days of 80-degree sunshine.

Francis, 32, producer of the topless “Girls Gone Wild” spring-break video series, flew the party from New York on his private jet. Francis appears regularly in the column, almost always in a positive way.

Johnson also got a free trip to the Academy Awards last month, paid for by ABC and Mercedes-Benz. The trip included first-class airfare, a three-night stay at the Four Seasons Hotel and a car and driver.

Johnson may not have taken money, but it sounds like virtually nothing else is out of bounds.

You might expect that the New York Times would react to all this with bemused attachment. Well, bemused, yes; detached, not at all. The Times has been riding this story since the moment it broke, and its editors appear to be enjoying themselves at least as much as Daily News editor Martin Dunn, who, by the way, was the Boston Herald’s editor for about 15 minutes during the early 1990s.

In this Times account of Stern’s being caught on tape, Stern told Burkle that a business executive (reported elsewhere as Ronald Perelman) bought himself good coverage by hiring Johnson’s fiancée (now wife) — and that media mogul Harvey Weinstein had helped himself by publishing books written by Page Six gossips and had put Johnson to work on a screenplay.

OK, Stern’s not the greatest source. But the bit about Burke’s fiancée is true. And it ought to be easy enough to verify the Weinstein stuff — as I hope the Times did before publishing it. Otherwise, the Times would be no better than a blog.

Seen in this light, Stern’s claim that he was not soliciting cash but, rather, an investment by Burkle in his clothing line strikes me not as sleazy behavior that makes him different from Johnson but, rather, sleazy behavior that makes him very much like Johnson.

If Stern is telling the truth, then I see no particular reason why he ought to be singled out. I say the gods at the bottom of the volcano ought to demand the whole lot of them.

Journalists and math: Not a good mix. An earlier error has now been fixed. Thank you, Mike.

Please pardon the lack of recent entries — there have been too many other things on my plate. As Mark Twain would have said, it’s better not to blog and be thought stupid than to blog and remove all doubt.

So nothing too heavy this morning, except to note that Apple announced yesterday that its new, Intel-based Macs will semi-support Windows, letting users boot up either OS X or WinXP.

Such a machine would obviously solve the multimedia problem I was whining about a couple of weeks ago. But I wonder. Even though Apple claims it’s not going to give Microsoft its unconditional love, doesn’t the mere existence of a Windows option reduce the incentive for software companies to write Mac versions of their products?

“You don’t need a Mac version — just run Windows” is not the sort of advice I want to hear.

So much so that he’s canceling his New York Times subscription and going all-digital.